Podcasts about Mob

Retired agent Geoffrey Kelly reviews his 22-year investigation of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist where 13 masterpieces worth over $500 million were stolen and have never been recovered. He shares his insights and theories about the infamous theft, and his thoughts about armchair detectives and journalists with their own speculations involving international culprits and government conspiracies. Geoff is the author of Thirteen Perfect Fugitives: The True Story of the Mob, Murder, and the World's Largest Art Heist, the behind-the-scenes true story about the case. Geoffrey Kelly served in the FBI for 28 years. Check out episode show notes, photos, and related articles: https://jerriwilliams.com/390-geoffrey-kelly-isabella-stewart-gardner-museum-heist-thirteen-perfect-fugitives/ Join my Reader Team to get the FBI Reading Resource - Books about the FBI, written by FBI agents, the 20 clichés about the FBI Reality Checklist, and keep up to date on the FBI in books, TV, and movies via my monthly email. Join here. http://eepurl.com/dzCCmL    Buy me a coffee - https://www.buymeacoffee.com/JerriWilliams Check out my FBI books, non-fiction and crime fiction, available as audiobooks, ebooks and paperbacks wherever books are sold. https://jerriwilliams.com/books/  

Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history through his unique perspective on the mafia. In this episode of Gangland Wire, Gary Jenkins welcomes an unusual guest from the world of organized crime storytelling—cartoonist Brett Juliano, creator of the Dust Bunny Mafia comic series. Instead of traditional books or documentaries, Brett tells real Mafia stories through short, three-panel comics featuring his unique cartoon characters while staying grounded in historical research and documented sources. Brett explains how his lifelong interest in animation and storytelling evolved into a project that blends true crime history with visual humor and commentary. After moving to Chicago, he became fascinated with the city's underworld history and began transforming real mob stories into illustrated comic strips that challenge Hollywood myths and highlight lesser-known facts about organized crime. His work draws on true crime books, FBI files, court transcripts, and podcasts, including Gangland Wire itself. Each comic strip distills a real historical moment into a visual gag or ironic twist that reveals the strange reality behind mob legends. Gary and Brett discuss several Dust Bunny Mafia comics and the real events behind them: The “Sicilian Flu” Courtroom Act A humorous look at a tactic sometimes used by mob figures: appearing frail in court to gain sympathy or delay proceedings. Wiseguys who were partying the night before might suddenly appear in a wheelchair, wrapped in blankets or hooked to oxygen tanks when they walked into court. Lucky Luciano and the Myth of “Lucky” Brett examines the legendary story that Charles “Lucky” Luciano got his nickname after surviving a brutal kidnapping and beating. His comic plays with the idea that mobsters often exaggerated their own legends—especially when trying to impress people. The Kansas City Mob Search – Carl “Tuffy” DeLuna One comic comes directly from Gary Jenkins' own experience investigating the Kansas City mob. When police searched DeLuna's home in 1979, the mobster calmly offered coffee and eventually led investigators straight to the basement, where incriminating notes were stored. The scene shows how, sometimes, the truth of organized crime investigations is stranger than fiction. Bugsy Siegel in Rainy Portland Another comic explores the obscure story of Bugsy Siegel visiting Portland to meet local crime boss Al Winters, only to endure two straight weeks of rain—highlighting the contrast between Hollywood-style mob glamour and the less glamorous reality of underworld negotiations. A New Graphic Anthology on Kickstarter Brett is now launching a major new collection of his comics titled: “Family Business: An Offer You Can't Refuse.” The book will include: 130+ pages of full-color comics More than 230 true crime strips Historical commentary explaining the real story behind each comic Additional artwork parodying mob businesses and underworld culture The project will be funded through a Kickstarter campaign beginning March 24, with the finished book expected to ship later in the year once printing is completed. Click here for

In this episode of Gangland Wire, I sit down with retired FBI agent Geoff Kelly, a specialist in art theft investigations who inherited one of the most notorious unsolved cases in American history—the 1990 robbery at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. He recently wrote a book about this theft titled 13 Perfect Fugitives: The True Story of Mob, Murder, and the World’s Largest Art Heist. Kelly's law enforcement career began as a New York City transit police officer before transitioning to the FBI. Like many agents, he initially sought violent crime work. Instead, he was assigned to economic crimes before eventually transferring to a violent crime squad. It was there that he encountered the Gardner case—a cold case largely untouched by senior agents at the time. The robbery itself remains extraordinary: two men posing as police officers gained entry to the museum and stole 13 works of art, including masterpieces by Rembrandt. More than three decades later, none of the works have been recovered. Inside the Gardner Heist Geoff explains how art theft is often misunderstood. Popular culture portrays refined, sophisticated criminals orchestrating elaborate capers. The reality, he says, is usually more opportunistic and frequently violent. Art theft often intersects with organized crime, drug trafficking, and even homicide. Massachusetts has a documented history of art-related crimes, and several individuals connected to the Gardner investigation met violent ends. The criminal underworld surrounding stolen art is less about wealthy collectors hiding paintings in private vaults and more about leverage—using artwork as collateral in criminal negotiations. The FBI's Art Crime Evolution Following the 2003 looting of Iraq's National Museum during the Baghdad invasion, the FBI formalized its Art Crime Team. Kelly discusses how intelligence gathering, informants, and international cooperation became central tools in recovering stolen artifacts. He emphasizes that solving art crimes often depends less on forensic breakthroughs and more on human intelligence. Informants remain essential, especially in cases where organized crime overlaps with high-value theft. Kelly also discusses his upcoming book, 13 Perfect Fugitives, which explores the intersections of mobsters, murder, and the illicit art market. Organized Crime and the Reality of Stolen Art Drawing on my own experience working organized crime in Kansas City, I found clear parallels between traditional mob rackets and art theft networks. The same structures—intimidation, secrecy, and violence—apply. Once a painting disappears into criminal circulation, it becomes a liability as much as an asset. Kelly challenges the myth that thieves profit easily from masterpieces. High-profile works are difficult to sell. The black-market art world is volatile and dangerous. In many cases, the artwork becomes bargaining collateral rather than a cash windfall. A Case Still Waiting for Closure More than 30 years later, the Gardner Museum still displays empty frames where the paintings once hung. Kelly remains committed to the idea that public awareness may eventually generate new leads.  The Gardner heist stands as both a cultural tragedy and a criminal mystery—one that continues to intersect with organized crime, violence, and international intrigue. 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 [0:00] Hey, you guys, Gary Jenkins back here in studio Gangland Wire. Y’all know me. I’m a retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective and now podcaster and documentary filmmaker. I have in the studio today… Jeff Kelly, he’s a now-retired FBI agent. He was an expert in recovering stolen artifacts and art pieces. He was involved. He wasn’t involved in the original theft of the Boston art theft, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, but he ended up inheriting that case. So welcome, Jeff. Hi. Thanks, Gary. Nice to be here. And guys, I need to mention this right off the bat. Jeff has a book, 13 Perfect Fugitives, The True Story of the Mob, Murder, and the World’s Largest Art Heist. Be out on Amazon. I’ll have links down below in the show notes if you want to get that book. I think it would be pretty interesting. I was telling Jeff, I just interviewed Joe Ford, the million-dollar detective, the guy that goes after classic cars, and I read that book. I love these kind of caper kind of books and caper crimes. Those are the ones I like the best is the caper crimes. And Jeff is an expert at working caper crimes. And that’s what these are, capers. So Jeff, how did you get into this? Now you came on the FBI. You were a policeman before, I believe. So tell the guys a little bit about yourself and your FBI career. Yeah, I started out with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority Police in New York City. It was a transit cop. I did that for three years. And then I got into the FBI in October of 95. [1:30] And my goal was always, I wanted to work violent crime. That’s what drew me to law enforcement in the first place, working bank robberies and kidnappings and fugitives. I had to do my five years on working economic crime, telemarketing fraud. It was interesting, but not all that exciting. And finally in 2000, I got my transfer to the violent crime squad. And I loved working it. And I did it for my entire career from then on, right up until my retirement in 2024. But back then, art theft was considered a major theft violation, [2:01] and it was worked by the Violent Crime Squad. And so in 2002… My supervisor dumped this old moribund cold case in my lap. It was the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist. [2:15] Nobody wanted it on the squad, so they figured, let’s give it to the new guy. I was ecstatic to get it because I’d heard about it. I went to school in Boston. I went to Boston University and graduated the year before it happened, but I knew about it. [2:28] That’s how I started working this case, this particular case, and then the following year during the U.S., there was a, the U.S. And coalition forces invaded Baghdad in Iraq. And during a 36-hour period, more than 15,000 objects of very, very important cultural history were looted from the National Museum of Iraq. And it’s really one of the most important museums in the world in terms of our shared history. Kind of the cradle of civilization over there in the Tigers and Euphrates River. Yeah, and that was the time when the FBI kind of belatedly realized that there was no art crime team to investigate this. And of course, FBI agents have been working art theft like any other property crime since the beginning of the FBI’s existence, but there was no codified team. So they did a canvas for the team in 2004 and I applied for it because at this point I’d been working the Gardner case for a couple of years and really was fascinated by it and made the team. And so then over the next 20 years, we continued to expand the team both in size and in scope and in our intelligence base and knowledge base. And when I left the Bureau in 2024, it was and still is a tremendous team with a lot of very dedicated and professional agents and professional support. [3:51] Now, guys, if you don’t know about the Isabella Stewart Gardner case, there was a Netflix documentary on it a few years ago. It was an art museum in Boston. [4:01] Two guys showed up. They had Boston police uniforms on, and they got in. They basically, it was an armed robbery, and they took control of the museum. The guards were in there late at night and took these really valuable paintings out. I believe you told me earlier they were Remington paintings. We’ll get into that. And it was a violent crime. It was an armed robbery of paintings, and you told me about other armed robberies of paintings. I think you got into some other armed robberies of paintings. You always think of, as you mentioned before, the Thomas Crown Affair character that goes out and does these sophisticated art thefts. That’s not always true, is it? It’s never that way, but it doesn’t matter. Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. Everybody wants to believe that art thefts are pulled off by the Thomas Crown Affairs and these gentlemen thieves repel in through skylights and do all that fancy stuff, put it in their underground lair. That’s just not the way it works. But if you look to art theft. [4:55] Massachusetts really is a cradle of art theft in this country, and it’s very unique. The first armed robbery of a museum occurred in Boston in 1972. It was committed by a guy named Al Monday, who was a prolific art thief. And they stole four pieces from the Worcester Art Museum in central Massachusetts with a gun. They ended up shooting the guard. And one of the pieces that they stole was a Rembrandt called St. Bartholomew. [5:26] And in keeping with the milieu of true art thieves, the paintings were stored on a pig farm just over the state line in Rhode Island. And when this Connecticut safecracker by the name of Chucky Carlo, who was looking at some serious time in prison for some of the crimes that he committed, when he found out that Al Monday had these paintings, he just simply kidnapped Al Monday and stuck a gun in his ribs and said he would kill him if he didn’t give him the paintings. which is no honor among thieves. And Al turned over the paintings, Chucky returned them, and he got a very significant break on his pending jail sentence. Right here in 1972, Boston thieves see Rembrandt as a valuable get-out-of-jail-free card. [6:09] And then if we jump forward three years to 1975, there was a very skilled art thief, really a master thief by the name of Miles Conner. I interviewed Miles for my book. It was very gracious of him to sit down with me for it. And he had robbed or committed a burglary of the Woolworth estate up in Maine, the family, the five and dime family magnets. And he got caught for it because he tried to sell those paintings to an undercover FBI agent. And so he was looking at 12 years in prison for it. And he was out on bail. And he reached out to a family friend who was a state trooper. And he asked him, how can I get away with this one? How can I get out of this? Because he was in serious trouble. The trooper’s response was meant to be hyperbolic. The trooper said, Miles, it’s going to take you a Rembrandt to get out of this one. [6:57] And so Miles said, okay, I’ll go get a Rembrandt. And he got a crew together and they did a daylight smash and grab at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, just across the street from the Gardner. And they stole Rembrandt, the girl in a gold-trimmed cloak. [7:12] And he was able to return that painting. Instead of doing 12 years, he did 28 months. And he even managed to, he told me he even managed to get the $10,000 reward in the process. So you have this atmosphere in Massachusetts that Rembrandts are a valuable commodity, right? They can help you out in a jam. And so I think it’s no coincidence that in 1990, when the Gardner Museum heist came down, the Gardner Museum had this array of motion sensors all throughout the museum. It would alert to wherever you went, every gallery, hallway, whatever. [7:49] And we know from these motion sensors that after, as you said, the two guys went in disguised as cops and bluffed their way into the museum, they made a beeline for the Dutch room, which is the room of all things Rembrandt. They stole three Rembrandts. They stole a fourth piece called Landscape with an Obelisk, which was actually by Govard Flink, but it had been misattributed to Rembrandt until the mid 80s. And then they took a large Rembrandt oil-on-panel off the wall and it was recovered the next morning leaning against a piece of furniture. We believe they just overlooked it in the dark. So out of the 13 pieces taken, three were Rembrandt, a fourth was misattributed to Rembrandt, and there was going to be a 14th piece taken, which was also Rembrandt. It definitely falls into that theory that this was going to be a hold-on to these pieces for a while and see if you can use them for a break. [8:48] Interesting. Now, back in the 70s, for example, when somebody would work in an art robbery like that or an art theft, you got your tried and true ways of working a crime. You got to have sources, you got to have witnesses, and hopefully you can get a crime like this. You can get a source that says, hey, this guy, we had a guy in Kansas City that he was a fence for these kinds of guys. He had an antique auction and he took all this stuff and got it somewhere else. So at the time, just use your regular police methods. And what changed over the years as you’ve done this? Yeah, certainly we’ve become much more sophisticated with the techniques that we use. But at the end of the day, it’s always still going to be intelligence. But I found from working my entire career in violent crime, virtually my whole career in violent crime, the sources are crucial. Having a good informant can make and break a case. And working art theft investigations, you’re certainly going to have the same types of fences of informants, fences for stolen property and what they’re hearing about what organized crime guys are doing and what drug guys are doing. But it also opened up a whole new avenue of sources for me as working in art investigations, because now you’ve got pawn shops and gallery owners and auction houses, and they’re in a position to know when not only when stolen artwork is coming in, but also fakes and forgeries. We spoke about this, that. [10:16] Somebody comes in with one valuable piece that would be very difficult for somebody in his or her position to come across one piece like this, let alone a dozen of them. That really points to probably a fake. And so that’s really the key to solving these things is just having a good intelligence base who’s going to let us know about when something comes up that’s either stolen or it’s been forged. [10:43] Brings up a question. In my mind, did you ever work a gallery owner or a gallery [10:48] that then would filter in, knowingly filter in some fakes every once in a while? They couldn’t do it 100% of the time, but you could certainly make some extra money by filtering fakes out of it because many people would get it and they’d never know. Nobody would ever know. Listen, it is a really difficult thing when you’re working these types of crimes because unlike bank robber, you go into a bank and you stick them up with a gun and take them on. It’s not up to the government to be able to prove at trial that you knew that the bank was insured by the FDIC. You went in and you robbed it, you committed the offense. When you’re talking about interstate transportation of stolen property or possession of stolen property, there are what’s called specific intent crimes, meaning you have to prove the element of knowledge. You have to be able to prove that the person knew that that item was stolen. Not that it said it was stolen. and you had to show that they knew it. And that’s a really high hurdle to overcome. And typically what we do to try and prove that specific intent is we’re going to go through. [11:53] Recorded statements made to a source or to an undercover or emails or texts or something that we can show that this person knew that item was stolen. And so we would see that a lot in auction houses and galleries. There’s a lot of willful blindness where a lot of gallery owners and auction houses, they’re going to look the other way because it’s too lucrative to pass up. And in fact, in 2015, the art crime team, once we received information that ISIL or ISIS was using looted cultural property from Syria and Iraq as a form, a viable form of terrorism financing. And we put auction houses and gallery owners on notice in 2015, and we basically told them that if you’re selling objects of cultural patrimony or cultural heritage with a dubious provenance, like a wink and a nod, you may be unwittingly or wittingly funding terrorism. While we never charged anybody with it, hopefully it was an eye-opener that when you’re getting into this world, it’s not a victimless crime. There are very real victims involved. [13:07] And that’s one of the things that really is interesting about working our crime investigations. And I used to get ribbed by my friends who were not on the art crime team about [13:18] where like the wine and cheese squad were raised and everything. But our subjects are far from it. We’re dealing with organized crime, gangs, terrorists. This is no joke. These are serious individuals and the stakes are high. And in the Gardner case, three or four people that we believe were involved in the heist were murdered a year after the Gardner case crime occurred. Yeah, I was just going to go back to that a little bit, as we said before, a little bit like the Lufthansa case. All of a sudden, everybody that was involved in the theft. Started dropping like flies. So tell the guys about that. That is really interesting. [14:00] Yeah. So the two individuals that we believe went into the museum dressed as cops, just a week shy of the one-year anniversary, one of the guys was found dead in his apartment of an acute overdose of cocaine, intravenous. And his family admitted that he used Coke, but they said he was terrified of needles. He was scared of needles. So it really looked to be like a hotshot, an intentional overdose of cocaine. Two weeks later, the other guy who we believe went into the museum with him, his wife reported him missing. And a couple of weeks later, his bullet riddled body was recovered in the trunk of his car out by Logan Airport in East Boston. There was another member of that crew. These were all part of the same crew. This Carmelo Merlino, who was a Boston mobster, had an auto shop down in the Dorchester section of Boston. Another member of his crew, a guy named Bobby, six weeks after the heist, he brought in, he visited a jeweler in the downtown crossing jewelry district in Boston. He came in with this object and he unwrapped it. It was an eagle. [15:03] It was the finial from the Napoleonic flag that was stolen in the Gardner heist. And he asked the jeweler, how much is this thing worth? And the jeweler looked at it and he said, it’s worth nothing. Because he immediately recognized it as one of the people that had been stolen six weeks earlier from the Gardner heist. And then a few months later, Bobby was stabbed to death and nearly decapitated on the front porch of his house. And the responding police saw that his house had been broken into and ransacked like his killers had been looking for something. There was a fourth guy, Jimmy, who bragged to his girlfriend a few months after the heist that he had a couple of pieces from the Gardner Museum hidden in his attic. [15:47] And in February of 1990, 11 months after the heist, he was executed on his front porch in what the local police called a mob hit. So, yeah, these are the types of crimes that have a tendency to have a chilling effect on anybody who harbors any aspirations to come forward with information. Yeah, and we talked earlier a little bit about, like, the crime itself, and the statute of limitations is up on that, what you said, and the crime itself, but how we talked a little bit and explained to them about how this could be part of a RICO case. And you’ve got the murders and you’ve got the actual theft and whatever they did with the paintings, then maybe you could get over after a Bob boss as a Rico case. Tell the guys a little bit about doing that. Yeah. [16:32] I’ve heard it so many times in more than two decades that I worked the case and people would say, geez, why don’t people come forward? They’re just paintings. There are so many times they’re just paintings. They’re like, yeah, they are, but there’s two things about that. Number one, there’s some dead bodies on these paintings, three or four, and that there’s no statute of limitations for murder. And so if you implicate yourself in the theft or you implicate yourself in possessing or transporting these paintings at any time, the fear is that you’re then implicating yourself in a homicide. And the other aspect of this, which I think has a chilling effect, is the fact that transportation of stolen property is one of the predicate acts for RICO, racketeering influence corrupt organization case. And RICO is basically, Gary, is basically an entire organization is corrupt. Yeah. There’s no legitimate purpose. It’s what we think about the mob and the [17:27] FBI has taken down the mob in the past. So if you implicate yourself in stolen property and you’re part of organized crime, that’s one of the predicate acts for a RICO. And that’s basically life sentences. And so one of my goals in the years and years that I worked in this case was to try and convince people that you could come forward with information and the U S attorney’s offices, whether it’s up in Boston or new Haven or Philadelphia. [17:58] Would be willing to figure out a way to get the paintings back with immunity from prosecution for a RICO case. Look, that’s a high hurdle. That’s a high hurdle to convince somebody that if you come forward, you’re not going to get charged and you’re eligible for millions of dollars in reward. That’s a tough bill to swallow, but it’s the truth. I’m retired from the FBI now. I can tell you that it was, it’s a, it was, and still is a bona fide offer. And that’s one of the goals that I’ve always tried to impress on anyone is the opportunity to become a millionaire without going to jail. There you go, Jeff. Can you, now you’re not with the Bureau anymore. Can you go out, if you could go out and find them and bring them in, could you collect that reward? I would certainly hope so. [18:48] I can’t tell you how many of my friends thought that I had some of these paintings stashed in my basement. Waiting for retirement to go turn them in the next day. I think half the guys I worked with were expecting to see me pull into the parking lot of the FBI. [19:01] Big package, but no. But yeah, I suppose I could. By this point, I can tell you the amount of my very being that I put into this case over two days. Yeah. I just would love to see these paintings go back just because they need to be back at the museum. That’s where they belong. Now, these crimes, they seem, You said there’s a lot of murders attached to this. They seem a little boring. Did you have any exciting moments trying to pop anybody or do any surveillances? I know we did a big surveillance of a bunch of junkies that were going around stealing from small museums around the Midwest. And we follow them here in Kansas City. And they would have been pretty exciting had we had a confrontation with them. Did you have any exciting moments in this? It actually was a fascinating case. And for the first, there’s the really boring aspects of this job and tedious aspects. And I would say that in my, two decades working this case, I probably did, I don’t know, 50, 60, 70 consent searches, searching in attics and basements and crawling through crawl spaces and just getting sweaty and covered in cobwebs. But the break in the case for me came in 2009 when one of the guys who was part of Merlino’s crew who was deceased, his niece came forward to me and told me that the paintings. Some of them had been hidden up in this guy’s hide at his house up in Maine. I went up to Maine with Anthony Amore, who’s the director of security for the Gardner Museum. We worked on this case together for years. [20:29] And then we found that hide. And then we interviewed, right from there, we went and interviewed Guarenti. That’s the guy, Bobby Guarenti. We interviewed his widow and she broke down and admitted that he once showed her the paintings and she gave them to a guy down in Connecticut. And we identified that guy and we interviewed him. My name is Bobby Gentile. He’s a made member of the Philly Mob. He got straightened out with his crew back in the late 90s. [20:54] And he refused to cooperate. And then that’s where we really just started getting, using a lot of ingenuity to try and break it. And an agent down in the New Haven office, a guy by the name of Jamie Lawton, he joined our team and we started working this case. And he had a source who knew Gentile, Bobby Gentile, and the source started buying drugs from Gentile. Ah, there we go. We ended up arresting Gentile and we did a search warrant at his house. And it was crazy. Like we recovered, I want to say seven handguns, loaded handguns lying all over the place. He had a pump action shotgun hanging by the front door. He had high explosives. We had to evacuate the house and call him the bomb squad. But the interesting thing was he had the March 19th, 1990 edition of the Boston Herald with headlines about the Gardner heist and tucked inside that newspaper was a handwritten list of all the stolen items. With what looked like their black market values. This is in the house of a guy who swore up and down that he’d never heard of the Gardner Museum. And we were able to figure out who wrote the list. It was written by none other than Al Monday, who’s the guy that did the first armed robbery of a museum, of a Rembrandt. And we interviewed him and he told us that he wrote that list for Bobby Gentile and his buddy up in Maine, Bobby Garanti, because they had a buyer for the paintings and they wanted to know what they were worth. [22:24] So yeah, and then Gentile took 30 months. [22:28] He wouldn’t cooperate. And while he was incarcerated, we turned two of his closest friends to becoming sources. And so when he got out of prison in February or April of 2014, they started talking to him and talked about the gardener and they said they might know somebody who’d want to buy him. That’s how we then introduced an undercover agent. Gentile was introduced to Tony, this undercover FBI agent. Over six months, they had long talks about selling the paintings. Unfortunately, before Gentile would sell the paintings, he wanted to do a drug deal first, which we couldn’t allow to happen. We can’t let drugs walk on the street. So we had to take it down. And although we’d seized all these guns from Gentile back in 2012, he told the sources the FBI didn’t get all of his guns. Because of that disturbing comment, one of the sources asked Gentile if he could buy a gun for him. And Gentile sold him a loaded 38. So we arrested him again. And he still refused to cooperate. I don’t respect what he did for a living or a lot of the things that he did, but you do have to respect his adherence to his values. However, misguided they may have been, he took the code of omerta, the code of silence to heart, and he took it to his grave. He died, I think, in 2021 after going to prison a second time. [23:50] While we never got any paintings back, it was a tremendous ride, and I’m confident they will come back. It’s just going to be a question of when. Yeah, that kind of brings up the question that you hear people speculate. Did you ever run across this? Is there actually any rich old guys or an Arab sheik or somebody that buys stuff like this and then really keeps it and never shows it to anybody? Does that unicorn really exist? everybody wants that to be true i know virtually it’s not yeah there’s there’s never been a case of some wealthy what we call the doctor no theory some some reclusive billionaire with his underground lair filled with all the illicit stolen treasures of the world yeah that’s it’s never happened yeah i guess you never say never but but no look the majority statistically about three-quarters of everyone that collects art in this country does it for, and I assume it’s probably worldwide, does it for the investment potential. There’s a lot of money to be made in collecting art. It rarely, if ever, drops in value. So that’s why people collect art. If there’s somebody who has a particular piece that they want so badly that they’re going to commission its theft, it’s more the stuff of Hollywood. It could happen, but we’ve never seen that happen yet. Interesting. [25:14] We did have one case here where we had a medical doctor and he had it on the wall of his house. And it was, I believe it was a Western artist named Remington that these junkies stole out of Omaha. But it was such a minor piece that he could show it to anybody and they wouldn’t. They would say, oh, that’s cool. You got a Remington. [25:30] There’s plenty of those around. And he could afford a real deal Remington anyhow. So it wasn’t that big a deal. And that’s really what it comes down to is that art, high-end art does get stolen. It gets stolen quite often. The art market is about $60 billion, and the FBI, we estimated about $6 to $8 billion of that is illicit, whether it’s theft or fakes and forgeries. It’s a tremendous market, but it’s mostly second and third tier items. [26:02] Really valuable, well-known pieces. They do get stolen, but that’s the easy part. The easy part is stealing it. The hard part is monetizing it. That’s why you very rarely see recidivism among art thieves, high-end art thieves, because you do it once, and now you’re stuck with the thing. It’s easier to steal something else. You got to go out and boost fur coats and stuff to make a living. Exactly. Do a jewelry store robbery down there and make a living. And that’s exactly the point. That’s why you’re seeing a sea change in terms of art thefts, museum thefts. The Louvre was a great example of that. Dresden green vault robbery where 100 million euros in gems were stolen back in 2019 yeah. [26:45] Gems and jewelry, it can be broken down. It’s going to greatly diminish their value, but you can recut a gem. You can melt down the setting. You can monetize it for a greatly diminished value, but at least you can monetize it. You can’t cut up a Rembrandt into smaller pieces. [27:02] It’s only valuable as a whole complete piece. Yeah. I’m just thinking about that. We got a couple of guys, Jerry Scalise and Art Rachel in Chicago, flew to London, robbed a really valuable piece, the Lady Churchill’s diamond or something, I don’t remember, but really valuable piece and mailed it to somebody on their way to the airport and then got caught when they got back to Chicago and brought back to London and did 14 years in England and they never gave up that piece and nobody could, it never appeared anywhere, but it was just cut up and they didn’t make hardly any money off of it. Yeah. Look, there’s a, there’s much more profitable ways to. Yeah. To make an illicit living than stealing high-end artwork, but it does still get stolen. And that’s one of the cruel ironies when you’re talking about art theft is if somebody has a $20,000 piece of jewelry or a very expensive watch, they’re most likely going to lock it up in a safe in their bedroom or something. But you have a $10 million piece of artwork, you probably got it on the mantle. You’ve got it over the fireplace or in the front foyer of your house and probably doesn’t have a passive alarm system protecting it or security screws to keep it from being taken off the wall because people want to show it off. Yeah. It’s way too enticing. [28:24] Really? So, yes, you need to keep the word out there and keep this in people’s minds. And I’m sure the museum tries to do this in some ways in order, hopefully, that maybe somebody will say, oh. Yeah. [28:38] I think I saw that somewhere in this news program or on this podcast. [28:42] I’ll put some pictures on the podcast when I end up editing this. No, please do, Kerry. And that’s the thing. That’s the basis for the title of my book is it really is a fugitive investigation. And that’s how I work this case is fugitives and perfect fugitives because they’re not like their human counterparts. They’re not going to get tripped up on the silly things that we need to do as human beings, getting a driver’s license or whatnot. Yeah. [29:09] And so that’s how I worked the case. The FBI was really, I was always impressed with the FBI’s support that they gave me on this investigation. We did billboard campaigns and social media and a lot of things to get these images out there to the public, hoping it might resonate with somebody. And that’s really my goal for this book. I felt it should be written. I felt it’s an important case. Certainly, it’s something that I wanted to write about. It’s something that’s very important to me. [29:42] But it’s yet another attempt to apprehend these fugitives. And I’m hopeful that somebody, it might resonate with somebody. Somebody’s going to see something. And there’s so much disinformation and misinformation that’s out there in the media about this case. People are endlessly, all these armchair detectives, and I don’t say it in a deprecating way. Good for them. Work as hard as you can. But if you want to work this case from your armchair, great. but you should be going off accurate information because there’s a lot of bad information that’s out there on the internet. And if you want to help out, if you want to collect that $10 million reward, great, but you should be going off the most accurate factual information that’s available. Yeah. And you probably ought to go down to the deep seamy underbelly of Philadelphia or Boston or somewhere and get involved with a mob and then work your way up and make different cocaine deals and everything. And eventually you might be trusted enough that some might say, oh yeah, I’ve got those in this basement. I would suggest there’s better hobbies. [30:47] That could be hazardous to your health. I wouldn’t recommend it. Yes, it could. All right. Jeffrey Kelly, the book is 13 Perfect Tuesdays. Those are the paintings that were stolen that you’ll see on the podcast on the YouTube channel. The true story of the mob, murder, and the world’s largest art heist. Jeffrey, thanks so much for coming on to tell us about this. Thanks, Gary. Thanks for having me.

Jeffrey Sussman joins Heart of The East End Gianna Volpe on WLIW-FM ahead of local readings for his newest book, Mafia Hits, Misses, Wars, and Prosecutions: The Rise and Decline of the Mob in America, on March 14 at Amagansett Free Library and March 28 at East Hampton Library.Listen to the playlist on Apple MusicWatch the interview on WLIW-FM YouTube

Harry und Flo sind tatsächlich in Köln – live aus dem Gästeblock beim Viktoria-Spiel. Knapp 2.000 Löwen haben sich mit uns auf den Weg gemacht, es wurde sauber geKranzlt und das Kölsch schmeckt erstaunlicherweise auch aus dem Plastikbecher. Zur Halbzeit steht's 1:0 für die Blauen. Entsprechend aufgeladen ist die Stimmung beim Mob und bei den Jungs am Mikro. Auch wenn die Tribüne leider gefühlt acht Kilometer lang ist und der Druck aus der Westkurve ein bisschen fehlt. Aber wer will denn meckern bei der Serie, die wir gerade hinlegen? Weiter so, Löwen, kämpfen und siegen! TSV 1860 München gg Viktoria Köln / 06.03.2026 / Spielstand 0:1 (0:1)

‘…huge social upheavals, hope and the MOB hungry for vengeance!'The French Revolution 1789, Paris & a baker called Denis Francois To help support this Podcast & get exclusive videos every week sign up to Neil Oliver on Patreon.comhttps://www.patreon.com/neiloliver Gold Bullion Partners,for more info about buying gold & silver go to this affiliate link,https://goldbullionpartners.co.uk/download-our-complimentary-guide-neil-oliver/ To Donate,go to Neil's Website:https://www.neiloliver.com Shop:https://neil-oliver.creator-spring.com Neil Oliver YouTube Channel:https://www.youtube.com/@Neil-Oliver Rumble site – Neil Oliver Official:https://rumble.com/c/c-6293844 Instagram - NeilOliverLoveLetter:https://www.instagram.com/neiloliverloveletter Podcasts:Neil Oliver: News Comment HistoryNeil Oliver: HistoryNeil Oliver: InterviewsAvailable on all the usual providershttps://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/neil-oliver-news-comment-history/id1513737418https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/neil-oliver-history/id1871225730https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/neil-oliver-interviews/id1869660872 #NeilOliver #Frenchrevolution #France #DenisFrancois #StormingoftheBastille #Revolution #TheTerror #The Mob #history #travel #culture #ancient #historyfact #explore Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, Host retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins dives into the shadowy intersection of organized gambling and college athletics through the story of Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal.  During the early 1960s, Rosenthal built his reputation by identifying weaknesses in sports systems, particularly among vulnerable college athletes. He met one who could not be bought, Mickey Bruce of Oregon. At the center of this story is a little-known but pivotal attempt at a fix involving the Oregon Ducks. Rosenthal and his associate, David Budin, believed they had found an opening, but they ran headlong into the integrity of Oregon halfback Mickey Bruce. Bruce flatly refused the bribe, setting off a chain reaction that would help expose a much wider pattern of corruption in college sports.   I break down how this wasn't an isolated incident but part of a nationwide effort by gamblers to influence outcomes and exploit young athletes. The episode explores the mechanics of organized gambling, attempts to fix games, and why college sports became such an attractive target for mob-connected bookmakers. The story reaches a dramatic turning point during U.S. Senate hearings on gambling in college athletics, where Mickey Bruce publicly identified Lefty Rosenthal as one of the men who tried to corrupt him. It's a rare moment in mob history—one where a gambler is named in open testimony by a player who refused to bend.   From there, I trace Rosenthal's continued rise in the gambling world, from Miami to Las Vegas, where he would help shape modern sports betting while repeatedly managing to stay one step ahead of serious legal consequences. Rosenthal’s story raises enduring questions about accountability, the limits of law enforcement, and why some figures seem untouchable. I close the episode by reflecting on Rosenthal's legacy—and on Mickey Bruce's quiet heroism.   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 The Story Begins 4:14 The Bribe Attempt 7:58 The Aftermath of Scandal 12:26 The Rise of Lefty 14:34 College Sports and Corruption 18:58 The Online Gambling Boom 22:26 The Fall of Adrian McPherson 24:24 Mickey Bruce’s Legacy [0:00] Hey, hey, all you wiretappers, back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, a retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective. I worked a mob for about 14 years, and now I tell some mob stories, as many as I can find. And we all know Lefty Rosenthal. We all know Robert De Niro played him as Ace Rothstein in the film movie Casino. And that movie, part of the reason it was so good that Nicholas Pelleggi, the screenwriter, and wrote the book, was able to spend hours and hours interviewing Lefty Rosenthal in real life. He had gone to Florida by then and it seemed like the mob wasn’t after him anymore. They had one attempted bombing of him, if you remember. [0:41] So it was a really good movie. There’s really good depiction of that era and that system that they had going out there. Let’s go back on Lefty Rosenthal’s history to a guy that he couldn’t corrupt. Lefty Rosenthal thought he could corrupt anybody, but he found a guy that he couldn’t corrupt. It was really one of his early cases where law enforcement, the FBI, and other state law enforcement agencies figured out Lefty Rosenthal was somebody, and he was a pretty big gambler. He was a nationwide gambler. In 1960, the Oregon Ducks had a pretty good team. What a name, the Oregon Ducks. They had a man named Dave Grayson and the quarterback with Dave Gross in the backfield. They had a 5’3 All-American receiver named Cleveland Jones. What a name, Cleveland Jones. They went 7-2-1. They lost to Michigan, and they also lost to eventual Rose Bowl champ Washington. But this was good enough to gain a Liberty Bowl invite to play Penn State. Oregon lost the bowl and played in two feet of snow and freezing temperatures in Philadelphia that year. [1:50] But the biggest news of the season was made during their trip to Ann Arbor to play Michigan. They had this potential All-American player named Mickey Bruce, who really was obscure compared to especially this Dave Gross or this Cleveland Jones, who was an unusual player. He was a president of his fraternity. He was a former Little League World Series star. He was the son of an attorney. He was a team captain. He played halfback and defensive back. And there was two professional gamblers came to Ann Arbor that year and they didn’t know much about this guy, but they did know, one of them’s name was Budin, David Budin, and the other one was Frank Lefty Rosenthal. They didn’t know much about Mickey Bruce, but they had a connection to him. A guy who played for the Oregon State basketball team named Jimmy Granada and knew Boudin from when they were little kids growing up on the basketball courts in New York City. Now, Granada told Mickey that he had two friends staying at the team hotel and they needed tickets. This time, players could then were given tickets and they could turn around and sell them to people. Boudin ended up finding him and introduced himself and said he was Jimmy Granada’s friend and invited Mickey up to the room and said, I’m the guy that needs a couple of tickets. [3:15] Mickey was a little bit hesitant, but didn’t know this guy. He’s probably got a New York accent, probably slick, more than likely. He hesitated at first and booted and said, just take a few minutes. I just want to get you to go and get those tickets. And so he goes him, so he follows him into the room and he finds Lefty Rosenthal waiting there, who he doesn’t know and won’t even have any idea who he is till much later. So they chatted a little bit about the game as people will and ask him questions about the team. And Rosenthal mentioned that Oregon was a six-point underdog. He said, do you don’t think a player could be bribed? Mickey said, I suppose they could. Buden then cut in. He said, Mickey, he said, what do you think it would cost to ensure that Michigan won by at least eight points? Mickey plays along. He says, you’re the big-time gamblers. You should know. So Buden said, about $5,000. And Mickey said, that’s probably fine. [4:14] Mickey said, let me check into this. And he said, I’m late for a team meeting and I got to get going. So they made plans to meet later on about 9 p.m. Mickey was no fool or small town rube. His father had been a Chicago attorney and he now practice in El Cajon, California. [4:31] He raced to catch up with his teammates and told an assistant coach about the bribe who told the athletic director, who then called in the Michigan State Police, who called in the FBI. And they told Mickey to go ahead and show up at 9 p.m. at the meeting in the hotel room. They don’t want to apprehend Buden and Rosenthal right now. They want to get some more information and really get a real solid bribery attempt out of them. So acting on the advice of these cops, Mickey goes back to the hotel room that evening. [5:00] Buden and Rosenthal start talking to him. And so they gave him tips about how to carry out this scheme without attracting any attention. Buden and Rosenthal say, we’ll give you an extra $5,000 and you can get the quarterback, Dave Gross, to go along with this scheme. He said, Mickey, you just need to let some pass receivers get behind you once in a while and let them run up the score a little bit. And you’re not going to win anyhow, more than likely. Get the quarterback to call a few wrong plays nobody really ever noticed. And he said, I’ll give you each $5,000 after the game if you’ll do that. He also offered Mickey $100 a week just to call him at his house down in Florida and update him about the health of Oregon’s team before weekly betting lines were released makes you wonder how many guys did Rosenthal have calling him to update him on injuries and everything on different college teams and professional too. Because I know from doing a story before that Ocardo and a lot of the Chicago gangsters really valued Rosenthal’s tips on making their football bets. He seemed to have some kind of an inside track. [6:08] As he got ready to leave, Mickey said, oh, wait a minute. I gave you those tickets. You got to pay me, which were only worth about three bucks each. And so Lefty gave him 50 bucks for the two tickets. Mickey would remember later that he had to roll $100 bills in his pocket, which is typical for a high-flyer, high-rolling kind of a dude like that, have a big roll of cash in your pocket. And then you reach down in, peel some off so everybody can see how much money you got in your pocket. Rosenthal said, hey, I got to leave tonight, but see my friend Buden in the morning, David Buden, and he’ll give you the money. Mickey agreed, went back to his room. The next morning, while eating breakfast with his teammates, he sees a state trooper leading Buden out of the hotel in handcuffs, and then missed Lefty Rosenthal, who, as he had told them the night before, the Lefty was going to be leaving, and they had made a good bribery attempt. I don’t know what the police were waiting on. They were trying to make an even better case or something. I guess they probably They wanted him to go back in and catch them all together with the money. But then lefty left, and they went ahead and pulled the trigger early. You never know how these things work out exactly and what was at play. During the game, Mickey, I tell you what, Mickey played his heart out. He got an interception for a touchdown. It didn’t make any difference. Michigan won easily, 21 to nothing, and easily covered the six-point spread. [7:28] A player will later be asked about this, and part of the reason was he said the coach had called a late-night team meeting and told them about this bribery attempt and asked them if any of them had been approached. Of course, everybody said no. Whether they had or not, they’re going to say no. But this player said it really shook us. We just had no rhythm. We just couldn’t get together for that game. [7:50] Buden, when he was arrested, it turns out he was arrested for registering at a hotel under a fake name. He ends up paying some little fine and leaving town. [7:58] Lefty was long gone the next day. It’s possible that Rosenthal and Buden knew that just attempting this bribe might have the negative impact on Oregon’s chances against the spread anyhow. All we know for sure is they got off scot-free in the end, and Buden paid a $100 fine or whatever. Lefty, but he did get exposed because Mickey Bruce, he didn’t have any idea of what he was getting drawn into, but it became a nationwide scandal. Basketball and football games, college games were being influenced on a wide scale by these gambling interests and Lefty Rosenthal was right in the middle of it all. Part of the McClellan committee, Senator McClellan of Arkansas convened his select committee just to investigate gambling and college athletics later that year. Because of this Michigan interaction with Lefty and college players and attempted bribery, they brought Mickey Bruce in. September the 8th, 1961, there’s a Senate hearing witness table. And sitting at that table is Mickey Bruce at one side and Frank Lefty Rosenthal at the other. And this was the same Frank he’d met at this hotel room. And he literally fingered Rosenthal as one of the men who attempted to bribe him. That photo that I’ve got in there, if you’re on YouTube, Rosenthal fled the fifth, of course. [9:27] Committee here, meetings like that, really what they’re good for is to stir law enforcement and bring people out and bring out and get the public riled up against organized crime. That’s what McClellan’s committee was really good for. They had several of those committees that finally got local authorities and the FBI to start looking at organized crime. And in particular, this is the mother’s milk of organized crime by now is gambling. And college sports gambling was the thing at the time. There was some pro teams going on, but it didn’t have near the action going down on it that the college teams had. There was a lot more interest in college and a lot more college games every week. Later on the next year, Wayne County, Michigan District Attorney’s Office wanted Mickey Bruce to come back to Detroit and swear out a complaint against the people that tried to bribe him and name him and give statements and everything. Bruce, by then, he didn’t really want to mess with it. He was playing football. He had his fraternity work. He had to keep his grades up because he was going to law school. [10:32] But they had a game against Ohio State that November. Michigan authorities thought, just come in and see us when you’re here. But he was out for the season by then. He had separated his shoulder, and he never really played again when they were playing Stanford earlier that year. He wasn’t going to go back to Michigan. His coaches tried to get him to cooperate, but he said, I’m done with the whole matter. In an interview, he said, as far as I’m concerned, this whole thing should have been dead a month ago after it happened. He conferred with his father, and they both said they can’t really make him do that. [11:05] He said, I didn’t have time to go. I’ve got all these school activities that I’m doing, and I just don’t want to go. And he said, the Michigan police botched this thing from the start. They should have stuck around, and they should have got Rosenthal before they left town. There were several things they should have done, and it was a poorly run investigation that probably wasn’t going to succeed anyhow. And he said it had been over a year, and he said, I don’t really remember exactly what happened. I understand all that, and he could have helped him make a case, but there’s an obscure a paragraph in Lefty Rosenthal’s FBI file. And it might explain a little more about why Mickey Bruce didn’t testify in a criminal trial against Lefty. It already testified and pointed him out in the McClellan hearing. But right after that, his mother received a telephone call in her home in El Cajon, California. Now, there’s some, it says name redacted, but you can easily fill in the name. 1961, September 1961, name redacted, El Cajon, received a phone call from an unidentified male asking if, name redacted, can you fill in, Mickey Bruce, name redacted, answered in the negative, at which time this person uttered an oath and added, you’re going to get it, and so is he. I think it’s pretty easy to fill in the names of Mickey Bruce and his mother easily. [12:26] Bruce stayed home Oregon went to Columbus Lost to the Buckeyes again Wayne County DA Dropped any cases Against Buden and Rosenthal For lack of evidence Lefty will continue During these years To run his sports book Out of Florida He’ll continue Traveling around the country And making contact With people in the College sports world Trying to bribe players And coaches And gather information And. [12:50] Cops in Miami were watching Lefty by then, 1960, New Year’s Eve. Police Chief Martin Dardis of Miami knocked on Rosenthal’s door with a group of guys and found him in his bedroom in his pajamas. He had a telephone in one hand and a small black book in the other. Dardis took the phone away from him and started answering the calls, and they were from bettors all around the country. He remembered that there was one guy named Amos who wanted to place a bet on a football game on New Year’s Day. And Dardis handed the phone to Rosenthal who told the guy that was calling in says you’re talking to a cop you stupid SOB. [13:28] During that raid, Rosenthal complained he’d paid $500 to keep local police from harassing his bookmaking operations. He said, you guys must be kidding. [13:37] Evidently, you didn’t get your piece. About a year later, February 1962, after the Senate hearings, detective knocked on his door again in Miami. He came to the door sporting dapper attire, which he was a really dapper dresser, and he had painted fingernails, according to a newspaper account. He said, I’ve been expecting you. [13:58] The detectives arrested Rosenthal, not for bribing Mickey Bruce, but he and his friend Buden faced charges in North Carolina for offering $500 to Ray Paprocki, a basketball player at NYU, and wanted to shave points in a 1960 NCAA tournament against West Virginia. During this time, authorities had uncovered a nationwide network of fixtures who conspired to influence hundreds of college basketball games over a five-year period. In the end, 37 players from 22 schools were arrested on charges relating to [14:31] port shaving. Man, that’s, boy, that was huge. We’ve got these guys going down now periodically that are getting involved because of the apps. And we’re going to get a little more into that. This gambling thing and college athletics especially, but even pro athletics. It’s a corrupting force, guys. I know a lot of you like to bet on games, but it really, there’s a real potential for corrupting the game. And in the end, if they keep it up and people keep corrupting these games, it’s just going to be like wrestling. You’ll just, somebody will control who’s going to win and who’s going to lose in every contest. That’s what these gamblers would like to get, and they’d make all the money. [15:08] Rosenthal pleaded no contest. He got a $6,000 fine for trying to fix this NYU-West Virginia game. He claimed that David Buden gave up his name and that he said later on, trying to clear himself of that, that that wasn’t really me. David Buden did it, and he would have given up his mother’s stay away from what he had to face. That was when the Nevada Gaming Control Board was after him. [15:33] In 1967, Rosenthal, under the watch of the Chicago Outfit, started acting like his outfit bosses and bring outfit tactics down to Miami. He started intimidating rival bookies and others in Miami who incurred his wrath. He ordered bombings of the territory. I interviewed the son of a CIA operative named, his father’s name was Ricardo Monkey Morales. Look back and see if you can find that interview of the son of Monkey Morales. I think Monkey Morales was probably in the title. And he told us about his father’s relationship with Rosenthal. He told him that Lefty had told his dad that he represented organized crime out of Chicago. And he said that Morales said that Rosenthal paid him. He said that Rosenthal paid Monkey Morales to blow up Alfie’s newsstand with a bookie joint in the back. He also had him, they had him blow up a car and a boat owned by a well-known jewelry thief that the mob was pressuring to do some burglaries for them. He also had him explode a bomb. I remember this, explode a bomb in the front yard of a Miami police officer trying to show his power. I guess this guy was messing with him or something, trying to tell everybody he was connected to the outfit and don’t mess with me. [16:50] Morales would also claim that he’d witnessed Rosenthal meeting with Tony Splatron in Miami in 1967. [16:58] 1970s, he goes to Las Vegas at the request of the outfit, which we all know. We’ll go back over it a little bit. Even legitimate gambling people will say he invented the sportsbook industry in Las Vegas. They didn’t really do that before. And Sports Illustrated once called him the greatest living expert on sports gambling. He’ll die in 2008 of natural causes down in Florida after all the skimming investigation went down and people started going to grand juries and being indicted and going to trials and everything. All the mobsters did. Several people in Las Vegas did. A guy out of the Tropicanda who was Kansas City’s man, Joe Augusto, and a guy named Carl Thomas who worked at both casinos and helping in skimming and several other guys that worked in the casino business. But guess who never was indicted? And guess who never even was called in for an interview? And guess who just hid out? Lefty Rosenthal. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Jane Ann Morrison of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Finally, they get an FBI agent to confirm to her that he was a top echelon informant during all this time. They try to blow him up in his Cadillac, another famous attempted mob hit. A lot of people speculate on that. They’ll always say it was Kansas City because they thought he was an informant all along. and never liked him and never trust him because he really, he brought all the heat down out in Las Vegas. Now, the heat was coming anyhow, but he maybe brought it a little bit quicker. [18:24] There’s a former federal prosecutor out of Las Vegas that once said, it’s been said you should never speak ill of the dead, but there are exceptions to the rule, and Frank Rosenthal is one of those exceptions. He is an awful human being. [18:38] Dave Budin, the guy who first approached Mickey Bruce, Yes. Continues in the sportsbook game and draws his son Steve into it. And by the 1990s, the online betting industry has taken over from your neighborhood bookie and a mob just running everything. It’s a multi-billion dollar thorn in the side of the U.S. authorities. [18:59] 1998, federal prosecutors indicted Miami gambler David Buden, same man that tried to bribe Mickey Bruce, and indicted Buden’s son for running something called SDB Global. [19:13] Which later became SBG. Federal authorities prosecuted Boudin under a federal anti-gambling statute because SDB Global was incorporated in Costa Rica, but it was based in Miami. Pleaded guilty and got a $750,000 fine. In Kansas City, during those same years, the son of the feared mafia capo, if you will, Willie the Rat Comisano, Willie Comisano Jr., They headed up a group of bookies that contained the names and sons and other extended relatives of many Kansas City Mafia members out of the 50s and 60s. And they were using the internet and dealing with either SDB Global or one of the other sports betting sites that sprung up in Costa Rica because they were all over the place. Budins were high flyers in this doing business out of Costa Rica. And they were making a lot of money, a lot of money. In 2004, SBG comes to the attention of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. They sent an undercover in, and they asked an SBG operator why the company required customers to call before wiring each new deposit. And he got him on tape to say, because we change the names in the countries of the middlemen all the time. The agent suggested that the process made it uneasy, and the employee of SBG said, you don’t have to worry about it. Lots of people do it. [20:35] Well, during this investigation, they also found there was a Florida State star quarterback named Adrian McPherson was placing bets on games that he was playing in and ends up getting dismissed from the Florida State Seminoles football team. He was a rising star, a rising young star quarterback. In the investigation, they learned he’d already lost $8,000 to a local bookie who’d cut him off. He was giving him, extending him credit. Guy owed him $8,000 and he cut him off. So that’s when he turned to online SBG sites. Now, you have to pay up front. So he was getting some money to gamble somehow, and he tried to hide this activity by using a roommate, but a review of his phone records showed several calls to STB, and one time was, like, just before, there were, like, two in a row. And that’s how they were, like, trying to hide it and then pass it off to make it look like there was somebody else making the bet. He eventually gets arrested. He pleads to lesser charges. But one of those charges was check forgery. And when a gambler starts losing, many times they’ll turn to those white-collar crimes like check forgery, embezzlement. They’ll start stealing from their work, shoplifting, drug dealing. They can do anything like a junkie, man. They’ll do anything to keep gambling. [21:52] I once knew a guy said he couldn’t even walk into a casino because he just starts getting a rush. He just can’t stay away from the machines once he walks in. So he totally has to stay out. Adrian McPherson, he was also an all-star baseball player. Even though he is kicked out of college ball for betting on his own team, he then gets drafted. The New Orleans Saints in 2005 draft him. They want him as their starting quarterback. But they also drafted a guy named Drew Brees, who ended up leading him to the Super Bowl in 2006. [22:27] Now, later in that season or during that season, the Tennessee Titan mascot will accidentally hit McPherson with a golf cart. He sues him for several million dollars. The following year, he does this. He’s been injured by this golf cart. I don’t know if it wasn’t a career injury, obviously, but they also the gambling thing. And the following year, he appears with the Grand Rapid Rampage AFL team. Then he goes to a Canadian team. Then he plays on a variety of arena football teams, a different one every year almost. And finally, in 2018, the Jacksonville Sharks, which is an arena team, releases him. His gambling led him to a free fall into obscurity. He was on his way up to life-changing generational wealth, and the gambling just got him. [23:17] Let’s go back a minute, you know, all these, I’ll be telling all these stories about these low rents and degenerate gamblers. Let’s go back to the incorruptible Mickey Bruce. He was injured during 1961 during his senior year. His last game was in 1961 against Stanford. His three seasons of Oregon, he rushed 29 times for 128 yards. At one touchdown, he caught 10 passes for 113 yards and three touchdowns. Defensively, he intercepted six passes in the last season, returned six punts for an 11-yard average. He ends up being drafted in the 24th round of the 1962 AFL draft by the Oakland Raiders, but he never pursued a professional football career. Instead, he followed his father’s footsteps. He went to law school and became a lawyer out in California. [24:08] Michael J. Bruce, his story goes really beyond the gridiron. He’s on that very short list of individuals who have implicated gangsters, pointed them out in court, and survived. And he prospered from then on under [24:20] his own name. He didn’t go in witness protection or anything like that. He might not have agreed to prosecute Lefty going back to Michigan for that other case, but he did stand up and point at Lefty Rosenthal and say, he’s the one that tried to bribe me. 1981, Mickey Bruce will get the Leo Harris Award. Presented to alumni, alumnus Letterman, who have been out of college for 20 years and have demonstrated continuous service and leadership to the university. Some of the other, Alberto Salazar went to Oregon. He got it. A guy named Dan Fouts, I know that name, Johnny Robinson, Bill Dellinger. [25:02] So guys, it’s much better to get a Lifetime Achievement Award for doing good than to get a car bomb or to die in obscurity. So thanks, guys. That’s the story of Lefty Rosenthal and his earlier years before the skimming and really the story of a tribute to Mickey Bruce, a guy that stood up and did the right thing when it needed to be done. Thanks, guys. And don’t forget, stand up and go to your computer and order one of my books online or rent one of my movies or look at my website and see what you like there. Make a donation, if you will. I got expenses. Don’t usually ask for. I got ads. They just cover some things and then other things. Some of these FOIA things cost a lot of money and got a few expenses. Anyhow, so thanks a lot, guys. But mostly, I appreciate your loyalty and all the comments that you make on my YouTube channel and on the Gangland Wire podcast group. It’s inspiring. It really, truly is inspiring. It keeps me coming back. Thanks, guys.

Watch all of our Epstein videos here:    • Epstein  Watch all of our Hamamoto videos here:    • Professor Hamamoto  Hamamoto on YouTube:    / @professorhamamoto  Prof. Darrell Hamamoto, who is an American writer, academic, and specialist in U.S. media and ethnic studies.Professors Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/share/hZajgC...UNTOUCHABLE - Jimmy Savile documentary    • UNTOUCHABLE - Jimmy Savile documentary by ...  ADOPTED KID'S CA HORROR STORY & BOYS TOWN! PASTOR Eddie https://youtube.com/live/vD3SGWpnfyMWatch Used By ELITES From Age 6 - Survivor Kelly Patterson https://youtube.com/live/nkKkIfLkRx0KELLY'S 2 HOUR VIDEO ON VIRGINIA    • Video  BOOK LINKS: Who Killed Epstein? Prince Andrew or Bill Clinton by Shaun Attwood UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B093QK1GS1 USA: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B093QK1GS1 Worldwide: https://books2read.com/u/bQjGQD All of Shaun's books on Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/Shaun...All of Shaun's books on Amazon USA: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Shaun-A...Follow P Diddys latest:   • P Diddy  #jayz #beyonce #hollywood #countrymusic #nashville #pdiddy #puffdaddy #truecrime #news #youtubenews #podcast #livestream #youtube #thepope #vatican #church Here are Hamamoto's recommended books:Can't Stop Won't Stop:A History of the Hip-Hop Generation ——-The Psychological Covert War on Hip-Hop——-The Covert War Against Rock:What You Don't Know About The Deaths of;(Jim Morrison, Tupac Shakur, Michael Hutchence, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix,Phil Ochs, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, John Lennon & The Notorious B.I.G)——-Hit Men:Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business——-Me, the Mob, and the Music:One Helluva Ride Tommy James and the Shondells——-Godfather of the Music Business:Morris Levy (American Made Music Series)——-LAbyrinth:A Detective Investigates the Murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., the Implication of Death Row Records, Suge Knight, and the Origins of the Los Angeles——-The FBI war on Tupac Shakur:State repression of Black Leaders from the Civil Rights Error to the 1990s (real world)——-The FBI war on Tupac Shakur and Black Leaders:US Intelligence's: Murderous Targeting of Tupac, MLK, Malcol, Panthers, Hendrix, Marley rappers and Linked Ethic Leftists——-Have Gun Will Travel:The Spectacular Rise and Violent Fall of Death Row Records——-The Big Payback:The History of the Business of Hip-Hop——-Ruthless:A Memoir——-Hip-Hop Decoded——-Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones——-How to Wreck a Nice Beach:The Vocoder from WW II to Hip-Hop, The Machine Speaks——-Dancing with the Devil:How Puff burned the bad boys of Hip-Hop——-Hiding in Hip-Hop:On the Down Low in the Entertainment industry—from Music to Hollywood

Did Daley steal the 1960 election for JFK?  Or was it the Mob?  Did dead people vote? Alyssa and John sort through fact and fiction regarding allegations of voter fraud.   Support the show by subscribing, leaving a five-star review, telling all your friends and following on Twitter, BlueSky, Instagram.   Show Notes: Chicago Magazine: Two Charts Show Chicago Getting More Democratic New York Times: Search The Learning Network Search Nov. 8, 1960 | Kennedy Is Elected President Washington Post: Here's a voter fraud myth: Richard Daley ‘stole' Illinois for John Kennedy in the 1960 election Block Club Chicago: Chicago And Rigged Elections? The History Is Even Crazier Than You've Heard Chicago Sun-Times: This week in history: JFK and the stolen election New York Times: Chicago Watched Amid Memories of Its Role in 1960 Time: The Press: The Inside Man NewYork Times: Did John F. Kennedy and the Democrats Steal the 1960 Election? BBC: Why is Chicago important? Chicago Magazine: We Should Never Vote in Person Again New York Times: DALEY SEES PLOT IN VOTE RECOUNT; Links G.O.P. Conservatives and Southern Democrats in Attack on Kennedy New York Times: G.O.P. SAYS NIXON MAY WIN ILLINOIS; Alcorn Predicts a Recount Could Reverse Kennedy's Victory in the State G.O.P. SAY NIXON MAY WIN ILLINOIS Washington Post: Horsefeathers, Mr. Nixon Chicago Tribune: The myth of 1960 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the very first episode of Canoli Watchers — the comical yet informative deep dive into the real stories behind the American Mafia. In Episode 1, we break down the life and legacy of Raymond Patriarca, the quiet but powerful boss who controlled organized crime across New England for decades. While other mob leaders chased headlines, Patriarca built a disciplined empire out of Providence and ruled with strategy, secrecy, and absolute control. Who was the man behind the power? How did he keep such a low profile while running an entire crime family? And why is he considered one of the most effective Mafia bosses in American history? We're serving history with a side of humor — because learning about organized crime shouldn't feel like homework. Subscribe to Canoli Watchers for more episodes covering mob bosses, crime families, power plays, and the true stories behind Mafia history. Leave a comment with who we should cover next

Send a textIn a fun change of pace, Leanna Renee Hieber joins, The Happy Hour to disscuss her new book, Haunted happenings, and all things Gothic!! Hap has a blast as does the VIP Chatroom listening to Leanna's own experiences, her knowledge, and her just telling these true ghost stories!!This is a very fun listen!Follow Leanna on Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/leannareneehieberCheck out her webpage and all her books https://www.leannareneehieber.com/This episode was recorded live on the network infront of Happy Hour V.I.P.sIf you want to be part of the live tapingsfollow us on Twitchhttps://m.twitch.tv/thehappyhourscorwww.TheHappyHourSocialClub.comAS ALWAYSThe Happy Hour is brought to you by the official Top Shelf Alcohol of the Happy Hour!CLEARWATER DISTILLERY https://shop.clearwaterdistilling.com/PROMO CODE KINGHAPSAVES 10% and free shipping over $100OLD SCHOOL LABSAmazing Supplements made for Amazing people!TRY OATMEAL CREAM PIE PROTEIN! Save 30% site wide with promo code Kinghaphttps://shop.oldschoollabs.com/KINGHAPLiquid I.V.WOW..... SUGAR FREE LIV ENERGY!!!https://glnk.io/koyv/kinghap*PROMO CODE KINGHAP SAVES 25%

In this extended sponsor promo, former Scotland Yard detective and "Hustling the Mob" author Don Spillane shares some tales from his police career and an overview of his new career as an acclaimed crimewriter. You can enjoy more of Don's true crime stories in a series of podcasts released on his YouTube channel - https://www.youtube.com/@donspillaneauthor/ Order "Hustling the Mob" from Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hustling-Mob-Mafia-Malware-Murder/dp/0990328376/

When Billy Joel sings "Mafia," he's referencing a pivotal shift in the 1950s—the moment organized crime stepped out of the shadows and into the American consciousness. In this episode of History Ignited, we pull back the curtain on the Mob's "Golden Age," focusing on the disastrous 1957 Apalachin meeting that forced the FBI to finally admit the Mafia's existence. Join us as we explore the rise of the Five Families, the ironclad code of Omertà, and how a secret society managed to infiltrate everything from labor unions to Las Vegas. Send a text

True Crime Tuesday presents: Mafia Secrets: Untold Tales From The Hollywood Godfather with Actor/Singer/Movie Producer/Businessman/Author, Gianni Russo!The Kennedys, Marilyn, the Vatican, Vegas, The Godfather, the Mob, and more . . .During a cursed childhood in a Manhattan neighborhood teeming with Italian immigrants, Gianni Russo fended for himself at an early age. It was a quality that didn't go unnoticed by Frank Costello—father figure, mentor, and legendary crime boss. Thanks to Costello, Gianni was only twelve when his luck would change for a lifetime. All of it charmed—and thrilling. With it came Hollywood glamor, Vegas risk-takers, political conspiracies, sex, murder, shadow governments, and secrets. The stories Gianni Russo could tell . . .Now he does in this bombshell confessional. This is the inside account of the Sicilian Mafia, Cosa Nostra, what really transpired in those Mulberry Street clubs, and who whacked whom—including how mobster Tony Spilotro and his brother really died, finally revealed for the first time. This is Gianni, buddy of Frank Sinatra, and intimately more with Marilyn Monroe. What's the cover-up behind her death, JFK's, and Jimmy Hoffa's? It's all here. So is the clandestine role of the pope as the sacred boss of bosses, the glory days and downfall of Las Vegas, and the colorful behind-the-scenes tales of Gianni's role in the greatest movie ever made, The Godfather.On Today's TCT, Gianni returns to spill it all! Inside stories on Marilyn, The Kennedys, Vatican money laundering, Elvis, His remember on Robert Duvall and Diane Keaton, and he even tells us the staggering amount of money that flowed through his hands in just five years of running nightclubs in Las Vegas! (IT IS STAGGERING!)Get your copy of Mafia Secrets: Untold Tales From The Hollywood Godfather here: https://www.amazon.com/Mafia-Secrets-Untold-Hollywood-Godfather-ebook/dp/B0DYWKL3Z7?ref_=ast_author_mpbLearn more about Gianni here:  https://www.giannirusso.com/PLUS AN ALL NEW DUMB CRIMES AND STUPID CRIMINALS W/ JESSICA FREEBURG!!A naked Wisconsin man stole an ambulance with a patient in it and took Police for a joyride!  See the video here:  https://www.wsaw.com/2026/02/19/suspect-identified-stolen-ambulance-chase-with-patient-still-inside/?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&utm_campaign=fark&ICID=ref_fark#A Florida man smashes a random SUV with a hammer in a Publix parking lot after thing it is his ex's! See his reaction when he is caught, arrested, and informed:  https://www.wesh.com/article/florida-man-smashes-suv-hammer-publix-parking-lot/70393741?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&utm_campaign=fark&ICID=ref_farkCheck out Jessica Freeburg's website and get tickets to her events here:  https://jessicafreeburg.com/upcoming-events/and check out Jess on Tik Tok:  https://www.tiktok.com/@jessicafreeburgwritesFor the first time, get ALL NEW TRUE CRIME TUESDAY GEAR!  Represent your favorite true crime podcast in style! There are new and different (and really cool) items all the time in the Darkness Radio Online store at our website! . check out the Darkness Radio Store!   https://www.darknessradioshow.com/store/Make sure you update your Darkness Radio Apple Apps!and subscribe to the Darkness Radio You Tube page:  https://www.youtube.com/@DRTimDennis#crime #truecrime #truecrimepodcasts #truecrimetuesday #giannirusso #mafiasecrets #untoldtalesfromthehollywoodgodfather #carlo #thegodfather #carlogambino #frankcostello #joekennedy #johnfkennedy #bobbykennedy #kennedyassasination #deathofmarilynmonroe #deathofjimmyhoffa #franksinatra #calnevalodge #lasvegas #meyerlansky #pabloescobar #shahofIran #popejohnpaul2 #vatican #vaticanmoneylaundering  #dumbcrimesstupidcriminals #TimDennis  #jessicafreeburg #ghoststoriesink #paranormalauthor #massshooting #shootings #stabbings #murder #dismemberment  #drugsmuggling #bribery #publicsex  #floridaman #drugcrimes #foodcrimes #stupidcrimes #funnycrimes  #sexcrimes #dumbcrimes

True Crime Tuesday presents: Mafia Secrets: Untold Tales From The Hollywood Godfather with Actor/Singer/Movie Producer/Businessman/Author, Gianni Russo!The Kennedys, Marilyn, the Vatican, Vegas, The Godfather, the Mob, and more . . .During a cursed childhood in a Manhattan neighborhood teeming with Italian immigrants, Gianni Russo fended for himself at an early age. It was a quality that didn't go unnoticed by Frank Costello—father figure, mentor, and legendary crime boss. Thanks to Costello, Gianni was only twelve when his luck would change for a lifetime. All of it charmed—and thrilling. With it came Hollywood glamor, Vegas risk-takers, political conspiracies, sex, murder, shadow governments, and secrets. The stories Gianni Russo could tell . . .Now he does in this bombshell confessional. This is the inside account of the Sicilian Mafia, Cosa Nostra, what really transpired in those Mulberry Street clubs, and who whacked whom—including how mobster Tony Spilotro and his brother really died, finally revealed for the first time. This is Gianni, buddy of Frank Sinatra, and intimately more with Marilyn Monroe. What's the cover-up behind her death, JFK's, and Jimmy Hoffa's? It's all here. So is the clandestine role of the pope as the sacred boss of bosses, the glory days and downfall of Las Vegas, and the colorful behind-the-scenes tales of Gianni's role in the greatest movie ever made, The Godfather.On Today's TCT, Gianni returns to spill it all! Inside stories on Marilyn, The Kennedys, Vatican money laundering, Elvis, His remember on Robert Duvall and Diane Keaton, and he even tells us the staggering amount of money that flowed through his hands in just five years of running nightclubs in Las Vegas! (IT IS STAGGERING!)Get your copy of Mafia Secrets: Untold Tales From The Hollywood Godfather here: https://www.amazon.com/Mafia-Secrets-Untold-Hollywood-Godfather-ebook/dp/B0DYWKL3Z7?ref_=ast_author_mpbLearn more about Gianni here:  https://www.giannirusso.com/PLUS AN ALL NEW DUMB CRIMES AND STUPID CRIMINALS W/ JESSICA FREEBURG!!A naked Wisconsin man stole an ambulance with a patient in it and took Police for a joyride!  See the video here:  https://www.wsaw.com/2026/02/19/suspect-identified-stolen-ambulance-chase-with-patient-still-inside/?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&utm_campaign=fark&ICID=ref_fark#A Florida man smashes a random SUV with a hammer in a Publix parking lot after thing it is his ex's! See his reaction when he is caught, arrested, and informed:  https://www.wesh.com/article/florida-man-smashes-suv-hammer-publix-parking-lot/70393741?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&utm_campaign=fark&ICID=ref_farkCheck out Jessica Freeburg's website and get tickets to her events here:  https://jessicafreeburg.com/upcoming-events/and check out Jess on Tik Tok:  https://www.tiktok.com/@jessicafreeburgwritesFor the first time, get ALL NEW TRUE CRIME TUESDAY GEAR!  Represent your favorite true crime podcast in style! There are new and different (and really cool) items all the time in the Darkness Radio Online store at our website! . check out the Darkness Radio Store!   https://www.darknessradioshow.com/store/Make sure you update your Darkness Radio Apple Apps!and subscribe to the Darkness Radio You Tube page:  https://www.youtube.com/@DRTimDennis#crime #truecrime #truecrimepodcasts #truecrimetuesday #giannirusso #mafiasecrets #untoldtalesfromthehollywoodgodfather #carlo #thegodfather #carlogambino #frankcostello #joekennedy #johnfkennedy #bobbykennedy #kennedyassasination #deathofmarilynmonroe #deathofjimmyhoffa #franksinatra #calnevalodge #lasvegas #meyerlansky #pabloescobar #shahofIran #popejohnpaul2 #vatican #vaticanmoneylaundering  #dumbcrimesstupidcriminals #TimDennis  #jessicafreeburg #ghoststoriesink #paranormalauthor #massshooting #shootings #stabbings #murder #dismemberment  #drugsmuggling #bribery #publicsex  #floridaman #drugcrimes #foodcrimes #stupidcrimes #funnycrimes  #sexcrimes #dumbcrimes

Send a textGarry Pastore is a seasoned actor whose impressive career spans over four decades in film and television. Most recently, Garry guest starred as Arnold White in the highly anticipated Peacock original series Long Bright River (2025), starring Amanda Seyfried and Nicholas Pinnock. Currently, he captivates audiences in the trending Paramount+ series First Shift (2024), where he plays Valente, a maniacal mob boss. Filming for First Shift will continue in New Jersey through September 2025. Throughout his extensive career, Garry has been a prominent presence in numerous blockbuster TV series, including The Blacklist, The Deuce, The Sopranos, Blue Bloods, Billions, Boardwalk Empire, Power, Law & Order, Hit & Run, Seven Seconds, Gotham, and many more. On the big screen, Garry's filmography is equally remarkable, with standout roles in iconic movies such as The Irishman, Wolf of Wall Street, Rob the Mob, The Week Of, Last Call, The Yards, Who's Jenna, as well as fan favorites like Goodfellas, Carlito's Way, Donnie Brasco, A Bronx Tale, Cop Land, The Siege, Do the Right Thing, Cocktail, Prizzi's Honor, and many others. His film and television credits now exceed over one hundred, and his prolific career shows no signs of slowing down. Recently, Garry has ventured into new territory, moving away from his signature mobster and law enforcement roles. He has been cast as Father McCarthy, a beleaguered Irish priest, in the upcoming gothic horror film Hellbound Covenant (2025), where he faces a demonic force threatening his clergy. Beyond acting, Garry is also pursuing a passion for writing, directing, and producing. Having already found success with his personal projects Waiting for Budd and Destressed, he continues to create compelling screenplays for the big screen, with plans to bring some of his projects into production before the end of the year.Find Garry PastoreIMDb InstagramFind The Suffering PodcastThe Suffering Podcast InstagramKevin Donaldson InstagramApple PodcastSpotifyYouTubeSupport the showThe Suffering Podcast Instagram Kevin Donaldson Instagram TikTok YouTube

Meet Sojugang - the upcoming titan for Mob in the music industry.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, host Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective, steps outside traditional Mafia territory and into a shadowy world just as dangerous—and just as fascinating: the international theft of ultra-rare automobiles.  Gary is joined by author Stayton Bonner, former senior editor at Rolling Stone, and legendary car-recovery specialist Joe Ford, the real-life figure behind Bonner's book The Million Dollar Car Detective. At the center of the story is a breathtaking pre-World War II automobile—the Talbot-Lago Teardrop Coupé—once described as the most beautiful car in the world. Stolen from a Milwaukee industrialist's garage in 2001, the car vanished into the international underground of elite collectors, forged paperwork, and high-stakes deception. Joe Ford explains how he became the go-to investigator when rare cars worth millions disappear—and why stolen vehicles are far harder to recover than stolen art. What follows is a years-long global hunt involving disgruntled mechanics, fabricated titles, shell corporations, Swiss intermediaries, and a billionaire buyer now locked in civil litigation. Bonner adds rich historical context, tracing the car's glamorous past—from European aristocracy to Hollywood royalty—and exposing how loneliness, obsession, and greed often surround these legendary machines. The conversation expands into other notorious cases, including the disappearance of the original James Bond Aston Martin from Goldfinger, and how wealthy collectors sometimes knowingly harbor stolen artifacts. This episode is a true-crime story without guns or gangs—but filled with deception, betrayal, and the relentless pursuit of justice across borders. If you love investigative work, high-end crime, and stories that feel like James Bond meets Gone in 60 Seconds, this one's for you.

The Morning Xtra with Tug and Los delivers conservative talk on the biggest political, cultural, and news stories of the day. Smart analysis, unapologetic opinions, and real conversations every weekday morning. Every weekday from 6a to 10a! First thing to know: New updates on Nancy Guthrie Bad Bunny Flops, Carrie Underwood shines Curling your way into politics Xtra Flashback: Seinfeld sums up Mob conformity A VP's grateful outlook vs a First Lady's victim mindset Atlanta's ONLY All Conservative News & Talk Station.: https://www.xtra1063.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Watch all of our Epstein videos here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPT_cCpNMvT5teRR4DzsrY_1arpDS6x33Watch all of our Hamamoto videos here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPT_cCpNMvT60BzykDhdZyU2AmVg7rLy6Hamamoto on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@professorhamamotoProf. Darrell Hamamoto, who is an American writer, academic, and specialist in U.S. media and ethnic studies.Professors Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/share/hZajgCgTANc3kWbd/?mibextid=LQQJ4dUNTOUCHABLE - Jimmy Savile documentary https://youtu.be/6zCOix1iTvgADOPTED KID'S CA HORROR STORY & BOYS TOWN! PASTOR Eddie https://youtube.com/live/vD3SGWpnfyMWatch Used By ELITES From Age 6 - Survivor Kelly Patterson https://youtube.com/live/nkKkIfLkRx0KELLY'S 2 HOUR VIDEO ON VIRGINIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdIWUZIkxEU&t=3535sBOOK LINKS: Who Killed Epstein? Prince Andrew or Bill Clinton by Shaun Attwood UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B093QK1GS1 USA: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B093QK1GS1 Worldwide: https://books2read.com/u/bQjGQD All of Shaun's books on Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/Shaun-Attwood/author/B0042NT0CU?All of Shaun's books on Amazon USA: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Shaun-Attwood/author/B0042NT0CU?ccs_id=601ed49b-a7d2-4682-8c04-f7b40a2217efFollow P Diddys latest:https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPT_cCpNMvT4Y2ccQrFoT8bTBQmiNEsVq#jayz #beyonce #hollywood #countrymusic #nashville #pdiddy #puffdaddy #truecrime #news #youtubenews #podcast #livestream #youtube #thepope #vatican #church Here are Hamamoto's recommended books:Can't Stop Won't Stop:A History of the Hip-Hop Generation ——-The Psychological Covert War on Hip-Hop——-The Covert War Against Rock:What You Don't Know About The Deaths of;(Jim Morrison, Tupac Shakur, Michael Hutchence, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix,Phil Ochs, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, John Lennon & The Notorious B.I.G)——-Hit Men:Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business——-Me, the Mob, and the Music:One Helluva Ride Tommy James and the Shondells——-Godfather of the Music Business:Morris Levy (American Made Music Series)——-LAbyrinth:A Detective Investigates the Murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., the Implication of Death Row Records, Suge Knight, and the Origins of the Los Angeles——-The FBI war on Tupac Shakur:State repression of Black Leaders from the Civil Rights Error to the 1990s (real world)——-The FBI war on Tupac Shakur and Black Leaders:US Intelligence's: Murderous Targeting of Tupac, MLK, Malcol, Panthers, Hendrix, Marley rappers and Linked Ethic Leftists——-Have Gun Will Travel:The Spectacular Rise and Violent Fall of Death Row Records——-The Big Payback:The History of the Business of Hip-Hop——-Ruthless:A Memoir——-Hip-Hop Decoded——-Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones——-How to Wreck a Nice Beach:The Vocoder from WW II to Hip-Hop, The Machine Speaks——-Dancing with the Devil:How Puff burned the bad boys of Hip-Hop——-Hiding in Hip-Hop:On the Down Low in the Entertainment industry—from Music to Hollywood

In this episode of Gangland Wire, host Gary Jenkins takes listeners deep into one of the most chilling and revealing moments in Chicago mob history—a secretive 1967 party for Mob stalwart, Fi Fi Buccieri. It was held at the legendary Edgewater Beach Hotel. What appeared to be a lavish celebration was, in reality, a tightly controlled gathering of roughly 300 mobsters, political figures, and underworld insiders. The occasion marked the 40th birthday of feared Chicago Outfit enforcer Fiore “Fifi” Buccieri, a man whose reputation for violence made him one of the most dangerous figures in the city. Despite not being invited, veteran journalist Bob Wiedrich managed to infiltrate the event, raising serious questions about security, secrecy, and the gathering’s true purpose. This was no ordinary party. Federal surveillance later revealed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had the room bugged, capturing disturbing conversations—including laughter and casual recollections of torture and murder by Buccieri and his associates. Central to this episode is Buccieri's alleged role in the brutal torture and murder of William “Action” Jackson, a crime that horrified even seasoned law-enforcement agents. These wiretap recordings provide rare insight into the mindset of mob enforcers and the normalization of extreme violence within the Chicago Outfit during the 1960s. The timing of the party was critical. Chicago boss Sam Giancana had recently been released from prison, and rumors swirled that major power moves were underway. Evidence suggests this birthday celebration doubled as a covert mob summit, where leadership issues, alliances, and strategic decisions were quietly discussed away from public view. This party was a who's who of the Chicago Outfit. Men like Mike Glitta, Teets Battalgia, Ceaser DiVarco, Ross Prio, Larry The Hood Bounaguidi, Irvin Weiner, Dominic DiBello, Wee Willie Messino, Joseph Cortino ( former chief of police in Forest Park and several others. You will learn how Anthony Accardo and his driver Jackie Cerone avoided the scene when the cops started taking pictures and writing down names. I also explore the role of the Santa Fe Saddle and Gun Club, an organization tied to questionable fundraising activities that blurred the lines between organized crime, business interests, and local politics. These raffles and social events weren't just about money—they were about influence, access, and control. Throughout the episode, I break down the cast of characters who attended this gathering: loan sharks, enforcers, racketeers, and political fixers. Their interconnected stories reveal a dense web of loyalty, fear, and ambition that defined the Chicago mob scene at its peak.   This episode uses the Edgewater Beach Hotel as more than a setting—it becomes a symbol of mob glamour masking ruthless criminal reality. It's a reminder of how deeply organized crime once penetrated American society, and why these stories continue to fascinate, disturb, and resonate today. 0:04 Chicago Mob Tales 1:39 Fifi Buccieri ‘s Infamy 3:19 Giancana’s Absence 4:22 The Santa Fe Saddle and Gun Club 5:36 Edgewater Beach Hotel 8:36 Police Intelligence Operation 12:22 The Notorious Players 16:02 Entertainment at the Banquet 18:54 Reflections on the Meeting 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 [0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there in gangland, wireland, [0:03] especially you guys up in Chicago. Yeah, I’ve done several stories on Chicago. I’m on a Chicago trip right now, I guess. I’m going to do one more with our friend, Mr. Cooley, Bob Cooley. We just haven’t set up a time yet, but I’m going to do one more with him for sure. But I’m going to keep some of these Chicago stories up. I got such a great reaction. You know, you guys, you know, like and share these, as they say, on the apps and on YouTube. But anyhow, let’s go back to March of 1967. [0:36] There was a real well-known reporter named Bob Wendrick at the time. He really covered the mob in Chicago. I mean, he might as well have been a member of the mob in Chicago. He was so close to so many people up there. And he had some really good sources and some inside tracks. And he went to a party, but he wasn’t invited to that party. You know, they never really were going to invite Bob Weindrich to a party. It was $25 a plate. There was about 300 outfit mobsters and their associates attended this party. Some of their political associates even. They called a chief of police and I think a mayor of a suburban city. It was at the Edgewater Hotel. It was sponsored by the Santa Fe Saddle and Gun Club. It was to honor the birthday of outfit enforcer, killer, and loan shark Fiore Fifi Bussieri. Fifi was a vicious killer, man. I mean, he was bad. Straight out of the Capone days. [1:36] And he was kind of best known in more modern times. It happened not too long before this party, I believe, or around this time, maybe right after. [1:48] He took part in the multi-day, I believe, three-day torture and murder of a bookie, a great big fat bookie named William Action Jackson. There’s some images, some pictures, a picture of him in his trunk was showing a lot of the torture that they did to him out there. I’ve seen it on the Internet. They kind of cut back on those pictures and try to keep those from getting circulated around on Facebook and some of the social media apps. I assume it’s still out there. Um, but anyhow, the Bureau had a, had a hidden microphone in a guy’s house, Jackie, the lackey Saron, who was, uh, uh, a Cardo’s driver at the time had a, had a hidden microphone in there and Jackie Saron and a couple others. And one of them was Fifi Sierra, Bussieri. I don’t remember who else it was. We’re laughing about Lacks and Jackson’s reactions to the cattle prod and some of the other gruesome details. [2:45] They thought he was talking to the hated FBI agent Bill Romer at the time, but in fact, he was not. He wasn’t talking to anybody. I did find one blurb where he was thought to be a child molester. So, you know, I don’t know. And I’m thinking it was a child of one of his girlfriends or something like that. I’m not sure. But anyhow, they tortured the heck out of him for about three days. Fifi came out of the 42 gang. If you remember, it was Alibaba and the 40 Thieves, so that meant there was 41 in Alibaba’s gang, and they wanted to have one more [3:17] than Alibaba, so they named themselves the 42 Gang. This party happened just as Sam Giancana was getting out of jail. [3:25] He didn’t attend, and he left for Mexico about that time to avoid further grand jury appearances. He’d been in jail about a year, I think, because they give him the old give you immunity and you have to testify. If you don’t, then they find you in contempt of court and send you to penitentiary or a jail for a year or so for the length of grand jury. And so he left town right after that and went down to Mexico for several years. Some speculate this meeting was really to get everybody together in one place and have some private meetings off the side without law enforcement really knowing what was going on, where Ricardo and Paul the Waiter Rica would name Joey Doves Iupa as the new boss in place of Gen Cona and make some other personnel shifts. You know, a few years later, when Giancana comes back, there’ll be a whole string of murders around the time he’s murdered because of some of his people that were always loyal to Giancana. [4:22] This Santa Fe Saddling Gun Club, anybody ever heard of that? I had not heard of this before. It was a registered club. The president was Joseph Scaramuza, who owned a gun store at Halstead & Taylor, which is, I believe that’s right down there in the middle of Mobland. There was an informant in the jfk files as i was researching scaramusa there was an informant that claimed that scaramusa knew jack ruby well and as they checked into scaramusa over that they found found that this halstead gun store that he owned had sold three pistols that were recovered after some puerto rican terrorists shot up the house of representative a few years before now you know what all that means i don’t know but uh and i remember that when i was a little kid these puerto Puerto Ricans, uh, now, uh, they tried to, they were trying to assassinate Harry Truman, who was staying out of the white house and the Blair house, uh, which is, I think maybe that’s where the vice president stays. Sometimes I’m not sure. Anyhow, he was not in the white house and they, they had a plan to assassinate him. They also went into the house of representatives and shot it up. They wanted complete freedom from the United States at the time. Now there’s not been any Puerto Rican freedom movement since that I know of. Anyhow, um. [5:36] The Edgewater Beach was a faded but once grand dom of hotels along Lake Michigan. They had their own beach for a while. Then something moved in between them and the beach. And it was about to declare bankruptcy. It was located a few guys that live in Chicago. It was 5555 North Sheridan. [5:56] And now members of the Chicago Police Intelligence Unit had found out about that themselves. It was like Weindrich had. Maybe they hip Weindrich to it. That all works, all that little undercover stuff. You have an employee at the Edgewater who knows somebody who knows somebody, and the work starts leaking out. When you have something this big, you have 300 people there, and it was really to make some money too, charged $25 a plate, and they did another little fundraiser. They’ve been selling raffle tickets all over Chicago and all, like down in northwestern Indiana. And in Indiana, anywhere that the outfit had some kind of influence and businesses that they could hold up. It’s like policemen. We used to go out and sell circus tickets. They were like $2 a ticket, but it wasn’t really for a ticket. It was like a support the police circus, which then gave a piece of the money to some police or widows and orphans fund. I don’t remember exactly. This is when I was brand new. and you were given like a handful of circus tickets and you’re supposed to go out to your local businessmen and sell them. Of course, they always bought them. All you had to do was go in and say, you know, I got some police tickets or circus tickets and they’d buy them. And they weren’t exactly even a ticket. They were a coupon and then they helped go buy a ticket. But, you know, that’s what they were doing, and that’s where they were. [7:23] Intelligence unit was milling around the hotel. They were, you know, I think what they were trying to do was waiting to see if the operators of this banquet, as this thing got going, if somebody actually, you know, drew, made a drawing or really raffled off a new car, which is what supposedly the raffle tickets were for, which would give them an excuse then to raid this place, saying it was an illegal lottery and then start really identifying the participants you know all of them that were there make them air everybody give you id and all that and then they had they were really loaded for bear they had 65 cops waiting close by it’s something called the foster avenue beach so it was it was a hell of an operation now the outfit during this time learned that the cops were going to be there and someone called Tony Accardo and Paula Guadarica, who were, you know, supposed to be there. They were like the headliners. They were the big ducks at that show. And really, if it was about having some meetings to realign personnel and name, maybe they’re going to have a making ceremony, but I doubt that. [8:30] But maybe they were going to name Joy Iupa as the new boss because he was the next boss. Somebody warned him not to come. And, of course, Jackie Lackey’s Roan didn’t show up either because he was a Cardo’s driver. [8:47] Cops, I’m going to tell you about some of the people the cops did find there and identify. Ross Prio, his north side loan shark and enforcer who had been Gen Conn’s second command and was reportedly consulted on all outfit murders. Now, Ross Prio, he’d been around. I can’t remember. I think he was out of the 42 gang himself. He had been around since the Capone days and a well-respected guy, had a lot of guys under him. And he was a bad dude. He was a bad actor. He was dangerous as hell and could take part in torturing the whole nine yards. They saw Irving Weiner there. He was a mob-connected bail bondsman. He was a guy who ended up a few years later walking with Alan Dorfman when somebody came up behind Dorfman and shot and killed him. Dorfman was their big guy in the Teamsters. Dorfman had helped him get those loans out of the Teamsters pension fund and loaned to people that wanted to buy Las Vegas casinos. Then everybody would get a kickback from those casinos. So he was integral. He was being investigated as an official of the Twin Cities. [9:54] Food products company and he had my he had partners felix milwaukee phil aldoricio and sam teach battaglia and marshall caifano i mean this guy is erb wiener he was he was a money man for the mob well known as a money man and and he was he was involved with with lombardo joe lombardo and tony splatter and some others and they got a loan for a guy named from the teamsters fund but for a guy named danny seifert they thought danny seifert had started a company with a lot of this money, and he was going to testify about how he got this Teamsters loan is my understanding. And I believe Lombardo and probably Frank Suisse showed up and killed him one day. He never spent a night in jail. Weiner never spent a night in jail. Go figure that. He’s kind of like, almost like Tony Accardo, huh? I saw a guy named Mike Glitta. He was an outfit member who had B-Girl bars, had these kind of hustling bars, and was involved, heavily involved in the porn business now. Um. [10:54] There was a lot of porn shops in Chicago, and Gletta was really, he was the guy on the porn shops. Chicago Crime Commission published something that said he supervised all pornography operations in an area that went from the near north side clear to the Wisconsin state line. So everything from, say, Rush Street on north was his. I guess he wasn’t down in, I think, Old Town is where Redwood met and some porn shops down there. and Frank Suisse was extorting money from some of them. Mob watchers claimed that Glitter always reported directly to Vincent Solano, who was a labor union leader and a capo, and the guy that probably had Tokyo Joe, Joe Ido killed. He was a racket boss on the north side and all the way up to the north suburbs. Identified a guy called Larry the Hood, who I’d seen that name before. It’s a really hard name to pronounce. was a Bonaguiti. [11:54] He was a mob wannabe at the time. As I researched into him, he was really just a wannabe. Hung around the Rush Street bars and he was associated with Mike Glitta. And he’ll eventually get an opportunity when Ross Prio dies and Mike Glitta has a heart attack and he moves on up real quick because he’s always in there around and he knows the porn business and the B-Girl bars on that near north side. And he’s the one that goes around and collects after after Glitter has a heart attack. [12:23] Another Northside vice boss named Joe Caesar Joseph DeVarco, he was dropped off by an underling driver. He came out of the 42 gang himself and is a well-known gangster on the Rush Street area. Dominic DiBello was a Northside gambling operator. He was seen with a friend of his and a fellow gambling operator named Bill Gold, or called Bill Gold. He had a longer name than that, and I don’t know him. If you guys make comments down below, if you know who this Bill Gold was and what the story was with him, he probably just ran a sports book or something or helped with the off-track betting outlets. And they arrived just before a guy named Joseph Cortino, according to the newspaper report. He was a former Forest Park chief of police. He was suspected of protecting gambling operations and leaking law enforcement information to the mob. A guy you hear mentioned, I’ve not really seen much on in detail, Willie Massino, and they called him Wee Willie because he was little, but he was supposedly really, really a bad character. [13:26] Here’s a guy when I believe it was Mario Raginone was invited to go on some kind of a crime, and he saw Willie Massino and somebody else in the area. And he said, uh-oh, if those guys are anywhere in the area where I am and they’ve got me kind of isolated like this, you know, going to do a crime so I’m not telling anybody where I’m going and what I’m doing and who I’m with, you know, they’re going to hit me. And he went in after that. That’s how feared Wee Willie Messino was. He had been a loan shark collector and enforcer for Tony Cardo and a guy named Joseph Gagliano, who I don’t know must have faded off into the woodwork by the 70s. 1970 he went to prison for kidnapping and beating a couple of contractors who owed money to the mob, George and Jack Chiagoris. [14:19] Sounds like they’re maybe Greek, huh? After he got out of the penitentiary, he went to work as an advisor with Marco D’Amico, who was, you know, remember Marco D’Amico had a gambling operation, and that’s who Bob Cooley worked with a lot. And he also did some work for Jackie Cerrone. [14:37] So Turk Torello, James Turk Torello, he was confronted by the cops as he was unloading sound equipment out of his, wherever his car. He yelled at him as they walked up. He said, hey, he said, I got machine guns in these boxes. You want to come and see? He was kind of a wise-ass, you know. He was a capo of the 26th Street crew and directly under Fifi Busseri. One time, he had been sent by an angry mob boss named Sam Giancana, who we all know, Mobo. And he was going to partner up with Jackie Cerrone to kill an outfit member named Frankie Esposito down in Florida. But the Bureau had recorded Giancana’s conversation and warned Esposito. and he came right back around. He didn’t help the Bureau. You know, you go out and you warn a guy and then you try to bring him in and make him a snitch or make him a cooperating witness in the end because they’re trying to kill him. They don’t all come in. And he ended up coming back to Chicago and settled his dispute with Giancana and that hit was canceled. According to the tape recordings, Torello and his killers were going to murder Esposito and cut him up in small pieces and feed him to the sharks off the Florida coast. You know, they had houses down in Florida. That’s where they, that was Jackie Cerrone’s Florida house where they overheard him and Fifi talking about the murdering and torturing Action Jackson. [16:03] Now, I mentioned bringing in the sound equipment. They had entertainment. Vic Dimone was the entertainment that night. Now, Vic Dimone has long-held connections to the Chicago outfit and I believe the Genovese family. I didn’t really go way in deep into him. I’ve got a bunch of notes. I’ll probably do a story just about Vic Dimone. [16:26] Maybe he was the character in The Singer and The Godfather, that kind of a blend of Frank Sinatra and Vic Dimone. As a singer in the Godfather movie. Guys named a couple brothers, Joseph and Donald Grieco, were there. Well, they had been in business with Vic Damone in the Vic Damone Frozen Pizza Company. Paul Rica and Fifi Boussieri had brought the famous singer Vic Damone into the outfits world and got him to lend his name to this frozen pizza business. And what they did, the Grieco brothers, They use it as a cover for their loan shark activities, but, you know, they sold pizzas, too, although I’ve never heard of. I don’t ever remember seeing a Vic DeMone frozen pizza. Vic DeMone had even taken his show to Giancana’s joint, the Armory. And if you’ve ever been by the Armory, it’s just like a neighborhood bar. A neighborhood joint is not a place. But Vic DeMone was big. You know, he would be playing Madison Square Garden maybe at the time or the big clubs, the Copacabana in New York. And they got him to bring his show out to. [17:33] Gincana’s Joint the Armory kind of like at his Villa Venice he got Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis to bring their show there and it was not exactly it was not the Copacabana they tried to make it into the Copacabana of Chicago but it never really got there another guy they saw was an outfit bookmaker and a tough guy out of Cicero who will get killed here in a little bit Sam Sambos Cesario Yeah. [17:59] He was a longtime workhorse. He’s well-liked throughout the whole Chicago underworld, but he made a mistake. He ended up marrying a girlfriend slash mistress, the Gomar of Milwaukee Field Aldericio, while he was in the penitentiary. Two guys showed up with this woman. He marries her. They’re sitting out in front of their house. It was like a brownstone. It was a hot summer night. They’re sitting out in lawn chairs out in front of their house, and two guys pull up and run up and kill him. They say Harry Ailman was the guy that did that. They call that. I’ve had some kickback on this when I said this one time before a few years ago. I didn’t really investigate into it. But, you know, the popular story is that it’s a hit from beyond the grave because Aldericio had already died in prison [18:50] between the time he gave that order and this actual murder. So that is a story of the big meeting at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago. [19:02] It wasn’t exactly like Appalachian or some of the other famous mob meetings, and it was just Chicago only. They didn’t identify that they named anybody from out of town at this thing. Seemed like it was a big moneymaker, maybe a meeting that you could hire some other little meetings in, get people in there that you didn’t really want to be seen with in public. This article, they talked about other politicians and businessmen that were there, but they didn’t really name them. I guess they didn’t want to get sued or whatever, but it was a, it was definitely, it was a fundraiser. He charged 25 bucks a plate and then have that, uh, that lottery for that car. And, and, you know, they never gave that car to anybody. And you know how much money you can raise with, with, you got, you know, a hundred guys or so going out, mob guys going out and raising money, selling lottery tickets at five bucks, 10 bucks each. You can raise a lot of money like that. So maybe it’s just one more big Chicago scam and honored Fifi Boussieri at the time. I don’t know. But anyhow, thanks a lot, guys. I thought it was an interesting story, and I thought you would find it interesting. And some of the people that they named that were there, I wish I’d have been there, but writing down license numbers and taking pictures and all that stuff. So keep coming back. Like and subscribe, as they say. And we’re just going to keep doing this and doing this. [20:24] I’ve gotten some you know I’ve got some things up that are like non-fiction books that are based on mob stuff, I don’t know if that’s okay or not, but I kind of like mixing that up. There’s only so many mob stories out there. You know, I don’t want a lot of these that have already been told. I don’t remember seeing any. I kind of looked around in the other podcast having this story. So I try to find them. You know, give me any tips, your comments that you can. I’ll try to look it up. And if I can find enough information, I’ll do the story on it. So thanks a lot. And adieu to you guys out in Chicago. I bet it’s colder up there than it is down here. Thanks, guys.

JULIE BOARDMAN, Founder & Co-Creator of the Museum of Broadway. Julie will be speaking about MoB's participation in NYC Must See Week, presented by NYC Tourism + Conventions and MoB's dedication to Black History Month in their permanent costume exhibit this February. ADDRESS: 145 West 45th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues) TICKETS: Timed tickets are $41 and Flexible tickets are $49 • NYC MUST SEE WEEK: Discounted tickets using code MSW26 (brings tickets down to $19.50/ ticket!) • Visit www.nyctourism.com for this deal! HOURS OF OPERATION: Open 7 days a week • Monday - Wednesday- 9:30AM - 4PM • Thursday - Sunday- 9:30AM - 6:30PM WEBSITE: www.themuseumofbroadway.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- STEVE CUOZZO- Restaurant critic, real estate columnist and op-ed contributor of the New York Post. WEBSITE: www.nypost.com RECENT ARTICLES BY STEVE CUOZZO Manhattan retail lease rebound continues — but prime storefronts remain vacant By Steve Cuozzo PENN District poised to grow by another block, replacing ‘junky retail' — NYC loses retail giant By Steve Cuozzo TJ Maxx set to open first new store in NYC in 10 years in Herald Square By Steve Cuozzo Investment in Manhattan real estate is booming — with Union Square storefronts filling up By Steve Cuozzo Holy smokes! The Post puts the best pastrami in New York and Los Angeles to the test — who will win, Langer's or Katz's? By David Landsel Featuring Steve Cuozzo

Fisher Ames didn't just worry about democracy, he despised it.  In this episode of America's Founding Series, the life and ideas of Fisher Ames reveal why the Founders feared mob rule, moral absolutism, and political urgency driven by emotion rather than reason. Ames believed liberty survives only when passion is restrained by law, time, and reflection. As modern mobs reject disagreement, delegitimize institutions, and claim authority over the law itself, his warnings feel less like history and more like prophecy. What You'll Learn Why Fisher Ames believed democracy is driven by impulse, not reason The difference between citizens and mobs, why disagreement becomes betrayal, and the impact of social media on polarization and the mob mentality  How the Constitution was designed to slow emotional surges before they become law Why gridlock is a feature, not a flaw, in a functioning republic How moral certainty and urgency lead societies toward instability and despotism This episode connects America's founding principles to modern unrest and explains why a republic cannot survive when mobs replace law and emotion replaces judgment.  

Watch all of our Hamamoto videos here:    • Professor Hamamoto  Hamamoto on YouTube:    / @professorhamamoto  Prof. Darrell Hamamoto, who is an American writer, academic, and specialist in U.S. media and ethnic studies.Professors Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/share/hZajgC...UNTOUCHABLE - Jimmy Savile documentary    • UNTOUCHABLE - Jimmy Savile documentary by ...  ADOPTED KID'S CA HORROR STORY & BOYS TOWN! PASTOR Eddie https://youtube.com/live/vD3SGWpnfyMWatch Used By ELITES From Age 6 - Survivor Kelly Patterson https://youtube.com/live/nkKkIfLkRx0KELLY'S 2 HOUR VIDEO ON VIRGINIA    • Video  BOOK LINKS: Who Killed Epstein? Prince Andrew or Bill Clinton by Shaun Attwood UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B093QK1GS1 USA: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B093QK1GS1 Worldwide: https://books2read.com/u/bQjGQD All of Shaun's books on Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/Shaun...All of Shaun's books on Amazon USA: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Shaun-A...Follow P Diddys latest:   • P Diddy  #jayz #beyonce #hollywood #countrymusic #nashville #pdiddy #puffdaddy #truecrime #news #youtubenews #podcast #livestream #youtube #thepope #vatican #church Here are Hamamoto's recommended books:Can't Stop Won't Stop:A History of the Hip-Hop Generation ——-The Psychological Covert War on Hip-Hop——-The Covert War Against Rock:What You Don't Know About The Deaths of;(Jim Morrison, Tupac Shakur, Michael Hutchence, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix,Phil Ochs, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, John Lennon & The Notorious B.I.G)——-Hit Men:Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business——-Me, the Mob, and the Music:One Helluva Ride Tommy James and the Shondells——-Godfather of the Music Business:Morris Levy (American Made Music Series)——-LAbyrinth:A Detective Investigates the Murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G., the Implication of Death Row Records, Suge Knight, and the Origins of the Los Angeles——-The FBI war on Tupac Shakur:State repression of Black Leaders from the Civil Rights Error to the 1990s (real world)——-The FBI war on Tupac Shakur and Black Leaders:US Intelligence's: Murderous Targeting of Tupac, MLK, Malcol, Panthers, Hendrix, Marley rappers and Linked Ethic Leftists——-Have Gun Will Travel:The Spectacular Rise and Violent Fall of Death Row Records——-The Big Payback:The History of the Business of Hip-Hop——-Ruthless:A Memoir——-Hip-Hop Decoded——-Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones——-How to Wreck a Nice Beach:The Vocoder from WW II to Hip-Hop, The Machine Speaks——-Dancing with the Devil:How Puff burned the bad boys of Hip-Hop——-Hiding in Hip-Hop:On the Down Low in the Entertainment industry—from Music to Hollywood

Joe Colombo was one of the most controversial mob figures in American history. From running a major New York crime family to founding the Italian American Civil Rights League, Colombo blurred the line between organized crime and public activism. His rise, his influence, and his shocking public shooting changed the Mafia forever.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/outlaws-gunslingers--4737234/support.Subscribe to our YouTube! https://www.youtube.com/@bangdangnetwork

In this episode of Gangland Wire, host Gary Jenkins talks with author Linda Stasi about her historical novel, The Descendant, inspired by her own Italian-American family history. Stasi traces her ancestors' journey from Sicily to the Colorado mining camps, revealing the brutal realities faced by immigrant laborers in the American West. The conversation explores the violent labor struggles surrounding the Ludlow Massacre and the role of powerful figures like John D. Rockefeller, as well as the diverse immigrant communities that shaped Colorado's mining towns. Stasi challenges stereotypes about Italians in America, highlighting their roles as workers, ranchers, and community builders—not just mobsters. Jenkins and Stasi also discuss Prohibition-era bootlegging and the early roots of organized crime in places like Pueblo, weaving together documented history with deeply personal family stories of survival, violence, and resilience. Drawing on her background as a journalist, Stasi reflects on loss, perseverance, and the immigrant pursuit of the American dream, making The Descendants both a historical narrative and an emotional family legacy. Click here to find the Descendant. 0:04 Introduction to Linda Stasi 3:12 The Role of Women in History 7:05 Bootlegging and the Mafia’s Rise 9:31 Discovering Family Connections 14:59 Immigrant Struggles and Success 19:02 Childhood Stories of Resilience 24:04 Serendipity in New York 26:19 Linda’s Journey as a Journalist 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] Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there, glad to be back here in studio, Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective, and I have an interview for you. This is going to be a historical fiction author. This is going to be a historical fiction book by a writer whose family lived the life of, whose family, This is going to be a real issue. This book is going to, we’re going to talk about a book. We’re going to talk with an author about the book. We’re going to talk with the author, Linda Stasi. We’re going to talk with the author, Linda Stasi, about her book, The Descendants. Now, she wrote a historical fiction, but it’s based on her actual family’s history. [0:50] From Sicily to New York to California. The wild west of colorado now get that you never heard of many italians out west in colorado but she’s going to tell us a lot more about that and how they were actually ended up being part of the pueblo colorado mafia the corvino family and then got involved in bootlegging and and then later were involved in ranching and different things like that so it’s uh it’s a little different take on the mob in the United States that we usually get, but I like to do things that are a little bit different. So welcome, Linda Stasey. Historical fiction, how much of it is true? Is it from family stories? All the stories are true. I’ll ask you that here in a little bit. Okay, all the stories are true. All right. All the stories are true. [1:41] It’s based on not only stories that were told to me by my mother and her sisters and my uncles and so forth, But it’s also based on a lot of actual events that took place while they were living in Colorado. And it’s based on the fact that, you know, people don’t know this. We watch all these movies and we think everybody who settled the West talk like John Wayne. There were 30 different languages spoken right in the minds of Colorado. So my uncles rode the range and they were, drovers and they were Italian. I mean, they were first generation. They were born in Italy and they made their way with all these other guys who were speaking Greek and Mexican and you name it. It wasn’t a lot of people talking like, hey, how are you doing, partner? How are you doing, bard? Talking like I do. Right. [2:46] But it took a long time for you you can blame the movies for that and the dominant uh uh caucasian culture for that right and you know there was that what was the movie the the martin scorsese movie killers of the flower moon oh yeah all the uh native americans spoke like they were from like movie set in color and oklahoma so he was like what. [3:13] Yeah, well, it’s the movies, I guess. [3:25] Unlike any women that I would have thought would have been around at that time. They were rebellious, and they did what they wanted, and they had a terrible, mean father. And I also wanted to tell this story. That’s what I started out telling. But I ended up telling the story of the resilience of the immigrants who came to this country. For example, with the Italians and the Sicilians, there had been earthquakes and tsunamis and droughts. So Rockefeller sent these men that he called padrones to the poorest sections of Sicily, the most drought-affected section, looking for young bucks to come and work. And he promised them, he’d say, oh, the president of America wants to give you land, he wants to give you this. Well, they found themselves taken in the most horrific of conditions and brought to Ellis Island, where they were herded onto cattle cars and taken to the mines of Colorado, where they worked 20-hour days. They were paid in company script, so they couldn’t even buy anything. Their families followed them. They were told that their families were coming for free, and they were coming for free, but they weren’t. They had to pay for their passage, which could never be paid for because it was just company script. [4:55] And then in 1914, the United Mine Workers came in, and there were all these immigrants, Greeks and mostly Italians, and they struck, and Rockefeller fired everyone who struck. So the United Mine Workers set up a tent city in Ludlow. [5:14] And at night, Rockefeller would send his goons in who were—he actually paid the National Guard and a detective agency called Baldwin Feltz to come in. And they had a turret-mounted machine gun that they called the Death Squad Special, and they’d just start spraying. So the miners, the striking miners, built trenches under their tents for their women and children to hide. when the bullets started flying. And then at some point, Rockefeller said, you’re not being effective enough. They haven’t gone back to work. Do what you have to do. So these goons went in and they poured oil on top of the tents. And they set them on fire. [6:00] And they burnt dozens of women and children to death. They went in. The government claimed it was 21 people, but there was a female reporter who counted 60-something. and they were cutting the heads and the hands off of people, the children and women, so they couldn’t be identified. It all ended very badly and none of Rockefeller’s people or Rockefeller got in trouble. They went before Congress and Rockefeller basically said they had no right to strike. And that was that. So here are all these men and women now living wild in the mountains of Colorado, not speaking the language, not. Being literate, not able to read and write. [6:44] And living in shacks on mountains in the hurricane, I mean, in the blizzards and whatnot. And then it’s so odd. In 1916, Colorado declared prohibition, which was four years before the rest of the country. [7:00] So these guys said, well, we need to make booze. We need to make wine. What do you mean you can’t have booze and wine? So that’s how bootlegging started in Colorado. And that’s how the mafia began in the West. with these guys. [7:18] It’s kind of interesting. As I was looking down through your book, I did a story on the more modern mafia. This started during bootlegging times in Pueblo, and I noticed in your book, I refer to Pueblo, this was the Corvino brothers. So did you study that? Is that some of the background that you used to make, you know, use a story? You used real stories as well as, you know, the real stories from your family, real stories from history. Well, the Carlinos are my family. Oh, you’re related to the Carlinos. Well, what happened was I didn’t know that. And my cousin Karen came across this photo of the man who was her son. [7:59] Grandfather that she never met because he was killed in the longest gunfight in Colorado history when she was 10 days old. And he was Charlie Carlino. So she came across it and we met, we ended up meeting the family. Sam Carlino is my cousin and he owns like this big barbecue joint in san jose california and uh we’ve become very friendly so i i said i look i’m looking at this and i think wait a minute vito carlino is the father he has three sons and one daughter the youngest son charlie who was the the handsome man about town cowboy, they had a rival family called the dannas in bootlegging and charlie carlino and his bodyguard were riding across the baxter street bridge driving in one direction and the dannas were coming in the other direction and the dannas got out and and killed them and it’s exactly what I’m thinking to myself, Vito Corleone, three sons, Charlie gets killed on the bridge while the two cars are… I thought, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I mean. [9:26] It can’t be that coincidental, right? No. No, it can’t be. Even the bridge. Somebody was doing their research. [9:46] And had baby Charlotte, who was only 10 days old at the time. So all these stories are true, and it started other gunfights and so forth and so on. But I thought, holy shit. That’s my family. I had no idea. I mean, I knew my aunt was married to a guy whose name was Charlie Carlino, And I should show you the picture because he looks like the missing link from the village people. He’s got big fur chaps on and a cowboy hat. I mean, he’s got his holsters on and he’s got his long gun over his shoulder. It’s like, wow. Yeah, so that story is true. And my mom was a little girl when the Pueblo flood happened. And she always recalled the story to me about watching in horror as the cows and the horses and people were floating away, dead. [10:54] So now the name of your book is A Descendant, which is you, of course. And you kind of use the situations that you just described and the real life people in this book. So then how does this book progress and what other situation do you use? Well, I used many of the acts. I used the Ludlow massacre, the flood, the bootlegging, the prohibition. I also uncovered that the governor of Colorado said. [11:30] Assigned all these guys to become prohibition agents, but they were all KKK. Yeah. So they actually had license to kill the immigrants, just saying they had a still. They had a still. And they were wholesale killing people. So there’s that story. There’s the story of the congressional hearing of Rockefeller after that. And um the the book ends up with my mother um beating my father um who was not in colorado she met him at my aunt’s wedding and avoided him and avoided him and they finally got together and it ends up the book ends up at the start of world war ii and my father was drafted into the air Force, or the Army Air Corps, as it was called that time, and his was assigned to a bomber. He was a co-pilot or a bombardier or something, I forgot. And my grandfather on my father’s side said, well, wait a minute, where are you going to do this? And he said, well, we’re going to Italy. And he said, you’re going to bomb this? Your own country? And my father said, no, no, Bob, this is my country. [12:47] So the book comes full circle. Yeah, really. You know, I, uh, uh, sometimes I start my, I’ll do a program here for different groups or for the library once in a while. And I always like to start it with, you know, first of all, folks, remember, uh. [13:03] Italians came here after, you know, really horrible conditions in southern Italy and Sicily and they came here and they’re just looking for a little slice of American pie the American that’s all they want is a some of the American dream and you know they were taking advantage of they had they were they were darker they had a different language so they didn’t fit it they couldn’t like the Irish and the Germans were already here they had all the good jobs they had the businesses and so now the Italians they’re they’re kind of uh sucking high and tit as we used to say on the farm they’re they’re uh you know picking up the scraps as they can and form businesses. And so it sounds like, you know, and they also went into the, I know they went in the lead mines down here in South Missouri, because there’s a whole immigrant population, Sicilians in a small town called Frontenac. And it also sounds like they went out to the mines in Denver, Colorado. So it’s based on that diaspora, if you will, of people from Southern Italy. And they’re strapping, trying to get their piece of the American pie. Right. And I think that I also wanted very much to change the same old, same old narrative that we’ve all come to believe, that, you know, Italians came here, they went to New York, they killed everybody, they were ignorant slobs. And my family had a ranch! They were ranchers! They had herds of cattle! It’s like, that’s just been dismissed as though none of this existed because. [14:30] Yes, they were darker, because they had curly hair. [14:34] There’s a passage in my book that’s taken actually from the New York Times, where they say that Southern Italians are. [14:43] Greasy, kinky-haired criminals whose children should never be allowed in public schools with white children. Yeah. They used to print stuff like that. I’ve done some research in old newspapers, and not only about Italians, but a lot of other minorities, they print some [14:57] horrible, horrible, horrible things. Well, every minority goes through this, I guess. Everyone. I think so. Part of it’s a language problem. You hear people say, well, why don’t they learn our language? Well, what I say is, you know, ever try to learn a foreign language? It’s hard. It is really, really hard. I’ve tried. It is really hard. I got fired by my Spanish teacher. Exactly. You know how hard it is. I said, no, wait, I’m paying you. You can’t fire me. She said, you can’t learn. You just can’t learn. My grandkids love to say she got fired by her Spanish teacher. [15:36] But it’s such a barrier any kind of success you know not having the language is such a barrier to any kind of success into the you know american business community and that kind of a thing so it’s uh it’s tough for people and you got these people young guys who are bold and, they want they want to they end up having to feel like they have to take theirs they have to take it because ain’t nobody giving it up back in those days and so that sounds like your family they had to take however they took it they they had to take what they got how did that go down for them, start out with a small piece of land or and build up from there how did that go out well from what i understand um. [16:21] They first had a small plot, and then that they didn’t own. They just took it. And then as the bootlegging business got bigger, they started buying cattle and sheep. And they just started buying more and more land. But my grandfather was wanted because he killed some federal agent in the Ludlow Massacre. So he was wanted. So it was all in my grandmother’s name anyway. So she became, in my mind and in my book, she becomes the real head of the family. And my grandfather had a drinking problem, and she made the business successful and so forth. And then I do remember a story that my mother told me that—. [17:16] Al Capone came to the ranch at some point, and all the kids were like, who’s this man in the big car? There was other big cars. And then they moved to New York shortly after that, although they were allowed to keep the ranch with some of my aunts running it. I think there was a range war between the Dana family and the Carlinos and the Barberas, and they were told, get out of town, and they got out of town. And then they made a life in Brooklyn. And then my mom went back to Colorado and then came back to Brooklyn. [17:54] You think about how these immigrants, how in the hell, even the ones who come here now, how in the hell do you survive? I don’t know. Don’t speak the language. You don’t have the money. How do you survive? I don’t know. I truly don’t know. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t either. I couldn’t either. I don’t even want to go to another country where I don’t speak the language unless I can hire somebody to do stuff for me, you know, try to scuffle around and get a job, work off the books. You know, you got to work off the books, so to speak, and take the lowest, hardest jobs that they are, that there are. I don’t know. It’s crazy. I don’t really understand. Yeah. But, uh, so this, uh, it’s really interesting this, uh, the whole thing with the ranches and, and building up the ranches out there. I know we spoke, talk about Al Capone. Well, his brother, I think it was, it was not Ralph. There was another Capone brother. Which one? Well, another Capone brother who became, came a revenuer and I’ve seen some pictures of him and he looks like a cowboy with a hat and everything. He was in Nebraska or something. [19:02] It’s so funny. And I just, when I was growing up and I would tell people that my mom rode her donkey and then her horse to school, and they’d always say to me, but aren’t you Italian? [19:19] That’s Italian. Italian. Yeah, it’s interesting. Now, of course, your mom was, I noticed something in there about being in Los Animas in that area. Yes. Was there some family connection to that? And I say that because my wife’s grandfather lived there his whole life in Los Animas. Well, Los Animas County takes in Pueblo, I believe. Oh, okay. That’s the northern, that’s the far northern edge of Pueblo. The whole big area. I didn’t realize it was that close to Pueblo. I think my mom’s birth certificate actually says Los Animas County. Uh-huh. Something like that, yeah. Okay, all right. I didn’t realize Los Andemos was that close. I think. I might be wrong. Oh, it could be. It had those big counties out west, a great big county, so it would probably do. [20:10] So let’s see. Tell us a couple other stories out of that book that you remember. Well, there’s a story of my mother and her sister, Clara. Clara was a year what do they call Irish twins you know Italian twins she was like 14 months younger than my mom and um, When my mom had to start school, she was very close to my Aunt Clara, and they refused to go to school without each other. So my grandmother lied and said they were twins. And the teacher said, I don’t think they’re twins. This one’s much littler than the other, and I’m going to send the sheriff to that guinea father of yours and make sure. Well, unfortunately, the town hall burnt down with all the records that night. So they were never able to prove that Aunt Clara was a year younger. [21:14] Interesting. And also there’s a story of how they were in school when the flood hit. And my mother did have a pet wolf who was probably part wolf, part dog, but it was her pet named Blue. They got caught in the flood because they were bad and they had detention after school. And um had they left earlier they would have um so the dog came and dragged them was screaming and barking and making them leave and the teacher got scared because of the wolf and so they left and the wolf was taking them to higher and higher ground and had they stayed in that schoolhouse they would have been killed the teacher was killed everybody was washed away Wow. Yeah, those animals, they got more of a sense of what’s going on in nature than people do, that’s for sure. But she had always told me about her dog wolf named Blue. When they went back to New York City, did they fall in with any mob people back there? They go back to Red Hook. They had connections that were told, they were told, you know, you can, like Meyer Lansky and a couple of other people who would help them, um. [22:33] But my mom—so here’s an absolutely true story, and I think I have it as an epilogue in the book. So a few years ago, several years ago, my daughter had gotten a job in the summer during college as a slave on a movie set that was being filmed in Brooklyn. And she got the job because she, A, had a car, and B, she could speak Italian. And the actress was Italian. So every night she’d work till like 12 o’clock and I’d be panicked that she’d been kidnapped or something. So she’d drive her car home. But then every night she was coming home later and later and I said, what’s going on? She said, you know, I found this little restaurant and right now we’re in Red Hook where the, and it wasn’t called Red Hook. It was called, they have another fancy name for it now. [23:32] And she said and I just got to know the owner and he’s really nice and I told him that when I graduated from college if I had enough money could I rent one of the apartments upstairs and he said yes and she said we’ve got to take grandma there we’ve got to take grandma there she’ll love the place she’ll love the place and so my mother got sick and just came home from college, and she was laying in the bed with my mother, and she said, Grandma, you’re going to get better, and then we’re going to take you to this restaurant, [24:03] and I promise you, you’re going to love it. So my mother, thank God, did get better, and we took her to the restaurant. [24:12] The man comes over, and it’s a little tiny Italian restaurant, and the man comes over, and he says, Jessica, my favorite, let me make you my favorite Pennelli’s. And my mother said, do you make Pennelli’s? And he said, yes. She said, oh, when we first came to New York, the man who owned the restaurant made us Pennelli’s every day and would give it to us before we went to school. And he said, really, what was his name? And she said, Don, whatever. And he said, well, that’s my grandfather. She said, well, what do you mean? He said, well, this is, she said, where are we? And he said. [24:53] They called it Carroll Gardens. And he said, well, it’s Carroll Gardens. She said, well, I grew up in Red Hook. He said, well, it is Red Hook. She said, well, what’s the address here? And he said, 151 Carroll Street. And she said, my mother died in this building. [25:09] My daughter would have rented the apartment where her great-grandmother died. What’s the chances of that of the 50 million apartments in New York City? No, I don’t know. And the restaurant only seats like 30 people. So… My mother went and took a picture off the wall, and she said, this is my mother’s apartment. And there were like 30 people in the restaurants, a real rough and tumble place, and truck drivers and everything. And everybody started crying. The whole place is now crying. All these big long men are crying. Isn’t that some story? Full circle, man. That’s something. Yeah, that is. Especially in the city. It’s even more amazing in a city like New York City. I know. That huge. That frigging huge. That exact apartment. Oh, that is great. So that restaurant plays a big part in the book as well, in the family. Okay. All right. All right. Guys, the book is The Descendant, Yellowstone Meets the Godfather, huh? This is Linda Stasi. Did I pronounce that right, Stasi? Stacey, actually. This is Linda Stasi. And Linda, I didn’t really ask you about yourself. [26:17] Tell the guys a little bit about yourself before we stop here. Well, I am a journalist. I’ve been a columnist for New York Newsday, the New York Daily News, and the New York Post. I’ve written 10 books, three of which are novels. [26:34] And I’ve won several awards for journalism. And I teach a class for the Newswomen’s Club of New York to journalists on how to write novels, because it’s the totally opposite thing. It’s like teaching a dancer to sing, you know? It’s totally opposite. One of my mentors was Nelson DeMille, my dear late friend Nelson DeMille, and I called him up one night after I wrote my first novel, and I said, I think I made a terrible mistake. He said, what? I said, I think I gave the wrong name of the city or something. He said, oh, for God’s sakes, it’s fiction. You can write whatever you want. [27:17] But when you’re a journalist, if you make a mistake like that, you’re ruined. Yeah, exactly. So I have. We never let the facts get in the way of a good story. Go ahead. I’m sorry. I said I have a daughter and three grandsons. My daughter is the only female CEO of a games company. She was on the cover of Forbes. And my husband just died recently, and he was quite the character. He got a full-page obit in the New York Times. He’s such a typical, wonderful New York character. So I’m in this strange place right now where I’m mourning one thing and celebrating my book. On the other hand, it’s a very odd place to be. I can imagine. I can only imagine. Life goes on, as we say, back home. It just keeps going. All right. Linda Stacey, I really appreciate you coming on the show. Oh, thank you. I appreciate you talking to me. You’re so much an interesting guy. All right. Well, thank you.

#Satanism #SatanicPanic #AntonLaVey #MichaelAquino #FormerSatanist #Psyop #PsychologicalOperationJoin us for Episode No. 2 of the Satanic Panic Was Real series. We are discussing the basic concepts & beliefs of LaVeyan satanism, the Church of Satan, & Anton LaVey. We also introduce you to Lt. Col. Michael Aquino. The purpose of this multi-part documentary is to discuss the realities of satanism. More importantly, the "Satanic Panic" of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, & even to today. We are discussing this topic because unlike the mainstream narrative wants you to think, the satanic panic was more than a Christian moral panic. It was a psychological operation (PSYOP), deployed on the American people meant to cover up real satanic crime.All sources used in the show are available down below. RISE TO LIBERTY - MASTER LINK: https://allmylinks.com/risetolibertySHOW SOURCES - LINKS: [A special 'Thank You' to George at CAVDEF] The Secret Life of a Satanist - Google Books: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Secret_Life_of_a_Satanist/sEIxCgAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA72&printsec=frontcoverMichael Aquino on Devil Worship & End of the Church of Satan - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6xDz2J2j-E Anton Szandor LaVey (1930-1997) - Find a Grave Memorial: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6838/anton_szandor-lavey Forbidden Science - Volume Two revised - PDF Free Download: https://epdf.pub/forbidden-science-volume-two-revised-5ea6ba9a3072e.htmlSatan, the FBI, the Mob—and the Forgotten Plot to K*ll Ted Kennedy - POLITICO: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/01/12/fbi-satan-mobplot-kill-ted-kennedy-097180?utm_source=digg The Church of Satan, By: Michael A. Aquino (History of The Church, 986 Pg): https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/religion.occult.new_age/occult_library/Aquino_M_A-Church_of_Satan.pdf Argosy Magazine, "Anton LaVey - "The Satanist Who Wants to Rule the World"" by D*ck Russell, 1975/06: https://www.churchofsatan.com/interview-argosy/Anton LaVey, FBI Files - FBI Vault (55 Pg): https://vault.fbi.gov/anton-lavey-part-01-of-01/Anton%20Lavey%20Part%2001%20%28Final%29

John Jay vs. the Mob reveals why the rule of law is the foundation that keeps a republic from collapsing into chaos. When mobs decide which laws apply, liberty does not expand, it disappears. This episode of America's Founding Series tells the gripping story of John Jay, a Founding Father who understood that freedom is threatened not only by tyrants, but by organized mobs that reject the legitimacy of law itself. From the streets of 18th-century New York to the unrest unfolding today in Minnesota, this episode explores how mob rule, selective enforcement, and fear of public pressure endanger the Republic. John Jay's life offers a warning that is more relevant now than ever. What You'll Learn in This Episode Why John Jay believed unchecked mobs were just as dangerous as kings How the 1788 New York riot shaped Jay's understanding of liberty and order What the Federalist Papers reveal about restraining all forms of power Why selective law enforcement undermines constitutional government How modern unrest echoes the same threat Jay warned about centuries ago

I have SOLVED who Poppy Playtime's Prototype really is…for real this time! Mob released a few new teasers and I noticed one small detail that completely changed my understanding of this franchise's most mysterious character, Experiment 1006, the Prototype.

Unlock full episode (of both parts!) and many more on Patreon or Spotify. M'sMs Exclusives #90 & 91: Sam Cooke. One of the greatest singers/musicians/cultrual figures of all time across all genres was murdered in a shady hotel. How? Was it a set up? The FBI? The Mob? A fellow musician? His crooked manager? His wife? Conspiracy theories abound. Muriel gets to it and sings a little along with way.

Send us a textScott Eden is one of the top investigative journalists in the business. His writing for ESPN the magazine and GQ show his talent but none as much as his new book, “A Killing in Cannabis”!!He and KING HAP talk about his career as a journalist, some of his most amazing articles, and of course the new book that drops this Tuesday!!!The VIPs have a blast as do Hap and Scott!Check out Scott's website with some of his amazing workhttps://www.scotteden.net/Follow Scott on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/eden.scottThis episode was recorded live on the network infront of Happy Hour V.I.P.sIf you want to be part of the live tapingsfollow us on Twitchhttps://m.twitch.tv/thehappyhourscorwww.TheHappyHourSocialClub.comAS ALWAYSThe Happy Hour is brought to you by the official Top Shelf Alcohol of the Happy Hour!CLEARWATER DISTILLERY https://shop.clearwaterdistilling.com/PROMO CODE KINGHAPSAVES 10% and free shipping over $100OLD SCHOOL LABSAmazing Supplements made for Amazing people!TRY OATMEAL CREAM PIE PROTEIN! Save 30% site wide with promo code Kinghaphttps://shop.oldschoollabs.com/KINGHAPLiquid I.V.WOW..... SUGAR FREE LIV ENERGY!!!https://glnk.io/koyv/kinghap*PROMO CODE KINGHAP SAVES 25%

The Morning Xtra with Tug and Los delivers conservative talk on the biggest political, cultural, and news stories of the day. Smart analysis, unapologetic opinions, and real conversations every weekday morning. Every weekday from 6a to 10a! First thing you need to know: The Mob has turned on Tim Walz By the Numbers: The Left can't win post 2030 Census Woman turned on for supporting Trump Atlanta's ONLY All Conservative News & Talk Station.: https://www.xtra1063.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this gripping, brutally honest episode of I'm an Artist, Not a Salesman, Luis Guzman sits down with reality TV icon Renee Graziano—and nothing is off limits. Best known from Mob Wives, Renee has lived through a storm of public scrutiny, personal battles, and deeply private traumas. But today? She's standing in her truth. This episode is not about the glamor of TV. It's about the real woman behind it all—the one who's fought addiction, heartbreak, betrayal, and years of internal struggle just to sit here and tell the story.If you're looking for a surface-level conversation, this ain't it.This is a raw, reflective, and surprisingly hilarious deep-dive into the life of a woman who's been through hell and decided to redecorate.Renee opens up about how she went from champagne and cocaine to a quiet life of sobriety, celibacy, and self-awareness. She shares how trauma shaped her identity, how she lost nearly everything—including her sense of self—and how she's rebuilding her life brick by brick with therapy, God, and a little bit of Prozac-fueled peace.We talk about:The unexpected addiction that started long before drugs: powerGrowing up with a father in the mob and what that really looked like behind closed doorsWhy her title as Anthony's daughter felt more important than being a motherThe toxic relationships that almost destroyed her—and the moment she finally said enoughHow losing 50+ pounds and gaining clarity helped her fall back in love with herselfThrough laughter and tears, Renee reflects on the harsh lessons that came from being on reality TV while quietly spiraling behind the scenes. She gets real about the damage that Xanax, secrecy, and shame did to her—and why she's finally done running from the mirror.You'll hear stories of violence, betrayal, mental breakdowns, and—somehow—still walk away feeling hope. Luis creates a space where Renee opens up like never before, from the trauma of a sexual assault while hospitalized to the pain of losing her father's letters and keepsakes to someone she once trusted.Highlights from the episode include:The chilling story of Renee's ex-husband wearing a wire while sleeping in the same bed as herWhat it's like dating as a well-known mob daughter—and why Renee's over itThe immersive mob-themed dinner show “Married by the Mob” and why it's her way of taking power backWhy she believes God kept her alive—and what she's doing with her second (okay, maybe eighth) chanceThere's no performance here. Just one woman, unfiltered, unpolished, and unapologetically transparent about the mess, the beauty, and the weird in-between of survival and self-discovery.Whether you're an artist, a recovering perfectionist, or just someone who's ever felt like a mess in a world that rewards masks, this episode will hit you in the gut and maybe even make you laugh while you're crying.Want more from Renee Graziano? You can catch her performing in Married by the Mob—an immersive wedding experience like no other—February 13–15 at the Avenel Performing Arts Center. And if you're in the skincare game, check out her brand Bad Body Butter—because healing is an inside and outside job.Let's keep this conversation going:Follow Luis Guzman on all platforms: @imanartistnotasalesmanSubscribe to the I'm an Artist, Not a Salesman YouTube channel for more raw and real episodes.Share this episode with someone who needs to be reminded that they're not alone—and that starting over doesn't mean you've failed.If this conversation moved you, challenged you, or made you think differently about your own story, drop us a review or a DM. We read them all. This podcast is for the misfits, the creatives, the comeback kids—and the ones still finding their way back home.

A Mafia insider and authentic Hollywood tough guy reveals the explosive secrets he's learned (and kept) for decades in this shocking tell all that unveils the hidden worlds of film and organized crime-from who shot JFK and murdered Jimmy Hoffa to the truth about Marilyn Monroe's death.The Kennedys, Marilyn, the Vatican, Vegas, The Godfather, the Mob, and more .During a cursed childhood in a Manhattan neighborhood teeming with Italian immigrant Gianni Russo fended for himself at an early age. It was a quality that didn't go unnoticed by Frank Costello-father figure, mentor, and legendary crime boss. Thanks to Costello, Gianni was only twelve when his luck would change for a lifetime. All of it charmed-and thrilling. With it came Hollywood glamor, Vegas risk-takers, political conspiracies, sex, murder, shadow governments, and secrets. The stories Gianni Russo could tell . .. Now he does in this bombshell confessional. This is the inside account of the Sicilian Mafia, Cosa Nostra, what really transpired in those Mulberry Street clubs, and who whacked whom-including how mobster Tony Spilotro and his brother really died, finally revealed for the first time. This is Gianni, buddy of Frank Sinatra, and intimately more with Marilyn Monroe. What's the cover-up behind her death, JFK's, and Jimmy Hoffa's? It's all here. So is the clandestine role of the pope as the sacred boss of bosses, the glory days and downfall of Las Vegas, and the colorful behind-the-scenes tales of Gianni's role in the greatest movie ever made, The Godfather. The go-getter Frank Costello once called "The Kid" shares his shocking, exhilarating, sometimes violent, and always riveting life with the dealmakers of Hollywood and the Mob. Gianni Russo lives to tell, and spills it all.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/arroe-collins-unplugged-totally-uncut--994165/support.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, Gary Jenkins sits down with author Craig McGuire to discuss his gripping book, Empire City Under Siege, a deep dive into three decades of FBI manhunts, mob wars, and organized-crime investigations in New York City. Craig explains how the project grew out of his collaboration with retired FBI agent Anthony John Nelson, whose career spanned the most violent and chaotic years of New York's Mafia history. From Nelson's early days as a radio dispatcher in 1969 to his transition into undercover and frontline investigative work, the book captures the gritty reality of law enforcement during the 1970s and 1980s. We explore how Nelson's career mirrored the evolution of organized crime and law-enforcement tactics, including the rise of undercover stings, inter-agency cooperation, and the increasing role of technology. Craig highlights the close working relationship between Nelson and NYPD detective Kenny McCabe, whose deep knowledge of Mafia families and quiet professionalism led to major breakthroughs against organized crime. He tells how these two investigators wathced and uncovered the Gambino Family Roy DeMeo crew under Paul Castellano and Nino Gaggi. Throughout the conversation, Craig shares vivid, often humorous slice-of-life stories from the book—tense undercover moments, dangerous confrontations, and the emotional toll of living a double life. These anecdotes reveal not only the danger of the job but also the camaraderie and resilience that sustained agents and detectives working in the shadows. The episode closes with a reminder that Empire City Under Siege is as much about honoring unsung law-enforcement professionals as it is about mob history. Craig encourages listeners to support true-crime storytelling that preserves these firsthand accounts before they're lost to time. 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. 0:02 Welcome Back to Gangland Wire 2:14 The Journey to Anthony John Nelson 4:46 The Life and Work of Law Enforcement 15:00 Inside Anthony Nelson’s Early Career 26:49 The Dynamic Duo: Nelson and McCabe 30:16 Tales from the Underworld 35:55 The Tragedy of Everett Hatcher 39:12 The High-Stakes World of Undercover Work 40:56 Closing Thoughts and Inspirations transcript [0:00] Hey, all you wiretappers. Good to be back here in studio of Gangland Wire. I say the same thing every time. I hope it doesn’t bore you too much, but I am back here in the Gangland Wire studio. And I have today an author who interviewed and wrote a book with an FBI agent named Anthony John Nelson, who was one of the premier FBI agents in New York City that was working the mob. And even more interesting about him to me was he formed a partnership with a local copper named Kenny McCabe, who you may know the name. I had read the name before several times as I started researching this and looking at the book, but he was a mob buster supreme and Agent Nelson really formed a dynamic duo. But first, let’s start talking to Craig, your book, Empire City Under Seize, Three Decades of New York FBI Field Office Manhunts, Murders and Mafia Wars. How did you get involved with Anthony John Nelson? [0:55] Hi, Gary. Thanks for having me on your show. Big fan. Appreciate the opportunity. Very interesting and winding path that led me to Anthony’s doorstep. I also previously wrote another book, Carmine and the 13th Avenue Boys, which was about an enforcer in the Colombo family during the Third Colombo War. And I was introduced to Carmine Imbriali through Thomas Dades. Tommy Dades, he’s a famous retired NYPD detective. So after the success of that book, Tommy introduced me to another member of law enforcement. I started to work on a project that sort of fell apart. And one of the sort of consultants, friends that I met with during that was Anthony Nelson. And then one day as that, due to my own fumbling, as that project was falling apart, I had a delightful breakfast with Anthony and his wonderful wife, Sydney, Cindy, one Sunday morning. And Anthony’s pulling out all these clips of all these investigations and all these Jerry Capiche gangland clips. And it was just fascinating. And so I started to realize that there’s something here because I’m also a true crime fan and I remember many of these cases. [2:08] So it took a while to get Anthony to agree to write a book. He’s not one for the spotlight. He’s really your sort of quintessential G-man, modern G-man. It’s also somewhat of a throwback. But he eventually was interested in doing a book if we didn’t just shine the spotlight on him. Gary, you should know the original, the working title of the book was In the Company of Courage. And that’s really the theme that Anthony wanted to bring forth. You’ll notice throughout the book, there are some vignettes and some biographical information about many of the members of law enforcement that I interviewed, but then we also covered and who are no longer with us. It was my privilege to write this book sharing Anthony’s amazing history, 30 years at the FBI and then several years at the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office as an investigator. And just like one of the themes is just to really shed some light on the valuable work that members of law enforcement, including you, sir. Thank you for your service. And we think too often these days, members of law enforcement are maligned and there’s a negative light cast on them. It’s the most difficult job in the world. And we just want to make sure that we’re shining some light on that valuable work that the thousands of members of men and women in law enforcement do every day protecting us. [3:24] I appreciate that. I’ll tell you what, all the way from the rookie on the street making those domestic violence calls and party armed calls and armed robbery alarms calls that are, there’s nothing there the first five times you go. And then all of a sudden there’s a guy running out with a gun all the way up to the homicide detectives. And even the people that handle the budget, they all paid their dues out on the streets and organized crime investigators, of course, and narcotics. I really appreciate that. It’s a thankless job for the most part. Once in a while, you get a little thanks, but not much. As we used to say, it was fun. I can’t believe they pay us to do this. [4:01] Gary, it’s like you’re repeating some of the lines of Frank Pergola to Al King, just like that. And that’s key, that thankless piece. I remember interviewing Frank Pergola, just famous New York City detective, worked on Son of Sam. He also worked on solving 79 homicides related to the Gambinos and the DeMeo family. And he echoed those same sentiments. While you’re investigating a case, it’s the victims’ families and the victims, their nerves are so fraught. It’s such a stressful situation. And the members of law enforcement bear the brunt of a lot of that frustration. [4:41] And too often, there’s no thank you at the end. And it’s not that they want to thank you. It’s just that they want the sort of closure, not even the recognition, just some sort of realization that they did a great job. And it’s unfortunate that they don’t, that doesn’t happen as often as it should. I appreciate it. Let’s talk about Anthony Nelson. He sounds like a very interesting character. Talk a little bit about what you learned from him about his early career. And I want to tell you something, that recalcitrance, I believe that’s the word, $25 word if I’ve ever heard one. His refusal to really make himself a hero or the center of attention. That’s pretty common among cops and FBI agents. I’ve noticed we’ve got, I’ve got a good friend here in Kansas City, wrote a book about the mafia in Kansas City called Mopsers in Our Mist, but he refused to put himself into the book. He had a publishing company that wanted him to do it and was going to pay him to do it, but it had to have him as a hero. He said, we have to have a hero in this book. He says, I won’t do it. So that Mr. Nelson, Agent Nelson, that’s not that uncommon. So tell us a little more about some of his early cases. [5:49] Anthony Nelson, interestingly enough, his career trajectory and really his life tracks with the latter half of the last century. And a lot of the technological evolution, the rise of organized crime post-prohibition, these themes of urbanization, radicalization that came out from the starting in the middle of the century. But really heating up as a young Anthony Nelson joins the FBI in 1969, really mostly in administrative roles, radio dispatcher first, eventually he’s an electronics technician. So I’m sure, Gary, you can reflect on, and some of this will resonate with you, just how archaic some of the technology was. Oh my God, yeah. Yeah. Back then, we have some fantastic anecdotes and stories in the book, but just also like, for example, when you’re responding to a hostage crisis and you don’t have a cell phone, you don’t have minimal communications and talking about, you better make sure you have a pocket full of dimes and knocking on a neighbor’s door because time is of the essence and to establish contact. So just some of this great, really interesting material there. Eventually, Anthony was sworn in as an agent in 1976, and he entered the FBI Academy at Quantico, graduated in 77. [7:13] And interestingly enough, Anthony reflects like some of his fellow graduates, perhaps were not as keen on going to New York, one of the larger field offices, perhaps wanting to cut their teeth at a smaller office, but he obviously wanted to go home. So he was, and he jumped right into the fray, really assigned to hijacking. And he was an undercover operative in Red Hook during the 1970s, like the really gritty. And from the stories and from the various folks I interviewed, this really was gritty New York back then with the economy failing, crime on the rise. [7:48] Gary, you look, I heard an interesting stat last week where you had, there was almost a record setting that New York City had not reported a homicide for a record 12 consecutive days. And that had not happened in decades. So when Anthony joined the FBI, they were recording five homicides in New York City. And also during the 70s, you also had this, when you talk about radicalization, with 3,000 bombings nationwide, corruption was rampant. You had credit card fraud was just kicking off. You had widespread bread or auto theft and hijacking. Again, at the street level, Anthony was the front for a Gambino-affiliated warehouse where he had first right of refusal, where some of the hijackers would bring in the loads. And he was doing this on an undercover basis. So he jumped right in. They set him up in a warehouse and he was buying like a sting, what we called a sting operation. He was buying stolen property. They thought he was a fence. [8:50] Yeah, they started doing that in the 70s. They hadn’t really done, nobody had done that before in the 70s. ATF kind of started sting operates throughout the United States. We had one here, but they started doing that. And that was a new thing that these guys hadn’t seen before. So interesting. He was that big, blurly guy up front said, hey, yeah, bring that stuff on. Exactly. If you look on the cover, there are three images on the cover, and one of them is following one of the busts afterwards where they tracked down the hijacked goods. I believe it was in New Jersey. So you could get the sense of the volume. Now, think about it like this. So he’s in Red Hook in the mid-70s. This was actually where he was born. So when Anthony was born in 49, and if you think about Red Hook in the early 50s, this was just a decade removed from Al Capone as a leg-breaking bouncer along the saloons on the waterfront. And this was on the waterfront, Red Hook eventually moved to Park Slope. [9:49] And this was where Crazy Joe Gallo was prompted, started a mob war. And this was when any anthony is coming of age back then and most of his friends is gravitating so to these gangster types in the neighborhood these wise guys but this was a time pre-9-1-1 emergency response system so the only way to report or get help was to call the switchboard call the hospital directly call the fire department directly so you had the rise of the b cop where it wasn’t just the police they were integral part of the community and there’s this really provocative story Anthony tells the first time he saw a death up close and personal, an acquaintance of his had an overdose. And the beat cops really did a sincere effort to try to save him. And this really resonated with the young Anthony and he gravitated towards law enforcement. And then a little bit, a while later as a teenager, they’re having these promotional videos, these promotional sort of documentary style shows on television. And Anthony sees it, and he’s enamored by it, especially when they say this is the hardest job in America. So he’s challenged, and he’s a go-getter. So he writes a letter to J. Edgar Hoover, and Hoover writes him back. [11:03] So it’s a signed letter, and now Anthony laughs about it. He says it was probably a form letter with a rubber stamp, but it really had an amazing impact. And this is at the time when, you know, in the 50s, you really had J. Edgar really embrace the media. And he actually consulted on the other famous, the FBI television show, several movies, the rise of the G-Man archetype. So Anthony was fully on board. [11:28] Interesting. Of course, J. Edgar Hoover wanted to make sure the FBI looked good. Yes, exactly. Which he did. And they were good. They had a really high standards to get in. They had to be a lawyer or accountant or some extra educated kind of a deal. And so they always think, though, that they took these guys who had never been even a street policeman of any kind and they throw them right into the DPN many times. But that’s the way it was. They did have that higher level of recruit because of that. So, Anthony, was he a lawyer or accountant when he came in? Did he get in after they relaxed that? Oh, that’s spot on. I’m glad you brought that up. So now here’s a challenge. So Anthony needs that equalizer, correct? So if you’re a CPA, obviously a former member of the military, if you’re a successful detective or a local police force, one of these type of extra credentials. [12:20] Anthony’s specialty was technology. Now, when you think of technology… Not the ubiquitous nature of technology nowadays, where you have this massive processing power in your phone, and you don’t really have to be a technologist to be able to use the power of it. This is back in the 1960s. But he always had an affinity for technology. And he was able to, when he, one of the other requirements was as he had to hit the minimum age requirement, he had to work for a certain amount of time, he was able to get a job at the FBI. So he was an electronics technician before he became an agent. [12:59] And he had all of the, and back then this was, it was groundbreaking, the level of technology. And he has some funny story, odd, like man on the street stories about, I’m sure you remember Radio Shack when there was a Radio Shack on every other corner, ham radio enthusiasts. And it was cat and mouse. It was, they had the members of organized crime had the police scanners. And they were able to, if they had the right scanner, they had the right frequency. They were able to pick on the bugs planted really close to them. And he tells some really funny stories about one time there was a member of organized crime. They’re staking out, I believe it was the cotillion on 18th Avenue. And then I believe he’s sitting outside with Kenny McCabe. And then one of this member of organized crime, he’s waving a scanner inside and he’s taunting them saying, look, I know what you’re doing. And so it was that granularity of cat and mouse. [13:55] Rudimentary kind of stuff. Yeah. We had a guy that was wearing what we called a kelk kit. It was a wire and he was in this joint and they had the scanner and so but they had to scan her next door at this club And all of a sudden, a bunch of guys came running and there’s somebody in here wearing a wire. And my friend’s guy, the guy I worked with, Bobby, he’s going, oh, shit. And so he just fades into the background. And everybody except one guy had a suit on. Nobody had a suit on except this one guy. So they focused on this one guy that had a suit on and went after him and started trying to pat him down and everything. Bobby just slipped out the front door. So amazing. I mean, you know, Anthony has a bunch of those slice of life stories. I also interviewed a translator from the FBI to get a sort of a different perspective. [14:42] It’s different. Like the agents a little bit more, they’re tougher. They’re a tougher breed. They go through the training. Some of the administrative professionals, like the translators. So this one translator, it’s a pretty harrowing experience because remember the such the insular nature of the neighborhoods and how everyone is always [14:59] looking for someone out of place. So she actually got a real estate license and poses a realtor be able to rent apartments and then she spoke multiple dialects and then just to have to listen in and to decipher not only the code but also the dialects and put it together when you have agents on the line because remember you have an undercover agent if they get discovered more often than not the members of organized crime are going to think they’re members of another crew so you’re dead either they’re an informant if they think they’re an informant you’re dead if they think you’re an agent yeah just turn away from you say okay we don’t deal with this guy anymore if you think you’re informant or somebody another crew or something trying to worm their way in then yeah you’re dead exactly so interviewing maria for this you get that sense from someone who’s not in like not an agent to get true how truly harrowing and dangerous this type of activity was and how emboldened organized crime was until really the late 90s. And back then, it truly was death defying. [16:02] Oh, yeah, it was. They had so many things wired in the court system and in politically in the late 70s and early 80s and all these big cities. No big city was immune from that kind of thing. So they had all kinds of sources. They even had some clerks in the FBI and they definitely had all the court. The courthouses were just wired. And I don’t mean wired, but they had people in places and all those things. So it was death to find that you got into these working undercover. Ever. Hey, you want to laugh? I don’t want to give away all the stories, but there was a great story. I remember Anthony saying, they set up a surveillance post in an apartment and they brought in all the equipment while they were, then they got the court orders and the surveillance post actually got ripped off twice. So while they try, like after hours, someone’s going, yeah, ripping off all the FBI equipment. So you have this extra level of, so that gives you like, It really was Wild West then. Really? [17:00] So now he gets into organized crime pretty quick, into that squad and working organized crime pretty quick. I imagine they put him in undercover like that because of his accent, his ability to fit in the neighborhood. I would think he would have a little bit of trouble maybe running into somebody that remembered him from the old days. Did he have any problem with that? I spot on, Gary. I tell you, this was he. So he’s operating in Red Hook and actually throughout the next several years, he’s periodically flying down to Florida as a front for New York orchestrated drug deals. So he’s going down to Florida to negotiate multi-kilo drug deals on behalf of organized crime. But at the same time, he’s an agent. He eventually rose to be supervisory special agent. He’s managing multiple squads. So there did come an inflection point where it became too dangerous for him to continue to operate as an undercover while conducting other types of investigations. [18:02] Interestingly enough they opened up a resident agency office the ras are in the major field offices in the fbi they have these they’re called ras i’m sure you’re familiar these like mini offices with the office and they’ll focus on certain areas of crime more geographically based so they opened up the brooklyn queens ra and that really focuses heavily on organized crime but also hijacking because you had the, especially with the airport over there and a lot of the concentrations of, especially in South Brooklyn, going into Queens. So he worked there. Also the airport. Also the mass, you have this massive network of VA facilities. You have the forts. So you need these other RA offices. So you have a base of operations to be able to investigate. But Anthony has such a wide extent of case history, everything from airline attacks to art theft heists to kidnappings, manhunts, fugitives. There was Calvin Klein, the famous designer, when his daughter was kidnapped by the babysitter, it did do it. Anthony was investigating that. So it’s just, and while he has this heavy concentration in organized crime. I mentioned that. What’s this deal with? He investigated a robbery, a bank robbery that was a little bit like the dog day afternoon robbery, a standoff. What was that? [19:30] This was actually, it was the dog day afternoon robbery. They based a dog day afternoon on this. Exactly. What you had, and this was before Anthony was when he was still in his administrative role. So he had a communications position. So he was responsible for gathering all the intel and the communications and sharing it with the case, the special agents on site. So what you had was like, he’s with the play by play of this really provocative hostage. It was a bank robbery that quickly turned into a hostage crisis. And then, so throughout this whole, and the way it eventually resolved was the perpetrators insisted on a particular agent. I apologize. It slips my mind, but he’s a real famous agent. So he has to drive them to JFK airport where they’re supposed to have a flight ready to fly them out of the country. And what happens is they secrete a gun into the car and he winds up shooting the bank robbers to death. And there were so many different layers to this bank robbery. It eventually became the movie. And a funny story aside, the movie, while they’re filming the movie, Anthony’s at his friend’s house in downtown Brooklyn. It may have been Park Slope. And they’re calling for extras. His friends run in and say, hey, they’re filming a movie about this bank robbery that happened on Avenue U. You want to be an extra? And he said, nah, no thanks. The real thing was enough for me. [20:55] I’ll tell you what, it wasn’t for a New York City organized crime and New York City crime. Al Pacino wouldn’t have had a career. That’s the truth. [21:05] Now, let’s start. Let’s go back into organized crime. Now, we’ve talked about this detective, Kenny McCabe, who was really well known, was famous. And during the time they worked together and they were working with the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. Is that correct? Were both of them working for it? Was he at the FBI and Kenny was with the Brooklyn DA’s office? [21:26] When you think about thematically, in the company of courage, Kenny McCabe was really close. This was a career-long, lifelong, from when they met, relationship, professional relationship that became a deep friendship between two pretty similar members of law enforcement. [21:46] Kenny McCabe had a long career in the NYPD as organized crime investigator before he joined the Southern District Attorney’s Office as an investigator. So the way they first crossed paths was while Anthony was working a hijacking investigation. So he gets a tip from one of his CIs that there’s some hijacked stolen goods are in a vehicle parked in a certain location. So he goes to stake it out. Like they don’t want to seize the goods. They want to find out, they want to uncover who the hijackers are and investigate the conspiracy. So then while he’s there, he sees a sort of a familiar face staking it out as well. Then he goes to the, he goes to the NYA, a detective Nev Nevins later. And he asks about this guy. And so this detective introduces him to Kenny McCabe and right away strike up with his interesting chemistry. And they’re like, you know what? Let’s jointly investigate this. So they wind up foiling the hijacking. But what starts is like this amazing friendship. And I’ll tell you, the interesting thing about Kenny McCabe is almost universally, he’s held in the highest regard as perhaps law enforcement’s greatest weapon in dismantling organized crime in the latter half of the 20th century. For example, I interviewed George Terra, famous undercover detective who eventually went to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. [23:12] And he had a great way. I hope I don’t mangle. Kenny knew all the wise guys and they all knew Kenny. And when I say he knew all the wise guys, he knew their shoe sizes. He knew who they partnered with on bank jobs years ago. So he knew who their siblings were, who their cousins were, who they were married to, who their girlfriends were, what clubs they frequented. For example, during the fatical hearings, where they would do sentencing, often the defense attorneys would want the prosecutors to reveal who their CIs are for due process, for a sense of fairness. And they refused to do that, obviously, for safety reasons, and they want to compromise ongoing investigations. So in dozens, perhaps so many of these cases, they were bringing Kenny McCabe. He was known as the unofficial photographer of organized crime. [24:07] For example, I think it was 2003, he was the first one who revealed a new edict that new initiates into Cosa Nostra had to have both a mother and a father who were Italian. Oh, yeah. I remember that. Yeah. He was also, he revealed that when the Bonanno family renamed itself as Messino, he was the one who revealed that. And then when Messino went to prison for murder, his successor, Vinnie Bassiano, Vinnie gorgeous. When he was on trial, that trial was postponed because so many of law enforcement leaders had to attend Kenny McCabe’s funeral, unfortunately, when he passed. So this is such a fascinating thing. Now, why you don’t hear more about Kenny McCabe, and I interviewed his son, Kenny McCabe Jr. Duke, is like Kenny McCabe like really issued the media spotlight. He would not, he wasn’t interested in grabbing the microphone. So you have almost no media on Kenny McCabe. If you do a Google search for him, I believe the only thing I ever found was a picture in his uniform as an early career police officer. [25:19] So it’s really hard to even do a documentary style treatment without having any media because B-roll is just going to get you so far. So really what Duke has been doing over the last two decades or more is really consolidating all of these as much material as he can. And I think eventually when he does put out a book, this thing’s going to explode. It’s going to be like true Hollywood treatment. But now going back to the mid-70s, so these two guys hook up. You have the FBI agent and you have the police detective. [25:49] Craig, what you always hear is that the FBI is suspicious and doesn’t trust local authorities. And local policemen hate the FBI because they always grab all the glory and take everything, run with it. And they’re left out. And I didn’t have that experience myself. They’ve got the case. They’ve got the laws. We don’t locally, county and statewide, you don’t have the proper laws to investigate organized crime. Yes, sir. But the feds do. So that’s how it works. This really blows that myth up that the local police and the FBI never worked together and hated each other. [26:25] I’m so glad you brought that up because this was very important to Anthony. He has so many lifelong friends in the NYPD, and I’ve interviewed several of them. And just this sincerity comes across, the camaraderie. In any walk of life, in any profession, you’re always going to have rivalries and conflict, whether healthy conflict or negative conflict. [26:46] Even more, you’re going to find that in law enforcement because the stakes are so high. But it’s a disservice to… And what we want to do is sort of dispel the myth that there was no cooperation. Why there were very well-publicized conflicts between agencies prosecuting certain cases. This was the time where technology was really enabling collaboration. Remember, and you had a time, if you had to investigate a serial crime, you had to go from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and you had to interview investigators. You had to comb through written records to piece this together. So it really was not conducive for collaboration. [27:22] So what you saw was the rise of, and then you had these investigative tools and these legal tools like RICO, while they were still trying to figure out and to build. So now you had the litigious tools where you could build conspiracies and prosecute them. So this sort of helped ferment this sort of collaborative interagency, which eventually led to these joint task force that were very successful. What I really love is this microcosm of Anthony Nelson and Kenny McCain. Now, Anthony Nelson was issued a Plymouth Grand Fury with the full police interceptor kit. If you’re familiar with that make and model, no automobile ever created screams cop-mobile like the Grand Fury. And so what you had was after hours, Anthony and Kenny would join up and they would go prowling the underworld with the Grand Fury on purpose. They wanted to be as conspicuous as possible. to the point where they would park in bus stops across the street from these social clubs. And when I say social clubs, they were… [28:29] Everywhere. There were dozens of them all over Brooklyn and Queens. And these are cafe, social clubs, bars, restaurants with heavy OC presence, blatantly conducting their business. So you have these two, Anthony’s always driving. Kenny’s always riding shotgun with his camera. I assume it was some sort of 35 millimeter hanging out the side, taking down names, license plates. Just a great story. You had Paul Castellano in front of Veterans and Friends on 86th Street when he had Dominic Montiglio start that social club so he could have more of a presence in Brooklyn on the street so that he actually crosses the street and he goes to Kenny and Anthony. And he’s saying, guys, you don’t have to sit out here. You could come down to Ponte Vecchio in Bay Ridge. I have a table there anytime you want to talk to me. So it’s that level of bravado. But pretty soon it changed. Once more of this intel started to build these real meaningful cases, Castellana put an edict, don’t talk to these two, don’t be photographed. What came out of that was an amazing partnership where they gathered so much intelligence and Anthony is very. [29:46] Quick to have me point out, give more credit to the investigators, to the agents, to the detectives. They gathered a lot of the intelligence to help with these investigations, but you had so many frontline folks that are doing a lot of the legwork, that are doing the investigations, making the arrests, that are crawling under the hoods. So it’s pretty inspiring. But then you also had some really good, and I don’t want to share all the stories [30:12] in the book. There’s a great story of Kenny and Anthony. They go into Rosal’s restaurant because they see this. [30:21] There may have been a warrant out on this member of law enforcement. So they had cause. So they go in and there’s actually some sort of family event going on. And they’re playing the theme song of The Godfather. As they go in and then they have to go into the back room to get this member of organized crime who’s hiding. So it’s these kind of really slice of life kind of stories that just jump out, jump out of the book. Really? I see, as I mentioned, they had some kind of a run-in with Roy DeMeo at the Gemini. You remember that story? Can you tell that one? Yeah, there’s, so Kenny and Anthony, throughout the hijacking investigations. [30:59] Were, they were among the first to really learn of this mysterious Roy. And his rise. And then also Nino. Remember Nino Gadgi was the Gambino Capo who took over Castellano’s crew, Brooklyn crew, when he was elevated. And then Roy DeMeo was really this larger than life maniac serial killer who formed the Gemini crew, which was a gang of murderers really on the Gemini Lounge in Flatlands, which is really close to Anthony’s house. And Kenny’s not too far. Didn’t they have a big stolen car operation also? Did they get into that at all? Yes. Stolen cars, chop shops. Remember, this is when you had the introduction of the tag job, where it was relatively easy to take the vehicle identification numbers off a junked auto and then just replace them with the stolen auto, and then you’re automatically making that legitimate. And then, so they’re doing this wholesale operation where they’re actually got to the point where they’re shipping hundreds, if not thousands of these tag jobs overseas. So it was at scale, a massive operation. Roy DeMay was a major earner. He was such an unbalanced, very savvy business for the underworld, business professional, but he was also a homicidal maniac. [32:22] Some say they could be upwards of a hundred to 200 crimes. Frank Pergola alone investigated and So 79 of these crimes associated with this crew. And it got to the point where, and he had a heavy sideline in drugs, which was punishable by death in the Gambino family, especially under Castellano. So then what you had was all these investigations and all this intelligence that, and then with this collaboration between the FBI and NYPD. Oh, wow. It is quite a crew. I’m just looking back over here at some of the other things in there in that crew in that. You had one instance where there was a sentencing hearing and of a drug dealer, I believe, a member of organized crime. And Kenny McCabe is offering testimony to make sure that the proper sentencing is given because a lot of times these guys are deceptive. [33:16] And he mentions DeMeo’s name. So DeMeo in a panic. So then maybe a couple of nights later, they’re parked in front of veterans and friends. And DeMeo comes racing across 86th Street. Now, 86th Street is like a four-lane thoroughfare. It’s almost like, oh, I grew up in the air a few blocks away. So he’s running through traffic. And then he’s weaving in and out. And he’s screaming at Kenny McCabe, what are you trying to kill me? Putting my name into a drug case? They’re going to kill me. And so it’s that kind of intimate exchanges that they have with, with these key members of organized crime of the era. [33:52] Wow. That’s, that’s crazy. I see that they worked to murder that DEA agent, Everett Hatcher, that was a low level mob associate that got involved in that. And then supposedly the mob put out the word, but you gotta, we gotta give this guy up. But you remember that story? Now, this is another instance where I remember this case. And I remember afterwards when they killed Gus Faraci. So what you had was, again, and this is very upsetting because you had DEA agent Everett Hatchard, who is a friend of Anthony’s. To the point where just prior to his assassination, they were attending a social event together with their children. And he would also, they would run into each other from time to time. They developed a really beyond like camaraderie, like real friendship. So then, so Hatcher has, there’s an undercover sting. So there’s Gus Faraci, who’s, I believe he was associated with the Lucchese’s, with Chile. [34:55] So he gets set up on the West Shore. And so he’s told to go to the West Shore Expressway. Now, if you’ve ever been on that end of Staten Island, that whips out heading towards the outer bridge. This really is the end of the earth. This is where you have those large industrial like water and oil tankers and there’s not really good lighting and all this. It’s just like a real gritty. So he loses his surveillance tail and they eventually, he’s gunned down while in his vehicle. So then Anthony gets the call to respond on site to investigate the murder. He doesn’t know exactly who it is until he opens up the door and he sees it’s his friend. And this is the first assassination of a DEA agent. It was just such a provocative case. And the aftermath of that was, again, like Gus Faraci, who was, he was a murderer. He was a drug dealer, but he did not know. He set him up. He thought he was a member of organized crime. [35:53] He was just another drug dealer. He did not realize he was a DEA agent. And then all hell broke loose. And you had just the all five families until they eventually produced Gus Faraci, set him up, and then he was gunned down in Brooklyn. [36:06] Case closed, huh? Exactly. Yeah. And as we were saying before, I don’t remember it was before I started recording or after that. When you’re working undercover, that’s the worst thing is they think that you’re an informant or a member of another crew and you’re liable to get killed. At one say, I had a sergeant one time. He said, if you get under suspicion when you’re like hanging out in some of these bars and stuff, just show them you’re the cops. Just get your badge out right away because everything just, all right, they just walk away then. It’s a immensely dangerous thing to maintain your cover. Yes, sir. Anthony was always good at that because tall gentleman has the right sort of Italian-American complexion. He’s passable at Italian. So with some of these folks, especially from Italy that come over, he could carry a conversation. He’s not fluent. [36:56] And he just walks in and talks in. It’s a different… George Terror was a fantastic undercover detective. And you talk to some of these undercovers, it’s like you have to be… There’s sort of this misperception that the organized crime members are like these thugs and flunkies. These are very intelligent, super suspicious, addled individuals that are able to pick up on signals really easy because they live on the edge. So you really can’t fake it, the slightest thing. And again, they’ll think that their first inclination is not that you’re a member of law enforcement. Their first inclination is that you’re a member of a rival crew that’s looking to kill me looks at looking to rip me off so i’m going to kill you first it’s just it’s just a wild and imagine that’s your day job oh man i know they could just and i’ve picked this up on people there’s just a look when you’re lying there’s just a look that just before you catch it quick but there’s a look of panic that then you get it back these guys can pick up that kind of stuff just so quickly any kind of a different body language they’re so good with that. [38:02] And he’s also, he has to be able to say just enough to establish his connection and credibility without saying too much that’s going to trip him up. And that’s like being able to walk that line. He tells, again, I hate giving away all these stories because I want readers to buy the book, but he has this fantastic story when he’s on an undercover buy and he’s, I don’t know if it’s Florida, if it’s Miami or it’s Fort Lauderdale and he has to go into a whole, like the drugs are in one location and he’s in that with the drug deals in one location and he’s in this location and, but he knows the money’s not going to come. [38:42] So he has to walk into this hotel room with all these cartel drug guys who are off balance, knowing that he’s got to figure out, how do I get out of this room without getting killed? And once I walk out, will the timing be right that I could drop to the floor right when the responding FBI agents, again, these are FBI agents from a different [39:08] field office that he perhaps doesn’t have intimate working. knowledge of. I got to trust that these guys got my back and they’re not distracted. So I can’t even imagine having to live with that stress. No, I can’t either. All right. I’ll tell you what, the book, guys, is Empire City Under Siege, the three decades of New York FBI field office man hunts, murders, and mafia wars by Craig McGuire with former retired FBI agent Anthony John Nelson. I pulled as many stories as I could out of the book from him. You’re going to have to get the book to get to the rest of. And believe me, I’m looking at my notes here and the stuff they sent me. And there are a ton of great stories in there, guys. You want to get this book. [39:50] I also want to say there’s something special going on at Wild Blue Press. My publisher specializes in true crime. And it’s just, they’re so nurturing and supportive of writers. Just fantastic facilities and promotions. And they just help us get it right. That’s the most important thing, Anthony, accuracy. So if there’s anything wrong in the book, that’s totally on me. It’s really hard to put one of these together, especially decades removed. But then I’m just thankful for the support of nature of Wild Blue and Anthony and all the remarkable members of law enforcement like yourself, sir. Thank you for your service. And Anthony, and I’m just so inspired. I just have to say, they’re like a different breed. And you folks don’t realize how exciting. Because there are so many stories like Anthony would come up with and he would say, do you think readers would be interested in this story? And I fall out of my chair like, oh my God, this could be a whole chapter. So it was as a true crime fan myself of this material, it’s just, it was a wild ride and I enjoyed it. [40:56] Great. Thanks a lot for coming on the show, Craig. Thanks, Gary. You’re the best.

Send us a textThis week we chat to Co-creators Jack Manning Bancroft and TysonYunkaporta for film, Imagine. We explore Indigenous identity being now and always, mosaic storytelling style and being brave and embracing unity. Imagine is in AUS cinemas January 26.For info on more screenings head to their website: https://imaginefilm.orgAs suggested by Tyson, double feature watching of The Midnight Gospel.Note: this interview is audio only. For other video interviews check out our YouTube playlist. Talk to your workplace about launching a RAP and work with Supply Nation for procurement. Links to orgs and causes you can donate to:Aboriginal Embassy:https://aboriginalembassy.com/donatePay The Rent:https://paytherent.net.au/Dhadjowa Foundation:https://dhadjowa.com.au/pages/donateOur Islands Our Home:https://ourislandsourhome.com.au/First Nations Futures:https://www.firstnationsfutures.com/co-investCommon Ground:https://www.commonground.org.au/donateChange The Record:https://www.changetherecord.org.au/donateSeed Mob:https://seed-mobs-eoy-giving.raisely.com/Uprising Of The People:https://uprisingofthepeople.org/pages/donate-help-us-grow-and-thriveIndigenous X:https://indigenousx.com.au/donate/Magabala Books:https://magabala.com/pages/support-usDjirra:https://www.givenow.com.au/fvplsAwesome Black Media:https://awesomeblack.org/awesome-black-media/ab-club/Mental Health for Mob:https://www.gofundme.com/f/nj2my-mental-health-for-mob?utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link_all&utm_source=customerWebsite | Rotten Tomatoes | Linktree | Youtube | Twitter | Instagram

Maureen and Jim are excited to welcome Donnie Brasco, the Mob guy who turned out to be an FBI Agent. He is the only FBI Agent who has infiltrated the mob so deeply that they wanted to make him a “Made” member. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It look like we stuck at the crib this weekend because another Arctic winter storm coming through! So if you in the path of this mess (Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Memphis, St. Louis, Indy, the Carolinas—wherever that cold finna slap), do me a favor: get your tail in the house, make sure your heat work, stack up blankets, water, and food, and stay off them icy roads. Mother Nature ain’t playing.

Mob hatred just the means To support this ministry financially, visit: https://www.oneplace.com/donate/549/29?v=20251111

Are some people truly above the law in America? And what happens when the justice system stops functioning altogether? In this explosive episode, we examine two unfolding crises shaking the country at the same time:

Minneapolis is becoming a warning sign for the rest of America. ⚠️ In this episode, Tara breaks down disturbing reports of left-wing street mobs targeting everyday citizens, forcing people to remove clothing, invading churches, and carrying out violent assaults — all while police are allegedly told to stand down.

What happens when investigators try to follow the money — and are met by a hostile mob instead of answers? ⚠️ In this episode, Tara breaks down explosive accounts involving Medicaid fraud allegations, empty storefront “businesses,” and violent intimidation aimed at stopping scrutiny. From viral investigator Nick Shirley's footage to a shocking confrontation involving top federal health officials, this episode explores how alleged fraud, political protection, and street-level intimidation collide — and what it could mean for the future of public safety and accountability in America.

In this powerful and wide-ranging episode of Gangland Wire, host Gary Jenkins sits down with Ken Behr, author of One Step Over the Line: Confessions of a Marijuana Mercenary. Behr tells his astonishing life story—from teenage marijuana dealer in South Florida, to high-level drug runner and smuggler, to DEA cooperating source working major international cases. Along the way, he offers rare, first-hand insight into how large-scale drug operations actually worked during the height of the War on Drugs—and why that war, in his view, has largely failed. From Smuggler to Source Behr describes growing up during the explosion of the drug trade in South Florida during the 1970s and 1980s, where smuggling marijuana and cocaine became almost commonplace. He explains how he moved from street-level dealing into large-scale logistics—off-loading planes, running covert runways in the Everglades, moving thousands of pounds of marijuana, and participating in international smuggling operations involving Canada, Jamaica, Colombia, and the Bahamas. After multiple arrests—including a serious RICO case that threatened him with decades in prison—Behr made the life-altering decision to cooperate with the DEA. What followed was a tense and dangerous double life as an undercover operative, helping law enforcement dismantle major trafficking networks while living under constant pressure and fear of exposure. Inside the Mechanics of the Drug Trade This episode goes deep into the nuts and bolts of organized drug trafficking, including: How clandestine runways were built and dismantled in minutes How aircraft were guided into unlit landing zones How smuggling crews were paid and organized Why most drug operations ultimately collapse from inside The role of asset seizures in federal drug enforcement 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 [00:00:00] well, hey, all your wire taps. It’s good to be back here in studio of Gangland Wire. I have a special guest today. He has a book called, uh, title is One Step Over the Line and, and he went several steps over the line, I think in his life. Ken Bearer, welcome Ken. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me. Now, Ken, Ken is a, was a marijuana smuggler at one time and, and ended up working with the DEA, so he went from one side over to my side and, and I always like to talk to you guys that that helped us in law enforcement and I, there’s a lot of guys that don’t like that out there, but I like you guys you were a huge help to us in law enforcement and ended up doing the right thing after you made a lot of money. So tell us about the money. We were just starting to talk about the money. Tell us about the money, all those millions and millions of dollars that you drug smuggler makes. What happens? Well, I, you know, like I said, um, Jimmy Buffett’s song a pirate looks at 40, basically, he says, I made enough money to to buy Miami and pissed it away all so fast, never meant to last. And, and that’s what happens. I do know a few people that have [00:01:00] put away money. One of my friends that we did a lot of money together, a lot of drug dealing and a lot of moving some product, and he’s put the money away. Got in bed with some other guy that was, you know, legal, bought a bunch of warehouses, and now he lives a great life, living off the money he put away. Yeah. If the rents and stuff, he, he got into real estate. Other guys have got into real estate and they got out and they ended up doing okay. ’cause now they’re drawing all those rents. That’s a good way to money. Exactly what he did. Uh, my favorite, I was telling you a favorite story of mine was the guy that was a small time dealer used to hang out at the beach. And, uh, we en he ended up saving $80,000, which was a lot of money back then. Yeah. And then put it all, went to school to be a culinary chef and then got a job at the Marriott as a culinary chef and a chef. So he, you know, he really took the money, made a little bit of money, didn’t make a lot Yeah. But made enough to go to school and do something with his life. That’s so, um, that’s a great one. That’s a good one [00:02:00] there. That’s real. Yeah. But he wasn’t a big time guy. Yeah. You know what, what happens is you might make a big lick. You know, I, I never made million dollar moves. I have lots of friends that did. I always said I didn’t want to be a smuggler. ’cause I was making a steady living, being a drug runner. If you brought in 40, 50,000 pounds of weed, you would come to me and then I would move it across the country and sell it in different, along with other guys like me. Having said that, so I say I’m a guy that never wanted to do a smuggling trip. I’ve done 12 of them. Yeah. Even though, you know, and you know, if you’ve been in the DEA side twelve’s a lot for somebody usually. Yeah. That’s a lot. They don’t make, there’s no longevity. Two or three trips. No. You know, I did it for 20 years. Yeah. And then finally I got busted one time in Massachusetts in 1988. We had 40,000 pounds stuck up in Canada. So a friend of mine comes to me, another friend had the 40,000 pounds up there. He couldn’t sell it. He goes, Hey, you wanna help me smuggle [00:03:00] this back into America? Which, you know, is going the wrong direction. The farther north it goes, the more money it’s worth. I would’ve taken it to Greenland for Christ’s sakes. Yeah. But, we smuggled it back in. What we did this time was obviously they, they brought a freighter or a big ship to bring the 40,000 pounds into Canada. Mm-hmm. He added, stuffed in a fish a fish packing plant in a freezer somewhere up there. And so we used the sea plane and we flew from a lake in Canada to a lake in Maine where the plane would pull up, I’d unload. Then stash it. And we really did like to get 1400 pounds. We had to go through like six or seven trips. ’cause the plane would only hold 200 and something pounds. Yeah. And a sea plane can’t land at night. It has to land during the day. Yeah. You can’t land a plane in the middle of a lake in the night, I guess yourself. Yeah. I see. Uh, and so we got, I got busted moving that load to another market and that cost, uh, [00:04:00] cost me about $80,000 in two years of fighting in court to get out of that. Yeah. Uh, but I did beat the case for illegal search and seizure. So one for the good guys. It wasn’t for the good guys. Well the constitution, he pulled me over looking for fireworks and, ’cause it was 4th of July and, yeah. The name of that chapter in the book is why I never work on a holiday. So you don’t wanna spend your holiday in jail ’cause there’s no, you can’t on your birthday. So another, the second time I got busted was in 92. So just a couple years later after, basically I was in the system for two years with the loss, you know, fighting it and that, that was for Rico. I was looking at 25 years. But, uh, but like a normal smuggling trip. I’ll tell you one, we did, I brought, I actually did my first smuggling trip. I was on the run in Jamaica from a, a case that I got named in and I was like 19 living down in Jamaica to cool out. And then my buddies came down. So we ended up bringing out 600 pounds. So that was my first tr I was about 19 or [00:05:00] 20 years old when I did my first trip. I brought out 600 pounds outta Jamaica. A friend of mine had a little Navajo and we flew it out with that, but. I’ll give you an example of a smuggling trip. So a friend of mine came to me and he wanted to load 300 kilos of Coke in Columbia and bring it into America. And he wanted to know if I knew anybody that could load him 300 kilos. So I did. I introduced him to a friend of mine that Ronnie Vest. He’s the only person you’ll appreciate this. Remember how he kept wanting to extradite all the, the guys from Columbia when we got busted, indict him? Yes. And of course, Escobar’s living in his own jail with his own exit. Yeah. You know, and yeah. So the Columbian government says, well, we want somebody, why don’t you extradite somebody to America, to Columbia? So Ronnie Vest had gotten caught bringing a load of weed outta Columbia. You know, they sent ’em back to America. So that colo, the Americans go, I’ll tell you what you want. Somebody. And Ronnie Vests got the first good friend of mine, first American to be [00:06:00] extradited to Columbia to serve time. So he did a couple years in the Columbian prison. And so he’s the one that had the cocaine connection now. ’cause he spent time in Columbia. Yeah. And you know, so we brought in 300 kilos of Coke. He actually, I didn’t load it. He got another load from somebody else. But, so in the middle of the night, you set up on a road to nowhere in the Everglades, there’s so many Floridas flat, you’ve got all these desolate areas. We go out there with four or five guys. We take, I have some of ’em here somewhere. Callum glow sticks. You know the, the, the glow sticks you break, uh, yeah. And some flashing lights throw ’em out there. Yeah. And we set up a, yeah, the pilot came in and we all laid in the woods waiting for the plane to come in. And as soon as the pilot clicks. The mic four times. It’s, we all click our mics four times and then we run out. He said to his copilot, he says, look, I mean, we lit up this road from the sky. He goes, it looks like MIA [00:07:00] behind the international airport. But it happens like that within a couple, like a minute, we’ll light that whole thing up. Me and one other guy run down the runway. It’s a lot, it’s a long run, believe me. We put out the lights, we gotta put out the center lights and then the marker lights, because you gotta have the center of the runway where the plane’s gonna land and the edge is where it can’t, right? Yeah. He pulls up, bring up a couple cars, I’m driving one of them, load the kilos in. And then we have to refuel the plane because you don’t, you know, you want to have enough fuel to get back to an FBO to your landing airport or real airport. Yeah. Not the one we made in the Everglades. Yeah. And then the trick is the car’s gotta get out of there. Yeah, before the plane takes off. ’cause when that plane takes off, you know you got a twin engine plane landing is quiet, taking off at full throttle’s gonna wake up the whole neighborhood. So once we got out of there, then they went ahead and got the plane off. And then the remaining guys, they gotta clean up the mess. We want to use this again. So we [00:08:00] wanna clean up all the wires, the radios. Mm-hmm. Pick up the fuel tanks, pick up the runway lights, and their job is to clean that off and all that’s gonna take place before the police even get down the main road. Right? Mm-hmm. That’s gonna all take place in less than 10 minutes. Wow. I mean, the offload takes, the offload takes, you can offload about a thousand pounds, which I’ve done in three minutes. Wow. But, and then refueling the plane, getting everything else cleaned up. Takes longer. Yeah. Interesting. So how many guys would, would be on that operation and how do you pay that? How do you decide who gets paid what? How much? Okay. So get it up front or, I always curious about the details, how that stuff, I don’t think I got paid enough. And I’ll be honest, it was a hell of a chance. I got 20 grand looking at 15 years if you get caught. Yeah. But I did it for the excitement. 20 grand wasn’t that much. I had my own gig making more money than that Uhhuh, you know, but I was also racing cars. I was, there’s a [00:09:00] picture of one of my race cars. Oh cool. So that costs about six, 7,000 a weekend. Yeah. And remember I’m talking about 1980s dollars. Yeah. That’s 20,000 a weekend. A weekend, yes. Yeah. And that 20,000 for a night’s work in today’s world would be 60. Yeah. Three. And I’m talking about 1985 versus, that was 40 years ago. Yeah. Um. But it’s a lot of fun and, uh, and, but it, you kind of say to yourself, what was that one step over the line? That’s why I wrote the book. I remember as a kid thinking in my twenties, man, I’ve taken one step over the line. So the full name of the book is One Step Over the Line Con Confessions of a Marijuana Mercenary. That’s me actually working for the DEA. That picture was at the time when I was working for the DEA, so the second time I got busted in 1992 was actually for the smallest amount of weed that I ever got, ever really had. It was like 80, a hundred pounds. But unfortunately it was for Rico. I didn’t know at the [00:10:00] time, but when they arrested me, I thought, oh, they only caught me with a hundred pounds. But I got charged with Rico. So I was looking at 25 years. What, how, what? Did they have some other, it must have had some other offenses that they could tie to and maybe guns and stuff or something that get that gun. No, we never used guns ever. Just other, other smuggling operations. Yeah, yeah. Me, me and my high school friend, he had moved to Ohio in 77 or 78, so he had called me one time, he was working at the Ford plant and he goes, Hey, I think I could sell some weed up here. All right. I said, come on down, I’ll give you a couple pounds. So he drives down from Ohio on his weekend off, all the way from Ohio. I gave him two pounds. He drove home, calls me back. He goes, I sold it. So I go, all right. He goes, I’m gonna get some more. So at that time, I was working for one of the largest marijuana smugglers in US History. His name was Donny Steinberg. I was just a kid, you know, like my job, part of my [00:11:00] job was to, they would gimme a Learjet. About a million or two and I jump on a Learjet and fly to the Cayman Islands. I was like 19 years old. Same time, you know, kid. Yeah, just a kid. 19 or 20 and yeah. 18, I think. And so I ended up doing that a few times. That was a lot of fun. And that’s nice to be a kid in the Learjet and they give me a million or two and they gimme a thousand dollars for the day’s work. I thought I was rich, I was, but people gotta understand that’s in that 78 money, not that’s, yeah. That was more like $10,000 for day, I guess. Yeah. You know? Yeah. It was a lot of money for an 18, 19-year-old kid. Yeah. Donnie gives me a bail. So Terry comes back from Ohio, we shoved the bale into his car. Barely would fit ’cause he had no big trunk on this Firebird. He had, he had a Firebird trans Am with the thunder black with a thunder, thunder chicken on the hood. It was on the hood. Oh cool. That was, that was a catch meow back then. Yeah. Yeah. It got it with that [00:12:00] Ford plant money. And uh, by the way, that was after that 50 pounds got up. ’cause every bail’s about 50 pounds. That’s the last he quit forward the next day. I bet. And me and him had built a 12 year, we were moving. Probably 50 tons up there over the 12 year period. You know, probably, I don’t know, anywhere from 50 to a hundred thousand pounds we would have, he must have been setting up other dealers. So among his friends, he must have been running around. He had the distribution, I was setting up the distribution network and you had the supply. I see. Yeah. I was the Florida connection. It’s every time you get busted, the cops always wanna grab that Florida connection. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. You gotta go down there. I there, lemme tell you, you know, I got into this. We were living in, I was born on a farm in New Jersey, like in know Norman Rockwell, 1950s, cow pies and hay bales. And then we moved to New Orleans in 1969 and then where my dad had business and right after, not sure after that, he died when I was 13. As I say in the book, I [00:13:00] probably wouldn’t have been writing the book if my father was alive. Yeah. ’cause I probably wouldn’t have went down that road, you know? But so my mother decides in 1973 to move us to, uh, south Florida, to get away from the drugs in the CD underside of New Orleans. Yeah. I guess she didn’t read the papers. No. So I moved from New Orleans to the star, the war on where the war on drugs would start. I always say if she’d have moved me to Palo Alto, I’d be Bill Gates, but No. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was so, uh, and everybody I knew was running drugs, smuggling drugs, trying to be a drug deal. I mean, I was, I had my own operation. I was upper middle level, but there were guys like me everywhere. Mm-hmm. There were guys like me everywhere, moving a thou, I mean, moving a thousand, 2000 pounds at the time was a big thing, you know? That’s, yeah. So, so about what year was that? I started in 19. 70. Okay. Three. I was [00:14:00] 16. Started selling drugs outta my mom’s house, me and my brother. We had a very good business going. And by the time I was got busted, it was 19 92. So, so you watched, especially in South Florida, you watched like where that plane could go down and go back up that at eventually the feds will come up with radar and they have blimps and they have big Bertha stuff down there to then catch those kinds of things. Yeah. Right, right. Big Bertha was the blimp. Uhhuh, uh, they put up, yeah. In the beginning you could just fly right in. We did one trip one time. This is this, my, my buddy picked up, I don’t know, 40 or 50 kilos in The Bahamas. So you fly into Fort Lauderdale and you call in like you’re gonna do a normal landing. Mm-hmm. And the BLI there. This is all 1980s, five. You know, they already know. They’re doing this, but you just call in, like you’re coming to land in Fort Lauderdale, and what you do is right before you land, you hit the tower up and you tell ’em you wanna do a [00:15:00] go around, meaning you’re not comfortable with the landing. Mm-hmm. Well, they’ll always leave you a go around because they don’t want you to crash. Yeah. And right west of the airport was a golf course, and right next to the golf course, oh, about a mile down the road was my townhouse. So we’re in the townhouse. My buddies all put on, two of the guys, put on black, get big knives, gear, and I drive to one road on the golf course and my other friend grows Dr. We drop the guys off in the golf course as the plane’s gonna do the touchdown at the airport. He says, I gotta go around. As he’s pulling up now, he’s 200 feet below the radar, just opens up the side of the plane. Mm-hmm. The kickers, we call ’em, they’re called kickers. He kicks the baskets, the ba and the guys on, on the golf court. They’re hugging trees. Yeah. You don’t wanna be under that thing. Right. You got a 200, you got maybe a 40 pound package coming in at 120 miles an hour from 200 feet up. It’ll break the bra. It’ll yeah. The [00:16:00] branches will kill you. Yeah. So they pull up, they get out, I pull back up in the pickup truck, he runs out, jumps in the back of the truck, yells, hit it. We drive the mile through the back roads to my townhouse. Get the coke in the house. My buddy rips it open with a knife. It’s and pulls out some blow. And he looks at me, he goes, Hey, let’s get outta here. And I go, where are we going? Cops come and he goes, ah, I got two tickets. No, four tickets to the Eddie Murphy concert. So we left the blow in this trunk of his car. Oh. Oh, oh man. I know. We went to Eddie Murphy about a million dollars worth of product in the trunk. Oh. And, uh, saw a great show and came back and off they went. That’s what I’m trying to point out is that’s how fast it goes down, man. It’s to do. Yeah. Right in, in 30 minutes. We got it out. Now the thing about drug deals is we always call ’em dds delayed dope deals because the smuggling [00:17:00] trip could take six months to plan. Yeah. You know, they never go, there’s no organized crime in organized crime. Yeah. No organization did it. Yeah. And then, then of course, in 1992 when I got busted and was looking at Rico, a friend of mine came up to me. He was a yacht broker. He had gotten in trouble selling a boat, and he said, Hey, I’d you like to work for the DEA. I’d done three months in jail. I knew I was looking at time, I knew I had nothing. My lawyers told me, Kenny, you either figure something out or you’re going to jail for a mm-hmm. And I just had a newborn baby. I just got married three weeks earlier and we had a newborn baby. I said, what are you crazy? I mean, I’m waiting for my wife to hear me. You know, he’s calling me on the phone. He goes, meet me for lunch. I go meet him for lunch. And he explains to me that he’s gonna, he’s got a guy in the, uh, central district in Jacksonville, and he’s a DEA agent, and I should go talk to him. And so the DEA made a deal with the Ohio police that anything that I [00:18:00] confiscated, anything that I did, any assets I got, they would get a share in as long as they released me. Yeah. To them. And, you know, it’s all about the, I hate to say this, I’m not saying that you don’t want to take drugs off the street, but if you’re the police department and you’re an agent, it’s about asset seizures. Yeah. Yeah. That’s how you fund the dr. The war on drugs. Yeah. The war begets war. You know, I mean, oh, I know, been Florida was, I understand here’s a deal. You’re like suing shit against the tide, right? Fighting that drug thing. Okay? It just keeps coming in. It keeps getting cheaper. It keeps getting more and more. You make a little lick now and then make a little lick now and then, but then you start seeing these fancy cars and all this money out there that you can get to. If you make the right score, you, you, you hit the right people, you can get a bunch of money, maybe two or three really cool cars for your unit. So then you’ll start focusing on, go after the money. I know it’s not right, but you’re already losing your shoveling shit against the tide anyhow, so just go after the goal. [00:19:00] One time I set up this hash deal for the DEA from Amsterdam. The guy brought the hash in, and I had my agent, you know, I, I didn’t set up the deal. The guy came to me and said, we have 200 kilos of hash. Can you help us sell it? He didn’t know that I was working for the DEA, he was from Europe. And I said, sure. The, the thing was, I, so in the boat ready to close the deal, now my guy is from Central. I’m in I’m in Fort Lauderdale, which is Southern District. So he goes, Hey, can you get that man to bring that sailboat up to Jacksonville? I go, buddy, he just sailed across the Atlantic. He ain’t going to Jacksonville. So the central district has to come down, or is a northern district? I can’t remember if it’s northern or central. Has to come down to the Southern district. So, you know, they gotta make phone calls. Everybody’s gotta be in Yep. Bump heads. So I’m on the boat and he calls me, he goes, Hey, we gotta act now. Yeah. And I’m looking at the mark, I go, why? He [00:20:00] goes, customs is on the dock. We don’t want them involved. So you got the two? Yeah. So I bring him up, I go, where’s the hash? He goes, it’s in the car. So we go up to the car and he opens the trunk, and I, I pull back one of the duffle bags I see. I can tell immediately it’s product. So I go like this, and all hell breaks loose, right? Yeah. I could see the two customs agents and they’re all dressed like hillbillies. They, you know. So I said to my, my handler, the next day I called them up to debrief. You know, I have to debrief after every year, everything. I goes, so what happened when customs I go, what’d they want to do? He goes, yep. They wanted to chop the boat in threes. So they’re gonna sell the boat and the 2D EA offices are gonna trade it. Yeah. Are gonna shop the money. Yeah. I remember when I registered with the DEA in, in, in the Southern district, I had to tell ’em who I was. They go, why are you working for him? Why aren’t you working for us? I’m like, buddy, I’m not in charge here. This is, you know? Yeah. I heard that many [00:21:00] times through different cases we did, where the, the local cop would say to me, why don’t you come work for us? Oh yeah. Try to steal your informant. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So how about that? So, can you get a piece of the action if they had a big case seizure? Yeah. Did they have some deal where you’d get a piece of that action there? Yep. That’s a pretty good deal. Yeah. So I would get, I, I’d get, like, if we brought down, he would always tell everybody that he needed money to buy electronics and then he would come to me and go, here’s 2000. And to the other cis, he had three guys. I saw a friend of mine, the guy that got me into the deal. Them a million dollar house or a couple million dollar house. And I saw the DEA hand him a suitcase with a million dollars cash in it. Wow. I mean, I’m sorry, with a hundred thousand cash. A hundred thousand. Okay. I was gonna say, I was thinking a million. Well, a hundred thousand. Yeah, a hundred thousand. I’ve heard that. I just didn’t have any experience with it myself. But I heard that. I saw, saw Open it up, saw money. I saw the money. It was one of those aluminum halla, Halliburton reef cases and Yeah, yeah. A [00:22:00] hundred thousand cash. But, uh, but you know, um, it’s funny, somebody once asked me out of, as a kid I wanted to be a cowboy, a race car driver, and a secret agent. Me too. Yes. Yeah. I didn’t want, I wanted to be a, I grew up on a farm, so I kind of rode a horse. I had that watched Rowdy, you got saved background as me, man. Yeah. You know, we watched, we watched, we grew up on westerns. We watched Gun Smoke, rowdy. Oh yeah. You know, uh, bananas, uh, you know, so, um. So anyway, uh, I got to raise cars with my drug money, and I guess I’m not sure if I was more of a secret agent working as a drug dealer or as the DEA, but it’s a lot of I, you know, I make jokes about it now, but it’s a lot of stress working undercover. Oh, yeah. Oh, I can’t even imagine that. I never worked undercover. I, that was not my thing. I like surveillance and putting pieces together and running sources, but man, that actual working undercover that’s gotta be nerve wracking. It’s, you know, and, and my handler was good at it, but [00:23:00] he would step out and let, here’s, I’ll tell you this. One day he calls me up and he goes, Hey, I’m down here in Fort Lauderdale. You need to come down here right now. And I’m having dinner at my house about 15 minutes away. Now he lives in Jacksonville. I go, what’s he doing in Fort Lauderdale? So I drive down to the hotel and he’s got a legal pad and a pen. He goes, my, uh, my, my seniors want to, uh, want you to proffer. You need to tell me everything you ever did. And they want me to do a proffer. And I go, I looked at him. I go, John, I can’t do that. He start, we start writing. I start telling him stuff. I stop. I go, I grew up in this town. Everybody I know I did a drug deal with from high school, I go, I would be giving you every single kid, every family, man, I grew up here. My, I’m gonna be in jail, and my wife and my one and a half year old daughter are gonna be the only people left in this town, and they’re not gonna have any support. And I just can’t do this to all my friends. Yeah. So he says, all right, puts the pen down. I knew [00:24:00] he hated paperwork, so I had a good shot. He wasn’t gonna, he goes, yeah, you hungry? I go, yeah. He goes, let’s go get a steak. And right across the street was a place called Chuck Steakhouse, which great little steak restaurant. All right. So we go over there, he goes, and he is a big guy. He goes, sit right here. I go, all right. So I sit down. I, I’m getting a free steak. I’m gonna sit about through the steak dinner, it goes. Look over my shoulder. So I do this. He goes, see the guy at the bar in the black leather jacket. I go, yeah. He goes, when I get up and walk outta here, when I clear the door, I want you to go up to him and find a talk drug deal. See what you can get out of him. I go, you want me to walk up to a complete stranger and say, he goes, I’m gonna walk out the door. When I get out the door. You’re gonna go up and say, cap Captain Bobby. That was his, he was a ca a boat captain and his nickname, his handle was Captain Bobby. And he was theoretically the next Vietnam vet that now is a smuggler, you know?[00:25:00] Yeah. And so he walks out the door and I walked out and sat with the guy at the bar and we started, I said, hi, captain Bobby sent me, I’m his right hand man, you know, to talk about. And we talked and I looked around the bar trying to see if anybody was with him. And I’m figuring, now I’m looking at the guy going, why is he so open with me? And I’m thinking, you know what? He’s wearing a leather jacket. He’s in Florida. I bet you he’s got a wire on and he’s working for customs and I’m working for the DEA, so nothing ever came of it. But you know, that was, you know, you’re sitting there eating dinner and all of a sudden, you know, look over my shoulder. Yeah. And, you know, and I’m trying to balance all that with having a newborn that’s about a year old and my wife and Yeah. Looking at 25 years. So a little bit of pressure. But, you know, hey and I understand these federal agencies, everybody’s got, everybody is, uh, uh, aggressive. Everybody is ambitious. And you just are this guy in the middle and right. And they’ll throw you to the [00:26:00] wolves in a second. Second, what have you done for a second? Right? It’s what have you done for me lately? He’s calling me up and said, Hey, I don’t got any product from you in a minute. I go, well, I’m working on it. He goes, well, you know, they’ll kick you outta the program. Yeah. But one of the things he did he was one of, he was the GS 13. So he had some, you know, he had level, you know, level 15 or whatever, you know, he was, yeah. Almost at the head of near retirement too. And he said, look, he had me, he had another guy that was a superstar, another guy. And we would work as a team and he would feed us all the leads. In other words, if David had a case, I’d be on that case. So when I went to go to go to trial or go to my final, he had 14 or 15 different things that he had penciled me in to be involved with. The biggest deal we did at the end of my two years with the DEA was we brought down the Canadian mob. They got him for 10,000 kilos of cocaine, import 10,000 kilos. It was the Hell’s Angels, the Rock something, motorcycle [00:27:00] gang, the Italian Mafia and the, and the Irish mob. Mm-hmm. And the guy, I mean, this is some badass guys. I was just a player, but. The state of Ohio, they got to fly up there and you know, I mean, no words, the dog and pony show was always on to give everybody, you know. Yes. A bite at the apple. Oh yeah. But I’ll tell you this, it’s been 33 years and the two people that I’m close to is my arresting officer in Ohio and my DEA handler in Jacksonville. The arresting officer, when he retired, he called to gimme his new cell phone. And every year or so I call him up around Christmas and say, Dennis, thank you for the opportunity to turn my life around, because I’ve got four great kids. I’ve started businesses, you know, he knows what I’ve done with my life. And the DEA handler, that’s, he’s a friend of mine. I mean, you know, we talk all the time and check on each other. And, you know, I mean, he’s, [00:28:00] they’re my friends. A lot of, not too many of the guys are left from those days that will talk to me. Yeah, probably not. And most of them are dead or in jail anyhow. For, well, a lot of ’em are, maybe not even because of you, I mean, because that’s their life. No, but a lot of them, a number of ’em turned their lives around, went into legal businesses and have done well. Yeah. So, you know, there really have, so not all of ’em, but a good share of ’em have turned, because we weren’t middle class kids. We were, my one friend was, dad was the lieutenant of the police department. The other one was the post guy. We weren’t inner city kids. Yeah. We weren’t meeting we, the drug war landed on us and we just, we were recruited into it. As young as I talk about in my book. But I mean, let’s talk about what’s going on now. Now. Yeah. And listen, I’m gonna put some statistics out there. Last year, 250,000 people were charged with cannabis. 92% for simple possession. There’s [00:29:00] people still in jail for marijuana doing life sentences. I’ve had friends do 27 years only for marijuana. No nonviolent crimes, first time offender. 22 years, 10 years. And the government is, I’ve been involved with things where the government was smuggling the drugs. I mean, go with the Iran Contra scandal that happened. We were trading guns for cocaine with the Nicaraguans in the Sandon Easterns. Yeah. Those same pilots. Gene Hassen Fus flew for Air America and Vietnam moving drugs and gun and, and guns out of Cambodia. Same guy. Air America. Yeah. The American government gave their soldiers opium in Civil War to keep ’em marching. You know, I mean, we did a deal with Lucky Luciano, where we let ’em out of prison for doing heroin exchange for Intel from, from Europe on during World War II and his, and the mob watching the docks for the, uh, cargo ships. So the government’s been intertwined in the war on drugs on two [00:30:00] sides of it. Yeah. You know, and not that it makes it right. Look, I’ve lost several friends to fentanyl that thought they were doing coke and did fentanyl or didn’t even know there was any. They just accidentally did fentanyl and it’s a horrible drug. But those boats coming out of Venezuela don’t have fentanyl on ’em. No. Get cocaine maybe. If that, and they might be, they’re probably going to Europe. Europe and they’re going to Europe. Yeah, they’re going, yeah. They’re doubt they’re going to Europe. Yeah. Yeah. And so let’s put it this way. I got busted for running a 12 year ongoing criminal enterprise. We moved probably 50 tons of marijuana. You know what? Cut me down? One guy got busted with one pound and he turned in one other guy that went all the way up to us. So if you blew up those boats, you know, you’re, you need the leads. You, you can’t kill your clients. Yeah. You know, how are you gonna get, not gonna get any leads outta that. Well, that’s, uh, well, I’m just saying [00:31:00] you right. The, if they followed the boat to the mothership Yeah. They’d have the whole crew and all the cargo. Yeah. You know, it’s, those boats maybe have 200 kilos on ’em. A piece. Yeah. The mothership has six tons. Yeah. That’s it. It’s all about the, uh, the, um, uh, optics. Optics, yeah. That’s the word. It’s all about the optics and, and the politic, you know, in, in some way it may deter some people, but I don’t, I I, I’ve never seen anything, any consequence. In that drug business, there’s too much money. There is no consequence that is really ever gonna deter people from smuggling drugs. Let me put it this way, except for a few people like yourself, there’s a few like yourself that get to a certain age and the consequence of going to prison for a long time may, you know, may bring you around or the, all the risk you’re taking just, you know, you can’t take it anymore, but you gotta do something. But no, well, I got busted twice. Consequence just don’t matter. There is no consequence that’s gonna do anything. Here’s why. And you’re right. [00:32:00] One is how do you get in a race car and not think you’re gonna die? Because you always think it’s gonna happen to somebody else. Exactly. And the drug business is the same. It’s, I’m not, it’s not gonna happen to me tonight. And those guys in Venezuela, they have no electricity. They have no water. Yeah. They got nothing. They have a chance to go out and make a couple thousand dollars and change their family’s lives. Yeah. Or they’re being, they’re got family members in the gar, in the gangs that are forcing them to do it. Yeah. It’s the war on drugs has kind of been a political war and an optics war from the seventies. I mean, it’s nobody, listen, I always say, I say in my book, nobody loved it more than the cops, the lawyers and the politicians. No shit. In Fort Lauderdale, they had nothing, and all of a sudden the drug wars brought night scopes and cigarette boats and fancy cars and new offices. Yes. And new courthouses, and new jails and Yep. I don’t have an answer. Yeah. The problem is, [00:33:00] you know what I’m gonna say, America, Mexico doesn’t have a drug problem. Columbia doesn’t have a drug problem. No. America has a drug problem. Those are just way stations to get the product in. In the cover of my book, it says, you don’t sell drugs, you supply them like ammunition in a war. It’s a, people, we, how do we fix this? How do we get the American people? Oh, by the way, here’s a perfect example. Marijuana is legal in a majority of states. You don’t see anybody smuggling marijuana in, I actually heard two stories of people that are smuggling marijuana out of the country. I’ve heard that. I’ve heard that. Yeah. They’re growing so much marijuana in America that it’s worth shipping to other places, either legally or illegally. Yeah. And, and, and you know, the biggest problem is like, what they’ll do is they’ll set up dispensaries, with the green marijuana leaf on it, like it’s some health [00:34:00] dispensary. But they, they just won’t it’ll be off the books. It just won’t have the licensing and all that. And, you know, you run that for a while and then maybe you get caught, maybe you don’t. And so it’s, you know, it’s, well, the other thing is with that dispensary license. It’s highly regulated, but you can get a lot of stuff in the gray. So there’s three markets now. There’s the white market, which is the legal Yeah. Business that, you know, you can buy stocks in the companies and whatnot. Yeah. There’s the black market, which is the guy on the street that Kenny Bear used to be. And then there’s the gray market where people are taking black market product and funneling it through the white markets without intact, you know, the taxes and the licensing and the, the, uh, testing for, you know, you have to test marijuana for pesticides. Metals, yeah. And, and the oils and the derivatives. You know, there’s oil and there’s all these derivatives. They have to be tested. Well, you could slide it through the gray market into the white market. So I know it’s a addiction, you know, whether it’s gambling or sex or Right. Or [00:35:00] there’s always gonna be people who are gonna take advantage and make money off of addiction. The mafia, you know, they refined it during the prohibition. All these people that drink, you know, and a lot, admittedly, a lot of ’em are social drinkers, but awful lot of ’em work. They had to have it. And so, you know, then gambling addiction. And that’s, uh, well here’s what I say. If it wasn’t for Prohibition Vegas, the mob never would’ve had the power and the money to build Vegas. No, they wouldn’t have anything. So when you outlaw something that people want, you’re creating a, a business. If, if somebody, somebody said the other day, if you made all the drugs legal in America, would that put out, put the drug cartels in Mexico and Columbia and out of business? Yeah, maybe. How about this statistic? About 20 to 30,000 people a year die from cocaine overdose. Most have a medical condition. Unknown unbe, besides, they’re not ODing on cocaine. Yeah. Alright. 300,000 people a year die from obesity. Yeah. And [00:36:00] another, almost four, I think 700, I don’t know, I might be about to say a half a million die from alcohol and tobacco. Mm-hmm. I could be low on that figure. So you’re, you probably are low. Yeah. I could be way more than that. But on my point is we’re regulating alcohol, tobacco, and certainly don’t care how much food you eat, and why don’t we have a medical system that takes care of these people. I don’t know that the answer if I did, but I’m just saying it, making this stuff more valuable and making bigger crime syndicates doesn’t make sense. Yeah. See a addiction is such a psychological, spiritual. Physical maldy that people can’t really separate the three and they don’t, people that, that aren’t involved and then getting some kind of recovery, they can’t understand why somebody would go back and do it again after they maybe were clean for a while. You know, that’s a big common problem with putting money into the treatment center [00:37:00] business. Yep. Because people do go to treatment two and three times and, and maybe they never get, some people never, they’ll chase it to death. No, and I can’t explain it. And you know, I, I’ll tell you what, I have my own little podcast. It’s called One Step Over the Line. Mm-hmm. And I released a show last night about a friend of mine, his name is Ron Black. You can watch it or any of your listeners can watch it, and Ron was, went down to the depths of addiction, but he did it a long time ago when they really spent a lot of time and energy to get, you know, they really put him through his system. 18 months, Ron got out clean and he came from a good family. He was raised right. He didn’t, you know, he had some trauma in his life. He had some severe trauma as a child, but he built one of the largest addiction. He has a company that he’s, he ran drug counseling services. He’s been in the space 20 or 30 years, giving back. He has a company that trains counselors to be addiction specialists. He has classes for addiction counseling. He become certified [00:38:00] members. He’s run drug rehabs. He donates to the, you know, you gotta wa if you get a chance to go to my podcast, one step over the line and, and watch this episode we did last night. Probably not the most exciting, you know, like my stories. Yeah. But Ronnie really did go through the entire addiction process from losing everything. Yeah. And pulling himself out. But he was also had a lot of family. You know, he had the right steps. A lot of these kids I was in jail with. Black and brown, inter or inner city youth, whatever, you know, their national, you know, race or nationality, they don’t have a chance. Yeah. They’re in jail with their fathers, their cousins, their brothers. Mm-hmm. The law, the war on drugs, and the laws on drugs specifically affect them. And are they, I remember thinking, is this kid safer in this jail with a cement roof over his head? A, a hot three hot meals and a bed than being back on the [00:39:00] streets? Yeah. He was, I mean. Need to, I used to do a program working with, uh, relatives of addicts. And so this mother was really worried about her son gonna go to jail next time he went to court. And he, she had told me enough about him by then. I said, you know, ma’am, I just wanna tell you something he’s safer doing about a year or so in jail than he is doing a year or so on the streets. Yeah. And she said, she just looked at me and she said, you know, you’re right. You’re right. So she quit worried about and trying to get money and trying to help him out because she was just, she was killing him, getting him out and putting him back on the streets. This kid was gonna die one way or the other, either shot or overdosed or whatever. But I’ll tell you another story. My best friend growing up in New Orleans was Frankie Monteleone. They owned the Monte Hotel. They own the family was worth, the ho half a billion dollars at the time, maybe. And Frankie was a, a diabetic. And he was a, a junk. He was a a because of the diabetic needles. [00:40:00] He kind of became a cocaine junkie, you know, shooting up coke. You know, I guess the needle that kept him alive was, you know, I, you know, again the addict mentality. Right, right. You can’t explain it. So he got, so he got busted trying to sell a couple grams. They made it into a bigger case by mentioning more product conspiracy. His father said, got a, the, the father made a deal to give him a year and a half in club Fed. Yeah. He could, you know, get a tan, practice his tennis, learn chess come out and be the heir to one of the richest families in the world, all right. He got a year and a half. Frankie did 10 years in prison. ’cause every time he got out, he got violated. Oh yeah. I remember going to his federal probation officer to get my bicycle. He was riding when he got violated. Mm-hmm. And I said, I said, sir, he was in a big building in Fort Lauderdale or you know, courthouse office building above the courthouse. I go, there’s so many cops, lawyers, [00:41:00] judges, that are doing blow on a Saturday night that are smoking pot, that are drinking more than they should all around us. You’ve got a kid that comes from one of the wealthiest families in America that’s never gonna hurt another citizen. He’s just, he’s an addict, not a criminal. He needs a doctor, not a jail. And you know what the guy said to me? He goes but those people aren’t on probation. I, I know. He did. 10 years in and out of prison. Finally got out, finally got off of paper, didn’t stop doing drugs. Ended up dying in a dentist chair of an overdose. Yeah. So you, you never fixed them, you just imprisoned somebody that would’ve never heard another American. Yeah, but we spent, it cost us a lot of money. You know, I, I, I dunno what the answer is. The war on drugs is, we spent over, we spent 80, let’s say since 1973. The, the DEA got started in 73, let’s say. Since that time we’ve, what’s that? 70 something years? Yeah. We’ve done [00:42:00] no, uh, 50, 60. Yeah. 50 something. Yeah. Been 50. We spent a trillion dollars. We spent a trillion dollars. The longest and most expensive war in American history is against its own people. Yeah. Trying to save ’em. I know it’s cra it’s crazy. Yeah, I know. And it, over the years, it just took on this life of its own. Yeah. And believe me, there was a, there’s a whole lot of young guys like you only, didn’t go down the drug path, but you like that action and you like getting those cool cars and doing that cool stuff and, and there’s TV shows about it as part of the culture. And so you’re like, you got this part of this big action thing that’s going on that I, you know, it ain’t right. I, I bigger than all of us. I don’t know. I know. All I like to say I had long hair and some New Orleans old man said to me when I was a kid, he goes, you know why you got that long hair boy? And this is 1969. Yeah, 70. I go, why is that [00:43:00] sir? He goes, ’cause the girls like it. The girls didn’t like it. You wouldn’t have it. I thought about it. I’m trying to be a hippie. I was all this, you know, rebel. I thought about it. I go, boy, he’s probably right. Comes down to sex. Especially a young boy. Well, I mean, I’m 15 years old. I may not even how you look. Yeah. I’m not, listen, at 15, I probably was only getting a second base on a whim, you know? Yeah. But, but they paid attention to you. Yeah. Back in those days you, you know, second base was a lot. Yeah. Really. I remember. Sure. Not as, not as advanced as they are today. I don’t think so. But anyway, that’s my story. Um, all right, Ken b this has been fun. It’s been great. I I really had a lot of fun talking to you. And the book is 1, 1, 1 took over the line. No one, no, no. That’s a Friday slip. One step over that. But that was what I came up with the name. I, I believe you, I heard that song. Yeah. I go, I know, I’m, I’ve just taken one step over the line. So that’s where the book actually one step over the line confessions of a marijuana mercenary. [00:44:00] And I’ll tell you, if your listeners go to my website, one step over the line.com, go to the tile that says MP three or the tile that says digital on that website. Put in the code one, the number one step, and then the number 100. So one step 100, they can get a free, they can download a free copy. Yeah, I got you. Okay. Okay. I appreciate it. That’d be good. Yeah, they’ll enjoy it. Yeah. And on the website there’s pictures of the boats, the planes. Yeah. The runways the weed the, all the pictures are there, family pictures, whatever. Well, you had a, uh, a magical, quite a life, the kinda life that they, people make movies about and everybody watches them and says, oh, wow, that’s really cool. But they didn’t have to do it. They didn’t have to pay that price. No. Most of the people think, the funny thing is a lot of people think I’m, I’m, I’m lying or I’m exaggerating. Yeah. I’m 68 years old. Yeah. There’s no reason for me to lie. And you know, the DEA is, I’m telling that. I’m just telling it the way it [00:45:00] happened. I have no reason to tell Phish stories at this point in my life. No, I believe it. No, no, no. It’s all true. All I’ve been, I’ve been around to a little bit. I, I could just talk to you and know that you’re telling the truth here I am. So, it’s, it’s a great story and Ken, I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you for having me. It’s been a very much a, it is been a real pleasure. It’s, it’s nice to talk to someone that knows both sides of the coin. Okay. Take care. Uh, thanks again. Thank you, sir. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

“ALMOST MARRIED TO THE MOB: HOLLYWOOD ACTRESSES WHO DATED MOBSTERS” - 1/19/2026  (123) In this episode, we slip into the shadows where classic Hollywood glamour meets organized crime, exploring the classic Hollywood actresses who found themselves romantically entangled with real-life mobsters. At a time when studios tightly controlled female stars' images, these notorious bad boys offered something intoxicatingly different: raw power beyond the backlot, fierce loyalty, protection from predators both on and off the screen, and a rebellious thrill that defied Hollywood's carefully scripted rules. Drawn by charisma, thrills and maybe even a little danger, these women navigated a world where diamonds, nightclubs, and whispered threats coexisted with premieres and press junkets—and where love could be as risky as it was seductive. This week, we're looking at the romantic entanglements that occurred when the mob meets Hollywood.  SHOW NOTES:  Sources: Tinseltown Gangsters” The Rise & Decline of the Mob in Hollywood (2024), by Jeffrey Sussman; Handsome Johnny: The Life & Death of Johnny Rosselli, Gentleman Gangster, Hollywood Producer, CIA Assassin (2018), by Lee Server; Double Cross: The Explosive Inside Story of the Mobster Who Controlled America (2016), by Sam Giancana, Chuck Giancana, & Bettina Giancana; Hollywood & The Mob (2011), by Tim Adler; An American Mafioso: The Johnny Rosselli Story (1991), by Charles Rappleye; Detour: A Hollywood Story (1988), by Cheryl Crane; Lana: The Lady, the Legend, The Truth (1982), by Lana Turner; “Sam Giancana: Chicago Godfather, CIA Collaborator, And The Man Who May Have Put JFK In The White House,” May 16. 2024,  by Carly Silver, ATI.com; “Two Survivors: The Scandalous Saga of Lana Turner and Cheryl Crane,” June 8, 2023, by Hadley Hall Meares, Vanity Fair; “Actor Lana Turner's Daughter Kills Turner's Gangster Lover,” 2022, by Thomas DeBose, EBSCO.com “New Allegations Emerge About Marilyn Monroe's Final Hours,” May 11. 2012, CBSNews.com; “The Gangster and The Goddess,” April 1999, by Patricia Bosworth, Vanity Fair; “Killers Gave Rosselli Drink, Shot Him in Belly,” August 10, 1976, by William Tucker, The Miami News;  “The Thug. The Actress. Her Daughter. And Homicide” September 8, 2023, by John S. Caragoizan, Caragozian Daily Journal; TheMobMuseum,org; Wikipedia.com; TCM.com; IBDB.com; IMDBPro.com; --------------------------------- http://www.airwavemedia.com Please contact sales@advertisecast.com if you would like to advertise on our podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dan takes us to downtown Dallas, across from Union Station, to an old hotel that's changed names so many times it's like it keeps trying to hide from its past. Room 1009 doesn't seem to care what the hotel is called, though. Stories of encounters with its ghosts remain unchanged. The room allegedly has a long, sordid history of murders and suspicious deaths tied to it. Then we explore the lore of the elegant Adolphous Hotel. It's been collecting tragedy since the first month it opened. On the nineteenth floor, guests still report hearing a woman sobbing like her heart is breaking in real time. Lynze starts off with a possible Grim Reaper sighting on the night of a confirmed death. Then, we head to Key West AKA Bone Island, for a ghost tour with an actual ghost. Lastly, on a long drive home after a long week of work, a man encounters someone who seems to have wandered out of their final resting place. Do you want to get all of our episodes a WEEK early, ad free? Want to help us support amazing charities? Join us on Patreon!Want to be a Patron? Get episodes AD-FREE, listen and watch before they are released to anyone else, bonus episodes, a 20% merch discount, additional content, and more! Learn more by visiting: https://www.patreon.com/scaredtodeathpodcast.Send stories to mystory@scaredtodeathpodcast.comSend everything else to info@scaredtodeathpodcast.comPlease rate, review, and subscribe anywhere you listen.Thank you for listening!Follow the show on social media: @scaredtodeathpodcast on Facebook and IG and TTWebsite: https://www.badmagicproductions.com/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scaredtodeathpodcastInstagram: https://bit.ly/2miPLf5Mailing Address:Scared to Deathc/o Timesuck PodcastPO Box 3891Coeur d'Alene, ID 83816Opening Sumerian protection spell (adapted):"Whether thou art a ghost that hath come from the earth, or a phantom of night that hath no home… or one that lieth dead in the desert… or a ghost unburied… or a demon or a ghoul… Whatever thou be until thou art removed… thou shalt find here no water to drink… Thou shalt not stretch forth thy hand to our own… Into our house enter thou not. Through our fence, breakthrough thou not… we are protected though we may be frightened. Our life you may not steal, though we may feel SCARED TO DEATH." Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of Scared to Death ad-free and a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this bonus episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins takes listeners back to 1970s Chicago for a series of lesser-known yet revealing stories about the Chicago Outfit, centered on violent enforcer Frank Schweihs, also known as “Frank the German.”   The episode begins with a personal side quest—tracking down the mystery of Tony Accardo and his rare red 1950s Mercedes sports car, possibly a 300 SL. These exotic cars were produced in limited numbers, and with Accardo's history attached, the vehicle could be worth a fortune today. The question is: where did it go?   From there, the story moves deep into Outfit territory. Schweihs was a feared figure who worked under Joseph Lombardo and alongside other notorious mobsters. I recount an undercover operation involving a wired Old Town business owner who helped federal agents capture Schweihs, extorting money, one of the cases that eventually put him behind bars. The episode also explores a remarkable undercover IRS investigation in which an agent posing as a criminal associate gained Schweihs' trust. Listeners hear about crooked real estate deals, political corruption, bribe demands, and just how casually violence was discussed inside the Outfit's inner circle—including talk of bombing a politician's car when business deals stalled.   These stories offer a raw, street-level look at how the Chicago Outfit operated during its peak years—how intimidation, corruption, and violence were everyday tools of business—and why figures like Frank Schweihs remain symbols of the Outfit's brutality. 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. 00:00 – Introduction and Chicago Bonus Episode 00:24 – Tony Accardo's Red Mercedes Mystery 02:55 – The Chicago Outfit in the 1970s 03:31 – Frank Schweihs and the Extortion Case 04:42 – Undercover IRS Agent Inside the Outfit 06:33 – Corruption, Real Estate, and Political Payoffs 08:37 – Violence Threats and Taking the Case Down 09:35 – Windy City Mafia and Final Thoughts Transcript [0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there, Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective here back in the studio with a little bonus episode, Gangland Wire. And I’ve been doing a bunch of Chicago stuff, as you know. Well, here’s one more before I stray away from Chicago. I had been away from Chicago for a long time and I missed it. I missed you guys up there. And, you know, here’s another thing before I really get started in this story. Okay. [0:24] I’m on a mission right now. I remembered an old story about Tony Accardo had a 1950s Mercedes SL, and I think it was a Gull Wing, but I’m not sure. It was a 300 SL. [0:40] He for sure had a 1950s Mercedes red sports car. And I always wondered, you know, I wonder what happened to that car. You know, I ought to be able to run that down. I interviewed a guy recently about an investigation into finding an extremely rare exotic car that was worth like $25 million or something. It was a teardrop, German-made, something about a Talbert Lago or some game like that. Anyhow, so it got me thinking. And they were talking about running down the cars and the history on cars, the Provence on cars. And they said, when you have a really good story attached to a car, it makes it worth a whole lot more money than normal. And I called up a friend of mine that wheels and deals in classic cars through Mecham’s. And I think there’s another auto auction. He said, oh, yeah. He said, man, you can find that car. If it hadn’t already had that priced into it, the fact that Tony Accardo sold it or owned it, then it would be worth a whole lot more money. So I thought, well, let’s just see if we can’t find that car. I started looking into it. These 1950s Mercedes 300 SLs, there wasn’t very many I’ve made. There was only a couple thousand I’ve made in over several years’ time. And the best I could tell, they’re all accounted for in some manner. I don’t know. I haven’t figured that out yet. I started asking around and trying to find people that could help me with sources on that. So if you know anybody that’s a real expert on these old Mercedes sports cars. [2:10] Send them to me. Have them email me at ganglandwire at gmail.com or something like that. And if you are, you know, give me a call, 816-931-3535. I just think it would be fun to find it. I’d do a little show on it if I found it. And find out what happened to it. Now, it might make somebody really happy. We can find it, and he didn’t know that it was Tony Accardo’s old car. Now, these old VINs, you know, now they’re 17 digits. Well, back then, they were like six or seven digits, and to trace it through the VIN, that old a car, with no more than I have to go on right now, it’s just almost impossible. I need to find, narrow down that maybe somebody has a story about who had it and try to find that person and then work down from there if maybe that person still has it. I don’t know. But it would be a fun little, it’s going to be a fun little project. But anyhow, let’s go up to Chicago in the 1970s. You know, you were rocking and rolling up there in Chicago. The outfit ruled. We just had all that information from Bob Cooley and all the things that he did and he was involved in up there. And they owned the city. You know, they damn near owned the whole city. So there’s one guy named Frank Schweihs. Now you may have heard of Frank Schweihs. He was called the German, Frank, the German Schweihs. He was a guy that Red Wemette met who has his show. [3:31] Can’t even think of the name of it anymore. He had a show with Adam out in Las Vegas. Red Wemette. He kind of went into the employ of the FBI. Nobody really had a case on him. He was just tired of him shaking him down. So he volunteered, and Frank Schweihs was coming around extorting money from him. He had a dirty bookstore or something like that in Old Town. Frank Schweihs had a restaurant in Old Town. Frank Schweihs started coming around, and Red Wilmette let the bureau wire up his TV. So it had a camera and a microphone in it, and it recorded all kinds of information about Frank Schweihs. And they ended up convicting him of extorting money from Red Wilmette. He was also a defendant in the Family Seekers trial, and I think Red testified in that. Frank Schweihs, he had gotten introduced to an IRS agent named Johnson, but he was going under the name Virgil Williams. Now, Virgil Williams, we’re just going to call him Virgil Williams. He was a black dude. He was a big black dude, looked like a former, you know, defensive tackle for the Chicago Bears or something. [4:42] And he had started out, the IRS had put him undercover, working the South Side and working policy back in the earlier 60s. And somehow he got introduced to Frank Schweihs as this guy who was, you know, involved in gambling and involved in the rackets in some manner on the south side and the black rackets. Frank was trying to sell him his restaurant in Old Town. Of course, he was trying to rip him off is what he was trying to do. You don’t just do business with a guy like Frank Schweihs. Absolutely, you do not do business with him. If you start going down that path, what he’s going to do, he’s going to rip you off in some manner. Guys start telling stories about later on, he’s at the trial and around that time he’s interviewed and he start telling stories about working with Frank, he said, Frank, and he would sit around the restaurant and talk and drink and, and Frank would say, we’re in about undercover agents. And he said, yeah, he said, I can spot him a mile off. He said, no undercover is ever going to get close to me. He said, uh, you know, I can just hear, I can pick out who’s going up and down the street out there and who’s an undercover agent. And he’d point out people. Of course, this guy knew that they really weren’t undercover agents, but you know, he, you know, would act like, oh yeah, you’re really cool, Frank, you’re a guy I need to do business with. You know what time it is. He said the one time, Frank told him, he said, I wish that us whites were as aggressive and binding as you blacks are. He said, the guy said, I said, I almost choked on that. [6:11] He said, who’s more violent than Frank Schweihs? And he worked for Joy the Clown Lombardo. And, you know, Harry Aleman was in that mix and the Wild Bunch. And, I mean, who’s more violent and vicious than those guys? I don’t think anybody. But he thought that blacks really had it going on when it came to the violence thing. [6:33] It was a hell of a story. He also, after he got done, he didn’t have much more on Frank, but talked about he was trying to, he got in. Frank probably hooked him up with this guy, a guy named Herman Kaye. And he told him that he would buy a building from him. And actually, the building was owned by Goodwill Industries. And this Herman Kay was kind of a high-ranking person in Goodwill Industries. And, and he was going to sell it for $325,000 in cash. He said, uh, uh, Johnson walked in. He said, I just dumped $325,000 in cash right on his, uh, desk. And so this guy said, oh no, no, no, we can’t do that. Cause he was, he was, you know, front of himself off was like a black dope dealer. It had just tons of cash. [7:18] He said, you know, we can’t do it like that. You know, we got to figure out how to get that in the check. And then you got to pay me and pay me so much under the table. And so they ended up making a case on this guy for ripping over $400,000 off in a series of real estate deals in which the Goodwill industries are the victim. Now, who would rip off Goodwill? I mean, who would you go in and shoplift from Goodwill? I think this guy probably would. He was an employee. It’s just, it’s crazy. I mean, these are just a few little stories of the outfit in 1970s Chicago. Johnson said he recalled one day he went into the office of a North suburban mayor, started talking to him about getting something done, said he was a businessman from Chicago, and he wanted to start a bar, and he wanted to have gambling and prostitution in it, and he needed some protection. [8:09] And the guy said the guy asked him for $2,000, and he said, okay, you know, I can handle that. And he said, the guy also warned him. He said, you know, he said, if you aren’t who you say you are, you know, uh, I won’t send my police down there to take care of you. I’ll take care of you myself. The guy, the mayor never really figured out after they ended up doing him. Now during this time, also the IRS agent kept telling the German that he couldn’t really. [8:37] Close a deal on the restaurant that Frank was going to sell him. He said, because there’s a politician that was holding up the licensing process on it. And, and Frank Swiss, he didn’t say who it was, but Frank Swiss decided it must be a guy named George Dunn, who was a Cook County commissioner and really was probably, it could have been a successor to Richard Daly. And he was, uh, uh, he was really heavy into Cook County politics. And I believe he was the one who was holding up the transaction and Frank wanted to bomb his car. You know, the guy said, no, no, no, no, we’ll get this worked out. And then they ended up taking the whole thing down before anything happened. [9:15] But it was a hell of an undercover investigation this guy had. So thanks a lot, guys. Just another little story about the Chicago outfit. Don’t forget, I’ve got my book, Windy City Mafia, the Chicago outfit. It is on Amazon and just go to run Gary Jenkins Mafia on Amazon, Mafia Books on Amazon. You’ll find all my books. And I’ve got a bunch of interesting little stories I’ve done on the podcast that are in this book. It especially makes a nice gift for somebody that is interested in Chicago outfit. It’s not very much. And I just wanted to let you know about that. I don’t usually try to sell. Sometimes I try to sell a lot. Sometimes I don’t try to sell at all. It’s kind of a hit or miss with me. If I did this to earn money with, I’d be screwed anyhow. I just do it for the love of doing it. So thanks a lot, guys. And don’t forget about that red Mercedes, little red Mercedes car. We got to find that red Mercedes of Tony Accardo’s. It’s got to be out there somewhere. You just don’t junk out a car like that. So thanks, guys.

In this explosive episode, Tara examines rising tensions surrounding ICE operations, local political leadership, and activist movements—focusing on how rhetoric, training materials, and misinformation can escalate real-world confrontations. The discussion centers on recent incidents where ICE agents were reportedly surrounded by crowds, the legal claims made by local officials, and newly surfaced activist training materials that encourage direct interference with arrests. Tara breaks down what is legal, what is not, and why conflicting narratives are creating dangerous confusion on the ground. The episode also explores how social media, partisan messaging, and selective framing are shaping public perception—fueling anger, fear, and the potential for violence between civilians and law enforcement.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, Mafia Genealogist Justin Cascio joins Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins to explore one of the most remarkable—and overlooked—figures of the Prohibition era: Pasqualina Albano Siniscalchi, the so-called Bootleg Queen of Springfield, Massachusetts. At the dawn of Prohibition in 1921, Pasqualina was a young widow living in Springfield's South End when she inherited her late husband's powerful bootlegging operation—one of the largest in western Massachusetts. Rather than step aside, she took control. Pasqualina ruled a crew of toughs and bootleggers, oversaw liquor distribution, and launched a relentless campaign of vengeance against rivals who challenged her authority. Newspapers dubbed her The Bootleg Queen, but her fight went far beyond rival gangs. She clashed with lawmakers, battled competing bootleggers, and even faced resistance from within her own family—all while operating in service of a secret society that would never fully accept her because she was a woman. Her story exposes the contradictions of organized crime: loyalty demanded without equality, power wielded without recognition. Cascio draws from years of meticulous research and family histories to bring Pasqualina's story to life, revealing her pivotal role in early Mafia expansion in New England and the hidden influence women could wield behind the scenes. His book, Pasqualina: The True Story of the Bootleg Queen of Springfield, challenges long-held assumptions about gender, power, and the Mafia during Prohibition. If you're interested in Prohibition-era crime, New England Mafia history, or the untold stories of women who shaped organized crime from the shadows, this episode is one you won't want to miss. Learn more about Justin and his work on Mafia Geneology by clicking this sentence. Get Justin’s book, Pasqualina: The Bootleg Queen of Springfield, Massachusetts Listen now on Gangland Wire — available on all major podcast platforms and YouTube. 0:02 Introduction to Mafia Genealogy 1:16 Pasqualina Albano’s Story 2:30 Family Reunion Revelations 4:56 The Impact of Prohibition 7:45 Prejudice and Organized Crime 10:50 Connecting the Genovese Family 12:34 Views from Sicily 13:50 Cultural Differences in Dress 16:37 Encounters with Modern Gangsters 18:36 Gina’s Documentary and Art 23:53 The Romance of the Gangster 27:24 The Nature of Risk 28:46 The Evolution of Organized Crime 33:16 Closing Thoughts and Future Plans 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 [0:00] Hey, all you wiretappers. Good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. I’ve got on tap here a repeat guest. He’s been on before. I had a little technical glitch this morning with the internet, and I had to scurry around and do something different. I totally forgot about what I was going to talk about with Justin, but I knew Justin’s been on there before. I knew he does mafia genealogy, and I knew he knows his stuff, and so he doesn’t really need a lot of help from me. So this is Justin Cascio from the website and some books, some mafia genealogies. Welcome, Justin. Thanks so much, Gary. Great to be here. Really. And you’re from the Springfield, Massachusetts area. And so that’s been some of your emphasis has been on that area. But you’ve done a lot of other mob genealogy, correct? Yes. On my website, on mafiagenealogy.com, I write about a whole lot of different places that the mafia has been in the United States. In fact, coming up, I’m going to be writing about Kansas City. But for the last 25 years or so, I’ve lived in New England. I live about 20 miles away from Springfield, Massachusetts, which if you’ve heard of Anthony Aralata or Bruno or the Shabelli brothers, then you know the Springfield crew of the Genovese crime family. [1:12] And I’ve been following them pretty closely since I’ve lived here. A few years ago, I got into the story of Pasqualina Albano, who was a bootlegger in Springfield during Prohibition. [1:25] That’s what my new book is about. Yeah. Oh, that’s a new book, right? I’m sorry. I didn’t pick up real quick there. And she’s done a documentary recently that hasn’t been seen by very many people. And they really, she was a woman. They do use the A at the end. Those of us that know about romance languages would know as probably a woman, but she’s a woman. And she was running a certain segment of bootlegging back during the 30s and late 20s, exactly when it was, which is really unusual. She must have been a powerful individual. I think that she was a very remarkable person, so I couldn’t find out enough about her. I really needed to understand how it was possible that somebody who the Mafia would never have accepted as a member allowed her to lead this crew for so long, even into the years when it was associated with Vito Genovese and that crime family. Yeah. Don’t you imagine it was, she must have been making money for them. [2:24] She was making money for her family, for sure. Got a few people probably pretty comfortable, yeah. [2:30] So that family, you went to a family reunion recently and learned quite a little bit. You want to tell your experiences about that? Yes. So, Pasqualea Albano, that bootlegger, has a nephew who is now 101 years old. His name is Mario Fiore. And when he turned 100, I was invited to his birthday party. And it was an enormous scene. It was tremendous. In fact, it’s a cliche, but the opening scene of The Godfather, if you imagine that wedding scene, it’s what it looks like. There’s a guy singing live on a PA system. There’s a pizza oven parked over here. There’s kids in the pool. There’s so many people, so much food, and this great big lawn and incredible view. Just an amazing scene to be at. And I met so many different people who were in Mario’s family. I met people who came over from Italy to come celebrate his birthday and talked with them as much as I could. I have no Italian, by the way. So we did the best we could. But I also talked to her American relative. She has all these grand nieces and nephews, and nieces and nephews who are still living, who were at this party and told me stories and drew little family trees for me. And what I was able to get a real good sense of is how the family feels about this legacy. Because not just Pasqualina, who was in organized crime, so many of her relatives were involved as well and continued to be up until the 80s, at least. [4:00] So the name, was it Albano? Was it got on in the modern times? The last name, was it still Albano? Was there another name? There are a few. Let’s see. I want some more modern names. There’s Mario Fiore. So he is one of her nephews. And then there’s Rex Cunningham Jr., who is one of her grandnephews. There’s the Sentinellos. So Jimmy Sentinello, who owns the Mardi Gras, or he did anyway. It’s a nude club, you know, a gentleman’s club, as they say. A gentleman’s club. We use that term loosely. Oh, boy, do we? Another old term that I picked up from the newspapers that I just love and like to bring back is sporting figure. Yeah, even sporting man. They don’t play sports. They’re not athletes. They’re sporting figures. I know. I heard that when I was a kid. Somebody was a sporting man. Yep. [4:57] This has been a family tradition. It’s something that has been passed down through the generations, and it’s something that I talk about in the book. But mostly what I’m focused on in the plot of the story is about Pasqualea’s time during Prohibition when this gang was turning into something bigger, turning into a part of this American mafia. Yeah. Interesting. And so tell us a little bit about how that developed. You had a Genovese family that moved in and she got hooked up with them. How did that develop? Yeah. More end of modern times. Early on, so 1920, beginning of Prohibition, Pasqualea Albana was newly married to this sporting figure, we’ll call him, Carlo Sinascocci. And I’m probably pronouncing that last name as wrong as well. He also came from a family of notable people who were involved in organized crime, getting into scrapes in Little Italy, New York City. There’s a whole separate side story about his cousins and all the things that they were getting into before Carlo even got on the scene. So by the time he arrived in New York City, he had a bit of a reputation preceding him because of these relatives of his. [6:06] And Pascalina was a young woman in Springfield. And the first question I even had writing about her is, how did she meet this guy? He was a Brooklyn saloon keeper. She was the daughter of a grocer in Springfield, three and a half hours away on the train. Like, why do they even know each other? And so trying to piece all that together, how that was reasonable for them to know one another and move in the same circles, and then for him to immediately, when he moved to Springfield, start picking up with vice because it was before Prohibition. So he was involved in gambling and police violence. And you could see some of the beginnings of the corruption already happening where he’s getting police protection before prohibition even begins. And then once it starts, he is the king of Water Street, which was the main drag of Little Italy. He was the guy you went to if you wanted to buy wholesale. [6:57] Justin, I have a question here. I was just discussing this with who’s half Italian, I guess, FBI agent that worked the mob here in Kansas City. We were talking about this, the prejudice that Italian people felt when they first got here, especially. And Bill’s about 90, and so he said his father told him. His father worked at a bank in New York, and he was told that with that last name, he had a different last name than Bill does. And with that last name, he said, you’re owning and go so high in the bank. And so talk a little bit about the prejudice that those early people felt. And that’s what drove people into the dark side, if you will, to make money. You had these bright guys that came over from Sicily looking for opportunity. And then us English and Irish Germans kept them out. [7:45] And so can you talk about that a little bit? Did they talk about any of that or have you looked into any of that? [7:52] I have. And it’s a theme that comes up again and again. Whenever I look at organized crime in any city, I’m seeing things like that ethnic succession of organized crime that you’re alluding to, how the Irish were controlling, say, the machine in Kansas City Hall or what have you. And they had that same kind of control over politics in other cities, too. And the way that they were getting a leg up and finally getting that first protection of their rackets was from outside of their ethnicity. It was Irish politicians protecting Italian criminals. And then eventually the Italians were getting naturalized where they were born here. And so then they move into politics themselves. [8:31] And that is one of the theories about how organized crime develops in American cities. It’s because you’re poor and ethnic and you’re closed out of other opportunities. And so the bright kids get channeled into organized crime where maybe in a better situation, they would have gone to college. Right. And then Prohibition came along, and there was such a huge amount of money that you can make in Prohibition. And it was illegal. That’s why you made money. But there was opportunity there for these young guys. Yes. And you really start to see a lot of new names in the papers after Prohibition begins. You have your established vice criminals who you’re already seeing in the newspapers through the 19-teens. Once Prohibition begins, now they have all these other guys getting into the game because there’s so much money there. And it’s such a big pie. Everybody feels like they can get a slice. [9:21] Yeah, interesting. Carry on. I’ve distracted you, Azai, but you were talking about Pasqualina and her husband. Of course, I’m not even going to try that. When you talk about discrimination against Italians, one of the things that makes my job really hard is trying to find news about a guy with a name like Carlos Siniscalchi. First of all, I’m probably saying it wrong. I think the Italian pronunciation is… So I’m getting all of the consonant clusters wrong, but I do it with my own name too. We’ve Americanized Cassio. That’s not the right name. How do you pronounce it? It’s Cassio. But we’re Cassio. That’s my grandfather said it. So how do I find Carlos Nescalci in the newspaper when every reporter mangles that name? And spells it differently. Yeah. Everybody spells it differently. How am I going to guess how all these different English speaking reporters were going to mess up Carlos’ name? And so I find it every which way. And sometimes I’ve just had to plain stumble over news about him and his relatives. It just happens by chance. I’m looking for general crime, and then I find him specifically. So yeah, it’s a little hard to find the Italians sometimes because their names are unfamiliar and they get written wrong in censuses and in the news. So we lose a little bit of their history that way. And that’s what you might call, I don’t know, a microaggression because they can’t get that name. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, yeah. You don’t care enough to spell it. I just, I know the thought process, I have to admit. I’ll just spell it anyway. I understand that thought process. [10:51] So you were asking earlier, I don’t know if you want me to continue this, but how the Genovese family were able to get involved in this thing going on in Springfield. Yeah, connected. Because of her second husband. Okay. Pascalina lost her first husband in 1921. He was killed by a fellow bootlegger. He takes over the gang. She conducts a war of vengeance against the guy who kills her husband and his whole family because they’re gangsters. And that takes years. She’s also pursuing her through the courts. And when that all finally gets settled a few years later, she has a quiet little second marriage to a guy that nobody had ever heard of called Antonio Miranda. [11:28] Now, Antonio Miranda is a small time gangster from Little Italy, New York City, and his brother is Mike Miranda, who is very close to Vito Genovese, and he became this conciliator eventually. So that old connections, going back to the days before the Castello-Moraisi War, when it was Lucky Luciano bootlegging with some of his pals, that’s the time frame in which she formed this alliance by marrying Tony Miranda. And that’s when it starts. That’s the relationship’s beginning between Genovese crime family having, before it was even the Genovese crime family, when it was the Luciano family. And so they’ve had that relationship with the Springfield crew ever since. A little bit like old world feudalism in a way, where one member of a royal family marries a member of another royal family. And I know in Kansas City, we’ve got our underboss, his sister, is married to our boss’s nephew. So, bring those two families together, the Lunas and the Savellas together, yes, very well, like noble families. Exactly. Interesting. Absolutely. [12:31] So that’s how they got together. I remembered that, but I’d forgotten it. So, you went to this reunion with people from Sicily there. So, tell us a little bit about that. How? [12:43] How do people in Sicily view the people in the United States? And they didn’t talk about the mafia. I’m sure there’s no doubt that they’re not going to really talk about that unless you got to find somebody that’s really lucky. But kind of care about the sociological impact and the old world and the new world, and the new world people that, you know, established here. Okay, so Pasqualea and his family are from outside of Naples, and they maintain really close ties to their family back in Italy. Like I am the third generation born in America. I don’t speak Italian. Neither does my father. Neither of us has ever been to Italy. We don’t have, we’re not Italians. We’re Americans. Okay. And the Italians will remind you of that if you forget. We’re not Italian. And like spaghetti and meatballs, not Italian. Chicken Parmesan, not Italian. These are things that we invented here out of a sense of, out of homesickness and a sudden influx of middle-class wealth. We were like, let’s have the spaghetti and the meatballs. I had separate courses anymore where the meatballs are, where they’re both a special treat and I’m going to take two treats with chicken and waffles. [13:50] So being around them, they’re formal. You know, I was meeting like Pasquena’s relatives from Mercado San Sivarino, where they’re from in Italy, they own a funeral home. They own the biggest funeral home business in the town, and they also own some other sort of associated businesses, like a florist and things like that. So I would expect a certain sort of decorum and conservatism of tone from somebody who works in the funeral business and from Italy. But they were also among the only people there in suits, because it was a summer day, we’re outside. Most of us were dressed a little less formally. Yeah. Old school, 1950s stuff. He does those old 1950s photographs, and everybody, every man’s wearing a suit. And there were women’s hat on. Also, that ongoing thing where people in Europe just dress better. Yeah, they dress more formal. I see a little bit in New York City. I noticed it when I moved up from the South. In the South, you go to a funeral and flip-flops, okay? It’s very casual because the weather absolutely demands it. I moved that back up North, and I’m like, wow, everybody’s just wearing the same black coat, aren’t we? And you go into New York. People are dressed a little better, even. You go to Europe, and it’s just another level is what I hear. People, they dress better. They’re not like us where we would roll out of bed and put on pajama pants and some crocs and go to the grocery store. They would never do something. Yes. [15:10] I was in a restaurant several years ago, and there’s a guy sitting at a table, and another young guy comes in. And the guy at the table says, dude, you wore your pajama bottoms in the restaurant. [15:22] People need to be sold. And I’ll have to admit, at the time, I hadn’t seen that before. And since then, I see it all the time now. I live in a college town. I see it a lot. Yeah. So i’ll carry on a little more about that reunion there uh okay so how to describe this so much of it was very surreal to me just being in this place like very fancy house the longest driveway i’ve ever seen like more than a mile i finally like when i parked my car because the track you know you can the parked cars are starting i parked and i get out of the car. And I’ve got this big present with me that I’m going to give to Mario. It’s unwieldy. And I’m like, oh man, this is going to be quite a schlep. And I’m wearing my good shoes and everything. And these two young fellas come up on a golf cart and bring me a ride. So I get in the golf cart and we get up to the house and my friend Gina was trying to point people out to me. Oh, he’s somebody that was in my documentary and you got to talk to this guy. And there was a lot of that. you’ve got to talk to this guy and you’ve got to talk to this woman and dragging me around to meet people. And one of the groups of people that I was, that I found myself standing in, [16:35] I’m talking to gangsters this time. Okay. This is not cousins who won a funeral home. These are gangsters. And I’m standing with them and they’re having the absolute filthiest conversation that I’ve heard since high school. [16:48] And, but the difference is boys in high school are just talking. These guys have done all the things they’re talking about. Wow. What a life is. The lives you would have led. Bye. I’m just trying to keep it. Are these American gangsters or are these? Americans. Okay, yeah. Current gangsters, they’re in the Springfield area with Anthony Arilada there. They’ve all hated him, probably. I’m sorry? I said Anthony Arilada when he’s there, and they all hated him. You probably didn’t bring his name up. Yeah, really. There are different factions in Springfield, it feels like to me, still. bill. And I haven’t got them all sorted. There are people who are still very loyal to the old regime and they have their figure, their person that they follow. And sometimes they can live with the rest of them and sometimes the rest of them are a bunch of lowlives and they want everybody to know about it. Yeah. [17:45] I’ve heard that conversation before. Interesting. Now, whose house was this? Somebody made it well in America. Yes. And I think it was one of his nephews. I don’t know exactly whose house it was. I was invited by Gina’s brother. He texted me and invited me to the party. And people just accepted me right in. The close family members who have seen Gina’s documentary, who have heard her talk about Pastelina and the research and meeting me, they think of me as the family a genealogist. And so I have a title in the family and belong there. Oh yeah, it’s here to document us. As you do, because we’re an important family. And so they didn’t really question my presence there at all. And you were able to ask questions from that standpoint too. That’s what was nice. Yeah. [18:37] And a lot of times it was just standing still and listening because there was so much going on, That was enough. Interesting. Now, her documentary, you’ve seen it, so tell us a little bit about it. Folks, it’s not out there streaming yet. She’s trying to get something going, I would assume. [18:58] Explain her just a little bit, too, in her book. Talk about her and her book and her documentary. Yeah. Okay. Gina’s a part of this big family that has got some wealth still and goes back to bootleggers in Prohibition and has gangsters in it, including her brother, Rex Cunningham Jr. So Cunningham is the name you don’t expect to hear in the mafia. Yeah, yeah. Done by Marietta Beckerwood. I don’t know if he was a member or associate, but at any rate, he was a known figure around here. Sportsbook and that kind of thing. Sportsbook, yeah. Yeah. She grew up with a little bit of wealth and privilege, but also feeling a little bit outsider because her family was half Irish. So among the Italians, it was a, you go to the wrong church, you go to the wrong school kind of vibe. And she grew up into more of a countercultural person. Her family is very conservative politically, religiously. I don’t know if you would expect that of a gangster family, but that’s what I’ve noticed is pretty common, actually. No, it’s pretty, that’s the way it is here. Yeah, real conservative, yeah. Yeah. You have to be socially for the whole thing to work. I can get into that, but And they keep going to the same church and school and everything, and you maintain these close ties with the neighborhood and local businesses and so forth. But she really was like, I’m going my own way. And so she became this free spirit as a young woman. And Gina’s, I don’t know how old she is. I want to say in her late 60s, around 70, about there. [20:23] That’s Gina Albano Cunningham. Cunningham. Oh, Gina. Okay, Gina Cunningham. See, I’m getting mixed up with the names. And Cunningham was… Ask Elena Albanos. Her sister married and became a Fiore. Okay. All right. That’s a little bit confusing. People have to go to your website to get this straightened out. Or maybe you have this, a picture, an image of this family tree on your website. In the book, you can find multiple family trees because I’m working with all these different branches. I’ll take a look if I can’t put an image in here for everybody to get this straight. But the modern woman that did the book and the movie, she’s in her 70s now. [21:04] Yeah. Yeah, and she’s a grandniece of Pasqualina, and her brother and her cousins were in organized crime in this room. Okay, all right, all right. Go ahead, go ahead. She’s absolutely immersed in this life, but she did not want any part of it, and so she left. And there are other people in her family that you can point to that did the same thing, like some of Pasqualina’s children just did not want to have anything to do with the family. Well, they left. They went and moved to another state. They stayed in another place. They didn’t come back. And she did the same thing, but she’s not cut ties. She keeps coming back and she has good relationships with her family members, even though she’s not aligned with them politically and so forth. [21:42] And she’s an artist. I’ve seen her work on a couple of different mediums. I don’t want to really try and explain what her art is, but she’s a feminist artist. And she’s also really been pointing the camera at her family quite a bit. And it seems like film might be a newer medium for her. She’s used to do more painting and sculpture and stuff kind of thing. How’d the family take that? A lot of these people, I’ve talked to some relatives here, and one of them come on to talk to me, but I said, your Uncle Vince, he said, yeah, I know. But then he never would get back to me all of a sudden. So a lot of pressure to not say anything about it. Oh, yeah. Sometimes I will get started talking to somebody and then it’ll reach a certain point where they’re like oh no we can’t don’t be recording this don’t put my yeah anything so yeah news to that but gina was like no this is going to be part of my, political art. I’m going to point the camera at my family. I’m going to expose, some of the hypocrisy that I see there, the things I disagree with. [22:41] It’s a short documentary, and I find it very powerful because it’s a family video. One of the first people she’s aiming the camera at is, I think, one of her nieces. Talking to this young woman who is leaning on her car, maybe in her late teens, early 20s, and this young woman is saying, oh, yeah, I would marry a gangster if I had the chance. And I’m just like, do you not know your family? Do you not know the heart? And later on in the video, you get to hear some of the really just like gut wrenching stories of what pain people in her family have brought upon themselves through their involvement in organized crime and all the things that it entails. And this young woman is, I don’t know, she’s acting because she doesn’t even know this other uncle or this other cousin that she’s got that can tell her these stories. Or is it, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter or something. And that to me was shocking. That’s the kind of thing that needs, that’s somebody who needs their mind changed. And I was like, I hope she watches this video she’s in and changes her mind about how she feels about that life and wanting to be a part of it. But that’s what mafia culture creates more of, is people who want to be a part of that. [23:53] There’s a certain romance to it that started out with Robin Hood, if you will. You get a romance of the gangster, the criminal that maybe is good to some people, good to support people, good to their family. And it continues on to this day to John Gotti. He’s the most recent iteration of Robin Hood and Jesse James here in the Midwest. People love Jesse James. When I grew up, everybody, every family had a story about how a couple of guys came by their house back in the 1800s and they gave them a place to stay and a meal. And they left them like a $20 gold piece, which was like $500 or something. And they said, it was Jesse James. I know it was. It’s the romance of the gangster continues. Yes. We all would love to imagine that we’re on the gangster side and that the gangster agrees. Yeah. As long as we don’t have to go to jail or pay that price. Because to me, I’ve got a friend today that he spent about 12 years and he would give all that gangster life back to get that 12 years back for these kids growing up. He’s turned over a new life today. I had lunch with him and his son not too long ago. And it’s just his son has told him, he said, every time I had to walk away from you in the penitentiary and come back home after our visit, he said, I was just crushed. It’s a huge price to pay for that. But there’s still that romance continues. [25:13] That terrible price, I think, is part of what feeds the romance. If there was no risk, there wouldn’t be that allure. Yeah, that’s true. You met that risk and overcame it and went on, came out on top. It’s what they always like to claim that came out on top of it. So I understand that thought process. I take a lot of risk in my life just from the other side. I said, live to fight another day. Yeah, there really are different kinds of risks that you can take. I was writing about a contract killer in Texas, and one of his targets was a guy who was a grain dealer. And I was like, that’s a really weird target for murder, right? Like, why would you kill a grain dealer from rural Texas? And it was because his old partner had an insurance policy out on him and decided to cash in on it. That was Charles Harrison, wasn’t it? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Sad story. Charles Harrison. Yeah. It was like, these were two guys that took very different kinds of risks, right? You got Charles Harrelson, who kills people for money. That’s a certain kind of risk you’re definitely taking. And then there’s the guy who buys grain and then sells it. So he’s taking these risks for his community of farmers. [26:27] And I was like, that’s really wholesome. And that’s, I don’t know, I feel like it’s a really positive example of masculinity. That’s the kind of risk we’re supposed to take for the safety and well-being of our neighbors? Yeah. Even the farmers, they risk everything every year. Smaller farmer, I grew up in those families and a smaller farmer practically risk everything every year, being in on the weather. That’s why I didn’t stay on the farm. And the markets, you don’t know what the markets are going to do. It’s a gamble every year. That Charles Harrelson, that’s Woody Harrelson’s dad who killed the Judds, famous murder down in El Paso. And he had a business. He carried a card that said he was a hitman. It was his story. [27:10] Bold. He was a crazy bold dude. I did a whole three-part series on that whole Jimmy Chagra marijuana business [27:20] down there on the border. and his connection to it and the killing of Judge Wood. So it’s just a business in these guys. Hey, it’s not personal. It’s just business. Yikes. It’s crazy. But Justin, you got anything else you want to tell us about? Anything you’re working on? And remind guys your website and what you can find there. He has some really interesting stuff about the old early days in Chicago. I know that. I referred to some of that several years ago when I was doing something on Chicago. So give guys a little walk through on your website. It’s really interesting. Okay, so John Gotti is one name I don’t think you’re ever going to find on my website. Yeah, good. [27:59] I’m really addicted to origin stories. I like to find out how the Mafia was already present before that point when we say it started. Yeah, in the 20s. But gangsters don’t come out of nowhere. Gangs don’t come out of nowhere. They evolve. They grow. There are forces to create them. And so that’s what I’m interested in. I like to go around. And I spent a lot of my early career writing about one place and its effect on the United States, Corleone, where my family’s from in Sicily. And that was my first book, In Our Blood. And some of my first posts on mafia genealogy are in that thread. They’re about my family and the Corleonesi. But then I started to get into other [28:42] places and wanting to know about their stories and getting into other parts of Italy as well. So if you go to my website, you’re going to find stories like Charles Harrelson and the two guys that he killed before the judge, or in Chicago about the different little Italys that existed before Capone consolidated everything, or Kansas City I’m writing about, Nick Fatsuno and the Passantino brothers. I don’t even know if you know those guys, but I thought their further stories were amazing. [29:09] Passantino had a funeral home today, but the other names I don’t really know back then. I don’t know much about that or those early days. Did they seem to come from the same little town, the same general area? They didn’t, actually. A lot of them were Sicilian, and they come from Palermo province, but not all from the same town. Not from okay. Yeah. Yeah, I wasn’t able to put—there’s not a strong current there in Kansas City like I’ve found in other places where everybody is from one town. Yeah. [29:37] But not so much in Kansas City. A little more varied. Interesting. So that’s what you’ll find on my website. And then Pasqualina is my second book, and you can buy both of my books at Amazon. Got them behind me here, Airblood, Pasqualina. And Pasqualina is about that prohibition era, and if you like to understand where big-nosed Sam Koufari got his start, it’s in there. And the Shabelli brothers show up. It’s about those origins. I was talking to a friend of mine about this name, Skeeball or Skeebelly. Yes. Who had some relationship back in Springfield, and he just really knew Skeeball when he was young. [30:17] Yep, because it was the spelling of his name. I’m not even sure how they pronounced it. I think it’s Skeebelly. Skeebelly. That probably was. Yeah, Skeebelly. I know somebody named Skeebelly, so probably was. That’s like the name of the body shop here in Kansas City, and it’s P-A-C-E. But really it’s Pache. We’ve got to do it right. And that’s probably short for Pache. I don’t know. I wonder if the family pronounces it Pache or Pace. I think business-wise, but then the person who was talking was close to the family and they said, oh no, it’s Pache. So I thought, okay. [30:53] Interesting. The immigrant experience in this country is really always interesting. There’s always conflict and the interest is in the conflict. And as people try to make their way, and stopping with, oh God, it was an author, T.J. did the Westies. You guys know T.J. that did the Westies. And he said, yeah, he said, and he really was articulate about, as we’ve discussed this, that people come here want an opportunity, because they didn’t have any opportunity in the old country, whether it be Naples or southern Italy or Sicily. They came here, they really just wanted opportunity. And then the opportunity, you have to start fighting for opportunity. That’s the nature of the beast in this country. In any kind, any society, you’ve got to fight for opportunity when you’re an outsider and you come in. And so that was the early development. These people just wanting a little slice of this American pie that they’d heard so much about. The streets are paved with gold over here, but found out you’ve got to dig that old man. [31:52] Some people probably came over here thinking they were going to make an honest living and found themselves, by one step and another, involved in organized crime. And then there were other men who came here from Italy for whom the opportunity was to be a criminal here. Richer pickings. Yeah. And they started restaurants and had your typical immigrant, all the immigrant restaurants, all these Chinese, whatever kind of ethnic food is, they start out with an immigrant who then puts his kids and his cousins and his nephews and sisters and grandmas in the back room kitchen, start those restaurants. And people, us people that are already here like that food and they run them, they do a really good job at it. And so that’s a way to get started in grocery stores for their other fellow paisans. And those were the ways that they made it here, at least now, probably the same way in every city where there’s a large Italian population. Got to feed the other Italians. And so an Italian restaurant is natural. Yeah. And also owning your own business is just really smart for a lot of people. If you’re an organized crime, it’s a great way to hide what you’re doing. [32:59] And if you’re trying to get a naturalization status, especially now, being a business owner is really advantageous. Yeah, I bet. I was talking about that on getting a naturalization process that showed that you’re an entrepreneur and you believe in the system and you’re doing well. Yeah, interesting. [33:17] All right, Justin Cascio, and the website is Mafia Genealogy. He’s got a couple books on there in this documentary. I don’t know. Keep us up on that. Maybe if it comes out, I’ll make sure to get it out on something where people know that they can go out and see it. It sounds really interesting. Thanks, YOL. All right. Thanks, Justin. I’ll do that no more. Thank you, Justin. It’s really a pleasure to talk to you again. Always a pleasure being on your show. Thank you. Great. [33:44] Justin, see, I was going to ask you about something. What? Are you going through a publisher? You got a publisher? No, I’m self-published. You’re self-published? Okay. Yeah. See, I self-published several books, and I’m doing probably my last ones, a story of my life, kind of more of a memoir, my struggles and my moral dilemmas and all that during when I worked intelligence. And then I’ll explain all about the big civil mob war we had here during those years. And I don’t know. I started poking around. I thought, well, maybe I’ll try to get a regular publisher. But boy, it’s hard. You’ve got to get an agent. You can’t get attention of an agent because there’s hundreds and thousands of people out there writing books wanting to do all this. So thank God for Amazon. Yeah. I think if you already have your audience. Yeah. And you know who they are and you’re already talking to them. You don’t need to pay somebody else to do that for you. Yeah. Yeah. I’m paying an editor to go over to… That’s different. That’s no other strengths. But to get it sold out there. Out here making videos every day. The good thing about getting a publisher is you can get, and then you got a chance of getting it into Barnes & Noble and into libraries. [34:59] See, libraries. You might into libraries anyway. How’d you do that? How’d you figure that out? The local library has an interest in the book, so they bought it. Yeah, they did. But I’m talking about other libraries. Yeah, they can all buy the book the same way. Yeah, but how do they find the library buy books? [35:18] I think buy them from the publishers normally. And if your book is self-published and they want to carry that book, because, for instance, about local history, then they’ll buy it. Yeah. I’m thinking about how do they get it out in other New York or Chicago or some other city that will be looking for nonfiction books. Publishers. You have to do every step yourself instead of being massive. Yeah. And then like Barnes & Noble and places like that to get it in, that’s hard too. You can do that locally. Those places carry my books on the website. Who does? They’re buying it from Amazon. Oh, okay. Interesting. Oh, really? Yeah. Because that’s the only place you can get it. I think I sell a couple of my, I’ve seen some people from, I think it’s through at Brafta Digital, I think’s the name of it. That’s another thing that this thing went up on that Barnes & Noble did sell a few copies of it. As a matter of fact, now that you mention it. [36:21] But it’s interesting. It’s fun. How are you ever going to get a screenplay sold if you don’t get their attention? [36:30] That’s why most people I talk to, they’re trying to figure out how to get a movie made from their book. Gangsters ask me that question. They’re like, you figure I know the answer to how to get a movie made from YouTube? and I do not have that answer. Nobody knows that. It’s hard work. Yeah, I tell them nobody knows that, the answer. It’s God. A divine being that strikes you, whether it be the Apollo or the God of Abraham, or Jesus or some higher power reaches out and touches you and says, okay, I bless you, and now you’re going to have a movie made and Robert De Niro is going to play your part. Although anymore, they don’t want De Niro to play him because they hate him now, and they want somebody else. Oh, my God. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, Justin. Likewise, Gary. Thanks so much. If I can do anything for you here in Kansas City, and as you’re going through your thing, if you’ve got any question or anything, I’ve got that one friend, that FBI agent, that he could maybe help you with if you’re looking for a connection or something. He knows quite a little bit. And somebody else was just talking about that, looking into that, those early days. But if you do have any questions or anything that you’re stumbled about here in Kansas City, be sure and give me a call, and I’ll see if I can’t steer you to somebody. I don’t know myself. I don’t really ever look at it. Okay. Okay. Stay safe. Thank you. You too.

In this week's Short Suck, we head back to the 1930s, when milk wasn't just one of many beverages  - it was survival, income, and power. As the Great Depression crushed farmers, workers, and cities alike, a perishable staple sparked riots, bombings, deadly shootings, and even Mafia involvement across the Midwest. This is the forgotten history of the Milk Wars,  when America went to war... over cow juice.For Merch and everything else Bad Magic related, head to: https://www.badmagicproductions.com Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode, we delve into the intricate world of the Chicago Outfit’s informants, featuring insights from my late friend, Cam Robinson, and Paul Whitcomb, a well-respected expert on the mob. This special compilation draws from past interviews and shorts that once highlighted various informants who operated during the notorious 1980s era of organized crime in Chicago. Through a series of concise segments, we explore the lives of key players who chose to turn against the Outfit, revealing the complex motivations and consequences of their decisions. We kick things off by revisiting the tale of Paul “Peanuts” Pansko, an influential figure leading the Polish faction of the Outfit. Pansko's criminal activities, including a racetrack heist, not only placed him in dangerous territory but also set into motion a chain of events that would later link to the infamous Family Secrets trial. It's during this journey that we outline how interconnected the informants’ narratives are, showcasing how Pansko’s actions inadvertently unraveled parts of the organization.   The discussion shifts to more dramatic stories, including Mario Rainone. Rainone's infamous decision to cooperate with the authorities opened the door to significant revelations about Lenny Patrick, one of the highest-ranking Outfit members to switch sides. Rainone's tapes ultimately led to the dismantling of major sections of the Outfit’s operations, including political connections that had long shielded them from legal repercussions.   We also explore the tale of Ken “Tokyo Joe” Eto, a Japanese mobster who thrived within the Outfit’s ranks. His attempts at self-preservation after surviving an assassination effort highlighted the stark realities faced by those who navigated the perilous landscape of organized crime. As he eventually became a witness for the prosecution, Eto’s insights illuminated the internal workings of one of Chicago’s most feared organizations. The episode further examines dramatic betrayals and deadly encounters that shaped the Outfit’s legacy. From the chilling events surrounding the murders of the Spilotro brothers, orchestrated by their own associates for reasons steeped in loyalty and betrayal, to the grim fate that met informants like Al Toco and the impact of domestic discord on organized crime, each tale is a window into the bleak realities faced by both mobsters and informants alike. As we round out the episode, we reflect on the cultural dynamics surrounding informants, particularly how personal relationships and family ties heavily influenced their decisions to cooperate. It becomes clear through the interviews that while fear of retribution often compels loyalty, the specter of betrayal looms large within the mob. This multifaceted examination blends personal stories with historical context, providing a deeper understanding of the Chicago Outfit’s complexity and its operatives. Join us in this retrospective journey through the shadows of organized crime as we pay homage to those who bravely shared their stories, revealing the inner workings of a criminal empire that continues to fascinate and terrify in equal measure. 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 [0:00] Well, hey, guys, after listening to Bob Cooley, one of the more damaging sources and witness and informant to the Chicago Outfit outside of the Calabrese family, [0:13] Nick and his nephew, Frank Jr., I got the rest of the Chicago Outfit informants on tap here. No, not really. They’re not coming in. But I did do a story. I did a series of shorts a few years, or I don’t know, two or three years ago, maybe. [0:32] I interviewed my late friend, Cam Robinson, rest in peace, Cam. So you get to hear from him again. And Paul Whitcomb, who is a Chicago outfit expert, he’s been on this. They used to have some kind of a round table show up there. I don’t know if they still have it or not with the Seiferts. But anyhow, I got these guys to sit down with me and talk about all the different informants in Chicago during the, it was during the 80s. So this is just kind of a series of shorts that I put up before. They’re six or eight minutes long, I think, each one of them, that they talk about different informants. This kind of threw it together as another little bonus episode we’ve done. And I went to Chicago, if you notice, after Johnny Russo, which I apologize for in a way, I don’t know. I mean, the guy’s got some crazy-ass stories, doesn’t he? Who am I to say that he didn’t do it? But most people know that he didn’t do most of that stuff. Anyhow, so I threw up another Chicago right away about the guy that had the race wire that they killed, James Reagan. [1:38] Then i had this interview that i’d been doing during those last couple weeks with bob cooley who’s appeared uh out of nowhere and he’ll maybe see him on some other shows now he’s he’s wanting to do shows he tells me so after hearing bob cooley talk i thought well i’m doing do one more i want to just throw it up as an extra uh from some of my old chicago outfit stuff and that’ll finish me off on the Chicago outfit for a while. I hadn’t, I hadn’t been in Chicago, uh, doing shows about Chicago for quite a while. And, and I didn’t want to, uh, neglect you guys. You know, I get a lot of books written about New York and I’ve got all these authors that are wanting to do these books about New York. Uh, not so much about Chicago. So if you got anybody that, you know, wants to, got a book and wants to come on the show, uh, talking about the outfit, why steer them to me. So anyhow, just sit back and relax and enjoy. [2:37] My late, great friend, Cam Robinson. One more look at Cam, for those of you who remember him, and Paul Whitcomb. And we’re going to talk about famous snitches from Chicago. Thanks, guys. Well, let’s move along now to, this is kind of interesting, Paul Peanuts Panczko, who was the leader of the Polish branch of the outfield. Is that what you would call Peanuts Panczko, the leader of the Polish branch? If the Polish branch is the Panczko family, which you could easily say there were three brothers, then yeah, that wouldn’t be right. We haven’t really done a show on them. I don’t know a whole lot about them other than they were released at all. So we said non-Italian, Peckerwood, as we call them at Kansas City, professional criminals who did a lot of business with different outfit people. And he did a robbery of a racetrack. I think it’s the Balmoral Racetrack. It’s the name of it. James Duke Basile and then Panczko was in trouble for that and he convinced Basile to come in and they did some talking remember anything about that situation, you know in a lot of ways you. [3:50] Panczko could be considered one of the first dominoes that eventually led to the Family Secrets trial. Panczko, as you said, led to Dookie Bazile, who they had done robberies together. Bazile led them to Scarpelli, who was a much higher guy. I mean, there’s debate, but he was, because there was a making ceremony at this time, but Scarpelli was pretty highly ranked. I mean, he was a known killer, and he was up there. He was in the wild bunch. But Scarpelli then did tell them about a lot of the things that Frank Calabrese had done. [4:28] He wasn’t known as well as Scarpelli had brought him up to be. And a lot of those things dominoed into what would eventually lead to family secrets years later. [4:42] Scarpelli, I think, did not know so much about Nick, but he did know about Frank. And so a lot of that information sort of filled in the gaps. And even though Frank Calabrese Jr. Led them led them to Nick They A lot of seeds were planted And can be traced back to Pianus Pansico Um. [5:01] So it is kind of an interesting line. Basile, he wore a wire on Scarpelli and not even talking about a lot of these things. It’s not the FBI knew about that. They were in a car together. Right. If I remember right, he even talked about a mob graveyard. They went up there and they found two or three bodies. One of them was connected. It wasn’t anybody really important, but one of them was connected to Harry Aleman. So it was a pretty important wearing of a wire on Scarpelli, who then came at himself for a while. And that’s what led to the family secrets. He talked about Frank Calabrese. Is that what you’re saying? Yeah, that’s right. And some of those bodies in that graveyard were 10 years apart, which was interesting. I’ve got, it’s on the map that I created, but some of those bodies, there was years in between them. So it was something they were going back to and they believed that there were a lot of things there they did not find. Yeah, because they built a health care facility or something. They built some big building over where there would have been bodies. Right. Right. And the fascinating thing about this is Scarpelli, like, just like Cam said, this guy was a serious killer. He was a muscle builder. He was a terrifying guy. I mean, he had almost inhuman physical strength. Yeah. And when he flipped, he was completely debriefed by the FBI and the DOJ and then decided to try and change his mind. [6:27] But before he could do that He hung himself in the bathroom Of the Metropolitan Correctional Center With his hands behind his back And a bag over his head, Who was he in prison with? Who was he in MCC with, Paul? Was it anybody? He did happen to be in the MCC with the German at the time. He bound his hands behind his back and put a bag over his own head. He did. He did. And so the outfit continues to somehow persuade people to take their own lives rather than testify against them. [7:07] It’s a hell of a way to die by suicide it is by suicide at least they didn’t have arrows in his back, not as far as we know yeah it was terrible he cut his own head off I saw a cartoon once that the homicide guy liked to go ahead and maybe real suckle of suicide because then you could just walk away from it so there’s a dead body laying there with a bunch of arrows at his back and a homicide detective standing over him with a hand and pencil and says, hmm, suicide, huh? [7:44] Got the inside joke. It worked homicide. You see how those guys sometimes will try to make something into a suicide that probably is a homicide. On the other hand, we had one, we had a mob guy, he wasn’t really a mob associate, who had gone to Vegas. He lost a lot of money and they found his body in his car at the airport parking lot after coming back from Vegas and they found out later lost a lot of money and the car was parked up against the fence and he was shot in the head and there was no gun in the car you know found so just assume that somebody shot him in his head the car kept going and rolling up against the fence. [8:25] But this one detective, I remember Bob Pence is his name. He was dumb. And he started, he went back over and he dusted that car for prints again. And he got some more evidence out of it. And then he went back to the airport and he looked and started asking questions. And he found out later that somebody who had a pickup truck parked there had a week later, three or four days later, come back and got his truck. When he got home he found a pistol inside the bed of his truck and he called the airport or he called somebody turned it in Pinson found that pistol that was a pistol that that shot the guy so Pinson's theory was he was rolling along in his car he shot himself in the head and then he flipped that pistol out is with a reaction he flipped it out and went in the bed in that pickup and then it rolled on up against the fence and they ruled it a suicide wow damn that’s not that different than Scarpelli I mean the fbi to this day insists it was suicide yeah well, Oh, well, right. All right. Let’s move along to Mario. John, the arm. Rainone. [9:41] Is that correct, Cam? That yeah, that’s Rainone. Yeah. So tell us about that. I know we talked about this, you know, a little bit about this one. [9:50] This is kind of a funny one. He was he was sent to kill a building inspector. Raynaud was with the Grand Avenue crew and so he’s en route to kill this guy and this is one of those mob blunders and he sees a couple guys following him and it’s Rudy Fredo and Willie Messino and he recognizes him when he’s driving over there and it’s important to point out who these guys are, Cam, not to interrupt you Willie Messino, was the right hand man and bodyguard for Tony Accardo for 30 years I mean, he was serious, serious business. Rudy Frayto, you know, the chin, but Massino was serious news. If you saw Willie Massino, you knew he were in for trouble. Yeah, he wasn’t there as backup to do anything except clean up after Rainone, including Rainone. So Rainone saw the writing on the wall. He pulls up and he goes straight to the FBI. [10:54] And he informs, he talks to them and gives them his information. And later on, he sort of regrets doing so, denies that he ever did. Uh, there were, there were, uh, articles written about him. There’s a, there’s a Chicago Tribune writer, John Cass, and Ray Nolan had a back and forth with him writing letters. This is how these mob guys in Chicago operate, talking about, I’m, I ain’t no beefer. And, uh. Once he was out of prison in 2009, he was busted several more times. If you can believe it, he stayed in the criminal life. He was robbing a liquor store with another guy. And the guy he was robbing with, this is why I jump ahead a little bit, was a guy named Vincent Forliano. He claimed that he didn’t even know Fratto or Messino. These were guys he didn’t know, so he never would have informed against them. The guy he was robbing the liquor store with and he was committing other robberies with, Vincent Forliano, was Fredo’s son-in-law. [11:56] So he was committing robberies with a guy related to the guy, but he didn’t know who they were. And to say that somebody didn’t know, as Paul said, Willie Messino, is just ludicrous. Anybody in the criminal atmosphere, period, knew who Willie Messino was because you were probably paying money to it. to exist. And this is extremely important because Rainone, at the time this happened, Rainone cooperated long enough to record conversations with Lenny Patrick. That’s right. That’s right. And that set dominoes in place that would lead to the fall of the outfit. Even though he tried to take back his cooperation, to say he never cooperated, I’ve heard those tapes that were played in trials that I participated in, so I I know better. Uh, and that’s why they call him Mario flip flop Rainone because he, uh, would cooperate and uncooperate and then cooperate. But he is the one who got Lenny Patrick on the hook. Yeah. [13:00] Interesting, interesting. Let’s just continue on with this Lenny Patrick because we weren’t going to talk about him. That’s a good lead hand to talk about another, really one of the most important informants that year who testified. [13:13] Can you talk about the domino that led to the end? Rainone really, really flipped the domino that kicked over. Go ahead, Paul. Well, Lenny Patrick was the highest, and even to this day, remains the highest ranking member of the outfit to ever turn state’s evidence. The guy was a capo in all but name. He had been in charge of Rogers Park, the gambling. He was essentially the head of the Jewish arm of the mafia, kind of the Meyer Lansky figure of Chicago. And when the Lawndale neighborhood moved north to Rogers Park, he moved with them, and he had his own crew. He reported directly to Gus Alex, who was, of course, at the very top, and Sam Carlisi. And he was dealing with Marcello and Carlesi in a number of different outfit ventures, loan sharking. He personally had been staked by Carlesi with a quarter million in cash to put out on the street. And he was involved in extortions Bombings of theaters All these things directly at the command of Sam Carlisi Who was then the boss of bosses of the Chicago outfit So when Rainone got him on tape They set up what was the beginning of the end for the outfit And I think people need to understand who Gus Alex is also For people outside of Chicago Gus Alex was. [14:40] Basically, I guess you could call him the equivalent of maybe the consigliere in Chicago. When you look at Chicago, the triumvirate in the 70s, once a guy like Paul Ricca died and several major outfit leaders died in the early 70s. [14:58] Tony Accardo decided that the outfit would be led by himself, by Joy Iupa, and the political wing and all of the non-Italians and all of the grift and a lot of aspects would be led by Gus Alex. So he was essentially on the same level as Joey Iupa, and he was responsible for much more for things of greater import than Joey Iupa. I mean, controlling the political arm and all the payoffs and all of that is much, much more than the streets and the murders. So all the politics and all the anything that had to do was definitely fell under gus alex and he was part of a ruling triumvirate he was a non-italian part of a ruling triumvirate with iupa and uh acardo so he was the the leader top of the outfit and he had been for years going back to going back to the 30s and the 40s 40 he had come up under, the Murray the Camel Humphreys and had made those connections he was the most connected guy in the Chicago outfit, so for a guy like Lenny Patrick to be. [16:15] Rollover against is essentially the political leader, national political leader and political leader of Chicago. This was absolutely crippling to the outfit. That was he wiped out the entire political arm of the Chicago outfit. After Lenny Patrick brought down Gus Alex, this became a basically a street crime organization. It was that those political contacts. I mean, I think that’s a fair statement, right, Paul? Those political contacts and judges, I mean, that was all but eliminated with Gus Alex going away. You’re absolutely right, Cam. And he not only took out Gus Alex, but he took out the boss of the Italians, too. That’s right, yeah. Both of them at the same time. He wiped out the outfit, and you put it beautifully by saying it became a street crime organization. You think about the division of labor and it started with IUP and IUP and. [17:19] La Pietra, Jackie Cerone, they had all the gambling, a lot of the sports gambling, but they also had the skim from Las Vegas, and they ran all that stuff, while Gus Alex, along with Lenny Patrick, ran all that politics, and you can’t have a mob organization if you don’t have cover politically. That’s why even in Kansas City, we’re pretty clean here, but we still never had any real mob prosecutions. [17:47] And it certainly had very few, if any, little, if any mob prosecutions at Cook County. And you couldn’t even get convicted of a real crime, murder, assault, or something. It’s just a straight-out crime. You weren’t even trying to do a RICO, I think, on anybody. So it was, you know, they just operated with impunity. Well, you took out that whole gambling side. That was all the money coming in. And then shortly thereafter, you take out the political side, who then turns back and gets the new boss on the gambling side and loan sharking and all that. [18:23] I’ll tell you, by 1990, the outfit’s gone. It really is. It still exists to a degree, but Sam Carlisi was the last traditional old line boss of the outfit. you, that, in my opinion, that ever ruled. After that, it was never the same. Yeah, I think a guy like Gus Alex, you know, like you said, Gary, you had Aiuppa who was dealing with gambling, but I think that’s a lot of, there’s a lot of optics to that, you know, and you’ve got all these cities who have got characters who are not Italian, Gus Alex in Chicago, and, you know, as Paul said, Meyer Lansky, who was New York, and you had Mashie Rockman in Cleveland, and these characters not italians so they know when to step back and let and let the italians talk but that doesn’t mean that they’re not running things it’s just for the optics of city to city where the italians have to see that they’re dealing with italians they don’t walk in the room it doesn’t mean that behind the scenes they’re not pulling the levers they just because of of the uh uh criminal um. [19:34] The the criminal view of of non-italians in that world sort of sort of their own prejudices these guys don’t always walk in the room when they’re dealing with other cities gus alex is is sitting down with anybody in chicago but you go to kansas city you go to new york, you know meyer lansky would leave the room when they were when they were talking you know italian to Italian. And the same thing with Gus Alex or Mace Rockman or any of those other guys who are not Italian. It was just an optics city to city. It doesn’t mean that they weren’t pulling the levers. Is it Yehuda or Jehuda, Cam? Jehuda. I’ve always heard of Jehuda. Yeah, Jehuda. So he kind of dealed with the IRS that year. [20:23] He must have had some. The IRS was really strong working the mob in Chicago. I’ve noticed several references to IRS investigations. We did not have that in Kansas City, and the IRS did a little bit, but they were not as strong as they were up in Chicago. [20:38] Yeah, he met with an agent, Tom Moriarty, who’s been around and worked Chicago for a long time. He was a pretty well-known guy up here. But Bill Jehota worked under Ernest Rocco Infelice, who was a real powerhouse going back a long time. And out in Cicero, and his crew, a lot of these crews had their own little names, and they called the good shit Lollipop. He was a huge gambling enterprise, you know. And they bought a house up in Lake County, which is north of the city. It’s funny, this house they bought was actually the family that had lived in it. The son had murdered the family. It was a murder house before the outfit bought it. and uh they bought it used it as a as a gambling den and and after that moved out they used it for prostitution and they would park cars at a nearby motel that they ran and then then have a uh a, valet service that drove him to this this gambling house and there was also quite a few uh murders that uhJahoda witnessed i’m sure he took no part in it he just happened to be standing outside of the house when they when they these murders were committed there was a uh was it hal smith and um. [21:57] Oh i can’t remember the they killed somebody else in this home and they burnt these were guys who didn’t want to pay his tree tags, and they were gamblers who refused to give in. And he brought down this entire crew. I mean, Rocco and Felice was… There’s a famous picture of the day after the Spolatros were killed. And it was really the upper echelon of the up that you’ve got. You’ve got little Jimmy Marcello. You’ve got the boss, Sam Wings-Carlesi. You’ve got the street boss, Joe Ferriola. And you’ve got Rocco and Felice, who’s right there. These are the four top guys, basically, in the outfit as far as at this time, the Cicero crew had risen to the top. That was the powerhouse crew. And so he was involved in those discussions because he was such a powerhouse out there with Ferriola being the street boss. So he was, it really can’t be thatJahodatestimony that eventually brought down this crew was really, it really crippled that crew for a long time. Well, those people that went down in that trial have only in the last five years come out of prison. Yeah, we’ve actually had been talking to somebody. We’ve had the… [23:13] Opportunity to meet he brought down uh uh robert um to go beat um bellavia and another guy who doesn’t like to be mentioned who runs a pretty successful pizza pizza chain up in lake county and uh these guys went down for a long time the beat was down for 25 years and he just came out. [23:39] So and billJahoda have if you read his testimony it is kind of kind of odd that he was standing outside of the building and just looked in the window and they were committing a murder and he just he he places himself outside of the house witnessing a murder through the window which is convenient when you’re the one testifying against murderers it certainly is yeah. [24:03] So so that was he was involved in the gambling so that makes sense then the irs got him and millions of dollars millions of dollars a month they were bringing and he met uh, i don’t remember paul and you did he he contacted moriarty right or did moriarty reach out to him because he was under investigation i i thought Jahoda was was worried about himself so he reached out to them i can’t remember the details i think you’re right yeah i i think he was worried about his own his own safety gary and he reached out to moriarty and they met up at a hotel just outside the city on the uh up in the northwest and uh they talked about things i actually found the location and on the little map you can find where where they met each other but he they met each other in disgust and they would meet different locations and and jahuda wore a wire and some of those some of those wiretaps are they really make for that. [25:05] That those conversations come right out of the movie just i love what we’re doing out here and i love my job and and you actually where i’m going to make you trunk music i mean you really hear these things that that you see it right in the movies i mean you you can’t write the dialogue that these guys are actually using it’s it’s it’s you know it it comes straight out of a book i mean You’ve got, you’ve got, uh, this is the toughest dialogue you’ll ever hear. Interesting. How’d you buy it? Where’d you find that at? Is that, uh, it’s probably not the audio in probably anywhere. No book or something. Yeah. You can, if you look up, if you look up different, different, you know, you go on newspapers.com or you go in different, uh, I believe, uh, I’ve got, um, uh, mob textbook by, um, Howard Abedinsky. I’ve got a couple of copies of his, of his textbook, organized crime. And he’s got some clips of it. This guy who owns a pizza shop up north is talking about how he loves his job. He loves what he does. And it’s funny to hear he talk about smashing somebody and loving what you do. Really? I’ve heard a few conversations like that back at the station house. [26:25] I don’t care. It’s on both sides. Is that what you’re saying? When you live in that world. Those guys can go either direction. [26:37] Well, let’s talk about ex-Chicago cops. Speaking of cops, let’s talk about, Vince Rizza, his daughter actually appeared on that Chicago Mob Housewives, or they tried to do a show. And Frank Schweiss’ daughter was on it. And Pia Rizza, who has gotten some notoriety as a model or something, I can’t remember. And she really, she was tight. She would not talk about her dad at all. I read an interview of her. She would just talk about her dad at all. But he came in and he testified against Harry Aleman, of all people, and linked him to the murder of this bookie, Anthony Ritlinger. Remember that one? [27:22] Go ahead, Paul. No, that one I’m not very up on, Cam. I’m sorry. So, Ritlinger, I believe he didn’t want to pay his street tax, if I’m right, Gary. Yeah, you’re right. He had been warned. Rattlinger had been warned that he needs to pay, he needs to pay, and he was making a good deal of money. And Ratlinger was he was brought in just the normal course of action with the wild bunch because he was a wild bunch murder I’m a little rusty but here it comes so he was a wild bunch killing, he was brought in he was warned it was the typical Harry Ailerman and if I’m remembering correctly and people correct me if I’m not it was Butch Petruccelli they sat him down. [28:11] Usually it would be Butch and, um, uh, Borsellino who would do the talking, uh, Tony Borsellino, and they would do the talking. And then afterwards, Butch Petruccelli would just sit down and glare. So he was a pretty scary guy. And he had that, uh, uh, Malocchio, the, the evil eye, and he would just glare at people. And that would send the message and Rattlinger didn’t, didn’t listen. He was making too much money, he’s not going to pay any damn Degos, that kind of line. And so he, of course, fell victim to these guys. And I believe he may have been trunk music. I think I remember this one, Matt, but I can’t remember. Yeah, I got this one. He went to a restaurant. That’s right. That’s right. And he had already, his daughter lived with him. I’m not sure about the wife, but he had warned his family to take all kinds of extra cautious. He knew something was coming. And it was, you know, after reading that thing, it’s, It’s kind of like, well, we talked about Spilotro taking off their jewelry. Ken Eto did this similar kind of a thing and told his wife he may not be coming back. [29:22] I tell you, another guy that did the same thing was Sonny Black. That’s right. It came out about Joe Pistone, the Donnie Brasco story. He did the same thing. He went to a sit-down or a meeting, and he took off his jewelry, I believe left his billfold, when he went to the meeting. this. Ken Eto was the same way. Ken Eto, I think, thought he could talk his way out. I think all of them thought they could talk their way out of it. So Rettlinger went out by himself and sat in a prominent place in this local restaurant that was really well known up there in the north side. It’s north of downtown Chicago, and I can’t remember the name of it. [30:02] And he just sat there and pretty soon a car pulls up and two guys run in kind of like a Richard Cain kind of a deal and just start popping. And that was a Harry Aleman deal. That’s right. He did, I believe. There’s an old guy who married the girlfriend of Felix Adlericio, I believe. He and this woman are sitting out in front of their brownstone, and Aleman and some other dude pull out and get out when guys walk up to him and shoot him and kill him. [30:31] And so that was – Yeah, that was Petrocelli and Aleman walked up, And he had been, he had been dating, uh, uh, Aldericio’s, Alderico’s girlfriend. Now that’s the famous hit from beyond the grave. Because we’re going to go on the old Samuel’s just sitting in the lawn chair thinking he’d got it made. That’s right. You know, Gary, you and I did the show on the outfit, uh, a long time ago. No, I’m sorry. On the wild bunch, a long time ago. So a lot of those, and they did so much work back in the day. A lot of those run together, but yeah, you’re now, uh, now that you’re right, writing her was he was eating in a restaurant. I’m, Uh, I can’t remember the name. It may have been, been Luna’s, but he was, went out in public. He thought he’d be safe. And like you said, a lot of these guys have a six cents because they come up on the street and they know these things. And, uh, like a guy like Sammy and Reno knew it was coming. He was dodging them for a long time, but they, they know that their time is coming. Eventually they just, they stay ahead of it for a while and figure they can fight their way out or talk their way out. And yeah, they, he was blown away right in public. Like it was similar to the, I remember it being similar to the, to the Richard Cain murder. And this was in, it was right around the same time. It was, it was in the mid seventies, 75, 74, 75, 76. It might’ve been 75 that writing or happened right, right in the middle of the restaurant. [31:58] I’ve been a lot cheaper to pay the street tax, I reckon. You know, and it wasn’t, I don’t recall that they’re asking for so much, but once these murder started happening yeah i think it was it wasn’t like it was half or 75 i think they just wanted it was you know it might have been a quarter it might have just been a flat fee across the board but once that street tax was was instituted i mean we’ve talked about this before gary that was when the wild bunch was out there that was that was they really didn’t play around When Ferriola told these guys, get everybody in line, [32:31] they really cracked down and they weren’t playing at all. You pay or you die. And guys like Alem and Patrick Shelley, whether it was right in public or whatever, in the outfit in the 70s, Paul, you know this from Richard Cain and several others. They just write in public would just blow you away. and writing her was just was almost textbook just like the Richard Cain it was it was right in the right in the restaurant yeah I’ll tell you I’ll tell. [33:05] I was conflating him with Hal Smith. Okay. I’ll tell you something about those mob hits. When they kill somebody in public like that in a public way, more than likely it’s because whoever the victim is has been alerted, and they can’t get anybody to get close to them. They will already try to send somebody around to get them isolated, and when they can’t get them isolated, then they want them bad enough. They’ll just lay, as Frank Calabrese, I heard him say once, well, lay on them. And I thought, oh, that’s interesting. Well, lay on them. I read that somewhere else. They use that term when you’re following somebody and you’re trying to set them up, or yet they lay on them. Calabrese even said, you know, you’re like, get an empty refrigerator box and hide inside of it. I mean, it’s just like the kind of stuff we used to do at the intelligence unit to run surveillances on people. And so they’ll lay on them for a while until they can get you somewhat isolated. And if they can’t, then they’ll just take you out in public. It might be to send a message, but I don’t think so because it’s so risky to get somebody in public. You can have a young, all-fitty cop in there that you didn’t even notice, and he comes out blazing. And, you know, it’s just not worth it. Even if you take him out, he’s probably got to get you. [34:21] So it’s kind of a last resort. A desperation. Yeah, it’s desperation because they can’t get you isolated. [34:28] You look at some of these public murderers, guys like Richard Cain or Ridinger, like you said, who was on the watch. Sam Annarino, who was right on Cicero. [34:39] A guy like Chris Carty, who was years later. I mean, these are guys who would have been smart enough and street smart enough to be on the watch, to watch their step, to know what was going on. With the exception of a guy like Michael Cagnoni, who just happened to be difficult to get, and he probably might have had an idea that something was happening, but I think just he was a family guy, and so it was hard to isolate. They blew him up on the interstate, but I think that in general, that’s a good point, Gary. These guys, if they just run up and blow away, it’s just a last resort. That’s an excellent point. I have always been in that camp of, oh, that must be sending a message. But you, with your experience, I think you’re exactly right. One thing, guys, I think we’re mixing up Sambo Cesario with Sam Annarino. I was thinking when they – yeah, you’re right, Paul. I was thinking, though, when they blew away Sam Annarino in the parking lot with his family, though, they had been trying to get him for several months. And they finally just went after him in the parking lot, called in a robbery, and blew him away in the furniture store parking lot. That was what I meant. Yeah, Gary was referring to Sambo earlier. I just meant they had been trying to get Sam Annarino for a long time, and when they couldn’t, they just got him in the parking lot. [36:08] Well, interesting. You know, no matter how much terror these guys strike in the heart of their underlings, in the end, they still will turn once in a while. And I think people don’t really not turn because they’re afraid of getting killed so much if they don’t turn because they don’t want to have their family suffering the disgrace of them being a rat or a snitch. I think that’s more important to be a man and go out like a man in this subculture and believe me I’ve lived in a subculture where being a man and being a tough guy is more important than anything else, I think that’s the most important thing that keeps people from coming in you’re like a wimp you’re a puss, you can’t take it, can’t handle it you know what I mean you can’t handle five years I could do five years standing on my head or a tray like the dude told me so uh you know but even even with all that and still there’s a certain percentage that will end up coming in sure and usually there are people that either don’t care about their family like lenny patrick yeah or that don’t have close family so that they don’t have it so much of that pressure that you’re talking about gary because you make a really valid point that that that cultural value is so strong yeah yeah it’s it’s. [37:36] In a lot of these small towns, you see in Detroit where they’re all family tied in and everything, you don’t see informants. I think they’ve had one. Kansas City, as you said, Gary, you don’t see. But then you look at a place like Rochester where they’re all just lower tier mob guys. Everybody was informing on everybody because they really weren’t as upper echelon sort of mob guys. So I think that, like you said, once you get that culture seeped in, you’ve got those families and all, there’s a lot of factors. But if it’s a deep-rooted mob town, you really don’t see a lot of real informants. [38:11] So, guys, now we’ve got one that I did a show on. I did a couple of shows on him. I talked to the FBI agent who brought him in and dealt with him for quite a while. Ken Tokiojo Eto. He survived a murder attempt. When that didn’t happen for him with the outfit, what happened after that? [38:32] I believe his attempted assassins got killed themselves. So tell me a little bit about Tokyo Joe Eto. There’s a photograph I have from the late 50s, early 60s And it shows Joe Ferriola And a couple of other heavyweights Hanging around with a young Ken Eto, And a lot of people didn’t know who Ken Eto was But he ran the Japanese game, Gambling, Bolita And lots of money Poured into the outfit through Tokyo Joe As they called him And there was a rumor that perhaps Tokyo Joe was going to turn under a little bit of pressure. And so Jasper Campisi put three slugs in the back of his head. [39:22] Miraculously, he survived three slugs at point blank range. And if he wasn’t going to turn state’s evidence before, he certainly had a powerful incentive to do so now. He seems to insist As I’ve heard that he was not His intention was not It’s hard to say at this point But he says he had no intention Of flipping and that he’s not sure What the evidence was against him But he was not going to flip until, It was Yeah. [39:55] I’m drawing a blank, Paul. Who was it that sent? It wasn’t the saint. It was Vincent Solano. He was kind of Vincent Solano, who was a union guy and a made guy up there. He kind of had which one. [40:11] He was a capo. And which crew was it? Do you remember? He was on the north side. North side crew. North side crew. And actually, Ken went to Vince Solano and had a talk with him. Said you know what i can do this he was looking at a tray i had a dude tell me what’s that pressure and tried to get him to talk and he said uh he said what am i gonna get out of this a tray he said man i can do a tray standing on my head and i threw him right then that’s right gotta talk to me so uh and that’s all he had to do but solano for some reason uh who knows what was in his head because uh ken Eto had made him a lot of money a lot of money and he was a tough little dude he had he had survived he had been put in the uh concentration camps if you will during the internment camps yeah internment camps and then came as a young man up chicago and been around for a long time by the time this all came down he’d been with him for a long time and made him a lot of money and all kinds of different gambling operations but particularly the bolita. [41:13] So uh it just didn’t make sense i heard one thing that these guys in chicago got the idea Yeah, to keep the noise down, they were loading their own rounds with lighter loads of powder. I don’t know. They had like a hit car up there. The guys in Chicago were pretty sophisticated or tried to be. And so they used these lighter loads. And when it went into his head, it just didn’t penetrate his skull. I remember I was at the hospital once, and there was a young guy who had gotten shot in the head. And they said that the bullet was not a good bullet because it went in under his skin and then went under his scalp, along his skull, and then lodged up on his forehead. [41:56] Wow. And so Eto was kind of the same way. Those bullets were probably lodged up underneath his scalp. He pulled himself to a neighboring, I believe it was a pharmacy that was right there, a corner store. And then that guy went to help him. I think he had to dial a call of 911 or whatever. 911 was in place then. He had to call for help for himself from a phone booth. You know, he saved his own life by being smart and playing dead. Yeah, that’s right. And you look at Chicago, it’s a city of neighborhoods, and you’ve got the Mexican town, and you’ve got the different towns, and you’ve got Chinatown where there’s so much money and so much gambling. And while Haneda was Japanese and there’s obviously division between Japanese and Chinese, it would be much easier for him to go in and then some of these outfit guys and because of different things going on back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. But he could go into neighborhoods and represent the outfit in ways in different communities that the outfit wouldn’t go into or a lot of these made guys. [43:12] And that gave him entry into a lot of communities. In the Asian community, there’s a lot of gambling that he was able to tap into. He was smart enough to see that as a route that maybe the Italian guys didn’t, just like Lenny Patrick, who we’ve talked about in other episodes, had that access into the Jewish communities and other Jewish gangsters. There’s a lot of gambling there. If you can get somebody who has an in to different communities, that’s really a way to go and that’s part of why he made so much money. A game like BolEto wouldn’t normally be and that’s huge in the Hispanic communities and huge with Asians also. You know in kansas city that’s interesting that you should point that out camp we had a um large vietnamese community moved in after the the boat peoples when it started and they moved in through the same church uh. [44:09] Sacred Heart Church and Don Bosco Center that the Italians moved in, the Sicilians moved into back in the turn of the century, the same neighborhoods. And Italians are getting successful and they’re moving out the suburbs and the Vietnamese are moving in and creating the Vietnamese restaurants and Vietnamese shops. And they brought, they have a love for gambling. Like you said, they have huge love for gambling. They don’t drink so much or do so many drugs, but they do love to gamble, it seemed to me like. [44:36] And so they had their own book. he was called the king a guy a friend of mine told me a story uh there’s a mob book he got on the periphery that neighborhood’s got a joint and he he was running a sports book and he had a lot of action going in and out of his joint so this one vietnamese guy had a big debt owed to the king so he goes down and talks to this guy’s name was Larry Strada, he ends up getting killed by some other uh mobsters in a deal they thought he was going to testify but i just needed to hear are there, this young, middle-aged Vietnamese guy goes down to the Caddyshack, Larry Strada’s bar. And he starts telling him about the king. He said, man, he said, the king, you take all your business. He said, he got all business down here. He take all your business. He said, you know, you need to do something about the king. He said, you know, we’re close to the river here. And then he made a motion across his throat like he was cutting his throat. So he was trying to get out of his gambling debt to convince this Italian, La Cosa Nostra bookie to go back and kill me yeah king piano. [45:42] You know i’ve heard a lot of stories and some of them are true some are not that one had to ring a truth to it it had a definite ring of truth that that got to do that playing them against each other yeah you bet and you know another thing about tokyo joe and you know he could testify But Ben Solano had Campizé and Gattuso killed right away. Found them in the trunk of their car, I think. Maybe at the airport, even. [46:09] Chicago trunk music, but they have some saying like that. And so Solano knew that they could testify against him, and they didn’t want to go down for attempted murder, more than likely, and he just didn’t take a chance. So he had them killed, and I can’t remember if he went down behind this or not. But another thing Tokyo Joe was able to do, I mean, he certainly could expose all the inner workings of what he knew about to the FBI, which gives you a lot of tips on where to go, who to work on, and maybe where to throw up microphones or some wiretaps. But he also traveled around he came to Kansas City during the skimming trial because they’re working on the Chicago hierarchy. So they just fly him into town. They show him that picture, the last separate picture where everybody’s in the picture. And they say, now, who’s that? Oh, that’s Aiuppa. Okay, then who’s that? Oh, that’s Vince Solano. Yeah, he reports to Aiuppa. You know, and who’s that guy? I can’t remember the other people at all. So the nation said that Joe is up hard. Oh, yeah, he reports to this guy. So to show the organization of the mob in Chicago and that it is an organization that gives orders to have other people carry it to make the RICO case, that he was a storyteller for that. And he didn’t know anything about the skim at all. But he was a storyteller on getting the mob name and the organization in front of a jury. That’s huge, as you know, Paul. [47:35] Absolutely. We had a similar arrangement during the Carlesi trial about how [47:40] the Carlesi crew operated and who was who, and to tell the story. Yeah. You have to make it a story. Let’s take a look at Betty Toco, which, uh, this is pretty interesting. There was a, um, I’m not sure. Albert Toco was your husband. Remind me what his position was at the outfit at that time. So Al Toco was, there’s sort of a division on who was the leadership of, who was the central leader of Chicago Heights. There’s Dominic Tuts Palermo and Al Toco, who was really a powerhouse in Chicago Heights. And Tuts Palermo was definitely highly connected and across the pond too, also in Italy. But uh Toco was involved in the in the chop shop wars really really heavily involved and he had a lot of connections in chicago too he was involved with lombardo and a lot of these chop shops throughout chicago he had a lot of partnerships and so this was a 30 million dollar a year racket stolen cars chop shops international car rings uh car rings throughout stolen car rings throughout the country. Toco was responsible for burying the Spolatro brothers. It was very sectioned off. Each crew had a part in their murder. And then Chicago Heights was responsible for the burial. [49:02] And they were down in Enos, Indiana. They got kind of turned around a little bit. They were down a farm road. They were burying them in a freshly tilled field. And the road where they’re on, there’s a little side road that you would drive down. There’s very little down there. I’ve, I’ve seen it, but a car happened to come down middle of night and they were in a, there’s a, there were a couple of feet off of a wooded area and they see this car coming down and they sort of all panicked and before they had a chance to cover the area or really do anything, it just looked like a freshly dug, it really just looked like freshly dug mound. And so they all fled and three of Toco’s guys went one way and he went the other. They had the car in both radios. [49:46] He’s wandering around barefoot, and he calls his wife finally. She shows up, and he’s screaming and yelling. And he runs to Florida, and he’s waiting for permission to come back from Joe Ferriola. He’s worried he’s going to get killed because they find the Spallachos immediately because the farmer sees his field all messed up, freshly tilled ground, and it looks really suspicious, like somebody had been poaching deer and burying the carcass. Uh but Toco was a tyrant to his wife he was he was horrible to her he was he was when you think of what a mob guy was that was Toco you know tipping the guy who mows his lawn the kid who mows his lawn hundred bucks and wandered around town everybody knows him but he’d come home and unlike a lot of these guys he was he was a real you know a real. [50:36] Real bastard to his wife you know and for years she put up with this sort of abuse and finally after this this happened and it was in the news and all he finally pushed her too far and she began informing on him and and he was arrested later on he was in his jail cell talking about all the murders he had committed and and this and that about his wife and uh his his uh uh A cellmate repeated everything that he said to try and lessen his sentence. So really, Toco got buried by his big mouth and his terrible behavior. He initially fled to Greece before he was arrested, and they extradited him back from Greece. So this is, I mean, Toco is like deep in mob behavior. [51:22] I mean, fleeing the country and all. I mean, it doesn’t get much more mafia than Al Toco. I hesitate to use that word with Chicago, but that was, Al Toco was running deep. and that Betty Tocco’s testimony eventually led to the trial of Al Tocco. And that was really a blow to the Chicago Heights crew that nowadays, I mean, they continued on and had a few rackets, but after the eventual trial that stemmed from that, it really wasn’t, there’s not much activity now. I’m in that area and there’s just, there’s really nothing here. [51:59] Interesting. Now, so Tony and Michael Spilotro had been lured to somebody’s house on the promise that Michael was going to be made. It’s my understanding. I believe that’s what Frank Collada had reported. And some other people, not part of the Chicago Heights crew, killed him. How did that go down? And how did they pass off the body? You guys, is there anything out there about that? Wasn’t that the family secrets trial, maybe? It was. And, of course, it’s been popularly portrayed in the movie Casino. And it’s surprisingly accurate Except for the fact That where they were beaten But what happened was Little Jimmy Marcello called them. [52:41] And said Sam, meaning Sam Carlisi, the boss, wanted to see them. And they knew that that was ominous because of what was going on beyond the scope of this show. But they took off the jewelry. They left. They told their wives, if we’re not back by 930, it’s not good. They really did not suspect that it was to make Michael. That’s what Collada said. You’re absolutely right about that, Gary. But I don’t think that’s correct at all. They knew that it was bad. And they went. He took a pistol, which was against the rules. They hit him a pistol. Tony hit a pistol on his brother, which you do not do when you go to see the boss. And they were picked up by, by Marcello and taken to a house. I, uh, was it Bensonville? Yeah. Up in Bensonville. Uh, in, in the basement, they walked down the stairs and all of a sudden they looked into the eyes of Carlici and, uh, DeFranzo and everybody, the whole, all the couples were there to spread the, the, uh, liability around and they were beaten to death with, with fists and feet, uh, in, in that basement and then transported to that burial ground, which coincidentally was just maybe a couple hundred yards away from Joey Aupa’s farm. [54:00] Right. So I guess that they must have had, uh, Toco standing by, because I don’t believe he was in that basement. I like that. He must have had him standing by to go grab the bodies and take them out. Really interesting. He should have had the old Doug before he got there. You know, that’s what they always say. First you dig the hole then you go do the murder right and i don’t think he had it done before he got there yeah i don’t i really that’s a good that’s a good point gary i really don’t know and nobody’s ever come forward to say what the status of the hole was beforehand uh you know it was a deep it was a deep it was it was a pretty deep hole uh but they may have had a dug ahead of Tom, but, but, uh, cause they knew the location and it’s pretty obscure location. So they had clearly been there before. And, and, you know, everybody knew that that was, I, I hope was, I got it right. Farm. And, uh, So they may have had it dug, and they just did a shoddy job covering it up. [55:05] But I also haven’t heard the specific details about how they handed it off to Toco. I don’t recall seeing that in Calabrese’s testimony. Yeah, it was Nick Calabrese that testified about that. It brought up the light. He named the killer. So he may not have gone that far, probably having Toco and having his wife testify that he did do this. that she picked him up out there. It was just a piece of the entire prosecution on the spot, which it really never was a trial or anything on that. I don’t believe. Another odd thing is he, I believe he ranted and raved the entire car ride back. And from where he was, you would run up with, It’s now turns into Indianapolis. So it’s a good car ride from where they were to Chicago Heights. I believe he ranted and raved about the guys and his crew and the burial and everything, the entire car ride, which was not something most guys would do in front of their wives. But I really, especially when he treated like that. Right. And complained about how long it took her to get there and everything. So she was able to verify a lot of what Calabrese was saying from the final end of it. Interesting. A friend of mine was in the penitentiary, and he said, there’s a guy in there who called himself a verifier. He said, what do you mean? He said, I’m a professional verifier. What he was, he was an informant. That’s what he was, but he called himself a verifier. [56:33] A girl would come to him and say, well, I heard this, this, and this. Is that true or not? He’d say, well, that’s true. That’s not true. [56:40] I guess that’s a more preferable term. Yeah, she was a verifier. Well, that was great. I really appreciate having that on there and Paul. And I really, I still miss Cam. Every time I get ready to do a Chicago show, I think, oh, I want to get Cam or Rochester. [56:58] We did one about Rochester. We did one about Utica. I did several other shows about other families. And he was a good guy and a real great researcher and a real expert on the outfit and other mafia families. So rest in peace, Cam and Paul. I hope to talk to you again one of these days. Guys, don’t forget, I got stuff to sell out there. Just go to my website or just search on my name for Amazon. I can rent my movies about the skim in Las Vegas, about the big mob war between the Savella brothers and the Spiro brothers in Kansas City. Then one about the great 1946 ballot theft in which the mob… Rigged election, helped Harry Truman rig an election. It’s a little harder to find than mine. You need to put ballot theft and Gary Jenkins. I think you’ll find it then. The other two, Gangland Wire and Brothers Against Brothers, Sabella Spiro, were a little bit easier to find. Had to put it up a different way because Amazon changed the rules, but I got them up there. So thanks a lot, guys.