Podcasts about North End

On today's show, Norris Howard and I dig into SMART's new Route 500, which restores service to Hamtramck for the first time in more than a decade. It's a new bus connection between downtown Detroit, the DMC, Hamtramck, the North End, and the Bel Air Center.  It matters for a city like Hamtramck where about one in five households does not have a vehicle, and it also gives fans another way to get to Keyworth Stadium and people visiting the city a way to get to Hamtramck without am Uber. Then, photographer Ryan Southen and I head to the Detroit Institute of Arts for a preview of Georgia O'Keeffe: Architecture, a first-of-its-kind exhibition that looks beyond the flowers and into the buildings, cityscapes, barns, and New Mexico spaces that shaped her work. We also talk with Ben Colman, the DIA's curator of American art, about why bringing this exhibition to Detroit matters and how O'Keeffe's New York paintings connect with the skyscraper boom that shaped Detroit in the same era. Finally, we check in on Detroit City FC as Le Rouge heads into the final stretch of the regular season, chasing a top-four finish and a chance to host a playoff match at Keyworth. Saturday's matchup against Pittsburgh is a big one, and DCFC will wear special green Capuchin Soup Kitchen charity kits. Feedback as always dailydetroit@gmail.com or 313-789-3211. Cover photo by Ryan Southen. What do you think on any of these topics? Hit us up, dailydetroit@gmail.com or 313-789-3211. Thanks for your support on Patreon!

An EMERGENCY BPP podcast from Jack.Talking all things #pnefc and the recent PNE breaking news of Paul Heckingbottom leaving North End.Who will be the next North End manager?

She grew up running around a veterinary college, spent three years in med school hating it, ran away to the circus for a bit, and now she's a PhD researcher in adversarial machine learning who doesn't really believe in AI. Meet Patti—a woman who refuses to be put in a box.In this episode, Patti takes us on a journey through her winding career path: from microbiology and immunology to computer science, from fire-spinning festivals to DJing under the name DJ Patti.K. She breaks down what AI actually is (statistics on steroids), why she thinks the cons of AI outweigh the pros, and how she's using her research to stay sharp while questioning the technology she studies.Patti also opens up about her passion for lowering the barriers to computer literacy, her work with Tech Girls Canada, and why she's launched a DJ collective called Freak Alantik to create space for racialised queer DJs in Halifax. She shares how she balances being a researcher, a musician, a parent, and a community builder—all by knowing her values and staying true to herself.Whether you're curious about AI, looking to start a creative project, or just trying to figure out how to be in multiple places at once, this episode is for you.Patricia (Patti) Kibenge is a 2nd-generation Ugandan-Canadian living and loving in Kjipuktuk, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi'kmaq people. She is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Dalhousie University in her final year of studies. Her research is in Adversarial Machine Learning (AML), which is an emerging field that combines cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, investigating attacks on machine and deep learning algorithms and defences against such attacks.In her spare time, she is a DJ, host, promoter and now also a mermaid. She can most likely be found working on her laptop at a café in the North End, supporting her 5-year-old's multiple interests and always surrounded by music.Find out more @patti.kibenge@dj.patti.k@freeqatl@blk.itnetwork

The boys get together to discuss Austin FC acquiring USYNT centerback Chris Applewhite on loan from Nashville SC, along with news about the future of the U.S. Open Cup. Then they preview this weekend's home match against San Jose Earthquakes before closing out the episode with Last Business Day and the nonsense. 0:30 - Intro 6:10 - Svatok named to MLS Team of the Matchday 8:00 - Austin FC signs Chris Applewhite on loan 25:20 - U.S. Open Cup news 28:30 - San Jose Earthquakes preview 52:25 - CJ Fodrey check-in 54:10 - Last Business Day 1:03:55 - Picks recap 1:04:30 - Best Ball update Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In celebration of our tenth anniversary, we are bringing you a remastered edition of an episode recorded in 2018 by Dr. Walter Woodward, Connecticut State Historian Emeritus with Dr. Fiona Vernal and former Hartford History Center Program Manager Jasmin Agusto. Dr. Vernal serves on the Connecticut Explored magazine Editorial Board. She holds a BA in history from Princeton University and a PhD. from Yale University. She is an associate professor of history and Africana studies and director of EPOCH: Engaged Public, Oral, and Community Histories at the University of Connecticut. Since this episode was recorded in 2018, Vernal has recorded hundreds of oral histories with members of Greater Hartford's West Indian community. The 2018 exhibit referenced in the episode has long since come down but a new exhibit entitled "Drawn Here: Stories from Hartford's North End" is open now, September 2026 to January 17, 2027, at the Connecticut Museum of Culture & History in Hartford. The exhibit exploresthe migration history and culture of Hartford's North End through a series of original graphic novels developed by local students and professional artists. The experiences of the Irish, Italians, Eastern Europeans, Black Southerners, West Indians, Puerto Ricans, and others who have made the neighborhood their home, whether briefly or for generations, add nuance and depth to our understanding this urban neighborhood. In today's Grating the Nutmeg episode, we're going to take a deep dive with Drs. Woodward and Vernal into the 70+ year history of West Indians who made Hartford home. Be sure to go to the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History's website to plan your visit to see Drawn Here: Stories from Hartford's North End". In addition to the fabulous graphic novel artwork, the exhibit also has interesting items too. connecticutmuseum.org/exhibition/drawn-here-stories-from-hartfords-north-end/   --------------------------- Don't forget to subscribe to Connecticut Explored magazine today-our Fall issue is about to go in the mail-in your mailbox or your inbox. And please set up your monthly donation to Grating the Nutmeg at ctexplored.org so we can continue bring you new research in Connecticut history, compelling first-person stories and fresh voices. ctexplored.org/donate/ This remastered episode of Grating the Nutmeg was produced by Mary Donohue and engineered by Patrick O'Sullivan at highwattagemedia.com/   Follow Grating the Nutmeg on Facebook and Instagram. Follow executive producer Mary Donohue on Facebook and Instagram at West Hartford Town Historian. Join us in two weeks for our next episode of Grating the Nutmeg, the podcast of Connecticut history. Thank you for listening!    

(00:00 - 2:54) It's Tuesday! Goodwill is opening a whole store dedicated to physical media, vinyl, CDs, cassettes, VHS and DVDs; Adam 12 is all in and will drive any distance to bring back 1994! (2:54 - 8:25) Today's DM Disaster is from Dan! He decided to join a group for Bird Watching, his friends all ragged on him for doing an older person habit. Then while Dan was Bird Watching with the group, he made a noise that scared the bird and group then voted to kick him out. That's Dan's DM Disaster! (8:25 - 14:09) Apparently, the thumbs-up emoji has gone from “got it!” to “I'm done with you,” and people are losing their minds over it. LBF and Adam 12 give some ways to end the convo without being rude. (14:09 - 17:41) Today's Supah Smaht is Danielle from Merrimac. Find out if they were Supah Smaht. (17:41 - 22:03) College may be getting a three-year option, which means less tuition, less debt and getting your kid out of the house a year earlier; we think not all professions should adopt this idea. (22:03 - 30:01) Pauli's in the North End is offering a free Storrow Spuckie to anyone whose moving truck gets stuck under one of the notoriously low-clearance bridges on Storrow Drive on Tuesday, Sept. 1. Plus, so-called “pheromone-maxxing” is a viral TikTok trend primarily associated with teen boys and young men that involves skipping showers and deodorant before a date. All this and more on the ROR Morning Show with LBF & Adam 12 Podcast. Find more great podcasts at bPodStudios.com…The Place To Be For Podcast Discovery! Follow us on our socialsInstagram - @rormorningshowFacebook - The ROR Morning ShowSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

WBZ NewsRadio’s James Rojas reports.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The boys get together to recap the road victory over the Portland Timbers. They discuss Facundo Torres finding the back of the net once again and a bounce back performance from both Joseph Rosales and Oleksandr Svatok, before closing out the episode with Last Business Day. 0:30 - Intro 4:30 - Lineup reactions 9:25 - Portland Timbers recap 40:15 - Postgame takeaways 52:05 - Last Business Day Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The boys get together to discuss the flurry of Austin FC news that dropped early in the week, including welcoming Khaled El-Ahmad as the club's new CSO and three outbound players. Then they recap the midweek loss against Toluca and preview Saturday's road match against Portland Timbers, before closing out the episode with Last Business Day and the nonsense. 0:30 - Intro 6:35 - Jayden Nelson transfer wrap-up 8:55 - CJ Fodrey loaned to Falkirk FC 13:40 - Owen Wolff trade wrap-up 18:25 - Khaled El-Ahmad welcome press conference 24:25 - Toluca recap 57:40 - Postgame takeaways 1:03:55 - Portland Timbers preview 1:20:15 - Last Business Day 1:28:45 - Picks recap 1:30:05 - Best Ball updates Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The boys went LIVE on their YouTube channel on Wednesday afternoon to discuss the trade of Owen Wolff to Sporting Kansas City in exchange for a record return for a U-22 Initiative player. 0:30 - Intro 2:40 - Austin FC trades Owen Wolff 5:40 - Tidbits from the press release 14:45 - Early fan reactions 20:45 - Wolff family ties in KC 30:50 - Rodo/Owen tension? 43:15 - State of the roster 54:05 - Dumbest take of all times? Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When Nathine Dagdick asked to be part of our 2026 Civic Election series, it was easy to see why. The city employee says he's watched Transcona taxpayers, transit users and drivers pay the price for bad planning and poor service delivery.Episode 33 opens with a brief review of our Season 7 Funding Drive (and Facebook group membership) and how you can help us get to the month-end goal of $3000, plus the reactions to his latest Winnipeg Sun columns:Augustine Centre snubs Osborne Village residents safety meetingParking permit renewal: new location, same old confusion“Downtown revitalization” charade ignores chaotic Riverwalk encampment proliferation8.40 Part 2- This observation from Transcona candidate Nathine Dagdick on his campaign website struck us as something we would have reported:"Every Transcona resident has a story about calling or emailing 311 to report a pothole, a damaged park bench, or a missed snow plow, only to receive a generic tracking number and absolutely zero follow-up. Our current 311 system operates like a black hole where resident complaints go to die. As a municipal operator, I know our front-line crews want to fix these issues, but the internal tracking system disconnects the resident from the worker on the ground."A City infrastructure equipment operator, Dagdick's central theme is that Winnipeggers are not getting value for dollar because of insider resistence to reforming wasteful policies."I have seen the orders that have been given to us (by) City Hall and the department heads and as the person doing them, we constantly see it's not working. We know other ways... that can save taxpayers money at every avenue- but because we're the worker ants our say just goes out the window."Citing the spiraling North End water treatment plant costs and the rejected housing plan for South Transcona, Dagdick says "The City to me has no foresight." He speaks about how pie-in-the sky development proposals are based on off-loading extraordinary costs onto longtime property owners. He attended the 12 hour committee meeting about the plan and notes one woman estimated adding sewer and water lines would "cost them almost $1.4 M. That is not a benefit, that's an eviction notice... that's not OK to me." Dagdick also blasted the "private-public walkway" development concept where "they want the homeowners to maintain the trail that would cut through their land."28.03 Part 3 - Dagdick pitches "the 1-10 Rule" to guide City road maintenance on streets rated "Good" where proactive low-cost cleaning and sealing of potholes can save expensive reconstruction later. "What we do is not a solution, it's a band-aid" and as a result, taxes are spent "patching the same holes every spring." 37.00- Dagdick says at the door voters say the Transit rehaul has failed the ward- fares keep going up while service goes down. He lauds Coun. Cindy Gilroy posting videos of her own experiences with late buses, missed connections and long walks to stops. Dagdick proposes daily users and drivers - "the people who rely on it every single day" should steer the Transit Advisory Committee:"I've had three people now tell me they've had to quit their job because they could not make it to work on time or get home because buses stopped running." 43.38- Dagdick addresses how wasteful spending led Mayor Gillingham and City Council to wrongly demolish Happyland Pool, noting the community had raised the operating funds to keep it open. While encampments are not a visible issue in the ward, Dagdick agreed council should consider the "Gatineau model" which "insulates the commercial and cultural core to spur private investment, while concentrating and managing street-level vulnerability in designated, controlled zones.”Part of the trend of younger Winnipeg residents going on the ballot, Dagdick maintains "a 100% generational shift is coming... the winds of change are a-howling."Watch Nathine Dagdick's candidate interview on YouTube

Today's guest will join the Restaurant Unstoppable Network for a live Q+A on August 3st, 2026 at 11AM EST. To join us and engage with all our guests and events, go to restaurantunstoppable.com/live -OR- to just catch today's guest, head over to restaurantunstoppable.com/cwe and we will get you a link to join that specific event for FREE! Meredith Tipping is the General Manager and Head of Marketing at The Boston Sail Loft, a longtime waterfront restaurant located on Atlantic Avenue in Boston's North End. She has helped lead the restaurant's operations, marketing, and business development since 2012, bringing a hands-on perspective to hospitality, guest experience, and the evolving Boston restaurant industry. Join RULibrary: www.restaurantunstoppable.com/RULibrary Join RULive: www.restaurantunstoppable.com/live Set Up your RUEvolve 1:1: www.restaurantunstoppable.com/evolve Subscribe on YouTube: https://youtube.com/restaurantunstoppable Subscribe to our email newsletter: https://www.restaurantunstoppable.com/ Today's sponsors: - Hermetic.ai  - Private event leads die in inboxes every day. Mia fixes that. She's an AI agent that responds within seconds, handles the back-and-forth, and fills your event calendar — automatically. Fully integrated in under 10 minutes. Head to hermetic.ai and put her to work. https://www.hermetic.ai/ - Hotshift - Hotshift is the all-in-one tool built by a restaurant owner, for restaurant owners. Scheduling, hiring, training, reviews — one roof, one login. Plusreal-time labor cost forecasting before the shift ever starts. Head to hotshift.pro/unstoppable. - Restaurant Technologies — the leader in automated cooking oil management. Their Total Oil Management solution is an end-to-end closed loop automated system that delivers, monitors, filters, collects, and recycles your cooking oil eliminating one of the dirtiest jobs in the kitchen.. Automate your oil and elevate your kitchen by visiting rti-inc.com or call 888-779-5314 to get started! - US Foods®. Running a restaurant takes MORE than great food—it takes reliable deliveries, quality products, and smart tools. US Foods® helps you make it. Ready to level up? Visit: usfoods.com/expectmore. - Today's guest recommends:  US Foods Toast BentoBox Guest contact info:  Website: https://www.thebostonsailloft.com Instagram: @bostonsailloft Thanks for listening! Rate the podcast, subscribe, and share! 

The boys get together to recklessly speculate on which players are going to be on the move early in the week. Then they recap Saturday's home draw against Philadelphia Union and complain about Neil Pierre before previewing Wednesday's Leagues Cup quarterfinal match against Toluca FC. 0:30 - Intro 4:15 - Khaled El-Ahmad notes 8:05 - Reckless Speculation 18:30 - Lineup reactions 20:45 - Philadelphia Union recap 59:45 - Postgame takeaways 1:04:50 - Los Verdes watch party 1:06:00 - Toluca FC preview Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The boys went LIVE on their YouTube channel on Monday to talk about the news that Austin FC is finalizing a deal to transfer Jayden Nelson to Bolton Wanderers in the EFL Championship. The proposed agreement for the 23-year-old winger consists of a $1.1 million transfer fee with further add-ons. 0:30 - Intro 3:30 - Gauging early fan reactions 10:40 - Does Austin FC get GAM from this? 17:10 - Bolton fans find the stream 21:05 - Impromptu Over/Under game 30:45 - State of the roster 53:05 - New DPs (in The North End)! Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

WBZ NewsRadio's Kyle Bray reports. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Minnesota State Fair is more than a 12-day event - it is a full-on lifestyle choice for 12 days, and Alex Lodner knows exactly how to make the most of it. Sunday's with Stephanie this week will feature my full State Fair Guide with picks, tops and tricks for making the most of the next 12 days at the Minnesota State Fair.Upgrade my subscription now so I don't miss the State Fair Guide.My goal with this newsletter is to help you discover new recipes and share things I am obsessed with. I also like to create short essays about what I am thinking about from time to time. It's like the miscellaneous drawer in my kitchen: a little bit of everything, some dribs and drabs—recipes, essays, helpful ideas, occasional interviews, restaurant suggestions, and more.What will I get as a free subscriber?As a free subscriber, you'll receive a newsletter in your inbox every week on Wednesday with a free recipe. You will be the first to know about any new classes or live cooking events I'm teaching, podcast episodes I'm releasing, etc.What else would I get if I paid to subscribe?Great question! First and foremost, you'll get my gratitude (I appreciate your support!!). I am a freelance creator, which means I work for everyone but no one full-time, so I pay all my own healthcare, buy my own groceries for recipes and shows, and fund my own podcast.You will also get the Sunday Subscriber email in your inbox each week. You will have access to the entire archive of posts, plus exclusive content like extra recipes only for Subscribers (there are 65 currently like this Corn Shrmp and Basil Risotto perfect for Summer), and access to Stephanie's Dish chat. .This chat lets you join the conversation, comment on posts, and engage with other people and me in the Sunday Subscriber community. I also link all my Taste Buds Episodes, Podcasts and appearance clips on the Jason Show so if you are into what I do - its all here posted each week. Subscribing is $8/month or $60/year.Whether you are a first-time visitor trying not to waste a single bite or a seasoned fairgoer looking to level up your annual plan, this episode will help you experience the fair like an insider. Perfect for anyone counting down to the fair, food lovers chasing the best bites, and Minnesota locals who want to make the most of every precious day on the grounds. Alex reveals the must-try new foods on her list, the classics she returns to every year, and the hidden gems that still make the fair feel magical even after decades of visits. You'll discover:* Why Tuesday and Wednesday are the smartest fair days for shorter lines* How to approach the new foods list before the most popular items get swarmed* The off-the-beaten-path favorites Alex never skips* Where to find the cleanest bathrooms, quietest rest spots, and easiest shortcuts* Which fair traditions are still worth your time, from the parade to the llama spectacle to the church dining hallsOriginal Episode TranscriptStephanie Hansen (00:00.724)Hello everybody and welcome to Dishing with Stephanie's Dish, the podcast where we talk to cool people in the food space. And today I'm talking to my friend Alex Lodner. And Alex is someone that I feel like I owe a public thank you to. She would fill in on my radio show a lot in the times when I started going to the cabin quite a bit more and started the garden.And I have become friends with Alex over the years. And Alex is also someone that whenever we think of the Minnesota State Fair, she is someone that comes to mind. She's a fair aficionado. She really has done a lot to help with the fair foundation. And I just am loving to geek out with a fellow friend that loves the Minnesota State Fair. Thanks to coming on the program, Alex.Alex Lodner (00:37.55)Okay, I'll take that.Anytime, of course. My favorite subject. You knew that. You knew that when you got me.Stephanie Hansen (00:53.756)I did. I did. So let's talk a little bit about your love of the fair and how it all started.Alex Lodner (01:01.5)yeah, so you know, the fair is kind of a crazy thing, right? It's this insane time for twelve days. I always say that I suspend my entire personality during those twelve days because I don't like crowds, I don't like fried foods, barn animals, you know, all those things are not something that I normally r seek out. And it just those twelve days are just magic. You just lean in and if you do it right, I think it's a it's aan amazing experience. I hear a lot from people who are who go once a year with their, you know, family of five and they they can't understand why I go an average of eight times. And I always tell them it's a completely different experience. When you go multiple times, you're not trying to fit everything into one day. You find your secret rest spots. You find your favorite foods that are maybe a little bit off the beaten path. We always had our sec secret little spaces where we put our blanket down and let the toddler run around andSo it's a very different experience when you go multiple times.Stephanie Hansen (02:02.629)Yeah, I think so too. There was a couple of years where Steph, my radio partner on Weekly Dish and I recorded a podcast and we would meet out there every day and record the podcast. We got a lot of cool behind-the-scenes stories, and just the pace feels different. The fair is like it's like a mini city that happens for 12 days in our state. The rest of the state, believe it or not, sort of comes to a silent pause.It has its own police force, it has mm people that sleep out there for weeks. It really is just like this weird microcosm of something that only happens once a year in our state, and it's actually pretty joyful.Alex Lodner (02:48.458)Exactly. And I used to live a mile away. And so when when my daughter was little, there would be a little parade of strollers of us going back and forth from the fair. We'd go back to the house for a nap. We go back to the fair. And so it really again, when you're right there, it's a very different experience. And the only thing I would say is do not try to go to the Target Roseville during the twelve days of the fair. It empties out, there's no produce.But other than that, it's just it was always so fun to live in that neighborhood. You're you're just in the thick of it. It's it's really it's quite a high.Stephanie Hansen (03:24.741)Yeah, yeah. When we think about the fare, one thing that people talk about a lot and I feel like I just want to address up front is expense, particularly in a year where people aren't feeling flush with cash. it is an expense. It is an expense to go with your family of four or five. Tickets are, I think, $20 unless you've bought them in advance.Alex Lodner (03:47.392)At the door, yeah. Mm-hmm.Stephanie Hansen (03:49.002)And you know, food is gonna be expensive because we've seen food costs go up 33% in the last two years. There is a large minimum wage in our state. So yeah, it isn't necessarily a value proposition. There are good values to be had and there are deals to be had. The blue ribbon book is probably the best thing to do.Alex Lodner (04:12.226)Fantastic deal. Mm-hmm.Stephanie Hansen (04:14.811)you get like a lot of discounts. There's two for ones and just going on the right days. Like if you're going on senior day or kids' day. So without not I don't want to lay belabor the costs of the fair because I don't it ruins the experience, but it is a thing.Alex Lodner (04:29.88)But it's a thing. It's a definite it's a definite factor. Yeah, for sure. For sure. Yeah. And again, I say we used to go every day. I understand that that's not an easy task for most. It's because we live so close. There's the cost of parking, there's a cost of just driving there from Elk River or wherever you're coming from. I have talked to the marketing department off and on in the years about doing a a punch card or a a passport of some sort, but it's just never really gone through.Stephanie Hansen (04:58.801)Yeah, it's a great idea. Cause I think it feels like since COVID, the fair has become even more wild because people couldn't go for the COVID times. And so now it's like people realize what a treasure it is and they don't want to miss it. When you plan your state fair, and are you planning yours already for this year?Alex Lodner (05:24.59)Did you really just ask me that? I'm offended. I'm offended. Yes, I'm planning the state fair this year. Well, so here's a side note. I've actually, other than covering the fair for I don't know, almost 20 years, I've also worked off and on for some vendors there. And this year I'm working for a vendor there. It'll she'll go unnamed, but I'm working for a vendor there. A friend of mine owns a a new vendor. So I'm going to be there.Stephanie Hansen (05:25.937)I'm just asking.Yeah.Alex Lodner (05:55.519)Seven shifts, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I I will, I will. Yes.Stephanie Hansen (05:57.519)gosh, I can't wait. Okay, you'll have to tell me off air because I'll make sure to pop by and see you. I over the years, so once we stopped doing the podcast I started doing the garden. And unfortunately for me, garden season in Ely is the end of August and the first week of September. So I basically front-load all my fair experiences. I'll be out there Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. And then I'll leave Monday evening and head up to Ely. And then that's sort of the end of my fair time and I start harvesting everything.But I do love kind of having it in that condensed window too, because I get all the early excitement.Alex Lodner (06:37.614)You do. And yeah, you go during the busy days, don't you? Tuesday and Wednesday are the quietest days. And one of my tips is always to go on a Tuesday and Wednesday, regardless of what deals you get. You're just gonna have the shorter lines. It's just not as stressful. But yeah, I I would I do all the things. I go throughout the whole thing. I don't go on weekends. That's kind of I believe I have weekend shifts, but I'll go work and get out.We do not go as patrons during the weekend. That's we leave that for people who can't go during the week.Stephanie Hansen (07:13.404)Yes, I think in the restaurant business we would call that the amateurs. I know, because it doesn't sound very nice and sound sort of elite. Yep. Okay, so day one, you're heading to the state fair, day one, and you're there for not reporting, not work, you're just there for fun. What are like some of your top things to do?Alex Lodner (07:18.528)I was gonna say we call it amateur hour, but I was not going to say that but you did. We always call it nope, that's amateur hour. Yeah, yeah.That you like to do on day one.Yeah. Such a good question. Last year was my first year as a regular folk going to the state fair on day one. And actually Smart and I talked about that. Like this is just so weird. She she did do her her report, but it's just very strange to not have the new list and to not make sure you get everything in. I think on day one, I still do try andgo for the new things that I have circled. So you know, the official foods and the non-official foods, if people know that there are some new foods that didn't make the official cut, but they're just as exciting, sometimes even better. And I do make sure that I hit those. And the reason that I do that is because once all of our colleagues have reviewed everything, it blows up. And so an example of that is the Amish donuts, Peach's Amish donuts.We when was that? Twenty twenty-three, I believe was their first year. And all of us rated at number one. So we go as a group. So I go with I went for MSP with Steph, March and you know, Minmo goes and strip goes. And we all including Jason Mathis and we all rated at our number one or in their top three. Well then now you know the lines are an hour long. And so I'm not saying we're so powerful, but if you can if you candecide what you want to try out of the official and new foods and hit those on day one before the reporters get there and before we release our reviews. That's your only chance of really getting away from those long lines. We went up to the pizza, to the pickle pizza. We were there when the first year we were there, we walked right up to the to the counter and day two history. Mm-hmm.Stephanie Hansen (09:31.165)Yeah. Now it's hard. I went, well, I have 14 new fair foods lined up for Jason to try on day one. And then day two, I have 14 beverage things, non-alcoholic and alcoholic things. And we try to really load them up for the first two days so that, you know, he is part of that queue of of influencers, as it were, of people thatAnd I have to say I've done a really good job of anticipating, not only because I have to think about like what he's gonna like, but which ones are gonna hit.Alex Lodner (10:03.427)Which ones will hit?And you do you only use the official foods? Official new foods? Yeah.Stephanie Hansen (10:09.896)I do, I do. And I know that there are a lot of great foods that come out that are on the new but not official food list. Cause each vendor has new items that they're introducing every year and not all of them make them to the new list. but I try to, I mean, we only have X amount of time, so I try to just load them up with as much as I can. Are thereAlex Lodner (10:30.105)Fourteen is a lot. Uhhuh.Stephanie Hansen (10:31.708)Yeah, I think so. I mean of the I think there were thirty-six new, so we're getting at least a third of them in one day. are there things on the new list that will you're excited to try?Alex Lodner (10:35.905)Yes. I actually have it written down because there's so many of them. So I like the I tend to no I notice when I look at all the new foods that I liked best over the years that I go for the more refreshing things. So I won't necessarily I rarely go for the heartier, heavier things, although we'll talk about that in a second. But the mango sticky rice refresher at Chan's Eatery. Do you know where Chanse Eatery is? It's it's in the north end, and not to be confused, there'sAlex Lodner (11:13.561)Chan's chicken and a stick in the South. Different, different vendor. So they have that. I think it's like gonna be a drink, but it almost looks like tapioca pudding situation, but with sticky rice. Really excited about that. the the it's on days two. Yes, so you're looking at as a drink. Yeah. The strawberry sundae tart with Ube at Sarah's tipsies. Sarah's tipsies pies is one of my I always have foods that I repeat.Alex Lodner (11:43.192)I try not to repeat foods ‘cause there's so many, but I have a handful that I repeat and that's always her pies. Usually I do her lemon lemon blueberry. But I'm gonna try the strawberry tart with ube. Ube is, you know, that's the hot thing. It's been for a while.Stephanie Hansen (11:58.739)It's very ubiquitous in TikTok land. It's the purple sweet potato ingredient.Alex Lodner (12:04.191)Ube or Pondan, which is the green. and then the the banana butterscotch barn razor at Farmers Union. Farmers Union can do no wrong in my eyes. Every they just hit out of the park every time. So really excited about trying that. And it's strange because these are all sweet things, which is not normally my thing, but Greater Tater, which is is it a new vendor this year? Or it might have been last year.They're sort of blowing up on on the socials as well. And they're over by the animal barns and I'm curious to try them too. We tr no, we tried it two years ago. It was there's the really big tater tots and they were d yeah, and they were delicious. Not really my thing normally, butStephanie Hansen (12:45.054)The square ones. And that booth, too, they have a child that has special needs. And yeah. Yeah, he's great. And they do a good job of employing kids with special needs. So outside of the fact that the taters are good, really good, you know, you have this whole heartwarming story piece that I always like.Yeah, he's very popular on socials right now. He's adorable. I pretty much just want to meet him, let's be real. But I'll buy a potato too.And then another mention I want to say that I'm probably most excited about is the caramel apple iced tea from Loon Lake. Loon Lake has such good drinks and again, huge line. Always a huge line. You guys, it goes so fast. Give it a chance. Get in the back of that line. It will surprise you how fast it goes. They're very efficient. They have two sides. So the caramel apple one sounds intriguing. And as I'm saying all these, none of these are things that I would be attracted to during the year, but.Stephanie Hansen (13:52.764)Yeah, I have them on my list too. the caramel infused cold foam kinda sounded good.Alex Lodner (14:19.043)Yeah. I mean any any place would have me at foam. Be a chance eatery. I love my foam. A chance eatery. Yes, yes, cheers. a chance eatery. They also have an iced coffee that I'm going to try that either has the Ube or the Pantan foam. So just just make sure that I'm staying hip with the 19-year-old crowd. I'm gonna try those as well. Right?Stephanie Hansen (13:52.764)You do you and you do love coffee.Pandon foam. Huh. I had Pandon for the first time with my friends Heather Jans, the curry diva, who made me a Sri Lankan curry with it in there. And yeah.Alex Lodner (14:19.043)Yeah, I know they'reReally? I only think of it as a sweet ingredient. Ooh.Stephanie Hansen (14:27.055)No, she uses it in almost everything savory.Alex Lodner (14:30.667)Speaking of people who can do no wrong, my goodness. Yeah. Mm-hmm. yeah, so that's that's sort of on the on the official foods and then the not official, I'm really so a must-stop for me is the dairy goodness building, which is not to be confused with the dairy barn. AndStephanie Hansen (14:33.49)Yeah, she's an amazing person andStephanie Hansen (14:50.334)Help me understand where dear goodness is.Alex Lodner (14:53.145)Dairy goodness is in the dairy building. So the dairy building is right across from the haunted house. The dairy barn is where the cows live and it's way down over by the an barn animals. And soStephanie Hansen (14:58.684)Got it. Okay.Stephanie Hansen (15:04.392)And dairy goodness is where the butterheads are carved and you get the milkshakes.Alex Lodner (15:07.481)Correct. And you have that long winding line and you get milkshakes and my favorite is actually always get the Sundays. I always get the strawberry rhubarb sundae. This year their Sunday is called Moose Soda Apple Pie Sunday. If it does not have cinnamon in it, I will be trying it. So Nope. It's the only it's the only food item I don't I'm not allergic. I just strongly dislike it.Stephanie Hansen (15:22.195)Yum.Stephanie Hansen (15:26.076)Yeah, are you not a cinnamon person? Yeah, my producer is allergic to it.Yeah. that must make a a pumpkin spice latte not your favorite thing.Alex Lodner (15:42.788)Well, fall is hard on me. S listen, I no sweets for me in the fall because they like to put that cinnamon garnish on everything and sometimes I'll just order innocently order cappuccino and there'll be cinnamon on it. And s no, dude. I know it's October, but no.Stephanie Hansen (15:57.511)Outside Yeah, outside of the new foods, are there some classics that you go back for year after year?Alex Lodner (16:01.711)Yeah, always. I always, always have the corn. The corn roast. I've researched, you know, Brad's stuff to death. I know where those farms are. That is just the best there is. And if you're skipping on that, it's it's just it's a must-have. Must have. They cook it for an hour. It caramelizes, so it's so sweet. the key lime pie on a stick is a little known stand. Do you know where that is? It's underneath the beginning of the Skyride by the food building. It's sort of tucked in under there. And it's a key lime pie on a stick dipped in dark chocolate. Divine. I think it's yeah. And I don't know that if they raise their prices this year, but year after year it's been five dollars. I don't know what they're doing this year. But that's delicious. it's kind of one of those foods my daughter grew up on. So when she was a toddler, there'd be chocolate everywhere. And and now we still get that.Stephanie Hansen (16:43.336)Okay, I'm gonna try that.Alex Lodner (17:01.133)And then for me the grain belt blue beer over at now it's the Pratna Prize is sponsoring that pavilion. And so that's at the West End. And they started out with the blue beer, which is a blueberry beer, and then they top it with a foam again with the foam theme, and they top it with blue foam. Well, now they've they have Sangria beer that they can tap it with. They can tap it with all sorts of foam so you can mix the flavors. I go classic, blue beer, blue foam. AndStephanie Hansen (17:30.132)They have that raspberry beer flavored ice cream.Alex Lodner (17:34.327)The ice cream. They so this year it's it's double flavored and I cannot remember what the flavor of it. Peach, peach and raspberry. That was a surprising hit. We all dreaded getting that, I'll be honest. For the first year, it w we just were not sure what it was delicious. Yeah.Stephanie Hansen (17:38.76)Peach.Stephanie Hansen (17:50.442)I thought so too. And I think peach and you can either have peach, raspberry, or a swirl. I think that's gonna be a home run.Alex Lodner (17:57.092)I think so too. It was it didn't taste like beer. And again, speaking of suspending my personality for twelve days, I don't think you've ever seen me have a beer other when I'm forced to when I'm reviewing. And I just love that one. It's again very refreshing.Stephanie Hansen (18:09.608)I think I did do the we did the specialty beverages one year together and all the beers and you just were not having any of it. And I was like, Alex, this one is good.Alex Lodner (18:18.735)Well I was like I tastes like the last thirty, but sure. I've ran out of words. I no longer know how to describe this the taste of this beer. Combining all the beverages and all the official foods was just that was brutal.Stephanie Hansen (18:34.44)Yeah, it was a big day for everybody. Okay, let's talk about some non-fair things. Like one of the things that I really encourage people to do is to go to the llama parade.It is just such a weird, kitschy, funny, fun, joyful experience to see people leading around their llamas in costume. They're in costume. It's just this cute, fun, weird Americana thing that I love so much. Do you have other like activities that you do at the fair that kind of check this box?Alex Lodner (18:50.937)We always watch the parade. So at two o'clock there's always a parade through the fairgrounds. We sit in front of the Bailey House, which it's is that big, beautiful yellow country house at the south end. We always sit right in front of it in the same spot every year. I bring a blanket. We have a blanket that I only save for the fair. It's very lightweight. We just always, always watch that the bands are especially a treat. And if you sit in that area or in front of the admin building, you're actually sitting by the sp by the announcer.So the marching bands really tear it up in front of the announcer because that's where the judges are. So that's a little tip of that's where you if you really want to see them display their full talents, sit in front of the admin building in the South End and they'll really pull it out for ya. what else?I'm trying to think to just some other in I meanStephanie Hansen (20:05.064)Well, yeah, and like seed art or crop art has really blown up in the last couple of years. I really enjoy it and I have seen some of the entries on threads that like preview, they're just they blow your mind, they're so amazing. so that's something, but also like don't overlook like just going and going through like the vegetable buildings and seeing like the big pumpkins and the beautiful tomatoes. They're just like these weird little moments of joy of just seeing some of the cool stuff that people make.Alex Lodner (20:31.241)Mm-hmm. The giant pumpkins. Mm-hmm.Stephanie Hansen (20:44.594)When I go into the four H building where they do their performances, the kids have plays. That's really fun.Alex Lodner (20:49.687)Right. Yes. And it's a really nice place to rest. It they have nice bathrooms there. They have nice stadium seating and yeah, you're supporting these kids who've planned on this all year. It's in the robotics competitions are in the education building. That's what we always go through the education building. I would say we go through every building, but probably my favorite is International Bazaar. And admittedlyStephanie Hansen (20:44.594)Yeah. What do you like there?Alex Lodner (21:15.831)I just weave. I do all the weaves. I get I'm not wearing it right now, but I get a bracelet from a specific place that's Kitty Corner from Holy Land. I get one every year from there. And I just I've seen it all a thousand times and somehow I just I just still love it. my my daughter used to get the little stuffed animals that that have the little beads in them. So she's got a collection of it's a snake and a dragon and yeah, we justIt's just you know, it becomes really nostalgic after you go for a while. this is maybe food related, but I'd really wanna encourage people to visit one of the dining halls or the Midway Men's Club. It is food, but you know, we used to have ninety some church halls at the state fair from the in started in the eighteen hundreds, of course, that's all there was, but now there's only two left. There's Salem and Hamlin and Hamlin. And Hamlin has been thereStephanie Hansen (22:08.702)Salem and Hamlin. Mm-hmm.Alex Lodner (22:14.091)is since eighteen fifty two or eight fifteen eight or something like that. And so, you know, go sit in there for a minute. It's so lovely to see all the volunteers that work there. Get an un at coffee at Salem, get whatever at Hamlet. It's all good. And just take that moment and sit down at Hamlet. They have the little the red and white picnic tablecloths and you share a table with people and they will often you turn to them and they will tell you how they've you know it's aStephanie Hansen (22:23.092)Get an egg coffee.Alex Lodner (22:42.915)Great grandfather, grandfather, daughter kids, and they will tell you, I've been coming here since I was eight. And so it's just a really take that moment in that you're at the fair, you're experiencing something, whether it's a cup of coffee or whether it's a a llama, you're experiencing it with people who have memories about it. So chatting with with strangers at those community tables is just a favorite of mine. And Midway Men's Club is they've been volunteering.for years those are all volunteers. I don't know how much their burgers are, but they were three twenty five in previous years. Yeah. I mean, I I think maybe. Yeah. And we call them pocket burgers because they wrap them up so nicely that when when we get burgers, we would get one and then or two and get one put in our pocket. And so we theStephanie Hansen (23:16.522)They're always the cheapest. It doesn't they maybe will have to raise their prices, but I I think they were maybe five bucks, but still the cheapest at the fair.Alex Lodner (23:38.274)Apparently it's the coldest beer at the fair. Again, not a beer drink over here, but that's what they claim. And everything is the least expensive there. And again, you're doing some good. They give all their money to the r to activities in Ramsey County, a lot of kids centered activities. They're all volunteers. So just take a minute and not go for the fancy, the colorful, you know, the hot new thing. But remember those classics because we're gonna lose them. So and I just I just really think they deserve a moment.Stephanie Hansen (23:42.268)And the least expensive. Yeah, that's where Stephanie and I always go first thing after the radio show on Saturday morning. We start at the Midway Men's Club. Yep, we have a beer, we have a burger, we thank them for their service and for being there. And theAlex Lodner (24:10.691)The men's club? Yep.Yeah. Yeah. They're the nicest. They're just the absolute nicest people. They have those fun little bar stools you can sit on. It's yeah. I really just I just really think it's important. If we we all love the state fair and we all talk about it, but then we also complain about it and we have to remember, you know, to give our put our money where to some of those classics as well.Stephanie Hansen (24:37.692)Yeah, I also want to call out Peg's Diner or the Peg. it is a full service restaurant experience and same family has been running it. They have a great egg sandwich. So if you want to start your breakfast.Alex Lodner (24:41.207)Yes. I it's on my list. It's on my list to mention. Yep.Mm-hmm. The only one.Alex Lodner (24:52.685)That I was gonna I have I have that on my list. And this year they're gonna have the dill pickle chicken tender sandwich on an English muffin. Hello. Right? Yep. I wanna say it's I I no, it's not official. It's new but not official. It's the Mr. Peg dill pickle chicken tender sandwich, an English muffin with toppings. And they're also very reasonably priced. The peg is very reasonably priced. They have the outdoor seating.Stephanie Hansen (25:01.738)Okay, you had me there. I did not know about this.Alex Lodner (25:21.247)And it's just it's again, it's one of those times where when I go there, just like when I go to the dining halls, I wanna sit for a minute. I'm not in and out. I wanna take it all in. It's a great place to sit and people watch for a minute.Yeah, taking your time.Stephanie Hansen (25:34.143)Where do you like to shop? You mentioned the bazaar. Do you because I really like shopping in the West End. Yeah, there's a lot of Minnesota makers there that I'm excited about. IAlex Lodner (25:37.185)I don't shop at the fair.Alex Lodner (25:41.635)Do you? You're a bigger shopper than I am. I'm not a very good shopper. I'm a pretty impatient shopper. I look at it and I like you, I go to the I Like You store. And I usually Sarah's stuff is amazing. I have several of her t shirts. I have her hat. I don't know if we're supposed to swear on this show, but it says that okay, it's a sh s**t s**t show on the on the hat. And I like getting the attention from that. People cover their children's eyes. ButStephanie Hansen (25:56.819)Yeah, that's a great one. They have good t shirts.Alex Lodner (26:15.725)So I like that. I do get something from her most years, but I put my money on food. I'll just be honest about that. Yeah.Stephanie Hansen (26:22.514)Yeah. Before we wrap it up, Alex, I wanna know where your secret bathroom is. Cause I feel like everybody has a secret bathroom. Maybe it's one that's not as well traveled as the others.Alex Lodner (26:33.839)Yes.Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So there are good bathrooms in every quadrant. So I don't know if people know this, but the fair is divided into quadrant. They call it quadrant on the inside. And you'll notice that the benches, the benches that you can buy and name after someone, those are all different colors. Those are your quadrants. So yeah, so in front of, for example, in front of ballpark, it's they're all yellow.Stephanie Hansen (20:44.594)Okay, I did not know that. Good tip.Alex Lodner (27:06.699)And so if people the the bench that that we purchased is for our friend Hanzi, who you know, who passed away in twenty seventeen, and he his bench is in front of ballpark. So you sort of dedicate it to someone and put it in front of their favorite place. I digress. Those are quadrants and every quadrant has a good bathroom. You just have to sort of know where. The best ones, honestly, they're not so hidden, but the very end of West End.has the big so anytime you see a red brick building bathroom, they will also have water stations at the at either end of it. So bring your refillable water bottle. That's where you can refill water as well as other places. As well as other places throughout the fair, but you just always look for the red brick building. Those are somehow always clean. Always. In the grandstand, there are tucked away bathrooms that almost I don't think I've ever seen a line there.Stephanie Hansen (27:45.844)That's a good tip.Alex Lodner (28:03.863)And they're also spotless. There's one on either end of the grandstand. They're inside, so you sort of have to know where you're going.Stephanie Hansen (28:10.078)And they're kinda smaller, but they are nice.Alex Lodner (28:13.463)Yeah, they're they're not tiny. They're there's one that's bigger than the other. But yeah, they're they're always spotless. The cleaning crew do there just does a great job. over over in the north end I would say is your most challenging because that's where the food building is. I'm sorry, the south end. That's where the food building is. And so that gets to be a little bit busier traction there. But yeah.I'm loath to give up my secret spot, but I'm going to for you friends of the pod. And it is behind the giant slide. There is a bank of bathrooms back there that are clean, nice. They're right behind our Fox 9 booth, and a lot of TV station people know to go to those bathrooms. So those are good ones if you're looking.Alex Lodner (28:45.153)Okay.Alex Lodner (29:02.703)Well you you r you ruined you ruin it now. But that's one of my shortcuts. So one of the advantages of having of going so many times is people like going with me, not because I'm such great company, but because I lead them through people, you know, that it's gets so congested in front of the grandstand and there's different places where it pinches and I know all the hidden shortcuts and I will not be giving them away. But that's one of them. Right by those bathrooms. That's one of those shortcuts. Yeah.Stephanie Hansen (29:27.664)It is. There's another shortcut under the glider. Kind of by the i it's a back shortcut where youAlex Lodner (29:39.287)Are you gonna tell my shortcut? Do not wait, stop talking. Which short don't. Don't. That's my shortcut. No.Stephanie Hansen (29:45.34)I'm just gonna say it's a shortcut that takes you from the Colossian up to the north.Alex Lodner (29:52.716)I don't think Yes, Steph. We should have talked about this ahead of time. And they you know what? One year they put one year they put a fence up there and I saw the fence when I was heading towards it and I thought they were gonna cut us off, but they didn't. There's still an opening there.Stephanie Hansen (29:55.111)It I won't I'm just I'm just gonna say a AlexStephanie Hansen (30:09.938)Yeah, it's just smaller. It it's a handy one because the my talk one seven booth is up in that area and it's a handy quick to get up there. All right, well Alex, please.Alex Lodner (30:19.383)Yeah. And the best entrance, can we say the best entrance? The best entrance with no lines is right behind the the my talk. Harder to get to because there's no parking by it. But if you're willing to walk a little bit, there's never a line at that entrance. It's a secret little vendor entrance.Stephanie Hansen (30:34.282)Okay, I didn't know about that one.Alex Lodner (30:36.784)it's right behind your booth. Mm-hmm.Stephanie Hansen (30:38.142)Yeah, okay. So a secret entrance there. I always we always end up coming in where the where you come in where you rent the scooters and that area because we get dropped off. Yeah.Alex Lodner (30:49.335)At the north end. Yeah. Yeah, that's it's kind of a hike from there. But if you didn't want to walk through the crowds, if it was really crowded, especially for you guys on a Saturday morning, you don't go into the fair. You walk around on the outside of the fair and it will lay lead you to that secret. I'm j but we're just gonna have people wondering aimlessly now because of what I've just said. Ignore what I just said. Don't do that. People hundreds of people lost.Stephanie Hansen (31:06.954)Okay. Do you haveStephanie Hansen (31:12.17)No, do it, do it. Do you have yeah, I was gonna ask you one more question and I just totally can't do you have a park and ride location that you think is good?Alex Lodner (31:27.073)No, I have a little bit of a beef with Park and Ride, honestly. I know it's a great program. I know they're doing their best, but I believe this year they took away the suburban ones. Don't quote me on that, but I did not see them on the list. So the West suburbs used to only have one right by Ridgedale, and there were be lines across the highway. So it's across the highway from Trader Joe's. There would literally be lines across the highway. AndStephanie Hansen (31:51.604)Mm-hmm.Alex Lodner (31:54.466)So it they're just we're not enough in the suburbs. So you're I think what they're trying to get us to do, again, I'm not an official representative, but I think what they're trying to get you to do is to drive closer to the fair and then use a park and ride closer to the fair. So those buses aren't on the highway for a half an hour, which makes sense. So you want to drive into Roseville. my favorite is a new life presbyterian.Stephanie Hansen (32:02.281)Sure.Stephanie Hansen (32:19.242)Okay.Alex Lodner (32:20.001)There's it g it's getting more and more popular, but that's always a really good one. The people it's volunteers from that church. It's where Millie went to nursery school. And so that's our soft spot in our hearts.Stephanie Hansen (32:29.183)Okay. Okay, well I'll send people there then. On behalf of you and Millie. Alex said to come here.Alex Lodner (32:35.585)No, don't Great. Sorry, peeps for you know, I mean, you have a lot of listeners to this show. I'm not used to to having such an amplifier.Stephanie Hansen (32:45.542)You're funny. okay, so just on a personal note, since I have you here before we wrap up, what's next for you? I miss your writing.Alex Lodner (32:55.865)Thank you. I don't Steph, I don't know. I don't know. I've I've been in conversations with a few people. If you had asked me this a year ago, I would have said, absolutely not. I am retired. I'm living my best life. I'm gonna sort of pull a Steph Hanson this winter and be gone most of the winter. But I I miss it. Never thought never thought I'd say that. What's that?Stephanie Hansen (33:14.548)Mm-hmm.Well, and you can do remote work. Yeah. I it's when you can retire and choose your own life, it doesn't mean that you might not choose your old life. It just means that maybe yeah, may well, because I think people think you have to like do something completely different, but you gravitated to what you wanted to do for a reason. AndAlex Lodner (33:26.467)Mm-hmm.Alex Lodner (33:31.79)listen to you. Deep thoughts with Stephanie. It's true.Alex Lodner (33:43.887)True.Stephanie Hansen (33:45.066)what you get the flexibility and the privilege to do is to make it in the image of what you would like. Cause you have the flexibility to say no.Alex Lodner (33:55.074)Right. And I'll I'll say this to be clear. When I say retired, I retired from a very part-time job. So I've always had that privilege. I've been extremely fortunate to have created exactly the career I wanted and to be able to do exactly what I wanted. So and to work with you know, I'm really, really mean this, the best people, right? You and I know that. We worked with the best people of theStephanie Hansen (34:06.025)Yeah.Alex Lodner (34:21.993)Our our community is tiny in the Twin Cities. There's maybe 10 of us that do this. And I love every single one of these people that I've worked with. And so going back to that doesn't is not gonna be a you know, it's it's because it's something that I enjoyed all along. I did not leave it because I wasn't enjoying it anymore. I'd left it because of, as you know, some life changes. So things are settling down andStephanie Hansen (34:42.462)Yeah.Alex Lodner (34:49.899)We'll see. We'll see. You and I will talk. W we'll go have a non a non beer. I'll have coffee, you'll have a beer and we'll figure it out.Stephanie Hansen (34:52.326)Yeah, please keep me in the loop. Yeah. Maybe we'll see each other at the fair this year.Alex Lodner (35:01.283)Possibly I don't work on Saturday, but I might just pop in just to wave at you. I love doing that. I love harassing people from the bleachers.Stephanie Hansen (35:04.894)Okay.Yes, we will be live at Weekly Dish. I will be at Fox, yeah, 9 a.m. Saturday, 9 to 11 at Weekly Dish up in the North End, the first. And then I'll be at Fox Thursday and Friday. We have two-hour shows. The first hour is our national show. Our second hour is our local show. It'll be 10 to noon. And then at noon to th 12:30, I'll be doing a book signing at Fox.Alex Lodner (35:11.534)Nine AMAlex Lodner (35:16.291)The first Saturday. There's two Saturdays. So you're there the first Saturday, right? Yeah. Mm-hmm.Alex Lodner (35:25.763)What what time?Stephanie Hansen (35:37.412)on both days. And then Saturday I'll do a book signing after Weekly Dish ends at 11 for a half hour. And then Monday I'll be back and I'll be on Fox in the 10 o'clock hour. And then in the 11 o'clock hour I'm co-hosting with Jason for that day. And then I'll do a book signing after that. So yeah, lots of fun activities planned.Alex Lodner (35:37.485)Goodness.fun.Okay. All right. I'll have you text me that because I am not gonna remember anything you just said. But I'll have you text me my s thank you, and I will pop in. I I know the secret door.Stephanie Hansen (36:03.795)I will text you. Okay. Thanks, Alex. Yeah, and I forgot to tell you this when we started. Give yourself about 20 seconds before you log off just to make sure that the podcast catches up with our voices. Yeah, exactly. Okay. All right. See you.Alex Lodner (36:18.97)So I'm not just out. Peace out. All right. Talk to you, Love.Stephanie Hansen's @StephaniesDish Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stephaniehansen.substack.com/subscribe

The boys get together to discuss the midweek road victory over Seattle Sounders. Before the recap they talk about the rumored playoff format changes reported by The Guardian on Thursday along with some puzzling Instagram activity. Then they dive into the Wednesday night win and preview Saturday's return to Q2 Stadium to take on Philadelphia Union before closing out the episode with Last Business Day. 0:30 - Intro 4:15 - Reported MLS playoff format changes 13:20 - "Extend Ramirez" 23:50 - Lineup reactions 31:40 - Seattle Sounders recap 1:00:30 - Postgame takeaways 1:06:10 - Philadelphia Union preview 1:21:55 - Last Business Day Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Bill rambles about being 'out to sea', getting fired, and a North-End gig.(00:00) - Thursday Afternoon Podcast(36:41) - Thursday Afternoon Throwback 8-20-18 - Bill rambles about sun stroke, robots, and pretzel rolls.Thursday Afternoon Interlude: Les Baxter - Jewel Of The SeaQuo: Try QUO for free PLUS get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to http://www.Quo.com/BURRPolicy Genius: Head to http://www.PolicyGenius.com to compare life insurance quotes from top companies and see how much you could save.SimpliSafe: Celebrate their anniversary with us and save 60% on your new SimpliSafe system at http://www.SimpliSafe.com/BURRSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The boys went LIVE on their YouTube channel on Thursday afternoon to discuss the reported hiring of Khaled El-Ahmad as the club's new Chief Soccer Officer. 0:30 - Intro 3:35 - El-Ahmad's background 6:55 - Early fan reactions 11:50 - Potential for moves this window? 23:45 - Dream first move? 27:30 - Austin FC has a type 28:35 - Potential red flags 35:05 - Bogert highlights Costalas Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Willett BakerySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The boys get together to talk through Sunday night's Copa Tejas loss against FC Dallas. They discuss the hapless first half from the Verde and Black and celebrate the continued ascension of Ervin Torres. Then they close out the episode with a preview of Wednesday's road match against Seattle Sounders and Last Business Day. 0:30 - Intro 8:45 - Lineup reactions 17:45 - FC Dallas recap 54:50 - Postgame takeaways 1:07:35 - Seattle Sounders preview 1:19:45 - Last Business Day Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The boys get together to recap Austin FC's Thursday night penalty shootout win over Club América to qualify for the quarterfinals of the 2026 Leagues Cup. They talk through the intense night at Q2 Stadium before previewing Sunday's Copa Tejas clash against FC Dallas. Then they close out the episode with Last Business Day and the definitely-not-forgotten victory song. 0:30 - Intro 9:15 - Andy Loughnane named CEO of Austin FC 11:35 - Lineup reactions 18:40 - Club América recap 53:50 - Postgame takeaways 1:04:55 - Quarterfinal schedule released 1:09:15 - Little Leslies 1:13:15 - FC Dallas preview 1:33:35 - Last Business Day Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It's a beautiful Friday morning, but the news is what's really making headlines. From sports to crime, and from Hollywood to local events, this episode has a little bit of everything.This episode covers a range of topics, from the world of sports where the Red Sox are back on track after a big win, to the Patriots' practice game against the Colts, which ended in a tie. We also discuss the exciting news of the Bridgewater Little Leaguers making it to the Little League World Series for the first time in 70 years. In other news, Jalen Brown's surprise announcement about attending MIT has everyone talking, and we dive into the latest updates on the Lindsay Clancy trial, including some disturbing Google search history.The speaker also touches on the upcoming Spider-Man movie, which is breaking box office records, and highlights some of the fun events happening around town this weekend, including the Elephant Migration in Boston and the Fisherman's Feast in the North End. With so much going on, it's a great time to catch up on the latest news.If you want to hear more about these stories and get the inside scoop, tune in to this episode to hear the full discussion.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The boys get together to recap the Sunday night victory over Club Puebla. They discuss Myrto Uzuni's hat trick and where he's positioned himself on the club's all-time leading scorer's list before previewing Thursday's decisive match against Club América and how Austin FC can qualify for the knockout round of Leagues Cup. Then they close out the episode with Last Business Day. 0:30 - Intro 5:55 - Lineup reactions 11:00 - Club Puebla recap 44:30 - Postgame takeaways 55:05 - Club América preview 1:17:00 - Last Business Day Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The boys get together to give an update on Patreon happenings this month, discuss the new MLS Commissioner and another edition of Reckless Speculation. Then they recap the midweek win against Club Tijuana and preview Sunday's match against Club Puebla before closing it out with Last Business Day and the nonsense. 0:30 - Intro 4:05 - Patreon updates 10:25 - New MLS Commissioner 12:55 - Reckless Speculation 24:15 - Lineup reactions 27:35 - Club Tijuana recap 59:10 - Postgame takeaways 1:05:30 - Club Puebla preview 1:20:35 - Last Business Day 1:31:05 - Best Ball update Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The boys get together to talk through the loan of Nico Dubersarsky and the signing of Jorge Alastuey. Then they recap Saturday's loss against Colorado Rapids before closing out the episode with a preview of the first Leagues Cup "Phase 1" match against Club Tijuana. 0:30 - Intro 5:30 - Austin FC loans Nico Dubersarsky & signs Jorge Alastuey 13:05 - Third kit pre-release party for STHs 14:40 - Lineup reactions 26:40 - Colorado Rapids recap 1:07:20 - Postgame takeaways 1:22:35 - Club Tijuana preview Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The boys get together to discuss the news of the week including potentially sweeping MLS roster rule changes, some coaching staff crumbs and a Dubersarsky rumor update. Then they preview Saturday's road match against Colorado Rapids before closing out the episode with Last Business Day and the nonsense. 0:30 - Intro 2:50 - Los Verdes watch party 4:05 - MLS roster rule change proposal 15:05 - New Senior VP of Soccer Strategy 18:50 - Dubersarsky loan rumor update 21:50 - Colorado Rapids preview 54:45 - Last Business Day 1:05:15 - Picks recap 1:06:30 - Best Ball update Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The boys get together to recap the disaster in Houston on Saturday night. First they address a law enforcement investigation into allegations involving academy players. Then they break down a pair of rumors that popped up late in the week before working their way through the 3-0 dude wiping of Austin FC at the hands of their biggest rival, including some unfortunate word choice in the postgame press conference and visible tension between Jayden Nelson and the interim coaching staff on the sidelines. 0:30 - Intro 3:00 - Academy players under investigation 8:30 - Rumor mill 21:05 - Lineup reactions 27:55 - Houston recap 1:03:50 - Postgame takeaways Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

WBZ NewsRadio’s James Rojas reports.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The boys get together to discuss the return to MLS play for Austin FC. They recap Brad Stuver bobblehead night, the match against the Seattle Sounders and what turned into the Ervin Torres show by the final whistle. Then they preview Saturday's Copa Tejas clash against Houston Dynamo before closing out the episode with Last Business Day. 0:30 - Intro 4:15 - Dani Pereira's IG comment 8:30 - Rumor mill 11:15 - Lineup reactions 23:35 - Seattle Sounders recap 55:15 - Postgame takeaways 1:04:30 - Houston Dynamo preview 1:24:20 - Last Business Day Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sue and Kendra kicked off their search for New England's best lobster roll by chatting with Richard Travaglione, owner of North End Lobster Company—one of the Top 5 lobster spots recommended by listeners—as the battle for ultimate bragging rights begins.

For America's 250th year, Denise Ilitch talks with two veterans who took very different paths. Our first guest is Evan Fay, who spent 10 years in the Air Force, rising to major as a nuclear missile officer and munitions leader in Wyoming and Alaska. He then moved to Detroit to launch Café Noir in the North End and Roar Brewing Company, the city's first Black-owned brewery. He explains why veterans make strong entrepreneurs, what "Service Before Self" cost him, and how the Lions, Tigers, and Motor City inspired the name Roar. Next is Khadijah Queen, who enlisted in the Navy to escape family hardship and pay for college, then earned a PhD and became an award-winning poet and memoirist. Her book, "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea", won a Michigan Notable Books award. She talks about truth-telling, banned books, and reframing adversity through imagination, and she reads from her poem "Anodyne." Two honest, wide-ranging conversations about where service leads, how a life gets rebuilt, and what it takes to make something of your own.

The boys are back to get you ready for Austin FC's return to MLS play! They discuss their takeaways from Saturday's open training session at Q2 Stadium and recap everything that's happened in the Austin FC universe during the World Cup break. Then they preview Wednesday's home match against the Seattle Sounders before closing out the episode with Last Business Day and the nonsense. 0:30 - Intro 6:10 - World Cup wrap-up 11:05 - Open Training takeaways 23:55 - Recapping Austin's World Cup break 37:30 - Seattle Sounders preview 1:03:35 - Last Business Day 1:12:25 - Picks recap Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The boys get together to discuss the Austin FC news of the week. They talk through Austin's preseason results, what it means for the team when the transfer window opens on Monday and chat about the latest transfer rumors circling the fan base. Then they close out the episode with Last Business Day and The Boy Factory. 0:30 - Intro 3:10 - USMNT bows out of the 2026 World Cup 10:15 - World Cup Draft Challenge scenarios 12:40 - MLS games this week 14:30 - Sporting JAX recap 16:25 - Brad Stuver bobblehead night 19:05 - Transfer window opening 23:15 - Rumor mill 27:55 - Final preseason tune-up + Open training 30:10 - Last Business Day 43:05 - The Boy Factory Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The boys get together to recap a busy Austin FC news week including a new player signing, two trades and a first look at the new "Violet Crown" kit. Then they answer a variety of listener questions from North End Patreon members before closing out the episode with Last Business Day. 0:30 - Intro 3:10 - Blood drive at Q2 Stadium 5:30 - Austin FC trades international slot 8:00 - Przemysław Płacheta signing wrap-up 10:20 - Dani Pereira trade wrap-up 12:35 - Querétaro recap 15:30 - Violet Crown kit leaked 19:15 - World Cup check-in 28:10 - Listener questions 1:06:05 - Last Business Day Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The boys went LIVE on their YouTube channel on Thursday afternoon to discuss Austin FC's trade of Dani Pereira to CF Montreal in exchange for $2.1 million in guaranteed GAM, another $250k in conditional GAM and an undisclosed sell-on percentage. 0:30 - Intro 4:05 - Initial fan reactions 7:15 - Who is making these decisions? 13:55 - Revisiting last summer's Dani rumors 21:10 - More fan reactions 24:40 - Shifting expectations for the rest of 2026 31:15 - Reading through the club's press release 35:10 - GAM refresher 45:45 - Favorite Dani Pereira memories Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

WBZ NewsRadio's Kyle Bray has more.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The boys went LIVE on their YouTube channel to discuss the signing of Polish winger Przemysław "Shemmy" Płacheta. They talk through their expectations for Shemmy in ATX and discuss the state of the team with viewers who were tuned in live. 0:30 - Intro 3:45 - Austin FC signs Płacheta 10:25 - Where does the roster stand? 18:05 - Expectations for Płacheta 26:25 - Guilherme Biro tangent 28:20 - Concerns about the signing Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The boys get together to recap a relatively quiet week in the Austin FC universe. They talk through what to expect as friendlies start up this Friday in preparation for the return to MLS play and draft their Austin FC All-Time "Worst XI's" before closing out the episode with Last Business Day and the nonsense. 0:30 - Intro 2:40 - LV watch party for Mexico vs Ecuador 5:30 - Jayden Nelson World Cup check-in 6:45 - What to expect this week for Austin FC 10:20 - Where is our sporting director? 17:40 - Friendlies begin Friday 19:45 - "Worst XI" Draft 45:35 - Last Business Day 1:01:40 - World Cup Draft Challenge update Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The boys get together to recap a relatively busy week of Austin FC news. They talk through the latest Dani Pereira rumor that came and went, the contract buyout of Robert Taylor and the return of Terry Boss as an assistant coach while sprinkling in some reckless speculation along the way. Then they close out the episode with Last Business Day and the nonsense. 0:30 - Intro 6:55 - LV watch party for Mexico vs Czechia 11:15 - Jayden Nelson World Cup check-in 18:00 - Friendlies announced 20:50 - Uzuni still in Europe? 24:55 - Dani Pereira trade rumor 36:55 - Robert Taylor contract buyout 45:15 - Terry Boss rejoins Austin FC coaching staff 47:05 - Last Business Day 1:00:10 - World Cup Draft Challenge update Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Mayor Wu continues her mission to destroy the North End, as a restaurant fights to keep its patio. Then, Grace plays more clips of V.P. Vance from his appearance on The View.  Visit the Howie Carr Radio Network website to access columns, podcasts, and other exclusive content.

The boys get together to discuss the Austin FC news of the week. They celebrate Jayden Nelson making the Canadian national team for the 2026 World Cup, deep dive the welcome press conference for new head coach Jim Curtin and answer some listener questions before closing out the episode with Last Business Day. 0:30 - Intro 4:50 - Jayden Nelson makes WC squad 8:05 - International results 9:15 - Farewell Nico Bosch 12:25 - Jim Curtin welcome press conference + listener questions 51:10 - Last Business Day Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The boys went live on their YouTube channel to discuss the Monday afternoon announcement that Austin FC has hired former Philadelphia Union manager Jim Curtin as the club's third head coach. 0:30 - Intro 5:25 - Combing through a lengthy press release 13:50 - Sporting Director speculation 17:15 - Coach Curtin's style of play 25:55 - R.O.S. with Arnaud at the helm 34:55 - Players on the move? 43:10 - Schedule after the break Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The boys get together to discuss the Austin FC news of the week including more details on the new third kit to be released in August and the club's first bobblehead recipient being confirmed. Then they talk with Adrian Healey and Coach Nick Cowell about their "Beyond the Touchline" podcast and the state of Austin FC before previewing the 2026 FIFA World Cup and closing it out with The North End's 2026 World Cup Draft Challenge. 0:30 - Intro 3:55 - TNEP World Cup Draft Challenge 6:30 - Third kit details 9:55 - Theme nights announced 15:25 - International results 26:15 - Adrian Healey & Coach Cowell join The North End 28:40 - Beyond the Touchline podcast 46:25 - The state of Austin FC 59:30 - World Cup preview 1:11:10 - Adrian, Coach, E and ZG select their World Cup Draft Challenge squads 1:31:40 - Analyzing the picks Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter 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 of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins sits down with author Frank Hayde to explore his latest book, Hoffa's Connection. Hayde, a Kansas City native and noted mob historian, brings forward a largely overlooked figure in organized crime history—Sylvia Pagano. The conversation centers on Pagano's rise from Kansas City to Detroit, where she operated at the intersection of organized crime and labor unions under Jimmy Hoffa. Known for her effectiveness as a union organizer, Pagano infiltrated workplaces, signed up members, and quietly maintained ties to powerful mob figures. Her ability to navigate both worlds made her a key behind-the-scenes operator during a volatile era in American labor history. Hayde details Pagano's role in helping broker alliances between the Mafia and the Teamsters during a turbulent strike, marking a turning point in the relationship between organized crime and labor. Drawing from FBI wiretaps, he reveals candid conversations that shed light on her relationships with influential mob leaders like Tony Giacalone and Moe Dalitz, emphasizing her strategic importance across multiple crime families. The episode also explores the life of Chucky O’Brien, who grew up surrounded by Hoffa and organized crime figures. Through Hayde's research and interviews, listeners gain insight into the generational impact of mob ties, as well as the strict code of silence that governed both mother and son. Beyond individual stories, the discussion expands to the broader national network connecting crime families and labor unions. Pagano's reach extended well beyond regional boundaries, illustrating how organized crime leveraged union influence across the country. This episode offers a fresh perspective on the enduring mystery surrounding Hoffa's disappearance by examining the deeper historical context—and the overlooked players like Sylvia Pagano who helped shape it. It's a detailed look at power, loyalty, and survival within the American Mafia. The book is Hoffa’s Connections:The Story of Sylvia Pagano: the Kansas City Girl at the Center of the Mafia’s Alliance with the Teamsters Union  xxx [0:00] Hey, all you wiretappers out there, good to be back here in the studio of Gangland [0:03] Wire. This is Gary Jenkins. I’m a retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective, later sergeant. I have this podcast, Gangland Wire. I’ve got a website. If you want to go check my website out, I’ve got a few things for sale on there. And you can go rent the documentaries I’ve done about the Kansas City mob on Amazon. Just search my name. I’m all over the internet. Just search my name and mafia and you’ll find more you ever wanted to know about me and the mob and what I’ve done. And today I have a really a former Kansas City boy, a Kansas City native who has done several books on the mob, particularly the Kansas City mob. And he’s got a most recent one that I find just really fascinating. It’s a little known story that will help shed the light on Jimmy Hoffa, a little bit more light than most of you ever knew. There’s some questions that I had myself that’s not really in the in the popular culture about Jimmy Hoffa. It’s Frank Hayde. Welcome, Frank. Thanks, Gary. Great to be with you again. All right, Frank. We’ve done Mafia Dreams and Mafia and the Machine. So tell the guys a little bit about yourself and your books. [1:13] I grew up in Kansas City. My family stretches way back in Kansas City, and they were involved in the political machine under Pendergast, and so I heard a lot of stories about those days growing up. Later in my career with the National Park Service, I worked a short stint at the Harry Truman National Historic Site, where I learned more about local history, more about the political machine and the mob in Kansas City. So that’s where my interest started. [1:39] And then many years later, I wrote The Mafia and the Machine, and then followed that up with some of these other books, including this most recent one, Hoffa’s Connection, the story of Sylvia Pagano, the Kansas City girl at the center of the Mafia’s alliance with the Teamsters. You know, that’s the mouthful, I know. You know how it is with the subtitle. You can try to get the, summarize the entire book in your subtitle. So, that’s what that is. Yeah. When you look up a book or you see it online or whatever, you want to know quickly what it’s about. So I see that title, Hoffa. Oh, that’s interesting. I thought everything was done about Hoffa. Then you got this subtitle in here and you say, oh, that’s interesting. I didn’t know about this. And I didn’t myself, this Sylvia Pagano. And the story starts in Kansas City. It’s a fascinating story, guys. I want to tell you, it is a fascinating story. [2:31] But before we get started, Frank was a park ranger, a law enforcement park ranger for the National Park Service for 20 years. And he has a really interesting mob interaction when he was in, I believe you run a temporary assignment out in California. Tell the guys about your mafia interaction as a law enforcement officer. [2:53] Yeah. So I was actually at the park service 32 years. 20 of those were law enforcement and just retired. But in the summer of 2024, I got to go out to Redwood National Park on what we call a detail, which is a temporary assignment. They were shorthanded and needed a little extra help. And I knew the place pretty well because I had worked there earlier in my career. So I went out there and it’s a beautiful place. And I was on patrol and I came upon a campsite and there was some violations going on. Nothing major, just the typical stuff that we see as park rangers. And I contacted the occupants of this campsite and I got their licenses and I was back in my vehicle running the licenses. There was a male and a female and the female, I noticed it was a New York license and Brooklyn address and last name is Scarpa. I said, no, that can’t be. That’d be too much of a coincidence. And ran the information, recontacted the subject. And I asked the female, I said, by any chance, are you related to Greg Scarpa? She said, oh, yeah, that was my grandfather. And Greg Jr. was my father. [4:02] And I guess I had to laugh. And by then, I had already written a ticket or two, I think, for just petty offenses. And so I handed her ticket and then asked her if she’d take a picture with me. But she was real nice. She understood that people don’t mind, and she was great. She took a picture with me, and she was more than happy to talk about her father and her grandfather. And it was all very interesting and just quite the coincidence. Yeah, really. That was quite a coincidence. Not only the main coincidence was that you knew her. And then a lot of people might know the name. You really knew the name. Yeah, no. And you had this whole interest in it to talk about. Yeah, I can tell you that 99% of park rangers, you have no idea. Now, if you’re a Brooklyn cop, that’s different. But I was probably the only park ranger alive that would have made that connection because of my interest in the topic. I’ve been trying to get Greg Scarlett Jr. to come on. He’s made some intimations to somebody else. He followed my Facebook group, and I followed his. And so I don’t know. I reached out indirectly. I don’t know exactly how to get a hold of him. Maybe I’ll package this little story up and I’ll send that to him. Maybe that’ll get him to come on the show. Except you wrote the tickets, damn it. That’s the problem. I hope he won’t come after me to write in his daughter’s tickets. Yeah. [5:25] All right, Frank. So let’s go in this most recent book, Hoffa’s Connection. How did you, Sylvia Pagano, how did you even get onto that name other than, did you start, she’s Chucky O’Brien’s mother, who most guys know if you’re really into Hoffa at all, or even on the little bit, Chucky O’Brien was, everybody thought he was like his illegitimate son a lot of times or his surrogate son. And he was really close to Hoffa and drove him around. I was going through your book. He was a guy that Hoffa could send around to other mob people because he was half Italian himself and both sides trusted him to carry messages and do meetings and things like that. So how did you get onto this originally? So I got a call from Jack Goldsmith, who’s a very interesting man because he is the learned hand professor of law at Harvard University, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, former assistant attorney general under President Bush. But for me, the most interesting thing about him was that he is Chucky O’Brien’s stepson. [6:29] And he was working on his book, Inhofe’s Shadow, when he contacted me. It’s a great book. I would recommend it to all the wiretappers. But it’s about Chucky. And he wanted to know if I had come across any information on Chucky O’Brien in my research for the Mafia and the Machine, because Chucky was from Kansas City. I said, what? Chucky O’Brien was from Kansas City? Because I knew all about Chucky O’Brien, but I had no idea he was from Kansas City. So that shocked me. And I don’t think very few people knew that. His Kansas City roots were scarcely known. Everybody just thought of Chucky as a Detroit guy. But when I finally read Goldsmith’s book, it’s about Chucky, but he touches on Sylvia. And I found what he wrote about Sylvia to be completely fascinating, especially because she was Kansas City. And so I thought, shoot, she’s in my wheelhouse. I thought, wow, she would make a great subject for a book. But I balked at it because she was so secretive that she left hardly anything information, hardly any documents exist about Sylvia. It’s just she wasn’t like the men that she associated with who were so extensively documented. There was just very little known about her, not even very many photographs in existence. [7:44] But fortunately, I got together with Pat Faisal in Kansas City. He’s a terrific researcher. You’ve worked with him a lot, Gary. You’ve had him on your show, I think. I think he’s written a couple of really important books on local history, and he had come across her independently of me, and through his own research, he had stumbled on just a brief mention or two of Sylvia Pagano in various FBI documents. [8:09] And so we decided to put our heads together, and Pat helped me with the research, did the lion’s share of the research, fed it to me, and then I would write the story. And that’s how it came together. [8:21] Interesting. And Frank, one of the coolest things, the research that Pat found was those wiretaps or bugs that the illegal bugs the FBI had in her house. And so they got a lot of really great conversations and they’re all transcribed and out there for somebody to find. So to me, that was fascinating. [8:45] Yes, that was probably our best source are these transcripts from the illegal microphones that the FBI placed in homes and businesses of organized crime associates all over the country back in the 60s. Got some great information from those. Sylvia talking freely in her apartment. Candidly, because she doesn’t know anybody’s list. And they had him in Tony Giacalone’s home juice company in Detroit also. And Sylvia was often a topic of conversation over there as well. By the way, Tony Giacalone was Sylvia’s paramour for many years. They had a long affair. People who think that Sylvia had an affair with Hoffa that produced Chucky O’Brien, [9:28] And that is not accurate. Chucky, we know who Chucky’s father was. He was a criminal out of St. Louis from the time he was a boy and went to prison when he was a young guy, was recruited from prison to come to Kansas City and work as a driver, for none other than Charlie Banagio. And so that put him right at the center of the action. [9:53] And Sylvia, having married the young man that put her right, she was already at the center of the action because she knew all the movers and shakers in the North End at that time already from the time she was a girl. But they became very much a part of Banagio’s network. And this was one fact that really blew me away that I didn’t know. And I don’t think you know it or Owsley or O’Malley or really anybody in Kansas City that Charlie Banagio was Chuckie O’Brien’s godfather. Yeah, I didn’t know that. Yeah. That is interesting. So Sylvia Pagano, she lives down there in the North End, what we call the North End folks, which is our little Italy. There’s a big church that anchors that neighborhood. And that’s where all the people came from Southern Italy and Sicily, moved into Kansas City and were associated with the church down there. After them, the Vietnamese came in and the church sponsored a lot of the Vietnamese and settled in that same neighborhood as it became a shifting neighborhood. So she’s down over there in Little Italy or the North End. And she meets a guy named Michael. Was it Three Fingers? [11:03] Oh, yeah. Frankie. Frankie Three Fingers. Coppola. Coppola, yeah. So tell us about that relationship. Yeah, that’s really interesting because Frankie Three Fingers… Hasn’t really been chronicled much as part of the Kansas City family. Because he was a roving guy, he had a lot of clout in both Italy and the U.S., and he had memberships in multiple families, and he was a high-ranking status too. So wherever he went, whether it was Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, St. Louis, New York, New Orleans, he was all over the place, and he was well-respected wherever he went. But he was in Kansas City for quite a long time. He was strongly associated with Padagio. And it appears from all the evidence, as well as testimony from organized crime experts in Detroit, that Frankie Three Fingers escorted Sylvia to Detroit after her marriage with Charles O’Brien ended in about 1941 in Kansas City. [12:13] So Sylvia arrives in Detroit on the arm of Frank Coppola, and that put her on the fast track to getting to know the upper echelon of the Detroit family and mobsters, top mobsters beyond Detroit. Coppola was associated with Costello in his slot machine racket down in New Orleans. [12:36] And later, after he got deported back to Italy, He worked with Lucky Luciano to put together the whole narcotics syndicate network that included the French Connection. So tremendously influential as a mobster. Sylvia could really not have picked a more influential and well-connected guy as a boyfriend. That really put her on the fast track to getting to know a lot of the most powerful guys in the country. Really interesting guy. Frank Copeland. I’ll just say it and maybe someone else can run with it. I don’t know if it’ll be me or not, but he would make a great subject for a book. Yeah, he’s not very well known. And the mob used to have this guy, Nikolai Gentile. He traveled around to different families and brokered different deals. I think back before communication was so fast and you didn’t fly from one city to the other, you had to take a train. That’s a whole day on the train to get one city to the other. Telephone communication wasn’t that good. You didn’t hardly make long distance phone calls back there in the 20s and 30s. I don’t think they were hard. So you have guys like this that then travel around and take messages that are trusted by the different cities. And so he had to be one of those guys. [13:52] You’re exactly right. In fact, he knew Nicola Gentile. [13:58] Gentile is also, I speak about him in this book also. He plays a role, a pretty important one, and he describes some events that are really fascinating. This story actually doesn’t begin in Kansas City. It begins in Pueblo, Colorado. There’s three geographic areas that are really emphasized in this story. Pueblo, Colorado, Kansas City, and Detroit. But Nicola Gentili and Frank Coppola knew each other in the United States, and they knew each other in Italy. And you’re exactly right, they had a similar role as traveling diplomats within the mafia. Very interesting. Not too many other guys, especially later on. They had Johnny Roselli, who was really well-traveled, and some others. But in those early days, a couple of these guys, Coppola, Gentile, I don’t know if there was any others or not, but that was what they did. They were all over the place, and they were so well-connected, and they really had memberships in multiple families. And that seems to have faded away later. You didn’t hear too much about guys that had more than one member. So occasionally somebody would switch families, but yeah, they were really interesting, [15:11] real, what you would call international mystery men, I think. Interesting. So she had an affair with him, and he brought her up to Detroit and started making connections in Detroit, if I remember the story right, with the Jackalones. And so what. [15:27] Take us on from there. How does she then move in with Hoffa? And she’s like in the middle between the Peckerwood truck drivers and the Italian mob, which they both needed each other and they worked well together for a long time. So how does she end up in the center of that? Yeah, she’s still quite young when she gets to Detroit. She’s just early 20s, maybe mid 20s at that point. But and here she is she’s immediately meeting all of the wise guys but she was still she needed a job she needed work i’m sure coppola helped her out to some extent but he had his own wife he had his own he probably had another mistress or two as well i mean she needed to make a she needed to make a living and raise her son chucky and um she got a job with the teamsters at that time in In Detroit, unions were strong. There was a lot of unions, and it was the capital of industrial unionism at that time. And so that just became a natural choice. She ended up meeting Burke Brennan initially, actually, even before Hoffa. Brennan was Hoffa’s right-hand guy. [16:36] And he gave her a job with the Teamsters as a salter. She was an organizer, and a good one, and a legit organizer. But her specialty was salting. Now, what’s that? So she was a union representative, and she would get a job in a factory or a warehouse, just an ordinary job. And she would go to work, just like everybody else, punch the clock. But while she was there, her real objective was signing other people up to join the union. So she’s like a secret agent in a way, buried into the normal workforce, but with a real different agenda. And she was real good at it. And the union guys noticed that she worked really hard and she was loyal and that she would keep her mouth shut. And so those were the same qualities that the mob guys admired. So this was at the time, though, and this is very important, when most of the unions and the mob were still at odds with each other. Back then, the gangsters were getting hired by companies to break strikes and to oppose unions. [17:47] And there was a particularly bad strike going on. It lasted a long time. The Teamsters were striking the Detroit Lumber Company. This was at about 42. And it was violent. And Hoffa could see the writing on the wall that the Teamsters were losing the battle. It went on and on. It was violent. And that’s where Sylvia Pagano stepped in. Burt Brennan told Jimmy Hoffa he should talk to Facci. Facci was Italian for face. And that was Sylvia’s nickname that she got when she was young back in Kansas City. Had a very pretty face. And so they called her the face. So Hoffa talked to Fauci and she set up a basically like a summit meeting peace conference, more or less. And they brokered a deal where the mob switched sides and became allies with the Teamsters against the Detroit Lumber Company. So that was really the moment that changed history, brought the mafia into the Teamsters orbit and vice versa. And that’s all traceable right back to Sylvia Pagano. [18:55] Wow. That’s interesting. I always wondered what the genesis of that was with Hoffa and the mob. And of course, we can see how it developed, but what that actual birth of that was. I think you’ve stumbled across the birth of it. You also… [19:11] We’re able to stumble across the birth of the Eastern families and New York families connection to Hoffa, which that that gets even bigger. Tell us a little bit about that. She was involved in that, believe it or not, guys. And just like in Detroit, back in New York, there’s Johnny Dio. He was busting up labor union strikes for the companies. Yeah, I think that to some degree in New York, New Jersey, that some Teamsters locals had already been infiltrated by the mafia independently and maybe unbeknownst to Hoffa in Detroit. But it really became a big thing with Hoffa and with Sylvia’s brokering that alliance. Little isolated examples of mob infiltration, I think, were already happening in Detroit. But once again, as Hoffa’s progressing in his career, moving up the ranks, he always had his eye on the top job. He wanted to be the president of the IBT. And of course, he knew he needed help in the Northeast for that, to realize that goal. And so with Sylvia helped set up meetings with Tony Ducks Corral Johnny Diagordi Tony Provenzano and Sylvia had gotten to know Provenzano in Detroit because he had strong connections to Detroit let’s see his cousin was married to. [20:39] Tony Giacalone’s cousin was married to Tony Pro, I believe, or vice versa. That’s your book. Yeah. I’d have to go back and read my own book. Yeah, it’s hard to keep up. Hard to remember all the details. All these players. Giacalone’s cousin was married to Provenzano. And so Sylvia had already met Provenzano in Detroit. And Chucky, her son, had already started calling him Uncle Tony. And so she had this great connection to Provenzano. And so she helped facilitate the Teamsters Mob Alliance in New York and New Jersey, just as she had in Detroit. And then it goes on from there. Then she later, we’re moving forward now, but she would later become the link between Hoffa and his closest contact in Cleveland, which was Moe Daylitz. She became the link between Hoffa and Alan Dorfman in Chicago. And she became the link between Hoffa and the Sevilla brothers in Kansas City. So she really was, and this is all, they taught, there’s a, from those FBI tapes, those illegal FBI tapes, we have Tony Zarelli and Nick Sevilla in Florida speaking about Sylvia Pagano and her relationship as a liaison between the Detroit family and between the Kansas City family. Like, there’s your proof right there. Not that you need it. She was really… [22:09] The guys, a lot of them really liked, adored her in the sense of she did have an affair with a couple of them, and she was a good-looking woman. A lot of them had, Moe Dalitz was known to have a crush on Sylvia, possibly an affair with Sylvia. But she was more than your mob mole, right? She was a dealmaker. She was an advisor. She was a liaison. She brought money to the table. She did deals with the guys. She helped broker some pension fund loans, all these things. So what I like to say about Sylvia is that we all know that the mob never inducted women into their ranks. But if they had, Sylvia Pagana would have been their first choice because she worked hard. She was loyal. [22:56] She kept her mouth shut. And she really lived truer to the code than some of the men did. She was 100% omerta. She really was. and she learned that in the north end of Kansas City, where Umerta was extremely strong even up into this century after it wasn’t so strong in other places and so she passed that on to Chucky O’Brien. He was also a real strong adherent to the code of silence. Yeah, I think we have to remember Chucky O’Brien was half Italian. His father was Italian. No. [23:33] So his mother, Sylvia, was the Italian. Mother, Sylvia, yeah. Yeah, his dad was Irish. Yeah, I got that mixed up. Exactly, asked backwards. But yeah, he was half Italian. And so he really talked the talk, and he moved right in. All these guys were like his uncle, Uncle Nick, Uncle Quirk, and that kind of thing. So he came back to Kansas City. Tell a little bit about Chuckie O’Brien and Kansas City. Yeah, so in 1950, he’d been in Detroit for about nine years by that point. 1950, he’s getting into high school age, and Sylvia sent him back to Kansas City to live on Independence Avenue with his grandparents, and he went to Cardinal Glennon High School. [24:13] And became a good athlete, started dating a gal from the old neighborhood who was a lot like Sylvia. I think that’s really interesting because Chucky really idolized his mother, but he never really, when he was young at least, got to spend as much time with her as he wanted. He spent a lot of time back in Kansas City. He spent a lot of time at his uncle’s house in Detroit because Sylvia was so busy with Hoffa and with the mob. So here’s Chucky in Kansas City. He meets a gal from Sylvia’s old neighborhood who has other things in common with Sylvia and who even looks, in my opinion, quite a lot like Sylvia. And he would eventually take her back to Detroit and marry her and have a family together. But his main objective, it really in Kansas City wasn’t so much going to school. It was becoming a truck driver. He wanted to become a truck driver so that he could put himself on the path to becoming a union organizer like his hero and surrogate father, Jimmy Hoffa. And according to Chucky, Uncle Nick and Uncle Cork got him his first job as a driver and got him his first union card with local 541. [25:23] And this was right at the time when Local 541 was becoming ground zero for labor strife and union corruption in the United States. And Gary, you said a key word earlier, which was Peckerwood. And that’s who was running the Kansas City Teamsters at the time. It was dominated by Peckerwood guys, country boys, basically, and like Hoffa. And these guys were just as bad as the Italian gangsters who were more famous. They ran those locals with intimidation and terror, and they were violent, and they were very ambitious. They had political power. [26:08] Make a long story short, in 1953 in Kansas City, we had an inter-union labor war. And it was the Teamsters versus almost every other union in town. And Teamsters were trying to dominate a lot of these other unions is what it was. And so you had a complete paralysis of the entire construction industry for three months. Imagine just all construction stopping for three months in any metro area and how devastating that is to the economy. 23,000 Kansas Citians were out of work. The Teamsters were refusing to pick up or deliver supplies. And that eventually morphed into violence and sabotage. You had guys going into battle at construction sites. People were getting badly injured. People were getting kidnapped. It was, and then furthermore, we had four military defense projects centered in the Kansas City area, and this is right at the height of the Korean War. So these military installations were suffering work stoppages also. So this was unacceptable in Washington. And Congress swooped in with hearings and an investigation. [27:17] And they called this, basically, it was, I think the exact language was something like the most forbidding chapter in the history of American unions, something like that. It was a big deal. This history has been mostly forgotten. But Kansas City was [27:32] completely paralyzed for about three months. And that was the union that was the local mainly primarily local 541 which chucky was a young member of he was too young at that time to get drawn into the politics of the union i don’t believe that he was on the front lines of these these battles and violence that was happening he was just a brand new truck driver at the time but he was part of that in the sense that he was a local a member of the local at the time this stuff was happening so yeah that’s that’s what happened when Chucky came back to Kansas City. [28:07] Interesting. And that must have been the time when Roy Williams started moving up the ladder and the mob was moving in and they moved this auto ring and some of his people out. And Roy Lee Williams must have, with the support of Nick Civella and the local mob, must have moved right on in. Yeah, that’s exactly what happened. The main guy behind all the strife and violence I was just talking about was Orville Ring, classic quintessential Peckerwood guy and then after all this happened Hoffa swooped in and helped negotiate an end to these conflicts in 1953 and, And Nick Civella and his crime family, they were all watching all this from the wings, planning and scheming. Wow, there’s a lot going on here. How can we capitalize on this? [28:50] So in the aftermath of it all, the Savellas basically intimidated Orville Ring out of the Union. He went back to his farm. Later, he was killed in an accident on his farm, which a lot of people thought was the mob, that the mob did it. But it looked probably just an accident. And I think a tractor rolled over on him or something like that. But yeah, Roy Williams. So at this time, just basically the Italians were taken over from the Peckerwoods. There were still some useful Peckerwoods, and they worked together. And Roy Williams was the key guy there. This is when Nick Civella and he started working together to take over the Teamsters in Kansas City. You’re exactly right. And the rest is history. Really? really. Roy Williams is an interesting guy. He was a war hero from World War II. He had several bronze stars and he was a huge war hero, but he knew which side of the bread got the butter. And so he went with that and he went with Nick Civella. And he did, he bucked up to him a few times, but Nick Civella, actually in a famous scene, Nick Civella had him picked up and driven somewhere and shined a bright light in his eyes and said, you will go along with this scheme. [30:05] So it’s, but he kept going along to almost, he almost, he did become the president of the union for a short period of time, almost right there at the end of his life and when everybody was going to jail. But he was Nick Civella’s protege and Nick Civella’s puppet for his whole life and the whole Teamsters union was. [30:24] Yeah and that story you mentioned with the white spotlight shining in his eyes they kidnapped him and took him into this empty warehouse and i always point to that as just one of those. [30:34] Terrifying stories about how the mob used to work and yeah man and that wasn’t the only time that they intimidated roy williams in that manner so he like you said he was this tough guy war hero He was a big guy, and yet even a guy like that can get intimidated into doing whatever these guys tell him to do because his tactics that they used were just terrifying. Yeah. I read one thing where he later on, he claimed when he turned and gave evidence and talked to the Bureau that he claimed that they also threatened his wife and children during one of these sit downs with him. I mean, they did the same thing to Alan Glick out in Las Vegas. Tuffy DeLuna was out there, and he read off Alan Glick’s name of his wife and his children. He said, you may find yourself expendable, but I don’t think you’re going to find your family expendable and read off their names. So there’s two good examples of them. Say that Bob never messes with your family. There’s two good examples of them using the family and family as threats. Yeah. [31:40] It’s very tough. Yeah, it is. I heard knowing Mo Dalitz, to me, that was key because he was such a mover and an operator. Talk a little more about that. He had been in Cleveland. He had to set her up with Bill Presser. And that was primarily Jewish mobsters in Cleveland, seemed to me like. And then he also had all those connections to Chicago to get to Red Dorfman, his son, Alan Dorfman. Talk a little more about that relationship with Mo Dalitz. In Mo Dalitz’s biography, I can’t think of the name of the author at the moment, but that author states that Sylvia was one of Mo Dalitz’s lovers. I’m not sure if that’s true or not. I do think that Mo Dalitz, at the very least, had a crush on Sylvia, but also respected her very much. And she, just as she had with the Detroit family before, she brokered an alliance with Daylitz. What happened was Daylitz had a laundry empire, was a rum runner and a racketeer and a leader in the Jewish mob. But he also had a lot of legitimate businesses, including a laundry empire in Detroit and Cleveland. [32:53] And while he was still in Detroit, before he really made his move to Cleveland, his permanent move to Cleveland, his laundries, along with other laundry owners, they bonded together in an association. And they were very anti-union. And they were basically at odds with the Teamsters. And until Sylvia swooped in. And Sylvia had her own connections by now to the Laundry Workers Union also. So she’s working for the Teamsters, and she’s very close to Hoffa, but she then married a guy named John Paris, who was the head of the Laundry Workers Union. [33:32] So Sylvia knows Hoffa, and she knows the head of the Laundry Workers Union very closely, and she knows Dalitz. So she’s the one who’s positioned to bring these people together, sit them down at the same table, and start working together, start negotiating. And that’s what she did with Daylitz. And so that led to Daylitz paying off Hoffa, basically, to settle this contract on terms that were favorable to Daylitz and the other laundry owners. [34:07] But you could say that Hoffa, in that case, sold out his members, at least at that time. Now, I do want to make it clear that most rank-and-file teamsters for many decades loved Hoffa because he definitely did negotiate some great contracts that brought truck drivers into the middle class, got them very good pay and benefits. And it’s only fair, it’s only right to give him credit because as somebody once said about Hoffa. [34:33] He was always a criminal, but also always a teamster. And he worked very hard for his membership. He never stopped working. And it was sincere, I do believe. But there were times when he, the ends justified the means and he did whatever he had to do to keep the union alive, but also to serve himself and enrich himself. And that was one of those cases where the membership lost out a little bit when Hoffa and Daylitz formed their alliance with the initiation and the help of Sylvia Pagano. Interesting. So let’s go back to Chucky O’Brien for a minute. He goes back up from Kansas City. He ends up back up in Detroit and working very closely with Jimmy Hoffa. And you talked to his son. Yeah. And to make that, and he was probably a huge help and some insight into what his father was like. So talk about Chucky O’Brien when he got back with Hoffa. Yeah, so he goes back to Detroit. [35:31] And he steps right back into the Hoffa family circle because Sylvia became part of the Hoffa family. She was Josephine Hoffa’s best friend. Jimmy Hoffa relied on her not only for important work in the union and for important connections to the mob, but he also relied on her heavily as Josephine’s personal assistant and caretaker. Sylvia worked extremely hard serving other people. And she was an excellent caretaker to Josephine who needed a lot of care, had very poor health, made worse by severe alcoholism. And Sylvia was a wonderful caretaker. But Chucky stepped right back into that family orbit. Later, when his own kids were small, Chucky and his wife and his kids moved into the Hoffa house. They’d all lived under the same roof for quite a few years. But Sylvia was really the glue that kept it all together and Chucky’s son who’s also named Chuck O’Brien he was a young boy at this time so his memories of his grandmother. [36:42] And Jimmy Hoffa started when he was a young boy and continued up until Sylvia died when he was in his late teens, but he was a great source for the book helped out a lot I really appreciate him And it was interesting to have direct access to someone who actually lived under the same roof with Jimmy Hoffa. So he was not privy, young Chuck was not privy to any inside information or any mob dealings or anything like that. But he later moved to Kansas City and went to work in the River Key for his uncle at the Godfather Lounge, which just a couple of years later was torched in the River Key War. And then young Chuck had worked in professional hockey for a while. And then he became a truck driver and joined Local 41. And so all this history just comes full circle and repeats itself. And I was a little fascinated by these Sylvia’s grandkids who were born and raised in Detroit. They both ended up back in Kansas City in the land of their parents and their grandparents. And they ended up in the same neighborhoods that Sylvia had been born in many years before. [37:57] Interesting. And Chucky O’Brien, then he’s kind of Hoffa’s driver sometimes. And Aaron Renner on up to the end of Hoffa’s life was even implicated at the very end. Some people claim that he helped set Hoffa up because he was the one person that Hoffa trusted. And that one movie, The Irishman or whatever, really threw a lot of shade on Chucky O’Brien. So how did you deal with that. [38:21] Yeah, I think Chucky got a real bad rap, and as I used to study Hoffa and read all the Hoffa books, I always thought, I always had a very low opinion of Chucky O’Brien, and he became the butt of a joke, and he was portrayed as this blundering, not-too-bright guy who either helped kill his surrogate father or was duped into giving him a ride to where he was killed without knowing what was going on and without being able to, realize it to the point where he could have maybe helped Hoffa. I think Jack Goldsmith put all that to rest. He really changed my opinion of Chucky in his book, but I realized that Chucky had been misunderstood in many ways. Was he involved in Hoffa’s disappearance or not? I think Goldsmith basically vindicates Chucky. [39:15] However, I do believe that there’s still some evidence that could strongly suggest that even in light of what Goldsmith wrote, that Chucky could still have known more than he let on. But he was so committed to Emerita that he took a lot of secrets to his grave, I believe. What’s interesting is some of the other co-conspirators in the Hoffa thing ended up dead, like Sally Buggs, and got killed in Little Italy a few years later, and the prevailing wisdom, at least, was to, keep him quiet about the Hoffa case. And they would have probably done the same thing to Chucky if Chucky could have pointed the finger at anybody or implicated anybody. And I’m sure he could have. I’m sure he knew some things about that. He was so close to Giacalone. Chucky was very close to Tony Giacalone and to Tony Provenzano. [40:07] And I think that Chucky survived because Giacalone trusted him 100% just as Sylvia Pagano’s son. Giacalone’s trust in Chucky to not give anybody up was just so rock solid. And he loved Chucky. And I think that he was also honoring Sylvia by allowing Chucky to stay alive. So I know I’m straying from your initial question, Gary. There’s so much going on with the whole Chuck O’Brien thing and his involvement. It gets very interesting. You have to get really down in the weeds with it to understand all of it. But I think that Goldsmith’s book is a great read for anybody who’s interested in Hoffa and the whole case. I definitely would recommend it. So it may come down to Chuck O’Brien. And was he more loyal to the mob, to the mafia and their code? Or more loyal to Hoffa and the Teamsters? as Hoffa as an individual, not to the teams or his union, but Hoffa as an individual. Was he more loyal to Hoffa or more loyal to the union or more loyal to the mob? And giving up those guys, he has to turn his back on everything. [41:21] The union and the mob. And so I can see where he, whatever he knew, [41:25] he was not going to say a word. It would be to his advantage. He has no, they didn’t have a hammer on him. Wasn’t a criminal. They didn’t have a life sentence hanging over his head for anything. They did have, they did prosecute Chucky on a federal case. It was a small time thing. He took some, maybe took some gifts from a, from an employer in his role as a union guy, some small gifts. And then he had also got caught up in a cargo theft case, which is all documented in the book, Office of Connection. But the law enforcement did have a couple of cases that they could apply pressure onto Chucky. But he didn’t say a word, and he just went to prison and served his time. He didn’t have to serve too much time. He was only in for about a year, I think. It was a low-level felony. But he just, he’d never thought once about turning state’s witness. He just went and served his time and got back out and went on with his life. [42:25] Yeah. It’s those 50 and 75-year sentences that’ll make the right attorneys. You get even, I used to say, when they came up, those sentencing guidelines for cocaine dealers, you could make a guy talk about his mother when he’s looking. He’s 40 years old and he’s looking at a 50, 75-year sentence. Yeah. I do have to say, though, if there’s one guy that might, and there was a few of them who went and served a hard time. Yeah, a long time until they’re old. Rather than give anybody else up. And I think Chucky would have been one of those guys. I do. Yeah. [42:57] Having been raised by sylvia pagano he was just so committed to that culture and those traditions and that way of life and and omerta yeah sylvia even had almost a kind of a halfway making ceremony for chucky she arranged for the top guys in detroit when he came back to detroit from kansas city in the early 50s tony giacalone put together a little event where chucky walked into the back room of grecian gardens restaurant in detroit and all the top guys were sitting around a table and he made a pledge of loyalty to them at that time and then he sat down and broke bread with them and he didn’t prick his finger and burn a card and he wasn’t made into the family but it was all halfway a little bit and they did that for sylvia and because they just valued her so much they respected her and they needed her they she was the connection to their most valuable asset, which was Jimmy Hoffa. So that tells you a little bit about how much respect they had for Sylvia and also for Chucky’s unique role. Here he is. [44:05] He’s he’s the son of charlie banagio’s low-level chauffeur yeah and yet he’s sitting down with guys like meyer lansky in florida he’s sitting down with all the top guys in detroit chicago inu acardo rica rosanova all these top guys in chicago then he would sit down with them on behalf of jimmy hoff he was he probably i say in the book that he probably had more chucky o’brien the son of, Banagio’s chauffeur probably had more sit-downs with high-level mobsters than Nick Civella did. As Hoffa’s representative, that was the life. And he knew how to handle that kind of thing because he was raised by Sylvia. So he knew how to say, what not to say, how to behave himself in those types of meetings. So that came naturally to him. And he was Hoffa’s gopher. He drove in places. He took Hoffa’s wife to her medical appointments. He did low-level stuff like that, but he also did more important work, more sensitive stuff, like sitting down with mob bosses and relaying information back and forth, just like as Sylvia had taught him to do. [45:16] That’s fascinating. I tell you what, guys, Frank Hayde, Hoffa’s Connection, the story of Sylvia Pagano, the Ken City girl at the center of the mafia’s alliance with the Teamsters Union. I might have links in here. You better get this book. This is untrod territory. Unplowed ground, as we used to say on the farm. This is fresh stuff that you’ve read. There’s so many books out there about Hoffa and his disappearance that they just want to, come on, we can’t do this. I can’t do this again, Hoffa’s disappearance. You’re never going to find his body. You’re never going to figure out exactly who killed him. Nobody’s going to talk, and anybody that could is dead. But this unearthed some really fresh, interesting information about Hoffa and his connection with the Italian La Cosa Nostra in the United States, the entire United States, really. Yes. Thank you, Gary. That was a very nice little summary of it. And I really appreciate you. You’ve had me on your show before, my other books, and I listened to your podcast. Can’t get enough of it. You do terrific work. All us wire trappers love you, man. And we all appreciate you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Are you still doing the, are we still buying you cups of coffee and that kind of stuff? Yeah, you can always buy me a cup of coffee and hit the donate button. [46:29] I forget about doing that. I’ve been doing this so long and I got a few guys that hit it regularly and some never do. I do this for the pure joy of it anyhow, but it helps to have a little extra money coming in now and then. When you were selling books yesterday, you love writing this book. You love all that research and putting it together and educating people, but it’s nice to get paid for it too. [46:50] It’s a small-time racket, but hey. It’s a small-time racket. Another interesting thing, Frank, we were talking about people doing time, getting so much time, and trying to force them to talk. Yesterday, Frank had a program at the library, and we had a local guy who was a subject of his last book, Mafia Dreams, who was a mob hanger-on guy when he was a young guy. And he got caught up in a murder, an accidental murder in a way. That it’s a long story and you have to get mafia dreams to learn about it. The next generation of the wannabe. [47:25] Italian mafia guys in kansas city and so that guy was there he did 25 years 25 years for what we call felony murder another guy he transported a friend of his to a drug by only the guy killed the man was selling the or tried to kill the man that was selling the drugs and the fbi had it set up and ran in and shot and killed the kid who almanese had carried up to the drug ripoff and And so they charged this driver with felony murder, and he did 25 years, just got out about four or five years ago. He could have talked. He had enough to buy him a lot of grace on that 25-year sentence, and he did every minute of it. He never said a word, and it was hard time. It was state time here in Missouri. Yeah, I think that’s true. I think he is representative of Kansas City in a way, because I do believe that in Kansas City, the Code of Emerita persisted longer than most places. And yeah, when you’re 24 years old, I think he was 24 at the time that he was sentenced. Maybe he was 25 and you get sentenced to 25 and a half years. [48:38] And you have the chance to whittle that down by giving up information on your friends. And you don’t take it, and you choose to do the 25 and a half years, that’s hardcore. And he did, and those are the best years of his life that he’ll never get back. But he is out now, and he’s making a legitimate living and keeping his nose clean and just trying to make up for a lot of lost time. Yeah, he is. 25 years will straighten your mind out, won’t it? Yeah. Man. All right, Frank. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Hey, thanks again, Gary. Don’t forget to donate Bob the Bob Gary cup of coffee, y’all. Thank you. Okay, Gary. Okay, Frank. That was great. Talk to you later.

The boys get together to talk through the Austin FC news of the week including a handful of international call-ups. Then they deep dive Rodolfo Borrell's tenure at the club before closing out the episode with Last Business Day, The Boy Factory and the nonsense. 0:30 - Intro 5:15 - Open training announced 8:05 - International call-ups 15:55 - Reviewing Rodolfo Borrell's tenure 1:30:40 - Last Business Day 1:38:45 - The Boy Factory 1:42:20 - Picks recap 1:43:45 - Best Ball update Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The boys get together to recap another disappointment from Austin FC headed into the World Cup break. They talk through the 3-0 defeat at the hands of St. Louis City SC before closing out the episode with some listener questions and Last Business Day. 0:30 - Intro 4:05 - Nico's farewell message 6:00 - Timing of Monday's news 8:55 - Lineup reactions 12:40 - St. Louis City SC recap 41:20 - Postgame takeaways 57:30 - Listener questions 1:09:50 - Last Business Day Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The boys get together to wrap-up their thoughts following Monday's big news and subsequent livestream. Then they preview Saturday's road match against St. Louis City SC before closing out the episode with Last Business Day and the nonsense. 0:30 - Intro 4:10 - Los Verdes watch party 5:40 - Nico/Rodo wrap-up 32:10 - St. Louis City SC preview 54:20 - Last Business Day 1:06:45 - Picks recap 1:08:10 - Best Ball update Sign up today for our new Patreon and join in on all the additional fun in The North End! Visit our website for match preview articles, weekly MLS picks and access to our salary cap and roster spreadsheets! Follow the podcast on socials YouTube Instagram Bluesky Threads Twitter 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 of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins interviews Eddie Inserra about the Boston Mafia. He is the author of Confidence of the Mob: The IRS Agent Who Took down the Mob – Then Advised Them, a deeply researched account of his grandfather, Fred G. Pastore, a key figure in early IRS efforts to dismantle organized crime. Fred Pastore was part of the IRS's early “racket squad,” targeting Boston Mafia enterprises. His work paralleled the groundbreaking financial investigations that helped bring down figures like Al Capone, demonstrating how financial crimes could succeed where traditional policing struggled. Then, he leaves the IRS and advises the Boston Mafia. Eddie recounts how he uncovered his grandfather's story through a remarkable archive of family documents, photos, and recordings. These materials revealed a complicated dual life: Fred was both a relentless investigator and, later, a trusted confidant to certain Boston Mafia figures. This paradox sits at the center of the book and this conversation. A major focus of the discussion is the “pinball racket”—a widespread illegal gambling operation hidden in plain sight within bars and storefronts. Fred's investigations exposed how these machines generated significant underground revenue streams for organized crime, particularly in Boston. Eddie details the innovative and often risky techniques the IRS used to infiltrate these operations, including undercover work within corporations like Raytheon, where illegal gambling rings had taken root among employees. The episode also explores the institutional challenges Fred faced. His aggressive tactics and unconventional relationships eventually brought him into conflict with IRS leadership and political figures, forcing his resignation. In a striking turn, Fred leveraged his deep knowledge of organized crime to advise former mob associates—highlighting the blurred moral boundaries that often exist in this world.   Eddie adds a personal dimension, sharing memories of growing up around his grandfather and describing the cultural landscape of Boston's North End, where family, community, and organized crime often intersected. These stories provide insight into how relationships between law enforcement and mob figures could be shaped by proximity, respect, and shared environments.  The conversation concludes with a look ahead at Eddie's upcoming podcast, which will expand on these themes through interviews with former IRS agents, mob associates, and others connected to Fred Pastore's extraordinary life.   This episode offers a rare look at the gray areas of justice—where the line between hunter and ally becomes increasingly difficult to define. Check out the book: Confidence of the Mob: The IRS Agent Who Took down the Mob – Then Advised Them, 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. Gary Jenkins: [00:00:00] hey, are you wire tapers? Good to be back here in the studio. Gangland wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit Detective. Glad to be back in the studio. I have a man on the line who’s written a really interesting book called Confidence of the Mob, the RIRS agent who took down the mafia and then advised him. So that’s what’s interesting about this. Here’s a man. The, it was part of the early racket squad with the IRS intelligence who were the guys that went after the mafia and in all the different cities, most famously in Chicago, and took down Al Capone, and he ends up in a conflict with his bosses over informant and then. He goes into business as an accountant and ends up advising Jerry Angelo and some and childhood friends, really. ’cause he grew up in the north end of Boston. So this is his grandson Eddie and Sarah. Welcome Eddie. Eddy Inserra: Hey, thanks Gary. Glad to be here. Gary Jenkins: All right guys. Now there’s the book and I’ll have [00:01:00] links to it in the, the show notes as well as you can see the book over Eddie’s right hand shoulder there. You’ll get it. Now. First thing I wanna bring up about this book, Eddie, is I’m gonna ask you a little bit about how you got into this, but about this QR code you have in there, guys, there’s a QR code in there. I don’t know, about a quarter of the way in. Tell us about that and what was your idea to do there? Eddy Inserra: Yeah, so the QR code takes you to our website, which is it links to confidence of the mob.com. And this project started off as me interviewing a bunch of people about. My grandfather’s story. So I have all these audio clips, I have all these documents that I found in the box that my mother gave me that really had my grandfather’s complete career in there. So it’s more of a evidence-based website where if you scan that QR code, you can access some of the documents. Listen to some of the clips by the book, just learn more about the story overall. So it’s, the QR code is meant to be interactive, so you can take from what’s on the book into your phone and just explore more, [00:02:00] right? Gary Jenkins: Really interesting that with the new internet and you can do so much more and make your, what used to be just a hardcover. Paperback or hardcover piece of, a bunch of papers together and you can go onto the internet and you can find so much more with really not that much effort and a little bit of effort on your part. I know that I did something like that with a book I did. And it is a little bit of effort, but it’s not as much effort as is really, I think for that to further instruct people, teach people what that life was like for your subject. ’cause that’s what you’re trying to do, is you wanna tell people what. Your grandfather’s life was like, and so that’s I think it was just ingenious of you to doing that. I haven’t really seen that. I don’t think there’s probably other books that I didn’t notice, but I had not seen that before. Anyhow Eddie, let’s let’s go back. You’re the grandson. Fred g Pastor, tell us how you got into this, your earliest memories of this. Did you know your grandfather when you were a little kid and probably didn’t get the stories you wish you’d gotten? More than likely [00:03:00] I’d have him. But tell us a little bit about that. Eddy Inserra: Yeah, so he actually passed away when I was eight years old, so I got to know him for eight years. He passed away in 1988, and then, I knew my grandfather was always, when you see your grandfather, he is always happy when you’re, a little kid. One side of him, always happy, generous smile on his face, always laughing. Typical grandfather give you candy when no one’s looking. Things like that. So typical grandfather, I found out later on that his life was much more complex than I had thought. And when I was younger, he had an office. So I’d go into the office and I’d, everybody would be doing accounting work. He’d have probably about, he had about six or seven employees, maybe more at some, sometimes I’d go into the office and I’m just a kid running around the hallways and sitting at the desks. My father worked there as well. And yeah, I’m just watching them push papers and write down numbers and stuff like that. So I didn’t think it was too, I thought it was pretty boring. It was cool, but it was boring. But later I found out much more about him. Gary Jenkins: Interesting. Eddy Inserra: Yeah. Gary Jenkins: So later on in life, how did you stumble [00:04:00] across this whole dualistic life He had in a way I would maybe dualistic not at the same time but these two careers that he had how did you stumble across that? Eddy Inserra: There was a box that my mother had in her attic, and it was a, an old Florida citrus oranges box carton and overflowing with papers. And she, about 10 to 12 years ago, she gave it to me and said, Eddie, I want to give you these documents that your grandfather’s documents. I don’t know what’s in them, but there yours now. So I said, okay, great. And I pulled out a couple of documents and I looked at them. One was like an accounting ledger. E exactly what I expected. Some, some numbers and things like that. And I put ’em back in the box and I said, lemme put this on the shelf and I’ll take a look at the other documents some other time. So a couple weeks later, I go back into it and I pull out some papers and I start seeing profiles for big names and organized crime that I had heard of in the past. Jerry Angiulo, Raymond Patriarchal profiles on Racketeers Bernie [00:05:00] McGarry, doc Gansky, all these huge. Folklore names from Boston gambling and numbers and mafia times from the 1950s to the 1960s. I started piecing it together and I said and then I find a telegram in there to, to the White House Bobby Kennedy and JFK from my grandfather saying, I need to meet you at the White House right away regarding this Bernard Goldfine case that I’m working on. And I just started piecing this together and I said whoa. I never knew anything about the IRS side, but. He was really the tip of the spear. You mentioned like Elliot Ness, Al Capone earlier. It was the same sort of division, the intelligence division that he was working in, but he was in the Northeast District and it was, this was obviously after Capone that era, but next generation of, racket squad leaders, and he was the tip of the spear in Boston and the FBI didn’t have jurisdiction at that time to go after these racketeers. It was the IRS at that time. Later on, after he switched sides, so to say the FBI took over, but at that time, the IRS was the [00:06:00] potent weapon against these racketeers. So I’ve got all his documentation on investigations, case notes commendations it’s just really a treasure trove of, his whole career. And I pieced this together over years. There’s hundreds of documents, had to put a timeline together. Gary Jenkins: Really. Eddy Inserra: You’ve done investigative work, you know how that stuff works and I didn’t know anything about it, so it was just complete disorganized mess and had to pull it all together. Yeah. Gary Jenkins: The first thing you have to do is get a timeline. Eddy Inserra: Yeah. Gary Jenkins: That is paramount. When you’re doing something like that, you have to get a time. In order to keep things straight. Otherwise, it just becomes a, it’s just, you can never get it straight in your mind. Interesting. You know that the IRS back in the day was the premier organization that, that and the the the Federal Narcotics people were the ones that went after the mafia, whereas the FBI wasn’t, and you know what people don’t understand about the IRS many people, the IRS is just this big, huge. Organization that’ll come down on you when you [00:07:00] cheat on your taxes. But it’s really two divisions. There’s a civil division, but then there’s this criminal division, which was called the Intelligence Unit for a long time. And then I think your grandfather what I read in your book was he went into some special squad within the intelligence division called the Racket Squad. Is that right? Eddy Inserra: Yeah, that’s correct. The Racket squad was a specialized division inside of the Intelligence Division. Okay. Which only went after high profile Racketeers. And there was even an old TV show if you go on YouTube and look up Racket Squad. Yeah. There was a TV show about that. Yeah. Gary Jenkins: I remembered. I think no, it was gangbusters on the radio, but Racket Squad was on tv. Interesting. Eddy Inserra: Yeah. Gary Jenkins: So he grew up with a lot of the mobsters in the Boston area. Correct. Eddy Inserra: Correct. He was born in 1919, the same year as Jerry Angiulo. They were the same age which you’ll hear that name a lot and a lot of your listeners know. Jerry Angiulo was the under boss of Raymond Patriarch in Boston. And so they grew up right across through the bridge. [00:08:00] So Fred grew up actually in East Boston and Jerry grew up in the North end, and I confirmed that they did know each other when they were kids. I don’t know how deep that relationship went, but they did know each other when they were kids. And there was another man who ended up becoming partners with Fred later on in his post IRS career who he grew up with named Guy Spano. And he was also in East Boston at that time, and they were all this they knew each other, Gary Jenkins: interesting. Fred, knowing all these people, he knows about the bars and stuff and I noticed one of the things that was interesting, one of the things looked like early cases. He went after the pinball racket. Guys back in the day, every corner store bars, they all had pinball machines and they were a great way. To launder money and get all this cash money in and not pay their taxes on kinda like a cover charge that strip clubs get today. Whether there’s a way to, to get line cash money in that didn’t really go through the cash register. Tell us about that pinball racket. Eddy Inserra: Yeah, the pinball racket was a big deal back then. There was a lot of paperwork in [00:09:00] his box about that. There was a map that he had inside that box that showed all the different places he was raiding in Massachusetts just for the pinball machine. Pinball machines and the pinball machines back then were a game, not a game of skill because they didn’t have flippers on them. So the flippers that, that came on later, then it became a game of skill and it wasn’t actually just throwing your money away and gambling, so to say. So they weren’t able to go after them after they added flippers to the machines. But before the flippers interesting. Gary Jenkins: Yeah, I did, I didn’t really realize that I saw one of those when I was. You my late teens over in Kansas City, Kansas, and now I didn’t really realize what the deal was. What it was if you play it so much and get lucky and your ball goes to a certain place, then you win. But if it doesn’t and there’s no way to have it, is all pure luck. That’s the difference. I’ll be darned. I never thought about that. Interesting. Eddy Inserra: Yeah. Gary Jenkins: Of course from then, that’s gambling and that’s where the money is. So he [00:10:00] continues on going after mobsters, Italian mobsters in that area of the country in organized, more organized gambling. So tell us a few of his other organized gambling investigations. Eddy Inserra: Yeah, he went after the Italians. He also did go after a lot of the Irish too that in his paperwork too. Wimpy Bennett, Walter Wimpy Bennett. There was a lot of, in Jewish DKI, like I mentioned. Yeah, a couple other too but yeah, one, one big investigation that really put him on the map was. The Raytheon investigation. Raytheon we know as a big defense company and they’re headquartered in Massachusetts. They always have been, I don’t know if they still are, but they have been up until a few years ago. But huge corporation and during that time was the Cold War. So they’re supposed to be building missiles, but they called the IRS saying, Hey, listen, we’ve got a problem. Our production, our manufacturing floor, everybody’s supposed to be working, but. They’re all not on the floor and they’re gambling somewhere. We don’t know where, we don’t know the root cause of this syndicate, but it’s in all of our buildings and people are consuming their time, playing the [00:11:00] daily numbers, betting on sports, all kinds of stuff. And they couldn’t really get to the root of it to root it out of the system. So they called the IRS, they assigned Fred, my grandfather to the case, and he took the lead. He ended up sending a bunch of his agents in undercover as janitors, and they had to go through the whole process, the whole hiring process as a normal, employee would try to get hired. So they’d have to submit an application, go through the test, all that stuff. Because the, it was just so embedded in Ray Raytheon that someone would. Tipped them off. So he got a bunch of these janitors in and they ended up finding out that the, there was long lines going to the bathroom all day long. And that’s, they were making the bets, taking the bets in the bathroom stalls in multiple locations. They rated them all at the simultaneously and they got a bunch of leads after that for more mafia stuff, but it was a big mafia gambling syndicate embedded in the US government sort of defense contractor. So that got him, that was on the cover of the newspapers. It was in. Magazines. It was a big deal. [00:12:00] So Gary Jenkins: Interesting. After that is that he gets crossways with. His bosses and with the US attorney’s office eventually. Was there any other cases I see on the headline here, Pastore names Paul’s, me and politicians behind the bookies. So how did he get into to finding who the bookies were paying off? Eddy Inserra: So he, he had an undercover confidential informant, I should say, who was giving him a lot of information. And we were real in the book. Who that was, we didn’t know at the time. Nobody in my family knew until a few years ago, and that’s, we’re talking 60, 50, 60 years ago. And even the president and RFK at the time wanted to know his confidential informant. So Fred was getting some really good information. They didn’t know where it was coming from. And Fred had made a deal at the time with Eisenhower and the chief of the IRS that. He’d keep this confidential informant on his, on the payroll, but the only people that would know about it was Eisenhower, the chief of the [00:13:00] IRS under Eisenhower and Fred. And then JFK came in, RFK came in as the Attorney General and they wanted to know whose confidential informant was and he would never give him up. So that, that caused some tension between Fred and RFK. Before that there was another case. With a man called Frank Aya. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him, but he’s out, he was out of Worcester part of the, actually, gen Outta Worcester. Yeah, outta Gary Jenkins: Worcester. Okay. Eddy Inserra: Yeah. Part of the Genovese faction so New York, but I, their territory went all the way up to Worcester. And the FBI was actually investigating him for the Brinks robbery in Boston. Gary Jenkins: Oh, Eddy Inserra: really? At the time. So they were looking for leads because they had understood that one of the guys was from Worcester. They’re, they assumed so they went interrogating him, and he said no, I’m not a criminal. I’m just a bookmaker. And as soon as he said that I guess Hoover didn’t want anything to do with Bookmaking at the FBI. So they just threw their hands up and they threw it at the IRS and [00:14:00] that fell in my grandfather’s lap. And so he started digging into IAC and he, he actually built a case against him. He ended up going to jail. But during that process, when he was investigating Ioni, Ioni gave up another man. His name was Bernard Goldfine. Wasn’t in the mafia. He’s a big businessman. He owned all these textile manufacturing companies. And he kept getting the contracts for all the US government, military uniforms every year. So no one else would ever win. And my grandfather exposed that there was some bribery and corruption going on. Between him and Eisenhower’s chief of staff named Sherman Adams. Gary Jenkins: Yeah, Eddy Inserra: I Gary Jenkins: remember, I remember that. Sherman Adams he went down. I remember that. Eddy Inserra: Do you remember the Una coat? That’s what that was the big Gary Jenkins: thing. Yeah. I forgotten about that. Somebody gave me this Una coat. I never was sure what a Una coat was, but yeah, I forgotten about that. The Vicuna code and he and everything, they found all these papers that be. For Eisenhower to four eight C, it’d have to say [00:15:00] KSA Sherman Adams. That was a big deal. While he was spooning feeding Eisenhower all the, anything that he wanted to have. Eddy Inserra: Yeah. That’s funny you remember that because that’s, yeah. Gary Jenkins: Yeah. That was huge at the time in the fifties. Eddy Inserra: Yeah. For some reason, he bribed him with a lot of things, hotel rooms, cash, all these things. But the Vicuna code, for some reason, stuck in the media, and that was my grandfather’s work, was exposing that and yeah. That was a big deal at the time and after he exposed that and with him not giving up that confidential informant. RFK wanted Fred out of Massachusetts. Pretty much out of the cross heads. We can get into that if you want, but yeah that’s the next Gary Jenkins: thing. What would he want? We, because Kennedy’s of course, were Boston area, new England based, and a lot of their people probably could then get in trouble with because of Fred Pastore and his bulldog attitude towards enforcing the law. Was that the deal? Eddy Inserra: Yeah, Fred would follow the money. I know that’s a common thing, but he really would follow the money. And from what I [00:16:00] understand, I wasn’t there, I didn’t live at that time, but from what I understand, he followed the money and wherever it led him and that led him right up to the White House. You know how politics are there, it’s a dirty game. So I’m sure that might’ve been someone who gave money to the candidate, maybe even the same guy, Bernard Goldfine or somebody. And if Fred dug that up, they could get. The same treatment Sherman Adams did. Gary Jenkins: Yeah. Yeah. Eddy Inserra: They wanted Fred out of there. Yeah. Gary Jenkins: So what happened then? They it seemed like they, they repressed him to reveal his informant or something like and he ended up, either I quit or, I have to give up my informant. Is that, was that what it came down to? Hobson’s choice like that? Eddy Inserra: Yeah, it came down to that. They tried to actually reassign him to Syracuse. New York was really, it was a demotion in pay and in actually title as well. So he would’ve been brought down. He wouldn’t have been in the rack racket squad. He would’ve been down to a special agent again, and would’ve been a step backwards and they would’ve had him out of the mix in Boston. And that’s really what they wanted to accomplish is silence Fred. Yeah. [00:17:00] So he was faced with a decision, do I take that demotion and that’s the end of it, or. Do what he actually did, which was, took him back to his up upbringing in East Boston. Tough poor kid when you actually have to face the bully, I think. And that street grit that he actually said no. You know what? He held his own press conference in downtown Boston and he said, I’m resigning from the IRS today. And I’m opening up my own tax fraud defense firm right across the street. He wanted to view them out the window every day. He had a chip on his shoulder. And so he ended up advising the same kind of people and some of the same people that he was previously going after at the IRS. And he was like a super weapon for those guys because he knew all the legalities and the loopholes and how to structure your businesses and things like that. So Gary Jenkins: yeah, I noticed there was like a Fred Angiulo was that Jerry’s brother then. Eddy Inserra: I don’t know if there was a Fred, if there was Gary Jenkins: a wonder. I thought it, it was Fred. I may have got [00:18:00] that name wrong, Nick in the Nick in my head, because your dad, your grandpa’s name was Fred Pastor. But anyhow, there he defended Angiulo and some of their people, he, he knew everybody went to North End at eight and, they were socially compatible, if you will. So tell us a little bit about that, what you learned about those, that part of his life. Eddy Inserra: Obviously post IRS career, I learned that from my mother and other people, that on the weekends Fred would go on Friday night. Him and his his daughter whose youngest daughter is Charmin, which is my mother. Oldest daughter’s, Pam and my grandmother is Nina. And they would go into Boston to the north end and they’d go down there for, to go to the bakery sit out front. The women would sit out front eating pastry, and Fred would go out back for about 15 minutes and. To me it was him giving advice maybe face to face. To, to Jerry and he’d come out 15 minutes with a paper bag from what I’ve heard. And and that would be it. Then they’d go to the fruit market and then they’d go home and they’d go out to Stella’s. [00:19:00] Restaurant in the North End on Fleet Street at the time, which is a famous spot. Even, JFK, they used to go there. But it was a real famous spot. Fred would be there a lot with the family. And on the weekends my mother remembers. So the Injus, by the way, Jerry and Jula, there was five brothers who really ran their empire together. But Jerry was the head of it and the genius with numbers. And he shared that with Fred. They both had a genius with numbers. So that was some that was interesting. And Nick would, his brother Nick would go to Fred’s house on Sundays, and my mother would call him Uncle Nick. He’d always bring something. One time he brought a pet dog for them. They had a dog, and he’d bring all kinds of gifts and they always saw the nice side to these people. Even in the office, when I went to the office and I met a couple of these people when I was young, I didn’t know who they were, but I, you’d always see the nice side because. Gary Jenkins: Yeah, Eddy Inserra: Fred was the golden goose helping them keep their money, but most importantly keeping them outta jail. So Gary Jenkins: interesting. Huh? That’s a, that’s quite a career switch. [00:20:00] The were you in 98 Prince Street? The famous 98 Prince Street. I went to the north end, went around, took some pictures and stuff. It’s nothing like it, it’s described, but back in the day, other than, it’s really cool, those little narrow brick streets and restaurants and everything. Talk about the north end over there. Eddy Inserra: The north end is that’s the Italian enclave of the city. Boston has different enclaves, different cultural enclaves I should say. And the North end is the the Italian, it actually was the was the Irish before the Italian. So a lot of people don’t know that. But I didn’t know that. The Italian section, and that’s where there’s, world class Italian food restaurants, every 10 feet. And. It’s a tight knit community. Everybody knows everybody especially back then. So you walk down the street, you’ll see people hanging on the corner and if when you’re, when you were a kid you’d go get your fireworks there at the park and, illegal fireworks and get whatever you want. But yeah, 98 Prince Street was where Jerry ran his sort of headquarters out of there and they called it the doghouse. That was, [00:21:00] they knew they had eyes looking out for them as well being there. So the whole neighborhood was really looking out for them. And eventually the FBI caught them by wiretapping a vehicle up front. Yeah. So inside. But yeah, it’s really tight knit Italian. If you come to Boston, I really recommend you go, especially if you want to eat some nice food and see how this still some remnants of how it used to be, like you said, those brick roads and things like that. It’s pretty nostalgic and interesting. Gary Jenkins: Yeah. Yeah, it’s really cool. I’d highly recommend any of you guys. You go out to, you, go to Boston, go to the north end and eat and just walk around. It’s really nice, although it’s pretty busy on the weekends, so a lot of people down there, man and some of the restaurants, there were long lines to get into ’em around dinnertime. Eddy Inserra: Yeah, try if you can make a reservation, try to, if not. Gary Jenkins: Yeah. Yeah. Good bakeries too that the nicer places. I can’t even remember the names of ’em now. I had ’em that day. But anyhow, so I have to, I’m gonna flip back just a little bit. I made a jotted down a note [00:22:00] about Frank, the cheese man c Chiara, who was at Apple Lake. He did he who was the consigliere, I think for Patri arca. I believe your grandfather went after him or had some dealings with him. Do you remember that? Eddy Inserra: Yeah, he, there was some documents in the box about him and they were telling him he was definitely the concierge for arraignment at the time. And there were documents that Fred’s team was actually tracking him. They were watching him, he was going to Cuba back and forth to Cuba at that time. And so they thought he was moving money or just setting things up with a casino and things like that down there. They couldn’t, I don’t know if they actually got him to go to jail. I don’t remember if they were able to prosecute him, but they were checking him at the airport. I remember they checked his passport. But he was the, he was a money man as well, so he was known to be like the bank at that time. Gary Jenkins: Did did your grandfather have any trouble? His own troubles with the IRS af? Did they come after him or try to go after him at any point in time? Later in his career? Usually they [00:23:00] do. Yeah. They could be pretty vindictive. I’ve seen it here where an FBI agent then becomes a white collar crime lawyer. And boy, I tell you what, his old buddies, he was, they, he, a friend of mine went like that and he was surprised. He was shocked how p how his old friends from the bureau treated him. So did he have any problems like that? Eddy Inserra: In fact, he had a big problem like that as soon as he wouldn’t give up, his informant’s name. That became a problem actually. The the FBI called him in one of the documents that I have. It’s a memo that he wrote right after he came back from the FBI interrogating him. So he was told to report to the FBI in Boston by himself. And this was from his IRS superiors that say that, they want you over there, you gotta go talk to them. And so he went over there. And there was two agents in the room with Fred and they interrogated him asking if he had taken bribes at all. Yeah. And Fred used he, he outwitted them saying, I can’t say anything. This is an on ongoing investigation. If he, if you want me to say anything about this, you’re gonna have to get my [00:24:00] superiors to sign off on this. And, whatever the process was. And he felt like it was unbelievable because he said, who’s accusing me of this? They wouldn’t tell him. But eventually he figured out that it was this textile manufacturer that I mentioned earlier, Bernard Goldfine, his sort of right hand woman, her name was Mildred Paperman. She had she’d already been convicted and so was Bernard Goldfine, but they had said that Fred was taking bribes from them. So they’re taking this information from convicted, felons. And she said she had proof of it. So she had a check made up to the initials, FGP and who else, that’s Fred’s initials. Yeah. Fred G passed story. So Fred started laughing when they pulled that out. He said, do you guys have any idea who this is? It’s not me. And it was for Maine Senator Frederick g Payne, with the same initials. And that was easily documented in his paperwork that he was accepting bribes from gold mines. It’s really interesting how he outsmarted them [00:25:00] and I guess they didn’t do their homework good enough, but, they went after him hard and even after he left the IR Rs they tried to, I think one of, one of the documents says you didn’t report $2 of your tax income or something like that. Just busted his dogs. Oh my Gary Jenkins: God. I’m in a heap of trouble then. Eddy Inserra: Yeah. But the thing that he did have. And I, I can’t say it for sure, but he did have, in his back pocket, was a list of police and politicians that did take bribes. And that’s what up in, in that newspaper behind me, he was supposed to release this list. There was the media believed that he was gonna release these names during his press conference. He didn’t, and I believe that was an insurance policy that he kept in his pocket to keep them away. That’s my belief. I can’t confirm that, but that’s my sort of theory on that. Yeah. Gary Jenkins: Yeah. I tell you what in Boston, greater Boston, that area, having a list of policemen and politicians that have been taking bribes, that’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Just take out about 10 out and name the rest. Eddy Inserra: I tell you what, [00:26:00] I do have that list. It was in the bar. Gary Jenkins: Oh, do you? Oh really? Yeah. Eddy Inserra: Yeah. Is Gary Jenkins: that gonna be on your website? Is that gonna be on your website or are you just keeping that to yourself? Eddy Inserra: I thought long and hard about that, and I don’t think it’s fair to ruin or tarnish any family or anything like that. So I, that’s not gonna come out. Gary Jenkins: Yeah. Interesting. Eddy Inserra: That has nothing to do with me. That’s not my, Gary Jenkins: I, I’d have to agree with that, that those were different times, different days. Yeah. And there’s no use hurting in what would be innocent people today with that kind of information, especially Boston seemed like it’s a. A small community in, in, in a way, it’s not like New York where you’re spread out over all these boroughs and Los Angeles, where you’re spread out over, 25% of the state. It’s more like Kansas City, more like a small area that is Boston. And so a lot of people, everybody knows each other in some manner. Eddy Inserra: Yeah exactly. Couple of degrees of separation if that. Gary Jenkins: Yeah. Eddy Inserra: Yeah. Gary Jenkins: Interesting. Eddy Inserra: Yeah. Gary Jenkins: All right, Eddie and [00:27:00] Sarah, confidence of the mob, the IRS agent who took down the mafia and then advised them. So a really interesting book. Guys. I’ll have links to the website or to the Amazon page where you can buy this book. I’d highly recommend you buy it and when you do, go in there see, I don’t know, it’s about a quarter of the way in and find that find that QR code and. Go to that website and listen to some, I listened to a couple of three of those interviews. Really interesting stuff. That off the stuff that you can’t get everything in, but it’s interesting. I understand about that. Eddy Inserra: Thanks Gary. Yeah. That’s a upcoming podcast. We’re gonna have all full interviews and all that stuff with all. Oh, Gary Jenkins: Are you gonna do one yourself or with somebody there in Boston? Eddy Inserra: We’ve, it’s not gonna be a live podcast. It’s actually a bunch of clips thrown together. So it’s, oh, Gary Jenkins: I see. Eddy Inserra: Okay. Yeah we put it all together. It’s taken a couple years, so far, 12 episodes. We’ve got IRS agents in there, mafia members. We’ve got Fred’s ex clients and family. It’s really interesting. So you can check [00:28:00] that out on the website. Gary Jenkins: Yeah. When is that coming? Eddy Inserra: So we’re shooting to start releasing the end of May. So last week in May. Okay. Gary Jenkins: I love board. I always need another podcast to listen to myself. Eddy Inserra: Yeah. Yeah. Only gonna be one season. It’s not gonna be a multiple season thing. Gary Jenkins: That, that was my next question. It was gonna be a limit limited edition, if you will. Limited season. You’re not gonna keep going year in and year out like I do. Eddy Inserra: Yeah, no, there’s not enough content, but we’ll do behind the scenes and we’ll do some live stuff in Boston and things like that. Yeah. Okay. If anybody knew Fred or of him, please contact me too on the website. Okay. Love to hear about. Gary Jenkins: All right. Great. Alright Eddie and Sarah, I really appreciate you coming on the show. Eddy Inserra: Thanks, Gary. Great to meet you.

In this episode, host Gary Jenkins, a retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective, sits down with author and mob expert Springs Toledo and discusses the Boston Winter Hill Gang and its notorious members. Springs' book, “Don’t Talk About Joe Mac: The Life, Wars, and Secret History of the Man Behind the Winter Hill Gang” Springs Toledo provides an exhaustive look at Joe McDonald aka Mac, a pivotal yet often overlooked figure in the Boston criminal landscape, especially during the 1960s-1990s. Springs, a Boston native, brings a unique perspective and personal anecdotes that enrich our understanding of the intersections of crime, family, and community within the city. They explore Joe Mac’s early life and how his background shaped his role in organized crime. Springs shares how Mac was an elder statesman in the underworld, feared and respected for his ability to organize the rackets in Somerville and maintain a significant network of relationships across various neighborhoods. Joe Mac's methods of operation were emblematic of a time when the Irish underworld was gaining ground in a city dominated by Italian crime families. Springs discusses the stark differences in these organizations, from their cultural practices to their hierarchies. Springs also highlights the complexities of Joe Mac's personal life, discussing his relationships with his family, especially his daughter Jacqueline. Their conversations reveal a side of Mac rarely seen in crime stories — a devoted father struggling with his dual identity as a loving parent and a cold-blooded criminal. Throughout the episode, Springs captures the essence of Mac's character, noting that while he was involved in heinous acts, he also exhibited genuine love for his family, a contradiction that adds depth to his narrative. As the conversation unfolds, we examine the dynamics within the Winter Hill Gang, particularly the relationships among Joe Mac, prominent figures like Whitey Bulger, and Howie Carr. Springs shares fascinating insights into Mac's cautious nature and strategic approach to power. He articulates how Mac operated in the shadows, steering clear of public scrutiny while effectively managing the group's criminal enterprises. The episode paints a vivid portrait of a gang operating amid violence, betrayal, and survival. In addition to discussing the various criminal exploits, Springs shares some gripping anecdotes that illustrate the real-life implications of this lifestyle. His stories about Joe’s attempts to balance family life while dodging law enforcement showcase the constant threat that loomed over their lives, encapsulating the dangerous allure and traumatizing consequences of organized crime. We also touch upon the significant events that defined the gang wars in Boston, including Joe Mac’s suspected involvement in notorious hits and how the landscape of crime shifted in response to law enforcement's increased focus on organized crime. Springs dives into the enigmatic character of Joe Mac, unraveling his military background, his unyielding commitment to the underworld, and how he managed to stay a step ahead of rivals and authorities alike. In closing, Springs reflects on the motivations behind his book—his desire to portray the human side of a man branded a monster while exploring the broader themes of morality, family, and the haunting legacy of crime. As we wrap up, it becomes clear that “Don’t Talk About Joe Mac” is not just a biography of an infamous crime figure, but a complex narrative that invites readers to ponder the true cost of a life steeped in organized crime. This episode is a riveting exploration of character, culture, and crime, offering audiences an engaging glimpse into the storied history of Boston organized crime, the Winter Hill gang through the lens of one of its most pivotal figures, Joe Mac. 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. Springs Toledo JOe mac Gary Jenkins: [00:00:00] hey, all your wire tappers out there. Gary Jenkins back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. I’m a retired Kansas City Police Intelligence unit detective, doing a podcast mainly about organized crime. We might stray into drugs every once in a while, but primarily about Italian based organized crime or, and then sometimes we get into Irish based organized crime. I’ve done a story on the Westie in the past and a few other stories like that. So today we’re gonna talk about the. Crossing of the Irish and and the Italians in Boston area, which is a really well known, famous story. A lot of great characters. And I have with me a man who wrote a book about this. Springs Toledo, welcome Springs. Springs Toledo: Thank you very much, Gary. Happy to be here. Gary Jenkins: Great. Now guys, the books is, don’t Talk about Joe Mack the Life Wars and Secret History of the Man Behind The Winter Hill Gang. And I’ve always wondered about this Winter Hill gang. I’ve always heard of it and Whitey Bulger came out of that and was so famous, but I’ve never really. [00:01:00] Seen anything or know anything about the background of it. And Springs, Toledo has somebody, a guy called Joe Mack that was involved in that and he’s really gone into it in depth. Springs, tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got into this. Springs Toledo: I’m a native of Boston, which did help, the accent helped open doors. Gary Jenkins: We can tell. Springs Toledo: But I don’t even try to hide it anymore. And I have a background in, in boxing, which also helps, that’s a breeding ground for, leg breakers and enforcers. Historically, in Boston, a lot of ex fighters became gangsters or, involved in that life. I went to Northeastern got a graduate degree in criminology. And I I didn’t, I never became a police officer. I worked with, actually with juvenile delinquents and troubled youth for many years. I’ve written several books some about boxing, some about an historical figure named John Brown, who’s an abolitionist, so I’m running the gamut. But Joe McDonald was a name that I heard whispered for many years, growing up. He had a very long criminal career over five decades.[00:02:00] And, so he was considered something very serious. But what I began to notice as the book started coming out after John Madano became a cooperating witness, as he’d say. Is that not much was known about this individual. What I knew is that he was about 20 years older than everybody else. So he’s an elder statesman in that world. So I started poking around. I know some guys who were involved in that life. I know some other guys who were very connected to very serious individuals who were active in the Boston Underworld during these years, the sixties, seventies, eighties, into the nineties. Yeah. So I started, asking around and the things I started to hear were very downright alarming about who this man was and that he was the guy not Whitey Bulger. There was what they’ll all tell you the deeper you get into the operators in that world is that Whitey Bulger is. Largely a mythology. And that in Somerville especially, he wasn’t really that respected. Joe Mack, however, was Joe Mack was, he [00:03:00] was the go-to guy. And upon doing all kinds of research, field research, but also I’m trying to corroborate everything. People are saying you can’t just take what people have to say at face value, especially if they’re, underworld figures. Yeah. A lot of ’em have a self-interest as so what I would do, I had a little strategy. What I would do is I would talk to one guy in Southie if I heard a story that sounded intriguing or something about Joe Mack, what have you, and then I’d try to find another guy in Somerville or East Boston or Hy Park who didn’t necessarily know that individual. And if the stories match, I’d look into it further. For instance, I wanna make sure the guy wasn’t in prison at that time, that he’s allegedly known to have done something. So that’s how I began to put together a picture. And what the u unanimously what I found out is that Joe McDonald was really the, he’s the one that put together organized crime in Somerville, centered in Winter Hill. He organized the launch sh the rackets loan, sharking booking, sports betting, all of that. And he was a very feared individual.[00:04:00] He looked like a building superintendent. He was balding. He, no, he was nothing flashy about him. He was family man. But so I started digging deeper and I got his military records, and then the picture really started to come together because of what he went through during World War II in the South Pacific and the trauma that he suffered. I didn’t wanna write a straight True crime book. So I wanted to do something different. I didn’t want it to be ordinary. I wanted it to be get underneath the behavior. It’s the, the criminology major is, was showing it’s yeah. Was coming to the fore. So I wanna get underneath it. So I consider this book more of a nonfiction noir. ‘Cause if you watch those old movies, a lot of ’em have a theme where you have, the main character, the anti-hero. These are movies from the forties, all black and white. All shadowy. Yeah. They come back from World War ii and they’re troubled. They’re shell-shocked. JoEM, Joe Mack came back and he’s marred. Something about his personality had changed and he’s one of the few individuals that I’ve encountered who [00:05:00] actually age into crime. He didn’t age out of it like everybody else. He aged into it. But he was very good at what he did. He was a brilliant individual. Very strong-willed. Someone said that I talked to, they said that, all the fear, whatever fear he had was knocked out of him, in SVO sound. When his ship went down, which was a USS Quincy with his brother on it. So he became a, began to emerge as a fascinating figure. But what. Made me decide to write the book was when I was hooked up with his daughter by TJ English. I reached out to him and he, he told me about Jackie McDonald. I reached out to her and I said, I’m thinking about writing a book about your father, Joe McDonald. I don’t think that the the literature on him now really got him right. And she said, give me a night to drink about it. Yeah, so the next morning she told me she was she’ll tell me everything she knows and she was the right person because first of all, she was named for the brother that he lost in SVO sound that he never got over his little brother. Her name’s [00:06:00] Jacqueline. And like her father, she’s absolutely brilliant. She’s charismatic. She is incredibly honest. If she’s not sure about something she’d say. So nothing in it was, what she told me was about herself. It was nothing was ego driven. She wanted to tell the truth of her father. And what I began to realize early on is that you know this, you have victims of guys like Joe McDonald who killed dozens of people professionally, but he was a murderer. There’s no doubt about it. And you have a lot of victims, including in his own family. Not that he intended to hurt his daughters and his son, but his, who he was and what he was, did a lot of damage to his own family and she was the perfect person to talk to because she was so honest. She’s also very funny if, you read about her in the book, she comes across as a real character, very charismatic. So her story runs parallel with his, she comes out about the middle of the book. I trace her life alongside with his, and she had a memoir that she did many years ago and she shared that with me. [00:07:00] She’s she really is a force of good, if you will, in the book. She’s the one to cheer for, she’s the one to root for. Joe McDonald is a formidable figure, but he’s a dark and shadow. We figure. I do bring him out as much as I can and he is fascinating, but. I felt like I needed someone to root for the reader, yeah. And also, it’s women who love true crime the most. Yeah. Gary Jenkins: That’s so Springs Toledo: had to give nod to them, they’re gonna buy it. Gary Jenkins: That is true. And a story like this will will attract men and women both, sometimes those just straight, kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out. Of true crime books are not really attractive to women. That’s really interesting that. You’re showing the human side of this guy instead of just the crime side, which there every one of these guys that are professional criminals in this life have a human side. They, that’s what one thing that fascinated me about ’em, even way back when I started, went into the intelligence unit is these guys all had families and they had kids going to St. Pius up here and they played football and the families all showed up [00:08:00] when their kids played football and they were in little league and all that kind of normal stuff. On one hand, but yet they came over into the CI city in here. They came from the suburbs over in the city and were these gangsters all night long, and then went back home to their suburban homes. So that family side. That’s really interesting. I’m glad you did that. Springs Toledo: That’s compartmentalization. And Joe was the best at it. But there was something unusual about this case and that is that. Joe told nothing to anybody. His Winter Hill partners barely knew about his personal life. They didn’t know much about him. Yeah, nobody knew much about him. ’cause he didn’t confide in anybody. He did it the way you’re supposed to do it. As an organized, if you’re gonna get into organized crime, you want to follow his lead. And he lived a tough life. It’s nothing to get into in terms of choosing that as an occupation. However, he did confide in his daughters. He trusted them and he told them an awful lot, which he didn’t realize was traumatizing them. But. Jackie McDonald is blessed with a very good memory, so she was able to fill in [00:09:00] a lot of blanks about some of which were cold case murders and other just, real eyebrow raising incidents that happened. I think this book would’ve been invaluable to the FBI. Right up to the early nineties interest because of the stuff that came out, several cold case murders. I think I solved them. And, they were attributable, well attributed. I attribute them to Joe, a few. I know he did. But, people didn’t know, and he was a, excuse my saying, but he had. He was a real talent for that. He knew how to get you. He knew how to find you. He knew how to get you. And he also, like I said, he didn’t have any fear, so there was nothing holding him back. And that’s a difference from Whitey Bulger. What people don’t realize is that Whitey Bulger was a very careful man. And that’s why a lot of murders attributed to Whitey Bulger. He didn’t do, it doesn’t even, it, it offends his personality. He was the kind of guy, if he’s gonna kill you, you’re gonna be in the basement tied to a chair, or you’re gonna be a woman. He’s not on Northern Avenue in Boston in broad daylight, killing Brian Halleran. It’s not true. That’s not Whitey [00:10:00] bulge, that’s not how he operated. Joe Mack was a different beast altogether, and yet he was never indicted for murder. He was questioned maybe for one of them. And the title is really a reason for that because you didn’t talk about Joe Mack. That’s actually, that’s that’s. I like the title a lot. It took me a long time to get to that title. First title was Hey Joe, ’cause of the song. And I was like, ah. Nobody said, Hey, Joe to him. Where you going with that gun in your hand, huh? That’s right. You’re good. Yeah. Jimmy Hendrix. And then another title was the Wars of Joe Mack. That was a little too masculine that works, but it was too masculine. Yeah, don’t talk about Joe Mack really captures, what he was and how he operated. Gary Jenkins: Springs set the geographic scene. I’ve always been a little bit confused about this in Boston. IU Boston is unlike Kansas City, for example, what I’m familiar with. It has these really distinct areas in neighborhoods. Set the scene, the Italians African Americans, the Irish what set that up for us? [00:11:00] Springs Toledo: Okay, this is the, fifties, sixties, seventies that, that’s where most of the book is occurring. Especially 60, 70, actually into the eighties. Boston first of all it’s basically back then was an Irish Catholic city. Yeah. There were other ethnicities, but it was overrun with the Irish and there were neighborhoods. So you had. You had neighborhood crews, you had crews that were operated out of East Boston. That’s Barboza, south Boston was several of them. Jamaica Plain, the North End obviously was where the mafia was. Sented La Ostra. Somerville, Charlestown. And a lot of, most of these guys who were got into criminality. Not only did they have families, they also had occupations. They were long showmen, they were roofers. They had jobs. I’m a policeman. And back then policemen, you didn’t make a lot of money. So you were encouraged to supplement your income. Oh yeah. Some of these guys were, they were detectives by day and they’re doing heists at night and that was not uncommon. And. Over time, certain organizations [00:12:00] became more organized and the Irish, remember, were barely organized. They were more like, it was more like the old West when things got hot. It was also a whiskey driven, a lot of the heinous acts and the murders that started to happen with that, the Irish gang war in the sixties, everybody was drunk. Some of these guys were really nice guys and then they got to the whiskey and forget it. They become monsters. Not everybody, but but. Boston was also very segregated. Not like the south. It was, there was natural neighborhoods, I was in Hy Park, that’s where I came up. If I went to Southy, there was a problem ’cause I didn’t know a lot of people there. If somebody from Southie went to the North End, it’s a problem. You are Irish, you shouldn’t be here. You didn’t cross boundaries. Mattapan was Jewish and then it became black. Same thing. So everybody congregating together is very tribal in that sense. Less so now, but there are still pockets, what’s upsetting to me is that you barely hear the accent, and you’re walking through Boston, you don’t hear the accent too much anymore. You have to get to Dorchester. That’s their accent’s. 10 times worse than mine, [00:13:00] and mine’s pretty bad but Joe Mack was Joe Mack was born in Medford, Massachusetts. He then, he was in Somerville by about 1950. His mother had moved there as as clan, if you will. Had moved there, his sisters and brothers. And so he was in Somerville in Winter Hill, and that’s where he started to operate and that’s where he started to put things together. Gary Jenkins: Interesting. You say Winter Hill. So let’s talk about the beginnings or this Winter Hill gang. I’ve heard of this. Many times. And Whitey Bulger of course popularized it. So tell me about the Winter Hill gang and Howie Carr. And there’s a famous picture that see on internet or on Facebook with our Underboss Tuffy Luna and this guy that was the head of the Winter Hill gang and a couple other gangsters from New York. So tell us about the beginning of this Winter Hill gang. Springs Toledo: We deserves a lot of credit. He’s the one that really brought the stuff out beginning in the eighties. He had the guts to mention Joe Mack in print. That’s high risk. I’m not sure how much he did it, but he was really [00:14:00] attuned to it early. And he had some great books, but winter Hill’s a neighborhood in Somerville. It’s not South Boston. You talk to guys who were associated with the Winter Hill Gang, what they called the Hill. Really? It was called The Hill by those who were a part of that organization. They get very resentful about Whitey Belgium and some of them will say that Whitey Belger wasn’t Winter Hill. Whitey Belgium was a partner, but he was South Boston. Okay. Once, and it’s a big story, but once he, it’s all in the book. But once he betrayed his partners in 79. With Fleming and all the partners just about were either they were all indicted except for about this big horse racing scheme that was going on, across several states. But Whitey and Fleming were unindicted co-conspirators, and that was hint number one that prompted Joe to go to Howie Winter, who was the face of the organization and say, I’m gonna kill them both. He was talked out of it because it’d be too much heat because Whitey had some very serious connections. You can’t take that away from him. And so he was a high [00:15:00] risk hit. Joe would’ve done it anyway and would’ve probably made him disappear or threw it at another organization to get the heat off the hill. But he was restrained, which was, I thought was a big mistake, but who can tell then? But after he cleared the field of his rivals, who. Where his partners in the Winter Hill gang he ostensibly should have taken over the rackets in Somerville, but that wasn’t really the case. He had salty that was his turf. He was a local guy. Salty was really where he was. He was no longer really welcome is my understanding from guys who I talked to were there, he was basically chased out of the Marshall Motor’s garage in Somerville in Winter Hill, and that’s when he went to the Lancaster garage in, on North End, which is closer to home, closer to his. Space of operations. Yeah. But Whitey was very treacherous and he was Machiavellian in his methods. Joe at the time was already on the lamb because I don’t think Whitey would’ve survived that if Joe was close and saw what he was doing. So it’s a lot of what could have been, if Joe wasn’t in the wind because of several other crimes and murders he was [00:16:00] doing at the time, he was actually on the FBI’s 10 most wanted on 76, long before Whitey was on it. Gary Jenkins: Interesting. So then the relationship between Howie Carr and Joe Mack how was that, how did that shake down? Springs Toledo: Howie Winter, you mean, Gary Jenkins: or Howie Winter, I’m sorry. Springs Toledo: Yeah. Howie Winter was mentored by Joe Mack. See, Joe Mack was really, he was like the general, he was like the general on the field. The Irish don’t operate in a hierarchy. That’s an Italian thing. There’s no ring kissing in an Irish pub. It’s just a different culture. What they were partners. You had one guy up front. He was the face of it. That’s Howie. Howie was the face of it before Howie’s buddy McClain. In the early, in the early sixties. Joe though, the guy in the shadows, he used to say, I’m at the back of the bus. He’s at the back of the bus, but he’s the one with the map. He’s the go-to guy. The guy up front is the guy that gets hit. That’s the guy that gets indicted. So Joe was astute enough to, just stay in the [00:17:00] background, let the kids have it. But they were. Very close, very close. During the war they were, very tight-knit organization. These were friends. They were very affectionate with each other. They took care of one another. This is before Whitey came in. He was, he poisoned the well. But Joe and Howie and Buddy McClean and they, anos when they come in, they were very close. It was a kind of a band of brothers in a way. But Joe still made. Maintain that, everybody was at arms length with him. He was careful about everybody. There was a rift between Howie and Joe later in their respective lives in the in the eighties, into the nineties. I’m told that it was healed. I don’t think it was, and that’s unfortunate. But they were close to most of their lives, they literally went to war together on, on the street, you’re gonna form strong bonds when you know you’re looking at this guy and you gotta rely on him to watch your back. And Gary Jenkins: yeah, Springs Toledo: that’s what was happening. Gary Jenkins: So Irish, they didn’t kick up, if you will, to somebody above them. Everybody was a kind of a independent operator. If you got a piece of action and you had something going that you didn’t have to kick up to [00:18:00] somebody to be part of the Winter Hill gang, if you will. Springs Toledo: That was where the, there were a lot of crews around. They were called independents. And there’s a lot of them around in Boston in the sixties. But if you got too big and you started making real money, Patri was a power in Boston. Gary Jenkins: Yeah. Springs Toledo: Raymond Patri, he was a power in Boston. There’s no doubt about that. But there’s two schools of thought. Some believe that Winter Hill had to always kick up to them, kick to Providence. Others say? No, not really. Because first of all, he loved Buddy McClean. Buddy McClain was he was a very charismatic guy, very tough guy, and he was a man of his word, so they really liked him. So there’s the other school of thought is that, they liked Buddy, they gave him a pass on that. But every now and then they’d have to do him favors, maybe do some hits, things like that. Yeah. Yeah. But again, but in, in Boston it’s, like I said, it’s mostly Irish, it’s not set up like New York where the Italians are a real power that’s right there. He, one guy, matter of fact a name of one of the chapters in the book where I get into the Gangland war. Is Boston was [00:19:00] overrun with sick bastards, quote unquote, because there was just so many dangerous guys. There wasn’t a few here and there, like the gallows or it, there was hundreds of guys and there was damn near psychopathic they were called and underworld polls. There was savages, they go right to your house. And it was too many. This, one guy actually several believed that if there was a problem between Rhode Island. The Boston Underworld, meaning Boston Writ Lodge, including Somerville, Medford, Malden, all that. That. The Italians would’ve come to the table. ’cause the Irish underworld, the Boston Underworld here would’ve made it very much not worth it. Not worth the blood and the treasure. So it’s, yes, with very interesting culture here. What you couldn’t control the Boston underworld. They would just, Boston itself has a reputation. You don’t wanna invade this place. Gary Jenkins: Yeah, just ask the English, huh? Springs Toledo: Exactly. Yeah. We go way back with that stuff. Yeah. Gary Jenkins: Yeah it’s, I was at I went into the north end and looked around at Prince Street and all the place where [00:20:00] Jerry Angelo and all that was going on, and that is such a small. Discreet little area in that then, so you, they just operated and he was not any kind of a real power. It didn’t seem to be like, compared to patriarchal. He was under patriarchal of course. And he didn’t really, it’s like the Irish all had their own thing all around him. All, and he didn’t really have didn’t, I didn’t find any, anything I’ve ever seen where there was much to do between those two. Was there, did he have anything about that? Springs Toledo: He had he had two guys joe Russo, he was a killer. He was a very serious individual and a guy who has two names. Some call him Byi, some call him Zino. Larry was his name. Very serious guy. But that’s two guys. The other dangerous guys in the north end. They were getting up there in age. Meanwhile, like you just alluded to, this sur this surrounded, by these, these crazy guys. Yeah, but they, they did. There was some interplay, there was some contracts would be given to the Hill, for instance. That happened several times. The Hill would borrow [00:21:00] money from Angelou and Jou had a lot of money. They’d borrow money from him. Whitey Belger borrowed money from him with Fleming and actually didn’t pay it back. And then Joe Mack got out of the can. This is 80 late 86, 87, and him and Howie went to Fleming and Whitey and said, listen, you’re paying them back. Matter of fact, you’re paying them back a million because you made us look bad. We pay our debts, you pay him, you pay in back 1 million. And they did. They Whitey Bulger. Yeah. Whitey Bulger did not step two, Joe McDonald. In other words he wasn’t the power that Johnny Depp would have us believe. Gary Jenkins: Interesting. So let’s go back to the family just a little bit. His daughter Jack Le, so when he went to prison, did she talk about that? I have a friend who went to prison for several years and he talks, tells me a lot about his kids coming to visit him in prison. Did he talk about that? Did she talk about that? How that affected her? Springs Toledo: She she talks about her whole life and how he was a shadow in her life. She loved him, [00:22:00] but he brought a lot of chains behind him and a lot of ghosts and a lot of fear of FBI raids and things like that. Even when he was on the run from the FBI was on the, top 10 most wanted, it’s only six o’clock news all over the place in every post office. He would just show up and see her. He thought he was being a dutiful father. He’s showing up. He’s got these black sideburns, glued onto his face and she could see the ink dripping. He got his rug on his head he startled her a lot. So she. He was a cause of great anxiety. And then she became a mother, and then things started to change. She had to protect her boys. And while, he looked like he could be a good grandfather, he was an extremely dangerous man. And when he went away to prison, she tried to be a good daughter. She would send him clippings. Matter of fact, she sent him a clipping of I think it was a national examiner because her father was in it. It was about the top 10. FBI fugitives. And she pointed out she was into astronomy and she astrology and she pointed [00:23:00] out that Joe Mack and another guy named Leo Corey had the same birthday, July 14th. So she thought he’d get a kick outta that. He gets outta prison a few years later, and he shows up at her house with Leo Corey. Who’s still on the top 10 most wanted. And she, he opens the door. He said, do you remember this guy? And she turned, that, that was a scary, that was a very scary moment for her. Yeah. He’s bringing very, this is a convicted murderer. It’s a multiple murderer. She’s got bringing, he’s bringing it to her house like he’s an old friend. So that kind of stuff happened a lot. It almost show off like that. Look what I can do. Yeah. So she had, I, she did love him and she has since forgiven him. And I think this book is part of her process to forgive, what he put her through and what he put his other children through. Not intentionally, he tried to be a good father, but how can you. In that position. Gary Jenkins: Yeah. Yeah. When you bring that violence into the home, and you can’t help but bring that aura of [00:24:00] violence with you. When you live that life and when you come back into the home, there’s still that edge of violence that, that unspoken communication, you jump every time, somebody pulls up out in front and you’re running to the window to see who it is and there’s just always, always on edge. I, that would be it. Springs Toledo: Here’s a good story. So he’s on the run. This is in the I think it’s the late sixties. Joe’s on the run. She’s at home and Joe set his wife and kids up in Malden and a house on the hill. And originally he was gonna live there too. And it’s a, it is a great place. He’s up, he’s on a corner. He’s on a hill. You can see Boston from it. So it’s got a great vantage point for kind of a, a paranoid damaged war veteran. Yeah. So a call comes into the house. Voice says, you know who this is. She’s about 11, 12 years old. Voice says, you know who this is? Yes. Meet me at the bottom of the hill. So she gets her sister Patty and they meet their dad at the bottom of the hill. He takes them bowling and saga. He’s got the disguise on. Yeah. He’s got so many IDs, fake IDs, and he’s they [00:25:00] go to they, they go bowl and. You gotta wait for Lane. So he’s sitting there like this, he got his arms out. He’s feeling good about himself. He’s a good dad. He got his two teenage girls here and one of ’em, one of ’em, almost a teenager. And suddenly over the intercom, Thomas Campbell, your lane is ready. And he’s just sitting there. Thomas Campbell, he’s just sitting there. Finally his daughter says, pat says, dad, that’s you. Oh. And off he goes. So he wasn’t even sure who he was half the time. Yeah. So he’s my heart went out to him in that sense because here’s a man who made some very dark life choices and he’s trying to be a conventional father. Meanwhile, he’s gotta keep his eye on the clock, on the door, on the phone and everything else, all day long. Not to mention the fact that, there’s, it was dangerous lifestyle. But, his daughters, I, his daughters, they idolize him and they loved him. They didn’t fear him, he never raised his hand to them, never raised his hand to them, but they feared what he brought with ’em. Yeah. And that’s a theme book. Gary Jenkins: Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, that’s a, that’s that is so interesting. Think about this [00:26:00] era or of violent violence. I think somewhere in the book I noticed I was going through it where he may have been possibly one of the suspects on the Joe Barbosa head out in San Francisco when they finally got him and in. Springs Toledo: That’s fascinating because actually I had to take out ’cause of the publisher, I take about 15,000 words, but I really get into that. But that had to go. But what happened was. He had to go out there and kill a federal witness. And this guy was a civilian. This guy looked like a grandfather. And but he was gonna be a fence for some rear stamps that Joe had taken a million dollars worth of rear stamps. And this guy was gonna be the fence. He was a rear stamp collector out in Sierra Madre. Long story short, in January of 1976, Joe Mack drives out there, shoots him in the head five times in front of his wife, and then in February, that’s when Bob Bozer is killed February, 1976. This is January, 1976. Now, what I heard from two sources, and they’re pretty good, is that Joe did not go from Sierra Madre, [00:27:00] California back to Somerville. What he did was he went to Laurel Canyon and that’s where Alex Rocco was staying. Alex Rocco du played Mo Green in The Godfather. Oh, Gary Jenkins: yeah. Yeah. Springs Toledo: Yeah, he was a Winter Hill guy and Joe stayed with him on the lamb for so many weeks. I don’t know if it’s true. I couldn’t chase that down. No way you’re gonna find that out. But it was an intriguing little tidbit. So then in in February Bob Bozer is killed. Now when that news hit a bar in Boston called Clocks was a mob hangout. The bartender who knew all these guys. He got off the phone and he yelled out to the bar that Bleepity bleep stool pigeon. Animal Barbosa is dead and gone. God bless Joe Mack. That’s what he said. He just assumed Joe Mack did it. So what I’m trying to chase that down and what happens is so I’m talking to guys, who’re talking to guys. What I [00:28:00] found out is that one guy said no, this that, that wasn’t Joe that was kept in-house among the Italians because Bob Bza really took apart the Italians influences Yeah. In Boston. Yeah. He took them apart with lies. And however, there were three people in that van. I got these I got freedom of information documents and. What I was told by a made guy actually, is that it was Russo and Byi Zino. They’re the ones that took out Bob Bozo with a shotgun from a van. The van two seats were taken out of the van. The windows were painted black. This. Side windows were painted black and peeps were drilled into the side door and the back, so they worked hard to get ’em, but there was a third man in the van, so that’s a little intriguing. Could it have been Joe? I don’t know. Probably not. I’d have to say probably not, but nice story. And then from there, and then literally just a few weeks after that, Joe was in disguise. Remember now he’s already on the news as a as a top 10 fugitive. The FBI’s looking [00:29:00] for, and where is he? He’s in Walpole. How did I find out? I got everybody’s prison records. I could, and Brian Halleran, who turns up later in the book and then turns up dead later in the book. He’s in prison. Joe visits him. How do I know? It’s Joe’s Alias? John A. Kelly, that was his alias at the time. So he’s wanted by the FBI, he’s on the news and literally a week or two later. He’s visiting somebody in Walpole State Prison. From there, I trace him to Montreal. What’s he doing in Montreal? He’s sticking, he’s holding up a an ahed car robbery. With the Montreal Express, they had a great program, the Montreal Express. And Somerville, what they would do is they would just swap guys to do these big highs, get these ika, get these banks, and then just return. So it was awfully hard to catch ’em ’cause they’re just doing like a swap off. Yeah. Joe Mack. Was up there. And what he was doing was, and he, it was a white van, which raises an eyebrow, another white van. And the Amed car, the guy wouldn’t open the door. So they open up the [00:30:00] door of the back doors of the white van. And there is a World War II Browning anti-aircraft gun. And guess who’s behind it? Joe Mack. So this is a very busy man, and he should be, he’s retirement age but did he kill Boba? Probably not, but there was a third guy there. I would not be surprised. I know the Italians used him. Gary Jenkins: You brought something to Montreal Express Now what’s that? I, that I’m not from, I’ve not heard that term before. Springs Toledo: I wasn’t either, but that a lot of guys told me they Gary Jenkins: back heard your story there. Springs Toledo: Yeah, there is. Yeah. They were they were up, they were they were bank robbers. They went for the armor trucks. That was their forte. Very well organized. Very skilled. They were specialized and they would swap off with, winter Hills, sometimes with Southie and South Boston, I should say. South Boston and Somerville would, they were very close, they were very much aligned. They would swap off. I think one of ’em was the brother of a Bruins hockey player. Yeah. Gary Jenkins: Interesting. These guys, they got their connections. I found out more and more after I since I started doing this podcast, how many connections people [00:31:00] had between cities and even within a city connections to regular look like Square John, businessmen and just connections all over the place. It’s Springs Toledo: all over the place. Matter of fact, Joe was Joe was in contact with the guys who escaped from Alcatraz. I couldn’t prove it, but I heard that, he was sending them money and, and supporting them. I pro I didn’t find nearly 50% of what Joe was up to, but that’s more than anybody else. I think before this book, we knew about 2% of what he was up to. Yeah. Gary Jenkins: It was Springs Toledo: pretty guy. Sure. Yeah. He was a footnote in the most of the books. Just a footnote, if that. So Gary Jenkins: that’s the smart one, the one that keeps his head down and keeps out of the papers and everything. Did that, did you talk to John Ano? Springs Toledo: Yes. Yeah. Gary Jenkins: Interesting. Springs Toledo: I did. He was he loved, first thing he said was how much he loved him. All these guys, very serious guys. They’re very powerful guys in the underworld. And when I brought his name up the ones who were close to him, they would say I love that. I love that man. Loved him. They loved and [00:32:00] revered him. Other guys who were not as close to him, but who were very, operatives in the bus world. I bring his name up now, he’s been gone since 1997. And they’d look around like this. And they say, oh gee. So you know, his name is still enough to and matter of fact, I was told early on when I was poking around that I’m poking around in dangerous places and Joe still has friends and you don’t wanna cross these guys, so even now his his shadow still looms, if you will, but I think it approve of what I did because, what I heard is that he’s very honest. He would not want any biographer to pull a pull punches about who and what he was. I didn’t, yeah. But some of his friends warned me. They were, you gotta be careful with this, but I call it bachelor’s privilege. I’m not married, I have no kids. If I end up in a ditch, who cares? So I can take risks. Gary Jenkins: Yeah. That’s some truth. It’s just that last few minutes before you’d done the dish, you go, oh shit, I wish I was anywhere but here. I, Springs Toledo: I would ask to talk to a priest. Let me get a confession. That what you gotta do, Gary Jenkins: you Springs Toledo: know, Gary Jenkins: you’d be like I think it was Tony Citro. Supposedly the story was he [00:33:00] wanted to know if he could say a quick prayer before they did him in, but Springs Toledo: I hope they let him, Gary Jenkins: I don’t know. Steve Fleming, we met, you’d mentioned about Steve Fleming, the Rifleman, who was whitey’s buddy and you, I think you mentioned you had a story about Steve Fleming. Springs Toledo: Steve Fleming was it’s interesting he doesn’t appear too much in the book. One of the things I had to do with this, I had to do my best to keep the names down. One of the a fatal flaw in a whole lot of Boston and Underworld books than any underworld books is there was just 8,000 names. Too many names. There’s too many names. So I, so I mentioned him a few times ’cause you have to, but I’m not focused on Fleming, but I can tell you that Joe was very suspicious of Fleming as early as he was very suspicious of Whitey. He respected him. Fleming was a killer. More of an ambush killer than than a Savage or a guy who took a lot of risks. He was a lot like Whitey, like that. But no, Joe didn’t trust him because. He had a long bid and he got out early, and that’s always a cause for concern among those guys. Why are [00:34:00] you out early? They got a story and the stories backed up by the government. They were already in cahoots. Gary Jenkins: Yeah. Springs Toledo: But with the names, there was one guy, this is an example. He was actually an MDC cop who was part of the Winter Hill gang in the early sixties, and his name was Russ Nicholson. I don’t wanna keep saying Russ Nicholson, the cop. So I shortened it to Russ the cop. Yeah. And then as things went on and the, police department realized that this guy’s involved in the rackets, they forced him to resign. So then I started calling them Rust, the ex cop. Then Rusty ex-cop gets clipped probably by Georgie McLaughlin. He’s dead, so now he’s Rust the dead ex-cop. So I’m trying to be polite to the reader and keep the names down. Gary Jenkins: Interesting. That’s a good idea that I know about that, that people say I love what you did, but there’s too many names. I got confused who was who. So it’s Springs Toledo: yeah, Gary Jenkins: it’s always a problem with these deals. All right, Springs, Toledo. [00:35:00] Let’s see. All of a sudden I like there it is. There you go guys. And guys, I will have your his link to for all his books and the show notes and of course links to my books too, but links to all of these guy, these books. You had some even about John Brown. You wanna go back into little Civil War history? Why check those out too. Guys, thanks so much for coming on the show. Springs Toledo: My pleasure.