Podcasts about Sicilian Mafia

AT THE HOTEL BOHEMIA WE BELIEVE YOU CAN'T KNOW WHERE YOU ARE GOING UNLESS YOU KNOW WHERE YOU HAVE  BEEN.2025 COMIN' ROUND THE MOUNTAIN.CAN YOU DIG IT? Drummer Buddy Rich died after surgery in 1987. As he was being prepped for surgery, a nurse asked him, “Is there anything you can't take?” Rich replied, “Yeah, country music.”Lucky Luciano was a mob leader who helped the U.S. work with the Sicilian Mafia during World War II in exchange for a reduced prison sentence. His last words were, “Tell Georgie I want to get in the movies one way or another.”Donald O'Connor was a singer, dancer, and actor known for his role in Singin' in the Rain. He also hosted the Academy Awards in 1954. O'Connor died at age 78 with his family gathered around him. He joked, “I'd like to thank the Academy for my lifetime achievement award that I will eventually get.” He still hasn't gotten one.Groucho's brother Leonard, who was better known as Chico Marx, gave instructions to his wife as his last words: “Remember, Honey, don't forget what I told you. Put in my coffin a deck of cards, a mashie niblick, and a pretty blonde.” A “mashie niblick” is a type of golf club.As he was dying, Alfred Hitchcock said, “One never knows the ending. One has to die to know exactly what happens after death, although Catholics have their hopes.”Blues guitarist Huddie William Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly, said, “Doctor, if I put this here guitar down now, I ain't never gonna wake up.” And he was right.Bo Diddley died giving a thumbs-up as he listened to the song “Walk Around Heaven.” His last word was “Wow.”"It was Christmas Eve babeIn the drunk tankAn old man said to me, won't see another oneAnd then he sang a songThe Rare Old Mountain DewI turned my face awayAnd dreamed about you"-Shane McGowenA VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU AND YOURS FROM YOUR SPLENDID BOHEMIANS!

نسترجع في هذه الحلقة قصّة ظهور «المافيا» ونتتبع تطوّرها وتوسّعها من منشئها في جزيرة مهملة في إيطاليا، وصولًا إلى دول مختلفة في العالم، أهمّها الولايات المتحدة.هذه الحلقة من بحث وكتابة بشر نجار، الإنتاج والتحرير جنى قزّاز، تدقيق المعلومات بيان عاروري، الهندسة الصوتية لنور الدين بلّاحسن، الإشراف التحريري تالا حلاوة، النشر والترويج فريق صوت.بودكاست «منبت» من إنتاج صوت.انضمّوا لبشر نجار في برنامج «جرعة تاريخ» الجديد من إنتاج صوت، واستمعوا لقصص تاريخيّة من دول مختلفة حول العالم، وتعرّفوا إلى تاريخها مع الحروب والاستعمار.اشتركوا في صوت+ عبر الرابط: https://apple.co/3Y8HWYEالمراجع: https://tinyurl.com/c6w24cws Cosa Nostra: a history of the Sicilian Mafia, John Dickie. The history of the Mafia, Nigel Cawthorne.https://tinyurl.com/44vmscm6 تابعوا صوت على: النشرة البريدية: https://sow.tl/newsletterإنستجرام: https://www.instagram.com/sowtpodcastsتويتر/إكس: https://twitter.com/sowtيوتيوب: https://www.youtube.com/@Sowt تيك توك: https://tiktok.com/@sowtpodcasts فيسبوك: facebook.com/SowtPodcasts لينكد إن: https://jo.linkedin.com/company/sowtتعرف على جميع برامج صوت: https://www.sowt.com/ar/podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thanks to writers like Mario Puzo, filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, and actors like Al Pacino and James Gandolfini, American and Sicilian Mafia characters are well-known figures in contemporary popular culture. Other powerful organized crime groups appearing in popular media include the Neapolitan Camorra and Mexican drug cartels. This book takes a close look at all these examples of organized crime by examining the different ways these organizations and their members have been portrayed in many of our most popular novels, movies, and TV series, and how the gangster figure has evolved from its earliest depictions in a trio of Hollywood films in the 1930s up to the present day. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/arroe-collins-unplugged-totally-uncut--994165/support.

In the city of Pittsburgh, Italian criminals were divided into two factions: the "Sicilians" and the "Neapolitans". The territory within the city was also divided as Sicilian Mafia clans controlled the north and south sides, while Neapolitan Camorra clans controlled the east end.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-history-of-the-american-mafia--4722947/support.

Thanks to writers like Mario Puzo, filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, and actors like Al Pacino and James Gandolfini, American and Sicilian Mafia characters are well-known figures in contemporary popular culture. Other powerful organized crime groups appearing in popular media include the Neapolitan Camorra and Mexican drug cartels. This book takes a close look at all these examples of organized crime by examining the different ways these organizations and their members have been portrayed in many of our most popular novels, movies, and TV series, and how the gangster figure has evolved from its earliest depictions in a trio of Hollywood films in the 1930s up to the present day. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/arroe-collins-like-it-s-live--4113802/support.

The Pizza Connection case was one of the most significant and expansive criminal enterprises ever uncovered, involving the Sicilian Mafia and American La Cosa Nostra in a global heroin trafficking operation that spanned decades. Using pizza parlors as fronts, the Mafia smuggled heroin from Turkey, processed it in Sicily, and distributed it across U.S. cities through an intricate network. The operation generated billions of dollars, which were laundered through international banking systems, including Swiss banks. Law enforcement eventually cracked the case through wiretaps, surveillance, and informants, leading to the arrest of key figures, including mastermind Gaetano Badalamenti. The subsequent trial, lasting nearly two years, exposed the inner workings of the Mafia and resulted in multiple convictions, severely disrupting the Mafia's grip on the heroin trade. The case left a lasting legacy, shaping modern law enforcement strategies in combating organized crime while highlighting the Mafia's ability to adapt to new illicit markets.(commercial at 9:52)to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.com

The Pizza Connection case was one of the most significant and expansive criminal enterprises ever uncovered, involving the Sicilian Mafia and American La Cosa Nostra in a global heroin trafficking operation that spanned decades. Using pizza parlors as fronts, the Mafia smuggled heroin from Turkey, processed it in Sicily, and distributed it across U.S. cities through an intricate network. The operation generated billions of dollars, which were laundered through international banking systems, including Swiss banks. Law enforcement eventually cracked the case through wiretaps, surveillance, and informants, leading to the arrest of key figures, including mastermind Gaetano Badalamenti. The subsequent trial, lasting nearly two years, exposed the inner workings of the Mafia and resulted in multiple convictions, severely disrupting the Mafia's grip on the heroin trade. The case left a lasting legacy, shaping modern law enforcement strategies in combating organized crime while highlighting the Mafia's ability to adapt to new illicit markets.(commercial at 9:52)to contact me:bobbycapucci@protonmail.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-epstein-chronicles--5003294/support.

Italian Art Theft: A Deep Dive into Two of the World's Biggest Heists  Italy, often referred to as the cradle of Western civilization, holds an estimated 60 percent of the world's artistic treasures. With such a vast collection of art, it's no surprise that Italian art has long been a prime target for art thieves.  The reality is that art theft in Italy and across the globe is often part of a much larger criminal enterprise, sometimes even tied to organized crime, such as the infamous Sicilian Mafia. In this episode, we explore the world of art theft in Italy, the Carabinieri's fight to protect cultural heritage, and dive into two of the country's most significant art heists.

With PJ Judge taken out, Martin ‘Marlo' Hyland quickly established himself as the new face of gangland in Ireland. He planned on doing things differently, with a more considered approach to drug trafficking. He drew in other criminals to work as a team. This was a tactic straight out of the Sicilian Mafia's playbook. The cash was rolling in, but the murder of a young Dublin mother would bring too much heat on Hyland.?This episode was originally broadcast in March 2024. Host: Kevin Doyle Guest: Paul Williams See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

En attendant l'ultime épisode de la saison consacrée aux sectes, réécoutez notre épisode consacré à un autre illuminé : Charles Manson.Celui qui se prend pour le fils du diable est le gourou de jeunes hippies. Sur ordre de Manson, la "Famille" commet des crimes atroces qui vont bouleverser l'Amérique des années Flower Power.

Kitchener, ON and Montreal, QC: two of Andre Goulet's many hometowns. The Harbinger Media Network Executive Director and host of various podcasts joins the show to discuss... infrastructure??? Other points of discussion include Montreal's wrong directions and snowplow corruption.Listen to Andre's podcast, Harbinger Showcase, on your favourite podcast platform now!Find more from Andre:https://harbingermedianetwork.com/https://www.unrigged.ca/Links:Canadian Encyclopedia: Kitchener-WaterlooKitchener Waterloo – Random Facts31 Facts About Kitchenerr/Waterloo: Why are the roads so bendy?Montreal Plugged Over 111,000 Potholes This Spring — Now The City Looks Less Like The MoonWith the Sicilian Mafia in Decline, Who Is Running the Mob in Montreal?r/AskaCanadian: How strong is the Mafia in Montreal?Quebec dairy mogul Lino Saputo had secret past dealings with U.S. mobster Joe Bonanno, then lied about itCanardian is the flagship podcast of Pod the North, the newsletter for the Canadian podcasting ecosystem from Kattie Laur.Check out Pod the North at podthenorth.com and share your Canadian podcasting news!Follow Pod the North on Instagram @podthenorthEmail Kattie at podthenorth@substack.comThe Canardian theme song is by Mark Allin and Kattie Laur, mixed by Jordan White, with vocals including Shane Fester, Brad Cousins, Ben Cousins. The Canardian podcast artwork is by Brad Cousins and Kattie Laur. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What could a History of Fresh Produce Club look like? What role did farming and produce have in solar eclipses throughout history? Who would've annexed Hawai'i if the US hadn't? Would pineapples still have been the big crop? Could the Sicilian Mafia still have been born without lemons? What crop had the biggest impact on history? And when did farmers and farming become perceived as less noble?Instagram, TikTok, & Threads:@historyoffreshproduce

What could a History of Fresh Produce Club look like? What role did farming and produce have in solar eclipses throughout history? Who would've annexed Hawai'i if the US hadn't? Would pineapples still have been the big crop? Could the Sicilian Mafia still have been born without lemons? What crop had the biggest impact on history? And when did farmers and farming become perceived as less noble? Instagram, TikTok, & Threads:@historyoffreshproduce --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theproduceindustrypodcast/support

With PJ Judge taken out, Martin ‘Marlo' Hyland quickly established himself as the new face of gangland in Ireland. He planned on doing things differently, with a more considered approach to drug trafficking. ­ He drew in other criminals to work as a team. This was a tactic straight out of the Sicilian Mafia's playbook. The cash was rolling in, but the murder of a young Dublin mother would bring too much heat on Hyland. ­ Host: Kevin Doyle, Guest: Paul Williams ­ Head to www.mypodcastfeedback.com, pop in code INDO and fill out the short survey to be in with the chance of winning a €500 OneforAll voucher.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From Al Capone to Tony Soprano, real life and fictional mafiosi have captured the public imagination for decades. Portrayed as thuggish, Italian American gangsters valuing “the family” above all else, Hollywood has certainly had an influence on how we think of the Mafia. But who exactly are the mafia? When did they come into existence? And what do they have to do with produce? Join John and Patrick in today's episode as they make you an offer that you can't refuse. The boys travel back in time to explore the origins of the world's most infamous criminal organization and its surprising ties to citrus groves on the idyllic island of Sicily.Join the History of Fresh Produce Club (https://app.theproduceindustrypodcast.com/access/) for ad-free listening, bonus episodes, book discounts and access to an exclusive chatroom community.Instagram, TikTok, Threads:@historyoffreshproduceEmail: historyoffreshproduce@gmail.com

From Al Capone to Tony Soprano, real life and fictional mafiosi have captured the public imagination for decades. Portrayed as thuggish, Italian American gangsters valuing “the family” above all else, Hollywood has certainly had an influence on how we think of the Mafia. But who exactly are the mafia? When did they come into existence? And what do they have to do with produce? Join John and Patrick in today's episode as they make you an offer that you can't refuse. The boys travel back in time to explore the origins of the world's most infamous criminal organization and its surprising ties to citrus groves on the idyllic island of Sicily. Instagram:@historyoffreshproduce --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/theproduceindustrypodcast/support

We all know there are cat people and dog people, it's a fact of life. But just for the sake of this episode, we'll be asking all the cat people out there to take off their cat hats and consider loving instead the humble African Wild Dog. The most cat-like dog species in the world, due to the fact they are obligate carnivores, are revered in Ancient Egypt and have no time for human bullshit. Talking about our first ever canine species on the show is the mega badass Lindsay Nikole, who tells the audience how Wild Dogs are REALLY perceived in Africa. Join her and Alice to find out more about Wild Dog territory size, how many teeth they have, and about the Sicilian Mafia - obviously... Our Charity of the Week this week is Painted Dog Conservation - Zimbabwe's answer to the Wild Dog population crisis. Check them out and lend them your support today at: www.painteddog.org. This podcast episode is also sponsored by the fabulous Blue Panda Clothing - where you ought to be shopping for your summertime clothing! Find their ethical fashion at www.bluepanda.co.uk and feel good about splurging on some wildlife-related garments today!

My guest this week is bestselling author Louis Ferrante. He was an associate in the Gambino crime family before going to prison, where he studied history and began writing books. He joins us to talk about the origins of the Sicilian Mafia and how they followed Italian immigrants to the United States, initially establishing themselves in crime-ridden New Orleans alongside a corrupt police force.  His new book is called "Borgata: Rise of Empire: A History of the American Mafia", the first volume of his Mafia trilogy.  More about Lou Ferrante and his work on his website: https://louisferrante.com/ Lou Ferrante's Simon & Schuster Publisher Page: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Borgata/Louis-Ferrante/Borgata-Trilogy/9781639366019 Lou Ferrante on Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/louferrante Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is a conversation with former mobster now mafia historian Louis Ferrante about his intriguing new book BORGATA: RISE OF EMPIRE. The former “chop shop” small time thug now erudite Ferrante is like a cross between Sonny Corleone & Niall Ferguson. Essential viewing/listening. Transcript below.AK (00:18): Hello everybody. It is Tuesday, January the second, 2024. We're in a new year, but old themes. Last year we did several shows on the Mafia, one with the historian Paul Moses on the what he calls, at least the true story of the immigrant cops who fought the rise of the Mafiaa. He had a new book out called Appropriately Enough, the Italian Squad, another with an interesting writer, Matt Beck, the Life We Choose about a series of conversations he had with a Mafiaa member called William Big Belly Delia. He talked about not just Donald Trump and Michael Jackson, but also Jimmy Hoffer, and we're going one better in 2024 rather than writing or talking to people who have spoken to people in the Mafiaa. We have a man, Louis Ferrante, who once upon a time was a member of the Mafia. And since become a very successful writer, the author of many books, bestselling books, including particular Mob Rules, what the Mafia Can Teach the Legitimate Businessman. It was a huge hit. And he has a new book out. It's a history of the Mafia, the Borgata Trilogy, volume one, rise of Empire. It came out in November of last year in the uk, and it's out this week in the US. Louis Ferrante is joining us from his home in Sarasota on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Louis, before we went live, you told me it's very nice in Florida.Louis Ferrante (02:01): Florida's beautiful, the Sunshine State, a lot of sun. I need sun. I grew up in New York, and the winters are dark and dreary, and London's a beautiful place too. I like the people in London, but once again, the weather's not the best part.AK (02:17): Dreary. Yeah, I'm talking to actually from California. So Louis, when you fly out and you get on a plane, you happen to sit next to someone and you get into conversation and they ask you what career you have or had, what would you say?Louis Ferrante (02:31): I'd tell 'em a hijacker if I'm on a plane.AK (02:36): And what do they do?Louis Ferrante (02:38): They look for the attendant or they go to the bathroom? No, I mean, I was a truck hijacker, a little different from a plain hijacker, but I tell them I'm a writer and a television host, which is the truth. I'm a bestselling author. My books have been translated into 2020 languages, and I hosted a show for Discovery Channel.AK (03:04): It's a good trade being a writer. But did you always intend to be one, or how did you go from being, as you say, a truck hijacker, someone who knows the Mafia, the American Mafia to actually writing about it.Louis Ferrante (03:21): I faced the rest of my life in prison, and I was lucky to get out of it with a 13 year sentence. I was represented at the time by the civil rights attorney, William Kunstler, who was very instrumental in, yeah, he helped Martin Luther King, Malcolm X. He went in to negotiate with the convicts during the Attica riots, and he defended me, and I was able to get a plea of 13 years without cooperating against anyone, and I didn't have to go to trial and possibly get the rest of my life sentenced to rest of my life in prison. And while I was there, I started to think through my life and eventually I picked up my first book, fell in Love with books, became an avid reader, and at some point or another I was reading a book a day, and that's what made my time go. And I started to teach myself how to write by reading all the great authors and taking notes as to how Leo Tolstoy begins and ends a chapter, how Dostoevsky Begins and Ends a plot, how Charlotte Bronte introduces a character, et cetera, et cetera. And that's how I taught myself how to write. And by the time I came home from prison, I was ready to be a writer. And my last book, Mob Rules was an international bestseller in 20 languages. And my current book will hopefully get picked up in a lot of languages as well. And it's a trilogy.AK (04:42): Yeah, it's already been picked up by the Germans. You imply that in prison, you were a meticulous reader. Is meticulousness something that's prized within the mafia? Was that one of your skills?Louis Ferrante (05:00): Skills? Yeah, I mean, I was a heist guy. I ran a crew of heist guys, heist and hijackings, and you need to know what you're doing and everything's, you got to cross your T's and dot your i's make sure that everybody knows their role. Make sure that you need a well-oiled machine when you're going to do a heist or a hijack in one mistake. And everybody's lives are at stake, including innocent people. Something I might regret now, but something that was just a fact then. But we wanted to get away with it. We wanted the money. I wasn't thinking about people's lives back then. I was thinking about money and we wanted to get away with it, and you need to know what you're doing and everybody needs to know what they're doing. And I was a big planner. I would make drawings, I would go over everything with everyone. I would do mock runs to the highway to make sure we had an escape route, a backup escape route. I made sure we had backup guys in place. I never just pulled the trigger too fast. At one point, I was picked up by the feds in California where you are. We were in San Francisco and we were looking to hit an armored car, and the feds swooped in on us and grabbed us the day before we were going to hit that armored car. And it was a crucial thing. I was one guy short, and the reason why we waited was I was waiting for an extra guy to come from New York so that he could make sure we had enough guys on the heist. But yeah, so I guess I was meticulous in that sense. I was ignorant and naive in a million other ways, but I was meticulous in that sense.AK (06:27): Yeah, you should come back, Louis. It's much easier to do your heist these days. I don't know if there are any police left in South Africa. Yeah,Louis Ferrante (06:34): I don't know if anyone would care anymore.AK (06:36): Yeah, you'd probably be encouraged. Lots of films and books about how young kids get into the mafia. There's The Godfather, of course, & the Irishmen. How did you get into it?Louis Ferrante (06:48):  If you start committing big enough crimes, they'll find you. And that's what happens. Once I started hijacking trucks, I ran an auto crime, a chop shop. I supplied car parts to auto collision shops for a long time when I was a kid, stole cars, chopped them up and sold them to a shop. That little operation started out with just a few car thieves, me and my friends, and eventually grew into, as I said, a chop shop. And then at some point, once we started hijacking,AK (07:18): What is a chop shop?Louis Ferrante (07:22): Chop shop is you have a shop where you steal a car, you get an order from a collision shop. So a collision shop, for example, has, let's say they got a Mercedes and they got to spend $30,000 in parts because it's a hundred thousand dollars car and the car's wrecked, so they need 30,000 in parts. They might tell us, look, we'll give you five grand, can you get us all the parts? And then they'll put the stolen parts on the customer's car and sell them back the repaired car. So we would get paid then to go out, steal the car, try to get the same color so they wouldn't even have to paint it, but if you had to, you paint it. It's not always easy to match colors, but we would steal the car, chop it up, give them the parts they needed, and then dump the skeleton somewhere in the beginning we dumped it in the woods. And then at some point or another, we started renting. Back then you could lease a building under a phony name and then just abandon the building when you were done with it. I don't think you could get away with that. Nowadays there's too many identifications and stuff required, and people are hip at things like that, but back then you could even fly. When I told you I went to California to knock off an armor car, we flew under different names. Pre 9/11, you just booked an airline ticket under any name. I just picked the name out of the phone book. Just get on a plane.AK (08:35): Those were the days. You mentioned your bestselling book, Mob Rules, what the Mafia can Teach the Legitimate Businessman. There's a sort of cliche, Louis, I'm sure you've heard it a thousand times, that had you been born into the New York or Boston upper classes, you would've ended up at Harvard Business School and made a million dollars that way, is what you were doing. Is that a form of innovation and in some ways equivalent to what kids are taught at Stanford or Harvard Business School these days to think and be meticulous and accomplish what they set out to do?Louis Ferrante (09:19): Yeah, I don't know if they're taught any more to think. I don't know what an Ivy League upbringing is like, so it would be unimaginable for me to even,AK (09:33): But you've met those types.Louis Ferrante (09:36): Oh, all day long. Yeah, all day long. Some of them can't tie their shoes. I mean, just can't fix a flat. I was with a doctor once who got a flat and didn't know what to do, had no idea where the jack was, where to even begin. If I wasn't with him, he would've sat on the side of the road probably for the rest of his life until he died of starvation. So yeah, I would rather grow up and have to learn how to do things yourself.AK (10:01): Where did you grow up? What town?Louis Ferrante (10:03): In Queens? Yeah. I grew up in Queens and one of the five boroughs in New York, lower New York. The lower borough.AK (10:08): Yeah. My son lives there now.Louis Ferrante (10:10): Does he really? What part?AK (10:13): On the border with Brooklyn.Louis Ferrante (10:17): Oh, okay. They're building it up. It's probably up.AK (10:20): Yeah. It's much more fashionable now than it, I'm sure it used to be.Louis Ferrante (10:23): Yeah. I mean, I was in a lower income section of Queens, middle to lower income, so it wasn't all that, but a lot of people now, they've bought up a lot of big real estate in Brooklyn, and I guess they're moving to Queens now too.AK (10:37): Did your family know what you were doing? How old were you when you started your chop shop?Louis Ferrante (10:42): I was in high school when I was running the chop shop, so I kept it from them as best I can. I remember the first time I came home with a tagged car. A tagged car would be if, let's say I bought a wrecked vehicle, let's say a wrecked Cadillac, and I bought the completely, it was totaled out. So you pick up the wreck for a couple hundred bucks. Nobody wants it, but it's got a clean title. If you have a clean title, you don't have to go to motor vehicle and go through an inspection at that time. I don't know if things have changed. Now, this is many years ago. So if you bought a wrecked car, you had a clean title, you could then go out and steal a car, pop a couple of the tags off, for example, the VIN number in the dashboard, pop that tag off, put it on your stolen car, and then drive that as if it's yours. If you get pulled over by a cop, usually the cops just checked the dashboard tag. They never went through the rest of the car unless it was auto crime, which was something different. They'd have to be looking for you. So I came home with a beautiful brand new El Dorado, and I remember my mother was heartbroken. She came out on the porch and looked at it and said, you're killing me. You're breaking my heart.AK (11:48): Right, because she knew what you were doing.Louis Ferrante (11:50): Yeah, of course. How would I afford that car? I didn't have a job. So I tried to tell her that my friend who I work at the Body shop for part-time, he gave me the car and he's going to let me pay it off, but she wasn't buying it. She came from a family who was crooked, although she was law abiding. She was hip to the streets in a way, and she knew something was wrong. And she said, you're breaking my heart. And I never forgot that I did break her heart. She eventually died in my arms. And when I was young, she died at 47. I was 19, turning 20, and I went off the deep end after that. But to this day, I regret that she had to go through that and no, did I admit it to her? No. Did I tell her? But she, no, she knew she was hip.AK (12:33): Louis, talk to me about why you've written this history. Is it bound up with your own history? I mean, much of this history, this first volume is set in the 19th, late 19th, early 20th century when of course you weren't around. But is this a very personal narrative or have you tried to step back and write about the history of the mafia as an objective historian?Louis Ferrante (13:18): Both. And so first answer, I'll answer that question and tell you how the book came about. I do try to be as objective as possible. I don't want anybody to believe that I'm inserting myself where I don't belong. I want to tell a real history. And Publishers Weekly gave me a rave review saying that I did not rest on my own experiences alone.AK (13:40): You didn't threaten them, did you?Louis Ferrante (13:42): No, I did not. No, I didn't hang anybody out of a window or anything. No. And then handed them a pen and said, you know what to do? No, I didn't. Basically, they just said it was Well-researched all my notes. My source notes are in the back years, years reading articles, books. But what I was able to bring to the table from my own insights was I have an extra sense that most people wouldn't have. Being I was a criminal when I read something, I know if it was true or if it wasn't. I know if the writer has been, they don't, usually a writer wouldn't intentionally mislead the reader, but sometimes writers themselves are misled and they may get information, and because they don't know the world or the culture, the subculture, they write the wrong story. And a lot of times I'd be in jail when I was reading history, biographies, science philosophy. I would hear other guys, mob guys reading mob books, and you would hear a lot of guys blurting out b******t never happened, who wrote this crap? And when I finally started to do my own research, I realized that I came across a lot of things that were untrue, and I was able to decipher that stuff for the reader, which I think is interesting. I debunked a lot of old mafia myths that have been around for decades about leading Mafia figures. And I would explain to the reader, this is why it could have never happened. I don't want the reader to just take my word. I want the reader to have confidence in me as a writer to know that this is why this could never have happened. So time and again, I do that. To go back to your original question is where the book came from, how it came about. It wasn't something I really thought about. I was invited to Mob Rules, as we mentioned, was an international bestseller. And I was invited to Sicily by the German media conglomerate at Axel Springer, and it was a retreat for editors in Argento, Sicily. And I was seated next to an older man who happened to be there, and his name was George. And him and I hit it off. He was in his nineties, but a very young nineties, sharp as nails. And we talked all evening, and at the end of the evening, he said, I would like to publish the next book. And it turned out to be Lord George Denfeld, one of the biggest of the 20th century. And the next day we had lunch in Argento overlooking the ruins with Lord George and his charming wife, lady Annabelle. And Lady Annabelle had some priceless input as well, which persuaded me to write the book, what turned down to morphed into a trilogy. Originally, I was contracted to write a book, but I said, you can't squeeze all this into a book. There's too much here. It has to be stretched out. And I probably could have wrote 10 volumes, but I ended up writing a trilogy, and that's how the book came about. Lord George, as I understand it, he had a reputation of connecting writers with subjects, and I was the last one he had personally did that with before he unfortunately passed away.AK (16:39): Louis, if you were to write a history of the Mafia itself, would that begin in Sicily? There's a very strong Sicilian quality, but the mafia existed throughout Italy, of course. Is there something about the Sicilian Mafiaa and the history of the American mafia that are inseparable?Louis Ferrante (18:23): There is, as I pointed out in the early chapters of the book, I dug deep into how the mafia was formed inside the Sicilian womb, and it did indeed start in Sicily and then spread throughout the peninsula up and down the peninsula of Italy. But it was born in Sicily, and it had a lot to do with socioeconomic reasons, culture, family tradition, as I point out all these things in the book. And there was also, I point out a strong Arab influence in Western Sicily, which is interesting because Sicily was invaded by so many different people's over the course of centuries, whether it be the Spanish, the French, the Austrians, and the Arabs at some point. So the Arabs had a strong, I believe, where it developed in Western Sicily for the most part, in places like Palermo and Argento and Casa Lama del Gulfo, there was a strong Arab influence there, which is still present, still prevalent in a lot of places in the architecture and stuff, in words, in people's names, et cetera. So I was able to trace the history deep into Sicily and how it started in America was during the Southern Italian mass exodus wave into the United States after slavery was abolished in the United States in the 1860s. That came on around the same time when the unification of Italy occurred in Europe. And Sicilians were not happy with the unification of Italy being sort of absorbed by Italy proper. And they felt like a lot of Sicilians felt like it was just the newest conqueror, the newest ruler, no different from the bans in France or whoever else was there. So they were like, Hey, you know what? We're not happy with this. And there was a lot of poverty. And when America abolished slavery, we needed labor. We needed cheap labor quick because we no longer had slave labor in the United States. And at that point, we started looking around and there were plenty of poor people in Europe, and we invited them, and they came here in droves, and the mafia rode in on those boats. A lot of them, and I go to detail, I go very, very close detail throughout the early chapters of how exactly that happened. And I'm also very, very careful to point out that most Italian-Americans came here to work hard and to make a new life for themselves and their children and grandchildren, and had nothing to do with the mafia and never committed crimes. But the unfortunate circumstance, the unfortunate byproduct of that mass immigrant wave was the Italian criminals that came with them. A lot of them were fugitives from justice in Sicily, and they planted new flags here in American cities throughout the country, in metropolitan areas. At one point or another. There were just as many Mafia families as there were metropolitan areas across the United States. There was one in every metropolitan area, and then the strongest one survived and went on sort of like Arnold Toby's Darwinian theory of how empires are built, the strong survive. It was the same thing with a lot of these.AK (21:27): Why was it that the Mafia, that the Sicilian Mafia became so dominant, and there were many immigrants from Naples and other parts of mainland southern Italy. What is it about the Southern Sicilian, and is it different in its principles organization, morality or lack of morality from the Neapolitan Mafia, for example?Louis Ferrante (21:51): Yeah. Well, the Neapolitan Mafia was the Kimora. I had done a documentary for the History Channel about them very different from the Italian Sicilian, the Sicilian Mafia in Sicily. A lot of these other mafias from Calabria, from Naples, and even there were a few in northern Italy, very weak. None of them had that sort of Sicilian, the Sicilians. They had something very special on that island. It was an island different throughout up and down the peninsula of Italy. You had city states throughout the Renaissance and stuff. So they were all very, I'm still asked, her father was from Naples, and her mother was from Sicily. So I have two grandparents on my mother's side from Naples and Sicily. And my father's, both parents were from Bari, all from southern Italy. But I'm still asked by people who are Italian American, where are you from? And they sort of connect with you a lot faster if you're from the same place they were from. So you can only imagine back then how territorial Italy was and how people really responded to people like themselves. So at that time, Sicily was an island away from even all those city states, and they were really, really isolated, and they really, really relied on themselves. And throughout history, there were always weak central governments in Sicily, no matter who ruled Sicily, they really never cared about the Sicilian people and implementing any positive changes, whether social changes or institutional changes. They just wanted to pretty much rape Sicily of whatever agrarian products they could get off the island. So most of the time, the Sicilian people relied on themselves, and that went a lot into it as well. And it was a patriarchal society, which in some cases comes from the Arab influence in Sicily.AK (23:33): Are you presenting then the Sicilian Mafia as a resistance, organizational resistance to colonialism of one kind?Louis Ferrante (23:41): Believe it or not, at one point they were. Now, I know that they evolved or devolved extremely quickly into something much more treacherous and less upstanding than that. But I do make the argument that in the very beginning, they were indeed just that in my book, even the word I trace, for the first time, people were, historians were sort of in agreement that it came from an Arabic word, but they threw out a half a dozen different Arabic words that it might've come from one meaning a cave dweller, another one meaning a proud horse, and all kinds of different words from the Arabic language, I was able to trace the word mafia. Those of us in the West who are familiar with the siege of Khartoum, where the Victorian general Gordo, the British General Gordo,, was sent to sort of hold off against the Muslim guy who sort took control and launched this rebellion and said, I am the sort of the prophet. I am the prophet incarnate. And he was sort of like a rebellious character against the status quo all throughout the world, throughout the east and the Middle East. And in this particular case, when the Arabs were pushed into the western region of Sicily, after the unification of Italy, the modest regime was known as the Media, which was one letter away from Mafia. So I left it, look, I'm not an etymologist, but I left it to future historians to debate this. And I make a cogent argument that this is where it came from, my quote, encyclopedia Britannica. I quote people who were on the scene at the time, I quote history books, et cetera, to make this argument. And I do believe it came from that particular word.AK (25:29): As I said, Louis, we've done lots of shows on the mafia infiltration, the response of the police, but is the reason why the Mafia became so powerful and perhaps remained so powerful in the United States because it's a country with a tradition of weak central government, of federal government, of government that isn't for the most part, very effective or efficient. So in other words, was there something, and you have to be careful using this word as a historian, but was there a degree of inevitability about the mafia's rise to power in late 19th century America?Louis Ferrante (26:12): It's a great question, and the answer is yes. There was a Sicilian mobster, and I don't recall his name, but he said, why in the world can anybody think why? When Sicilians left Sicily for New life in America, and a lot of them landed in South America, central America, a lot of them landed in North Africa. They went everywhere. Sicilians were scattered everywhere. But why only in America did the American Mafia, did the Mafia really take root as it did? And that goes to our system, which is we have always had a very corrupt system. And I traced that it was very easily manipulated by mobsters who really learned how to bribe politicians and law enforcement officials during prohibition. And that was a prime time because during prohibition, which took place the roaring twenties into 1930, we had people in America who wanted to drink and were told by their government, you're not allowed. And so the people as a whole didn't agree with this. So they were really, really suddenly the mafiaa who wanted to provide them with liquor, with alcohol and supplying the demand for alcohol weren't seen as these animals anymore. These killers, these beat bad guys, they were all of a sudden these romantic sexy figures who were giving the United States, the people of the country, alcohol when they desperately wanted it. And that's when the mafia began to corrupt a lot of politicians and political machines. And the influence ran throughout law enforcement agencies and that deep influence they had during prohibition, basically, once prohibition was repealed and Americans could drink again, the mafia kept a lot of those deep corrupt alliances that they had made, and they moved on to use them for gambling and stuff, to open up casinos, to have a casino, to have a casino. So a lot of why the mafia was able to prosper here in America had a lot to do with the easily corruptible local governments. And at that point, there wasn't an overarching federal government who could come in and say, Hey, you've been all corrupted. We'll take over from here. We know you're all bought and paid for by the Mafiaa here in your local town. So here the federal government's going to move in with j Edgar Hoover's, FBI, et cetera, et cetera. That didn't happen.AK (28:44): Yeah. And of course, j Edgar Hoover's, FBI began in some ways as a response, not always a particularly effective one to prohibition. To what extent the book covers legendary figures and legendary mafia figures like Lucky Luciano & many others. To what extent do these kind of guys capture the spirit of a violent independent 19th century America?Louis Ferrante (29:16): They do and don't. By the time we get to Luciano and Genovese and Costello, they're sort of this newer generation of American mobsters. So the first generation with these sort of old mustache, peats, grease balls, all the derogatory names that they were called in this country, they were sort of like off the boat, Italians. That was the first generation. Then there was the second generation that were more American, and they weren't as clannish as the Sicilians were. They understood that if they were going to prosper in America, they needed to form these diverse relationships with Jews, with blacks, with Irish. They needed to really, if they were going to get somewhere, they basically came up with the plan that they were going to, Hey, we're going to keep this thing of ours, this thing of ours, this our thing, La Cosa Nostra. We're going to keep that to ourselves.Nobody's allowed entry into this secret organization that we have, but let's deal with everyone. We're not going to get anywhere if we stay to ourselves. And they made alliances with everyone across the country. And that was the key. And that was sort of like that second generation, even though Costello and Luciano came to the country when they were eight or nine years old, they may as well have been born here. They were just as good as Americans, just as good as American born citizens. They were a second generation of this. And they did away with the old ones, the old clannish Mafiosos, who felt like, no, we have to defend ourselves. We have to stick with ourselves. We have to continue to live amongst ourselves, and we can't trust the Irish. We can't trust the blacks or the Jews. This second generation of Italian-Americans said, no, we can trust them and we're going to, and we're going to deal with them.And for example, Frank Costello not only partnered with a million Jews in business, but he married a Jew. So he had a Jewish family. And at one point or another, Al Capone in Chicago, his guy Jake, greasy Thumb Gik was his best friend. He was a Jew. And when somebody had bragged that he made this little Jew greasy thumbs wine, Capone was beside himself, and he went looking for the guy, and he unloaded a revolver in his face and murdered him because Capone wasn't going to allow that to happen. He says, Jew or Italian, it doesn't matter if you're my friend, I protect you, I defend you. So these relationships really started by that sort of next generation of Italian American mobsters. And by my generation, I mean, I had a hijacking heist crew. The two of the toughest guys in my crew were Jews, and they were treated the same as any other Italian. We were all from the same neighborhood. We all grew.AK (31:50): It extend to race as well? I mean, in The Godfather, we all remember the explicit racism of many of the fictional figures were black Americans, African-Americans, were they as welcome as Jewish Americans?Louis Ferrante (32:08): Yes. Now, even in my time you had at one time, I said, for example, mobsters weren't going to go, oh, that African American owes me money. Let's go over there and pay him a visit. Obviously, the lingo would be that N owes me money. Let's go over there and pay him a visit. And the N would refer to us as a grease ball or whop a Guinea. So the words that we used back then would be considered racist today. But were we racist? And what were the Italians or the blacks racist against each other? Absolutely not. The only color we all saw was green. And that was it. And I point out in my book, they made a strong alliance, Lucky Luciano Luciano did with Bumpy Johnson. Bumpy Johnson, when they took over the policy racket in Harlem, they needed to smooth things over with the blacks because the black was a huge population in Harlem blacks. So Luciano struck a deal with Bumpy Johnson, where Bumpy Johnson was going to pretty much handle any black problems in Harlem and deal directly with Luciano. And bumpy Johnson's wife wrote a memoir years later that praised Luciano and said that him and my husband were best friends. And it was a real legitimate friendship. It wasn't just business. They had a real friendship. So all that racism they try to make, that's all television now because it sells. But for the most part, yeah, the talk, you told jokes about each other. You called each other what would be considered horrible names now, but were we really racist toward each other? Absolutely not. People will say Italians. And the Mafia hated gays. The Genovese family ran all the gay clubs in Greenwich Village. They controlled all the gay clubs.AK (33:53): How about women? We did a show last year on female drug gang leaders in Latin America. There aren't that many women in your narrative, are there?Louis Ferrante (34:03): No. I mean, if you want to say misogynistic, then I have to agree. Yeah. Not racist, but misogynistic. The Italian, theAK (34:09):Women in all the movies, the women are at home cooking the past, and the men are out killing each otherLouis Ferrante (34:14): Yeah, go home and cook. No Italian man wants his wife buttoned into his business. So I have to concede that point. I won't give in on racism because it wasn't there. But I will give in on misogynistic outlook toward women.AK (34:27): And I don't necessarily mean that critically. One way. The other narrative, Louis, which of course is most clearly articulated in the Godfather, the movies, the Godfather, maybe even Godfather three, is that the mafia began in a sort of communal way, reasonably decently, even if there was a great deal of violence, and it went really badly wrong with drugs. And of course, that was the foundation of the narrative in The Godfather, the cause of all the bloodshed. Is there any truth in that? There is tell you that veto Corleone in the Godfather wasn't a bad guy, and then it all went wrong when his family got in the drug business.Louis Ferrante (35:07): Yes, there definitely is a direct correlation between the movie and real life and the movie, whether Putto, I believe Mario Puzo, who was the author that they based the movie on, but either Puzo or Francis Ford Coppola adopted it from a real life story, which was Frank Costello. Frank Costello was the acting boss when Lucky Luciano went to jail and then was deported. And when Costello was boss, he was dead set against drugs. He did not want his Borgata dealing drugs because he felt that he had all these big political leaders in Tammany Hall who did everything that they could do for the mob to keep them out of jail, to help them with things. They had judges, they put judges in. They chose the head of Tammany, who in turn helped choose the mayor of New York slash the governor. And then obviously through the governor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt started out in New York and ended up being the president. So it's no telling how high you could go. Well, Costello said, if we continue to deal drugs, these political alliances are going to run away from us. They're not going to, this is something the American people do not like. They're fine with alcohol. They wanted alcohol. We gave it to them. They're fine with gambling. If the United States prohibits gambling and we allow them to gamble, that's fine. The people have no problem with that. They feel like we're providing them with a desire that they have. Even Luciano ran a chain of bordellos. That's an ointment for the hard up. That's fine. But obviously it's human slavery.AK (36:40): can I quote you on that ointment for the hard up?Louis Ferrante (36:44): Well, that's what, yeah, it basically was. It was like an outlet for social frustration maybe. Obviously. Obviously it's woman trafficking. It's disgusting. However, however, Luciano really didn't have a direct connection to it, but it was taking place, but it wasn't thought of by the American people, I should say, as the worst thing in the world.AK (37:10): I mean, the way the Godfather presents it is that this was the argument I think Sonny Cordone made with his father is that if we don't do it, someone else will. There's going to be other groups who do it. Was there any truth to that?Louis Ferrante (37:24): Yes. Yes. And everyone uses that argument today. There are still mobsters who sell drugs and say, if I don't do it, somebody else will. Somebody's got to do it. And me, myself, I never went near drugs. I had an uncle who was a drug addict. He was a heroin addict. And my mother from when me and my sister were little kids, she would beg us, please don't ever do drugs. Please don't ever do drugs. Don't put us through this hell that your uncle put us through. And we never did. I never did it, and I wouldn't sell it. I wouldn't call that curse down upon another person's family. I was dead set against it, but some people did. I knew people who sold drugs. I was in jail with a million different people who sold drugs. I don't think a lot of them sat down and really, really thought deeply about the consequences that could have with regard to mothers crying for the rest of their lives. And some kid dropped dead on his bed because he OD'ed or some, yeah, IAK: Excuse the Dimwittedness of this one. Louis, you've mentioned the word “Borgata” a couple of times. You might define it. Why did you title your book “Borgata”?Louis Ferrante (38:37): Borgata is what we called a crime family is the Borgata or the Broga, we would say, and it's a slang for a crime family. We wouldn't say we belong to a crime family. We wouldn't say we belong to the Mafiaa. We would say, I'm in so-and-So's Borgata or Borgata, and a Borgata. In the Italian definition of the word, it stems from the Latin burial. It's sort of like a poorer neighborhood of Italians would be a Borgata. A poorer community of Italians would be considered a Borgata. And that became, somehow, it became the name of a crime family, which is a little bit of a community. And obviously they don't start off super well off, or they wouldn't be committing crimes. People typically aren't born into wealth and commit crimes. So whoever the name came to mean, a crime family, that's what it means. And nobody had ever used it for a book before. So I figured, what the hell? It's perfect. So I went with the Borgata trilogy.AK (39:32): Well, I hope in this trilogy we're going to get to have you on at least two more shows for volume two and three. You end in the sixties, of course, in The Godfather, there were a wonderful moment in Godfather two, filmed in Cuba. Cuba was central. You make Cuba an important place in this narrative. Why'd you end in the sixties? Did something happen? Did something profoundly change?Louis Ferrante (39:58): Yes. There's a major shift that occurs in 1960 from the beginning of Borgata volume one until the end of Borgata volume one, there really isn't any concerted effort to destroy the Mafia. Thomas Dewey, who went on to become the Governor of New York and eventually ran as the Republican candidate for President against FDR, he did take a shot at locking up some gangsters in New York, but there was never really a concerted effort by the institutions of law enforcement to go after the mob. When Bobby Kennedy, when John f Kennedy's elected president in 1960, or begins his term in 1960, he appoints Bobby Kennedy, his younger brother, the Attorney General of the United States. And Bobby always had a thing against the mafia. He had started out in the McClellan Committee where he went after Jimmy Hoffa, and he went after other gangsters and called them to testify. And he was incensed that they took the Fifth Amendment all the time, and he didn't like that they would hide behind the Fifth, how dare them. And he swore he would go after them one day. And when John F. Kennedy becomes president, and Bobby is appointed Attorney General of the United States, he now suddenly has all of the Justice Department's, 30,000 employees under his control, treasury, I-R-S-I-N-S-F-B-I, et cetera, et cetera.AK (41:18): Although Bobby Kennedy used to call j Edgar Hoover, j Edna Hoover. He never seemed to listen very much to what Bobby Kennedy said.Louis Ferrante (41:27): No, he demeaned Hoover to, I mean, beyond what we would even consider. I mean, our standards today, forget it. They'd cancel Bobby Kennedy in a minute. But he was horrible to Hoover. And Hoover hated him. But Hoover did not. Hoover was dragged into the fight kicking and screaming. Hoover knew that if you made a concerted effort to destroy the mob, a lot of those mobsters, their backgrounds led to Congress led to congressmen, politicians, senator,AK (42:00): And of course, Hoover wonderful new biography, Al Prize winning biography. I'm sure you've read it. He was more interested, I think, in racial divisions in America. He might've been slightly sympathetic to the Mafia because they were white.Louis Ferrante (42:15): Yeah, I mean, he probably was at some point or another, he used the Mafiaa to uncover, I don't know if you're familiar with when those three civil rights workers were killed down in Mississippi.  Johnson put tremendous pressure on Hoover to crack the case, and Hoover probably got dragged into the fray kicking and screaming. I'm sure he didn't want to go after that. He was not deferential to blacks at all, Hoover. But he knew that that's what Johnson wanted. And the public wanted to know who these people were that killed these three civil rights workers, two whites and one black. And Hoover called one of his FBI informants down south and told them, here's the KK guy. The agents told, not Hoover himself, but Hoover's agents told this mob guy, here's the KKK guy. We believe the KKK guy we believe had something to do with it. You could beat it out of him if you want. Go for it. And this guy did. And then they dug up the bodies and they cracked the case. But Hoover, Hoover didn't like Italians, but he didn't go after them. And of course he didn't like blacks. Hoover was old school, very conservative in his views. Yeah. I mean, he was a man of his own time, but he was only concerned with groups trying to advocate the destruction of the United States. He was big on communists. He did not like communists Obviously, blacks and Italians weren't trying to overthrow the United States, but groups for the most part, like communist groups…AK (43:50): Right. His obsession with anti-Communist. And finally, Louis ending in the sixties, of course, in the sixties, America descended into a great deal of political violence, and particularly the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, of Bobby Kennedy, of Martin Luther King, many others. Lots of stories. And I'm sure you covered this in the book about Mafia involvement in one kind of assassination or another in the sixties, is in an odd ironic way at the end of this first volume, did America and the mafia kind of come together? Are they increasingly inseparable in the 1960s in the public use of violence of one kind or another?Louis Ferrante (44:31): That's a great question. I guess they've always remained, there's some sort of inseparability between them. But yeah, America became a very violent place.AK (44:44): Always was, but politically much more violent in the sixties.Louis Ferrante (44:48): Correct. I mean, we didn't have assassinations like we did. There's still a song. I heard it the other day. Where's my old friend, Johnny Martin, Luther King, John and Bobby, they died. Where are they? I forget the lyrics of the song, but it was made on the heels of that violence, and it still plays on the radio today. Where's my old friend Johnny? I think it is. But yeah, I mean, America became a violent place. I do believe that the mafia had something to do directly with John f Kennedy's. I present tremendous evidence in volume two of the Borgata Trilogy, trilogy. They had something to, andAK (45:24): That book's not out yet, right? Louis?Louis Ferrante (45:25): It's not out yet. But they did have something to do with his murder. And I also believe at some point or another, I intend to write a book about the Mafia's involvement with Martin Luther King's murder as well. I do believe there was a mafia informant who had something to do with Martin Luther King's murder as well. And I think if Hoover's hands aren't dirty in each of those cases, he definitely had his head in the sand and he heard things that he chose to ignore. And I think that that was the type of person, Hoover was where if I want a certain outcome and I just didn't see it or didn't hear it, it's like if you have a neighbor whose dog's been crapping on your lawn for the last 10 years, and then somebody beats up the neighbor, maybe you didn't see it. Maybe you looked the other way when it happened. I don't know. Maybe you get the outcome you wanted. So that could be what happened with Hoover.AK (46:19): Final question. I got to ask you this. We will get more next time you come on the show with volume two, talking about JFK and all that. What about you grew up in Queens? What about, you know who, I'm not sure if you've ever met him or come across him, but there's a mafia quality in the way, maybe a wannabe mafiaa quality to your fellow queens in New Yorker?Louis Ferrante (46:43): I never met him. I will say a lot of people have accused him of his construction business and the buildings that went up in New York having some type of mafia involvement. But I will say this, I know for a fact all of the buildings that went up in New York had some sort of mafia involvement. So you couldn't operate as a building developer in New York, especially back then, without having to deal with the mafia controlled unions without having to deal with the mafia controlled construction companies without having to deal with the mafia controlled concrete companies. There was something the mafia had, which was called the Concrete Club. And any bid over a million dollars, which would be any bid for a skyscraper, was controlled by the mafia. They let any bids under a million, they let them go, but anything over a million, they wanted to control. My friend, my former friend, I haven't seen him in years, I did time with him also. Tommy Rizzo supplied the rebar for the Trade Center. He was a Colombo gangster, Colombo family mobster. The guy who was supposed to fireproof the supports in the trade center was a Gambino family mobster. And the Port Authority cleared him of any wrongdoing when the towers fell. But I mean, these are mobsters who have all these contracts in New York and all these building developers to some extent have to deal with them. Now, usually there's a GC on the job, a general contractor, and at some point or another way below, someone like him or someone like somebody, his associates in that industry, somewhere down there, there's someone dealing with the cash envelopes under the table and stuff. But I don't think it ever rises to the height of himself or people like him in the developing industry. I think they're much bigger. They go to the parties. If he has a flamboyant nature, that's a completely different thing. But I mean, as far as incriminating something that he may have done incriminating, I don't believe so. I believe it was done lower, much lower than him. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

This week on Whale Hunting, Tom Wright is joined by Simon Willis, journalist and host of new podcast, The Professor. The series unravels the story of William Veres, an art dealer charged with running an art trafficking ring linked to the Sicilian Mafia. With a 20-year prison sentence looming, Veres has a daring plan to win the favor of prosecutors – he'll solve the coldest case in the history of art crime: the theft of Caravaggio's Nativity. In this episode of Whale Hunting, Simon and Tom discuss the hidden world of art trafficking and organized crime that is exposed in The Professor, and its shadowy connections with the Italian establishment. Plus, Simon explains what it was like to navigate the still-treacherous world of Mafiosi while reporting this story. If you'd like to listen to the show, search for The Professor in your favorite podcast app, or visit www.brazen.fm/the-professor.  For more information and to subscribe to the Whale Hunting, visit whalehunting.projectbrazen.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Half-Arsed History, discover the history of the Sicilian Mafia, the most famous criminal organisation in history, and hear about its spread from the island of Sicily across the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Camorra clans of Naples had always played second fiddle to the Sicilian Mafia and the Calabrian 'Ndranghetta. Until Raffaelle Cutolo started building up his Nuovo Camorra Organization while locked up in a notorious prison. When he wasn't writing poetry or challenging other bosses to knife fights, his old school charisma and genius leadership skills, as well as his insanity, saw him take a small prison crew and build it into an army of thousands ready to die for him. Many of his soldiers would get that opportunity as he started a war trying to rule all of Naples, but it was his battles with the government that ended up really taking their toll. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The origins of Naples' feared criminal clans known as the Camorra go back hundreds of years to the days of rural banditry and villa owners with private armies that lived by a code. Now, having access and control to one of Italy's most active ports and corrupt governments has paved the way for their growth but unlike the Sicilian Mafia or the Calabrian 'Ndranghetta, there's a whole lot more parallel groups as opposed to a hierarchical structure. From making tens of millions of dollars smuggling black market cigarettes to running street level coke sales, the clans have emerged as the most violent groups in Italy, constantly warring with each other and everyone else. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You bustin' my balls?? Tossed Popcorn encounters another mob movie, but this one is from the '90s. Get in the trunk for culinary criminals, coked-out camerawork, and yelling. The person most confused by the film this week was: the entire heist crew getting whacked.See omny.fm/listener for privacy information.

The Sicilian Mafia is one of the most murderously amoral organisations on the planet – yet babyishly sentimental when it comes to Italian peasant Catholicism. And, like other branches of Italian organised crime, questions exist over whether they have allies in the Vatican, some of whose senior officials are as keen on money-laundering as the Mafia, only not so good at covering their traces.  The relationship between the hitmen and the hierarchy casts an exotic shadow over a new series of thrillers by Alexander Lucie-Smith, the first of which, The Chemist of Catania, has just been published. To quote A.N. Wilson, Lucie-Smith's plots are fast and his characters unforgettable. 'Menace, suspense, lust, love and fear all enliven his narrative. I can see him becoming a real cult author.'  Some scenes describe acts of stomach-churning depravity. Others display a surprising degree of theological literacy – surprising, that is, if you don't know that the author is a Catholic moral theologian and hard-working parish priest of Arundel and Brighton. I hope you enjoy our conversation and buy Father's book. But be warned: page 95 is not for the faint-hearted. 

“Theft is the act of taking another person's property or services without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it.[1][2][3] The word theft is also used as a synonym or informal shorthand term for some crimes against property, such as larceny, robbery,[1] embezzlement, extortion, blackmail, or receiving stolen property.[2] In some jurisdictions, theft is considered to be synonymous with larceny,[4][5] while in others, theft is defined more narrowly.[6] Someone who carries out an act of theft may be described as a "thief" (pl: thieves).[7]” “Burglary, also called breaking and entering (B&E)[1] and sometimes housebreaking,[2] is the act of illegally entering a building or other areas without permission, typically with the intention of committing a criminal offence. Usually that offence is theft, larceny, robbery, or murder, but most jurisdictions include others within the ambit of burglary. To commit burglary is to burgle,[3] a term back-formed from the word burglar, or to burglarize.[4][3]” I saw similar things: “The newest growth sectors for organized crime are identity theft and online extortion. These activities are troubling because they discourage consumers from using the Internet for e-commerce. E-commerce was supposed to level the playing ground between small and large businesses, but the growth of online organized crime is leading to the opposite effect; large businesses are able to afford more bandwidth (to resist denial-of-service attacks) and superior security. Furthermore, organized crime using the Internet is much harder to trace down for the police (even though they increasingly deploy cybercops) since most police forces and law enforcement agencies operate within a local or national jurisdiction while the Internet makes it easier for criminal organizations to operate across such boundaries without detection. In the past criminal organizations have naturally limited themselves by their need to expand, putting them in competition with each other. This competition, often leading to violence, uses valuable resources such as manpower (either killed or sent to prison), equipment and finances. In the United States, James "Whitey" Bulger, the Irish Mob boss of the Winter Hill Gang in Boston turned informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He used this position to eliminate competition and consolidate power within the city of Boston which led to the imprisonment of several senior organized crime figures including Gennaro Angiulo, underboss of the Patriarca crime family. Infighting sometimes occurs within an organization, such as the Castellamarese war of 1930–31 and the Boston Irish Mob Wars of the 1960s and 1970s. Today criminal organizations are increasingly working together, realizing that it is better to work in cooperation rather than in competition with each other (once again, consolidating power). This has led to the rise of global criminal organizations such as Mara Salvatrucha, 18th Street gang and Barrio Azteca. The American Mafia, in addition to having links with organized crime groups in Italy such as the Camorra, the 'Ndrangheta, Sacra Corona Unita and Sicilian Mafia, has at various times done business with the Irish Mob, Jewish-American organized crime, the Japanese Yakuza, Indian mafia, the Russian mafia, Thief in law and Post-Soviet Organized crime groups, the Chinese Triads, Chinese Tongs and Asian street gangs, Motorcycle Gangs and numerous White, Black and Hispanic prison and street gangs. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that organized crime groups held $322 billion in assets in 2005.[197]” --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/antonio-myers4/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/antonio-myers4/support

“All three dark triad traits are conceptually distinct although empirical evidence shows them to be overlapping. They are associated with a callous–manipulative interpersonal style.[9] Narcissism is characterized by grandiosity, pride, egotism, and a lack of empathy.[10] Machiavellianism is characterized by manipulation and exploitation of others, an absence of morality, lack of emotion, and a higher level of self-interest.[11] Psychopathy is characterized by continuous antisocial behavior, impulsivity, selfishness, callous and unemotional traits (CU),[12] and remorselessness.[13]” I had similar experiences in the DMV: “The newest growth sectors for organized crime are identity theft and online extortion. These activities are troubling because they discourage consumers from using the Internet for e-commerce. E-commerce was supposed to level the playing ground between small and large businesses, but the growth of online organized crime is leading to the opposite effect; large businesses are able to afford more bandwidth (to resist denial-of-service attacks) and superior security. Furthermore, organized crime using the Internet is much harder to trace down for the police (even though they increasingly deploy cybercops) since most police forces and law enforcement agencies operate within a local or national jurisdiction while the Internet makes it easier for criminal organizations to operate across such boundaries without detection. In the past criminal organizations have naturally limited themselves by their need to expand, putting them in competition with each other. This competition, often leading to violence, uses valuable resources such as manpower (either killed or sent to prison), equipment and finances. In the United States, James "Whitey" Bulger, the Irish Mob boss of the Winter Hill Gang in Boston turned informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He used this position to eliminate competition and consolidate power within the city of Boston which led to the imprisonment of several senior organized crime figures including Gennaro Angiulo, underboss of the Patriarca crime family. Infighting sometimes occurs within an organization, such as the Castellamarese war of 1930–31 and the Boston Irish Mob Wars of the 1960s and 1970s. Today criminal organizations are increasingly working together, realizing that it is better to work in cooperation rather than in competition with each other (once again, consolidating power). This has led to the rise of global criminal organizations such as Mara Salvatrucha, 18th Street gang and Barrio Azteca. The American Mafia, in addition to having links with organized crime groups in Italy such as the Camorra, the 'Ndrangheta, Sacra Corona Unita and Sicilian Mafia, has at various times done business with the Irish Mob, Jewish-American organized crime, the Japanese Yakuza, Indian mafia, the Russian mafia, Thief in law and Post-Soviet Organized crime groups, the Chinese Triads, Chinese Tongs and Asian street gangs, Motorcycle Gangs and numerous White, Black and Hispanic prison and street gangs. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that organized crime groups held $322 billion in assets in 2005.[197].” --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/antonio-myers4/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/antonio-myers4/support

In recent years, another one of Italy's feared criminal groups has risen above the Sicilian Mafia to become among the most powerful organized crime groups in the world: The Calabrian 'Ndrangheta. Started as a self-defense militia centuries ago to protect against pirates and raiders, the secretive society later morphed into a powerful group of bandits who made their bones through high profile, high profit kidnappings - like snatching the grandson of one of the richest men in the world. Soon enough, though, they wanted in on the real money, which means cocaine trafficking...and that's where Rocco Morabito excelled. Dubbed the cocaine king of Milan, he eventually became one of Italy's most wanted men and went on the run in South America for decades after brokering massive cocaine deals between the cartels and Italian organized crime groups, helping the Ndrangheta control the majority of Europe's cocaine trade. Calabrian crime reporter and journalist Antonio Talia, who grew up in the same area that Morabito hails from, takes us inside the Ndrangheta and the rise and fall of one of the world's biggest cocaine brokers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

To hear the rest of the episode, subscribe at patreon.com/TrueAnonPod ---------- We're joined again by Matt (twitter.com/GhostStoriesEnd) from Ghost Stories for the End of the World (patreon.com/GhostStoriesForTheEnd) for a look at the Sicilian Mafia's place in Italian society and the history of the organization through to the present day.

AP correspondent Charles de Ledesma reports on Italy Mafia Arrest

Italy's most-wanted Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro has been arrested in Sicily after 30 years on the run. Mr Denaro was reportedly detained in a private clinic in Sicily's capital, Palermo, where he was receiving treatment for cancer. Considered the boss of the notorious Cosa Nostra Mafia, he was tried and sentenced to life in jail in absentia in 2002 over numerous murders. Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has celebrated his arrest, but says the war against the mafia isn't over. Davide Lerner, a journalist based in Rome, spoke to Charlotte Cook.

Yeti Airlines has now confirmed that there were no survivors, Wages in Australia are on the way up, one of the most notorious bosses of the Sicilian Mafia has been caught after 30 years on the run, Rafael Nadal, Daniil Medvedev and Iga Swiatek all won their first round matches at the Australian Open yesterday, Aussie actor Samuel Johnson has blasted Molly Meldrum for his antics at Elton John's concert, the Critics Choice Awards were on in the US yesterday. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Southern Italy is home to some of Europe's most powerful criminal organisations; the Sicilian Mafia, the Camorra in Naples and the Ndrangheta based in Calabria. For many, crime is a family business. So a judge in Sicily has come up with a radical plan to prevent young people becoming the next generation of mobsters. He's been taking children away from Mafia families. This controversial policy is now being considered by other countries around the world. Daniel Gordon travels to Sicily to meet those involved in the programme and find out whether it actually works. Photo: A 17 year-old girl, Letizia, supported by her uncle, addresses an anti-mafia meeting in the Sicilian town of Messina. Her mother is missing and is believed to have been killed by local gangsters. (Rocco Papandrea, Gazzetta del Sud.) Reporter: Daniel Gordon Producer: Alex Last Series Editor: Penny Murphy Sound engineer: Graham Puddifoot Production coordinator: Iona Hammond

Southern Italy is home to some of Europe's most powerful criminal organisations; the Sicilian Mafia, the Camorra in Naples and the Ndrangheta based in Calabria. For many, crime is a family business. So a judge in Sicily has come up with a radical plan to prevent young people becoming the next generation of mobsters. He's been taking children away from Mafia families. This controversial policy is now being considered by other countries around the world. Daniel Gordon travels to Sicily to meet those involved in the programme and find out whether it actually works. Photo: A 17 year-old girl, Letizia, supported by her uncle, addresses an anti-mafia meeting in the Sicilian town of Messina. Her mother is missing and is believed to have been killed by local gangsters. (Photo: Rocco Papandrea, Gazzetta de Sud.) Reporter: Daniel Gordon Producer: Alex Last Series Editor: Penny Murphy Sound engineer: Graham Puddifoot Production coordinator: Iona Hammond

On todays episode I review the first movie of 2023, M3EGAN. This horror movie became a fan favorite as soon as the trailer dropped a few months ago. It was such a big opening weekend for this movie that I had to get  two guests on the podcast to help me review it. Glenn and Liz, who are recurring guests on the podcast, joined me again with two choices for their throwback movies. Glenn chose 365 days which is the first ever erotica movies on the show. And Liz picked Father Stu starring Mark Wahlberg on Netflix. M3GAN (2023) Directed by Gerard Johnstone.  A robotics engineer at a toy company builds a life-like doll that begins to take on a life of its own.365 Days (2020) Directed by Barbara BiaIowas and Tomasz Mandes. Massimo is a member of the Sicilian Mafia family and Laura is a sales director. She does not expect that on a trip to Sicily trying to save her relationship, Massimo will kidnap her and give her 365 days to fall in love with him.Father Stu (2022) Directed by Rosalind Ross. Follows the life of Father Stuart Long, a boxer-turned-priest who inspired countless people during his journey from self-destruction to redemption.Follow on all social links https://msha.ke/thisseatstaken

Michael Vecchione joins the relaunched Mobsters Inc. as they discuss the life and journey of Luigi Ronsisvalle. Luigi was a gun for hire for the Sicilian Mafia as he wanted nothing more than to get made. Michael Vecchione is a best selling author of Homicide Is My Business: Luigi the Zip―A Hitman's Quest for Honor.   Get the book here: https://amzn.to/3GXjRMv #Mobstersinc #Luigithezip #Sicilianmafia

Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence considered a 17th century masterpiece, created by Italian painter Caravaggio in 1609. Nativity has been missing since it was nicked by thieves in Palermo in 1969. No one for sure knows who stole it, or why they stole it, but what might have become of it has sparked dozens of tales. One prominent theory is that it was stolen by the mafia – and, quite possibly, eaten by pigs.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We're sitting down with former Bonanno associate Frank Fiordilino. Frank was born into a Sicilian Mafia family and became active in the Bonanno crime family in Brooklyn. We cover a lot of ground as Frank provides his insights regarding legendary Bonanno members including Joe Massino, Carmine Galante, Sal Montagna, and more!

We're sitting down with former Bonanno associate Frank Fiordilino. Frank was born into a Sicilian Mafia family and became active in the Bonanno crime family in Brooklyn. We cover a lot of ground as Frank provides his insights regarding legendary Bonanno members including Joe Massino, Carmine Galante, Sal Montagna, and more!

Patreon... because you want to support our goofy asses www.patreon.com/accidentaldads  So thank you to a beautiful and wonderful listener, we decided to do an addendum to our top police stings and follow it up with the top most dangerous mobs/gangs of all time.  La Cosa Nostra One of the biggest threats to American civilization from organized crime is the Cosa Nostra, sometimes referred to as the "Mob" or the "Mafia," which sprang from the Sicilian Mafia. The term "La Cosa Nostra," used by the US government, and "Cosa Nostra" by its members literally translates to "this thing of ours" or "our thing." This international organization of criminals, made up of many "families," is committed to combating crime and defending its members. These organized and major racketeering activities are being carried out by these crime families or groups, which are connected by kinship or by conspiracy. A wide range of illicit activities, including as murder, extortion, drug trafficking, government corruption, gambling, infiltrating lawful enterprises, labor racketeering, loan sharking, prostitution, pornography, tax fraud schemes, and stock manipulation are also engaged in by them. The Cosa Nostra is most prevalent in the urban areas of New York City, New England, and portions of New Jersey, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Chicago. The Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese families are among the prominent ones in the New York City region. Sometimes, members and associates of one La Cosa Nostra family collaborate with members of other La Cosa Nostra families to carry out joint criminal activities.   Within these families, members collaborate on "crews" that are commanded by a "capo" or "captain," who is in charge of overseeing his crew's illicit actions and offering them assistance and safety. The crews are made up of trusted outsiders known as "associates" and "made" members known as "soldiers." An associate must be of Italian heritage, have proven their capacity to make money for the Family, and have shown a willingness to use violence in order to become a "made member" of the Family. The three highest-ranking members who manage the Family are the Boss or Acting Boss, the Underboss, and the Consigliere, or advisor. Cosa Nostra has its origins in Italian organized crime, although it has existed as a distinct organization for a long time. It still collaborates with many criminal organizations with Italian headquarters today in a variety of illicit operations.    Labor racketeering, in which it attempts to dominate, manage, and control a labor movement in order to have an impact on associated businesses and industries, is one of its main sources of income, power, and influence. Organized criminal organizations may profit greatly from labor unions, particularly their pension, welfare, and health funds. The mafia tries to regulate these schemes by giving businesses "sweetheart" contracts, cordial worker relations, and weak work regulations, or by manipulating union elections. Large cities like New York, Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia that have robust industrial bases and labor unions tend to be the epicenters of labor law infractions. Additionally, there are several organized criminal characters in these cities. Labor racketeering costs the American public millions of dollars annually through increased labor expenses that are ultimately passed on to consumers, according to many FBI investigations.   In order to investigate potential violations of labor law, the FBI collaborates closely with other governmental organizations and uses methods such as electronic surveillance, covert operations, use of secret sources, and victim interviews. The passing of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) in 1970 was the one event that helped more than anything else to deter organized crime. The agencies were able to work more effectively as a result of this action because they could target the entire corrupt organization rather than incarcerating individuals who might simply be replaced by other members or affiliates of organized crime.   The first known Sicilian Mafia member to immigrate to the United States was Giuseppe Esposito. After assassinating 11 rich landowners, the chancellor and vice chancellor of a Sicilian province, and six other Sicilians, he escaped to New York. In 1881, he was detained in New Orleans, Louisiana, and then sent back to Italy.    The nation's first significant Mafia event occurred in New Orleans. Police Superintendent David Hennessey of New Orleans was executed on October 15, 1890. Numerous Sicilians were detained, and 19 were ultimately charged with the crime. An acquittal spread allegations of widespread corruption and scared witnesses away. On March 14, 1891, a group of angry New Orleans residents formed a lynch mob and murdered 11 out of the 19 defendants. Eight managed to flee, nine were shot, and two were hanged.   As different gangs gained and lost power throughout the years, the American Mafia changed. The Black Hand gangs in the early 1900s, the Five Points Gang in New York City in the 1910s and 1920s, and Al Capone's Syndicate in Chicago in the 1920s were a few of the earliest.   The Italian Mafia factions started fighting during Prohibition for exclusive control of lucrative bootlegging networks. They struggled for dominance of bootlegging alongside Jewish and Irish ethnic gangs. By the conclusion of the decade, two Italian organizations were competing for dominance of the nation's criminal underworld. Joe Masseria, the head of the Genovese criminal family, oversaw one gang, while Salvatore Maranzano, who oversaw the Bonanno crime family, oversaw the other. The deadly Castellammarese War, which raged from February 1930 to April 15, 1931, was the result of the rivalry's escalation. When Charles "Lucky" Luciano, Masseria's senior soldier, and Salvatore Maranzano planned to have Masseria assassinated, the battle came to an end.   Maranzano eventually rose to prominence as the nation's most powerful Mafia leader, referring to himself as "Boss of Bosses." Maranzano designed the organization's code of conduct, set the conflict resolution processes, and split New York City into five families. Charles "Lucky" Luciano was designated as the leader of the Genovese family, as it eventually came to be known.   Maranzano's leadership position would, however, be transitory. Maranzano preferred to exclusively associate with Sicilians and upheld the traditions of the purported "Old World Mafia '' by refusing to cooperate with non-Italians. Younger Italian organized crime figures like Luciano believed that limiting their business dealings to Italians would restrict both the development of their individual careers and the possible expansion of their criminal empires. As long as there was money to be made, these men—known as the "Young Turks''—wanted to deal with Irish and Jewish gangsters.   Marazano quickly saw Luciano as a threat and gave the order to kill him. On September 10, 1931, Marazano was murdered by a group of mobsters at his office in the New York Central Building when Luciano learned about the scheme.   In order to prevent future Mafia battles, Lucky Luciano formed "The Commission," a coalition of five Mafia families of similar magnitude, with the aid of his lifelong buddy, Meyer Lansky. Vincent Mangano, Tommy Gagliano, Joseph Bonanno, and Joseph Profaci served as the commission's other leaders. After then, this panel made decisions about all organized criminal activity throughout the 1930s. The leaders of the Chicago Outfit and the Five Families of New York City reportedly still make up the Commission.   The organized crime groups quickly diversified into new businesses after Prohibition ended in 1933 because they were unable to maintain the high profits they had made throughout the 1920s. These new businesses included labor racketeering through the control of labor unions, construction, loan sharking, extortion, protection rackets, sanitation, transportation, prostitution, and drug trafficking.   In Las Vegas, Nevada's legal casinos by the 1950s, numerous Mafia leaders had made legitimate investments and were skimming money before it was recorded. It is assumed that the sum was in the hundreds of millions of dollars.   For years, the Mafia operated in secrecy with little opposition from the law because local law enforcement authorities lacked the tools or expertise necessary to successfully confront organized crime perpetrated by a covert organization they were unaware even existed.   It wasn't until 1951 that a U.S. Senate investigation concluded that this country was home to a "sinister criminal organization," subsequently known as La Cosa Nostra. Six years later, in the little upstate New York hamlet of Apalachin, The New York State Police discovered a gathering of important La Cosa Nostra officials from all across the nation. Numerous guests were taken into custody. The incident served as the impetus for altering how organized crime is combated by law enforcement.   Joe Valachi, the first Mafia member to turn state's evidence in 1963, divulged extensive details about the organization's inner workings and trade secrets. After then, the National Crime Syndicate of the Mafia was aggressively attacked by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Although the Mafia came under additional pressure as a result, its illegal operations were not significantly reduced.   However, the Nevada State Legislature's passage of a measure in 1969 that made it simpler for companies to run casinos caused the Mafia's power in the Las Vegas economy to start to decline. A year later, the RICO Act was approved by the US Congress, giving law enforcement extra power to go after the mafia for its criminal operations. By the start of the 1980s, the FBI had achieved success when it was able to free Las Vegas casinos from Mafia rule and made a concerted effort to weaken the Mafia's grip on labor unions.   23 mafia bosses from all throughout the country were found guilty of violating the RICO statute between 1981 and 1992. By 1990, almost 1000 members of criminal families had been found guilty. While many Mafia organizations around the nation were severely damaged, the most powerful families continued to control crime in their regions.   The Mafia has persisted in engaging in a wide range of illicit operations into the twenty-first century, including extortion, government corruption, gambling, infiltration into lawful firms, labor racketeering, loan sharking, and more. Today, Chicago and the Northeast still account for the majority of its operations.   La Cosa Nostra's organizational structure has not altered since the 1930s, and Cosa Nostra has operated for more than a century in a variety of guises.   Camorra Mafia   Now We talked about the American Mob, and we hear about them a lot, so let's talk about the True Italian Mafia, The Camorra.   Due to that gang's effect on American organized crime, the term "Mafia" has come to symbolize all forms of organized crime in popular culture. However, that phrase is really the name of the organized criminal gang rooted in Sicily, according to Mafia historian Umberto Santino's study of Mafia and Mafia-type groups in Italy. The 'Ndrangheta, from Calabria, the Sacra Corona Unita, from Apulia, and the Camorra, from Campania, the area that includes the city of Naples, are further "Mafia-type" groups.   The history of the Camorra is "particularly discontinuous," according to Santino. Despite having origins that may go as far back as 15th-century Spain, sources like Britannica claim that the organization first rose to prominence in the 19th century. Santino, however, claims that the organization's current form dates back to the late 1950s, when local criminal organizations in Campania started using the term "camorra." In the 1960s, these organizations expanded and became increasingly effective at smuggling cigarettes.   In this decade, they also forged advantageous relationships with a number of Neapolitan Mafia factions, which in the 1970s led to the development of profitable black market drug trafficking. However, there is one key distinction between the Cosa Nostra, sometimes known as the Mafia, and the Camorra. While the Mafia has a top-down, pyramidal structure of authority, the Camorra has a more dispersed system of small organizations, or "clans," that hold power. The Camorra has found success with its organizational structure, and as a result, is currently more powerful than the Sicilian Mafia.   According to Santino, the Camorra has 7,000 members spread throughout its 145 clans. The Camorra is the most prosperous and feared criminal gang in Italy thanks to its domination over the trafficking in narcotics including cocaine and heroin. The Independent published a story in 2006 about an Italian author named Roberto Saviano who wrote a book that revealed a few more details about the Camorra than the gang would have wanted. He had excellent reason to worry for his life. "This sprawling network of criminal gangs, according to [Saviano]," wrote reporter Peter Popham, "now dwarfs both the original Mafia of Sicily, the 'Ndrangheta and southern Italy's other organized gangs, in numbers, in economic power and in ruthless violence."   The New York Times reported that Saviano's book Gomorra was a "literary sensation" that sold more than 500,000 copies, but it also resulted in death threats and compelled him to go into hiding because it depicted gang violence, drug trafficking, child soldiers, and other aspects of the Camorra's business that the gang would prefer to keep hidden from the outside world. Aspects like the rampant government corruption, which causes trash to pile up in the streets car-high, or the fact that the Camorra has killed much more people recently than the Sicilian Mafia and made Campania one of the most deadly regions in Europe.   Sicily is where the Mafia that we know and admire today originated. They first appeared at some time in the late 19th century, and over the next 150 years or so, they expanded all over the world and became involved in just about everything. It has long been a mystery how this highly ordered system came to be, but new study from the University of Nottingham suggests that it all began with lemons.   Sicily discovered they had the ideal mixture to develop a lucrative crop in the late 1800s. Despite having the greatest concentration of lemon trees in all of Italy, they also faced a particular set of issues. Lemon farmers eventually turned to hiring their own private protection firms to protect their investment and themselves because of factors such as a wealthy upper class that exploited the peasant class to the fullest, a glaring lack of public law enforcement, and a government that really wasn't keeping the peace. Add a few more elements now: Sicily's location on a key Mediterranean trade route, the rapidly expanding citrus industry, and the demand for private security forces to safeguard interests make it the ideal location for the Mafia to establish itself.   Don Calo Vizzini was at the head of the Villalba Mafia during World War II, and he may have said it best. He was quoted by the University of Nottingham paper as saying, "In every society there has to be a category of people who straighten things out when situations get complicated. Usually they're functionaries of the state. Where the state is not present, or where it does not have sufficient force, this is done by private individuals."   The roots of the Camorra have speculated that it originated from a secret 12th century organization of assassins.   The Beati Paoli were a Sicilian group that originated in the 12th century; no one knows why they were given that name, although it's presumably religious in nature. The tale claims that they formed in response to the persecution of the aristocratic class, and the majority of what we know comes from Francesco Maria Emanuele, Marquis of Villabianca. They not only attracted each and everyone to their cause, but they also created a hierarchy akin to a royal court. From there, they set up security services, employed themselves as paid killers, and... well, secrets prevent us from knowing what else. Since they obviously had an underground hideout, we do know that it was accessible through the crypt of a Palermo church.   There are even reports that the Camorra had a lot to do with helping the allies sabotage Mussollini in World War 2. Much information was originally written up as German control and sabotage during this time but many years after, with arrests of many members, documents were found that showed that the Camorra and other factions helped screw over Ol' Mussollini.   Crips   The Crips were only a social group, as one Original Gangster (OG) put it, and by most accounts, he is right (Kontos 99, 2003). While there are numerous uneven areas throughout the turbulent history of the Crips, there are also recurring themes. However, unlike the violent, frequently fatal incidents connected with the Crips, which are frequently portrayed with dramatic exaggeration, the genuine components of the narrative do not make for riveting television. Many OGs and gang members have voiced their shock and disappointment at how the Crips have been portrayed, while still admitting the group's flaws and its final transition from activism to gangsterism. Debra Addie Smith, a close friend of the founder of the Crips, once expressed that she “was wondering when someone was gonna finally tell the real story about the Crips”.   The Black Panther movement was being dismantled by the police, who were making "mass arrests, incarcerations, and deaths of black teenagers by the police," which led to the formation of the Crips, a grassroots group mostly made up of African-Americans. The CRIPS (Community Resources for Independent People) emerged in South Central Los Angeles, California, in 1969 with a message of resistance and justice during a period of despair and pessimism within the black community, following the ultimate dissolution of the Black Panther movement. Raymond Washington, a "fearless and strong 5-foot-8 fireplug who liked to fight and detested guns," is credited with founding the gang. He finally distanced himself and was killed as the Crips started using guns and formed a feud with the Bloods.   Stanley Tookie Williams met Raymond Lee Washington in 1969, and the two decided to unite their local gang members from the west and east sides of South Central Los Angeles in order to battle neighboring street gangs. Most of the members were 17 years old. Williams however appears to discount the sometimes-cited founding date of 1969 in his memoir, Blue Rage, Black Redemption. In his memoir, Williams also refuted claims that the group was a spin-off of the Black Panther Party or formed for a community agenda, writing that it "depicted a fighting alliance against street gangs—nothing more, nothing less." Washington, who attended Fremont High School, was the leader of the East Side Crips, and Williams, who attended Washington High School, led the West Side Crips.   Williams recalled that a blue bandana was first worn by Crips founding member Buddha, as a part of his color-coordinated clothing of blue Levis, a blue shirt, and dark blue suspenders. A blue bandana was worn in tribute to Buddha after he was shot and killed on February 23, 1973. The color then became associated with Crips.   By 1978, there were 45 Crip gangs, called sets, in Los Angeles. They were heavily involved in the production of PCP, marijuana and amphetamines. On March 11, 1979, Williams, a member of the Westside Crips, was arrested for four murders and on August 9, 1979, Washington was gunned down. Washington had been against Crip infighting and after his death several Crip sets started fighting against each other. The Crips' leadership was dismantled, prompting a deadly gang war between the Rollin' 60 Neighborhood Crips and Eight Tray Gangster Crips that led nearby Crip sets to choose sides and align themselves with either the Neighborhood Crips or the Gangster Crips, waging large-scale war in South Central and other cities. The East Coast Crips (from East Los Angeles) and the Hoover Crips directly severed their alliance after Washington's death. By 1980, the Crips were in turmoil, warring with the Bloods and against each other. The gang's growth and influence increased significantly in the early 1980s when crack cocaine hit the streets and Crip sets began distributing the drug. Large profits induced many Crips to establish new markets in other cities and states. As a result, Crips membership grew steadily and the street gang was one of the nation's largest by the late 1980s. In 1999, there were at least 600 Crip sets with more than 30,000 members transporting drugs in the United States.   Funny side note: As of 2015, the Crips gang consists of between approximately 30,000 and 35,000 members and 800 sets, active in 221 cities and 41 U.S. states. The states with the highest estimated number of Crip sets are California, Texas, Oklahoma, and Missouri. Members typically consist of young African American men, but can be white, Hispanic, Asian, and Pacific Islander. The gang also began to establish a presence in Canada in the early 1990s; Crip sets are active in the Canadian cities of Montreal and Toronto.   Bloods   The Bloods gang was first established in Los Angeles as a defense against the Crips. The Pirus street gang, which was initially a group of the Crips, split out during an internal gang battle, united with other minor gangs to create the gang that would later become known as the Bloods, which is where the Bloods' origins and their rivalry with the Crips begin. At the time, there were three more Crips sets than Bloods sets. Despite this disparity in numbers, Bloods sets became more aggressive, especially towards rival Crips members, in an effort to demonstrate their dominance. Therefore, it is believed that the Pirus were the original Bloods founders. The gang's concentration changed to drug manufacture during the emergence of crack. The United Blood Nation, a gang that started out on Rikers Island, is frequently associated with blood sets on the East Coast.   The George Motchan Detention Center (GMDC), often known as C 73, is located on Rikers Island and is home to the United Blood Nation, also known as the Bloods. Problem offenders were separated from the rest of the jail facilities using GMDC. The Latin Kings were the most prominent and well-organized gang in the NYC jail system before this time. The majority-Hispanic Latin Kings were violently abusing White and occasionally African American prisoners. These African American prisoners created a defense organization they named the United Blood Nation after being organized by some of the most aggressive and charismatic prisoners. This prison group, United Blood Nation, was copying the Bloods street gangs in Los Angeles. Eight initial Blood sets were formed by many of the leaders of this freshly formed prison gang to recruit in their local communities around New York City.   By 1996, the Blood street gang had grown to include thousands of members and was becoming one of the most powerful gangs in existence. It also kept up a regular recruiting push. The Bloods were at this point less organized and more vicious than other gangs. Numerous slashings (attacks with a razor blade or knife) that were recorded during robberies were later determined to be Bloods initiations. The Bloods' signature ceremony was the Blood ritual. Bloods found recruits all throughout the East Coast.   In addition to members of other races and ethnicities, African Americans make up the majority of the Bloods. Early adolescence to mid-twenties is the average age of members, however some continue to retain leadership roles well into their late twenties and, on occasion, their thirties. Although there is no one person who can be identified as the Bloods' national leader, each individual Bloods set has a hierarchical leadership structure with distinct degrees of membership. Status within a gang is indicated by these membership levels. Each set is managed by a leader, who is often an older person with a longer criminal history. A fixed leader is not chosen; instead, he or she exerts themselves through creating and overseeing the gang's illicit businesses, using their reputation for brutality and violence as well as their own charisma to do so. The majority of the cast members are "soldiers," and they range in age from 16 to 22. Because of their readiness to use violence to win the respect of gang members and to deal with anybody who "disrespects" the set, soldiers have a strong feeling of dedication to their set and are very dangerous. Although they are not full members, "associates" participate in a variety of illegal acts and identify with the gang. If any women are involved in the gang, they are often associate members and are frequently employed by their male counterparts to carry guns, store narcotics, or engage in self-prostitution in order to support their group.   The surroundings of a recruit frequently affects recruitment. Bloods actively seek for school-age African Americans in particularly impoverished regions. Youth might find security and a sense of belonging by joining a gang. Economically deprived children who observe the trappings of gang life—gold jewelry, cash, pricey sportswear—can likewise experience instant satisfaction.   Based on how long a person has been a part of a certain set, blood sets have an informal hierarchy of levels.   The ranks are only a symbol of respect for individuals who have been a part of the set the longest and have survived the longest; they do not indicate leadership or domination over the set. Bloods of lesser ranks are not subject to those in positions of authority. Bloods of lesser status frequently refer to Bloods of higher rank as "Big Homies." They also call one another "relatives." Once a person joins a Blood set, they cannot quit the set or flip (move to another set) for the rest of their lives.   Members of the Bloods frequently refer to themselves as dawgs or ballers, HKs (an initialism for Hoover-Killer), CKs (an initialism for Crip-Killer), and MOBs (an initialism for Member of Bloods) (meaning drug dealers). Contrary to popular belief, Bloods & Crips are typically friendly amongst sets. Although it is against the law, bloods sometimes engage in civil war with one another. For example, the deuce 2x Crips and tray 3x Crips are at war, and they frequently work with Crip sets to eliminate their fellow blood competitors.   The many gang indicators used by Bloods members to distinguish themselves from other gangs include colors, attire, emblems, tattoos, jewelry, graffiti, language, and hand signals. Red is the gang's primary color. They like donning athletic attire, such as team coats that display their gang's colors. San Francisco 49ers, Miami Heat, Atlanta Hawks, Houston Rockets, Boston Red Sox, St. Louis Cardinals, Cincinnati Reds, Portland Trailblazers, Cleveland Indians, Philadelphia Phillies, Los Angeles Clippers, New Jersey Devils, Philadelphia 76ers, and Chicago Bulls are a few of their favorite clubs.   The most commonly used Bloods symbols include the number “5,” the five pointed star, and the five pointed crown. Despite common misconception Bloods are not a people nation (with the exception of a few) but they will however tie flags with the people for defense or mutually such as how the Crips & BGDs consider themselves cousins. These symbols may be seen in the tattoos, jewelry, and clothing that gang members wear as well as in gang graffiti, which is used by the Bloods to mark their territory. Such graffiti can include gang names, nicknames, declaration of loyalty, threats against rival gangs, or a description of criminal acts in which the gang has been involved. Bloods graffiti might also include the word “Piru” which refers to the fact that the first known Bloods gang was formed by individuals from Piru Street in Compton, California. Yakuza   During the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603–1868), two distinct groups of outcasts gave rise to the yakuza. The tekiya were the first of such groups; they were nomadic peddlers who moved from village to village selling cheap things at fairs and markets. Many tekiya belonged to the burakumin social class, which was essentially underneath the four-tiered Japanese feudal social order and consisted of misfits or "non-humans."   The tekiya started forming close-knit gangs in the early 1700s under the direction of bosses and underbosses. The tekiya began to engage in customary organized crime operations including turf battles and protection rackets after being strengthened by fugitives from the upper classes. In keeping with a long-standing custom, tekiya frequently provided security for Shinto festivals and, in exchange for payment for protection, assigned stalls at the associated fairs.   Between 1735 and 1749, the shogun's government appointed oyabun, or officially recognized leaders, in an effort to quell gang conflicts among various tekiya factions and lessen the amount of fraud they engaged in. The oyabun was given the privilege of using a surname and carrying a sword, which was previously reserved for samurai. The term "oyabun," which refers to the bosses' roles as the leaders of their tekiya families, literally means "foster parent."   The bakuto, or gamblers, were the second social group that gave rise to the yakuza. During the Tokugawa era, gambling was outright prohibited and is still outlawed in Japan today. The bakuto hit the highways and preyed on gullible prey using hanafuda card games or dice games. They frequently adorned their bodies with vibrant tattoos, which gave rise to the practice of full-body tattooing among modern yakuza. The bakuto naturally expanded from their primary line of work as gamblers into lending shady business and other illicit pursuits.   Depending on how they make the majority of their money, certain yakuza groups may still refer to themselves as tekiya or bakuto. They still use the rites that were a component of the initiation ceremonies of the older organizations.   Yakuza gangs have seen a rise in prominence since the end of World War II following a decline during the conflict. More than 102,000 yakuza members in 2,500 different families were reported to be employed in Japan and overseas by the Japanese government in 2007. Despite the burakumin being officially exempt from discrimination since 1861, many gang members today are descended from that marginalized group. Others are ethnic Koreans, who are also subjected to a great deal of prejudice in Japanese society.   The distinctive characteristics of modern yakuza culture bear traces of the gangs' antecedents. For instance, a large number of yakuza have full-body tattoos that were applied with conventional bamboo or steel needles as opposed to sophisticated tattooing guns. Even the genitalia may be tattooed, which is a very unpleasant ritual. Although they typically wear long sleeves in public, the yakuza members frequently take their shirts off while playing cards with one other and show off their body art as a reference to the bakuto customs.   The practice of yubitsume, or cutting off the little finger's joint, is another aspect of yakuza culture. When a yakuza member disobeys or otherwise offends his boss, he will perform a yubitsume as an apology. The offender provides the boss with the top joint of his left pinkie finger, which he has amputated. Subsequent offenses result in the loss of other finger joints.   This practice dates back to the Tokugawa era; the gangster's sword grip is weakened by the loss of finger joints, theoretically making him more reliant on the group as a whole for defense. To blend in, many yakuza members wear prosthetic fingertips today.   The three biggest yakuza organizations currently in existence are the Sumiyoshi-kai, which started in Osaka and has about 20,000 members, the Yamaguchi-gumi, centered in Kobe, with 15,000 members, and the Inagawa-kai, located in Tokyo and Yokohama, with 20,000 members. The gangs engage in illegal activities such the trafficking of people and goods, the exportation of weapons, and the smuggling of illegal drugs. They do, however, also own a sizable amount of stock in well-established companies, and some of them are well-connected to the Japanese financial, banking, and real estate industries.   It's interesting to note that the Yamaguchi-gumi were the first to assist victims in the gang's hometown after the tragic Kobe earthquake of January 17, 1995. Similar to this, many yakuza organizations delivered truckloads of goods to the afflicted area following the earthquake and tsunami of 2011. The yakuza also has the strange benefit of suppressing small-time criminals. Because small-fry thieves don't intrude on yakuza turf, Kobe and Osaka, with their strong yakuza syndicates, are among the safest cities in an overall safe country.   The Japanese government has clamped down on the gangs in recent decades despite these unexpected social benefits of the yakuza. A strong new anti-racketeering law known as the Act for Prevention of Unlawful Activities by Criminal Gang Members was passed in March 1995. All of the listed businesses with ties to the yakuza were removed from the Osaka Securities Exchange in 2008. Yakuza bosses have been detained by authorities since 2009, and businesses that support the gangs have been closed down.   Even though the police are currently working very hard to quell yakuza activities in Japan, it appears improbable that the syndicates would completely vanish. After all, they have endured for more than 300 years and are intricately linked to many facets of Japanese society and culture.   Mara Salvatrucha(MS-13)   La Mara Salvatrucha, also referred to as MS-13, is a ruthless, inhumane street gang. As many as 40 states in the United States are now home to MS-13 members who commit murder, rape, maiming, and terror. Legendary tales exist of their heinous crimes.   No one contests the veracity of these statements. MS-13, like many street gangs, actually takes pride in its well-deserved image. The U.S. Department of Justice claims that the group's motto is "kill, rape, control."   If you believe President Donald Trump and others, America's broken immigration system is to blame for MS-13. The belief is that the United States will be a lot safer if it can stop MS-13 gang members from committing all of their mayhem, deport them, and stop them from crossing the border.   Unfortunately, things don't work that way.   "Attention to gangs is valid. About 13 percent of the homicides in this country are gang related. That's far more homicides than from mass shootings or terrorism," David Pyrooz, a sociologist at the University of Colorado who specializes in gangs and criminal networks, says. "But let's remember this. The maximum number of homicides associated with MS-13 in a given year — gang-related homicides — is about 2 percent of the total ... gang-related homicides in the United States. That is, I hate to use this language, but that is in many ways a drop in the bucket when it comes to gang activity."   "MS-13 is sort of the perfect boogeyman," Pyrooz says. "They are the moral panic; the connection to immigration, the connection to Latinos, and then the heinous violence, makes it so they can function as this evil boogeyman."   It's frequently forgotten in discussions of MS-13 that the organization didn't start out in Latin America and then storm the border to wreak havoc on the American way of life.   The gang was founded in the United States in the 1970s. El Salvadoran immigrants went to Los Angeles in an effort to escape a devastating civil conflict. There, they lived in areas of the city that were already under the influence of other gangs, used marijuana, and listened to heavy metal music. La Mara Salvatrucha was created when the newcomers came together to socialize and to defend themselves from other groups.   A brief explanation of the group name is as follows: In El Salvador, the word for "gang" is "mara." Here is an explanation of "Salvatrucha" and the subsequent 13 (again, from the DOJ):   Salvatrucha is a slang term for "alert," "watch out," or "cunning," and it combines the terms "Salva," which stands for "Salvadoran," and "trucha." The "13" stands for the 13th letter of the alphabet, or "M," signifying the group's ties to the Mexican Mafia, an organization that operates inside prisons.   Police started to crack down as the new gang confronted more established organizations in Los Angeles and linked up with other gangs (including the Mexican Mafia), deporting some members to El Salvador, where civil instability remained rife.   However, some of those MS-13 members returned to the United States in the 1980s, and others from El Salvador joined them. However, it seems unlikely that there was a premeditated influx of gang members from Latin America into the country.   "Criminal migration is real," according to "MS13 in the Americas: How the World's Most Notorious Gang Defies Logic, Resists Destruction," a report by The Center for Latin American & Latino Studies at American University in Washington D.C., and Insight Crime, a foundation that studies organized crime in Latin America and the Caribbean. "But this does not appear to be part of a master plan, nor is it coordinated from some central headquarters. Gang members appear to move in the same patterns as the rest of the population, and many of them move to escape the gang and the violence associated with it."   Currently, MS-13 claims to have 10,000 members in the United States and 30,000 members worldwide. Thus, it ranks among the largest gangs in the entire world. The group is the first and only street gang to be listed as a global criminal organization by the American government.   Despite its size, MS-13 does not have a particularly significant criminal presence in the United States when compared to the total number of gang members in the nation. The National Gang Intelligence Center estimates that there are 1.4 million gang members nationally, and MS-13 is just one of the 33,000 gangs that the FBI has identified.   "What's interesting about them, what makes them different from other groups — partly in response to what the president has been tweeting and talking about them" Pyrooz says, "we can't think of an example in recent history of a single group that has attracted such attention on a national level."   According to news reports and those who have investigated the MS-13 gang, its members engage in money laundering, prostitution, drug trafficking, racketeering, and other illicit activities. They are extremely brutal in how they do their street business. The group has been implicated in numerous violent assaults, kidnappings, rapes, and most infamously, some horrifying murders.   "Gang violence is far more lethal than what it was four or five decades ago," Pyrooz says.   From "MS-13 in the Americas": "Violence is a major part of the glue that binds the MS-13. It is part of every stage of an MS-13 member's life: Potential members commit violent acts to be considered for membership and ultimately to gain entry; they are then beaten into the gang in a ritual that has left more than one permanently scarred; they move up the gang ladder by 'putting in the work' and showing 'commitment,' euphemisms for committing violent acts in the name of the gang."   According to the Washington Post, up to 10 MS-13 members lured a guy into a park in Maryland in 2017 before stabbing him more than 100 times, beheading him, and chopping out his heart. In vengeance for her boyfriend's murder, an 18-year-old Virginia lady admitted to taking part in the killing of a 15-year-old girl. The 18-year-old killed the younger girl by stabbing her 13 times and recorded it to show MS-13 leaders.   "It's hard to say that the attention is not undue or not deserved," Pyrooz says. "But it's hard to be able to focus specifically on them without paying more attention to what the problem of gang activity is in the United States as a whole." The 25 Best Gang Movies of All Time - IMDb

“The American Mafia,[5][6][7] commonly referred to in North America as the Italian-American Mafia, the Mafia, or the Mob,[5][6][7] is a highly organized Italian-American criminal society and organized crime group. The organization is often referred to by its members as Cosa Nostra (Italian pronunciation: [ˈkɔːza ˈnɔstra, ˈkɔːsa -], "our thing" or "this thing of ours") and by the American government as La Cosa Nostra (LCN). The organization's name is derived from the original Mafia or Cosa nostra, the Sicilian Mafia, with "American Mafia" originally referring simply to Mafia (or Cosa nostra) groups from Sicily operating in the United States, as the organization initially emerged as an offshoot of the Sicilian Mafia (known also as Cosa nostra by its members) formed by Italian immigrants in the United States. However, the organization gradually evolved into a separate entity partially independent of the original Mafia in Sicily, and it eventually encompassed or absorbed other Italian immigrant and Italian-American gangsters and Italian-American crime groups (such as the American Camorra) active in the United States and Canada that were not of Sicilian origin. In North America, it is often colloquially referred to as the Italian Mafia or Italian Mob, though these terms may also apply to the separate yet related Sicilian Mafia or other organized crime groups in Italy or ethnic Italian crime groups in other countries. The Mafia is currently most active in the Northeastern United States, with the heaviest activity in New York, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, and New England, in areas such as Boston, Providence and Hartford. It also remains heavily active in Chicago and has a significant and powerful presence in other Midwestern metropolitan areas such as Kansas City, Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and St. Louis. Outside of these areas, the Mafia is also very active in Florida, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. Mafia families have previously existed to a greater extent and continue to exist to a lesser extent in Northeastern Pennsylvania, Dallas, Denver, New Orleans, Rochester, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and Tampa. While some of the regional crime families in these areas may no longer exist to the same extent as before, descendants have continued to engage in criminal operations, while consolidation has occurred in other areas, with rackets being controlled by more powerful crime families from nearby cities.[10] At the Mafia's peak, there were at least 26 cities around the United States with Cosa Nostra families, with many more offshoots and associates in other cities. There are five main New York City Mafia families, known as the Five Families: the Gambino, Lucchese, Genovese, Bonanno and Colombo families. The Italian-American Mafia has long dominated organized crime in the United States. Each crime family has its own territory and operates independently, while nationwide coordination is overseen by the Commission, which consists of the bosses of each of the strongest families. Though the majority of the Mafia's activities are contained to the Northeastern United States and Chicago, they continue to dominate organized crime in the United States, despite the increasing numbers of other crime groups.[11][12].” --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/antonio-myers4/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/antonio-myers4/support

Giovanni Brusca was an enforcer under the Boss of all Mafia Bosses in Corleone, Sicily - Totó Riina. Part of a 12-person hit squad, Brusca was cold-hearted and brutal, and would become known as ‘The Swine' or ‘The Slayer'. He would admit to killing more than 150 people during his time as a part of the Sicilian Mafia, before turning against La Cosa Nostra and becoming an informant instead. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

www.patreon.com/accidentaldads for bonus content and to support the show AND The Save The Music Foundation!   Top police stings   A sting operation is a deceitful operation used by law enforcement to apprehend criminals in the act of trying to commit a crime. In order to obtain proof of a suspect's misconduct, a typical sting involves an undercover law enforcement officer, investigator, or cooperative member of the public acting as a criminal partner or prospective victim and cooperating with a suspect's activities. Journalists for the mass media occasionally use sting operations to film and disseminate footage of illegal conduct.   Sting procedures are prevalent in many nations, including the United States, but are prohibited in others, like Sweden and France. Certain sting operations are prohibited, such as those carried out in the Philippines where it is against the law for police enforcement to act as drug traffickers in order to catch purchasers of illegal substances.   Examples   Offering free sports or airline tickets to lure fugitives out of hiding. Deploying a bait car (also called a honey trap) to catch a car thief Setting up a seemingly vulnerable honeypot computer to lure and gain information about hackers Arranging for someone under the legal drinking age to ask an adult to buy an alcoholic beverage or tobacco products for them Passing off weapons or explosives (whether fake or real), to a would-be terrorist Posing as: someone who is seeking illegal drugs, contraband, or child pornography, to catch a supplier (or as a supplier to catch a customer) a child in a chat room to identify a potential online child predator a potential customer of illegal prostitution, or as a prostitute to catch a would-be customer a hitman to catch customers and solicitors of murder-for-hire; or as a customer to catch a hitman a spectator of an illegal dogfighting ring a documentary film crew to lure a pirate to the country where a crime was committed.   Whether sting operations constitute entrapment raises ethical questions. Law enforcement might have to be careful not to incite someone who wouldn't have otherwise committed a crime to do so. Additionally, while conducting such operations, the police frequently commit the same crimes, like purchasing or selling narcotics, enticing prostitutes, etc. The defendant may raise the entrapment defense in common law jurisdictions.   Contrary to common belief, however, laws against entrapment do not forbid undercover police personnel from pretending to be criminals or deny that they are police officers. Entrapment is normally only a defense when suspects are coerced into confessing to a crime they probably would not have otherwise committed. However, the legal meaning of this coercion differs widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Entrapment might be used as a defense, for instance, if undercover agents forced a possible suspect to manufacture illicit narcotics in order to sell them. Entrapment has often not taken place if a suspect is already producing narcotics and authorities pretend as purchasers to apprehend them.   Operation Entebbe The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) commandos successfully carried out Operation Entebbe or Operation Thunderbolt, a counterterrorism hostage-rescue mission, at Entebbe Airport in Uganda on July 4, 1976. A week earlier, on June 27, two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - External Operations (PFLP-EO) (who had previously split from the PFLP of George Habash) and two members of the German Revolutionary Cells hijacked an Air France Airbus A300 jet airliner carrying 248 passengers. The declared goal of the hijackers was to trade the hostages for the release of 13 detainees in four other countries and the release of 40 Palestinian terrorists and related prisoners who were detained in Israel. The flight, which had left Tel Aviv for Paris, was rerouted after a stopover in Athens through Benghazi to Entebbe, the country of Uganda's principal airport. The ruler Idi Amin, who had been made aware of the hijacking from the start[10], encouraged the hijackers and personally greeted them. The hijackers confined all Israelis and a few non-Israeli Jews into a separate room after transferring all captives from the plane to a deserted airport facility.  148 captives who were not Israelis were freed and taken to Paris over the course of the next two days. Ninety-four passengers—mostly Israelis—and the 12-person Air France crew were held captive and threatened with execution.  Based on information from the Israeli intelligence service Mossad, the IDF took action. If the demands for the release of the prisoners were not granted, the hijackers threatened to murder the hostages. The preparation of the rescue effort was prompted by this threat. These strategies included getting ready for armed opposition from the Uganda Army. It was a nighttime operation. For the rescue mission, Israeli transport planes flew 100 commandos to Uganda over a distance of 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles). The operation took 90 minutes to complete after a week of planning. Out of the 106 captives still held, 102 were freed, and three were murdered. In a hospital, the second captive was later slain. Lt. Col. Yonatan Netanyahu, the unit leader, was one of the five injured Israeli commandos. Netanyahu was Benjamin Netanyahu's elder sibling and the future Israeli prime minister. Eleven Soviet-built MiG-17s and MiG-21s of the Ugandan air force were destroyed, and all five hijackers and forty-five Ugandan troops were killed. Idi Amin gave the command to attack and kill Kenyans living in Uganda after the operation because Kenyan sources supported Israel. 245 Kenyans in Uganda were killed as a consequence, and 3,000 left the nation. In honor of Yonatan Netanyahu, the commander of the force, Operation Entebbe, which had the military codename Operation Thunderbolt, is occasionally referred to retroactively as Operation Jonathan.   Operation Valkyrie Senior Nazi military officers and Adolf Hitler convened in the Wolf's Lair in Rastenburg, Eastern Prussia, on July 20, 1944. Hitler's body was discovered scattered across the table as the Nazi military chiefs sat down to plan troop deployments on the Eastern Front when an explosion burst through the steamy meeting room. With the Führer's death, the Nazi threat to Europe could have been lifted. or so it seems at first.   Claus von Stauffenberg and his accomplices believed they had turned the course of World War II and maybe saved thousands of extra lives for a brief period of time in history. The July Plot, also known as Operation Valkyrie, was the most famous attempt to have Hitler killed, although it was ultimately unsuccessful for a variety of reasons, some of which are still unknown to this day. The July Plot Is Hatched Many Germans, including some of the country's top military figures, had begun to lose faith in Germany's ability to win the war by the summer of 1944. Hitler was widely held responsible for ruining Germany. The Wolfsschanze was one of Hitler's military headquarters. A number of prominent politicians and senior military figures devised a plan to murder the Führer by detonating a bomb at a conference there in order to spark political unification and a coup. Operation Valkyrie was the name of the strategy. The plan was that after Hitler's death, the military would assert that the murder was the result of a Nazi Party coup attempt, and the Reserve Army would take significant buildings in Berlin and detain senior Nazi figures. Carl Friedrich Goerdeler would become Germany's new chancellor, and Ludwig Beck would become its first president. The new administration wanted to negotiate a peaceful conclusion to the war, ideally with benefits for Germany. The main conspirators' motives varied, according to Philipp Freiherr Von Boeselager, one of the last remaining participants in the July Plot. Many of them only saw it as a means of avoiding military defeat, while others hoped to at least partially restore some of the nation's morals. They chose Claus von Stauffenberg, a young colonel in the German army, to carry out the assassination. Despite not being a member of the Nazi party in the traditional sense, Stauffenberg was a devoted German patriot. In the end, he came to think that if Germany was to be saved, it was his patriotic duty to expel Adolf Hitler. Hitler, though, had experienced assassination attempts before. Assassination attempts against Hitler had been more frequent since his spectacular ascent to the top of Germany's political scene in the late 1930s. Hitler, who was becoming more and more paranoid, frequently altered his plans without warning and at the last minute. What Went Wrong Stauffenberg entered the bunker at Wolfsschanze on July 20, 1944. The conference was planned to take place in a concrete, windowless subterranean bunker that was closed off by a large steel door. By making sure it happened within one of these facilities, the detonation would be confined and anyone nearby the explosive device would die quickly from the shrapnel. The conference was moved to an above-ground wooden bunker with better air circulation on July 20 due to the oppressively hot weather, according to Pierre Galante's Operation Valkyrie: The German Generals' Plot Against Hitler. Numerous windows, a wooden table, and other beautiful furniture were all present in the area, which meant that the potential explosion would be much diminished since the energy of the blast would be absorbed and diffused. Stauffenberg was aware that this was the case, but he nonetheless proceeded, assuming that two explosives would be sufficient to destroy the room and kill everyone within. Stauffenberg excused himself when he arrived, saying that he needed to change his clothing, and went to a private room. The two explosives needed to be armed and primed. However, he only had time to arm one of the two devices due to an unexpected phone call and a quick knock at his door. Thus, the possibility of a greater blast was cut in half. Stauffenberg realized that in order to cause any kind of harm, the explosive device needed to be placed as near to Hitler as possible. He was able to get a seat as near to Hitler as possible with only one other person between them by claiming that his hearing was impaired due to his wounds. Placing the bag as near to Hitler as possible, Stauffenberg then left the room pretending to take a personal call. The briefcase was accidentally shifted to the opposite side of a large wooden leg that was supporting the meeting room table as another official was taking a seat. The Aftermath Panic broke out after the device exploded at precisely 12:42 pm. Twenty individuals were hurt, including three cops who subsequently died from their injuries, and a stenographer was instantaneously murdered. Stauffenberg and his assistant Werner von Haeften leapt into a staff car and bluffed their way past three different military checkpoints to flee the mayhem at the Wolfsschanze complex because they believed that Hitler was indeed dead. Hitler, however, along with everyone else who was protected by the large wooden table leg, only suffered a few minor cuts and an eardrum perforation. He had fully torn-up pants, and the Nazi leadership would subsequently utilize pictures of them in a propaganda effort. Ian Kershaw, a historian, claims that during the explosion, contradictory news concerning Hitler's fate came. In spite of the disarray, the Reserve Army started detaining senior Nazi officials in Berlin. The entire scheme, however, was eventually thwarted by delays, unclear communication, and the announcement that Hitler was still alive. The conspirators were all given the death penalty in a hastily called court martial the same evening by General Friedrich Fromm. In the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, a makeshift firing squad murdered Stauffenberg, von Haeften, Olbricht, and another officer, Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim, while Ludwig Beck committed himself. At Berlin's Plötzensee jail, Berthold Stauffenberg was gently strangled while the incident was being recorded for Hitler to see. Hitler's life was ultimately saved that day by a number of interrelated reasons, but the conspirators were right that Germany was headed for disaster. Less than a year later, the Nazi leader and his closest advisers committed suicide. Operation Iceman Ever wonder what its like working undercover with an alleged murderer? Well, let's just say it's not hard to get a stuffy nose around this case… In fact, serial killer Richard Kuklinski's preferred method of murder involved using a nasal spray bottle to spritz cyanide into the faces of his victims. As a result, undercover agent Dominick Polifrone was never more on guard than during the 18 months he spent building a case against the so-called Iceman. “No matter where I went with him, I wore this leather jacket with a pocket sewn inside containing a small-caliber weapon,” recalls Polifrone, who gained his target's confidence and taped dozens of their conversations. “I knew that I was somewhere on his hit list. If he'd pulled out that nasal spray, I'd have to protect myself.” The streetwise New Jersey officer acquired enough proof before Kuklinski had suspicions, preventing that situation from occurring. Finally, the enormous 6-foot-4 gangland killer was apprehended thanks to his evidence. “I've met hundreds of bad guys, but Kuklinski was a totally different type of individual,” he tells The Post. “He was coldhearted — ice-cold like the devil. He had no remorse about anything.”  Kuklinski was captured by Polifrone in a combined operation between the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the office of the New Jersey attorney general. The criminal, who was a leading suspect in the murder of a mobster whose body was found two years after his disappearance, was posing as a respectable businessman residing in suburban Dumont, New Jersey. The reason the medical examiners discovered ice in the muscle tissue was because Kuklinski, who earned his notoriety for frequently freezing the bodies of his victims and then defrosting them, erred that time. Police made an indirect connection between the deceased man and Kuklinski, who was charged with a number of previous homicides.  “We had to get something nobody knew,” recalls Polifrone. The sting only appears briefly on screen in the film. In order to gain Kuklinski's trust, Polifrone, a resident of Hackensack, New Jersey, pretended to be a "bad person" for a whole year and a half. They met in parks and rest areas along highways and discussed the horrific killings Kuklinski had carried out, including a Mafia hit in Detroit for which he was paid $65,000. Additionally, there were "statement killings." To put a dead canary in the mouth of a victim as a warning to other victims, one mafia leader paid him extra. Another occasion, Kuklinski made light of the fact that he saw a gang member consume an entire cheeseburger laced with cyanide before passing away while joking with Polifrone. Recalls the cop: “He told me that cyanide normally works real quick and easy, but that ‘this guy has the constitution of a God damn ox, and is just eating and eating.  “He said he almost ate the whole burger and then, bam, he's down!” Polifrone knew exactly how to play his role. “I laughed, of course,” he shrugs. “That's what bad guys do.”  Paradoxically, Kuklinski was a committed family man. He led a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence.  “He never socialized, gambled or messed around with other women,” adds Polifrone. “He lived for his wife and kids.” One minute he'd be repairing his daughters' toys, the next, dismembering a body with a chain saw and stuffing it into an oil drum. “He would come home and completely shut off this murderous component and seek security and love from his family,” says “Iceman” director Vromen. “He fulfilled the need to provide for them by killing.” Polifrone finally nailed Kuklinski after tricking him into buying what he thought was pure cyanide. A team of feds and ATF officers arrested him in December 1986. Twenty-eight years later, he reflects on the man who died, apparently of natural causes, in Trenton Prison in 2006 at age 70. Eyebrows were raised because he was due to appear as a witness at the trial of a Gambino family underboss. “I hope he died a slow death because of what he did to families and individuals,” concludes Polifrone. “He had no mercy. And if it was foul play, that's OK with me.” So let's talk about some controversial sting operations you may or may not have heard of.   ACORN Sting   Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now is known as ACORN. ACORN was a group of neighborhood-based organizations in the US that supported low- and middle-income families. They also offered details on affordable housing and voter registration. James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, two young conservative activists, published recordings that had been edited with care in 2009. The two pretended to be a pimp and a prostitute before using a hidden camera to get unflattering answers from ACORN workers that seemed to give them advice on how to hide their prostitution business and avoid paying taxes.The plea for assistance in obtaining funding for a brothel didn't appear to deter the ACORN employees either. This sparked a national debate and led to a reduction in financing from public and private sources. ACORN declared on March 22, 2010, that it was disbanding and shutting all of its connected state chapters as a result of declining funding. Interesting fact: On January 25, 2010, James O'Keefe and three other people were detained on felony charges for allegedly tampering with the phones at Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu's office in New Orleans. O'Keefe stated that he was looking into claims that Landrieu's staff had dismissed constituent phone calls over the health care issue. O'Keefe recorded the action as they pretended to be telephone repairmen.In the end, they were accused with breaking into a government building under false pretenses, a misdemeanor. Following his admission of guilt, O'Keefe received a three-year probationary period, 100 hours of community service, and a $1,500 fine.   Operation West End The largest undercover news story in Indian journalism has been described like this. In order to expose the alleged culture of bribery inside the Indian Ministry of Defense, a well-known newspaper from India by the name of Tehelka—which translates as "sensation" in Hindi—started its first significant undercover operation, "Operation West End" in 2001. Two reporters from the publication pretended to be London-based armaments dealers from a fake firm. In the undercover film, numerous politicians and defense officials are shown discussing and accepting bribes in exchange for assisting them in obtaining government contracts, including Bangaru Laxman, secretary of the ruling BJP party. Laxman and Military Minister George Fernandes (shown above) resigned following the release of the tapes, and a number of other defense ministry employees were placed on administrative leave.   Interesting Fact: Instead of initially acting on the evidence from the sting operation, the Indian government accused the newspaper of fabricating the allegations. The main financial backers of Tehelka were made targets of investigations, and the newspaper company was almost ruined. In 2003, Tehelka was re-launched as a weekly newspaper, and was funded by faithful subscribers and other well-wishers. In 2007, Tehelka shifted to a regular magazine format.   Senator Larry Craig On June 11, 2007, an undercover police officer conducting a sting operation targeting males cruising for sex at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport detained Idaho Senator Larry Craig. Sgt. Dave Karsnia, the arresting officer, claimed that just after noon, the suspect entered a restroom and shut the door. Craig then moved into the stall next to him and propped his suitcase up against the stall door's front. By obscuring the front view, this is frequently done in an effort to hide sexual activity. Several minutes later, the officer claimed to have noticed Craig looking into his stall through a gap, tapping his right foot repeatedly, then moving it till it brushed Karsnia's. Craig then passed his hand under the stall divider into Karsnia's stall with his palm up and guided it along the divider toward the front of the stall three times. Karsnia then waved his badge back, to which the senator responded, “No!” The senator pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and paid a fine, but changed his mind after word of his arrest later became public. Craig claimed he just had a “wide stance”, and he only pleaded guilty to avoid a spectacle.An appeals court rejected his request to change his mind about entering a guilty plea. Craig completed his time in the Senate but was unable to have his case dismissed by the Senate Ethics Committee. Craig departed office on January 3, 2009, having not to run for reelection in 2008. Fascinating Fact: Soon after Craig was arrested, the men's room started to resemble a tourist destination, with people coming to seek directions and take photographs. Even restroom tissue may be purchased on eBay. Listen to the conversation between Senator Craig and Sgt. Karsnia immediately following the arrest here.   7 Sarah Ferguson was victimized by Mazher Mahmood, a reporter for the tabloid daily "News of the World," in May 2010. In order to set up a meeting with Ferguson, Mahmood pretended to be a wealthy international businessman. The Duchess, who was discreetly recorded throughout the encounter, offered to connect the "tycoon" with Prince Andrew's influential inner circle. "500,000 pounds when you can, to me, open doors," Sarah Ferguson is heard saying on the video. She may also be seen removing a briefcase that is holding $40,000 in cash. After the event was reported, Ferguson's spokesman claimed she was both "devastated" and "regretful." She said that she had been drinking before asking for the money and was "in the gutter at that point" in an interview with Oprah Winfrey. Mazher Mahmood, the guy who pretended to be the tycoon, is referred to as the "Fake Sheikh" and has conned several famous people. No one is certain if that is his true name or what his real history is since he likes to make things as mysterious as possible. The journalist denies ever allowing his face to appear in any of his pieces and claims to have received several death threats. He also avoids public appearances.   Bait Cars The Minneapolis Police Department employed the first bait cars in the 1990s. The largest bait car fleet in North America is now situated in Surrey, British Columbia, which is widely regarded as the continent's "auto theft capital." The cars are carefully modified, equipped with GPS tracking equipment, audio/video surveillance, and an engine-disabling remote control. It has helped to lower car theft by 47% when it was introduced in Surrey, British Columbia, in 2004. In one of the more contentious bait vehicle stings, a lady was murdered nearly instantaneously after a robber driving a bait car drove into her in Dallas, Texas, in 2008. To resolve the litigation, $245,000 was given to the victim's family. Fact: The key to determining whether police are utilizing a bait car improperly and would result in entrapment is if they left it in a way that would tempt someone who would not ordinarily commit a crime. Here, you can view one of the more eye-catching (to put it mildly) bait vehicle stings. Many others will undoubtedly have the same thoughts as I had. “Where the heck was the kill switch?”   Marion Barry A well-known politician and former mayor of Washington, D.C., Marion Barry. Police were going to conduct an undercover narcotics transaction with former Virgin Islands official Charles Lewis on December 22, 1988, but they were turned back when they discovered Mayor Marion Barry was in Lewis's hotel room. This prompted a grand jury inquiry into potential mayor meddling in the narcotics probe. Barry testified for three hours in front of the grand jury before telling reporters he had done nothing wrong. Then, on January 18, 1990, Barry was arrested in a Washington, D.C. hotel after using crack cocaine in a room with his former girlfriend, who had turned informant for the FBI. This was the result of a sting operation put up by the FBI and D.C. Police. Barry said the now-famous phrase, "Bitch set me up," which has come to be linked with him. Following his arrest and subsequent trial, Barry made the decision not to run for mayor again. He was charged with 14 charges by a grand jury, including suspected grand jury perjury. The mayor could have spent 26 years in prison if found guilty on all 14 counts. Barry was only given a six-month prison term after the jury found him guilty of using cocaine. Barry campaigned for municipal council after being let out of prison. He garnered 70% of the vote due to his widespread popularity and the perception held by many that Marion Barry was the target of a political witch hunt by the government. Then, in 1995, Barry won a fourth term as mayor of Washington, D.C. Barry is currently back in his position on the D.C. city council. Regardless of your opinion on Marion Barry, you have to respect his perseverance and drive to help the people of Washington, D.C. The aforementioned occurrence is only a small portion of his remarkable life. A documentary titled "The Nine Lives of Marion Barry" was produced by HBO.    Joran Van der Sloot Dutch national Joran Van der Sloot is a key suspect in the case of Natalee Holloway, who vanished on May 30, 2005, while traveling to Aruba to celebrate her high school graduation. On March 29, 2010, Van der Sloot got in touch with Beth Twitty Holloway's mother's attorney John Q. Kelly, reviving the case. Van der Sloot promised to provide details about Holloway's demise and the whereabouts of her remains in exchange for a total of $250,000 with a $25,000 down payment. After Kelly and Twitty made contact with Alabama law enforcement, the FBI launched a sting operation. On May 10, Van der Sloot accepted a wire transfer of $15,000 to his Dutch bank account along with an additional cash payment of $10,000. He drove Kelly to the location of Holloway's remains in exchange for the cash. He indicated a home, saying that his father had assisted in burying the body in the foundation. The home had not yet been constructed when Holloway vanished, therefore this turned out to be untrue. Later, Van der Sloot informed Kelly through email that the entire incident was a fraud. At this point, police might have detained Van der Sloot for wire fraud and extortion, but they chose to wait while they worked to establish a case of murder against him. Van der Sloot was not only let free, he was also given permission to depart Aruba and travel to Bogotá, Colombia, and then Lima, Peru, with the money he had made from the operation. He met Stephany Flores Ramirez, a 21-year-old University of Lima business student, in a casino hotel in the city. Ramirez and Van der Sloot are seen entering a hotel room together on security footage, but only Van der Sloot is seen exiting. On June 2, Ramirez was discovered dead in the hotel room that Van der Sloot had booked, her neck broken and she had been battered to death. On May 30, 2010, precisely five years after Natalee Holloway vanished, Ramirez passed away. A person arrested Van der Sloot He admitted to the murder on June 3 and June 7. Fascinating fact: Van der Sloot is presently detained at Peru's Miguel Castro jail, where murder charges have been brought. He apparently now claims that if he is permitted to move to a jail in Aruba, he would tell the whereabouts of Natalee Holloway's remains.   Perverted Justice Stings Perverted-Justice is a group that uses volunteers to masquerade as juveniles online, often between the ages of 10-15, and wait for an adult to message or email the decoy back. If the topic becomes sexual, they won't actively reject it or support it. Then, in order to set up a meeting, they will attempt to identify the males by acquiring their phone numbers and other information. The group then provides law enforcement with the information. Additionally, Perverted-Justice has worked with the American reality show "To Catch a Predator." In Murphy, Texas, one of the more contentious instances took place in 2006. Louis Conradt (seen above), a district attorney in Texas, pretended to be a 19-year-old college student and had sexually explicit internet conversations with a person he thought was a 13-year-old kid. They hired an actress to portray the youngster on the phone when Conradt demanded images of the boy's genitalia. Conradt stopped returning phone calls and instant messages, so police and the reality program decided to conduct a search warrant operation at his residence. A gunshot was heard as the police entered the scene to make an arrest. Conradt was inside with a self-inflicted wound when they arrived, and he eventually passed away at a hospital. 23 people were taken into custody for online solicitation of minors as a consequence of the sting operation in Murphy, Texas. Due to inadequate evidence, none of the 23 instances were prosecuted as of June 2007. Conradt's family launched a $105 million lawsuit against Dateline's To Catch a Predator series. The dispute was ultimately resolved outside of court. All next episodes' development was halted by the network in 2008. Rachel Hoffman On February 22, 2007, a traffic stop in Tallahassee, Florida, resulted in Rachel Hoffman being found in possession of 25 grams of marijuana. Then, on April 17, 2008, police searched her flat and found 4 ecstasy tablets and 151.7 grams of marijuana. Police allegedly threatened to put her in jail unless she worked as an undercover informant for them, according to her account. She was then dispatched untrained to an undercover gathering to purchase a weapon and a significant quantity of narcotics from two alleged drug traffickers. The suspects relocated the drug purchase while she was there. When she departed the buy place in the car with the two suspects, the police officers who were keeping an eye on the sting lost sight of her. The identical gun she was intended to purchase was used to kill her by the two suspects while they were in motion. Two days later, her corpse was discovered close to Perry, Florida. One of the murder suspects was convicted of first-degree murder and given a life sentence without the possibility of parole on December 17, 2009, which would have been Rachel Hoffman's 25th birthday. Trial for the second murder suspect is set for October 2010. Interesting Fact: On May 7, 2009, a law called “Rachel's Law” was passed by the Florida State Senate. Rachel's Law requires law enforcement agencies to (a) provide special training for officers who recruit confidential informants, (b) instruct informants that reduced sentences may not be provided in exchange for their work, and (c) permit informants to request a lawyer if they want one.    Mr. Big The Royal Canadian Mounted Police created Mr. Big, sometimes known as "the Canadian method," in the early 1990s in response to unsolved killings. It is employed in Canada and Australia, but many other nations, like the United States and England, view it as entrapment. The technique works something like this: An undercover police unit poses as members of a fictitious gang, into which the suspect is inducted. The suspect is invited to participate in a series of criminal activities (all faked by the police). In addition, the “gang members” build a personal relationship with the suspect, by drinking together and other social activities. After some time, the gang boss, Mr. Big, is presented to him. The police have a fresh interest in the first crime, and the suspect is instructed to provide the gang with further information. They clarify that Mr. Big might be able to affect the course of the police investigation, but only if he confesses to the full extent of the crime. He is also warned that if he conceals any other previous offenses, the gang could decide against working with him in the future since he would be a burden. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are shown in the picture above carrying the hats of the four officers who were killed in Edmonton, Canada, in 2005 at a memorial service. Two of the men serving prison sentences for the murders made confessions to Mr. Big operatives.Interesting Fact: In British Columbia, the technique has been used over 180 times, and, in 80% of the cases, it resulted in either a confession or the elimination of the suspect from suspicion. However, cases of false confessions and wrongful convictions have recently come to the public's attention, and many are starting to question the controversial technique. In 2007, a documentary was made, called Mr. Big, that was very critical of the procedure.   You can't talk about undercover operations without talking about the mob. Here are five badasses who infiltrated the mob.   In law enforcement, working as an undercover officer carries the high risk of discovery by criminal suspects, leading to violence, torture and death. But the rewards can be huge, with wire recordings and eyewitness testimony that can result in arrests and convictions. A trained officer knows how to strategize, win the confidence of their targets and get them to reveal what's needed to build a case to take to trial. It requires an unusual kind of person, able to work under stress, stay focused, pull off the character he or she is playing and be prepared to tell many lies. What follows here is a list of five remarkable individuals whose undercover operations, despite real dangers, resulted in the convictions of leaders and associates of organized crime, over almost a century. This list leaves out many other famous undercover officers, whom we would like to recognize in the future. Perhaps because of the gravity of the investigations, and the financial resources required, all of these undercover officers worked for agencies of the U.S. government. MICHAEL MALONE Mike Malone worked undercover for the Treasury Department's Intelligence Unit. In the late 1920s, he infiltrated Al Capone's Chicago Outfit and helped convict the crime boss of tax evasion. Michael Malone had all the makings of an undercover agent who would successfully infiltrate Al Capone's Chicago gang for nearly two years. Malone, whose parents came over from Ireland, grew up in New Jersey and meshed well with its European immigrants, eventually learning to speak Gaelic, Italian, Yiddish and Greek. With his “black Irish” dark hair and skin, he resembled someone from southern Europe. After finessing his way into Capone's inner circle in 1929, Malone proved invaluable to his superiors in the Treasury Department pursuing a tax evasion case against the Chicago crime boss. Despite the danger, Malone kept an iron will. Blowing his cover would have proved fatal. But given his skills, it didn't happen. While Malone kept up the charade, he delivered information that proved incriminating not only for Capone, but for his top enforcer, Frank Nitti (aka Nitto). Malone remained disguised within Capone's bootlegging band even for a time after the feds filed tax charges against Capone, Nitti and Capone's brother, Ralph, in 1931. When Capone's jury trial commenced, and the Treasury Department removed Malone from his undercover job, the agent gained a bit of respect from the embarrassed gang chief himself. In the Chicago courthouse, Malone happened to enter an elevator where Capone stood with his defense lawyers. “The only thing that fooled me was your looks,” Capone is said as to have remarked to Malone. “You look like a Wop. You took your chances, and I took mine. I lost.” From 1929 to 1931, Malone fed intelligence about Capone that would culminate in the historic conviction of the nation's most notorious Mob boss. His fascinating story began after his service in World War I. With law enforcement his career goal, Malone joined the Treasury Department's Intelligence Unit later known as the “T-Men.” Early on, in the 1920s, Malone appreciated how donning disguises brought him closer to the suspects. He posed in everyman roles such as garbage man and shoe shiner. Elmer Irey, chief of the Intelligence Unit, had worked with undercover agent Malone on Prohibition cases. Once, Irey enlisted Malone to smash a West Coast version of “Rum Row,” rumrunners selling contraband Canadian liquor from ships off the coast of San Francisco. Malone posed as gangster from Chicago in hiding, with money to invest in illegal booze. He devised a nighttime sting operation. Agents posing as bootleggers drove speedboats out to the booze-laden mother ship and, after money changed hands, Malone fired off a flare, signaling the U.S. Coast Guard, which boarded the mother ship and arrested the astonished bootleggers. President Herbert Hoover entered office in March 1929, a few weeks following the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago, where seven men associated with Capone's bitter rival in bootlegging, George “Bugs” Moran, died in gunfire. Hoover conferred with Irey and urged him to compile a team of special agents to “get Capone” on tax charges. Meanwhile, another team of Prohibition Unit agents in Chicago, headed by Eliot Ness, would attack Capone on violations of federal liquor laws under the Volstead Act. Irey appointed Special Agent Frank Wilson, Malone and several others to the get Capone team. Meanwhile, a group of wealthy business executives in Chicago, called the Secret Six, donated large sums of money for expenses to assist the feds in getting Capone. Malone used their largess to purchase some expensive clothing to look the part of a well-heeled hoodlum that Capone would envy. Malone set about infiltrating Capone's underworld at its core – the Lexington Hotel, where the boss and his men lived. Wearing a fancy suit, purple shirt and white hat, Malone sat in the lobby, reading newspapers for days on end. He spoke in an Italian accent, introduced himself as “Mike Lepito,” met Capone men playing craps and played the part of a mobster. He mailed letters to friends in Philadelphia, who wrote back. Capone's guys broke into his room, noted his pricey checkered suits and silk underwear. They opened his mail from Philadelphia, read the letters written, impressively, in underworld lingo they understood. They informed Capone. Finally, Capone sent a cohort down to the lobby to ask “Lepito” about his business in town. “Keeping quiet,” Malone replied in his Italian inflection. In the coming days, over drinks, Malone told the guy he was on the lam for burglary in Philadelphia. That got Malone invitations to play poker and trade gossip with the gang, then dinner at their hangout, the New Florence, and then to attend the birthday party Capone planned for Frank Nitti at the Lexington. Malone met Capone at Nitti's party. The secret agent's new acquaintances included big-shot hoods Nitti, “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn, Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik, Paul “The Waiter” Ricca, Murray “The Camel” Humphreys and Sam “Golf Bag” Hunt. Malone was in. He discreetly phoned Wilson about what he'd overheard within the gang. Wilson and his aides traced signatures on bank checks while pursuing tax evasion cases against Nitti and Guzik. A federal court in Chicago convicted Guzik, who got a five-year sentence. But Nitti skipped town. Malone, assigned to find him, followed Nitti's wife to an apartment building in Berwyn, Illinois. There, the cops nabbed Nitti, later sentenced to 18 months in prison for tax evasion. Then the police pinched Al himself following his 1931 indictment on tax charges. “Mike Lepito” was there at the Lexington when Al Capone arrived back, triumphant about his release on $50,000 bail. Malone listened and reported to Wilson about Capone's scheme to bribe and fix the jury in his favor. The feds moved quickly and a judge created a new list of jurors. Malone then reported Capone's plot to hire five gunman from New York to kill four federal officials in Chicago – including Wilson. With safety measures in place, Capone ordered the gunmen to leave town. Capone's trial, after a judge refused to plea bargain with the Mob boss, started in October 1931. Four days afterward, Malone finally gave up the act. The news spread fast to Capone and his men. Malone had heard that Phil D'Andrea, Capone's bodyguard, planned to bring a concealed gun into the courthouse. Malone and another agent frisked and disarmed D'Andrea, and had him arrested. A jury Capone could not fix found the boss guilty on 22 criminal counts. The judge gave him 11 years in the federal pen and a $50,000 fine, plus court costs. Months later, in early 1932, the Intelligence Unit had Malone, Irey, Wilson and Special Agent A. P. Madden probe the kidnapping of aviator Charles Lindbergh's son. The team's persistence paid off within two years, with the capture (and conviction) of suspect Bruno Hauptman, who still had some of the marked currency the agents convinced Lindbergh to use as ransom money. Malone had other notable cases. In 1933, Irey assigned him to find fugitive New York gangster Waxey Gordon, wanted for tax evasion. Malone located Gordon in a remote cottage in the Catskill Mountains. Special Prosecutor Thomas Dewey took the case, and the court put Waxey away for 10 years. A year later, Malone infiltrated Louisiana Governor Huey “Kingfish” Long's crooked crew. After Long's assassination, the IRS won a tax fraud conviction against Malone's target, Long's close aide, Seymour Weiss. In his last undercover operation before his death, the Intelligence Unit gave Malone a large amount of cash and a Cadillac to use in Miami Beach, disguised as a rich syndicate man. He found and reported what the agency wanted – details of a coast-to-coast illegal abortion ring. After Malone's death in 1960, Wilson described him to a news reporter as “the best undercover agent we ever had.” JOSEPH PISTONE Joe Pistone is one of the FBI's most celebrated undercover agents. Using the name Donnie Brasco, he infiltrated the New York Mafia and helped produce 200 indictments. Courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In New York City during the mid-1970s, the FBI investigated a rash of truck hijackings happening each day. The agency assigned agent Joseph “Joe” Pistone to go undercover for six months to find out where the Mob-connected thieves took the stolen cargo. His adopted name was “Donnie Brasco.” He was so effective as a wiseguy that the FBI let him keep it up. No one knew how far the investigation would lead, or what it would mean for Pistone, who started as an agent in 1969. His experience would eventually prompt the mobsters in New York to put out a $500,000 contract for his murder, but it never happened. In the end, the evidence and trial testimony he provided in the 1980s produced 200 indictments of Mob associates and more than 100 convictions. His work decimated the Bonannos, one of New York's five major crime families. Pistone's journey while undercover, impersonating a mobbed-up jewel thief, would last an incredible five years, from 1976 to 1981, during which he penetrated the upper levels of the Bonnano organization. No FBI agent had made it inside the Mob like that. The agency beforehand had to rely on informants. Pistone took a class to learn about jewelry to make his affectation believable. In Brooklyn and Manhattan, he roamed bars and restaurants frequented by Mob types. He communicated using the street smarts he absorbed growing up as a working-class Italian-American kid in Paterson, New Jersey, where he went to Italian social clubs and encountered local hoods. Years in, he had the Bonanno circle so convinced that it moved to have him a “made” man shortly before the FBI ended his assignment. At first he befriended low-level mobsters. He wore a wire to record conversations, and committed to memory names and license plates since taking notes would obviously raise red flags. By 1976, he'd won the trust of important Bonnano members, notably family soldier Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero, said to have killed 26 people, and capo Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano. Ruggerio recommended him so that he could join the clan. Pistone's Mob activities centered in New York and Florida, taking him away from his wife and young daughters for extended times. Pistone even had to vacation with his demanding cohorts. He moved his family members out of state for their protection. As “Donnie Brasco,” Pistone helped Ruggerio transfer stolen goods and sell guns. He engaged in loansharking, extortion and illegal gambling. Once, while pretending to be an expert in burglar alarms, angry Mob associates intent on committing burglaries demanded he reveal the name of a mobster who would vouch for him. The FBI used an informant to quell their suspicions. In the 1997 film Donnie Brasco, undercover agent Joe Pistone is played by Johnny Depp, left. Al Pacino, right, plays Benjamin “Lefty” Ruggiero. In 1981, the situation intensified again when the crime family commanded him to kill an adversary. The FBI pulled him out of the sting. It was time to start making cases, and for him to testify in open court as himself. Starting in 1982, Pistone's testimony over the next several years in racketeering cases sent more than 100 mobsters to long prison terms. Prosecutors considered him crucial to convicting 21 defendants in the “Pizza Connection” case of pizzerias used to traffic in heroin and launder money for the Sicilian Mafia. Pistone went into hiding and later retired from the FBI, unscathed, in 1986. In the 1990s, Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, former underboss for the Gambino family who turned FBI informant, said the embarrassment from the “Brasco” case drove bosses in New York's crime families to suspend the Bonanno group from its board of directors. But Pistone couldn't stay retired. In 1992, at age 53, he requested reinstatement with the FBI, which agreed only if he would enter the agency's strict training class, lasting 16 weeks at its base in Quantico, Virginia. Pistone endured the rigorous course alongside recruits in their 20s. He passed and the FBI rehired him, at least until the mandatory retirement age of 57. Pistone's 1988 book on his undercover experiences, Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia, was a bestseller. Based on the book, actor Johnny Depp portrayed Pistone in the 1997 feature film Donnie Brasco, with Al Pacino as Ruggerio. JACK GARCIA Jack Garcia was an FBI undercover agent of Cuban descent who convinced members of the Italian-American Mafia that he was Italian. He took part in more than 100 undercover investigations over a 26-year career. Before he succeeded in infiltrating New York's Gambino crime family, FBI agent Joaquin “Jack” Garcia had to go school. That is, the FBI's “mob school,” where he received an education in how to hit the ground running with veteran mobsters. His teacher was special agent Nat Parisi. First off, Parisi said, do not carry a wallet – wiseguys carry wads of currency, often bound by the kind of rubber band grocery stores use to keep broccoli together. Also, correctly pronouncing Italian food matters – as Tony Soprano might say, those long pasta shells are not “manicotti,” but “manicote.” Another valuable lesson he learned is that his Mob brethren loved compliments – his favorite one: “Where did you get those nice threads? You look like a million dollars.” In his 26-year career as an FBI agent, Garcia took part in more than 100 undercover investigations, from Miami to New York, Atlantic City and Los Angeles, targeting mobsters, drug traffickers and corrupt politicians and cops. He participated in the highest number of undercover cases in FBI history. In many of his capers, he impersonated a mobster, using the name “Jack Falcone” (in honor of the Italian judge Giovanni Falcone, killed by the Sicilian Mafia in the 1990s). As a backstory, he told his Mob marks about having a Sicilian pedigree (actually he's a native of Havana and grew up in the Bronx) with an expertise in stealing and fencing stolen goods, with jewelry as his specialty. Sometimes, he had to run several undercover roles at once. He took advantage of his fluency in Spanish and Italian, being careful not to mix things up when the phone rang. In the early 2000s, the FBI chose Garcia for what would be the most fruitful infiltration of an organized crime family since Joe Pistone's in the 1970s. While undercover as “Jack Falcone” with the Gambino's family's chapter in Westchester County, New York, for two years, he flashed cash, Rolex watches, diamond rings, flat-screen TVs and other supposed stolen property (items seized in other FBI cases). Much of the cash he held went to pay for expensive dinners – mobsters, he said, are notoriously cheap when the check comes. He gained 80 pounds over the two years. One mobster in particular who liked his money and goods, and would become his almost daily companion, was Gambino capo Gregory DePalma. An “old school” hood who in 2003 finished serving 70 months for racketeering, DePalma right away threatened violence and extorted owners of Westchester-area construction firms, strip joints, restaurants and other businesses. Garcia said he witnessed DePalma commit a crime almost every day. The FBI had Garcia pose as a wiseguy seeking to invest in a topless bar in the Bronx. Garcia's inquiries led him to meet DePalma in 2003. By providing stolen property for DePalma to sell for cash, Garcia convinced him that “Jack Falcone” was an experienced jewelry thief and fencer from Miami. When Garcia hung out with DePalma over the two-year period, he wore a body wire, and the FBI planted bugging devices at DePalma's hangouts. Garcia gave DePalma a cell phone that the talkative mob capo used prodigiously, not knowing the FBI had bugged it. The operation yielded 5,000 hours of recorded conversations used to implicate DePalma and other Gambino men in racketeering. In 2005, DePalma planned to honor “Falcone” by rendering him “made” within the Gambino family. In a recorded conversation, Garcia as “Falcone” replied to DePalma, “I'm honored for that,” he said, in the tape later used in court. “I will never let you down either.” But it wasn't to be. After Garcia witnessed a Gambino soldier beat another member with a crystal candlestick, the FBI shut down the undercover operation. (Garcia and Pistone are the only law enforcement officers ever nominated to be “made.”) Garcia's efforts inside the Gambino crew paid off big time. The evidence he delivered for the FBI resulted in the arrest of 32 Gambino members and associates, including DePalma, Gambino boss Arnold “Zeke” Squitieri and underboss Anthony “The Genius” Megale. DePalma went to trial in 2006. Garcia, who retired from the FBI two months before the trial started, agreed to testify in federal court in Manhattan. The jury found DePalma guilty on 27 counts, and the judge gave the 74-year-old a 12-year prison term. Like Pistone, Garcia's undercover career is chronicled in a memoir, Making Jack Falcone: An Undercover FBI Agent Takes Down a Mafia Family. KIKI CAMARENA Kiki Camarena was an undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Mexico. After contributing information that led to major drug busts, he was tortured and murdered by drug cartel bosses in 1985. Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, the late Drug Enforcement Administration agent assigned to investigate drug trafficking in Guadalajara, Mexico, in the 1980s, is famous as one of the most heroic DEA agents ever. But he is more well-known in death than in life. His torture-murder in Mexico in 1985 took place at the hands of drug cartel bosses with the complicity of high-level Mexican government officials, law enforcement and, allegedly, the CIA. At the time, the Reagan administration was secretly training and supplying Central American guerilla fighters, known as the “Contras,” against the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The U.S. government allegedly granted the cartel bosses free rein to traffic drugs – to the point of using CIA-recruited American pilots to fly cocaine into the United States to sell for cash so the cartel could make donations to buy more weaponry for the Contras. Camarena, born in Mexicali, Mexico, in 1947, moved with his impoverished family to Calexico, California. He served as a firefighter in Calexico, and with a strong desire for police work, joined the Imperial County Sheriff's Department, moving up to its narcotics task force. The experience led to his career in the DEA starting in 1975. Assigned to the DEA office in the “narco paradise” of Guadalajara in 1980, Camarena was a convincing undercover officer with his appearance and ability to speak Spanish and barrio “street” language to fit in with the drug underworld. His target was the powerful Guadalajara drug cartel (which later evolved into the Sinaloa cartel). In the early 1980s, in what he called “Operation Padrino,” Camarena arranged for U.S. agents to seize international bank accounts held by wealthy cartel drug lords. He developed evidence of major marijuana plantations in the Mexican state of Zacatecas, based on informants and overflights in a plane flown by his DEA pilot, Alfredo Zavala Avelar. In November 1984, from his background work, Mexican federal police and the DEA raided enormous pot-growing operations on a ranch in Zacatecas that employed thousands of field hands. The task force confiscated 20 tons of marijuana, burned the crop and made 177 arrests. The bust cost cartel figure Rafael Caro Quintero about $50 million. Caro Quintero believed his operation had the protection of the Mexican army, and the CIA, since he owned a farm used to train the U.S.-backed Contras. He vowed revenge against Camarena. Meanwhile, a DEA force organized by Camarena seized a large cache of cocaine shipped by cartel boss Miguel Felix Gallardo's operation to New Mexico and Texas. Gallardo also believed he had CIA and Mexican official protection. During the fall of 1984, Quintero held meetings with top cartel traffickers Gallardo, Ernesto “Don Neto” Fonseco Carrillo and Ruben Zuno Arce. Also present, thanks to rampant corruption bought by the Guadalajara cartel, were Mexico's minister of domestic affairs and DFA chief Manuel Bartlett Diaz, plus Mexico's defense minister, the head of Mexico's Interpol office and the governor of the state of Jalisco. The agenda was to kidnap Camarena and get him to reveal his informants and other information. Zuno Arce gave the order. Fonseca only intended to scare and release him, but Quintero wanted to kill the DEA man. On February 7, 1985, Quintero and Gallardo directed their henchmen to kidnap Camarena off a street in Guadalajara. As the agent walked from the U.S. consulate to meet his wife for lunch, they forced him at gunpoint into a car and drove him to a residence used for cartel rendezvous. They bound and blindfolded him, turned on a tape recorder and questioned him, during which he was severely beaten and tortured. The lead interrogator was the crooked head of the secret police in Guadalajara, Sergio Espino Verdin. The cartel men wanted to know what Camarena knew about them, their dealings with Mexican officials and the CIA's involvement in drug trafficking. The gangsters also brought in and beat up Zavala, Camarena's pilot. Both men died about two days later, angering Fonseco, who told Quintero not to kill Camarena. Camarena's wife reported him missing and Washington launched what would be the largest manhunt in the history of the DEA. The cartel had the two men's bodies buried, then dug up and relocated to a farm in another state, where Mexican police found them in early March. During his funeral a week later, Camarena's family interred his ashes in Calexico. His slaying triggered an international incident. U.S. officials ordered all cars from Mexico at the border searched, effectively closing it. The investigation revealed the CIA connection, leading to bitter clashes between CIA and DEA agents. A federal court in Los Angeles charged 22 defendants in the murders of Camarena and Zavala. Under pressure, Mexican authorities acted, arresting 13 men. Mexican courts convicted Fonseco, Quintero and Espino, and sentenced each to 40 years, although Quintero won early release on a technicality in 2013. U.S. officials are still seeking Quintero to face federal charges. Mexican police arrested Gallardo in 1989, and he received 40 years. A court in Los Angeles found Zuno Arce guilty in the murders in 1990, sentenced him to two life terms in prison, where he died in 2012. In Camarena's honor, in 1985 the National Family Partnership started the National Red Ribbon Campaign, a volunteer anti-drug use and education effort that urges youths to recite a pledge to refrain from drugs, and celebrates “Red Ribbon Week” on drug awareness each October. Camarena's is featured as a character, played by actor Michael Pena, in a chapter of the Netflix series Narcos: Mexico, about on his actions with the DEA. JAY DOBYNS Jay Dobyns went undercover with the Hells Angels outlaw motorcycle gang for 20 months in Arizona on behalf of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. His work led to 16 arrests. For Jay Dobyns, fitting in with the infamous biker gang the Hells Angels for almost two years meant adhering to his undercover alter ego, Jay “Bird” Davis, to the point of obsession. To maintain his cover, he had to divert his mind away from his wife and kids. And it all would be worth it – at least that's what he thought at the time. Dobyns had hit on his best clandestine ruse yet while in Arizona in 2001, after 15 years of service as an undercover special agent with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. While working undercover cases in the late 1980s for the ATF, he'd been injured twice – from a gunshot wound to the back from a suspect in Tucson and when gunrunners hit him with a car during an attempted getaway in Chicago. He took part in investigations of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Other undercover roles of his ended in the arrests of a Mexican drug boss and members of the Aryan Brotherhood gang. Altogether, he served in more than 500 undercover operations disguised as a hitman and Mob debt collector. He infiltrated organized crime groups and gangs engaged in drug and arms smuggling. In 2001, to gather intelligence as “Davis” for the ATF in northern Arizona, Dobyns worked in the Bullhead City area, posing as a gun seller and an enforcer for a nonexistent collections agency. But his operation was interrupted in 2002 with the now-famous riot and shootout among members of the Angels and a competing biker gang, the Mongols, at the Harrah's casino in nearby Laughlin, Nevada, during the annual River Run motorcycle rally. Two Angels and one Mongol died and dozens of people were injured. The ATF brass soon redirected him to penetrate the dangerous Hells Angels club. Dobyns certainly had the physical part down with his beard and six-foot, one-inch frame he used as an all-conference football player for the University of Arizona. Later, an Angels member would apply tattoos covering his upper arms. Dobyns teamed with another ATF agent, two other undercover officers and a pair of paid informants. The idea was to create a fake biker gang with the aid of one of the informants who once served in a motorcycle gang based in Tijuana, Mexico. The gangster informant and Dobyns would run the gang, called the Solo Angeles, promote it as a pro-Hells Angels crew and request to join the Angels as a “nomad” chapter. The ATF named the setup “Operation Black Biscuit.” As a convincer, Dobyns and his fellow agent feigned an execution of a Mongol member, tying up an agent, placing cow's brains and bloody Mongol clothing on him and taking a photo. Based on the picture, the Angels took the bait and let them hang out and ride with them. They trusted him so much they offered to make him a member of the Angels' Skull Valley Chapter. He was the first law enforcement officer to infiltrate the Angels. His undercover penetration of the Angels lasted more than 20 months, one of the longest ever for the ATF. His work ended with 16 arrests from the Angels gang. But the criminal case, amid problems between the ATF and Justice Department lawyers, fell through in federal court. Federal prosecutors blamed the ATF, saying the agency did not reveal evidence from informants. In 2006, the feds dropped racketeering enterprise charges – the most serious — against all but four of 42 Angels charged in the Laughlin riot. Dobyns' battle with his own employer, the ATF, soon began. He filed suit in federal court against the agency alleging it did not protect him while he was on duty. He won a $373,000 settlement in 2007. The next year, Dobyns's wife and two kids barely escaped after someone firebombed the family home in Tucson. The ATF investigated Dobyns himself as a suspect in the arson. Investigators cleared him. In 2014, the year he retired after 27 years with the ATF, he filed another suit, for $17.2 million, saying the ATF failed to safeguard his family amid death threats. A judge awarded him $173,000. During an appeal, the judge voided the monetary judgment, but recommended discipline for ATF personnel and barred seven Justice Department attorneys from the case. He ordered a special master to investigate government actions in the case, and possible misconduct by the feds in the arson investigation. But the judge died of cancer. The special master in a report said that the first case was fair enough and required no further probe into the federal government. A new judge accepted the recommendation. Dobyns has authored two books, one on his undercover experiences, another on his travails with the ATF. These days, he delivers lectures on his life to audiences at universities and law enforcement associations nationwide. And now some of our infamous quick hitters:   Donald Duck decoy   Police in Fort Lee, New Jersey used a Donald Duck costume as a decoy to catch drivers who failed to yield to pedestrians. Drivers who didn't stop for the cartoon duck were ticketed. One woman, Karen Haigh, fought her $230 ticket.   "They told me that I was getting a ticket for not stopping for a duck," she told Eyewitness News. "But it scared me. I'm a woman. This huge duck scared me."  Coco the Clown   These old clips from the show COPS show a strange undercover police sting, and proves the adage that clowns are usually scary or just creepy. One cop dressed up as Coco the Clown, an outfit that kind of resembles John Wayne Gacy, to catch women working as sex workers. Spoiler: he pretty much sprays all of them with silly string and the whole thing is sad to watch. Amish woman   At least one cop from the Pulaski Township Police Department in Pennsylvania dressed up as an Amish woman in an attempt to catch a sexual predator. Sgt. Chad Adams of the Pulaski Township Police Department wandered the streets for two months in 2014 after police were tipped off that a predator was masturbating in front of children, according to the Associated Press. He posted on the department's Facebook page, “Hey friends, sometimes being a police officer means going undercover and doing what you have to do to catch the bad guy. Now that our investigation is complete I'll share with you this photo! Back in January we had an individual preying on Amish children walking home from school. The male individual was pulling up to the children and getting out of his car and masturbating in front of them. Although we did not apprehend the individual we believe he was caught in another county. I wanted to share with you that we will use all means available to try and protect our children. That includes dressing up as an Amish woman to attempt to apprehend a pervert! Thanks goes out to the Neshannock police and New Wilmington police in assistance with the investigation! Sincerely, Sergeant Chad Adams.”   Sadly, the sting didn't work, but police believe it is because the culprit moved into another county.   DVD Prize sting   Police in Phoenix, Arizona set up a sting to catch people with outstanding warrants, mostly DUIs, in 2002. The people were told they won a DVD player. People thought they were showing up to pick up their prize. Instead, they walked right into their own arrest. Watch as these suspects went from excited to shocked to sad. Panhandling trick   In 2015, undercover cops in California posed as panhandlers to ticket distracted drivers. They stood on the side of the road, posed as panhandlers and holding signs that identified them as police officers. The pieces of cardboard they were holding also stated that they were looking for seatbelt and cellphone violations. For those drivers who weren't paying attention

FULL VIDEO AVAILABLE ON SPOTIFY! Sam welcomes Cris Italia, West Ham fan and owner of The Stand comedy club, from the JFL Festival in Montreal to chat Gianluca Scamacca to the Hammers, spontaneous plans to buy Trapani Calcio in collaboration with the Sicilian Mafia, having a goomah, Italian neighbourhoods, whoring yourself out or career advancement, and tons more! Enjoy! TikTok, Twitter, Instagram @CalcioPodcast and like our Facebook page (The Calcio Podcast) For Juventus-exclusive content, tune into the one and only Turin Giants podcast Available on Spotify, iTunes, Google, Anchor, iHeartRadio, Amazon, Podbean and all other major platforms. Music: "Doja" by Central Cee "S!r" by thasup, Lazza & Sfera Ebbasta --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/calciopodcast/message

On this day in the mob, July 19th 1992 Italian anti-mafia crusader and magistrate Paolo Borsellino is bombed to death while sitting in front of his mothers house. His car was laced with TNT on the orders of Vicious Mob Boss Salvatore 'ToTo' Riina. In todays epsiodes we discuss the hero Borsellino's epic crusade to bring down the Sicilian Mafia.--- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/this-day-in-the-mob/support

Support Ghost Stories to unlock other goodies and listen to our Patreon-only series Books of War: A History of the Sicilian Mafia by clicking here: https://www.patreon.com/GhostStoriesForTheEnd   Had some issues putting together the final run of America-centric episodes so I've unlocked this classic from last summer. Drugs, 9/11, nazis, Gladio, banking, money laundering, the CIA, James Blunt and more. We will be back next week with fresh material.   Peace.  

Welcome aboard for another crazy episode! Today on the train we step into a familiar world…or should we say .. Worlds? A couple episodes ago we did some mass disappearances and you know we love some true crime so today we sort  of combine the two. You see, for the mass disappearances episode there was one case that kept popping up. Now this was interesting to us because we've had that particular case on our list of shows to do for some time now. We figured this would be a good time to go ahead and finally do it. Today we are talking about the disappearance of the Sodder children.  The incident happened on Christmas Eve in 1945 in Fayetteville, West Virginia. George and Jenny Sodder lived with 9 of their 10 children. At the time, the oldest son was off fighting in WW2. The night of the incident, Jennie was awoken three times.   First, at 12:30 a.m., she was awoken by a phone call during which she could hear a woman's voice she didnt recognize asking for a name she didn't know, as well as glasses clinking in the background. Jennie told the caller she had reached the wrong number, later recalling the woman's "weird laugh". As she did, she noticed that some of the lights were still on and the curtains hadn't been closed, two things the children normally did when they stayed up later than their parents. Marion had fallen asleep on the living room couch, so Jennie assumed the other children ,who had stayed up later, had gone back up to the attic where they slept. She closed the curtains, turned out the lights, and returned to bed. She then went back to bed only to be startled by a loud bang and a rolling noise on the roof. She soon dozed off again and finally awoke an hour later at around 130, to see the house engulfed in smoke. She found that the room George used for his office was on fire, around the telephone line and fuse box.   Those are pretty much the facts that can be proven for the most part. Everything else…well it's strange to say the least.   George and Jennie made it out of that fire, as did Sylvia, just a toddler at the time. Also two of their teenage children, Marion and George Jr, made it out. 23 year old John rounded out the kids that made it out alive. Or did he? John said in his first police interview after the fire that he went up to the attic to alert his siblings sleeping there, though he later changed his story to say that he only called up there and did not actually see them. The children remaining inside were Maurice 14 , Martha 12, Louis 9, Jennie 8, and Betty 5. According to accounts, Marion, ran to the neighbors house to call the fire department because their phone was not working. A driver on the nearby road had also seen the flames and called from a nearby tavern; they too were unsuccessful either because they could not reach the operator or because the phone there turned out to be broken. It was Christmas Eve and I've read that the police chief sent everyone home to their families. She couldn't get an answer so another neighbor went to find the fire chief and let him know what was happening.    While this was going on, George, who climbed an outside wall, barefoot, to get to the attic and Jennie tried desperately to save their other children. This is where some of the strange things happen. First off neither of the Sodders trucks would start, despite having worked perfectly during the previous day.. Then their ladder was found to be mysteriously missing. Because of the family not being able to get help from the neighbor and their trucks oddly not starting when they tried to leave to look for the fire chief, help didn't arrive until 8am, almost 7 hours later. The fire department is just 2 miles from the home. The fire department was low on manpower due to the war and relying on individual firefighters to call each other. Chief F.J. Morris said the next day that the already slow response was further hampered by his inability to drive the fire truck, requiring that he wait until someone who could drive was available. Because he was fucking drunk; partying at a local pub, celebrating Christmas Eve. Oh, and one of the firefighters was Jennie's brother, their children's uncle.   The fire was initially blamed on faulty wiring, even though the Sodders claim there had never been any kind of issues with the electrical wiring before. In fact, A visitor to the house, seeking work, went around to the back of the house and warned George that a pair of fuse boxes would "cause a fire someday." George was puzzled by the observation, since he had just had the house rewired when an electric stove was installed, and the local electric company had said afterwards it was safe.   During the investigation something happened that makes this case the crazy thing that we are talking about. 5 of the Sodder children allegedly perished in the fire but the body's were never found. The fire chief told them the fire had cremated the bodies. Jennie asked a crematorium worker if that was possible, the worker told Jennie that bones remain even after bodies are burned at 2,000 degrees for two hours. The Sodder home only took 45 minutes to burn to the ground. So we did a little fact checking about this and there is a lot of argument about whether a house fire can burn bones to ash, but, it seems like those who have degrees and a bunch of letters after their name all agree that a house fire typically will not burn hot enough to get rid of bones. Also another thing we found is that even during cremations bones do not actually turn to dust. In fact after being incinerated at usually between 1800-2000°f, for about 2 hours, the bones are the only thing left. Now, the bones are not the same, granted, as with all the heat, it destroys the structure of the bone but does not turn it to ash. The ashes you receive are actually the bones of the deceased that have been put into what is essentially a big mixer, to pulverize them into dust. So enjoy that thought.    At any rate, due to what the experts said, the family did not believe that the other children simply burned up in the fire. They believed something else happened to the kids. But what else could have happened?   What else would lead one to think something possibly nefarious happened? Well according to some reports, some strange things happened in the lead up to the fire. One strange thing that happened was that in the months before the fire a "ominous drifter, hinted at doom '' We're assuming it was like Friday the 13th…the guy just points and goes…you're all dooooooomed, doomed! Whatever happened it sounds funny.    A few weeks earlier, not too far out from the incident, an angry insurance salesman berated George, telling him that his house was going to go up in smoke and his children would be destroyed as a retaliation for his criticisms of Mussolini in the mostly Italian immigrant community. Actually he said "the dirty remarks you have been making about Mussolini." If it was a sales tactic, it definitely needs work, otherwise, it's oddly specific! Also a bus driver came forward and spoke of how she saw "fireballs" being thrown into the roof of the house, could that be the noise she heard?   In the weeks before Christmas that year, George's older sons had also noticed a strange car parked along the main highway through town, its occupants watching the younger Sodder children as they returned from school.   What about the man who cut off the telephone lines at the Sodder residence? Someone witnessed him taking away a block and tackle used to remove car engines during the fire. He admitted to the theft but answered that he had no part in starting the fire; he had just wanted to cut off the power lines but instead clipped the telephone line. He was let go, and no records exist identifying him or questioning why he wanted to cut lines to steal a block and tackle.    Then on top of that you have the incidents on the night of the fire. There was the phone call and then the noise on the roof and she woke up to smoke in the house. Put all that together, and one could see where people may start to form some theories that this was more than just a tragic house fire.  You know we love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next folks…well at least Moody does.    Not only that, sightings of the children started almost immediately. For starters, locals reported seeing the 5 children in a car that was driving past and watching the fire. Then the next morning a woman operating a truck stop claimed she saw the children come in for breakfast with 4 Italian speaking adults.  Once pictures began to circulate, more sightings came in. a woman said that she saw four of the children (where was the fifth?) in the company of four adults at a hotel in South Carolina.  Which could lend credence to the truck stop story, which also mentioned 4 adults.    Armed with all these facts, George and Jennie went back to the police and demanded to have the fire further investigated. But the police refused, claiming that the coroner's inquiry determined that no crime had been committed.   This is when George and Jennie decided they would continue the search on their own.   George would constantly go and dig through the rubble trying to find something. At one point his searching seemed to find the first evidence of the children. He found what appeared to be an internal organ and also some small pieces of bone. They were sent for testing and the tests revealed that the "organ" was a cow's liver, and that the bones were from someone older than any of the missing children. The small bone fragments that were unearthed were determined to have been human vertebrae. The bone fragments were sent to Marshall T. Newman, a specialist at the Smithsonian Institution. They were confirmed to be lumbar vertebrae, all from the same person. "Since the transverse recesses are fused, the age of this individual at death should have been 16 or 17 years", Newman's report said. "The top limit of age should be about 22 since the centra, which normally fuse at 23, are still unfused". Thus, given this age range, it was not very likely that these bones were from any of the five missing children, since the oldest, Maurice, had been 14 at the time (although the report allowed that vertebrae of a boy his age sometimes were advanced enough to appear to be at the lower end of the range). Also the bones show no sign of being affected in any way by the fire. It was speculated that the bone fragments were mixed in with some dirt brought in to help fill in the basement. Later, Tinsley supposedly confirmed that the bone fragments had come from a cemetery in nearby Mount Hope, but could not explain why they had been taken from there or how they came to be at the fire site. The Smithsonian returned the bone fragments to George in September 1949, according to its records; their current location is unknown.  As far as the liver, it is said that a private investigator found out that the liver was put there by the fire chief at some point in hopes the family would find it and accept the idea that the kids perished in the fire.  George sometimes made his own sightings. On one occasion, George saw a magazine photo of a group of young ballet dancers in New York City, one of whom looked like his missing daughter Betty. He drove all the way to the girl's school, where his repeated demands to see the girl himself were refused.   The investigation and its findings attracted national attention, and the West Virginia Legislature held two hearings on the case in 1950. Afterwards, however, Governor Okey L. Patteson and state police superintendent W.E. Burchett told the Sodders the case was "hopeless" and closed it at the state level. The FBI decided it had jurisdiction as a possible interstate kidnapping, but dropped the case after two years of following fruitless leads.   After this second official investigation ended, George and Jennie continued their search.   George followed up on many leads on his own including heading to St Louis where a woman claimed Martha was being held in a convent but nothing came of that. Another woman in Texas claimed that she overheard two other patrons making incriminating remarks about a fire that happened on Christmas Eve in West Virginia several years before. Again nothing here proved significant.    At one point George heard that a relative of Jennies who lived in Florida had children that looked exactly like his had. He went down there to check it out and only when the relative was able to prove the children were his that George would leave it alone.         In 1967, George went to the Houston area to investigate another tip. A woman there had written to the family, saying that Louis had revealed his true identity to her one night after having too much to drink. She believed that he and Maurice were both living in Texas somewhere. However, George and his son-in-law, Grover Paxton, were unable to speak with her. Police there were able to help them find the two men she had indicated, but they denied being the missing sons. Paxton said years later that doubts about that denial lingered in George's mind for the rest of his life.   That same year the family would receive something pretty crazy. A photo showed up in the mail one day. The photo showed a man that appeared to be around his early 30s with strikingly similar features as their son Louis had had.    Written on the back of the photo was this:               Louis Sodder I love brother Frankie Ilil boys A90132 or 35   Interesting…. Very interesting.    The photo was in an envelope postmarked central city Kentucky. There was no return address.    The Sodders hired a private detective to go to Central city and try and track down where this letter came from and follow this lead. The private detective headed to Central city and guess what he fucking found….. well no one will ever know because after he left he was never heard from again. He never reported back to the Sodders and they were unable to ever locate him. Did he disappear with their money or was he made to sleep with the fishes?   Unfortunately, this took a pretty heavy toll on George. He said in an interview the following year that the lack of information had been "like hitting a rock wall—we can't go any further". "Time is running out for us", he admitted in another interview around that time. "But we only want to know. If they did die in the fire, we want to be convinced. Otherwise, we want to know what happened to them".   George would pass a year later in 1969 believing that his children were never killed in that fire and they were still out there someplace.    After this the rest of the family would continue to search and publicize the case. The only one that would not get involved was John. John believed that the family should accept what happened and all move on with their lives. Jennie stayed in the family home and built a fence around it and added rooms. She wore black for the mourning for the rest of her life and tended the garden at the site of the former house.    These are basically the facts as we know them. Since there's not much in the way of actual forensic evidence in this case, there's no way of telling for sure what happened as far as the children's bodies being burned. Obviously the investigation was quick, taking only 2 hours, and there wasn't a ton of forensic detective work back then. Plus DNA testing wasn't a thing. And just in general investigating wasn't generally as thorough as it is these days.   The surviving Sodder children, joined by their own children, along with older Fayetteville residents, have theorized that the Sicilian Mafia was trying to extort money from George and the children may have been taken by someone who knew about the planned arson and said they would be safe if they left the house. They were possibly taken back to Italy. If the children had survived all those years and were aware that their parents and siblings had survived too, the family believes, they may have avoided contact in order to keep them from harm.   Sylvia Sodder Paxton, the youngest of the surviving Sodder siblings, died in 2021. She was in the house on the night of the fire, which she said was her earliest memory. "I was the last one of the kids to leave home", she told the Gazette-Mail in 2013. She and her father would stay up late, talking about what might have happened. "I experienced their grief for a long time". She believed that her siblings survived that night, and assisted with efforts to find them and publicize the case. Her daughter said in 2006: "She promised my grandparents she wouldn't let the story die, that she would do everything she could".   George and Jennie passed out flyers and put up a billboard on route 16 in Fayetteville. The Sodders purchased the billboard in 1952. It featured black-and-white photographs of each missing child and an account of the fire with a $5000 reward that was increased to $10,000. It was taken down shortly after Jennie's death in 1989. It read:  “After thirty years, it's not too late to investigate. So what happened to the children if they didn't die in the fire? Well there's a few  theories but nothing solid.   One of the biggest questions is how someone could abduct 5 children with nobody being woken up. Well truecrimefiles.com say of that question:             "One of the most puzzling questions is how the actual alleged abduction took place. How did the kidnapper(s) get the five children out of the house, considering that the eldest sister was asleep on the sofa in the living room and the parents were asleep in a bedroom less than 20 feet away? Surely at least one of the children would have made some noise had a stranger (or even someone known to the family) come into the house and taken them away. There is at least one scenario that may have happened that would solve this specific puzzle. One of the chores the two boys were told to do was to attend to the family's handful of farm animals.”   On a side note, Marion, the oldest daughter, had been working at a dime store in downtown Fayetteville, and she surprised three of her younger sisters—Martha, Jennie, and Betty—with new toys she had bought for them. The younger children were so excited that they asked their mother if they could stay up past what would have been their usual bedtime.   At 10 p.m., Jennie told them they could stay up a little later, as long as the two oldest boys who were still awake, 14-year-old Maurice and his 9-year-old brother Louis, remembered to put the cows in and feed the chickens before going to bed themselves.    ”It is possible that all five of the children left the house to perform these chores (the three girls went along to watch) and were taken once they were outside and away from the house."   But an even bigger question would be why would someone do this. Many people believe that it had to do with George's and his background.    George immigrated from Italy and changed his last name from Soddu to Sodder upon arrival. Nobody really knows why he came to America or the circumstances behind his immigration. He would never discuss the issues and whenever it was brought up he would change the conversation. So that's kind of strange. Also George owned a coal trucking business, and at that time the coal industry was under a lot of pressure from the mafia. That plus his little known about past, have lead many people to speculate about mafia involvement in the crime.    Another theory suggests the kids were abducted by an illegal child-selling agency similar to Georgia Tann's with help from the local police. And remember that insurance guy George argued with, the guy that warned that their house would burn and the children would vanish. He was also a member of the coroner's jury which ruled the fire accidental. Leading many to suspect foul play.   For those of you wondering, For more than 20 years, Georgia Tann ran the Tennessee Children's Home Society, where she and an elaborate network of co-conspirators kidnapped and abused children to sell them off to wealthy adoptive parents at a steep profit. This is too crazy a story to not talk about a little here because if there was a network similar to this operating in that area, it seemed like another plausible theory.    Beulah George "Georgia" Tann was born in 1891 in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Named for her father, a powerful judge, she hoped to follow in his footsteps and practice law. Instead, her domineering father forbade it, and she instead pursued a career in social work — one of the few socially acceptable positions for a woman of her means.   She first went to work in Mississippi, but she was soon fired for inappropriately removing children from impoverished homes without cause. She made her way to Texas, where it's believed she adopted her daughter, June, in 1922. Later, in 1923, she adopted Ann Atwood Hollinsworth, a woman believed to be Tann's longtime same-sex partner. It was common at the time for same-sex couples to use adult adoption as a means of transferring property or inheritances.   Tann then moved on to Memphis, where her father used his political connections to secure a new job for her as executive secretary at the Memphis branch of the Tennessee Children's Home Society in 1922.   By 1929, she had staged a takeover and named herself executive director.   Tann's scheme coincided with a sharp increase in families looking to adopt kids In the 1900s and 1910s, formalized adoptions were fairly rare, but in the 1920s adoption began to be marketed as a shortcut to societal improvement. According to one ad from the National Home Finding Society, adopting would "reduce divorces, banditry, murder, and control births, fill all the churches and do real missionary work at home and abroad, exchanging immigrants for Americans and stopping some of the road leading to war."   At the time, the theory of eugenics — that is, the controlling of the reproduction of genetically "inferior" people through sterilization — was popular. The movement claimed that people of better genetic endowment were subject to greater infertility. It became important in adoption not just to get babies but to get the best babies. A campaign to explain the superiority of adoption was launched.   This new outlook, along with the popularization of baby formula, helped Tann's baby-trafficking business grow. Suddenly, nonnursing mothers could easily and affordably feed their babies. The demand for adoptable infants rose, especially among busy, successful women.   Tann was calculated in her approach and targeted the rich and famous, who paid premium prices for their adopted children. Actors, authors, and entertainers, including Dick Powell and June Allyson, Lana Turner, Pearl S. Buck, Smiley Burnette, and New York Gov. Herbert Lehman, all adopted Tann babies. In 1947, Joan Crawford adopted twins, Cathy and Cindy, from Tann.   Stealing children wasn't a small side business. During the 21 years Tann ran the Children's Home Society, it's believed she made more than $1 million from taking and selling children — about $11 million in today's money. And she didn't do it alone.   Tann's extensive child-trafficking operation required connections, and she quickly linked up with E.H. "Boss" Crump, who ran a powerful Tennessee political machine. Crump offered Tann protections in exchange for kickbacks.   To kidnap and traffic her victims, Tann paid off a network of social workers, police officers, doctors, and lawyers. Some kidnapped children from preschools, churches, and playgrounds for her. Kidnappers preyed on poor children and families who didn't have the means to fight back. Tann's coconspirators were authority figures — people not to be contradicted — so children often went with them willingly. Sometimes, Tann would approach families and offer medical or other help. Tann would tell parents she could get their children into a clinic at no cost, but if they came along as well they'd be charged a large bill.   In the era before internet and with few phones, Tann relied on her network of spotters. They alerted Tann to children on riverbanks, in shantytowns, or walking home from school. She drove up in her big black car and offered them rides.   Tann was also in cahoots with a local judge who helped procure children, specifically from impoverished single or widowed mothers. One of her most high profile coconspirators was Judge Camille Kelley, who presided over the juvenile court in Shelby County, Tennessee, for 30 years.   "She had a stooge down in the welfare department when someone would apply for assistance, this person would get their name, and get in touch with Camille Kelley," Robert Taylor, an investigator, said in a 1992 interview with "60 Minutes."   In 1950, Taylor, a local lawyer, was asked by newly elected Gov. Gordon Browning to do an in-depth investigation into Children's Home Society and Tann. "Camille Kelley would send a deputy out to pick them up and award custody to Georgia Tann," he added.   Tennessee law required children to be adopted in state for a fee of $7, about $75 in today's money. But Tann moved her "merchandise" at $1,000 per head — $10,000 today. When the state finally investigated, the report on the Children's Home Society, the Browning report, found that Tann conducted "private" adoptions and pocketed up to 90% of the fee. She would gouge prospective parents on everything from travel costs, to home visits, and attorney's fees.   The report also detailed how children were then spirited away from the Home Society in the middle of the night to avoid detection by authorities who weren't in the know or others who might ask too many questions. Her "nurses" had regular circuits to New York and California, though she shipped to all US states and Great Britain.   Elaborate backstories were added to stolen children's files to make them more "marketable." Their files said they came from "good homes" with "very attractive" young mothers. Fathers were described as "intelligent" and often in medical school.   Tann also knew how to capitalize on opportunities in the adoption market. Few agencies adopted to Jewish families, and Tann saw her chance. A few pen strokes turned a Southern Baptist child into a baby from a "good Jewish" family. As the Children's Home Society scandal was exposed, the scenario played out in the adoption records over and over again.   If parents, biological or adoptive, asked too many questions about children, Tann threatened to have them arrested or the child removed. She was known for "repossessing" children whose adoptive parents couldn't make full payments on time. And she wasn't above blackmailing customers for more money later.   Often she would return to adoptive parents months later and say relatives of the child had come around asking for a baby's return. But for a hefty fee she had lawyers who could make the situation go away.   Homes for unwed mothers, welfare hospitals, and prisons were targeted. Doctors, working with Tann, told new mothers their babies had died during birth. Those children were "buried" at no cost to the families.   Other mothers were coerced into signing their children away while still under sedation from labor. Tann preyed on women's desperation, their poverty, and their sense of shame.   "If they were unsedated and tried to hold on to the babies after the baby was born, then Georgia Tann would step in and say, 'Well, you don't want people in your home town to know about [your pregnancy], do you?'" Robert Taylor, a lawyer who investigated the Tennessee Children's Home Society scandal for Gov. Gordon Browning, said in his 1992 "60 Minutes" interview.   By the 1930s, as a result of Tann's scam, Memphis had the highest infant mortality rate in the US.   Archives at the Benjamin Hooks Library, in Memphis, reveal some of the cruelties children were subjected to. Babies were kept in sweltering conditions, and some children were drugged to keep them quiet until they were sold. Other children were hung in dark closets, beaten, or put on starvation rations for weeks at a time. Drug addicts and pedophiles were hired to watch over them.   According to "The Baby Thief: The Untold Story of Georgia Tann, the Baby Seller Who Corrupted Adoption," sexual abuse was a common occurrence at the home.   Tann was brutally unsparing in her cruelty. Former Home Society employees revealed to Taylor that if an infant was deemed too weak, it might be left in the sun to die. If a child had a congenital disability or was considered "too ugly" or "old" to be of use, Tann had people get rid of them. Many were buried on the property, though about 20 children were buried in an unmarked plot of land within Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis.   In the 1940s, Tann developed a new publicity stunt.   "They would raffle 20 or 30 babies off every year in the 'Christmas Baby Give Away' in the newspaper," Wingate said. "How did anyone ever think that was all right?"   For $25 a ticket — about $350 today — purchasers could buy as many raffle tickets as they liked.   Tann pocketed thousands of dollars that ticket holders assumed went to the Home Society, and had to give away just a fraction of her "merchandise" in the process.   Tann's baby-selling scheme carried on unabated for over two decades. But in 1949 things took a turn. Tennessee elected a new governor, Gordon Browning. Weakened, E.H. Crump, Tann's crony, lost his hold on Memphis politics.   On September 12, 1950, Gov. Browning held a press conference during which he revealed Tann and her network managed to amass more than $1 million from her child-selling scheme — again, nearly $11 million in today's money.   But Tann was never held accountable. Three days later, she died at home after slipping into a mysterious coma from untreated uterine cancer.   On November 11, 1950, Judge Camille Kelley, who had worked so closely with Tann, quietly resigned. It took until late November or early December to find safe homes for the remaining children. Somewhere in the waning days of 1950, the doors to the Tennessee Children's Home Society were closed for good.   No one was ever prosecuted for their roles in the black-market baby ring.   Holy fuck…. So we know that was a tangent but you got a 2 fer here with that crazy tale, and again the reason we went into the  details on this are because there is speculation that the Sodder children could have been victims of a similar scheme. I mean.. If it happened on that scale in one place who's to say it didn't happen here as well. https://www.ranker.com/list/best-movies-about-kidnapping/ranker-film

Today's Mafia Snack is focusing La Stidda which is Sicilian Mafia like organization based in the southern part of the Sicilian island. They split off from the Sicilian Mafia and overall appear to be even more ruthless. Check out our show Sponsor, JSV Capital: http://JSVCapital.com Check out Deeper Globalism: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvfF...

A new miniseries about the deep politics of casinos. Tonight we introduce the story of the near-destruction of the Syndicate, with a look at the story of Lefty Rosenthal, Tony Spilotro, and the secretive networks of business, intelligence and crime surrounding the massive skim operation they oversaw in Las Vegas back in the 70s.   Sub and show some love on Patreon to gain access to paywalled episodes and Books of War: A History of the Sicilian Mafia: https://www.patreon.com/GhostStoriesForTheEnd   Twitter: @ghoststoriesend   Email: ghoststoriesend@gmail.com