Gangland Wire

In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins takes a deep dive with his guest Matt into the assassination of Carmine Galante—one of the most infamous mob hits in American history. Matt co-authored a book titled Made In Long Island Matt begins by analyzing the controversial footage captured at the Ravenite Social Club shortly after the murder. While federal investigators interpreted the scene as a celebration by those responsible, Matt challenges that narrative. He breaks down the body language and behavior of key figures, including Bruno Indelicato, suggesting the footage actually reflects anger and exclusion—not guilt. The episode introduces guest Matt, co-author of Made on Long Island, who provides an insider’s perspective on the inner workings of organized crime. Matt prefers to not give his last name. Together, they explore how the Galante hit fit into a broader power struggle within the Bonanno crime family and beyond. Matt cowrote this book with Bartley Scarbrough. Matt tells a little-known story about Mob dealings with Fireworks around the 4th of July. One story is about a closed store and how they made up for the closed store and gave a fireworks show on the 5th and most of the kids never knew. The conversation expands to include major mob figures such as John Gotti and Sonny Red Indelicato, examining the shifting alliances and rivalries that shaped the events leading up to the assassination. Matt shares firsthand stories of mob life, detailing how communication relied on coded language and payphones—tools that kept operations hidden in plain sight. Gary and Matt dissect the planning behind the hit, revealing a calculated operation involving surveillance, weapon disposal, and carefully constructed alibis. They also address the aftermath, focusing on law enforcement’s inability to definitively link the crime to certain suspects—raising questions about whether individuals like Indelicato were wrongly accused.   A central theme emerges: the gap between official narratives and the complex realities of organized crime. Matt argues that investigative misinterpretations—particularly by federal authorities—led to flawed conclusions and, potentially, unjust prosecutions. This episode challenges long-held assumptions about the Galante murder, offering listeners a more nuanced view of Mafia politics, loyalty, and betrayal. It’s a detailed reexamination of a landmark mob hit—and a reminder that the truth is often far more complicated than the headlines. Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee” Subscribe to the website for weekly notifications about updates and other Mob information. To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent ‘Brothers against Brothers’ or ‘Gangland Wire,’ the documentaries click here.  To purchase one of my books, click here. Transcript [0:00] Yeah, if you could just hold the frame right there, I think it’s very important [0:03] to set the stage of what we have here. This is a meeting of Bonanno crime family members, very high up ones, in front of Neil Delacroche’s Gambino headquarters on Mulberry Street, known as the Ravenite. Now, the feds used this tape to say that Bruno Indelicato was part of a conspiracy to murder Galante and that this tape shows the celebration. It does not. This tape is an absolute beef being put in primarily by Sonny Red and Delicato because he was supposed to do the hit jointly with the Gambino family led by John Gotti. He’s furious because at this point in time, he thinks he’s left out of the head. And just before you roll it, this video basically proves to every law enforcement person and every Cosa Nostra member that the people in this video did not do the murder. You don’t go out in Cosa Nostra, commit one of the biggest hits ever, a triple homicide, and then show your face an hour later. It does not work that way. So if you roll the tape, we can see some of the body language on these guys as well. [1:08] The guy in the white is Stefano Canone. He is the family’s consigliere, [1:13] which is technically third in charge, an advisory role. He is already at the Ravenite when everyone else arrives. A key figure in this is Sonny Red in Delicato Wearing a black jacket you’ll see His son is in the white shirt there The younger fellow that’s Bruno in Delicato The only guy that was convicted of this crime Now look at what’s going on here This is not a celebration They’re in the face of him And they’re furious And stop right there if you could, The gentleman in the black jacket right there. [1:44] Sonny, Red, and Delicato, he takes a couple steps back from his consigliere, which is technically his boss, and he turns around in fury, and he’s angry because, again, his team, led by him, was left off the head. Notice also, if you want to keep rolling the tape, he goes to his glasses. This is an absolute sign of anger, as per our body language experts, who, by the way, don’t even know who these people are. The only thing they know is this is a dispute, not a celebration. You notice that when he puts his hand up by his glasses? Now he thinks a little bit better of it because that’s his boss he’s talking to. And that’s a very good sign here. Again, another angle of this is in the Pizza Connection case in 1985. [2:27] Not only in the indictment, but also in FBI testimony, when asked who killed Carmen Galante, they did not say it was Bruno and Delicato and two other masked assailants. They said it was three unknown masked assailants that killed him. That’s what their testimony was. Everybody on the Cosa Nostra side and on the law enforcement side knows what this is. No mob guy commits a triple murder and then goes out to run to a place that we used to refer to as the FBI screen test, which was the Ravenite in Lower Manhattan and Mulberry Street. Everybody knows it, and it’s about time the story gets told, [3:05] and you’re going to see a lot more of this. Hey, all you wiretappers. Good to be back here in studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit Sergeant, and I have a guy here who has a different story and what he would say the real story behind the murder of Carmine Galante. Now, guys, there’s three monumental hits in organized crime history, I would say. The Galante hit… [3:33] Big because of the cigar in his mouth and that picture that was captured, but he was also an important hit in Mob. Now we also had the Anastasia. Anastasia was important and it was also got important, more important because of the photographs. Paul Castellano was important, I think more because of John Gotti than anything, but Carmine Galante and Matt here knows a lot about that hit and a lot about an alternative story to what really happened as it was reported it in the media. So welcome, Matt. Thank you so much for having me on, Gary. I really love your program. I’m happy to be here. All right, Matt, you got a book made on Long Island. Let’s just show everybody the copy of that. There you go, guys. There’s a copy of the book. It’s available on Amazon right now, right, Matt? [4:25] It certainly is. Thank you for putting it up. And one little sentence I’ll draw attention to at the bottom is, no AI was used in this. I know a lot of books are coming out now and people using AI, which I personally think is garbage. This is all handwritten and 440 pages of story after story. Yeah, there’s a lot to it. I guess you were writing under the name of Bartley Scarborough. Yeah, Bart is a good guy. He’s a friend of mine who actually started organizing this with me literally about 15, 20 years ago. Just to give everybody the timetable, we could not release this stuff till now because everybody with criminal culpability is now deceased or one guy is doing life in jail without the possibility of parole for another crime. That’s why we waited so long. Bart organized this stuff. He had me go over the thoughts. And he actually, I don’t know how much he’s going to want to talk about it, but he actually was there when we spoke to some of our friends who gave us extreme detail about this. But in terms of the actual writing, I actually penned it all myself with Bart’s assistant. All right, great. And as you know by now, it’s no easy task to write, especially 400-some pages. That’s a lot of words. That’s a lot of work, guys. Trust me, that is a lot of work. [5:41] You’ve got to keep going over it. Good writing is hard because it takes about three rewritings to actually get it out. Did you find that? [5:51] I did. It’s definitely extremely hard to do with volumes like this going over the past so many years. And plus getting the information from our friends, it was extremely hard to do. It was very time consuming. And I need to stress for the audience, I was not present when any of these major crimes like the homicides went down. I was present for the other things in the book, horse racing, which I’m sure we’re going to talk about later, major fireworks sales. But I need the audience to know that I was not present when the homicides went down, even though I was a juvenile at the time, and that from the proceeds of the fireworks sale and the horse racing, I did not pocket the proceeds like other people did. I know there’s lawyers out there, and I’m paying some $1,000 an hour. I apologize to people, but the lawyers told me 100 times I need to make those facts clear. Okay. All right. You did not do any of this, but you were right next to people who did do this. So we’re talking about firsthand information, correct? That is correct. Now, again, I was there for some of the stuff. I was there for some of the entity in the book. I was definitely there for the major league fireworks deals and participated in those. The horse racing that we’ll get to later, I was there for that. But in terms of the hard stuff, the stuff with no statute of limitations, homicides, I was not there. [7:12] So tell me about these group of guys that you grew up with, that you started doing some of these things. We have some kind of interesting personalities in there. Tell us about those guys. Oh my gosh. We had a real collection of characters is the only way to put it. Now, growing up when we were very young, let’s call it 11, 12, 13, we all really had two goals in mind. We wanted to make money and we wanted to play sports at that age. And that’s what we did. We made money on anything, paper routes, shoveling snow, raking leaves. And what happened was being so competitive, we got into a feud with another group in the same town. Now, there’s no way around it. We were idiots at this age. Some of our guys were carrying guns. Two of the guys in particular, their parents, what we call, were on the job, which means they were cops. So they had access to guns. Another guy was able to get us guns. So the bottom line is you’ve got 13-year-old kids who… That have no fuse carrying guns. Here is where it all started. [8:11] My uncle, like my cousin’s dad, came to one of the baseball games, and we had no idea that he knew the other coaches. And all of a sudden, they realized these kids are carrying guns. They’re going to kill each other. So they sat us down, disarmed us. It’s a pretty funny thing that’s in the book. I remember my uncle saying, whoever has a weapon, you put it on the table right now. I take a sock out of my pocket. He’s, what’s wrong with you? He goes, I asked for weapons, not your dirty laundry. I go, there’s a 25 inside the sock. He was shocked. But what they did was this. They disarmed us. They said, you want to kill each other with fists? Go at it. But we have a better idea. Why don’t you sell fireworks? Why don’t you work for us? You’ll make money doing this. First year, we only had about a week before the 4th of July. We sold out a couple pallets that they had. Now, the second year, I said, can we get these same prices? They said absolutely We went nuts to sell this stuff We ended up with an order for $85,000, And that’s how the order was so big That John Gotti got brought into this He was their boss at the time That’s how we met him And again, people say John Gotti, John Gotti Well to us at the time John Gotti was the same as John Smith The name meant nothing to us. [9:26] So some of these guys, older guys that you started dealing with that sat you down were relatives. There were members of the Gambino family then of Gotti’s crew. That is correct. Yep. Yep. They actually had two guys out of the three guys that sat us down. And by the way, none of us, myself included, ever had even the slightest inkling that these guys were involved in organized crime. You actually had two guys that were Gambino guys and one guy who was also a coach who was with the Genovese. [9:54] That was the actual makeup of the three guys that sat us down. And this was that. What towns are you talking about out there in Long Island? Kind of guys that listen from New York. Sure. This is actually Syosset, believe it or not, which was a upper middle class area. Nice and calm, crime free. And again, most of everybody that was with us was from Syosset. [10:19] Interesting. So the fireworks thing, I’ve always wondered about that. I’ve noticed in Kansas City, the mob guys, several of them every year have these huge, big firework tents. And I started asking around. I found out that they might make $100,000 in about two or three weeks time off those fireworks. There must be immense profit in it. And it’s so that kind of profit and kind of a gray area crime, if you will, in some cities, they don’t allow fireworks to be sold or even to be shot off. Mob likes to get into that and make that money. So tell us a little bit more about how that worked. Who were your customers? You guys went out into the community and sold more. You were more like you weren’t retailers. You were more like found other people to retail. It sounds to me like tell me the nuts and bolts of how that worked. [11:05] That is exactly correct. Now, the first year when they gave us the two pallets with about five or six days, maybe a week before the 4th of July, we sold those strictly to local people we know. And by the way, as kids, we loved fireworks ourselves. We still do. I do. I can speak for myself. We love this stuff. Now, when I saw the prices, for example, that these guys can get us, and I’ll use a barometer, very common in New York, a mat of firecrackers, which is a pack of 80 packs inside, 16 firecrackers to a pack. You could buy that for $8 And it would just fly like hotcakes These guys were selling us the stuff At $3 a mat So all these prices Were anywhere from. [11:49] 70, sometimes even 80% cheaper than what we could sell them for. So the profit, like you said, was utterly enormous. Now we had a full year to work our second year because they said, yes, sell as much as you want, go ahead and get the pre-orders. We contacted everybody we knew. All of our guys had people in other places, Huntington, the town of Huntington, we did big business, other places out in Suffolk and even somewhere in the city. [12:13] And again, for young kids at that age to put together an order for $85,000. She knocked everybody. And that’s what really got their attention. And for that kind of money being fronted to us, that’s why they had to bring their boss in, which was John. The other thing that really shocked us too, I was worried about getting caught. Now the legal penalties for getting caught was nothing. Five or $10 fine, nothing on your record. It was nothing. However, the police could take all your firearms. If they took money like that from young kids, we’re finished. Our lives are over. and to be honest, the organization solved that for us. They sat us down with cops. The cops told us to our face, you will never have a problem. Don’t worry about it. And once I heard, that’s when I told our guys, go ahead and sell as much as you can, and that’s when we got the order for the two tractor trailers. I knew at that point in time, the risk is pretty much gone. Yes, there’s a risk of getting robbed, but we had two of our guys’ older brothers who were a really severe, a tough guy, one that’s referenced in the book a lot, Bubbles. And again, he’s a deceased, and we’ll talk about him more in terms of the Galante hit. So people that are going to rob us really would be like, why would I rob these guys? Look at who they’re with. So in my opinion, we had no risk, and that’s why we went nuts with this. [13:30] That’s the beauty of working with the mob. They usually had connections with law enforcement that could get you protected. Now, you brought Gotti into it. Tell us about meeting Gotti for the first time. [13:39] Was he all that, like they say? Was he just this real charismatic personality that you just wanted him to like you and wanted to do what he wanted you to do? What was that like? I’m glad you brought it up because I’m going to tell you that’s the funniest thing that ever happened to any of us in our lives. And I suspect it might have been one of the funniest things that ever happened to him. When we got this order for the two-tracked trailers, he wanted to meet us with some of his other people. One that turned out to be Angelo, quack, quack, Angelo Ruggiero. And we decided to meet at our friend’s house over in Syosset. It was during a school day, but we had no risk because his dad was a New York City cop. His dad wasn’t there. His mom would be out the whole day playing a card game she played called Mahjong. So we said, yeah, let’s do it at his house. Now, these guys show up. Again, we’re teens. We’re 13, 14, 15 in that range. One, a couple guys maybe a couple years older. And these guys were like in their low 30s. That’s all John Gotti was age-wise when we met him, I would say. [14:39] No older, I wouldn’t think, than 35. I could do the math, but right in that range. All nice cars, nice suits. They come in with all the samples. So we lay them all around my friend Jeff’s house I’m talking about in his stoves, his mother’s piano, the couches and everything And they’re going over stuff and they’re saying, look This stuff here comes $48 to a case Your price, I’m just making up numbers for argument’s sake Your price is $175 a case on this one You can easily sell this stuff for $600 or whatever the numbers were So we’re shocked Now to set the stage My friend’s mom was really A kind of a crazy lady she was very Loud and she was extremely Opinionated if not wild She would always kid my not kid She was serious to my friend Jeff saying You’re a no good bum this Boy’s gonna end up in jail she would berate Our friend into the ground I mean this kid was crazy believe me this kid was Driving us to school at 14 and 15 years Old didn’t have a worry in the world So Yeah. [15:40] This is where the humor came in. She came home unexpectedly. Apparently, one of the card players didn’t show up. They couldn’t do it. She walks into her house, and she sees fireworks all over. She sees us with guys who look like gangsters that are 35 years old, and she blows her stack. She screams, who are these hoodlums in my house? What are these devices these criminals have? What is this fool meaning her son done this time with nuts? And I’ll never forget John says to my uncle who was in there He says did you set this up as a gag? Very low so nothing we could hear except a few people And my uncle had a really weird look on his face He goes I wish I could get off that easy So we figure the deal is all over She’s going nuts I run up to her with the price lists And I say Mrs. Goldberg please I know we like to shoot a fire It’s not about that It’s about making money I show her the list And I reference before the matter firecrackers I point to it. I call these guys firework salesmen. That’s what I call John and Angelo. I go, these firework salesmen here can sell us this amount of firecrackers for $3. [16:49] We can sell it all day long for $8. There’s a fortune in this. So then instead of her blowing up, she goes, tell me more. So that was funny enough. So I go through more prices. And just to set the stage for your listeners, a lot of people in New York might know this term. People outside might not. I’m a Christian, but if you have a non-Christian, Jewish people call him Goy or Goyim. She’s looking at the lists, and she explodes in the loudest voice you’ve ever heard. If the Goyim will buy these devices, then sell them to the Goyim we were. We lost it. [17:24] She said that Angelo, my uncle, a bunch of the guys had to go outside. And I stepped outside with them, too, because they didn’t want to insult her and laugh in her face. I don’t know how John stayed in the house with her, but he did for a while. These guys were laughing so hard, tears were coming out of us. So the neighborhood girls that we knew saw these guys all dressed in suits. They thought we were crying, and they sincerely asked, are you guys okay what happened? It was because we were laughing so hard we started crying. So I said, let me get in here. The fireworks deal is more important. So she went over this stuff with us, telling us how we’re going to make money. Just insanity. The book really expands on this. And then afterwards, when John left the house, he also broke down in laughter. He didn’t want to do it in front of her. He couldn’t take it. Out of respect, he didn’t want to laugh in someone’s face like that. But he walked two doors down, and he freaking lost it. So I think it’s got to be one of the funniest things he’s ever had happen to him in his life. He said it was. And it just got crazier from there. [18:19] Now, was Angelo Ruggiero with him? He was his right-hand man. Was he there on this deal? Yeah, Angelo was there with him. Yep, he sure was. What was he like to deal with as a person? I’ve interviewed his son who has a show. What was he like? Was he funny? He seemed like he talked a lot and was a funny guy. I’m just curious. He did. And again, in the account that you guys are going to read about in the book, Tommy, who’s the main character in this book, who again, deceased and gave me all the interactions he had with him, explains what a nice guy he was. I know he had a violent side. I know he has a lot of hits under his belt, but he was apparently a ton of fun. [18:59] When I interacted with him, I thought he was freaking hilarious. And as you’ll see in the book, Angelo is really the one who fed all the inside information nonstop to our buddy Tommy, Tommy, who at that time was playing cards over at John’s Club in Ozone Park, the Bergen, very regularly at that point in time. And the book really traces Tommy about what happened, his interactions with Angelo, his interactions with everybody else. And when you get to the whole crux of the matter, Angelo is the one who told our good friend Tommy that, hey, the commission has authorized a hit on Galante. And the hit is to be done jointly with our family, meaning the Gambinos, and with the Bananos. And that John was going to be the leader of the Gambino faction. [19:48] Sonny Red and Delicato was going to be the leader of the Banano faction, and Joey Messino was not only the one taking the messages to and from Rusty, which is the Philip Mestelli in jail, but Joe Messino was going to supervise the entire operation. So that was the structure of it. Yeah, that’s what I’ve read about it. And also what you’re saying about Angelo Ruggiero is that’s one reason the Bureau was able to learn so much about Castellano because he would go to meetings at Castellano’s house, if I remember right, come back home and get on the phone or have some people come over. And he talked to him about, he said this and he said this and he said that and he said this. That gave him probable cause then to go into Castellano’s house. So he was known to be loose lips, and that’s why he got the moniker quack quack, I’ve heard. But I also heard it was because of the way he walked, so I’m not sure. No, that’s true. Both of what you’re saying is true. And just to touch on him one more time, very important. He loved my friend Tommy because Tommy got him out of more than a couple of jams. I’ll give an example. There was a guy in the Gambino family up in Connecticut. John always referred to him as the genius Tony Mungali And he put a firework sorter in with Angelo. [21:06] Now, this guy blew his stack because no fireworks came, and he had promised the entire neighborhood a gigantic fireworks show. He had his friends, his people of his family over there, neighbors and no fireworks. This guy blew his stack, and this story is detailed in the book. Tommy got a call from another Gambino guy the morning of July 5th, very early. He was still hungover from partying the night before. He said, oh, my God, what’s this about? It’s got to be something bad. Did somebody blow their hand off with fireworks? What’s going on? And the bad news was that this Tony had put a beef in saying, what’s wrong with you people? You didn’t do what you said. And he was blaming Angelo. Tony was all over Angelo. And the bottom line is Tony was right. It was Angelo’s fault. However, my friend Tommy never threw Angelo under the bus. My friend Tommy ate it. And he basically, it’s a real good recounting in the book. And there’s so many stories like this. There’s hundreds of them. But I’ll give you this one real quick. [22:03] Like, so Tommy basically told Tony Mengele, listen, how old are the kids that you promised this big fireworks show to? And Tony blew up. He’s like, what the F does it matter how old the kids are? But my friend Tommy was smart and he was going somewhere. He’s like, listen, these kids don’t know the difference between July 5th and July 4th. We’re going to come to your house tonight. We’re going to give it the most insane fireworks show anybody in your area has ever seen. We don’t want a dime. We’re so sorry this mistake happened They go up there I was with them at that point. [22:38] Nothing but fun. So welcoming. And again, my buddies, none of us would ever throw Angelo under the bus. And believe me, Tony and his uncle, Sandalo, he tried to pin it on Angelo. We said, no, it’s not his fault. It’s not his fault. Bottom line is those guys loved us. One of Tony’s workers ended up being a gigantic fireworks customer of ours. And to the best of my knowledge to this day, and I’m not involved in it in the slightest, To this day, all one of his guys does is sell fireworks in the Connecticut region. Makes a fortune. Interesting. And so that’s a wild story. But again, Angelo loved Tommy because so many times Tommy would say, look, Angelo didn’t do this. I did. What did Angelo do in return? He gave Tommy so many different pieces of information. And again, I won’t bog you down, but each one of these stories is so interesting. Angelo had some fireworks clubs that he made money on. [23:32] There’s no other way to put it. Angelo was not working much at all. And then one of these meetings, John brought everyone in and said, listen, from now on, these clubs that sell fireworks, particularly Oceanside, New York, Long Beach, Bayville, Massapequa, he goes, I’m giving them to you guys to run. And now, obviously, none of us want anything to do like that. We’re going to cut out his friends. We’re going to end up in a freaking meat grinder or end up in a cement truck. So we all told John we didn’t want it. John said, that’s it. It’s over. It’s yours. so then our next step was to make sure we figured out how much roughly those guys were making. [24:05] I give my friend tommy all the credit in the world he ended up giving angelo more money by a lot, for using the place than angelo ever made doing work and this time angelo doesn’t have to do any work angelo loved us all these guys loved us because we paid them more than they made and now they didn’t have to do a damn thing so our guys were very smart and calculating particularly Tommy, but some of the other ones. And that was a good Angelo story. Yeah, it is. And I’ve read that not only Gotti and in his neighborhood, but other mob guys around in New York and their neighborhoods, they would put on a huge fireworks shows for everybody in the neighborhood every year. Gotti particularly was noted for that. That is interesting, their love for fireworks and fireworks shows. Did they ever front you these things? Did they front you money or did Did they buy the fireworks? [24:56] You guys made this money each year, but I’m sure you’d spend it all. Then the following year, you’d have to come up with money. How did that work? The money worked. You wanted to be able to pay them back if they fronted anything. [25:08] Yes. You have a bunch of good questions here. I’m going to backtrack one second on what you said about guys in the life loving fireworks. That is a hundred percent fact. Love the fireworks and the stuff that people see at some of the celebrations over at the Bergen. Yeah, that was rooted from our guys providing it. Now, here is one of the reasons why John turned over these four locations to us. He had complaints from multiple people. Castellano, I believe Michael Franzese people. These guys went to the fireworks locations on the best days, like July 2nd and July 3rd, and they were closed. And John blew up at that. He’s making me look like a freaking idiot. I’m telling Castellano’s people, it could have been his nephews or little cousins or whatever, go to this place to load up with fireworks for free. These guys go to the place and it’s closed that’s one of the motivating factors why john, turned that business over to us we had it open all the time now in terms of fronting stuff absolutely the money was enormous those guys fronted it to us all the time big loads that’s just how it was young kids like that we can come up with anything near that kind of money. [26:14] And just another tidbit too the lady i told you about who would go wild when we were doing the deal. She offered to fund some money up too. And that’s detailed in the book as well. But yeah, as we got it to like year number three, I don’t remember us ever putting a penny up after year three. It was all fronted to us. Was it all cash too? When you went out to these clubs and these people with the neighborhoods and stuff, would they always just give you cash each year? [26:40] That is a great question, and the answer is yes for the people we retailed to, yes for the people that walked into the stores. However, we had wholesale customers that we would give credit to. Now, I’ll give you this story, which is also detailed in the book real quick. There was a street gang in Huntington. They were known as the Huntington Hitters, primarily Hispanics. They gave us an order, and one of our good friends got back from a younger kid that he helped out before that his older brother was intending to rob us when we dropped off the fireworks. [27:14] So we had what I thought was a brilliant plan made. Tommy was very instrumental in this, and I gave some feedback too. We told these guys, come meet us at this bar out on Jericho Turnpike in Huntington. We have some additional fireworks we want to show you guys and see if you want it, which was a lie. But we knew that they wouldn’t rob us then because we didn’t have anything honest. Let me tell you what we brought to that meeting. We brought Bubbles and two of his guys that were freaking deadly people. And they had freaking gym bags with them. And they said, don’t worry anything about security when we do this deal. And they showed him stuff inside the bags, heavy duty weaponry. So right away, these Huntington hitter group said, these are the wrong people to rob. So sure enough, right on cue, a day or two later, they called my buddy and said, you know what? We don’t want to do the fireworks business. We can’t. That I petitioned, and I got a few of my friends to agree, and Tommy definitely went with it too. You know what? These guys can make a fortune doing this. Let’s front them five or ten grand worth of this stuff and see what happens. And I’m like, it’s not going to cost us anything. Number one, I don’t think they’re going to rob us. If they do, what did we lose? $1,500 at the most? My friends said we were nuts, but we went with it. And I want to tell you, smartest move we ever made. [28:29] As every year we went by, we fronted them more and more. They were our first customer that we ever fronted a full tractor trailer to. Never had a problem getting one cent from them. It’s funny how that evolved. It’s just absolute madness. But again, I give Tommy a lot of the credit here and some of the other guys very sharp to come up with a business plan like this. [28:52] I tell you, this little crew you got in with early on, they were a bunch of hustlers. But you also had this deal with Gotti and horse racing and getting inside information on horse racing. There’s some pretty good stories there that are in the book. Tell the guys a little bit about that point. Then we’ll move on to the Galante hit. [29:11] Absolutely. Now, horse racing was interesting. We would go to a place called Roosevelt Raceway, which is over in Westbury, Long Island. Really not that far from where we lived over in Syosset. Now, again, I know the law was probably you had to be 18 to make a bet. They didn’t care. I was making bets there at 12 and 13 years old. I’ll tell you this one time that they did care, and I’ll get to that at the end of the question you asked, and you’ll see why. So we were clowns, but even as clowns, we could see it. If a horse, these were harness racing, by the way. If a harness race is coming down the stretch, you didn’t have to be a genius to see that one or two of these horses would hold back, but the other two jockeys would whip the crap out of their horses. So naturally, we felt cheated, even at young ages. Our guys were definitely certified. There’s no question about that. Our guys would throw things at the freaking jockeys. I’m talking about golf balls, rocks. Our guys were insane. And a lot of that stuff is detailed in the book, how crazy we were. But to get to your point, after I think it was the third or fourth year, John walked with Tommy. [30:17] And he said, you guys are bringing in so much money and doing so well. I want to give you a gift. And I remember Tommy, because myself and a little bit of Bart, but myself, I had to pull all this out of my friend Tommy. He knew he was going to pass away. And he wanted this story out in the public. Now, this guy, Tommy, never wanted his real name used, but he gave me detail after detail. Some of the stuff, like I’m explaining with the fireworks and the horse racing, I was there myself to see. But on the heavy stuff, he gave me detail after detail. same with a little bit to Bart. So this is how Tommy explained it to us. John gave him a sheet of paper and Tommy being a smartest said, oh, what is this, John? You want me to go play the freaking lottery with these numbers? What do these numbers mean? John, you smartest. Here’s what the numbers mean. The first number was the number of the race at Roosevelt Raceway. The next four numbers were the only four horses that could win. Usually these races had eight horses in them. Once in a while, seven, once in a while, nine, but eight was the norm. Those are the only four horses that can win. And for the audience, I want to explain to them how that’s possible. [31:24] Let’s say you have an eight horse harness race and you tell four of the jockeys, no matter what happens, you are not to come in the top. They’ll hold the horses back. And by the way, this is not just conjectural rumor. These guys got locked up for it later on down the line, jockeys and everybody what they were doing is it hold the four horses back the organization would have no idea what horse was going to win they just knew which four wouldn’t so what did they didn’t bet winner plays to show they would bet exactus triples and sometimes super factors which means all four and box those four around some yeah so in your example. [32:03] Basically, John gave our buddy Tom three races, and Tommy knew that this has got to be damn better than a tip. It has to be rock solid. So what happened was we all went there, and we knew nothing about it. We didn’t know that we should just bet a small amount of money. We had no knowledge about damaging a pool, so I’ll make it easy for the listeners. Tommy overbet these races like crazy. For example, if a three combination triple should pay $1,500, the first thing the FBI and the New York Racing Authority would ask is, why did this $1,500 triple pay only $400? And the reason is, and they knew it because the race was fixed. So everybody was betting those combinations. Now, the organization was smart enough to only bet small amounts of money, and they used the term not to damage the pool. That was a term they used all the time. We don’t want to damage the pool. [33:04] Again, throw us in the mix. We had absolutely no idea. We didn’t know any of this. So Tommy bet the crap out of these races, and he did damage the pool. And that brought the attention of the authorities. But worse than that, another long story in the book goes back to the Connecticut people, because I think the genius Tony Mengele was the one helping to fix the races. So they figured there was a leak on their side. And John Gotti actually thought he was going to get killed over this. And he told people, including Angelo, I might not be coming back from this meeting. I got sent for here. The horse pulls bad because John was really running the horses with Tony and some other guys. Tony grabbed him by chance outside of the Ravenite, Mr. Neal’s club, and they walked. [33:52] And Tony apparently was furious, like, yeah, let’s kill whoever damaged the pool, whoever did this. And then John apparently told him it was us. And then Tony says, oh, man, those fireworks guys, I love those guys. He goes, okay, nothing’s going to happen here. So apparently Tony went into the meeting, and he basically lied to the people there, Castellano and Neil Delacroach, and he says, listen, I found out the leak. The leak is on our side, and I’ll take care of it. And that’s how it worked But again, that ties back to the fireworks If that never happened, I don’t know what would have happened John had every intention of going in there and saying he’s screwed up He didn’t explain to us And he had no business giving us the numbers And he knows that, He did not have permission to give us anything at the racetrack He took it on himself to do it, And he got saved by that stroke of luck Of meeting Tony in front of the club before the meeting Had someone been outside, whoever Tommy Bellotti or anybody said Hey, get inside, the meeting’s going on Those two would not have had a chance to talk. I don’t know what would have happened, but I think it would have been very bad for Sean. Yeah, would have been. Yeah, that’s interesting. Now, explain to the guys about the pool. Everybody doesn’t know about the pool. [35:04] These exactors and trifectas, how that pool works. That is a great question because we had to have it explained to us. Let’s take any racetrack, and the first number you’re going to have is how many people bet on what’s focused on triples. Now, the definition of a triple is horses come in the order of one, two, three. So if you bet a 7-4-3 triple, the race must end 7-4-3 for you to hit that triple. Now, the next variation of that is if you like the 7-4-3, what most people will do is they will do what’s called boxing that triple, which means they have 7-4-3 and that’s a winner. [35:43] But so is 4-3-7. So is any combination. So is 2-7-4. [35:49] 3-7-4. Any of the combination of your three horses win. Now, they can tell what a triple should pay based on the amount that’s spent and what the odds are. Let’s say you have a horse that’s a mid shot, like an 8 or 10 to 1. You have a favorite in there and maybe a halfway of a little bit of a long shot. They know what that should pay in a certain range. Now, if you know that race was fixed, and by the way, it’s all pari-mutual, so the weighting is average. If you’ve got $10,000 in a triple pool and you have 10 winning tickets, each ticket’s going to get paid $1,000. And they would know that’s legitimate and that’s honest. And there should be about 10 people with those combinations. Now, if you have that same $10,000 worth of triple pool, and again, these are round numbers. It’s way higher, just for an example. and all of a sudden you’ve got 105 winning tickets when mathematically there should be 10 or 15 at the most the money drops that thousand dollar prize now might be 210 dollars and that’s what the feds and everyone new york racing authority looks for if you have a horse that’s eight to one first place let’s say ten to one second place and let’s say five to two third place that triple should pay something like, I’m guessing, $400, $500, $600 around that range. If that triple pays only $150, right away they know that somebody knew something. [37:16] Too many people bet on that combination. They know how many people probably will bet on any certain combination. And when that gets skewed, too many people bet on one combination, then they know something’s up. Interesting. That’s like these new sports prop bets in the apps on gambling, on the apps on sports. If all of a sudden there’s a whole lot of money goes out on some team on the spread and too much money goes down in one place, then they know there’s something going on. Somebody knows something and they start looking. [37:48] Exactly. They start looking and you make a great point about today’s sports betting. If you have a basketball player, and again, this is not conjecture. There’s already been indictments on this. Let’s say the guy is supposed to have 11 rebounds in a game. All of a sudden, when he has nine, he tells the coach, man, I hurt my ankle. I can’t play anymore. Now, if the balance was normal on his under and his over, no problem. What do we all know happens? The under money bet on this guy is radical. It’s a 95 to 5 ratio. They know right away it’s fixed. And that’s what I believe the guy in Toronto, the Toronto Raptors was doing. And so many other ones were too, but that’s everywhere. We were involved in that way, way back in the day as well, to some degree. We heard so much about it. Yeah, interesting. [38:34] Let’s get into Carmine Galante. The probably most famous, certainly the most famous image, even more famous than Albert Anastasia of Carmine Galante laying there. He was the Bonanno, longtime Bonanno capo and had risen up in the ranks. And he comes out of the penitentiary and Rusty Rustelli is supposed to be the next Bonanno boss. And Carmine decides that he’s going to act like he’s the boss. So let’s talk about how this whole thing started a little bit. That is a great observation. And that’s pretty much how the ball got rolling with those guys. Here’s how we got involved in this. [39:12] We had one of our good friends who was helping us with the fireworks and going to the clubs and having nothing but fun. And then the one night when Tommy was at the club, the cops came in. And I know a lot of people think, oh, Cosa Nostra doesn’t mix with the cops. People will think that they don’t know what they’re talking about. Look at the convictions with gas pipe cases and everybody else. John had guys on his payroll that ended up getting convicted and stuff. [39:39] The cops and Cosa Nostra do work together. despite what everyone else says. Look at us with the fireworks, for example. So anyway, at the card game, what I was told from Tommy is they kept getting messages after messages. And again, these messages at that time would come in over pay phones. There were no cell phones. So you’d have a guy sitting at the pay phone. And as I’m told, most of the messages would be coded numbers. Let’s say Angelo’s number was 167. The guy would just pick up the phone, tell number 167, which is Angelo. [40:11] Another set of code numbers and that might mean hey the cops are coming over now the cops came into the club they came into the bergen and apparently they told everybody listen nobody here is getting locked up we don’t want information we just need to give you some news and from what tommy says because he was there playing cards at the time they told him that our good friend michael had died in a car accident and they wanted to know should they go and wake his dad up and And his dad obviously was in the life made guy and do it that way. Or did John and Angelo perhaps want to go out to the house? They gave him the option to do it. And John and Angelo, of course, jumped at that. And they, whatever they did, they went at the house. I don’t know if they waited till they woke up in the morning, whatever it was and knocked on the door or whatever. But so that’s what happens now at the wake, by the way, just to make the story a little bit more clear, there. [41:09] This was probably our fourth year or so selling fireworks. And every year we sold fireworks, we met more and more people. So many of it is detailed in the book. I can’t even tell you the list of people we met. And you name it, Tony Ducks, Corralo, all these guys. So we’re meeting more and more people. Two in particular that we started hanging out with because they liked us because we were just crazy, drinking, women chasing maniacs, were Baldo and Chesery. And that’s Baldo Amato and Cheshire Bonventry. They were with the Bananos. And we were hanging out with them. They grabbed my friend Tommy at the wake and pulled him away. And everyone’s thinking, oh, they’re really Sicilian. We call them the Zips. They’re tough guys. They probably just don’t want to show their emotions because they love Michael in front of everybody. We didn’t know what was going on. They informed my friend Tommy that our friend, Michael, did not die in a car accident. It was a basic, supposed to be a warning that turned into a hit. [42:12] And Tommy’s, that’s nonsense. The cops told us the car was off the road. The car was a crumpled mess. That’s nonsense. But Baldo insisted and said, no, these guys shot him off the road. So nobody believed any of this. But we came up with the conclusion of, hey, we’re friends with the cops. The cops will take us to the impound yard. Let’s see for ourselves. House so those guys went over there and what tommy says they found bullet holes in like less than a minute they found a couple bullet holes so they knew right away that baldo was telling the truth now all this was going on other people would tell us don’t trust baldo don’t trust chesery the sicilians are the most ruthless cunning backstabbers you’re ever going to meet and i didn’t feel that way and neither did tommy or the other guys that were involved with us our other friends aunt and The whole gang, Gonzo, we didn’t feel that way at all. We thought they really had our best interest. So. [43:08] That stayed quiet, but two of our friends swore on that day, no matter who did this to our friend, Michael, no matter who they are, we don’t care what their rank or anything. [43:19] We’re going to make them pay for what they did. They’re going to have to answer for what they did to our friend. And we know the rules. You can’t touch a maid guy or an associate without getting permission. But we kept everything quiet for another reason. Michael’s dad I referred to as a maid guy. Now, you talk about crazy. This guy was nuts. This guy had no fuse. He’s detailed all over the book. For example, when John O’Neill would tell him to go out and just talk to a guy, don’t hurt him. This guy owes us a couple thousand. Just talk to him. The guy would end up with two broken arms. This guy had no fuse whatsoever. If he ever thought for a minute that somebody had killed his son, the worry was, and I think the worry is correct, he would have gone out and just killed better than adult targets all over the place. Whether they knew anything about it Which 99% of them knew nothing about this He would have just started killing people He would have started a war So that was the reason why the bosses, Did not want him And to his death he never knew that this happened They kept it from him for that reason There was no stopping this guy would have gone on a rampage So that was a big factor in that, So Then you talked before about the card games And Angelo. [44:30] More of these messages came in And my buddy Tommy noticed it And he said, Angelo, what’s going on? And so don’t worry after the card game, I’ll walk you down and we’ll talk to you. Apparently after the card games, Tommy and Angelo would walk down 101st Avenue and have these long talks. And Angelo said to Tommy, the commission has authorized a hit on Carmine Galante. We got the hit. John is our lead. [44:54] We have to do it jointly with the Bananas. Sonny Red is there, and Joe Massino is going to look at the whole thing and supervise the whole thing. So bells went off on my friend Tommy’s head. All of a sudden, he got everybody together. Not me, of course. I was not there when this transpired. I was not there when they organized the hit. But he got the other guys together, and he said, look, this is the guy who killed our friend. We have no risk now because the commissioner wants this guy dead. So these guys came out with what Tommy detailed to me. And by the way, it wasn’t just Tommy who detailed this to us. Bubbles detailed it to us. And there’s one big distinction I need to mention here. Tommy wanted all of this out. He did not want his real name used. [45:40] However, Bubbles wanted his real name used. He used to hang out with general views people. And he told me, he goes, use my name. I want people to know that I did this. And after he passed and that’s why inside the book we do reveal his real name and where he lived and the interesting thing for me was Bubbles and Tommy had no idea that each one of them was talking to me and to a small degree Bart about this so the details that they both gave were exactly the same the most ingenious hit I’ve ever heard of in my life they had police help from the 8-3 precinct over in Bushwick. Apparently, there was some cop over there that hated, I think it was a family dispute of some kind. The guy who was being, I think his grandmother or aunt or somebody was being shaken down by the bananas. So we had that asset. We now had Baldo and Chesery, who were Galante’s top bodyguards. So our guys went out on surveillance for months. And the funny thing about the surveillance was, who else was doing surveillance at the same time? [46:47] John Gotti was, and so was his people. So there was times like when Tommy and the guys would be close to a certain place. And by the way, he was killed at Joe and Mary’s. But that is not the only place that these guys did heavy surveillance on. And it’s not the only place that Galanti hung out at. So the book names a bunch of other places that the surveillance was done. So these guys would be there, and they’d look down the block, and possibly John and Angela were there doing the same surveillance. So they had to leave. Otherwise, John and Angela, what the hell are you guys doing over here? So that was funny to me on that regard But our guys in my opinion Put together the most ingenious hit Down to every single detail. [47:26] Basically took out the police help to help with the zips. The alibi is another crazy part of this. At that time, we would like to do a lot of fishing. We went off to a place called Sentinel Riches in Long Island. And one time we were night fishing over there and we saw guys jump off the boat, get onto smaller boats and come back an hour or two later with bundles. Now you don’t have to be Albert Einstein to realize what they were doing. They were running junk and they were Colombians. Yeah. So I discussed it a little bit with the boat’s captain and he said, just don’t say a word. Don’t go near him. Keep you guys away. We almost had a problem because again, our guys were drunk and our guys were carrying and our guys will, we came close to having a problem. But Tommy put this together. He had the boat captain go out one day and again, he didn’t tell all the people that were with, he didn’t tell his cousin’s crew for Shaw, who was with us that day, our guys jumped off the boat onto a smaller boat, took that boat to the Oak Beach Inn, took stolen cars in on that day, the July 12th, 1979, and they did the hit. [48:35] So Tommy’s uncle was furious with him. He thought he was lying to him. He goes, you’re lying. You were not there. I put you on that boat, which he did. Our friends were drunk and they drove him there on the road. Morning and i picked you up when that boat doc said don’t lie to me you’re on the boat all day and that’s when tommy and again this is detailed in the book like crazy told everybody can you say alibi and what do you mean he goes yeah you just said we were on the boat all day that’s not true, jumped the boat went to the oak beach and took the stolen cars did the work and came back so that was that shocked everybody in the room apparently when tommy was forced to detail, everything that happened on the hit. He even detailed for them all the cars that were involved. He detailed how the marked police cars actually held parking spaces for our guys in front of the place. One was, my understanding, about a half a block north. The other one was about a half a block south of the location over there, which was 205 Knickerbocker. They held the parking spaces. Our guys rolled up. [49:37] And if there was something going on, like, for example, FBI surveillance or unmarked cops in the place, those cop cars were not giving up the space. Our guys would honk and flash at them. But if they did not give up the spaces, the signal to our guys was the place is dirty, leave. So we had a lot of built-in signals like that. And then when they gave up the parking spots, both of the cops moved from one north heading south, one south heading north. What did that do? That let them both take one more scan of the block. Is the block dirty? And if the block was dirty, they were going to blow the sirens and everything was off. But the details, again, that are in the book about this hit are freaking shocking how meticulous it was. [50:22] Interesting. I have one question that Galante’s guy, Cousin Moy, they called him, Angelo Prezzanzano, I probably butchered that, but he was off sick that day. Was he part of it or was he just off sick that day? I’m going to tell you, to be honest, I have no knowledge of that. I know that Boldo and Chessery were the primary bodyguards that day. Yeah, they were there that day. I actually have no knowledge, but the other couple of details that are just beyond fascinating, how our guys operated on this. For example, when the car pulled up with one driver and three shooters, one of the shooters, again, he wanted to be named, so we’re naming him. It was Bubbles. [51:01] And the other two guys, Bubbles was a very big-built guy. He would easily be spotted. Plus, he knew a lot of people in the city. He stayed in the car. The two guys that were normal-built, they went inside. And I want the listeners to understand how skilled these guys were at this hit. [51:19] They had provided Baldo and Chesery with dark jackets that day. Now, I’ve read some stuff that people said, oh, they had big, heavy leather jackets on. That’s a lie. They were lightweight summer jackets. And people said, why do that? The answer is because at that time, people were wearing white and pastels and light clothing. It was burning hot that day in the summer. And if you want to spot somebody in a restaurant, you want them to stick out like a sore thumb. So that was the motivation for those black jackets. Now, check this one out. And again, the book goes through this in so many more details. Our guys walked in prearranged with Baltimore Orioles baseball hats. Because again, keep in mind, Chesaree and Boulder did not have a great command of the English language. They didn’t really 100% know American customs. And we showed them Mets and Yankee hats that everybody has. So now we show them a distinctive bright orange baseball hat with a bird on it that nobody could mistake. Here was the signal. Our guys walked up to them face to face with these hats on. [52:22] Now, that was slick. That was slicker shit, man. It was smart because if the place was hot, if Boldo and Chesery realized there was too many maid guys in there or surveillance guys or FBI in there, they were to immediately tell our guys it’s too crowded today. Only get takeout. Only get takeout. The place is too crowded. That was a signal to our guys to walk out and to tell the people the place is hot. leave. These guys had multiple hot signals here that if something was wrong, they would do it. Now, if they didn’t give those signals, our guys were to turn their hats around. So they walked in with the hats like a normal baseball player. They walked out with the hats like a catch you would wear with his hat on backwards. That was to give Boulder and Chesery the signal, Boulder and Chesery the signal this thing was going down. Now, here’s the most fascinating thing about the story is Tommy recanted for us. That day, July 12th, 79, was supposed to be a dry run. [53:28] And they told everybody, just do it like it’s real. Now, we were all hoping that Bould on Chesaree would do it like it was real, and they did it. They walked out of the place, and they walked north. I believe in their minds, they said, this is a dry run. Nothing’s going to happen. Then they heard the shots, and that’s what happened. And I want to elaborate on this because, again, there’s so much built in here. One of the witnesses said that, and I’ll tell you who the witness was. It was one of the guys who killed his daughter, Torano. His daughter had said that, oh, I saw Baldo crouched over with a gun. Gary, you’re a former detective. You’ve got a scene with four people shot, three dead. And you have a witness saying that a guy was in there with a gun out. You tell me how the guy is not arrested at the very least and tried. And I’m going to give everyone the answer here of why that didn’t happen. And I think it’s pretty clear. [54:25] I’m convinced that the FBI had static surveillance on the place, just like they did to Mr. Neal’s club that we always call the, basically the FBI screen test. Yeah. That’s number one. And, or they had a guy up the street. So I believe what happened here was they looked at what this witness said, and then either their own cameras or a human agent that they had on the streets said, wait a second, we cannot charge these guys. I saw a bold on Chesaree, whatever the number would be, 200 feet up the street before the shots rang out. They’re innocent. They didn’t do the shooting. Otherwise, of course, you got a witness saying, I saw a guy behind a table in a gun in a quadruple shooting, triple homicide, and that guy’s not going to get arrested. So obviously there was something there. [55:16] I was wondering why. And I’m going to take another step for people, too. And again, terrible. Cosa knows the story ever told. But to take this one step further, the cop cars were there. There were two marked cars close in proximity when this went down. I think the FBI might have said, wait a second here. What just happened? One guy that we hate, Galante, is dead. Some other guy, a cap on a maid guy are gone. Look at our cameras. How could we do anything here? There’s marked cops here. I think the feds had to realize the cops played a role in this. [55:50] Let’s just kill it and move on. I think that’s possible. Now, the cop cars were also referenced by Tommy. He told us the meeting that they had. It was a life or death meeting, by the way. When John Gotti and other people went to that meeting, Tommy’s uncle and people like that, there was a good chance none of them were going to come out alive. The book details that Castellano, who everyone knows, wanted to kill John Gotti, had a cast of killers in that building. Roy DeMail’s people were in there. There were people in there that you couldn’t even believe. Nino Gadge’s people in there. Hardcore butchers. They knew how to dispose of and chop up bodies. So in that meeting, apparently what Tommy made clear, and again, we took notes, we went over this for hours, days, literally years. [56:36] Sonny Red and Delicato made the statement in that meeting because, again, Sonny Red and Delicato put in the beef, hey, you guys did this hit without us. John Gotti’s saying, fuck you. Excuse my language. Effu. You guys did the hit without us. Nobody knew who did this hit, and I’ll get to that later. What happened here was that Sonny Red and Delicato and his people made an immediate beef, and we’ll talk about that later, saying, hey, The commission said this is to be a joint hit Between the Bananos and the Gambinos And I can definitely confirm From what they told me, Banano people and Gambino people Were on this hit together and doing surveillance So when Galante got killed Sonny Red and his Banano people Were furious Because they thought John Gotti went off And did a hit against the commission’s wishes At the same time, John Gotti was furious At Sonny Red and his people Thinking they did the work Without them being notified But the thing that Tommy always stressed is, again, that meeting was a death trap. Castellano always hated Gotti. Castellano wanted Gotti out. And this was the chance to do it for breaking the commission rule. So Castellano had hardcore murderers there that day. Roy DeMeo and his crew. [57:49] Incredible. You know, Gadgi, a cast of murderers. And John Gotti being street smart. And again, this is fully detailed in the book. It’s just too much to talk about here. John Gotti had made some very heavy precautions himself. Going into that meeting. But what the catch for me was, Sonny Red and Delicato said something like, whoever did this hit was either the most incompetent hitman ever, or possibly they were zips from Montreal that couldn’t give a crap if they were shot at or in a police shootout or whatever. They just didn’t care. And then Tommy said, what if I tell you that those cops were in on the hit? And that silenced the room. And that’s when Tommy had to come clean and talk about everything about it. And it shocked the people that were in that run that this hit was done like that. But that’s, that’s really how this thing was done. Interesting. Guys, you got to get this book. I’m telling you, Made on Long Island. And there’s a whole lot more details, these behind the scenes details about the Galante hit with some real people involved. It’s a lot different story than what we’ve ever heard. I know that. And even people went to jail behind this. But it was mainly on the say-so of informants who, as we know, will pretty much say anything to get out of there, whatever it is they’re trying to buy their way out of. [59:07] Matt, I’ve got one last question here. We don’t want to give away too much of this book, but what about, didn’t the FBI kind of make bank on the celebration afterwards? [59:19] What would you say about that? Gary, you’re bringing me the most important thing in this book, and this is what I want the listener to understand. Bruno and Delicato did heavy time for this, and he did not do this crime. He’s innocent. And I’m going to throw a few things. You referenced one in the video, and I’m shocked that none of these experts and bloggers ever looked at any of this. But I’m going to tell you exactly what told every member of Cosa Nostra and every cop and every fed worth his salt. Bruno didn’t do this. The FBI claims that the video you referenced was made at that club roughly 50 minutes after the hit. Now, this is the way that a mob hit goes down. The planning is meticulous. The car is prearranged. Who’s going to chop it up and destroy it? The weapons are prearranged. Who’s going to take those and destroy them? The clothing is prearranged. Who’s going to get the clothing and destroy that? A shower is critical These guys were using, as Tommy explained to us This orange cleaning gel That was like a pumice structure And everybody who did a hit would wash themselves For a very long time Especially on places where gunpowder residue Could be like a face, hands And scrape off their skin with this pumice orange gel Type of paste soap. [1:00:42] I want to tell you what the feds want people to believe happens, and you tell me how preposterous this is. They want you to believe that Sonny Red and Delicato, who’s a top hitman, did this hit along with his son and his brother JB and Lucky Phil, and then took the getaway car, didn’t drive it anywhere except to Queens, the opposite direction of Manhattan, by the way, heading east. And you wanted people to believe that Sonny Red and Delicato was going to take a car that was used in a quadruple shooting, triple homicide, and just dump it in broad daylight in Queens. People, this is not what happens. It is a prearranged chop shop where that car is going to go. That’s number one. Number two, look at the timetable. Nobody would have any time To get these things done Dispose of weapons Dispose of clothing Get over to Neal’s Club in Manhattan In that time frame Again that’s why the FBI knew. [1:01:47] Sonny and Bruno And all the Indelicados Had nothing to do with this hit It’s not possible Mob hits don’t work like this No mob hit in the world Ever takes place With the guys who did a hit like this To go somewhere out in the open and get congratulated, it’s not reality, people. It’s not how it works. It’s the opposite. These people are buried in safe houses until their boss tells them, look, everything’s fine right now. You can quiet it down. You guys can come out. Nobody’s going to go out in the open, especially not to Neil Della Croce’s club that we called the FBI screen test. So right away, honest FBI people, honest cops, and everybody in Cosa Nostra knew right away that Bruno, JB, Sonny, Phil Lucky had absolutely nothing to do with the galant they hit. It doesn’t work that way. Now, you specifically brought up that video. This, to me, is a shock. [1:02:42] People say, oh, they’re celebrating. And again, that doesn’t happen. But let’s play along and say that, yeah, they were celebrating. Tell me a celebration that anybody listening to your program ever went to, where you’re going to drive through hellish traffic from now Queens into Manhattan. I know the distance is not that far mileage-wise, but the time sure as hell is. I’ve made the drive many times. You’re going to go to the celebration. You’re going to stay outside, not even go inside the building, and you’re going to leave a minute and a half later. That’s a celebration? No. That’s an infuriating beef. And I want people to watch this video. We have it up on our YouTube channel. I’m going to make sure Gary has it up on his. And you can watch this video as we break it down. [1:03:24] Sonny Red is in the face of his consigliere, Stefano Canone. And at one point in the video, you’ll see Canone. [1:03:32] Take his hand and point in back of him, point it to Mr. Neal’s place, basically saying, look, I’ll register the beef. I’m with you. God, he must have done this. We’re going to register the beef. And another critical thing about this video is what Sonny Red does. Now, we actually had a body language expert look at this stuff. He focuses mostly on card games, shoplifters, stuff like that. But he’s a body language expert. He knew nothing about the mob, knew nothing about who these guys were. And we said, what do you make of this video? He goes, it’s obviously heated. There’s definitely some major points of contention. People are angry. That’s obvious. And the most important point you could see about the anger is Sonny Red is face to face with Stefano Canone. He turns around and then something else hits him in his head because he’s so angry. He can’t control himself. He goes right back to his own consigliere and he reaches for his glasses. And that’s also a sign of anger, reaching for something on your face, be it a pencil, be it in glasses. [1:04:27] So Sonny Redd is furious that this hit was done without his team doing it. And anyone looking at the video should know that. And again, that’s critical. Now, Joe Messina was critical in this too. He was a hands-on guy. He shouldn’t have been, but he was. You could give him whatever title you want, acting boss, street boss, acting street boss. But he was the one, by his own admission, giving Rusty in jail the information about the hit on Galante. What did Joe Messina do years later In the Three Capitals hit He was there He shouldn’t have been there He’s an acting boss at the time And he actually took part in that hit And he admits to this Now when he was convicted of crimes. [1:05:07] Seven murders to be particular. He made a deal right away and he ran to them. What else did he have to give to the FBI? He gave him a lot of stuff and people need to follow this. He gave up John Gotti for a murder that no one was ever charged with, a guy named Vito Borelli. And Massino said him and Gotti were the ones who pulled off this murder. I believe it was 1975. And that John Gotti was the trigger man. So Joe Massino knew that if you make a deal with the government. You must tell them everything. You cannot leave out one crime. He even went back to a murder he did in 1969 that the government apparently had no idea about. Some guy that he killed back then. I don’t remember the guy’s name. Zumo or somebody. [1:05:48] So the gas pipe case example comes in here. If you leave one thing out of the government or you change one detail, they’ll void your deal. Now, Joe Messino knew that. So in his mind, I must tell the government every single thing and not leave anything out. So he details these hits that they didn’t know about. Vito Borelli with John Gotti being the trigger man. I’ll ask your listeners one question. What details did Joe Massino give defense about the Galante hit? The answer is none because he had none. He went to his grave not having any idea who freaking did this work. Now we talked about the hit. Not only was Galante killed, which was approved, but you had a Bonanno Capo and a banana soldier killed in that hit, which are major violations of the rules. You can’t touch a guy without getting it approved first. So on a hit like this, the conversations were furious. So if Joe Massino did his job, which he did, he grabbed these guys and said, hey, why did you guys kill these guys? What happened? What’s going on? What do I have to report up to Rusty? And Sonny Redd came back as detailed in the book. [1:06:55] Basically telling Joe Massino, we don’t have any freaking idea. We thought Gotti did it. So that’s a really good point for people to know. Had Joe Massino, the guy in charge of this, known one detail about it, he would have done it. Would he have figured Sonny Red? Of course he would have. Any of these guys. He would have fingered Bruno like he set up his own acting street boss, Bassiano. He put him away wearing a wire. But he didn’t because he didn’t know. And the last thing I’ll leave your listeners with, which is what lawyers that we know call exculpatory proof that Bruno and Delicato was innocent, is this. In 1985, you had two cases going on simultaneously in the same courthouse in Brooklyn. Pizza Connection case, which I think a lot of people know about, and the commission case. Bruno was charged with this crime in the commission case. However, in the Pizza Connection case, I believe that the FBI and the prosecutor, I think the guy’s name was Richard Martin, were not about to lie or purge themselves. [1:07:55] On their indictment, they wrote the murder of Galante was conducted by three still unknown males. They did not say the murder was done by Bruno and Delicato and two unknown males. They said it was done by three unknown males, not just in the indictment, but also in their testimony. Now, any good lawyer would have taken that testimony because, again, these FBI guys were on the Banano Squad, the same family that Bruno was in. So they knew everything about anybody in the Bananos. They don’t keep secrets from each other. Brought them into that courtroom and said, what was your testimony down the hallway? And they would have had to say, it’s three unknown males. That’s exculpatory evidence and it works. Now, my question was, what the hell kind of lawyer did Bruno have? Yeah. [1:08:42] Yeah, that’s crazy. And the answer is the lawyer he had was a mob lawyer who basically told them what he can do and what he couldn’t do. And I know so many cases where guys wanted to put on a defense and they couldn’t. And one good reason is because if they were ever to take the stand, they would ask him questions they couldn’t answer. So go away for a year on contempt. But this is all clear proof that Bruno did not do this. Nobody does a hit and goes and celebrates. You don’t even have the time to do it. What about all the time needed to do all the stuff we discussed? Disposing of the clothing Disposing of the gun And I can promise you one last point on this If anybody in any family Ever committed a quadruple shooting With three homicides And they left a getaway car Quote unquote out in the open Quote unquote with a palm print inside of it They’d be dead There’s not even a question I can give you a list of guys Who were killed for what they call botching hits That are not even close to this Leaving a getaway car out in the middle of a street In broad daylight It’s all a lie. And the honest FBI agent said, we’re not going to go on alone with this lie. We’re going to tell what we know. And it’s three unknown males did the shooting. [1:09:48] Interesting. All right. Matt, I really appreciate you coming on. And guys, here it is. It’s 400 and some pages of details that you know about and a lot that you don’t know about, but a real inside nuts and bolts look at being a mob associate and being around mobsters and around mob associates and doing some of those minor things that they all do and make a lot of money at. [1:10:11] And you get a real detailed insight on that from a guy that did it. And you’re also getting the story indirectly from a guy who was involved with the Galante hit. So I really appreciate you coming on the show, Matt. [1:10:24] It was my pleasure. And again, if anybody ever wants to contact us and ask us questions, no problem at all. The best way to get us is by email. I’ll put your email in the show notes. It is made in Long Island at, go ahead. I’m sorry, go ahead. That’s okay. It would be made on Long Island 32 at yahoo.com. And we have a YouTube channel up and Gary, you’re a great guy. And I know from what Hollywood people have told me, this is going to be the biggest Cosa Knows story mystery ever revealed. And I truly hope that this brings an avalanche of people to your site. And it should with all the other great work, because then they need to look at your other great work that you have up there. And I just hope that’s exactly what happens. Thank you, Matt. And I’ll have a link to your YouTube channel also in the show notes and the audio and the video version. I have both out there. So thanks a lot, Matt. My pleasure. Thank you so much. Yeah.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins sits down with Charles Bufalino, a relative of notorious Mafia boss Russell Bufalino. What begins as a family history discussion quickly expands into one of the most enduring mysteries in organized crime—the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. Charles recounts how, in 2011, he uncovered information that unexpectedly tied his own family to the Hoffa case. That discovery set him on a path of research that ultimately led to his upcoming book, Revelations of a Mafia Family, the Teamsters, and the Final Resting Place of Jimmy Hoffa, scheduled for release April 28. While he stops short of revealing his conclusions, he makes clear that his findings point toward new insights into Hoffa’s fate. The conversation provides a detailed look at the Bufalino family’s Sicilian roots and their migration to Pennsylvania’s coal regions. Charles explains how these immigrant communities, bound by kinship and necessity, became intertwined with labor struggles, violence, and early organized crime. The discussion highlights the 1902 anthracite coal strike and the broader environment that allowed criminal networks to gain influence within unions and local industries. Gary and Charles examine Russell Bufalino’s rise from these beginnings into a respected and highly effective Mafia figure. Known more for his discretion and organizational skill than overt violence, Bufalino developed a reputation as a trusted “utility man” across multiple crime families, including connections in Detroit and Buffalo. His ability to navigate alliances and maintain loyalty made him a quiet but powerful force within the national Mafia structure. The episode also explores the transition from coal and labor rackets into the trucking industry and the Teamsters Union, a shift that significantly expanded organized crime’s reach and profitability. Charles offers personal reflections on his family, including his relationship with Bill Bufalino, and describes the dual nature of their lives—family men on one side, deeply connected to organized crime on the other. As the discussion turns back to Jimmy Hoffa, Gary and Charles analyze longstanding theories and newer leads regarding his disappearance. Charles suggests that his forthcoming book will provide a more definitive perspective on Hoffa’s final resting place, adding another layer to a mystery that has persisted for decades. This episode delivers both historical depth and personal insight, offering listeners a closer look at how family loyalty, organized crime, and American labor history intersect—along with a compelling preview of potential new answers in the Hoffa case. Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee” Subscribe to the website for weekly notifications about updates and other Mob information. To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent ‘Brothers against Brothers’ or ‘Gangland Wire,’ the documentaries click here.  To purchase one of my books, click here. Transcript Charles Bufalino [00:00:00] hey, are you wire tappers out there? Good to be back here in studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins. You know I’m a retired Kansas City, Missouri Police Intelligence unit. Officer and I I worked a mob for a long time and now I’m still studying the mob. And today we have a a descendant of one of the more famous mob names in the United States Russell Buffalino This is Charles Buffalino Welcome Charles. Thank you. And I’m actually not a descendant of Russell, but I’m a an extended family member of his right. Basically I never wanted to write a book about our family until and I still didn’t after, after it occurred in 2011 that I stumbled across three pieces of information that all aligned on the theme of the Hoffa disappearance and its relationship to. Several extended members of my family and there are three things about, there were three little revelations that I experienced, and I don’t really want to go into detail about them now because they’re [00:01:00] all in the book, and frankly, that’s proprietary information for right now until April 28th when the book comes out. But when I got to the third one it really hit me like a shot that. I knew something about the Hoffa disappearance and my family’s relationship to it that nobody was ever really meant to know. And it bothered me just a little bit and I tried to dismiss it and I went away from it for a couple of days and I thought, this is still bothering me. So I’m gonna find out a little bit more about the Hoffa disappearance so I can dismiss this suspicion, right? So I’m searching on the web and I’m pretty sure the source that I found, it doesn’t matter. This is pretty common knowledge. The source that I found though was from the UCLA magazine, 1984 or sometime in that timeframe. And it detailed what the FBI was doing in the [00:02:00] aftermath of Hoffa’s disappearance in 1975. And what they did, the presumption that they made was that Hoffa had been cremated, and that’s a story that you may hear. That’s a story you have heard from. I have Ken Lama. Yeah, he got that from Russ himself. So they took that theory to Bagnas Go’s funeral home in Detroit, which whose clientele had been some of the members on the FBI’s watch list over the years. And Bagnas said, look, we don’t have a crematory. They then went to a place called Central Sanitation. Is that, does that ring any bells for you? Central sanitation was Zy Vitale’s place Peter Vitali. Yeah. Who was a member of the Detroit Partnership, right? He had two such enterprises. This was the second one of them. And when the FBI went there, they interviewed the lawyer for the facility and asked him to show them around. He showed them [00:03:00] around to the trash compactors, the, the cardboard compactors and said, yeah, occasionally, a homeless person or a bum crimes in there to, catch a nap and ends up being more or less as asphyxiated than crushed per se. But, that’s a rare occurrence. And and then they wanted to see the incinerator. And they showed him the incinerator and the FBI said, okay, we want another look at that. We wanna make a date and come back. They set a date to come back and central sanitation burned down. Now the, there’s nothing. Unusual about that, except when I was reading the account I’m running across the name Nick Elli, who was the lawyer for the facility who’s giving the FBI the tour and his name was Ringing Bells. Ringing Bells. And I’m thinking Nick, miss Nikki, is that my cousin? That’s my first cousin Nick from Burbank, [00:04:00] California. Oh really? And how did he get involved in this and. That led me to want to know, okay, who all in the family was in Detroit in 1975, apart from Bill Bino and his three of his close relatives, his siblings who went out there with him that nobody knows their names and Russell and what all was going on out there. And moreover, I needed to understand better again for myself. How these people really related to one another. What was the nature of Bill Binos relationship with Russell? The real nature. It’s commonly understood that they’re cousins. What does that mean? I have cousins that I’ve never met and I think it’s easy for people to presume that was the case. That was not the case, bill. And Russell were. In Bill’s mind and owing to a special relationship they had, they were closer than [00:05:00] brothers due to the fact that Bill’s daughter Bill’s rather Russell’s wife was Bill’s daughter’s godmother. That essentially that made Russell Bills. They had a godfather relationship between him and I. Describe what that means in the book. So Yeah. Which is pretty strong in, in this kind of a family that Godfather relationship’s pretty strong. I may talk about the movie, we’re talking about in Italian family, the Godfather’s pretty strong relationship. Correct. It’s a kind of a, yeah, it’s I get to talk about it in the book because in Montero Sicily, where Bill’s father is from. If I suggest to you that, I want you to be my child’s godfather, it really doesn’t imply anything, any responsibility you have with respect to the child. That means I want us to be as, I want us to be in cahoots business together, brothers. But I’m sure it meant more to Bill than it did to Russell. But, it was a token relationship [00:06:00] probably from Russell’s direction, but they certainly were close and they certainly were involved in teamster business together from very early on. So should I spend a minute and tell you what the family structure was like? Yeah. Explain that Family structure from Sicily on, forward in, in kind of a shortened version, but yeah. Explain that. I’ll do it now. I went ahead and I. Put together some visual aids if you would like to. Yeah. Is this that kind of a show? Can we do multi? Yeah, we can do, yeah, we can do that. Oh, not too many because about half the people that listen to it are audio. I’ll be frustrated. Let’s not do that. Alright. What we’ll do instead is we’ll talk about so I’m sitting in Pitton, Pennsylvania right now in a house that my grandfather and his brother built. My grandfather was Nikola, my. Grand uncle was Salvato and Salvatore’s role in the greater family was he assembled everybody. He came here in 1901 in just [00:07:00] before the great big 1902 anthracite coal strike that sent about 30,000 people out of the coal fields. They just, they gave up after a five month strike and went back to the old country or then went west to the Batum fields. So there was a labor shortage. And at the same time, in Sicily, in Montero, especially where sulfur mining was the key industry they were running into a problem where the United States was breaking into the sulfur market in a big way. It was the fracking process. And eventually the United States and Sicily settled the whole sulfur market thing by treaty. All of that is to say sulfur mines were becoming in trouble, and the last of them would close in the 1970s, the Sicilian mines. So they had this problem where they’re gonna have surface of population, they started to [00:08:00] immigrate and they started to immigrate to the Coalfields, Pennsylvania, where, you know there was this lack of late people to work in the anthracite mines. And Salvatore’s role was to bring them over for probably banks of labor brokers. And once they were here to outfit them with. Food and lodging and all of their material requirements. So he was working for, if he was not himself the Petron system. So that’s my grandfather and his brother. And eventually they took three other Buffalo men into the country. One of them was Russell’s father and the other that was Angelo and the other. Brother of Angelo was kalo. They say Charles, but I call him Kalo in the book to distinguish him from other Charles’s. Kajaro was a black hander. [00:09:00] He was a mafioso. Angelo’s father didn’t live for two years. He was killed in a mine explosion that injured my grand uncle. And Russell grew up under Klo, which is right. Russell was an infant when he arrived. And for several years he bounced in and out of the country back to Sicily and eventually Reland in the country in 1914, living for a time in Buffalo and then back in the Pitton area. So in the Pitton area on my block. So I’m in the kitchen now at the house. On my block was this property, which was a soda factory in a general store. Next door also in the family was a grocer. Up the street was a hotel, and next to that was a bar. And they all belonged to Kalo and they were all run by my members of my family. My grandfather in [00:10:00] particular ran the bar and the hotel while Salvato and his family, they all had very large families. Were servicing the general store and the. So that was their role. And all of the children, there were 20 some children between Nicolo, Kalo, JRO, and a third brother. And they all considered Russell their first cousin, despite the fact that there might not have been a familial relationship between Kalo and the other brothers. They all represented themselves as brothers, four men for about 25 years until the family split apart as Sicilian families only can in very grudging way. But Russell never forgot his relationship to everybody in the family. And at one time or another, every one of those 20 children could reach out to him, rub a lamp, and Russell [00:11:00] would appear and. Do something for them and it was mutual. My father was a professional photographer, probably never charged Russell for a thing. And it was that way with other members of the family that had their crafts of their own. Yeah. So does that help to. Yeah that when the Binos came over, they were like in, in this patron system. And so Russell just kind. Fell right into that. And your one uncle was already in a black hander from the old school Mafioso. So they brought that with him. And then you had this one guy, Russell who probably had the oomph, the wherewithal to then rise on, go into that system, rise onto the top. He was really, was born and bred into that system. Yeah, you could say that. He by, people get confused. They assume based on some facts that he was [00:12:00] raised in Buffalo and came up under Macino. Yeah. And I don’t think that’s the case. There’s plenty of evidence within the family and traditions within the family that say, Russell was a very well known quantity in the city of Pitton at the store next door where everybody sat outside drinking soda on a hot summer day, and all the children would fight to entertain the old men. Russell was there along with Kalo Jro, who was a very day-to-day presence in the family, but. There was a strong relationship between Pitton, Pennsylvania and Buffalo, New York, based on, at the time the Lehigh Valley Railroad. That was the northern terminus of that railroad. So it was an easy trip and there were a lot of labor jobs up there as well with the hydroelectric plant. So people from Buffalo and people from Pitton, a lot of famili familial relationships between them. And at the same time, in 1920, they could see prohibition coming. And Russell was a [00:13:00] mechanic. Where NASCAR comes from? NASCAR is mechanics souping up cars, so they get away from Yeah. The police from the the revenues. Yeah. So I’m almost certain that’s Russell’s first reason for being in Buffalo, working for a guy named John Montana. And John Montana would later testify before the rackets committee. In 1997. So Russell worked for him. It was probably, and again, Mandino’s specialty was importing Canadian whiskey. Yeah, and then there was typical bootlegging they were doing, down here as well as up there. So Russell was probably taking the good stuff down from New York to Pitton area on a regular basis. Pitton is like between Scranton and Wilkes Bar. It’s like a six hour car drive. To Buffalo, and that was his first job. And then he’s back, and so for all of his [00:14:00] life, he was bi-coastal, right? We think of him as in his later years being in New York City, and then two or three days out of the week being in his Kingston home, which is again just down the street here. But he was that way all of his life. He did that between Buffalo and Pittston, and there was a lot of interchange between them by 1922 he’s on the record. He had a car accident on the, on a bridge locally that sent him up for a while. So by 1922, you could more or less consider him again a Pitton property. And he ends up marrying in 1928 into the family through the Chandras. But he was always, a skinny guy. He was, he didn’t really, fit the mold of a classic mobster. He didn’t. He grew up in it. He didn’t show signs of being a real gun toter himself. That makes sense. Yeah, it does. He [00:15:00] probably had a lot of organizational abilities in a certain amount of charisma that would get people to do what he wanted. His specialty was diamonds and jewelry, and so that, that was a specialty. And his other specialty was cars. And again, that continued to be important right through the end of prohibition 1933 December. And. At that key juncture. So kalo, his grant, his uncle was in a tree partite relationship with two other men that formed the real coal country power. They were all coal contractors and gangsters in their own right? Okay. And bootleggers. So they were all in this cahoots relationship, and Russell was in their sphere. Through klo a lot of real heavy mob style violence locally in the 1920s [00:16:00] that was related both to union problems in the coal mines, but also the bootlegging, right? So people were stealing each other’s shipments that needed to be dealt with. Coal miners were going out on Wildcat Strike. There were assassinations related to that big doings in the twenties that probably ended by the middle thirties. The heart of the depression things were so bad for the coal miners, they just assumed worked for substandard wages as go out on strike ’cause they really couldn’t afford to do it. Yeah. But things calmed down pretty much by then, and by that time things were heating up for the three men that they went on background and gave control over to John Chandra. Now, John Chandra is a co contractor in his own right and he’s running the show for Karo and Vbi and Latour, and it’s [00:17:00] under Chandra that Russell really is in a mentorship relationship with Chandra and Chandra, it seems to really have gentled him somewhat. Because the first three men were, they were just killers. They would just, they would take you out rather than deal with you. And Chandra inherited a new generation in the thirties. And his career lasted until 1949. And Russell by then was just the natural to take over. Now from Infancy Forward, he had been in the company of the most dangerous man in the coal fields. People who knew New York gangsters for certain, and was in their company as well. So he knew how to get along and he knew how to be quiet, and he became trusted. That’s probably the thing he was most relied on for. Yeah. Interesting. He was quiet and trusted. That’s, [00:18:00] that is really interesting. People say, and I don’t know how true this is, but they say that, when people have a vacancy and they’re organizational structure, they plug Russell in. And he was not the kind of guy who was gonna try and muscle in your territory. He was just going to keep the balls in the air for you. Yeah. Until the next guy came back and then just hand ’em right back over. He wasn’t a threat. He did seem to be like the utility man of the northeast mobs. He sure was. And when app leaking happened. So I was born in 1957. I was born on the anniversary of his father’s death in the coal mine. Huh? Right away. That’s an Oman. Bad things are coming. Russell and two months later, apple Aiken. Yeah. He was real busy in the late 1950s, early 1960s. He was facing deportation for a very long time, and that’s where. [00:19:00] Bill got a little bit more involved with him because Bill was, an attorney in the family and he was writing letters and doing motions and whatever to keep Russell, you knows, court proceedings to, going on for a long time. Bill eventually wrote a letter to the authorities in Italy that basically said, Hey, don’t take it personally that Russell volunteered to be in the army in 1940. He wasn’t really, trying to get back at you. He was just trying to support his new native country. And and of course there were other people who will tell you there was a suitcase with a million dollars in it that accompanied that letter. Yeah. But Hitler refused to receive Russell. But Russell was apparently ready to get on the plane. Before that refusal came down. Yeah. There’s a whole slew of those cases. I just did a research on that. All the different guys that they tried to deport during those years and the, and their lawyers and [00:20:00] the how they just kept staving it off and staving it off until many times the government just gave up. ’cause it was just like, okay, you have to wonder if they were really serious about it. I think they were just messing with them, but, yeah. But, bills, bill’s teamster career. Where to begin? So Bill and my father both were born in 1918 and a third relative, Jimmy, they were all born in 1918 and they all graduated high school together. Bill was at the University of Scranton for a while before it was called that he was majoring in Divinity and his brother Charles, who was already married into. The greater family suggested you need to be, you need to be a lawyer. We’re going to, we’re gonna get you into law school. And so Bill claimed he had, through his undergraduate, just monitored law classes and approached the dean to say, I’d like to be, I’d like to graduate with a pre-law degree. And [00:21:00] the dean said, sure, why? Sure, why not? And so then Bill went off to, farley Dickinson Law School. Left there just in time to join World War ii, and now he’s assigned in the Detroit area, so it was World War II that brought him to Ellis Air Force Base. Ah, I think it’s just south of Detroit. I’m not sure exactly where it is, but it’s not far. And in that time, I know you know the name Angela Melley. He is a member of the Detroit Partnership. He’s considered the conser of that organization. He has a brother, and the brother has a son who wants to get into business. The brother, I forget his name, comes to Pitton, meets with the Buffalo family. He is from, I think, San Cataldo. Which is a neighboring community in Sicily and they say, look we wanna be in business together. So Bill [00:22:00] now is given the name of Mel’s brother and suggested to contact him, which he does. He says just it was randomly, looking for a deserter in Detroit and it occurred to me to call the brother. So he calls the brother, ends up getting invited to the house. Invited to dinner the next day, proposes to the daughter within three days, and now they’re in the family way. And Bill and Vincent Melly become corners of Belvin Distributing Corporation, I think was the name of it. They were world of to jukebox people. This is where he meets hfa. They’re in the world to jukebox business. Jimmy James, the head of the local 8 95 of the Teamsters, which was called the Jukebox Local ’cause it was a coin and operated local. Starts picketing them. And now Bill and Hoffa are in a lawyerly [00:23:00] way because Jimmy James asked Toya Hoffa into the picture. And Bill presses Hoffa makes him the business agent for the local. Very shortly thereafter, deposes Jimmy James makes Bill the president, and later he is formally elected to the role and now he’s a union president a local president for the next 20 years. And a close associate of Hoffa during the 1960s. So seeing as how I came around so late, I was there to see this. Teamster action because Bill was frequently in Pittston, especially after Hoffa went to Lewisburg Prison, which is 90 minutes down the road. Bill’s sister Mary is my next door neighbor. She’s retired and he comes to visit whenever he goes to C Hoffa, which is every week according to him. To get instructions to bring back to [00:24:00] Fitz. He’s in Pittston. Moreover, he launches a law office in the city of Pittston downstairs on the other side of the house. His father’s old general store because he needs to, he’s not a trial lawyer in Detroit and he wants to join the Detroit bar. And he has to fulfill a. The requirements of a by motion thing to be admitted. Other than that, he’s gotta take the test. He doesn’t want to do that. So he just comes, does a couple probates, this and that for three years and now you’re in. So he does that. So he’s by the time I’m 10, I’m pretty well acquainted with Bill. And Bill is, my father. They’re the close friends. They’re always talking in Mary’s kitchen. I’m sitting there listening, Bill’s running a rator, and they’re laughing about how they sent Bobby Kennedy a parachute because he he said, if I can’t put Hoffa in prison, I’ll jump off the Capitol dome [00:25:00] that I’m a parachute. And he writes about that. RFK writes about that. So it, it was very interesting having him around. Yeah. And he had a brother that would often come with him. To bodyguard him to bodyguard Hoffa, he wore Hoffa’s money belt. His brother Angelo, they called him Yabo, very big guy. And and sometimes he would bring his son Billy boy. William Bino ii, who later had some fame of his own in the nineties. Defending white boy Rick in Detroit. Oh yeah, that’s right. I forgot about that. Yeah. So I knew them all and I knew them all in a family way and I was not quite aware that Bill and Hoffa had a falling out. ’cause then I guess that wasn’t fitting information for a 10-year-old. Yeah. But yeah that’s how I know all of them. And so my real connect to the family is through Bill, his sister Mary. His brother [00:26:00] Yabo. When when Bill retired in 1982 for health reasons, his brother Angelo Yabo returned to Pitton and was my neighbor for the next 10, 12 years. And he was my last connection to the 1920s. And he would tell me things that I had no real frame of reference to understand, about. Running whiskey and whatnot. He didn’t share a lot of stories about that, but every now and then something would escape. And he was just the kind of guy you could tell he’d done a lot of things and I didn’t find out until his funeral. At his funeral an individual came up to me who had traveled to the area from Detroit, probably with William ii. He just for some reason he squared up with me, put his hand out and said Yabo was like a father to me, and then just told me everything. I never wanted to know about what Yabo had done in Detroit. Working for Angelo Melly, [00:27:00] running a bar for him. Being a bartender, occasionally helping people find their checkbook, that kind of thing. So he was obviously a very colorful guy. He was obviously very well respected by the Detroit people. At the same time he wasn’t gonna kill anybody. That was not what he did. But the FBI followed him to Angelo Millie’s farm one day. They had an informant in his car, basically. And it became clear, I finally learned why he and his sister Mary, and other members of his family would go to Florida every year and spend about a month in Florida. They were at Angela Mel’s. Timeshare. Basically he availed Yabo, and this is, somebody at the very top level of the organization down there. So he was not respected. I have to ask about this as Hoffa and Russell Bino and Bill. As the Teamsters Hoffa starts having problems [00:28:00] with Kennedy and there’s this back and forth there. Then was, there, was there, there’s a lot of talk about that that Kennedy and, he, that he got so personal with Hoffa, which he did, there’s some talk about, maybe they had something to do with the murder of JFK Mo. Mainly it falls to, marcelo down in Detroit, I mean down in new Orleans, but yeah. But still, Bino was right in there among that crew. Was there ever much talk about that even after it happened? Yes. There’s a lot of talk about it. When Bill Buf, so I’m trying to Dan Mul Day. Dan Mul Day is a researcher who had worked for many years on the Hoffa disappearance. And he spent a lot of time talking to Bill Bino about that. And when he quizzed Bill about, who, who did this right? Bill answered have the CIA investigate the FBI and then have the [00:29:00] FBI investigate the CIA and then you’ll have the answer. That’s exactly what he said. Interesting. And what he was saying was, yeah, the Bay of Pigs thing, the whole. Pal Kill Castro was something that was known by a lot of people that went missing in 1975, or no. Ended up murdered Johnny Roseli. Yeah. Gian and Gian Kana, I think was 1975 too. Hoffa was really the third person to go missing in 1975 that had information to contribute about that Uhhuh. Interesting. Or at least was believed to. And when you read Bill Alia’s book, he says Russell also knew something about that. So Russell was becoming edgy. That Bill would say something, or rather, no, Hoffa would say something too much about that because Hoffa was, pretty much a loose cannon by that time In terms of speaking.[00:30:00] I interviewed that guy with that Billy Leya book. Did you know him? He was Billy, yeah. Do you know him very well? I did not know Billy, my brother knew Billy when they were both young. Okay. My brother Nick, see Nick’s 12 years older than me and I think so is Billy. Yeah. Alright. I did not, I’ve been in his company once or twice, but he wouldn’t know me. Okay. I was just in curious about that. He seemed like he was a guy that was like, he was always around the binos and during those ta those years, he was like always somewhere around in and around that. It’s a real interesting, contrast between Pittsburgh and Detroit, the Coalfields a more rural area, and then the big city and the auto factories and the teamsters and how these immigrant Sicilians moved into that and moved in on up that, the immigrant way, you get here man, and you start getting better jobs. You get better jobs, you take care of your relatives and you bring them in. And so it’s just, it’s really an interesting complex there. I [00:31:00] forget who I was talking to. I said some of the history’s not good, right? It’s not, it doesn’t, yeah. It’s not real neat. And I said, feel bad sometimes for some of the people. And and the party I was talking to said they would swam here if they could have. When I was right, I was expressing concern about the Padron system and how it was sometimes exploitive. I think Salvatore was pretty fair as Padron went. He wasn’t a gouger, but there was a lot of gouging in that system, and it was effectively dead by 1930. Curiously, by 1930, that’s when the family split apart. That’s when Kelo said, okay. This is not a revenue stream for me anymore. Time to break with the other binos and move on. But the thing about the the Sicilians and the coal mines, they started as really, they started as what’s the word, scabs, right? Yeah. So there was a lot of union trouble in 1902. You got Welsh minors from. [00:32:00] Ireland everywhere. It was all here. It was like Brooklyn and now we’re coming in to fill this void of 30,000 workers. There’s trouble, a lot of trouble. And the people who are the replacement miners, these Sicilians, they already owe a tithe to their pad. Drones. Yeah. They’ve gotta go down they’re in this heated place. Now once you get in and eventually it’s 10 or 12 or 15 more years before unions really started to sign contracts with these particular mines in the northern coal field that were run by 1913, by at least three and probably four black handers ran the contracts, right? So the mafia is to all intents and purpose the mine owner. And they’ve got all of these dependent [00:33:00] people who are, their their agents through the Padron system who are members of the union, and eventually they run for elective positions within the union. And now what you end up with is the company is the union. And it happened at least once, that an insurgent branch of the United Mine workers went in opposition against its own district leadership. The district leadership’s bodyguard was one of those individuals who was at the same time a union organizer. A partner with one of the black candidates. So it didn’t work out well. There was a murder involved. Things went badly. It happened ultimately. It’s interesting that, and now you it started out, as union busters, as scabs, right? And [00:34:00] they move in and take over the unions, and then the teamsters come along as the coal kinda goes down and the truck driving is going up, up and up. And then they just. Move smoothly right into the teamsters Union. Yeah. Where there’s political power and money. That was the seat of political power and a lot of money and the political power the power of the purse, the power of the pension fund and the los, and of course clear out to Las Vegas. And Russell Vino was right in the middle of all that with the guys from Detroit and Chicago. It was just, it just is a natural progress of of activity. Exactly. And where was it? Just a couple of years ago. Was it in Florida? The Longshoreman’s Union threatened to go out. Yeah, I remember something like that. What did DeSantis do? He DeSantis mo mobilized the National Guard. Yeah. So that never happened here, but if you think about it so Bill Buffalino at one time the FBI was advised that. Bill was being groomed [00:35:00] to take over the Teamsters. Not by force. Something, God forbid if Hoffa should end up in prison. Yeah. So that was happening. But I think it was thwarted because Hoffa had a little there was a a situation in his ranks where he, somebody was trying to. Openly deposed him. And it didn’t work out. And he probably did a reorg of his own and that’s when he decided to run fifth for 1965 for the, as his vice president. So that, so he was trying to head off all, he probably could see it coming. Yeah. And it was in those years that he began to lose a little bit of trust in Bill. And that was the source of their breakup eventually because he got hot with Bill in prison. But think about it. So Bill then, as the president of the Teamsters, imagine the power they had at that time to effectively shut down the country. Oh [00:36:00] man. Yeah, it was huge power. It was huge. And what’s interesting is Hoffa, then he starts bringing what we affectionately refer to here in Kansas City as Pecker Woods. He brings in Roy Williams down in Kansas City. He brings in Jackie Presser up in cleveland and Fitz Fitz Simmons. These are all peckerwoods, these are not Italians. Now Italian, some of ’em are behind the string, behind the scenes, pulling some strings. Of course. Yeah, but they’ve got all those guys out front. It’s just it is fascinating to me how these guys have worked. Yeah. Very insidious. And the thing about unionism somebody will tell you that, union membership is down, or union participation is way down from the 1960s. Yeah. There was a union for everything. Yeah. In the fifties and sixties, bill to, and probably it was to boost his resume. I don’t know. The car washers in the Detroit area. There were 200 car washes and they employed up to [00:37:00] 40 to 50 people each. Just doing this job. It was, to organize them. The the tactic was I’m not gonna go after the WR and file and get them to vote on anything. I’m going straight to the owner. He is gonna pay me to their membership fees and he’s gonna pay their dues. That’s how it’s gonna be. And that’s what they did. There were certain, car washers that were not assaulted in this way, and others who were, and they were pretty upset about it. And they took it to the law and there was a grand jury hearing that Bill was invited to attend. But according to Dan Mul day, the judge in the hearing was in their pocket. And yeah, nothing ever came of it. That was mentioned also before Keith f so a bill was on the hot seat for that and the Zer, the er the Zer company to sell their machines entered into an agreement whereby their service people [00:38:00] would be unionized. And therefore, if you went to a bar, now you’re a union agent for local 9 8 9 85. Of the teamsters. You go into a bar and you look at the jukebox and it’s not a er. Yeah. Now we’ve got a big problem. Now there’s a picket outside. I guarantee you the picket was Yaba, Bino Bell’s brother. Gotta be big guy with a mortar board walking back and forth. Unfair, this is a scab shop and now what’s gonna happen? No union truck driver is gonna deliver beer to that bar. Crazy. Yeah. And so that’s right. So that’s how they worked that one out. So that was the extent of Bill’s organizing skills. Interesting. So let’s skip forward here a little bit and we don’t want to give it all away, but we’re talking about the final resting place of Jimmy Hoffa. So how do you go into that? Just, and we want guys to, you gotta get this book guys. It’s the revelations of a mafia family, the temperatures, [00:39:00] and the final resting place of Jimmy Hoffa. The key words here is the final resting place of Jimmy Hoffa. As you might know, Charles, that’s the hook here and Dan Maldia and you probably have a problem, I gotta say. ’cause he’s pretty sure he knows the final resting place. I know he, he, that’s what he, but there’s another guy who also thinks he knows the final resting place as well as me, but he doesn’t know as far as I go. So his theory expands on the central sanitation. Whereby HAA is brought to central sanitation and cremated incinerated, to me that means ashes. And what do you do with ashes post cremation? You can throw ’em to the wind or you can do something extremely appropriate and almost poetic with them. And then move them to a town that is your native [00:40:00] home. That’s what I’m saying. Now, that’s where you come in. Okay. But now, in order to, in order for that to be true I’m willing for that not to be true. In order for that to be true, central sanitation has to be in the mix. And a fellow by the name of, oh my gosh, I’ll never forget his name. Bernstein. Scott Bernstein is a Detroit reporter. I know Scott. Alright, so last year they had this symposium in which he and Novi Toko and a former prosecutor Yeah. All submitted. Did you see that? I didnt see it, but I remember when it happened. I didn’t even know that was happening and I was wrapping up the book at that time, submitting the second to last draft when I became aware of their theory. And their theory solves a problem that I had, which is, skeletal remains. Yeah. And I’m not gonna, I’m not going to break [00:41:00] their I’m not gonna give away their findings, but. The problem with an incinerator is it’s not a crematory and it falls 800 degrees short of being able to render, and even, bones have to be crushed afterwards. Anyway. Yeah, there’s still bones left some their theory pretty much takes care of that, that the bone thing. On top of that, someone else wrote a book Mr. Tubman wrote a book in 2024 that said his parents were, driving in a Detroit suburb on the day Jimmy Hoffa went missing and saw someone being wrestled into a central sanitation truck. And the father noted that truck was not supposed to be there on, on that day. And of course, the property was one of the properties that were suspected of being the place where Hoffman went missing. Again, and that’s not definitive. If there were ashes involved, I think that I have a [00:42:00] first person memoir of the person that did something with the ashes. All right guys. And that’s gonna be in Revelations of a Mafia Family, the Teamsters in the final resting place of Jimmy Hoffa, correct Charles? That’s what it is. And it’s gonna be released on what is it? April? 28th. 28th. 28th. All right. Charles Buffalino I really appreciate you coming on and talking about your book. And guys, you gotta get this book. I’m telling you, it’s I’ve got a advanced copy of it and it’s pretty interesting. It’s readable and it is. Got a lot of great history into it, as you can tell. If you ever wanted to know the immigrant story of Sicilians, this is it, that the, there were huge miners and because they were minors in Sicily, so we had mining activities. I didn’t know about the whole strike breaking thing. That’s interesting. I knew they came down, like here in Missouri, southwest part of Missouri, we have coal mines and a huge group of Sicilians came down here. [00:43:00] And because I was wondering why. Joy IPA outta Chicago was going dove hunting down in Pittsburgh, Kansas. I went down there just to, to look around in this little town, front, neck. All the stores are, have Italian names and so I, there’s a little museum down there. So I stopped in. I said, what’s the deal? And she said, oh. She said, tons of people came over from Southern Italy and Sicily. To work in the coal mines around here, and it’s a big coal mining area. I said, oh, that’s it. That’s it. That is it. That was a safe territory for these Chicago mobsters and Kansas City mobsters to go hunting down there. Okay, so the coal mining is the mining much to know is a big part of the history of the mafia in a way. For sure. And there’s a place in so I thought Pitton had a lot of at, and it does, has a lot of Sicilian, maybe 24% as of the last census. Yeah. Was recently invited. Last year I went to [00:44:00] Clarksburg, Virginia. 40% Italian to this day. Ah, yeah. And they were all minors. And you go there and there’s no there’s no southern speech pattern. It’s all. Ah they’re Pittsburgh. And I said, why? What’s that all about? Oh, he said, no. We are a, we’re a suburb of Pittsburgh. We’re two hours away. Yeah. But the stuff we were producing went right to the mills. Yeah. And so that was the language that we spoke. Oh, we darned. And there were so many of them that they spoke their own language. They didn’t try to blend in with the right Scott, people that had been there from the country and from the hills down in there for a while. I’ll be darned huh. That’s interesting. That is that. And Clarksburg, I’ll tell you that place in the 1950s and sixties, or I’m sorry, in the seventies when the dress factories fell apart, they were burning pittston down. So Piston’s, a lot of old missing buildings. Yeah. But Clarksburg is just like visiting old Pittston. Huh, interesting. [00:45:00] Pitton, Pennsylvania the the seat of power for Russell Bino back in the day, Northwest. I always, you always hear about Northwest Pennsylvania and up into New York was his territory. And again, he was such an interesting guy because like you said, he was like utility man. He was going around to different families or, they, you don’t, they don’t ever talk about this big seat of power that he had in his underboss and his. His capos and that right there in that one geographic area. So it’s really interesting. Different anthracite coal was such a product. So there’s batum is coals everywhere else, but there’s only five counties in the United States that has 80% of anthracite coal. And anthracite coal was the fuel of choice for the industrial revolution. So there was a lot of money here. And so people really can’t understand, just how much wealth there was here. And how a place this small could be somebody’s seat of power, as you say. Yeah. Huh. Interesting. All [00:46:00] right, charles Buffalino I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Okay. All right, we’re done here. I’ll redo that When I stumbled over your name again and got a couple other things to redo, but otherwise it’s it gotta be an easy edit. That’s the guy I like when the guy really knows his stuff and he goes right on through it makes my job easier and I will wait and put this out just about the time. I gotta make a note right now. Anytime from the 15th forward is fine. I’m sure, we didn’t, I didn’t reveal anything so sensitive that. Anybody can steal. I’ll be maybe mu Monday the 20th. I got a feeling here either. That’s perfect. 13th? 13th or the 20th? Probably the 20th. I got it written down on the 20th. Okay. That’s awesome. All right, Gary, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you. All right. All right. You made it very easy. Oh good. Oh, and have you have you been in touch with Scott? You gotta go on Scott Show. I did mention to him, Scott, I’m gonna send you a book when it’s time. I, I didn’t wanna reveal everything again. Yeah. I’m just being real careful [00:47:00] for all these months. But yeah, I have, oh yeah, I’m in. But yeah, get on his show. He has, I think he has bigger fo I know he has a bigger follow than me. He kinda really gets into the, what’s going on today, which I never do. And he does, I don’t know, I, here in Kansas City, they get bad. I, and I get word back from ’em that they’re bad at me if I mention their names or there’s any mafia today, so I just seem to not mess with that anymore. Yeah, i’m the same way, I’m not even a fan of this stuff. This is not my thing. Yeah. If it’s the whole, like if Hoffa is here in Pitton I really feel, and my family’s involved in it. It’s like a moral obligation. I’ve got a interesting, yeah, I can see why. That’s the only reason I, that’s the only reason I even bother to research. Yeah. I just started doing some research on a true crime that’s not mafia and it’s kinda it’s like a breath of fresh air. I think I’m getting a little bit burned out in the mafia thing. I like the [00:48:00] stories. I like the capers and stuff that people do. I really love that. And so that’s there are some. Interesting people in this. Yeah. And I’ve known a bunch of them myself. My story’s not interesting, but I, yeah. When I was in college, I worked at a pizza shop. The guy was a bookie. Yeah. And every Friday night we’d be with Butchy, scotchy, Ragy Fingers, and the Greenie, and we’d go to the Skyliner Diner after the track, and it would just be, I’ve been at more dice games. Yeah. They used to rope my head for luck. I was 17. They’re so colorful too. And another thing I’ve learned is, hey. These mob guys, they have so many connections throughout the community Yeah. That most people, they don’t have. When I was a policeman, I didn’t have any idea how many connections I, in hindsight, I realized that how naive we all were, how many connections they really had out in the community, and how those worked and how they I don’t know. So many people found it colorful or they liked buying something that fell off a truck and then. And they like to [00:49:00] gamble and they’re just throughout the entire community and we didn’t know it ’cause I lived in this narrow little police world. It’s the adulation that people just adore this lifestyle. And I don’t know, I think maybe if people had less of a sense they were getting bent over by the government all the time. Yeah. Yeah. There’d be less of that. But everybody’s a secret agent in a way, yes. And I’m, everybody wants to be James Bond. And I’m naive enough to write a book about the Mafia and, but everybody I know, they all know better than me. And I tell some of my classmates, yeah, I wrote a book and they’re like, because they know there’s a whole network up. Yep. All Charles, it was great to meet you. Thank you so much. Great meeting with you. Take care. Bye bye. Bye-bye.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, I sit down with Salt Lake City author Flats to discuss his book, Ice Pick Willie: The Life and Times of Israel Alderman. We take a deep dive into the shadowy world of Israel “Icepick Willie” Alderman—a largely forgotten but deeply embedded figure in early 20th-century organized crime. Willie’s criminal career traces back to Prohibition-era New York, where he began as a jewelry thief before evolving into something far more lethal. His nickname came from his preferred weapon: an ordinary household ice pick. In the 1920s, it was common, inconspicuous, and devastatingly effective. Flats explains how Willie’s method allowed him to carry out murders quietly and efficiently, often avoiding the attention that accompanied more public gangland shootings. We follow Willie’s movements from New York to Minneapolis and eventually into the orbit of Chicago’s violent underworld. Along the way, he intersected with major figures of organized crime, including Meyer Lansky, Charles Luciano, and Bugs Moran. Flats outlines the shifting alliances and rivalries that defined the era, placing Willie within the broader context of gang wars that culminated in events like the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The conversation also examines Willie’s transition from violent enforcer to gambling operative as organized crime evolved and shifted westward. As Las Vegas rose with legalized gambling, figures like Willie adapted—moving from street-level brutality to more structured rackets under established mob leadership. Despite brushing against major historical events and powerful crime bosses, Icepick Willie faded into relative obscurity. Flats and I explore why certain gangsters become legends while others—equally dangerous and influential—slip into the margins of history. We also touch on Willie’s odd cultural afterlife, including regional pop-culture references that keep his name alive in unexpected ways. This episode provides both a character study of a cold and calculated killer and a broader examination of how organized crime adapted from Prohibition chaos to structured syndicates. It’s a detailed look at a man who operated in the shadows—lethal, efficient, and nearly forgotten. Flats’ book, Ice Pick Willie: The Life and Times of Israel Alderman, is available now on Amazon. Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee” Subscribe to the website for weekly notifications about updates and other Mob information. To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent ‘Brothers against Brothers’ or ‘Gangland Wire,’ the documentaries click here.  To purchase one of my books, click here. Transcript [0:00] Hey, welcome all you wiretappers. Good to be back here in the studio of Gangland [0:03] Wire. This is Gary Jenkins. As most of you, I’m a retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective turned podcaster and documentary filmmaker. I got a couple of documentary films you can rent on Amazon if you choose. I’ll have links in the show notes. Or just go to Amazon and search my name and you’ll find my stuff. But anyhow, today I have a friend of mine from Salt Lake City called Flats. And he’s just Flats, all right? And he’s written a book about a man named Icepick Willie. Now, Icepick Willie has got a great, cool nickname. I’m surprised that he didn’t last through history a little better because people had an easy-to-remembering cool nickname. His real name is Israel Alderman. Now, Flats has been researching him. He got a hold of me because I did a show on David Berman, who ended up in Las Vegas. He was a Jewish gambler from Minneapolis. And ice pick ends up out there connected to him somehow. And I didn’t really stumble. I stumbled a little bit across that, but I couldn’t remember what it was. But anyhow, welcome flats. [1:09] Glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me. All right. Go ahead. I’m sorry. I’m always open for any chance to talk about Ice Pick Willie, one of my favorite people. And if you guys out there know anything about Ice Pick Willie, get a hold of me and I’ll connect you up with Flats. And I’ll have his Gmail in the show notes. But either that or get a hold of me pretty easy. Any rumors or stories, lies, anything about him. [1:38] But in the meantime, in a couple of weeks, actually, by the time this podcast is out, that book’s going to be up on Amazon. But you can always go back. You can always pull those down and add more information in and then put them back up if you want. So that’s a good way to go. Nicknames are interesting. I once talked about doing a show on nicknames and how people got them, and I just never got around to it. And many times you can see how people get their nicknames. Al Capone, Scarface Al. He’s got the big scar on his face, right? Here’s one. One of Icepick’s Willie’s contemporaries, a guy named Albert, was it Tannenbaum? Yeah, Tannenbaum. And he was called Tick Tock. And I looked that up because, like I said, he was a contemporary of Icepick Willie’s. And he got the name Tick Tock because somebody said you move all the time. You’re always like a watch. You’re Tick Tocking all the time. And, of course, there’s Anthony Accardo, who they called Joe Batters. And his guys gave him that. They used to call him Joe. And that was because he beat up somebody with a baseball bat so bad that Al Capone said, you’re a real Joe batters. But he also, many times the press will give people these nicknames. And they gave Anthony Accardo the nickname of the big tuna because he was big. And they had a picture of him with a huge big tuna he had caught. There’s Joe Bananas Bonnano. That speaks for itself, Joe Bananas. And I think the press gave him that. First question, Flats, you know how Icepick Willie got his nickname? The nickname came… [3:06] From when he was in Minneapolis, he apparently picked it up. And this is something which he admitted to later on in his life. He claimed to have taken about 11, 12 victims out by using an ice pick in the ear. [3:27] And ice picks were actually really common back in the 20s everywhere. People had them. Everyone had them in their homes. and they were a real popular tool among Murder Incorporated members. It’s a handy thing, small, quiet kind of a tool. [3:49] Normally, a knife-pick killing was something that took maybe three or four people, not counting the victim. They’d crowd around him and grab his arms, whatever, and then somebody’d do him, they’d haul him off. Uh, Willie had managed to turn this into a one man operation. He’d take his victim. [4:11] He’d be up at the bar with a drinking buddy, get this guy really liquored up, and he’d slip his ice pick out of his jacket. Boom, real quick in the air, ice pick’s gone, the guy’s down on the bar. Not much blood because it’s an ice pick. Forensics wasn’t real hot back in the 20s, so a lot of times they would diagnose this as a brain aneurysm. But the guy would slump over the bar, drunk, dead drunk, and then they’d just haul him off. The story is they’d take him in the back room, he’d go down the coal chute, which everybody had back then, out into a truck, they’d haul off the body. The people that went down the coal chute, they were all pretty much forgotten. But Willie, he seemed to have stuck around. Now, in Minneapolis, apparently he’s still a real popular figure. Memorable, which is funny because Minneapolis, for all my research, is the place there is the least documented evidence about. [5:19] But that seems to be that and Las Vegas are where he’s best known. There’s even a company in Minneapolis that does a nail polish they named Ice Rick Willie. It’s a popular culture thing there. Yeah. Now, did he start out in New York with Erlansky? He started out in New York. He grew up on the Lower East Side. Like so many people, Benny Siegel and Meyer, everybody came from there. Early on, and back by the 20s, Meyer had hooked up with Charlie Luciano, and most of the serious Jewish gangsters came under Meyer’s umbrella, so to speak. And this Willie supposedly, according to another author, this is when Willie hooked up with Meyer, was early on during Prohibition. But Willie didn’t start out as a bootlegger. He started out with a bunch of jewelry store robbers, but they were pretty notorious at him. God, his first record of him was, oh, when was it? About 1925. [6:34] He got a charge for robbery. Not a lot of details on it. The charge was dismissed, and it seems to be a pretty common thing throughout his entire life as far as resolution of his legal issue. But anyway, then right after Christmas, that’s in year 25, he was going by Izzy Alderman back then. Israel, Izzy was his nickname. He didn’t get into Willie till later, but he went into with a couple other guys and they hit a jewelry store for about $75,000 worth of jewelry. Oh, wow. That’s a pretty good chunk of change back then. That’s a score, man. That is a real score back then. Oh, yeah. And then a few months later, along with a couple other people, he hit another jewelry store in the Bronx, William Sims Robbery. This one was pretty well publicized. And they go in, they take the, everybody there, the owner, employees, customers, tie them up, they’re in the back room, they grab trays full of gems, usually diamonds, they’re out the door, never even touched the cash register. So they got about a hundred grand on that. Got away. Next morning. [7:59] Another jeweler, Sam Candle, as he was opening up his shop to let a friend in, some guys come pushing into the door. Izzy’s with them again. Once more, the same M.O., everybody’s in the back room tied up. Another hundred grand or so worth the gems. So they’re doing pretty good by now. Wow, yeah. I assume that whenever they fenced them, did you find out much about how they fenced them? Did the Italians get a piece of the action? Did they make him pay up, or did Meyer Lansky get a piece of that? I’m sure that Meyer was somehow connected to this. He got a piece of everything that was going on in the Jewish world. And originally, at that point in time, there was not a lot of interaction between the Italian mobsters and the Jewish mobsters. They had their own little thing that they kept to themselves. They felt safer that way. They could trust everybody. It was actually pretty much Meyer and Charlie Luciano that moved things past that point. I see. But up till then, everything was coming under Meyer’s thing. So they were doing pretty good until they did a robbery. [9:19] There was a jeweler, Aaron Roddark. Now, about 18 months earlier, he’d had an attempted robbery where he had shot and killed one of the robbers as they were running out of the store. So he got a bunch of publicity called the Fighting Jewelers in the press, a popular guy. About a year and a half later, another crew walks in. This is Izzy’s crew. [9:50] When they come in, same thing, the fighting jeweler, he goes for his gun. Doesn’t work out so well this time. This time, he’s shot and killed. But they didn’t get any jewels. They take off again. [10:05] But now they’re hot. This is big news. Fighting jewelers murdered. Big publicity, big public outcry. And cops are looking for them hot and heavy by now. [10:17] And by now, so a few weeks, couple weeks after the fighting jewelers murdered, one of Izzy’s crew was picked up, coming out of a doctor’s office, for a gunshot wound, where he’d been treated. Cots get word of this, they pick him up, and he immediately starts confessing to all the jewelry store robbers, giving up partners. They pick up a couple more people pretty soon everybody is just singing like canary it’s like the mormon tavern fire or something so the cops are looking for everybody they haven’t got they pick up almost everybody the two people are missing from the last robbery where the guy was murdered is Izzy Alderman and one of the other guys Robert Byrd. [11:09] So Izzy and Robert they know they’re hot They’ve got warrants out. They know the police are looking. They’ve got this information because they’re connected to whoever. So they leave town. They’re on their way to Chicago. They’re going to go there to hide out, take care of business for a couple reasons. One is Robert Berg has brother, Ollie, who is tied in with the Northside Bugs Moran gang in Chicago. Ago, Holly is also a jewelry driver and right about the time, right before. [11:47] His brother, Robert, gets to Chicago. Ollie and a couple guys are on an Illinois Central commuter train. They robbed three jewelry salesmen while they’re on the train of their jewels, managed to get off the train and get away. They got picked up about 12 hours later, though. So now his brother, Ollie, is in prison again, of course. But Robert is connected. They have connections to the Northside gang. Through the brother, through Ollie. And this is a safe place for them to go, relatively safe. At that point in time, Chicago’s got the beer wars going on, and so it wasn’t a real safe place to be. But they had out there, they’re there maybe a week or so. The cops raid a hotel room, they pick up Robert Burke. They also find a bunch of jewelry, which they trace back to the New York robbery. So they know this is all tied together now. They don’t get Willie. Izzy is still at that point. So Robert Berg, now he’s back to New York going to prison too. Izzy needs a new partner. Berg had a guy he was running around with, Red McLaughlin. [13:06] Red’s partner’s in jail, and Izzy’s partner’s in jail, so they came up a little bit. But now Red already at this point the cops are looking for him hot and heavy in Chicago a little while before they found him. [13:24] The cops saw him on the side of the road, Red was on the running board of the car, reaching through the window, choking the driver. The driver turned out to be, of course, a jewelry salesman with the jewelry in the car. Red explained to the cop that his friend was just having some kind of a fit, and he was trying to help him. The cop wasn’t going for it, and so Red was off to jail. He managed to get bailed out. And as soon as he’s out, he just goes off on all kinds of things. By now, the cops are looking for him for being involved in some kidnappings and bootlegging and murders. One newspaper article called him the man of a hundred brides. He’s like Lon Chaney of the criminal world or something. So now the cops are really hot after Red. He’s junk bail. He’s doing all this other stuff. There they raid a hotel, the Webster Hotel in Chicago. They’ve got a tip. That’s where they’re going to find him. Yeah. They don’t find Red, but they find his buddy in there. They find him, and he’s got a suitcase full of guns. [14:38] But no, he knows this is turned out to be actually Izzy Alderman, but he knows the cops are looking for Izzy Alderman. So he tells the cops his name’s Robert Lewis. They don’t know any better. Things are different back then. Yeah. He also told them that he was a bootlegger from Detroit. And that, I guess, would explain having a suitcase full of guns. And when they get ready to arrest him, he tells the cops they’re going to be wasting their time because he says he has some high connections in the illegal liquor business in town here. And apparently he was right because all of his charges were dismissed as soon as they haul him in once again. Back then, it seemed in Chicago, because of Al Capone, Bugs Moran. [15:30] New York with Meyer and Charlie, Prohibition contributed to it a lot. Corruption was just fantastic. So you could buy your people’s way out of everything, which was nice if that’s what you were doing. Yeah so anyway Robert Bird disappears and now Willie all of his partners all of his connections everybody’s locked up missing dead something he’s out of work again but he’s in Chicago since 1927 they’re in the middle of the beer wars he’s a starker a tough muscle man starker’s Jewish term so he hooks up right away They were Bugs Moran on the North side. Bugs is more, the Bugs Moran gang, they were people like Frank Foster, Ed Newberry. He had other Jewish gangsters working with him at the time. So Lizzie fit in pretty good. And it isn’t long at all, maybe a month later, he gets cops pull over a car. They find Frank Foster and Izzy Alderman in there. And they’ve got guns, of course. And once again, the charges just disappear. Everybody goes on their way. [16:51] So things are rolling along. The beer wars are going good. And now we get into the taxi cab wars. because in Chicago back then, that’s how you settled everything. You had a war. There were two cab companies mostly going on in Chicago at the time, and they were shooting up each other’s cab offices and throwing bombs and shooting up cabs. So the Yellow Cab Company puts out a hefty reward for the people involved, which leads to another made by the cops on this time. It was a Broadway apartment where there were supposed to be people involved in all of this. [17:30] Among the people they find, first off, Frank Foster, who at the time was a high-ranking member of Bugs Moran’s group on the north side. They also find another bunch of people, one of them named Harry Davidson. This was, again, Izzy Alderman, but he knew that the cops were looking for Izzy Alderman, and they were looking for Robert Lewis by then. So that was Harry Davidson, and that worked out. And, of course, everybody gets charged with concealed weapons, and then the charges are dropped, and catch and release. Yeah, catch and release Chicago. It was really interesting. So shortly after this, of course, this is 1929 in Chicago, and it’s Valentine’s Day. We all know what happened there. Now this brought major heat, major attention from everyone nationwide, the student. [18:30] And surprisingly, later in life, like I said, he used to almost brag about his activity as he got older. One of the things he would tell people is that he missed the St. Valentine’s Day massacre because he was in the bathroom. Yeah, I was going to say, he missed that. The bathroom wasn’t in SMT partage, if that was the case. They had an outhouse, Flats. They had an outhouse out back. That’s true. Yeah, he was close enough to do that activity. Yeah. He was just caught up in the middle of all the major things happening throughout Gangland at that point in time. Really? How does he end up in Minneapolis? It’s reasonably close to Chicago, and there are some connections. It is. [19:19] Before he ends up back in Minneapolis, first he ends up back in New York. What happens now in New York, they’ve got their own problems going on between the two gangs back then. Yeah, they had the Castle Marie’s War during that time, I believe, or sometime around then. It broke out. Actually, it happens right after he gets shot. But as he gets picked up, there’d been a shooting that they had. First, they had the Easter Massacre, where a few people get shot up. And then the Fox Lake Massacre. Like I said, everything in Chicago was wars or massacres. And by the time the Fox Lake massacre happened, it was after the Valentine’s Day thing. Izzy Alderman, Frank Foster, Ted Newberry, and probably at least 6, 8, 10 other people affected. They left the Northside gang, and they moved south and joined up with El Capote. [20:21] Obviously, they could see where everything’s going. I mean, everyone at the outside is winning. But the authorities were aware of it. So after the Easter massacre and the Fox Lake massacre, now the cops know there’s going to be all kinds of retaliation. Fox Lake thing, Al Capone’s people got shot up. So cops are out on the street looking for people. They pull over a car racing down the street. They find Frank Foster, Izzy Alderman again, out with their guns. Once again, they get hauled in, arrested, catching release. Shortly after this, now we get a reporter, Jake Lingle. Jake Lingle, he was crooked. He was on the take. He was one of these $65 a week reporters who vacations in Hawaii and has an apartment on Lake George Drive, that kind of thing. He even said he had a fancy piece of gold jewelry that was a gift from Al Capone. Anyway, he gets into trouble with people there. He gets killed. [21:32] Now, everybody knows you can’t. The people you don’t kill are cops and newsmen. Jake Lengel gets killed, and now, once again, it’s like St. Valentine’s Day all over again. Big public outcry. Cops are hot and heavy. They know somehow Izzy Alderman is somehow tied into this. Frank Foster’s tied into it. So they’re hunting them. And a few months later, a cop spots Izzy. He’s in a restaurant with another guy, Joe Condi. They’re eating dinner. Cop recognized Izzy because he was really, which is surprising, he was really well known then to the cops, to the press, to other gangsters. [22:19] And yet today, who was Izzy Aldenman? Who was Ice-Pick Willie? So time goes by. But the cop spots him, recognizes him, grabs, snatters him up, and arrests him. As soon as they come out of the restaurant, runs him in for questioning for the Lingle murder. They get him in. There’s nothing they can tie him to the Lingle case with. So they charge him with vagrants. This is a new deal, a new tool that prosecutors are using in Chicago. Yeah. We know you’re a gangster. We can’t prove anything, so we’re going to arrest you for vagrancy because you have no physical means of support. You don’t have a job. [23:07] When Izzy was arrested at this time, he had about $650 in his pocket. This is worth like over 12 grand today so yeah the economy’s good when vagrants are carrying that kind of money obviously but they get arrested charged with first they’re brought in before a judge one judge mccordy he says there’s nothing to hold them on the lingual thing so they’re free to go the minute they walk out of the court building they get arrested charged with vacancy taken in front of another judge, Judge Lyle. Now, Judge Lyle, he’s known, he’s a holy terror when it comes to gangsters. He’s just after them. And even he admits the vagrancy thing, I’m not sure it’s really valid, but we’re going to charge you anyway. First thing is, he says, is I want a lawyer. So the judge tells the court reporter, the defendant has no comment at this time. And then in what’s probably the shortest trial in history, Izzy and his buddy are found guilty. [24:21] And shipped away to jail in a matter of like 10 minutes or something. How long was the sentence for? How long was the sentence for? They were sentenced to six months in jail. Okay. Surveillance. Okay. So now their lawyer comes back, goes back to the first judge, McGordy, who had released them on the Lingle chart. [24:49] And he convinced her, I don’t know, for whatever reason, Judge McGurdy says, no, I have jurisdiction in this case because they were brought before me first. And so he issues a bond and sets them free again. As soon as they walk out of the courthouse, they’re re-arrested again for vagrancy. At this point, their lawyer, the lawyer’s upset. And he’s telling, he tells the cops, that’s it. If you’re going to take them in on this bullshit again, you got to take me too. So they all went down to the station, the lawyer with them, charged with vagrancy again, locked up. Judge Lyle, like I say, Judge Lyle was not a friend of these people. He missed their fail at $10,000 on the vagrancy charge. And then he immediately changed it to $20,000 a piece because he was afraid they might make the $10,000 bail. These vagrants, mind you. So they’re backed off in jail. [25:56] Late that night, the lawyer, who’s also out of jail at this point, finds another judge who is either totally unaware of this case or he’s very aware of it. Either way, this judge says, oh, no, that’s way too much bail for vagrancy. The bail should be $100 for that. And as he says, they’re bailing at $100. They’re out again. Boom. So the next day, they go to court facing the, vagrancy charge in front of Judge Lyle. Judge Lyle immediately says, no, your bond was issued falsely, charges him with another $20,000 bail, has him re-arrested. Oh, my God. So they get their bond reduced to $10,000. They bail out of jail. They go to court. [26:51] Finally, on the vagrancy charges, maybe a month later. They’ve been dealing with this now for almost two months. Vagrancy charge. First day of the actual vagrancy trial, Izzy goes in, they arrest him for the burglaries back in New York, charging with hoax. So now they’re ignoring the vagrancy charge. They’ve got him locked up. They’re holding him for extradition to New York. He fights this still. He holds out finally in December, just a couple days before Christmas. He ends up back in New York to face the vagrants. He’s charged with the robberies and the murder of the fighting jeweler. Finally, everything gets dropped back in New York. You know, this is Meyer and Charlie’s area. All the charges are dropped. He’s free and clear again. He’s back home, so he sticks around. and it’s just in time because, as you mentioned, the Castle Marie’s war breaks out like a month later. [27:57] There’s no actual evidence, a lot of evidence of his involvement, but coincidentally, he is charged with murder about a month after the war breaks out. And, of course, his charges drop again, too, like they are. And then as the war goes on, first, Charlie Luciano, he swapped, changed his sides, they whacked Joe the boss, and then they set up Maranzano. [28:27] And Salvador Marenzano gets shot and killed in a restaurant, supposedly by a hit squad of Jewish gangsters that Meyer organized, because Meyer and Charlie were pretty close at this point in time. It isn’t sure who all was involved in that. Benny Siegel was supposed to be one of the shooters. And there’s no mention of Izzy being involved in it, but once again, just coincidentally, he left for France a couple of weeks after the shooting, where he stays until the end of the year when they first held at a couple of conferences. The one where Charlie Luciano organized pretty much the Italian crime family And then a couple months later, Meyer had one where he organized Jewish people, except Meyer had more of a national thing, whereas Charlie’s was more of the New York Five family kind of thing. [29:37] So anyway, at this time, I guess moving along here, Dave Berman, as you’re familiar with, being a Jewish mobster out of the Midwest, he’d come under Meyer’s umbrella. And then in 1927, he gets called to New York. He ends up in New York. At the time, Meyer, the Bugs and Meyer gang, especially being Budgie Siegel and Meyer Lansky, had this thing going where they were kidnapping rival bootleggers. Bootlegging was big business. Meyer was taking control of all of that. It was coming, especially coming in from Canada, which is where the Midwest came in, coming in by boatloads from Canada. We were drinking Canada Dry. Yeah, good one. So Dave Berman, he ends up in New York. Another bootlegger named Abe Sharlin gets kidnapped. [30:45] And the family agrees to pay like a $50,000 ransom to get him back. So when the two guys show up to collect the ransom, instead of a pile of money, there’s a pile of cops waiting for him. Immediately, a shootout breaks out. The one guy jumps out of the car, pulls out his gun, big shootout, people running everywhere. One guy shot and killed. The other guy, he surrenders. That’s Dave Berman. So Dave Berman, it’s, doing this for Meyer, but the cops don’t know that for sure. But they arrest him. He’s off to Sing for seven years for kidnapping. [31:27] Actually, back then, Sing, the prison in Ossining, New York, sat on the river, and so most people sent there, prisoners were shipped up there by boat. That’s where the term sent up the river. I didn’t realize that. Cool. So he does his time while he’s locked up there there’s not a lot of Willie doesn’t show up a lot but there is one specific mention of him, B Kittle he was a nightclub singer back in the early 30s young girl goes to New York chasing her dream ends up working at the nightclub that just happens to be to hang out for the mobsters. She doesn’t know this, but… And actually, she ends up marrying Mo Sedway later on. And Mo Sedway was one of Meyer Lansky’s close people, Benny’s people. She does remark, though, that she remembers there were two guys she’d always see sitting over at a table in the corner drinking together. One of them, she said, was Izzy Alderman, who she said was a lieutenant for Moe Sedway, and the other was Fat Irish Green. [32:51] Fat Irish Green was Benny’s bodyguard, hang-around-everywhere kind of guy. We always see the same people popping up all through this thing. Izzy’s plugged into this bunch. So anyway, we jump ahead a couple years. Dave Berman gets out of prison. Gets out of prison immediately. Meets up with Mo Sedway and Meyer and Charlie, everybody there. Dave’s been a stand-up guy. He kept his mouth shut about everything. He took his beef. He was good about it. But the story goes, they offer him a million dollars in cash for his loyalty. Fire took the judge. More employers should be like him. [33:42] Dave said he didn’t want the money. He wanted to be, he wanted control of gambling in Minneapolis. His mother lived there. His brother, Chickie, was there running small-time gambling thing. That’s where he wanted to go. And they say, okie-dokie, which I think is a good example of the influence, shall we say, that the East Coast group had over the rest of the country. They can just, I’ll give you this city in the Midwest. But before A.V. heads there, interestingly enough, there’s a couple of treasury bond robberies, big treasury bond robberies that happened in New York. They need total like over $2 million. [34:31] Big bucks and the FBI tracks down some of the bonds to a Minneapolis gangster, so when they arrest him along with him the Minneapolis gangster his name was Royce Boris Royce not that it’s a big deal but with him they pick up Davey Berman Davey the Jew is what he was called at that time they weren’t quite as politically correct, They got Dave Berman, they got Moe Subway, and there was a guy that the newspapers called, one account called him Jacob Irish Greenberg, and another one called him Jack Green Greenberg. So this would have been Fat Irish Green, it was Jacob Greenberg. [35:21] Once again, by the time it was done, acquittals all the way around. Wonderful things for him. Now Davey Berman pays off to Minneapolis to join his brother in the gambling thing. He gets there. Brother Chickie was running gambling initially. Isidore, or Kid Khan, was in charge. Isidore Bloomfield was in charge of the Minneapolis thing. And his brother, Yiddy Bloom. Yeah. But, of course, Davey’s here now. Since Kid Khan and his bunch were also Jewish popsters, that means they are linked to Meyer. And when Meyer says, okay, here’s Davey, now that’s how it goes. Davey immediately starts expanding the gambling joints into horse booking and race wire and craft games and everything. And he’s a good businessman. He’s sharp. And he’s learned a lot, apparently, from Meyer because he knows how to keep his name and people out of the name. Back then in Minneapolis, they had a deal. It was called the O’Connor Existence. [36:41] For the it was a deal that the local police had with gangster you could come to our town, and we won’t bother you we’ll leave you alone three conditions you check in with us when you get here so we know you’re here you of course make various payments to the necessary police and city officials and it was an orphan’s fund to the widows and orphans fund the police, and you promised that you will not commit any crimes major crimes while you’re in twin cities minneapolis st paul and if they’d agree to that they could stay there safely no matter who was looking for them so this also made it kind of more attractive i think for dave burman and people like him because obviously all you got to do is pay people off you’re good to go yeah kind of like the hot springs of the north, huh? Oh, yeah. So, once again, with this kind of ability, you don’t find a lot of mention of. [37:52] Dave Berman or his crew, especially in Minneapolis, and some of the police records have been lost there over the years. So that made it a little harder, too, to track things down. There are a couple of interesting things. For example, now, part of the Berman crew, one of them especially was Slippy Sherr, a guy named Phillip Sherr. They went by Slippy. He was really an interesting sort of guy. He was definitely a violent person he was constantly charged with assaults and murders and of course the charges were always dropped there was one occasion he was out with some friends in a bar they end up in an argument with the bar owner turns into a fight the bar owner goes outside flags down a motorcycle cop who’s going by the motorcycle cop goes back in with the bar owner and they proceed to get in a fist fight with Flippy and his friends, they get lumped up pretty good. Later, when they go to court. [39:01] The officer made a remark in court about, he said, all in all, it was pretty fair fight all the way around. And he said, for the most part, they’re pretty nice guys when they’re not drinking. Yeah. So aren’t we all? He was that kind of the guy Flippi was bollocked, Oh, another example of that. Willie ends up, by the time he hits Minneapolis, he’s become Willie Alden. He’s given up the Izzy thing, trying to put that behind him. Now, his focus is gambling. He’s like Dave Berman. It’s a muscle, maybe, behind Dave Berman. But he’s mellowed out a lot, and you don’t hear a lot about him. In one incident, though, they were golfers of all things. They loved golfing. And this is the 30s. So, of course, they can only golf at the Jewish golf course. Jewish people weren’t allowed at the regular country club. They’re out golfing. Flippy, sure, he would always join them. We wanted to force them. They didn’t deal with golf well. They’d get upset easily. I know the feeling. I know. [40:19] So on one occasion, Flippi slices a ball over into a neighboring farmer’s field. There’s an 18-year-old kid over there farming his potato crop. And Flippi, being argumentative, is a problem breaks out over the ball, him and this kid. Pretty soon, Flippi’s over there in the field. First, he starts wailing on the kid with his fist. And then he starts beating on him with his golf club until he knocks him out. Oh, man. This is like a $30,000 golf club. Game for flippy by the time it’s over and probably got extra strokes on that hole while he was there. [41:03] That the berman crew ran in minneapolis was 613 hennepin this was they were regularly it seemed like it was an annual thing it’s probably a deal they hadn’t once a year the cops would hit 613 Hennepin, they’d raid it, they’d charge him with gambling, whatever, and they’d pay their fine, let it go. But like clockwork, if you check the newspapers, once a year, it’s 13 Hennepin. So finally, last time, 1940, they go in, and now their cops are hyped. Big, great, they ain’t got all these cops, they’re ready to get the door down, charge in. To get there, Doors are wide open. Cop belt all run in. There’s still hot coffee on the stove. There’s a chalkboard full of all the race results. Everything but people. The places. There’s nobody in the place. This upset him made more of an embarrassment, I think, than anything for the police. He finally got beat out on that one. [42:09] That was 613 Hennepin. Was that the address and the name of the spot, 613 Hennepin? Or was that Hennepin’s like a common name up in Minneapolis? It was called the TMA Club. Okay, and the address was 613 Hennepin. Yeah, it actually had a couple of different names, But the address, no matter what club was at that address, whatever they called, it was the same thing. Yeah, I got you. They just sold. Now, about this time, this is late 1930s, of course, I’m sure you’re familiar with the Silver Church thing, the support group, so to speak, in the States, right? Yeah, yeah. And Judge Perlman from New York got a hold of Meyer Lansky. Yeah. See if he could offer assistance. And among the people that Meyer called was Dave Berman, of course, in Minneapolis. And Dave said, sure, I’d be glad to help. And Willie would be glad to help, too. Dave was a little nervous about Willie’s assistance because they really didn’t want anybody killed. And he wasn’t sure about that with Willie. But as it turns out, they said that Silver Shirts held their meeting at the Elks Club in town. and J.B. Berman showed up with some friends and baseball bats. [43:32] It took him about 10 minutes to clear the place out. A couple more go-rounds like this and the silver shirts, all the… [43:42] Nazi groups, neo-Nazis, whatever, they changed their mind about having these kind of meetings there. Like in New York, when they had Nuremeyer brought his people in, they were not extremely friendly to the Nazis, which is understandable. So the Silver Shirts complained to the mayor, Mayor LaGuardia, demanding protection for their rallies and their marches. And the mayor is obligated by law to protect them, to provide them with the support. And he did. He rounded up all of the black and Jewish officers he could find and assigned them to that duty. His mother was Jewish. Yeah, crazy times. It’s hard to believe. If you don’t read it in history yourself, you wouldn’t know it. It’s really something that’s been a gift under the rug. We had those Nazi sympathizers right up to World War II. It was crazy. Oh, it was amazing. People like Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, who wrote The International Jew. At one time, if you bought a new Ford, you’d get a free copy of that book. [44:57] I read that somewhere, The International Jew, that Jewish conspiracy that’s supposed to take over the world and have all the money and everything. Yeah, that’s interesting. That’s ridiculous. They just want to take over gambling. It’s obvious. Yeah, really. Then they wanted to move all these guys you mentioned, Mo Sedway and Mayor Lansky, of course, and Buggy Siegel. They all end up out in Las Vegas. They take it all to Las Vegas, don’t they? Yeah, and like I said, right from the very beginning, you’ll see the same name over and over. Benny Siegel, Gus Greenbaum, Joe Stacker. They had an amazing bunch. And if you look at it, most of them died in bed. Yeah. [45:43] It was a whole different, probably, mindset than you’d see with the Italian gangsters at that time. These are people who managed to stay out of jail, stay out of the press, and stay out of the ground and make money. Yeah. A FBI agent here in Kansas City gave me a quote one time on a documentary I was doing. He was talking about this national crime syndicate. And he said, yeah, he said, the Italians provided the brawn, and the Jews provided the brains. Pretty much how well you got to Vegas, obviously the Jewish groups around the country had been running gambling. They were smart. Meyer especially was a visionary. This guy was a genius in Meyer’s mind. And he could see that, obviously, Prohibition, as wonderful as it was for them, wasn’t going to last forever. But he could see the future in gambling. And I’m sure he didn’t foresee Las Vegas back when Prohibition was repealed, but he did see the direction things were going. [46:55] He developed gambling all over the country. And then when Vegas came along, this was just a wonderful thing for legalized gambling. They had the expertise, the experience, the knowledge, all they needed. Because opening casino is an expensive venture, so they needed more money. The Italians provided extra cash, and the Jewish groups had all the experience and the knowledge to run there. That’s where, back in the one conference, the Fraconia conference that Meyer organized, where he organized the Jewish groups around the nation, at that time he convinced, both groups were convinced that it was time that they start working together and not be at odds with them. with each other. Yeah, no, it was actually, it turned out to be a real profitable agreement as time went on. Yeah, especially in Las Vegas, so. [47:55] I’ll tell you what, Flatsy, it’s a hell of a book. That’s a hell of a story you’ve got there, guys. [48:00] We’re not going to disclose everything because we’ve got to go on out to Las Vegas, but we’re not going to disclose everything. We want you to buy that book. It really sounds interesting. It’s really a walk through the history and the expansion of organized crime from the early days from the Castle of Racey War and Chicago and the Beer Wars to Minneapolis and on out to Las Vegas. It’s a hell of a story. and Ice-Pick Willie was there for all of it, it sounds to me like. That’s what I found so amazing is pretty much every major event in gangland history at that point in time, he would somehow evolve there. And yet, here like 50 years or so after he’s dead, nobody even remembers him. They will now. The people he knew, the people he associated with, the things he’s seen, what a life really guys the book is Ice Pick Willie the life and times of Israel Alderman and the author is Flats F-L-A-T-S and I will have a link to that book on Amazon when this comes out so thanks a lot Flats I really appreciate you coming on and telling those stories, you betcha thanks for having me.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence detective Gary Jenkins sits down with former drug trafficker Carlos Perez for a direct, unfiltered discussion about the evolution of the drug trade in America. Carlos has a new book out titled Pedro Pan: The Product of a Revolution Gone Bad The conversation opens with recent controversy surrounding the reported death of  the Jalisco New Generation Cartel leader El Mencho, and what that development signals for the balance of power among modern Mexican cartels. From there, Gary and Carlos trace the arc of the drug trade from the Caribbean smuggling routes of the 1970s and 1980s to the dominance of today’s cartel-controlled corridors. Carlos reflects on the era of Ronald Reagan and the early “War on Drugs,” describing a time when enforcement was uneven and smugglers routinely exploited weak regulatory environments in places like the Bahamas. He explains how traffickers adapted faster than policymakers, using maritime routes, small aircraft, and coordinated pickup operations to move multi-ton quantities of narcotics. Gary and Carlos contrast those earlier days with modern interdiction efforts—advanced Coast Guard surveillance, satellite tracking, military-grade radar, and cross-border intelligence sharing. What was once opportunistic smuggling has evolved into highly structured cartel logistics supported by corrupt officials and narco-state dynamics. Carlos provides a candid account of his own rise in the trade. Starting as a construction laborer, he moved into pickup crews retrieving floating bales of drugs in open water. Over time, he became involved in larger-scale operations involving aircraft and organized distribution networks. He details the operational mechanics, the risks, and the constant calculation between profit and prison—or worse. The discussion also explores the blurred lines between political authority and cartel influence. Carlos explains how governments in certain regions became intertwined with trafficking operations, illustrating how power, money, and violence intersect across borders. In the second half of the episode, Carlos shifts to a personal reckoning. He discusses the moral compromises required in the drug trade and the toll it takes on family and identity. Ultimately, he chose to step away, prioritizing stability and long-term survival over fast money. Now living a legitimate life, Carlos has documented his journey in his book Pedro Pan: The Product of a Revolution Gone Bad, offering readers a firsthand account of smuggling culture, Cuban heritage, revolution-era influences, and the psychological weight of that world. His story reflects both personal accountability and a broader commentary on the human side of organized crime. This episode blends law enforcement perspective with insider testimony, giving listeners a rare dual lens: the cop who chased traffickers and the man who once outran them. Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee” Subscribe to the website for weekly notifications about updates and other Mob information. To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent ‘Brothers against Brothers’ or ‘Gangland Wire,’ the documentaries click here.  To purchase one of my books, click here. Transcript [0:00] Hey, all you wiretappers, Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence [0:03] Unit detective. It’s great to be back here in the studio. It’s a cold day in Kansas City, Missouri, but we’re going to talk to a warm state and with a man that lives in that warm state, Carlos Perez. Welcome, Carlos. How are you doing, Gary? Doing good? Yeah, I’m doing good. A little cold, and I know it’s much warmer down there. We talked about that. Carlos was involved in the drug business, which is quite topical right now, especially today. Now, this won’t come out today, but as of over the weekend, the Mexican government arrested the El Mencho, the head of that, I can’t remember the name of that cartel. It was a Western Mexico, the state of Jalisco cartel. And somehow he got killed on the way to Mexico City as they’re transporting him. And his guys, the cartel members, are going crazy. Carlos, let’s talk about that a little bit, about this new war on drugs. When I was in Ronnie Reagan’s war on drugs, it was different than it is now. Now we have this new war on drugs with blowing drug boats out of the water. And this guy dies on the way to the bigger jail. Well, let’s talk about that a little bit. Carlos, how would you, as a former drug trafficker, how do you react to that? [1:18] The laws change. And the more that the smugglers change, the more that the system to catch them changes also. In fact, when you’re talking about Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs, there was quite a few things that allowed the smugglers to succeed. One was, most of it, and I’m talking Caribbean now, most of it was going through the Bahamas. The Bahamas had laws at that time where anything governmental was not allowed to land nor dock a boat anywhere in the Bahamas without the permission of the Bahamian government. Which, by the time they got to wherever, if they reacted, if they were advised of some drugs coming in, it would take them a long time to react. I think they had two boats for all the islands that had to travel back and forth. You never, you couldn’t, they couldn’t, the DEA, the Coast Guard, they couldn’t catch you. [2:12] And when you fly a plane in, you just land anywhere and say hello to the DEA as they’re flying by because they can’t land. And therefore, you score the load that you have. Nowadays, Jesus God Almighty, now you’ve got the Coast Guard out there. You’ve got the Coast Guard citation constantly flying, plus Navy. But you couldn’t get it done. And back in those days, that’s the way it was done. It was the Bahamas played a huge part. The prime minister of the Bahamas was so heavily, even though he never. [2:42] Did any time or anything he was heavily involved he took payoffs to left left and right the whole the situation is completely different now you got AWACS flying overhead that can hear you when you’re in the bathroom anybody here’s my opinion on that I want to know who in the hell was in charge of sending those boats out of Venezuela that after the first one got blown up who was telling them to keep sending boats over now if maduro this is my theory if maduro was smart he would have stopped that if he was really the one in charge he would have gone god you got to make me look better you can’t keep doing it that tells me he was not in charge of the shit okay so there’s someone behind that kept going send them we got to see if we can score keep the score, i don’t know how he kept doing that that was to me that was such a stupid move especially when you You see that you’ve got half of America’s Navy sitting on your doorstep, and you keep trying to send drugs. What are you, nuts? The Pacific, they should have gone over to the Pacific, where there’s less surveillance, and maybe run it up the Pacific coast by land. [3:53] Okay. Try to get it into Mexico by land. Because back in the day, Mexico was not really involved at all in that. It was the Caribbean. And then when the Colombian cartel, which was Medellin cartel, when they stopped losing so many loads, they started to go to Mexico. And through Mexico, they just flew small planes, landed in the woods somewhere in Mexico, and then they moved it up. That was not – you weren’t doing that in the Caribbean by that time. And talking about Reagan’s war on drugs, I had two – this is the sideline. I had two little boats coming in from the Bahamas that had marijuana on them. [4:35] I still got to laugh at this freaking idiot. One of them, they were coming in from – Bimney’s only 47 miles away. You can almost do it on the fumes of a gas tank. This guy forgot to gas up. Coming over, he gets stopped by the Marine Patrol, right? As they’re searching him, the other boat had gone through but was wondering where his partner was, and he goes back to see where the guy is. [5:01] How’s that for – anyway, they get them both. It was a total of about 1,200 pounds. That had come from Jamaica, that’s about –, And the vice president, who was Bush, was at the Coast Guard dock when they were unloading the boats. And I was sitting there watching, going, damn, they look like my boats. And when I investigated, it was a—but that was one little incident that had happened. But the difference between yesterday, yesteryear, and now is chronologically things change. They trump the other everybody that was a president or that that had something to do with stopping the trade with drugs never really stuck their foot in deep to stop it it makes me feel like yeah you’re not really you’re talking a lot but you’re not really doing much because if i was a cop my god i usually i’d have had all kinds of medals from stopping these people because it’s an easy thing but no one really had the interest who was involved economically up the top god and only In the Bahamas, I knew who it was. It was the prime minister. Knew his people real well. In the States, everything changes every couple of years. And you don’t know what they’re thinking, what their process of thought is to try to stop this. You know what it was? None. They didn’t try. Okay, they did not try. [6:22] There used to be, oh God, probably about two or three DC-3s a night landing in Bimini, 47 miles away. Okay? Each one of them had 10,000 pounds on it. The boats were running up the river, the Miami River. Once you get inside on a river, inside land, you pretty much already scored. That changed. Then it went to freighters, fast boats going out, picking up, coming in. Then when the United States stopped that, when they declared, we’re going to be able to stop any boat anywhere in international waters. You couldn’t do it back then. [7:02] When that ended then you began with the airplanes the airplanes would take it this is still back when you when the US or any governmental agency could not, set foot in the Bahamian territory, Bahamian waters, without the prime minister’s knowledge. The prime minister’s involved. You’re not going to get it. It’s not going to happen. So that change, and it went to small airplanes. Fly it in anywhere you want in the Bahamas, and then get your boats, and from there on in, try to see what you’re thinking, your process of thought is going to be to get it from the Bahamas, some of the shorter points to the States and to Miami at that point. One of them for me was easy. And that was because I had information on the Miami tower and where in the hell everything was at any point in time. So I would sit and wait for my messenger to get back to me, to tell me where the smoker was, which was the big Coast Guard boat and where the citation was. Once I knew that, I knew I could come across. And the only thing I was going to run into was fishermen. [8:10] So things changed. And then they allowed things change after that. And obviously they were allowed to go into the Bahamas and do whatever they wanted. But that was when Pinland was finally out. I don’t know who the prime minister became after that, but it changed. And now it became, this is why I think that the cartels were stupid. They, instead of doing as much as you could without getting noticed, they started bringing in loads of 10,000 and 20,000 kilos. I was like, God, what the hell do they get all that? I know where they get it, but since I know how the situation goes, I want to know how they amass it and get it onto one boat or one container or whatever and not have it noticed. That’s just way too much to not notice at one point or another. People get edgy around shit like that. In other words, I could take two people and put them in front of a container and separate them and tell one of them, that’s full of drugs, and then tell the other one, no, that’s full of furniture. And then stand both of them there and see who gets nervous. [9:16] It’s human nature. It’s human nature. If you know something bad is going on, to feel it and to react. Why they did that, I don’t know. I was one of the ones, if not the only one, that was sent to Mexico to teach them how to put airstrips in the middle of the jungle, how to protect them, what to do with them, where to put potholes with certain rocks, get them out when they play in the stomach, put them back in when he’s done so if anyone else tries to land, they’re gone. But how it got so deep, I’ll never understand that. And I was pretty much in the beginning of smuggling as to notice chronologically how everything’s seen because I stayed for quite a while. Yeah. Now, Carlos, you’ve written a book about this. What’s the name of that book? The book is called Heisting the Beard. I just need the beard. The beard with a D, meaning Fidel Castro. Ah, interesting. Yeah, he’s just in Cubans when they go like this to their chin or they mention him and they mention him as the beard. He was heavily involved in the decision-making of Cuba running drones. [10:27] That book is about, oh, I ran into a guy. This is how this happens, which is really fun. I ran into a guy who I used to call him by the name of Banco. And he came and told me that he knew where there was a big load of drugs, jewels that they had pilfered from the ocean where they knew that shipwrecks have gone down. Because no one can dive around Cuba. And Cuba is a country that held all the gold before it went to Spain. Everything stopped there and went on. So he told me he knew where there was a warehouse that was holding that plus a lot of coke. And I had ways to get in. I have a friend who’s Bahamian, who was actually one of my partners, who’s from Ragged Island in the Bahamas. Ragged Island is maybe… [11:17] 20 miles off the Cuban coast, down on the eastern end of Cuba. So it was easy for me to sneak in. Everyone thinks of Cuba as this military power, Russia’s buddy. They didn’t have shit. They couldn’t put a plane in the air. They didn’t have patrol boats. They had patrol boats, but I swear I could out-swim them. It was ridiculous to see at what point they were developed as far as a country. And it was like, everything is going downhill as today, and it keeps going downhill. So I would sneak in on a Zodiac. [11:53] And I’d hit the coast, middle of the night. No one would see me. I speak perfect Spanish. I speak a Cuban dialect. So I wasn’t going to get caught by it because I looked like a black bean in a pot of white rice. It wasn’t going to be like that. So we figured out where everything was, and we went in and took a little look. And got awake after a lot of headaches, but we were able to do that. There’s other instances where there’s an airport right next to Havana called the Varadero Airport, and it’s a military airport. And I know that they were holding a lot of cocaine that was going in there. The reason I know that is because hearsay in the streets in Miami, you go drink a little Cuban coffee somewhere, you hear assholes talking garbage, and they would say that they were getting boats ready to go to Cuba to bring in whatever they had. So it’s not really why they make it a mystery as to why they were involved. If you think logically, let’s say you leave Colombia and you’re doing business with Cuba. Wouldn’t it be safe to just, oh, you’re chasing me, let me land in Cuba and I got no problem, not because they don’t want you here, but they want me here. That’s logically speaking. So why that… [13:11] That mystery among people that they weren’t involved. What are you, crazy? Not only that, recently, you might have seen it, they’ve had a Carlos Leder Riva. Okay. [13:27] Carlos, can you say that over again? It just zeroed out to say that over again. After you said Carlos Leder. Leder Rivas. Yeah. Now, whatever you said after that, say that over again. [13:45] Carlos Lerder Rivas recently has done some interviews on the drug trade. He did a lot of time in the States over the Norman’s Key transporting point where all the coke would go there. And then, like I told you before, they fly it into the Bahamas and then over into the States. He recently has been on saying how he was personally involved with Raul Castro. I have no doubt about that. I knew him personally. i flew a couple times into that island where it was transported out so i know what he was told the reason i also know that is everybody has this pablo escobar myth in their head he was neither the boss and he was neither the money man the money people were the ochoas the military his might and his force did not come from him and his mouth that he could do this and that it comes from rodriguez gacha who had a 2 000 man private army and he was one of the members of the cartel and they never tell you who started it all and it was carlos letter rivas he was the one that started the cartel he’s the one that wanted to be on in the colombian parliament and was looking for votes escobar is he was a he was a late comer into all that stuff the only reason they put him out there that I can understand is because they just wanted to figure out that they could knock the hell out of later on. [15:09] Okay? Because when he started fighting against Los Pepes, which was that organization that got together to try to kill Pablo, Pablo reversed it on those guys. He got rid of almost all of them, but it wasn’t him. It was Rodriguez. [15:24] Rodriguez gotcha. He’s the one. And he was involved in the Emerald business before he got into the coke business. He was the guy, let me tell you what, when Pablo was around, and I only saw that once, when Pablo was around Gacha, okay, this was down in La Guajira, in the high desert in Colombia. When he was around Gacha, you could tell that he was subordinate. He was scared. He was like, damn, if I mess up with this guy, he’ll take my head off. [15:53] So people really have the whole story, Pablo, Pablo, my, you know what, Pablo, my ass. There’s a lot of people who you had to have money to do those things yeah and in those days they were strong enough because of the ochoas well they could gather big loads a thousand two thousand keys and put it all together but as time went on chronologically that shit changed okay i can remember once getting a load where it had it damn you they labeled it they labeled everyone One had one name, one had the other So what they were doing at that time Was it got so tough on them Because of Pablo’s big mouth And because of his, I’m going to take over Blowing up a plane Doing a few other attacking parliament All those things You couldn’t put those loads together To me there’s no cartels anymore To me they’re government Narco systems You. [16:55] The Mexican government is definitely involved with the cartels. And as you saw, we went after a cartel in Venezuela, but the head of the cartel was the Venezuelan government. So what they are is narco states now. And you know how hard it is to attack or to deal with a narco state? Now you’re dealing with a government entity that has a lot of power. It’s a completely different ballgame. And Venezuela themselves, including Cuba, had a diplomatic immunity flying into different countries with the drugs. And they could put a load of cocaine on and fly into Spain, and they had no problem with it. And they were doing those kind of things, I would say, recently, like within the last 10 or 15 years. Maybe even since Maduro has been there, which is about 20 years, that they’ve been doing that. Really, the United States can get information on anything they want. They had this information but couldn’t do anything about it. [17:57] So chronologically, everything changes. Back in the beginning, let me tell you, the first time I made a little money was hauling some marijuana with old Touch Brown from the Everglades. And I worked like a Hebrew slave for four days in the swamp hauling bails from marijuana and into the into the everglades and then over into miami and it was completely different game and you know what they didn’t cheat me for one penny they didn’t cheat me for one penny and how much came in 40 tons on one of the boats yeah it was 80 000 pounds on a freighter and we worked like little like slaves and they paid me like two weeks later, they paid me $2. I’ll tell you that story in a minute. You asked me a while ago how I got started. Should I answer that, or you got another question you want for me? No, go ahead. How’d you get started in that? You started out as a grunt, as we say in the military. You started out as a low-end worker, a guy that transports bales. What did you do? You started saving your money up, and you knew where the connections were, and finally you You bought your own load and just kept getting bigger and bigger. [19:11] In a sense, yeah, it wasn’t drastic. When I came in, here’s the story. I’m in Texas. My mom calls me up and tells me I have an uncle who’s in Texas. He wants to see me. I get together with him, and he’s driving a brand-new Cadillac. This is a guy who, two and two to him is 22. I know he’s my uncle, but he’s a dumb son of a bitch. [19:35] He’s telling me that he’s got a, you know what a roach coach is? Yeah. with those construction things with food. He tells me he has a red smoke in Miami and that he bought a house, got a house, he’s doing really good. And I looked at him and I said, bro, you’re the one that’s crushed. You’re the wetback. I came on a plane a long time ago. He’s telling me stories. What’s going on here? So anyway, he tells me and I say to him, get me a job. I was working as a carpenter in Houston. Straight out of college, I’m banging nails. I said, God damn, I’m banging nails. but I got an education here. What’s going on? So anyway, I loaded up in Houston. I head and I end up in Coconut Grove working for one of the bosses. My job was $500 a week and I had to go and sleep on his yacht about 7 p.m. And by 6 in the morning when the workers started coming in, just go. That went on for about four or five months and I finally said, let me make some real money because I saw he was still moving and doing things economically economically moving forward, and I was sleeping on a boat. So he finally gets me an interview with two of the bosses. And this is a building in Miami that was called the DuPont Plaza building. [20:52] And so we go to the meeting, and I’m talking to the two guys. One of them, they called him El Coronel, and the other one, El Colorado. The Colonel and Red. They were the ones that were handling it. And this was, by the way, this was marijuana, coming from Colombia at that time. So we go in there, and he tells me, no problem. I’ll pay you $2 a pound. Now, understand that at that time, at that point in time, my mind is in Jersey and New York. And if you’re moving 20 pounds from one place to the other, it’s a lot. You’re not dealing with loads at that time. We’re talking, what, 1977 in New York? And I looked at him, I said, you’re fucking crazy. You think I’m going to risk my ass for $2 a pound? Even if it’s 300 pounds, that’s $600. Are you fucking nuts? [21:45] My uncle grabbed me by the shirt, stood me up and said, excuse me. Walked me outside and said, listen, there’s 40 tons coming in. You want the job or not? I went back in. I apologized to you guys. I said, no problem. I will go to work. From that point on, there wasn’t, that’s just, was right about at the end of the big freighters. And so now my uncle invites me to go to Bimini because he had a friend there and they were going to do some job. I don’t know. When we go, I end up running into a younger guy, Bahamian, and I became partners with him. We call him Dreamer. And I said, look, if you can set things up over here and gather up whatever materials you can gather up, I’ll come and get it and we’ll be partners. At that time, a lot of freighters and a lot of boats were being chased by the Coast Guard and what they would do is they would drop, they would dump it overboard. Oh yeah. Ergo the, what they call it, the square grouper. [22:44] Yeah, I’ve heard that before. Bales were floating everywhere. You could go out. So what he would do is he would go on a boat, find bales that were floating. He would call me up, and he would tell me, hey, I salvaged a 300-horsepower engine. Come and get it. I knew what the weight was, so I knew what kind of boat I had to take. So I bought an 18-foot formula. I dug out the hole in the bottom. I made a secret hole. What the what cubans call a clavo a clavo which is you’re hiding it underboard he called me up one day tells me there’s three he can get 300 pounds i left at eight in the morning was back in miami by 11 30 left at about 12 30 went back and picked up another load so in that first job we ended up making a couple hundred thousand dollars from there we bought a bigger boat, Now he started patrolling, All the area where the boats were coming in Because everything flows from the Gulf Down in this area, flows north The Gulf Stream goes north So everything’s going to float this way somehow. [23:54] We did that for probably a year Until one time, I was over there. We were going fishing, and we ran into a duffel bag. The duffel bag had 65 kilos in it that was just floating. At that time, it cost probably around $40,000 a kilo in Miami, let alone New York. We didn’t bother to take it up north. Sold it all in Miami. I used to say to myself, where in the hell does all this cash come from? Because they would pay. We made a lot of money that time. And then we had seen… Carlos, let me interject here. No, no. [24:38] You were making hundreds of thousands of dollars just by picking up cocaine and marijuana that had been thrown off other boats. So you didn’t even have to go buy it, really. You guys were just picking it up, the square groupers, and then putting it together and then bringing it to money. That’s crazy. You are an entrepreneur. You’re a guy that sees an opportunity and seizes it. Tell you what. And that’s exactly how it went, Gary. When we made that big chunk of money, we had seen how things were going because we knew that planes were coming in and landing. And they had whatever it is that they were hauling, either coke or marijuana. So with that amount of money, we bought a plane and I decided to become a pilot. I said, hell, we’re going to cut this down. I’ll fly. We’ll save money that way. And now we can talk to the people down in Jamaica or Columbia and say, hey, we’re coming together. We’re taking a responsibility. We’re not going to middle it. We’re not going to find it. We’re going to do the job. And it took off from there. [25:43] Took off real good from there. Eventually, I see that you are going to build in to have a legitimate life, become a horse breeder and a ranch owner and rub elbows with all the kind of the muckety mucks, if you will, down there in Florida. So tell us about that transition and how did your life change during that time? [26:04] I had a family. I had four kids by then. And I knew that I was in a business where the chances were threefold. I either score or I die or I go to jail. And I didn’t like any of those odds at that time. I was like, you know what? I’ve made enough money. I got a small little ranch out here. I don’t need to do anything. And I decided that was it. I don’t need to be doing this anymore. I’m set. And I’m the kind of person, I’m set with what I mathematically calculate. I’m not like I need almost $20 million. I calculated it to where I knew I could be comfortable. And talking about the mucks and the big famous guys, I had lunch with Sam Walton one time. How did you do that? [26:59] I was at his, his daughter, Nancy Walton, Laurie was heavily into the horse. And by that time I was into horses also. So we used to, I used to show them all over the country and we were in, in Illinois at a horse show. And the setup that his daughter used to put out there was unbelievable. It was like, whew, she really put out a spread. And he happened to be there one time. And it wasn’t like I went and had lunch with him, but a few people sat around, ate a couple of grilled burgers. And that’s my story of Sam Wolfe, the richest man in the world at that time. And look who he’s having lunch with. how really i’ve noticed going to horse races that a lot of the support staff are all hispanic i think because hispanic people know how to deal with horses have an affinity affinity for horses, you’re absolutely right the barn work even me and who as far as the horses went i was a nobody i just had my own little stretch even my workers were mexican they just are good at it they’re very good at that. Interesting. They understand country life, too. Yeah. [28:10] So, what happened? You’re like, you’re going straight. You haven’t really done any time. Surely DEA, I know enough about them that they keep files, and they may not do anything about you now, but they know a lot about you, and they don’t forget. So, what happened here? You can’t feed the government. It’s an entity, not an individual. You know, one guy prosecutes you and he retires. That doesn’t mean your case is over. He hands it over to somebody else and it goes on and on. They didn’t get, I didn’t get caught doing anything. I had too many ways to outmaneuver them and not because I was smarter than anybody else. It’s because I had contact. I had a contact, like I told you, at the Miami Tower where I would call him and say, hey, I need to know where this was. He would call me back and let me know exactly when I could cross. [29:06] So it was a matter of, in my case, I didn’t play Russian roulette. I tried to put things on more of the positive end of it on my side but i’m so they arrested me for money because they thought i had too much first the irs came in and they started checking out the next thing i know is i’m being visited by by the fbi but it was alphabet soup when they showed up at their hotel yeah not the farm i was like what the hell are these guys doing here anyway they grabbed me took me in and i’ll give you a funny story and you used to be a policeman yes all They pick me up, and I say to the guy, the old James Cagney state, I’ll be home before you tonight. Yeah, I’ll be home. You’ll be still writing your report when I’m back home. You’ll still be filling out the paperwork, but I’ll be sitting at home. [29:58] So I played that act. And actually, I did get home pretty quick. I was able to call my lawyer. He actually called up the mayor of Fort Myers. His name was Wilbur Smith. And he was a lawyer also. And Wilbur is the one that got me. It happened to have been on a Friday, which meant if they didn’t work something out, I was going to sit my ass in the jail until Monday. When the judge comes up. But Wilbur got me out of it. Wait a minute. Wait till the dogs get, okay. Can you start that with Wilbur? Wilbur got me out of that when the dogs quit. Let’s see. [30:38] Anyway, Wilbur gets me out of it. I’m walking down the hall with Wilbur to go see the judge real quick. And he says to me, he goes, do you do drugs? Do you have any drugs on you? And I’m like, oh, Jesus. I don’t know. I smoke weed, but I don’t touch anything else. I never have. And he goes, so, okay, we’re okay with that. And in my pocket. I had a joint in my pocket. I pull it out and I go, here. Oh, Jesus Christ, put that back. Oh, Wilbur. Oh, Wilbur’s shit when he saw that. But anyway, I was home. I was home that night. Now, here’s another funny story. I had a, along with this story, I had a maid at the house at the farm. And she was Brazilian. And she was not a resident or anything. That girl took, when they came, went to pick me up. And they took me into, it was a U.S. Marshall. She took off running into the woods. and I’m talking deep Florida woods and when I got back home about an hour later she ends up showing up and I said what are you doing why did you take off like that I was scared they were going to deport me, if you were scared what do you think I was. [31:46] And when they showed up that one time when they showed up you could have sworn that they were picking up Pablo Escobar it was alphabet soup long guns long freaking guns not just People holding their little long guns. Yeah. And I’m like, all this for me? Really? And you know what it is? It’s not long before that happened. They had called me in to do a polygraph. [32:14] The FBI did. I had no problem because they were trying to associate me with the head of the Indian cartel in America, the guy that handled everything, including the money. You might have, did you see Cocaine Cowboys Kings of Miami? Yeah, I did. Okay. The one guy, George Valdez, that was pretty much testifying against the other guys that he said he helped. Like how can you you’re snitching right in front of everybody bro anyway he i had a farm next to his, and the next thing i know because i guess they tried to associate me with him i had nothing to do with him next thing i know the fbi is calling me out they do a polygraph even my lawyer said don’t do the polygraph it’s not mandatory said i got nothing to hide now they told me they were going to ask me about horses they ended up asking me everything except horses until i finally yeah took those things off my fingers i pulled them off and i said this is done and i left not long after that is when they swatted in i was like jesus god who do they think they’re picking up here i’m just a in in uh in sense i’m still even if they know everything i’m still a grunt, I’m working for you. It’s not like I’m Mr. Put-it-together shit. You call me up, hey, we got a job. You want it? Yes or no? But it was unbelievable. [33:41] I went to jail. I did some time in jail. When I got out, I never once again really, even though I got 100 phone calls about you want to go to work, you want to listen to that, I never really thought about it again. My kids were growing up. The youngest one was six or seven by then. And they had suffered because I was gone. Yeah. And I didn’t like that. That made me feel like shit. [34:10] It just, it got to the point where when I was working, I looked at everything economically. Hey, this is what I’ll be able to have. Once you have what you want, economics is bullshit if that’s what you’re working for, because you already have it. Yeah. And when I got out, my thoughts were completely different. My thoughts were that the money is not going to solve any issues I may have. Physically, maybe. Mentally, no. mentally, I’ve got to learn how to deal with a little bit of reality here and figure out who is affected by my actions. And the people that were affected by my actions were people that were close to me. And I didn’t enjoy that. I didn’t enjoy that at all. It made me double take. It made me go inside and do a lot of things. [35:04] So from that point on, I really didn’t know what to do. And so I have a friend who is a big-time producer in Hollywood. We grew up together in Jersey, who told me, wow, you’ve got a lot of stories. You should start writing. I never thought about writing. So I started putting down ideas. I wrote a book. I wrote a bunch of political essays on what was going on in Cuba. See, I grew up in a revolutionary family. My father was in intelligence, and my uncle trained the troops that were going to go to the Bay of Pigs, among other incursions into Cuba. So I came over, I’m six years old. I’m a Peter Pan kid. I don’t know if you know what that is. Now, what is that? You’ve mentioned that before. What is that? Tell the guys. Peter Pan is, it’s not a good translation because it has nothing to do with Peter Pan. In Spanish, it’s Pedro Pan and had to do with a little kid eating some bread or whatever. But in 1960, the Catholic Church got together and decided to send the children out of Cuba so they wouldn’t suffer the wraths of the revolution. In essence, 14,000 kids were put on planes and sent into the States. I was one of them. Wow. I ended up in Miami. [36:27] I was one of them, and I was actually one of the lucky ones because I had family in Miami at that time, so I was able to stay with them. My parents were still back in Cuba applying to leave. Back then, they called the freedom flights. So a lot of those kids though they were sent some of them were sent to alaska montana wyoming really they were dispersed all over through families that were willing to help and and keep them until their parents came so i was one of them that grew up because of my father and my uncle the conversation most of the time if not all the time was around cuba and his freedom so the revolution at that time is going really strong in New Jersey. There’s a family in New Jersey by the name, the last name is Cook. [37:17] And they owned a big factory called Cook, Color, and Chemical. They were very wealthy people, but evidently they lost a lot of land or investments in Cuba. So they were willing to help the revolution and the revolutionaries. They had a big farm in this small little town called Hope. And that little town, you had all the Cuban revolutionaries up there getting ready. I’m talking about going into the woods with every kind of equipment you could think of. And they were training to go to Cuba. Now, here I am, six, seven years old. And I’m running around the woods with these maniacs. They would dress me in camouflage and tell me I was the next generation of Cuban revolutionaries. And I’m like, what the fuck is this guy talking? I didn’t. I was having a good time with all these guys. [38:06] And it ended up being that the new york times caught wind that there were these crazy cubans. [38:12] In the woods in jersey and they had to move their operations down to florida but about what happened in jersey in jersey the mafia at that time they were all involved with the kennedy and the prior to the assassination and everything that was going on they thought that the cubans did it they thought to the mafia. They didn’t know who did it. But there was a get-together one time. I was probably about seven or eight years old, and it was a dove shoot where they had a thousand doves, and they would all line them up and let some of them go, and then they would do a big dove fricassee. But that meeting, I just remember the names because I was being introduced, the son of, and this is Mr. Spud. The names never left me. One of them was Santos Traficante, who was the head of the mafia in in in tampa the other one was fat tony salerno who was the head of the mafia in new york there was my mom’s cousin who was an fbi uh agent and a bunch of other guys that looked exactly like him they dressed exactly like him well i could pick you out of a barrel boy and a lot of these other i grew up in the jersey new york area so i know what tough guys act especially of the Italian guys. So there was a bunch of them walking around like they could take on the world. And this is part of my life. I’m a young person doing it. I really don’t know what’s going on, but I’m picking up on all this stuff. [39:40] They moved to Florida. I’m away from all that stuff for a while. But my parents regularly go to Florida for a visit, for vacation. So every year, I’m running into my uncle and the things that he’s doing, what’s going on. [39:57] And so the life never mentally never leaves me. I’m always, I’m always hearing next year in Havana, we’re going to get them, all this nonsense. So the years go on and on and the situation, you wonder how the smuggling game got started. The smuggling games basically, and I saw a report on this not long ago, some lady reporting on it. You had a lot of educated men that were involved in the revolution that wanted to get their country done. The U.S. government, Secret Service at the ICIA, whoever they may be, cut off the funds when all the bullshit with Cuba was done. You’re not allowed to leave from U.S. soil if we cut you with any arms headed down. And they caught a lot of these Cubans trying to go to Cuba on little boats with all kinds of armament. They didn’t do shit to them. Okay, they just slapped them on the head and don’t do that. But it got to the point where the government was not funding that part of the Cuban Revolution anymore. What do a bunch of college-educated, university-educated men do? [41:06] They’re going to go work at the Fountain Blue? My father worked at the Fountain Blue when he first got to Miami. And there was water fountains that said whites, blacks, and Cubans. He was still trying to drink. It’s like my mother used to tell me. I didn’t know I was white until I got to this country. And now all of a sudden we have white Spanish, white this, white this. It’s ridiculous. So these men were not going to go to work with a little bacon with a little Cuban coffee. They have all these contacts all through Central and South America because of the revolution. So who becomes the primary smugglers? [41:44] Yes, the Cuban revolutionaries. And that’s how smuggling was started in the Caribbean. I’m involved with all these people because of my father and my uncle. My legacy is I can get right in. I don’t have to prove anything to anybody. And that’s how I got to my uncle and him giving me the job with the guy. No, that nonsense. So it’s like the grateful dad said, what a long, strange trip it’s been. It’s been. [42:13] So where are you at now with your life? [42:17] Right now, we’re putting together hopefully a TV show on basically my life, but my life in a novel way, not in a very direct memoir way. And I continue to write. I am married to a wonderful woman who actually led me down this path. I was sitting on my farm doing quite well. My wife at that time had passed away from pancreatic cancer. That’s a death sentence. Yeah, I’ve heard that. [42:52] I didn’t have a will, and everything was in her name because I wanted to protect the family. Yeah. So when she dies, everything’s gone. I’m not knowing which way to turn here. I was 50, 70 years old. I thought I was going to be relaxing and fishing every day, and it didn’t work out that way. I was going downhill like a sled in a snowstorm, boy. I was going to hit eventually. I don’t know what bottom would have been, but I knew there wouldn’t be good. And I ran into a wonderful woman who led me down the road of, we’ve got to write, we’ve got to do this. And she is my manager, and we eventually got married. And sometimes things are tough, but they’re a whole lot better than getting that bottom. Yeah, really. Better than you’re out of jail. You’re not in jail. Not there anymore. What a long, strange trip it’s been for Carlos J.C. Perez. [43:57] I want to know how strange it gets to the point where the DEA comes to me to get information. And I’m like, you guys got to be kidding me. I always knew that when you’re in law enforcement, you depend on information. You go wherever you think the source is, that’s for sure. You think you can get something out of them. Exactly. They ended up being great, by the way. Great guys. Super nice guys. Okay? And if I said any different, I’d be lying. [44:28] But it doesn’t sound like you ever particularly worked for them. You didn’t go back in undercover for them either. No, no, I didn’t do that. Luckily, when I was doing the stuff that I was doing, it wasn’t out. It wasn’t a guns and roses type deal. I don’t ever remember collecting any money or doing anything where I had to have a gun on it. I’ll give you a little tidbit of something that just happened recently. I had to go into a government and reinstate my license or something like that. The lady’s going through it. She comes up with a ticket that I got in 19—now, I’m talking in the year 2000 and probably 14. She comes up with a ticket that I got in 82. It was a ticket. Yeah. The ticket was for $52. Two different tickets, 26 each. Okay. Yeah. You know what that ticket was for? I had come in from the Bahamas in the hull of the boat. I had 800 pounds. The Marine Patrol pulls me over and says, let me see what you got. They go through the whole thing. He finds two lobsters that I had in the live $26 per lobster. I got the ticket. The guy never checked the boat, never did anything. And I got in with 800 pounds, which at that time was like a quarter million bucks. [45:50] Oh my God. Life is funny, man. Life is funny. Life is funny. That’s for sure. All right. Carlos Perez. Now the name of the book and guys, I will, I will have a link in the show notes to it. Remind me of the name of the book, Carlos. Pedro Pan. Pedro Pan, as in Peter Pan. And Ron is bred in Spanish. So there’s something to think about the little magical character, Peter Pan. Not a thing. Not a thing. And it’s a product of a revolution gone bad, which basically is me. I’m an unfortunate product of that. Revolution. You’re back around now. You’re contributing to society. That’s the only thing that’s important in the end. Hey, I have a quick question. Did you ever hear of a book called The Corporation written by a guy named T.J. English? Oh, hell yeah. Read it from cover to cover. As a matter of fact, I know the guy. [46:46] What’s his name? Batista? Was it Jorge Batista? No, Battle. Battle, yeah. As a matter of fact, I know the guys that own the manuscript. Okay tj what’s his name what’s his last name tj english english the only thing he did was write the book off of the notes that they had gotten from a guy that i know his name is tony gonzalez tony gonzalez has another partner by the last name of freitas and what they did was they investigated battle over the years and years and and then somehow ran into english because he had written a couple of books on Cuba. And then T.J. English ended up writing that. And by the way, Battle took the New York mafia and put it on its knees. Yeah, I did a story on the book. And that’s true. He had to get permission. Actually, he had to get permission from back in the 60s from Fat Tony Salerno, and they couldn’t get an approval until Traficante stepped in and said, work with him. And what the hell were they doing then? They were killing each other. They were blowing up their little bolita houses and all that. Oh, that was crazy. But you know what? He was never any kind of a Cuban mafia boss. [48:05] He liked to fight chickens and play the numbers. The Cubans don’t really have a mafia per se. They’re too splintered. And in the mafia, you’ve got to go ask permission to do this and that. These crazy guys, they don’t ask anybody permission for anything. [48:19] Interesting that’s a that’s an interesting world that’s a whole different world that cuban, You’ve got the revolution on one side, the Castro revolution, and then you’ve got the anti-revolution against Castro that’s been going on all these years. And in the middle of it, you’ve got some of these people that were kicked out of Cuba that can’t get jobs and they only want you to work as a waiter or something. And so you go into business and the best business going with your connections is the drug business. And so it’s just a really interesting millage, if you will, or mix of people and situations down in the southwest part or southeast part of the United States. Oh, yeah, you’re right. It is a millage of like, how does this work? [49:04] There’s no sense to it sometimes. No, that’s for sure. I guess I’m glad they weren’t blowing boats out of the water. They might have got you back then. I can’t tell you what. They wouldn’t have dared because I would have said, I said, why don’t you do that? Oh, you get somebody else to do it. Yeah, probably what would have saved my ass anyway is that I have never, ever been money hungry. My family in Cuba, my great-grandfather was a sugar baron. And I’ve heard all the stories about all the money, but I’ve yet to see a penny. [49:36] I don’t work that way. I grew up with a bunch of humble people. And it wasn’t, damn sure, it wasn’t about money. And when I’m young, I’m not thinking like that. But now at my age, I go, wow, man, if I knew then, what do I know now? Yeah, really. All right, Carlos. Thanks a lot for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. No, no problem, Gary. Thanks for having me on. Okay.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, host Gary Jenkins sits down with author and historian Gary Clemente for a deep dive into the remarkable life of Nicola Gentile, one of the most influential yet little-known figures in early American organized crime. Click here to find books by mob expert Gary Celemente Gentile was no street thug. Born in Sicily in 1884, he immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s and became a roving Mafia diplomat—trusted to mediate disputes among crime families in cities such as New York, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Kansas City, Pueblo, Chicago, and beyond. Known as Zio Nicola (“Uncle Nick”), Gentile operated as a stabilizing force during the most violent period of Mafia history, including Prohibition and the Castellammarese War. Clemente reveals that Gentile’s story survives largely because Gentile broke the ultimate Mafia rule: he wrote memoirs. Those writings—published in Italy in the 1960s—were seized by the FBI and later translated by Clemente’s father, Peter Clemente, one of the first Sicilian-born agents assigned to the FBI’s elite Top Hoodlum Squad. The episode offers rare insight into those translations and the intelligence value they held for federal investigators. The discussion traces Gentile’s interactions with legendary figures such as Carlo Gambino, Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and Vito Genovese, as well as his behind-the-scenes role in shaping the Mafia’s modern organizational structure—including the creation of the national Commission. The episode also explores Gentile’s personal contradictions: a lifelong criminal who saw himself as an honorable man, a mediator capable of violence, and a romantic who later believed a lover betrayed him to federal authorities. After fleeing the U.S. under indictment, Gentile returned to Sicily, where he later provided intelligence to Allied forces during World War II—another unlikely chapter in an already extraordinary life. Despite being sentenced to death by Mafia leaders for publishing his memoirs, Gentile was spared due to the respect he commanded on both sides of the Atlantic. He died peacefully in Sicily in 1970, leaving behind a story so expansive it feels tailor-made for film. To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent ‘Brothers against Brothers’ or ‘Gangland Wire,’ the documentaries click here.  To purchase one of my books, click here. [0:00] Hey, all you wiretappers, Gary Jenkins back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. I am a former Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective and now turned podcaster and documented filmmaker. We record the mafia, everything we can about the mob. And today I’ve been wanting to do this story, guys, as a man named Nicola Gentile. Did I get that right, Gary? Beautiful. All right. This is Gary Clemente, and Gary’s been on before, or GP Clemente. He’s been on before. His father was Peter Clemente, who was one of the original Sicilian-born FBI agents in the United States and did a lot of translation work with Bellacci. And he’s written, he’s writing books. So we talked about the first book, but tell just a little bit more about it. And guys, I’ll have links to that book. And then tell me a little bit about the two more you have coming out. The first book that I wrote in a series of books about my father’s lengthy FBI career is called Untold Mafia Tales from the FBI Top Hoodlum Squad. [1:04] And it’s about my father’s career in the mafia from 1950 to 1976. And in 1957, he became a part of the Top Hoodlum squad, which is an elite group that J.H. Goober started as part of the Top Hoodlum program. And what happened was in 1957, they had a big mafia conclave meeting in Appalachian, New York. [1:30] And they had about 60 members of the mafia throughout the country, all the bosses that attended this meeting. And it became publicized. The cops were there. They confiscated their identification, their wallets, the money, everything. And it got released into the news. This was a big story. [1:50] So what happened was J. Edgar Hoover at that time had been denying the existence of the mafia for a number of reasons. Probably because he didn’t want to get involved with all of the muck of trying to prosecute these gangland people because he knew that they had a lot of buffers between the bosses and the guys committing the murders. So he knew it was going to be difficult, and it would blemish their conviction record and rate. So he kind of stayed away from it, denied the existence of the mafia, And along comes this Appalachian Conclave meeting. It got released into the news, and everybody was up in arms about this. That’s when Hoover decided to start the Top Hoodland program, because there was absolutely no denial of what was going on here, that there was some sort of vast criminal organization that was highly organized, and he had to do something about it. So in 1957, my father became part of the Top Hoodlum program. [2:54] And in particular, the Top Hoodlum squad in New York City, which is really a hotbed of mafia criminal activity. You couldn’t get any more hotter than what they had. They had five mafia families alone in New York. And the first book was really about how my father confronted Carlo Gambino, how Carlo Gambino became one of his original subjects for him to study and to profile. [3:24] He was ordered to do that, and he was happy to do that. The book is really about him confronting face-to-face with Carlo Gambino, and then afterwards wiretapping him at the Golden Gate Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida. He was on the other side of a wall. From Gambino for six weeks. Gambino did not know he was on the other side of the wall wiretapping him with another agent. So that’s what the first book was about. And the second book is about really the backstory of my father’s life before he got into the FBI a little bit. Then his first years in the Bureau, when he was a part of the investigation of the Communist Party and the Workers’, Party and the few offices that he was in, like the Springfield, Illinois office, and also Cleveland. And then he became a part of the New York office. He was still investigating communist activities at the time. And then he became a part of the Top Woodland squad. And his milieu, his wheelhouse, became organized crime and the mafia. So that’s generally what has happened so far. The second book is being released this coming month, and it will We’ll have book two and book three talking about these sorts of things. [4:44] Interesting. Interesting. All right, guys, I’ll have a link to the old book down there in the show notes and look for that new book coming up and we’ll get back together. I’ll get back with Gary after the book comes out sometime and we’ll do another show. And we’re not going to talk about the mafia so much. We’re going to talk about these activities, which I think is interesting, of the FBI against the Social Workers Party and the Communist Party USA because they did a lot of work. When I was growing up, Gary, do you remember I Led Three Lives, the TV show about, his last name was Phil Brick. It was a weekly TV show about an undercover FBI agent who supposedly was working as a member of the Communist Party. He would go to these meetings and things like that. Do you remember that? I Led Three Lives. I do remember that. That show goes way, way back. What year was that show? Oh, that had to be 1953, 54. I had to be like 9, 10 years old, 55. I was 10 years old, so it probably may be 1955. I do remember the show. I think I’ve seen reruns of it. Yeah, I bet it’s on YouTube. I have to look that up for fun one of these days. [5:52] Issue Machine’s show back then, we will talk about this later on at another time as regards to the second book. Back in the 1950s, J. Edgar Hoover’s main enemy was the Communist Party. It wasn’t organized crime. That was his top focus. He wrote a book called Masters of Deceit. And people, I think everybody, they should have this book in public school system, but they don’t want to do that today. Today’s public school system, they try to inculcate youngsters in more social activities and social warriors and not learning about the perils of Marxism and communism. [6:33] Okay, today we’re going to talk about Nicola Gentile. Now, 1903, he was a Sicilian immigrant that came to the United States, and he found a lot of opportunity among the other Sicilian immigrants because he was a blackhander, if you will, when he first got here. He was a criminal who came over from Sicily, but he was able to move among all the different families, all the different cities, and settle disputes and help people get organized and do things like that. Gary, start telling us a little bit about what you remember about Nicola Gentile. First of all, I want to tell people that Nicola Gentile was an uber jovelace. He was jovelace on steroids. Somebody later on in his life, toward the end of his life, he wrote his memoirs down. This was in 1963. So what happened was he published his memoirs in Italy. He had a co-author, he had another journalist write these memoirs down in Sicilia. [7:36] These memoirs were then grabbed by the FBI and they were given to my father. My father had the papers written in Sicilian. And I remember as a boy in 1963, when this happened, my father was sitting at a table translating these memoirs with my grandmother. Now, my grandmother grew up not too far away. My grandmother and my grandfather grew up not too far away from Nicola Gentile. Nicola was born in the town of Siculiana. Try to say that, Gary. [8:14] I give. I said that one real fast. So he’s writing these, translating the memoirs with my Sicilian-speaking grandmother and grandfather. My grandfather spoke, my grandparents, my father spoke Sicilian as well, too. He grew up with that as a little boy. But my grandmother and my grandfather were helping him translate these papers. These are the FBI papers. This is a copy. This is a copy of the FBI photocopy after it got translated. And my father did write some notes here and there. You can see it’s fairly light. The print is fairly light on it. I do have some post-it notes or notations, comments on it. But this is about 185 pages that were translated. And the language is quite formal, I’ll read to you a little bit of the first page What Nicola Gentile wrote as he started off Before you get started there, was that book ever translated? Is that available here in English form like on Amazon as a book you can buy today? I know a lot of people are wondering, can I find that? [9:34] That’s a good question. I haven’t gone that far yet. Okay, all right. I don’t know. I’ll take a look. That is a good question. But this is the translation that my father and my grandparents did. And whether it came out that way in these books that are out now, I don’t know. There are some books that do talk about Nicola Jantili, but I don’t know if there are any English translation books. So this is how the first page of Nicola’s book opens. Siculiana, a small town of Sicily, did not, prior to 1900, offer any opportunity for work or secondary school education for the betterment of life of its youth. [10:22] The greater portion of whom in which there existed the disposition encouraged by the family while still young frequented the shop of an artisan where they struggled to learn a trade, but at the same time often neglecting school so that illiteracy reigned supreme. So that’s the sort of language that Nicola used in it. And it’s quite interesting. It’s a bit formal. He does jump around a bit from his activities from one place to another. He talks a lot about how he knew practically everybody in the mob at that time. He knew people like Luciano. He knew he interacted with Al Capone. He interacted with Vito Genovese. He interacted with Albert the Mad Hatter, Anastasia. These were all the big shots. I’m talking about in the 1920s through the 1930s and all the way after. If you remember that in the 1920s, the 1919 prohibition happened, okay? That’s what really blew up out of everything, the prestige, the money, and the power of the mafia. That’s how it grew because of prohibition. and they were able to bootleg liquor, and Nikola was indeed a part of this. [11:51] He traveled around a lot. Now, what was the deal with that? He was in New York. I think that was his base, and that’s where he got started, but he traveled to, I think, New Orleans, or did he come up from New Orleans? I can’t remember. He was in Kansas City. He was in Cleveland. He was in Pueblo, Colorado. He made some connections. There’s a really old, early family in Pueblo, Colorado. I’ve talked to a descendant of that family, and I’ve talked to another author that knew quite a little bit about it so he traveled around to these different families what was the story with that, For whatever reason, he was a robing ambassador and a mediator. Look, you’re talking about organized crime. You’re talking about the mafia. You’re talking about vicious people who had one thing and one thing only in mind. What was it? Duh, money. Money and power. Because of that, you’re going to have disputes. You’re going to have arguments. You’re going to have people being killed as a result of it. And Gentile was the sort of individual that, think of Nicola Gentile as a Vida Colleone. [12:59] Think of him as a godfather figure. Very wise, understanding how to mediate the disputes, realizing that, as everybody else did, that if we do not mediate these disputes, what will happen? We will be at each other’s throats like animals. Yeah. And our organization cannot exist. Our universe, our world cannot exist if this happens. So we must mediate these disputes. We must have an organizational structure. We must have a boss. We must have an underboss. We must have a consigliere, an advisor, who tells, who gives words of wisdom about how to proceed with business. Whether to take somebody out, how to proceed in such a fashion. So all of that was a part of the world. And it existed for many years, for many decades because of that. [14:01] Now, let me start off a little bit to tell you the beginnings of Nicola so we can lead up to how he got to this position. So he was born in 1884. He came to America at the age of 19 and went to New York. He travels to Kansas City to meet with his brother Vincent, who lived in Topeka, Kansas, not too far away from Kansas City. He started working out in the Santa Fe Railroad, and he became a linen peddler, and he did make some money doing that. He returned to Italy in 1909. He married in 1910 and had a daughter named Maria. Now, in his papers, you really don’t hear anything more about that happening. You don’t hear anything about his wife, children, nothing. And it isn’t until later on, at the very end of his memoirs, he talks about the women in his life. We’ll get to that later. But so what happened was he returns back from Italy, gets back to America, and he goes to Canada. Then he moves to San Francisco with his brother, and he continues to sell linen until 1914. And it isn’t until he was a year or two later, maybe about the age of 19, 20 or so, he starts getting involved with the Honor Society. [15:27] Now, he knows about the Honor Society from back in Sicily. He’s been well aware of it. He’s been involved with it. At the age of 15, he had been convicted of a crime, and he had been sentenced to jail at the age of 15. So he wasn’t new to the world of organized crime. He knew it from back in Sicily. It’s a very deep fabric of the world of Sicily at that time. Why is that? Because in Sicily, in those years, in the late 1800s, you had either what? You had a sort of a feudal system where people were working for these large landowners, and the landowners were absentee landowners, okay? They delegated authority to people underneath them, and the people working for their land and working on their land were really, for example, a lot of poverty happened because of it. So to bridge that sort of gap with poverty, the Mafia started, in other words, and they called it the Honor Society. These were men of honor. And Nicola Gentile describes it as the, let me see here. [16:39] He describes the honor society, originating many years ago in antiquity, and it gives the right to defend the honor of the weak and to respect human law. With these principles as its guide, it’s still operated within the mafia. So you understand that within the honor society, here’s the code that we must be civilized, even though we’re acting like animals. [17:08] We don’t want to act too much like animals but otherwise we will destroy, the golden goose so this is what they put in the back of their minds we must act in a civilized manner, so that was the understanding of how the outer society worked so he went to New York he went to Brooklyn, and at that time the mafia probably had 2,000 2,000 members of the mafia in New York at that time, between the five families. They call them Bocate families. So he joined the Outer Society in Pittsburgh. [17:49] And soon after, he was asked by Gregorio Conte, the head of the mob boss in Pittsburgh, to do a killing for him. Okay? Now, he doesn’t say whether this was an initiation right, because that’s what they usually did in the mafia. You had to kill somebody in order to be initiated into the mafia, become a member of it. So he was ordered to do a killing, and what happened was he confronted this individual in front of a restaurant. His brother shoots the victim in front of the restaurant. He runs away before Nikola, empties his gun into the guy. Paul runs away. Nicola’s standing there with his gun. People are yelling and screaming, oh my gosh, he did it. He killed this person. Paul is running down the street. He takes his firearm. He shoots it up in the air. [18:45] Scares the crowd away. Nicola runs away. He escapes from that scene. Now, Nicola really has never, throughout his mafia career, he’s never been arrested. It isn’t until later on in his life that he actually does get under the eye of the police and he becomes indicted and will get arrested. So that’s what happens to him later on. But later, during his life in the mob, he does not get arrested in any way, shape, or form. Although he got to Italy, when he goes back to Italy, he was under the scrutiny of the police there and he had been arrested. He gets out on bail, and he was accused of crimes there. So he was pretty slippery. But in terms of what we’re talking about, his mediation skills, little by little, he becomes this sort of individual that people look at as somebody that can mediate their problems and to tamper down the situation that can become very hot. And he became somebody that the other mobsters called, they called him Uncle Nick or Zio Nicola, Zio Cola, Uncle Cola. They saw him as a sort of a vunticular figure. [20:07] That could ameliorate these disputes and these situations that they were involved with. In Kansas City, our mob boss was Nick Savella for a long time, and I was looking over some wiretaps, and people were talking about him, and one of his underlings was talking to another underling about something he was going to take to him, and he called him Zeo the whole time. They always referred to him as Zeo, so that’s a term of honor and respect throughout the mafia world. [20:37] That’s right. As I keep saying, the mafia was able to exist for as long as it did because they had an organizational structure. They had a code of honor that kept them from not acting like wild animals too much. Too much. A lot of these people, you’ve met more than your share of criminals. Gary, you know how many of these people can be. Some of them can be very business-like. Some of them can be very vicious, vicious, sick people too. And the great scarpets of the world that would kill dozens of people. These were psychopaths. You had your whole range. You had your whole range of people. And the fascinating thing about Gentile was that he knew a lot of these individuals. You talked about the Kansas City, the Kansas City entity. Yes, Pueblo, Colorado did have its problems at that time. And somebody had been killed, the Pueblo, Colorado family, and that sort of spilled over into Kansas City. Kansas City was asking to mediate the situation, and it was Chile mediated the situation because of it. [21:57] Chantina became the boss of the Kansas City family. Now, he does not get into this in great depth about what he did in Kansas City at Boston, but it was a temporary thing. He was bopping around from Pittsburgh to Cleveland to Kansas City. He went to New York. He was in Boston. He was far away, San Francisco, Los Angeles. He was all over the place. And he was very well respected. He had a lot to do with what was going on in Chicago with Al Capone. Interestingly enough, Al Capone, at that time, when Gentile encountered him, his family, if you want to call it his crime family, had a lot of international entities in it. It wasn’t an Italian thing. He had a lot of different people from different ethnic backgrounds as a part of his organization. It wasn’t until Nicola comes around and the mafia bosses came around and told him, look, this is what the mafia is like. We’re not an international group here. [23:08] It’s strictly Italian. You want to be a part of it, you need to buy into this. Okay. And that’s indeed what he did, bought into the mafia, marginalize the people that were not Italians. Booted them out and or killed them sometimes and started his own mafia italian thing in chicago which became very very well known as as a bloody place to believe bloody bloody place to be because of the the killings that they had prior to him being a part of the mafia officially there were a tremendous amount of gangland killings as you know in chicago so he had a large part to and he He did keep a lot of those other ethnicities around as players, as people he could use, though. And on into Frank Nitti’s time and on up into current modern times, up into the 50s and 60s, they had several people that were on the periphery would be associates. But I guess he had more organization of Sicilians, it looks to me like, over the years. Yes, yes, he did. What happened eventually was, as Gary, the Castellamareci War erupted in the 1930s. That’s another hard one to say, Castellamareci. Castellamareci. I can say that, Castellamareci. [24:35] Try to say that real fast. So what happened, the Castellamareci War erupted. In June, the boss mazzeria was the boss of bosses. They called him the king. Was the boss of the Capetituticape, the boss of bosses, okay? [24:53] And Mazzaria was wielding a very heavy hand that a lot of the other bosses in the country did not like at that time. And in particular, Maranzano became his chief foe. And he was originally from the Castellammare area of Sicily, okay? and his henchmen, his crew, the men around him were from that area. So they had a big war with the children past Mazaria. They wanted to assume power. A lot of people were dying. They were dropping like flies, especially over in New York. And Nicola Gentile was one of the people that were trying to mediate this situation between Mazaria and Marazano. Originally, Nicola sided with Mazaria, but then the ties changed. In turn, everybody wanted Mazaria dead. All the other bosses wanted him dead, including Capone. Mazaria was eventually executed in, I believe it was 1931. [26:05] And so Salvatore Marzano assumes power, okay? The people that Mazaria had underneath him, And Marisano said, we need to get rid of these guys. So he wound up killing all of the mazzarela boys. So everybody was saying, look, I don’t see any end of this bloodshed. We don’t need this publicity, okay? We need to operate in the shadows, okay? And Carlo Gambino was an expert at doing that. So what happened was the war ended. Marisano took over. He kills the boys. But then after that Marzano, what happens power gets to his head and easily lies the crown of the king, Marzano eventually gets killed by the other bosses and it was Vito Genovese. [27:00] It was Vito Genovese that was ordered to do the hit on Marazano with his crew. And as a result of that, Gary, the other bosses said, look, we need more structure here. There’s too much bloodshed. We can’t have this going on forever and ever. So they created a commission. Now, they did have other commissions before. They did have general assemblies like that. And so they created a commission that included Lucky Luciano, included Al Capone. [27:35] Included Joe Profaggi, included Joe Bananas as part of the commission to settle down, settle things down. Now, I said that originally, when we started that, that they had an Appalachian conclave, right? They had about 60 bosses, 60, 80 bosses there at that conclave. That’s big. Believe it or not, while the big war was going on, Al Capone had a meeting on his dime in Boston, I believe. Guess who was there? I’m sorry, about 500. They had 500 mafia guys there. And there was no publicity about it. Not what happened later on in Appalachian, New York. So here you have, you imagine, 500 mob guys meeting at a hotel in Boston, and it wasn’t covered by the media at that time. But that’s part and parcel of what Nicola was involved with, some of the people he was involved with at that time. So what happens to him later on? What stirs him to write this book? [28:44] What happened was, toward the latter part of his life, he starts to talk about a couple of women that he was involved with. He talks about, I will put all the paperwork so you can actually hear the words that he talks about. He talks about how he met this woman named Maria. [29:08] He meets this woman named Maria, and he really captures his imagination. He doesn’t talk about that he had been married, that he also had a child, too. He had a child named Maria. So he meets this woman named Maria, and she’s really stricken with him. And to the point where she tells him that she’s so smitten with him that I’m going to read what, He tried to pose as a jewelry salesman so that he could meet her. He says, I suspected that you weren’t a jewelry salesman. She says to him, she said, you did. She whispered in my ear, lightly touching my earlobe with her lips. She used to finish by kissing me on the mouth wild with love. There were moments of passion that our bodies would entwine, palpitating with love, and which would later be abandoned with languid reproves. So that’s the sort of language he used. And at one point, he talks about how he liked going to her apartment to visit her when he was feeling edgy. [30:28] You’re a mobster. You feel a little bit edgy. You’re always looking over your shoulder, right? So he was happy to go to her apartment to calm down, and she would talk to him. And she says, Mary was happy to see me. She used to tell me, Nick, that’s how she called me, you are an extraordinary man. You don’t know with what fear and respect those Boers, the Shacatani, speaker view. The Shacatani were the people of Sciacca, Sicily, that were mobsters that he associated with. It says, your name impresses everyone. Any woman alive brought to live among this rabble would be happy to be your co-worker, to wear men’s clothes, and at the necessary time of the occasion should present itself, to embrace a Tommy gun and die in your arm. [31:26] So that’s the sort of romantic verbiage that they used at the time. So what happened, too, was he sees her, then eventually he meets another woman named Dorothy. [31:41] She professes herself to be Irish to begin with, but then he finds out later as she tells him, I’m actually not Irish. I come from a Sicilian family. But she just wanted to impress him somehow to get his eyes. She was very attracted to him, to this woman, Dorothy. What happened was they have a love affair with each other, and Nikola, this is to the very end of his story here, Nikola had been involved with a gambling house in New York, and the gambling house was starting to go underwater. He needed money, so it was proposed to him by another mobster by the name of Jacono to do some narcotic trafficking down in Texas and Louisiana. [32:31] He gets the permission to do so from his bosses. Look, Nicola was still a roving asset, and he had to get permission to do things so that he could acquire enough money for investments, so he can give them money back, so he gets permission to do this. He starts getting involved with the drug trafficking trade in Texas and Louisiana, and he sees that he’s being tailed a lot. He doesn’t understand why. He says, out of nowhere, the police would show up. How did they find out? At the same time, he was trying to contact Dorothy. Before he left, Dorothy asked him. [33:11] Will I be seeing you much? She said, I don’t know. I could be gone six months or a year. She says that she’s so heartbroken about this. And he leaves and he gets involved with the drug trade. And he’s asking these questions about how is it that the cops are showing up at these different places where we are trying to transact business? What happens was he tried to contact Dorothy at different places where she said that she could be contacted. She didn’t get back to him. So he puts two and two together. He thinks that he believes that Dorothy was actually a treasury agent. She had been spying on him, that she was the Mata Hari, so to speak, and was feeding the information to the feds. to where he was. So what happened was they indicted him, got out on bail on $18,000 bail, and he was urged to be a stowaway to get to Italy. So he stows away on a ship, gets back to Italy. And interestingly enough, Gary. [34:23] He starts at World War II erupts, and he becomes an asset to the Allies in Sicily. He’s given them intelligence about what’s happening in Sicily with the mafia in Sicily. And the mafia in Sicily did not want to have anything to do with Mussolini. Mussolini was trying to bag on them big time. He’s trying to shut them down. And Nicola helped the Allies with intelligence reports on what was going on in Sicily. And that was a big part of what he was doing. And then later on, it wasn’t until 1963 or so, and he was still getting involved. He was still getting involved with the mafia at that time, doing criminal activities. But he wasn’t welcomed as much as he had been before. But he was still involved with them. What happened was the 60s came around, and he started writing his memoirs. He was an older man, and he started writing these things down on paper. [35:28] Which is what a mafia member does not do. You do not speak a word, let alone try to write it on paper. Otherwise, it’s a penalty of death. So he wrote all of these memoirs down in 1963. It got published that he was sentenced to death. But one of the mafia families in Sicily refused to do it. They refused to do it because he had a lot of respect. Members of the mafia in the U.S. And also in Sicily respected Gintilian very much because he had this godfather air about him. He had the Vita Corleone air about him. I will talk to you, and I will come up with a solution for you. Everybody’s calmed down by that. They’re not so excited and bloodthirsty when they hear that. They sense him to death. The mafia family in Sicily refused to carry out the hit. The book was published, and he lived the rest of his life in peace. He died peacefully as an old man in Sicily in 1970. Wow, 1970. That’s a hell of a story. That is a hell of a story, man. [36:44] I’m telling you you can make a movie out of this man’s life oh yeah literally the way he was jumping around from one place to the other he was really a maverick rogue sort of individual who is who did not have a higher education about him but was extremely intelligent and was able to use this and that’s what that’s why they respected him a lot of these individuals that he dealt with were boars and uneducated individuals to begin with. Many of them were highly intelligent. And as my dad always told me, his son, these individuals, especially the mob bosses, they could have been tycoons of finance. They could have been industrial tycoons, wizards of finance and economics and Wall Street if they had wanted to, but they did not want to. So they choose a life of crime. [37:40] Interesting. I’ll tell you what, that’s a hell of a story, Gary. That is a really cool story. I’d always wanted to do this guy’s story, mainly because I knew of his Kansas City connection. I talked to our local FBI agent here that has chronicled a lot of these things, got a book out there about those early days, and he’s excited. He’s looking forward to listening to this. So I really appreciate you coming on the show. Gary Clemente, GP Clemente. His father was Peter Clemente, the first Sicilian-born member of the FBI Top Hoodlum Squad. And Gary has been translating his works, is what he did. He wrote down a lot of stuff, and Gary’s been translating. He’s putting it down to a series of books. It’s called, let’s see, it is Untold Mafia Tales from the FBI Top Hoodlum Squad, I believe. I think I can read that on your event there. He does speaking events, too. If you’re back east, you’re from New York City area. Where are you from? Where do you speak at? I originally grew up in New Jersey, not too far from one of the Sopranos guys. [38:47] In New Jersey, my father was working at the New York office at that time and decided to buy a home in the suburbs of New York, not too far away from New York City. So that’s where I grew up. On the right side of the track. If somebody wants to get a hold of you to do a speaking engagement, though, how do they find you? They can get a hold of me at my email, gpclementibooks, gpclementibooks, at gmail.com. And I’m also on X, gpclementi16, I’m also on X. And the book is available on Amazon. You can pick it up there, and it’s doing quite well. I’m looking forward to the next one coming out next month. Yeah, I bet you’re looking forward to that. Yeah, and if you get his book, be sure and give him a review. Give him a good review on whatever review you want to give, but give him a good review. Please. [39:48] Because it helps these guys a lot to get a good review. More people will buy their book. And we, guys, we all want to encourage these mob historians. And Gary has done a real great job at chronicling the history, not just the blood and guts. We all like the blood and guts stories and the murder stories, but the entire history. You were talking about them being out in Pueblo, Colorado, and I just couldn’t figure that out. I just talked to a woman whose ancestors were in Pueblo, Colorado, connected to the mob out there. And she said that what it is, there was lead mines out there, and a lot of Sicilians were miners, and they went to that southern Colorado area to work in the mines. And I know we have a large group of Sicilian populations in southwest Missouri where there were strip mines down there for coal. And it’s a huge family of them down there. And so it’s, you know, where the work was is where people went to, and that’s how they ended up spread around the country. [40:45] That’s right. There were many Sicilians in San Francisco, Louisiana. Believe it or not, when Sicilians were in Louisiana when they first immigrated to Louisiana, there were several of them that had been home because they were looked upon as less than human. And the locals did not want them infiltrating their population. So it didn’t just happen to African-Americans, it also happened to Sicilians. Yeah, I’ve read about that story. So it’s an immigrant experience. Any group of immigrants that comes to the United States at first. [41:25] You know, the greater population, the English and the Irish and the Germans already have the good jobs and they keep them pushed out. And they have a different language, totally different language. And everybody else is speaking English. And so it’s really hard for an immigrant population to move in. That’s why they have to start businesses. And along with them, they brought the mafia. They had brought this tradition of the mafia that is shadow government, if you will, for them. Well, that’s true. And I must add that even though I talk a lot about the mafia and the world of the mafia, the Cosa Nostra, that my father was involved with, My father would be the first to tell you he was not proud of the criminal association and organization that these people started. He was not proud of it in any way. In fact, if you read my first book, you will read the part about how my father confronted Carlo Gambino and told him to his face that he was not proud of what Gambino and his associates were doing. And the bad name that they were bringing upon other Italian and Sicilians that had come to this country, like my grandparents, that work hard and made something of themselves. It’s not something to be proud of. Fascinating, interesting, but it’s not something that I’m certainly not proud of either. But pretty amazing, considering these people could have done something more honest. [42:51] But they chose not to. That’s a whole other story and movie to talk about. Yeah, it is. Gary Clemente, I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thanks so much. You’re welcome. Thank you, Gary. Great being here. Gary to Gary. Gary to Gary, yeah. You know, they don’t name Gary anymore. Gary, little kids, Gary anymore. That was back right after the war in the early 50s. Everybody was named Gary. I had three Garys, I think, in my class. I tell you, I went to this movie with my grandkids. It’s called Zootopia. And they had a character in there called Gary the Snake. [43:27] So that’s what we’ve devolved down to, We’re nothing but snakes, Gary Guys, I really appreciate y’all tuning in And don’t forget to like and subscribe And down in the show notes, I’m going to have links to this stuff And I’ve got links to some of the stuff that I sell My books and DVDs If you want to rent them, I’ve got a link to that You can rent my DVDs for $1.99 So thanks a lot, guys. Okay, Gary, thank you. Hey, thank you, Gary. Thank you very much. Really appreciate that you’re having me on. Really enjoy it. Anything I can do for you, please let me know. Anything I can do. You know that I’ve got your endorsement on the back of the book, right? I didn’t remember. I do so much sometimes, Gary, that I forget all what I do good. Yeah, I’ve got your endorsement on the back of the book. I gave you a good endorsement. All right. The second book, the one that’s coming out, the one that’s coming out, we’ll have the same thing on there. You got some author blurbs? You got enough author blurbs on there? Yeah, yeah. Your endorsement will be on the back of the next book, too. Okay, all right, all right. All right, Gary. Thanks a lot, my friend. Hey, thank you, buddy. Anything in Kansas City. When the other book comes out, I’ll let you know. Yeah, let me know. We’ll do that show here in a couple of months. Okay? Hey, thank you very much. Appreciate it. All right, all right. Stay safe. Okay, buddy. Take care. Bye-bye.

In this episode, Gary Jenkins, retired intelligence detective, sits down with veteran true crime authors Frank Gerardot and Burl Barer to examine their book Where Murder Lies, a case that intersects Russian organized crime, Italian mob connections, and a troubling claim of wrongful conviction. At the center of the story is Jimmy Kitlas, a young man who struggled with learning disabilities and instability after aging out of a rehabilitation facility in Los Angeles. Facing homelessness and limited options, he gravitated toward individuals connected to the Russian mob, seeking protection and belonging. Instead, he was drawn into criminal schemes—including check fraud and drug trafficking—engineered by experienced mob figures who exploited his vulnerabilities. Frank and Burl provide historical context on the rise of Russian organized crime in the United States, particularly in neighborhoods like Brighton Beach. Unlike the rigid hierarchy of traditional Mafia families, these groups often operated through looser networks, engaging in lucrative scams such as gas tax fraud alongside Italian crime figures. The authors explain how these alliances blurred lines between ethnic crime groups and created new power structures within the American underworld. The discussion then shifts to the murder that reshaped Jimmy’s life. What began as manipulation and grooming evolved into betrayal, jealousy, and ultimately violence. The authors detail how Jimmy’s arrest followed a carefully orchestrated narrative that shifted blame onto him while shielding more powerful figures. Through examination of court records and transcripts, Gerardot and Barer argue that investigative failures and prosecutorial decisions compounded the injustice. 0:02 Introduction and Guests 0:47 Wrongful Conviction Discussion 4:26 Kelly Lee’s Influence 6:33 Russian Mob Background 12:28 Jimmy Kitlas’ Journey 18:47 Investigative Challenges 22:58 The Murder Plot 26:45 Russian Mob Operations 28:29 Geographic Control in LA 31:29 Trust and Collaboration 35:03 Daniel Patterson’s Role 37:10 Conclusion and Book Promotions Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee” Subscribe to the website for weekly notifications about updates and other Mob information. To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent ‘Brothers against Brothers’ or ‘Gangland Wire,’ the documentaries click here.  To purchase one of my books, click here. [0:00] Hey, all you wiretappers, good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective, and I have two guests today. Frank Girdo. Is that correct, Frank? Girdo? That’s pretty good. Gerardot. I’ll take it. Gerardot. Gerardot. Just don’t pronounce a T at the end, right? Yes, sir. [0:24] And Burl Barer. Is it Barer, Burl? Yep, that’s close enough for government work. Joe’s enough for government work. That’s the story of my life, as everybody knows. I like to get it close. And we never let the real facts get in the way of a good story either. So let’s just get going here. We like to tell stories on this channel. That’s what my guys like is stories. [0:44] Stories about the Russian mob and maybe a little bit about the Italian mob. And we also got a story about a wrongful conviction, which is a kind of a hot topic right now. We’re seeing a lot of different things in these true crime shows about wrongful convictions. And there’s been, I think a lot of them have been uncovered. In the last few years because people started paying attention to that a little more than they used to. When I was a policeman, they didn’t pay any attention. Never heard of a wrongful conviction. I really congratulate you investigators and authors and true crime diggers out there that see these things and then go take a look at them because they need to be taken and given a look at. So Burl Baer is an Edgar winning author and two-time Anthony Ward nominee. He’s got a lot of experience in reporting. I see you’ve been in the Hollywood Reporter, even the London Sunday Telegraph, New York Times, USA Today. [1:38] You’ve got, I believe you’ve got some other, what else do you do, Burrell? I watch a lot of TV, watch a lot of movies. What kind of shows have you been on? You’ve done other investigations here. Yeah. I did almost, Frank and I have done most of those shows. Deadly Women, Deadly Sins, Behind Mansion Walls, you know, all. [1:57] Do you name them and claim them? We’ve probably been on them. All right. And Frank Gerardot, you’re a journalist, radio host. You’ve authored several true crime nonfiction books, co-author with Burl on A Taste for Murder, Betrayal in Blue. And you did one with somebody else named Byrne. Oh, that was about John Orr. And I read that book. Actually, I read that book, that John Orr. That was a hell of a story, man. That was a hell of a story. Several years ago. So that’s a, it’s a crazy thing. And that, that, that book really tells the story of John Orr through his daughter’s perspective. Ah, okay. And, and I don’t remember which one I read. I read one. I listened to a podcast about the whole thing all the way through guys. That was the LA County was an LA County fireman, fire investigator who was sat in his own fire all up and down in California. Oh yeah. He would go up North. He was in Southern California. He would go up north to a fire conference and he’d set fires on the way back. It was crazy, craziest story I ever read. And after he got arrested, the number of arson fires in California declined by 70%. I’ll be darned. I’ll be darned. He set brush fires, just all kinds of fires. It was crazy. Name of that book is Burn, Guys, if you’re interested in that by Frank Cardo. That’s the French pronunciation. Yes, sir. Yes. [3:18] So these two guys, they have their publicist, God Hold Me, and they introduced me to this book, Where Murder Lies. It is a fascinating look, and they did a real great examination of the Russian mob, a little connection to the Italian mob in New York City as part of this investigation into really a wrongful conviction case, a wrongful conviction of a kid who was, I guess we don’t use the word retarded anymore. He was mentally disabled and retarded in some manner. I’m not sure exactly how to describe that anymore. How would you guys describe him? So, yeah, I think he’s differently abled. We’ll say that. He’s actually a pretty smart guy. He speaks a lot of languages. He read this book in a night. [4:01] He just, I think more of his problem is that he’s maybe learning. He had learning difficulties. And as you’ll see when we get into the book here, he had a lot of physical and emotional trauma growing up. Okay. Jimmy Kittlis was his name. Yes. And a woman named… Kelly Lee. [4:22] A woman named Kelly Lee got you guys interested in this story. It’s a wrongful conviction story that strays into this mob ties. Who was she? Now, who was Kelly Lee? [4:32] I could tell you about Kelly Lee. She was one of the first people I met when I came to Los Angeles in November of 2003. Three, she was doing intake at Teshuvah, which is a Jewish community kind of rehab for people with all-matter recovery issues. I’d just been through a bad patch, et cetera. He needed some help. She did my intake. Wound up becoming friends with her and her husband. And a few years later, we’re having dinner together. She says, oh, Pearl, you’re a true crime writer. I go, duh, yeah. And she pulls out a handful of court transcripts that are difficult to get nowadays. Thank you. Says, take a look at this. She was, at the time this murder took place, what I would term an unlicensed pharmaceutical supplier on the streets of West Hollywood. Correctly. Gotcha. Marijuana, primarily. Yeah. And she had six arrests for selling pot, which now would probably get her a community service award here. Yeah. Times were different. And when Jimmy Kittlis ages out of the facilities or whatever down in Lake Elsinore. When he turns 18, they just put him on a bus with a ticket to West Hollywood. Goodbye. [5:49] And he gets off. He meets her. She’s a very compassionate person. She can see that this kid is really childlike. Babe in the woods or babe on the street, he’s really going to get taken advantage of. She takes him under her wing like a surrogate mom and tries to tell him and teach him how to survive on the street. And then she said, he’s like a child. Could be really eager to please, super polite, has the intentions man of a goldfish. Oh, look, there’s a castle. Oh, look, there’s a castle. It’d be very easily used. [6:28] It had a lot of sexual energy. He needed a girlfriend. He got one and got her pregnant. And she really tried to help these kids, But she couldn’t be with him 24-7 And she certainly raised her eyebrows When she saw who was spending a lot of time With this couple And that was a well-known fellow In the Russian mob, Yeah, I read that So let’s talk a little bit about the Russian mob So you guys really went in the background When they first came to Brighton Beach Tell the guys a little bit about that background. [7:02] Yeah, sure. As the Soviet Union began to crumble, a lot of Russian Jews found their way to New York, and they found their way to Brighton Beach. And they set up a sort of black market trading system among themselves and within the community with all the sort of standard features of mafia, right? Protection, extortion, sometimes murder, certainly dealing in black market stuff like drugs. [7:32] Clubs, prostitution, just about every kind of crime you can think of happening in a neighborhood that’s protected by a mafia. These guys were controlling in this neighborhood of Brooklyn called Brighton Beach. What I thought was interesting, and readers will probably find interesting too, is that there’s not a real setup like a commission or families. The Russian mob really operates more like Ronin. There’s guys that just independent operators and build up their business based on their relationships and how many people they can pull into a scheme. What we also found is that these guys were pretty adaptable and they picked up on a scam that the Lucchesis and the Gambinos were operating. And that was to get gas, steal it, take it from places where it wasn’t really tracked and put it into gas stations, sell it for maybe a penny less than the guy across the street, but capture the tax, the federal excise tax money and pocket it. And this was a multi-million dollar scheme And to the fine-tuning of it The Russian mob, Worked with guys like Michael Francesi To really extract as much as they could from it One of the guys in our book. [9:00] Meyer Ida, who was in Brighton Beach and operating there, came to Los Angeles in the mid-90s and started up the gas tax scheme. But the feds were pretty wise to it at that point, and he got caught up in the sting. Interesting. If I remember right, some of them were, they couldn’t steal it, but they would set up companies, shell companies, and then buy gas and then sell it a little bit cheaper. And it was up to them to collect the tax and then pay the state. And they do this for a certain period of time. And then they just declare file bankruptcy or just walk away from that shell company and create another little LLC and do the same thing. So just like run after you just couldn’t catch up. You bust out of one and move on to the next one. And that’s what they and you could they change the laws for gasoline purchase changed as a result because you could just go buy it. You can make up a company today, buy it tomorrow, sell it on Thursday, collect the tax on Friday, and bail out on Saturday and start all over again next week. Wow. Wow. There’s a scam. There’s a mob that’s willing to take advantage of a loophole like that. It’s crazy. So they moved out to LA. What other kind of scams? Go ahead. Go ahead, Brett. I was going to say that the Russians were so good at this type of scam, far ahead mentally of the American Mafia. [10:29] They were the best people they ever worked with. They were geniuses. They knew how to do this unlike any other. And in fact, the gas tax scam, the biggest moneymaker for the Russian mob and eventually the American mafia than any other form of income, billions of dollars. Interesting also is that if the former Soviet Union, should probably know, they factor in the Russian mob in their economy. I believe the last figure was 63% of the GNP of Russia was crime. They actually give a figure for it. Here we go. In America, this percentage of our federal income is from crime, but in Russia, they do. 63%. I don’t know what it is in America, But we talked to this Stan, who’s never going to pronounce his last name. And he had been in the Russian mob ever since he was a kid, raised in it. [11:32] And so that’s just what we were brought up with. We didn’t think there was anything unusual. If you were a girl, you were going to be a sex worker. They were respectable. If you were a guy, you were going to do this. And it was never as bad or as evil as the Americans said it was. It was always, the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming. coming. It’s so scary. I noticed you had a chapter titled Glassnose Gangsters. [12:00] I thought that was a pretty tricky title. I also read once that in Russia, they were so used to dealing with corrupt officials and running different scams that were in and around governmental agencies, like the tax collecting thing. They were so used to that, that they really refined this to a fine point than Americans could, because we’re not so used to dealing with corrupt officials. We have some, but not like Russia. Russia was an art in Russia. [12:28] Yeah, and they just took the template and brought it right over here and started earning pretty quickly. So now, how does Jimmy Kittlis, he’s a street kid. He’s one of these, what I call throwaway kids. We have this group of kids on the streets that are 18, 19, 20, use drugs. And lots of times these older men who are gay want to pay him for sex or bring him in and take care of him. Was he one of those kids? Did he get into that kind of a lifestyle? [13:02] He’s a homeless kid. He’s a runaway. And the place that he goes to, Hollywood and West Hollywood, is full of people that want to exploit young boys. Yeah. The lifestyle that he got into, though, was I think he recognized that there would be, people there who were stronger than him and smarter than him and want to take advantage of him. And so he sought out ways to hook up with mobsters because he figured that if he was connected, that would protect him from some of the bad stuff that might happen, especially like sexual exploitation. [13:41] When he goes into a homeless shelter, he peripherally knows about Mark. He asks around about Mark, who’s a Russian mobster. And the homeless shelter introduces them and says, oh, hey, yeah, Jimmy here would like to do some work with you. And so he falls into doing work with Mark and let the scamming begin, as they say. Interesting. Yeah. I read the book how he was, he had such a facility to learn language that he learned Russian pretty quick. And he had other languages. Just one of those people that just could start picking that up. Me work like hell, and I can’t have one conversation, but somebody like that, they just pick it up. I understand he picked up Russian pretty quick, too. Very quickly, and to this day, speaks it pretty well. And that got him some cachet. [14:30] But that only goes so far because, Gary, these guys that come in at a low level and aren’t Russian are really just mules. And that’s really what Jimmy was. He was a mule. Mark’s specialty was Czech forgery. and check washing. And he taught Jimmy how to take envelopes and get checks out of them, change who the check was written to or the amount that the check was drawn for, and go to various banks and cash those checks. And Mark was a pro at it. He had equipment to do it. He knew how the scam worked. He knew that you don’t go to the same bank three days in a row. You go to a couple of different banks and that’s how they got by day to day. [15:18] Interesting. Yeah, I worked one of those little scams once, a little group of people that were doing that. They could have a process that can wash some of the ink off of a check and then put and change the amount and those kinds of things. They’d work, they’d go to grocery stores on paydays. People used to take their grocery, their checks to put grocery stores on paydays plus banks. So it’s a pretty good moneymaker that needs little guys like this to go out and cash the checks while the bad guy sits back and provides the checks and takes most of the money. So it’s interesting. Yeah. And that’s exactly what Jimmy was, the little guy that cashed the check. [15:57] I want to interject something here. Now, Mark was, as Jimmy said, he looked like a Russian mobster. He was a Russian mobster. However, what Jimmy didn’t realize is that the whole family, or most of the family, was involved. Mark’s uncle, Meyer ITF, also known as Mike, was a very prominent figure in the Russian mob in Los Angeles. The fans were very aware of him. He was, shall we say, a big shot. He was the godfather of Plumber Park here. He was the guy. Jimmy didn’t know that. He just knew about Mark. As you know in the book, sooner or later it becomes a situation involving a fortune in gold and smuggled MDMA that puts Meyer in federal custody. Meyer wants out of federal custody. Mark not only is a Russian mobster doing bank fraud, he’s also an FBI informant and a DEA informant and an informant of the Pasadena Police Department. [17:07] Frank says, according to the menu at a Chinese restaurant, going from column A to column B, how do I get my uncle out of prison? Solve a murder. Oh, what’s the easiest way to solve a murder? Plan it. Set it up. Blame it on someone, like maybe Jimmy. Final result, I’ll tell you, Meyer got out of prison. Jimmy went to prison. [17:36] Wow, that’s a hell of a story. Frank can give me more insight on that process, but that’s the short form on how this all winds up fitting together. Yeah, and you guys, when you went back, you had to go back. Could you be able to pull she had transcripts from the court so you could find out who testified were able to get any more information police department’s notorious for not allowing reports to go out i can’t even get them out of my own but and i bet it was really bad on that how did how’d you go about that how’d you start digging into this and get your first clues that you can tell you about trying to talk to the items about this yeah yeah so it’s like an onion i i look at it like that and we had early on kelly shared with us some of the trial transcripts so that’s pretty good yeah there’s a lot of information in there and it and within the trial transcripts there’s names and and dates and so we started picking at it and early on you know we couldn’t get cooperation from any of [18:40] the mobsters yeah we didn’t get cooperation from the fbi or the dea We were able to do some digging. [18:48] And I think the digging led to a congressional hearing on the Russian mob back in the early 90s. And Meyer Itev’s name pops up in that hearing. So from there, I started digging through federal court files using PACER and came across all kinds of court documents involving Mike and then his nephew for various scams they were involved in. [19:21] And then taking those court documents and continuing to research and talk to people and figure it out, we were able to lay it all out. It took us six years to do this, but lay out a narrative of who’s Mike, who’s Mark, who are they involved with, and what kind of things were they operating when Jimmy got involved. And where was everybody when this murder took place? And what we found out was that Mike was in federal custody and had been charged with involvement in a scheme to steal gold from a place in Massachusetts. And how the scheme worked is Mike and his buddy posed as government scientists who were building a nuclear reactor facility in a run-down apartment in Pasadena, California. And they were able to put in purchase orders for the gold and have it delivered to this apartment. And only when one of them misspelled sergeant on the P.O. And sent a fake check did the government catch on and arrest him. [20:37] When they brought him in and charged him with this, the first thing that these guys wanted to do was figure out how they could get out of it. They hooked up with a guy in Hollywood who was involved in a scheme. Yeah. To dissuade a reporter from writing about the actor Steven Seagal. And this guy, his name is Alex Proctor, went to Meijer and another man in our book, Daniel Patterson, and said, listen, can you help me? I need to knock off this reporter. [21:12] Daniel, as you’ll see from reading our book, is a pretty well-connected guy. He’s done some pretty interesting stuff, but murder was the limit of what he would do for anybody. He began to peel back some of the layers of that onion for authorities in that case. And that led to Meyer being in custody. And that was the catalyst for Mark and his other uncle, Gary, to try to figure out how can we get him out? And they believed that the government would let Meyer out of custody if they could inform on a big enough crime. Big enough crime probably wouldn’t be a burglary or a low-level assault or a battery. It had to be something significant. And then this murder happens. Wow. How did they choose this victim? I don’t know necessarily that they chose him, but this guy lived in the neighborhood where Mark and Jimmy hung out, and they essentially manipulated him into believing he was going to have sex with Jimmy’s girlfriend. And then manipulated Jimmy into thinking that, hey, this guy’s going to have sex with your girlfriend. Aren’t you upset by that? Doesn’t that piss you off? Don’t you think you should be a man and do something about it? Yeah. [22:39] Hormones, jealousy, rage, greed. It’s like there’s everything like comes together in this one moment. And we end up with this guy, Alex, who’s a school teacher, just ends up dying. [22:55] So they got motive and means and opportunity. They can manipulate Jimmy into providing all those for the investigated officers. Yep. Yeah. Wow. And, you know, and what, and what really the thing that really, I think, so there’s this event that happens and there’s a, there’s like part of this, there’s a locked door mystery that investigators encounter. But the other part of it is how after the crime, Jimmy was arrested. [23:27] Manipulated into going to a hotel as a hideout that was arranged for him by Mark and Gary Iteve. And as soon as Jimmy’s in the hotel, they park themselves outside and guide the police to the hideout where they arrest Jimmy and his girlfriend. I think I read that initially, after the school teacher was dead, they got in, was it Pasadena? One of the police departments got an anonymous call giving up the body, where it was, the murder, and the suspect. Only one anonymous call. And then they, and then, oh, my God, this was heinous. Let’s mention that locked door. Let’s mention this locked door. This was heinous, heinous. When the police get to the scene of the crime, and they noticed that the apartment does not show any forced entry. Living room, everything, it’s fine. Get to the bedroom, however. The door had been locked from the inside. Jimmy said when he left, he locked the bedroom door from the inside. This is now after the fact. Someone shows up and tries to get in. They can’t because the door’s locked. They want to get in real fast. And they finally get in, practically ripped the doorknob off to get in. [24:50] At the same time, let’s assume it might be the same person, Mark ITM uses the dead man’s telephone to call his lawyer to say, I want to report a murder that we could use to get my uncle out of prison. [25:07] Using the dead guy’s phone. Then after they arrange that, he cuts the wires and leaves. Also wiping the door, the doorknob clean. His fingerprints are in there because he acknowledges he was in the bedroom earlier when Jimmy put the unconscious, still-breathing fellow on the bed. [25:29] He leaves. Mark left, went out and told the girl. Jimmy killed the guy. But when he left, the guy was alive, breathing on the bed. He says, come down after in a minute. So then he tells the girl, we got to go because we’re going to get in trouble with the cops. What are we going to do? So it was a real mess. So to say, who killed this guy? Jimmy had to take full responsibility because he confessed to protect his girlfriend. Also, he felt bad about putting the guy to headlock and throw the old drunk guy to the ground anyway. But then again, how did Mark make a phone call to his lawyer and the dead man’s phone after all that happened? And after the doors ripped open in the apartment to the bedroom. Did he find the guy already dead? Or did he have to help finish the process? Legally, he was found not guilty. Mark was. Just like OJ was. Because did OJ do it? Did OJ not do it? Did he cover for his son? Whatever. But legally, he was not guilty. Same thing with Mark. Not guilty. Jimmy, guilty. Whether we killed him or not. [26:45] We can’t say. We weren’t there. Crazy. Crazy, isn’t it? [26:52] What other kinds of things was this crime family, this Russian mob family? It’s like a family. I’ve read about these. They’ll have that one strong man, and then you’ll have a group that kind of emanates out from that, but yet they’re not part of some larger group. They stand on their own. And so what else, what other kind of crimes were they involved in? Was this talking about MMDA being smuggled into those that’s a party? Rave kind of clubs yeah they one of the things that they did was make a counterfeit viagra one of the guys had a uh an idea to he bought some viagra and he had a plan to set up pharmacies where he could like order viagra through the pharmacy and like with the gas tax right don’t pay anybody have the viagra and sell it and then one of the other guys said that’s a waste of time I got a pill press. Just all we got to do is get the chemicals or some chemicals and put them together and press a bunch of Viagra pills and then we can sell thousands instead of tens. [27:54] And then the gold scheme, which we mentioned, and the MA, the list goes on and on. And within the community of the Russian diaspora, extortion, loan sharking, gambling, prostitution, all those means of making money were on the table and being used. They were familiar with the casinos here in LA, familiar with the how to operate prostitution rings and advertise the services. Very sophisticated group of guys. [28:29] Did they have a geographic area in which they were kind of like the ruling group? [28:35] So that’s the funny thing about LA. And we talk about this a little bit in the book, that LA’s never really had like a mob family. There’s no five families here. If you go back to the 1940s and 50s, there was a guy named Mickey Cohen, who was a mobster here in LA and with help started the casinos in Vegas. But there’s no turf here In LA, if you’re going to set up an operation You’ve got to find a way to work with some of the other mobs In Los Angeles, the Mexican mafia is very prominent And their operation is run out of the jails That’s where their leadership is in the jail and prison system And the soldiers are on the street And that’s where the drugs and prostitution are distributed at street level, operated from the jails. Guys like Meyer or people operating within those turfs, they got to work with the Mexican mob to make sure that they’re not crossing lines. And we chronicle some of that, especially with the MDMA smuggling in the book. [29:44] Interesting. Wow. Yeah. LA’s not really had that, like you said, that five families each has a geographic territory or even had one family, a guy named Jack Dragna, but it was really, it was open. LA was open city. We had a guy from Kansas City went out there in the 50s and fell in with some people out there. And, of course, from Tony Splatro and that Jimmy Fradiano, Jimmy Fradiano, these people from Chicago had some action going down in L.A., but no one mob family controlled L.A. And it’s spread out that you’ve got these neighborhoods over the place that I just wonder if they’re like a Brighton Beach kind of a place that where a lot of Russians had settled in. That was their neighborhood, at least where they did. They all live in one neighborhood. So, yeah, West Hollywood has a Russian enclave. And then there’s a park there called Plummer Park. That’s a gathering place for Russians in the neighborhood to get together and play chess and talk about what’s going on. I live in a neighborhood that has its own little enclave of Armenian mobsters. And their hangout is a donut shop. Yes, I’ve seen that here I have I was at a Starbucks up by the airport And I see these guys all ganged up together And they look like. [31:03] They’re Italians. They look like down at the social club down in the North End. I was retired by then. So I look at these guys. I call a friend of mine back down the intelligence unit. I say, I see these guys and here’s one of their license plates and it’s some kind of a limo service. And so, yeah, that’s our Albanian gangsters. They all hang out there at that Starbucks and then they go to the airport. They have these different things. They haul drug dealers back and forth. We are on to them. [31:29] That’s great interesting people ask Frank and I how is it that you get guys from the Russian mall or the fact with Betrayal in Blue who was a drug cartel guy or guys from the American mafia how do you get them to cooperate with you when you write these books I would like to stand whose name I can never pronounce with a whole section about the Russian mob, where he talks openly about it. And he says, because they trust us and anybody else, they want their story told truthfully. This is their legacy. They don’t want a bunch of BS about them in a book. If it’s been over seven years, they could talk about it. Unless it’s bank robbery, then it’s 10 years. We always tell them, don’t talk about anything you can be arrested for. Although, we’ll appreciate this because you’re doing this podcast. I was doing one, had this guest on, and all of a sudden he’s just talking about killing somebody. [32:35] I said, you can tell I’m kind of getting upset. Turns to his lawyers, he goes, what’s the statute of limitations on murder? Murder. Oh, my God. There isn’t one. Shut up. I have told guys that. I said, I’ll tell you something, dude. Do not tell me something I can’t live with. You can talk to me, but do not tell me something I can’t live with. You cannot trust me if you tell me something I can’t live with. And that’s the main one right there. Fortunately, they trust, People learned that they could trust Frank and I to be honest with them, direct with them, protect them if they need protection. I don’t know about the protection part. I’m not going to protect any. I’m with Jerry. Don’t tell me anything. Well, that’s what I mean. You tell them, don’t cross this line. That’s protection. Please tell them where the guardrails are. Yeah. It’s an interesting thing that we do. I’ve got some guys here and some guys around the country I’ve dealt with. And they reach out to you and they want to tell their story. I wish I could get more of them to want to tell their story. And they want to tell one thing I get criticized for. And it’ll be somebody that’s on YouTube, obviously in the know, and they’ll tell me how I got something wrong. [33:47] You deal with what you got. You deal with the newspaper articles and old court cases and things like that and try to get it right. But you can’t totally get it right. Of course, you don’t get it right as the way somebody else sees it, too. Everybody has a different take on the right story. I found out long ago, if you only rely on law enforcement, you’re not going to get the whole story. No, you got to go. Well, then you’re doing stenography. That’s what I always said. Yeah. Yeah. But it’s hard to get those people to open up, too. Man, it’s. Yeah. I was a reporter for a long time, so I’ve had some practice at it. And I’ve interviewed guys in prison. I’ve interviewed people who pre-arrest, during arrest, post-arrest. [34:26] And I’ve developed a way to talk to people that makes them comfortable. With Adam Diaz that Burrell mentioned in our book, Betrayal in Blue, this guy is a South American cartel member dealing cocaine in the United States. He went on the record and talked about his life doing that. [34:47] And the same thing in this book with Daniel Patterson. Daniel is quite a colorful character. And I interviewed him over five or six weekends about everything that he was involved in, up to and including the stuff that he did with the ITEVs. [35:04] Now, Daniel Patterson, explain who he was to the Russians. Sure. He’s basically a conduit for the Russians. He’s a guy who knew how to make money more legitimately than they did. He had the pill press. he explained the gold scam how to operate the gold scam how to write po’s how to like add a veneer of legitimacy to their business and and make more money by doing that yeah it’s like the scam emails you get you see the misspelled words they greet you in some archaic way this is a scam this guy could take all that out of it and right i always love it without warning people i want to worm. If the woman on the dating site says, I am so-and-so by name, they’re Nigerian. But if you tell them that, then all the Nigerians will stop telling them, I’ll stop using that. But if it says, I am Sally by name, they’re Nigerian. Even if they say they live in your hometown, they’re Nigerian. Good clue. Good clue. You guys hear that out there? [36:12] Yeah listen closely when you trip to one of these emails or one of these online things and you start talking to them they say my name is sally my name is nigerian hang up, how’s everything in nigerian click yeah. [36:31] Guys, I didn’t expect to get that kind of a great clue for my guys out there, but that’s a good one. I didn’t really realize that one myself. Yeah, I am Sally by name. Here’s your clue. Watch out. I was talking to a guy once, a friend of mine. He was talking about some girl that he met online, of course, through Facebook. And he said, she told me she just thought I looked interesting and sounded interesting from my Facebook. And I said, what’d she do? He said, I think she’s legitimate. I said, what’d she do? She’s an entrepreneur. I said, dude, dude. On. Dude. Model and entrepreneur. Yeah. [37:10] Okay. This has been great. Frank Girardeau and Burl Baer. B-A-R-E-R. Yes. And guys, I’ll have links to these books, all of their books. This book is A Taste for Murder, and they have Actually, this book is Where Murder Lies. Oh, I’m sorry. Okay. Oh, yeah. All right. Let me start. I’ll edit this. Their book is Where Murder Lies. And they also have one called A Taste for Murder, Betrayal in Blue, and Burned. So those are all three great true crime books. And I will have links to them in the show notes, guys. Thanks so much. Merle and Frank, I really appreciate you coming on. It’s really interesting. And Owen, if you buy the book, review the book. Say something nice about it. If you don’t like it, keep your mouth shut. Don’t give me one of those one-star reviews or I’m coming for you. You can’t trust those. [38:08] Thank you, Gary. All right. Thank you. All right. I’ll send, I don’t know, do I have your emails or do I have the publicist’s email? I got somebody’s email. Sometimes I never get your guys’ email. You got Vine, you got Frank, you got them both. All right. I’ll send you a link whenever I get this. It’ll probably be a month or more before I actually get this up. I would stay way ahead. Okay, good. Okay. All right. Talk to you soon. Same thing I can ever do for you here in Kansas City while you get on these stories or something. Hey, I’m in Missouri. I haven’t used to Missouri. I’m in Houston, Missouri. You what? I’m in Houston, Missouri. Oh, are you? Yeah, Texas County, Missouri. Oh, Texas County. Yeah, that’s way down south. That’s down south. I’m in the Ozarks. Yeah. Okay. That’s why I grew the goatee. Okay. All right. All right. Thanks, guys. Bye-bye. Bye.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins sits down with author Aaron Mead to discuss his gripping novel Body in the Barrel, a story inspired by a real-life discovery in Lake Mead that shocked the nation. In 2022, as water levels at Lake Mead dropped to historic lows, authorities discovered a body in a barrel with a gunshot wound to the head—a killing style that many investigators immediately linked to organized crime. The discovery triggered speculation that the remains could date back to the 1970s or 1980s, the heyday of mob activity in Las Vegas. Aaron Mead explains how this discovery sparked the idea for his novel. Although Mead is a longtime water engineer for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the mystery of the barrel victim and the history of mob activity in Las Vegas inspired him to craft a fictional story grounded in real events. Gary and Aaron dive deep into the Chicago Outfit’s influence in Las Vegas, discussing figures like Tony Spilotro and hitman Frank Cullotta, whose violent methods and stories helped shape the mythology of organized crime in the desert. They also explore the long-standing mob practice of disposing of bodies in barrels, including the infamous case of mobster Johnny Roselli, whose body was also discovered stuffed in a drum. The conversation examines several possible identities of the Lake Mead victim, including casino insiders and Outfit associates who disappeared during the era of casino skimming. Mead’s novel follows a fictional mob associate named Lenny Battaglia, who becomes terrified when news breaks about the barrel discovery. The reason? He knows there’s another barrel—with his victim—still resting somewhere in Lake Mead. The discussion moves beyond mob history into the psychological consequences of violence, comparing Mead’s story to classic works like Crime and Punishment. Rather than focusing on a traditional “whodunit,” the novel explores what happens after the crime, examining guilt, fear, and the moral weight carried by those who commit violence. Gary and Aaron also discuss the broader context of violence in American culture, including parallels between organized crime murders and modern tragedies such as the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting. Finally, the conversation shifts to Mead’s professional expertise in Western water law and the Colorado River, explaining how drought and declining water levels at Lake Mead are literally revealing pieces of hidden history—sometimes including crimes buried for decades. This episode blends mob history, real crime mysteries, and fiction inspired by true events, offering listeners a fascinating look at how the past can resurface in unexpected ways. Click here to find Body in a Barrel Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee” Subscribe to the website for weekly notifications about updates and other Mob information. To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent ‘Brothers against Brothers’ or ‘Gangland Wire,’ the documentaries click here.  To purchase one of my books, click here. [0:02]Introduction to Gangland Wire [0:00]Hey, all you wiretappers, good to be back here in studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins. You know, I’m a retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective. Now I have a podcast and I interview real crime mobsters, policemen, FBI agents, do authors that are doing true crime books. And I do authors that are doing novels that are based on true crime. Because we stick with true crime as close as we can here, guys. You know that. And today I have one of those authors that has written a book that is a novel, but it’s based on a lot of real events in Las Vegas. And we all know a little bit about Las Vegas and the Mafia. So Aaron Mead, welcome, Aaron. Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. It’s great to have you on the show. Tell us a little bit about yourself, a little bit about your history. [0:47]Sure. Yeah, I’m actually I’ve been working as an engineer, a water engineer for 30 some odd years. And so I come by my writing habit as a sort of a side interest. I, I, yeah, I just, I got a very, I’ve got a varied educational background too. So I started out as a, as an engineer in my training and then just had a creative itch and went back to school, ended up doing a PhD in philosophy of all things. And while I was doing that, I, I thought I might be an academic. I thought I might be a professor at one time and through the job search, things didn’t really work out. I did find a job, but it just wasn’t going to pay well enough, consider moving my family across the country for it. So I ended up not going into academia, but I stuck with writing, which was my favorite part of the PhD, the dissertation. [1:31]And I just started writing different things, some nonfiction stuff related to my dissertation research, but then just got an idea for a story, wrote a novel. It’s still sitting in the drawer. I’m interested in publishing that someday. But this idea for the book related to kind of Las Vegas mob stuff actually came connected with my work as a water engineer. So I work for Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. We import water to Southern California from the Colorado River. And so I track the Colorado River news pretty closely. And in 2022, the lake was dropping because of drought and overuse. And this body in a barrel showed up on the shore of Lake Mead. And there was a gunshot wound to the head. And this looked an awful lot like a mob hit to the authorities. And so this just piqued my interest and got me thinking about how did this barrel get there and this body and what’s the story behind it. And I started doing a little research and it turns out that the clothing on the body was pretty well preserved. [2:29]So the police dated it to the late 70s, early 80s potentially. And that’s of course the heyday of the mob activities in Las Vegas. It got me onto the Chicago outfit and, Some of the characters involved in the outfits activity in Vegas there. And so my story just went from there. But, yeah, I guess that’s a little about me and the story. So, yeah. Yeah. Those are the days when Tony Spolatro was really active out there. Chicago outfit man on the scene, if you will. And Body in a Barrel, another interesting Chicago link is they found a guy named Johnny Roselli, who was a highly placed mob guy who was connected to Las Vegas and Los Angeles. He had been their guy before Spalatro. He had been their representative out in the West, and they found his body in a barrel down in Florida. Wow, okay. There’s some reference there. [3:21]I’d read a little that this is a pretty popular method of body disposal in various times. And Tony Spalatro was, I understand that they haven’t actually identified the victim yet, but the kind of style of killing they think is pretty connected with something Tony Spalatro might do. I guess the sort of low caliber gunshot wound was a popular way to dispose of it, to whack people just because it was a little less messy than a high caliber weapon. Yeah, this is one they call it a lupara blanca, which means white shotgun in Italian. And that means that you never find the body. In this case, they found the body. Every once in a while, they’ll find the body. Not very often, though. Usually they hide them pretty good. Now, who’d ever thought that Lake Mead would drop that much? Yeah, they dropped it at 100 feet of water, and I don’t think anybody expected it to drop that low. And it could go even lower in the next couple of years here, honestly. Really? Oh, really? It’s still dropping. I thought there’d been some more rain and some snow up in the mountains that were going to add to that. It’s going to be still dropping, huh? Yeah, there has been a fair bit of precipitation this year, but in the areas that count most, where you get most of the runoff, which is up in the mountains of Colorado and Utah, it’s really quite dry, actually. They’ve had some rain, but not much snow, and so they’re talking about a snow drought. Yeah, things could. It just depends. We’ll see how things develop, but it could get bad. Yeah, talk about that gun now. Chicago was noted. [4:40]For using these 22 caliber high standard i think they’re browning semi-automatic pistols with a silencer on it and they had them out there i believe and they also another interesting thing about the outfit in order to keep the sound down they would load their own shells and so they were had less powder in them and sometimes the shells didn’t do the job that they wanted to do now frank Kulata, who was in Las Vegas working for Tony Splattro during these years, he tells a story about trying to kill a guy with one of those guns and how he had such a hard time getting him killed. So I don’t know how many holes were in this guy’s head, but you got to get somebody just right in the head with that .22 caliber pistol. Yeah, they say it had to be pretty close range. You’re talking about the Jerry Listener murder, I think. Is that right? Yeah. I read about that one. That’s actually the kind of the murder in question in my book is based on that loosely. And so yeah, Kolata advises my main character, Lenny, to load his gun with half loads because they’ve lost their silencer or something. So that’ll keep the sound down. But yeah, I guess Lister ended up with multiple bullets to the head. And when they found them, more than you’d imagine would be necessary. [5:55]Really? There’s a guy that worked for the Stardust named Jay VanderWalk that disappeared at the time. It disappeared for a long time. Did you look at that one, too, as some of your source material? Yeah. So there’s this great article that’s been turned into a podcast on the Mob Museum website. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that in Las Vegas there. And they suggest there might be three potential victims. [6:21]VanderMark is one of the—is that the guy you mentioned, George VanderMark? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they call him by Jay. That’s right. Yeah. So, yeah, he is one of the, he’s a missing person, right? From that era, had connections with the Argent company. So they think he, that’s one of the possibilities. He was running the skimming operation, at least in some of the casinos there for Argent. And I guess the, as the gaming control board in Nevada found out about the skimming operation, gradually, they were starting to talk to people. And I think that they were worried that he was going to talk or actually this is, I think the, the outfit suspected he was stealing money from him. I think it was a combination. Stealing money is worse than talking. Right, yeah. So I guess he took off to Mexico, maybe, I read, or Costa Rica even. But I think… He came back. I can’t remember the exact story, but yeah. Yeah. So from what I read, Nick Calabrese, who I guess was a hitman for the outfit, and then turned eventually and started talking to the feds. He suggested that, I guess, Vandermark ended up in a hotel in Phoenix or something, and the outfit sent a couple of hitmen after him and whacked him there. And then Calabrese said they buried his body in the desert. So that means, you know, if that’s true, then obviously it’s not the guy in the barrel, but he’s one of the ones they talk about because they never found his body. Yeah. And I guess the other one I read about was William Crespo. [7:40]I don’t know that story. Yeah. So the little I know of it is he was a drug runner [7:48]Stories of the Las Vegas Mob [7:45]involved with the outfit in Las Vegas. And he got caught kind of landing in the Las Vegas airport coming from Miami with $400,000 worth of cocaine on him. And the feds arrested him. He accepted an offer of immunity to become an informant. And he was set to testify about this drug ring that the outfit was part of. And he actually ended up testifying before a grand jury, got a bunch of folks indicted. I guess one of the names of folks who was indicted was Victor Greger, according to this article. He was a former Argent executive. But then when Crespo himself went to testify, he was set to testify in June 83. And they got to him before then and he never testified. So, he’s another kind of missing person they suspect could be in the barrel. But the article thought the most likely candidate was a guy named Johnny Pappas. I don’t know if you know him at all. Yeah, I don’t know the story of that. Okay. So, this is a Chicago native guy who was involved in some of the Argent Corporation casino work. And he was, I guess by the 70s, late 70s, he was managing this resort on the northern part of Lake Mead called Echo Bay Resort, which was an Argent Corporation Resort. [9:00]And it’s closed now. It’s not there anymore. It used to be like a hotel and a boat launch. And so he was at the lake at different times. He also owned a boat on Lake Mead. And so in 1976, the day he disappeared, his wife told authorities basically that he went to meet this guy at a restaurant who was interested in buying his boat at Lake Mead. And so they think it could have been a ruse set up by outfit folks luring him basically down to the lake to show him his boat. And then they knock him off and take him out on his own dang boat and drop him in the lake. The motive is a little less clear in this case, but it was around that time when stuff was coming out about the Argent Corporation and the skimming. And they could have just thought he was a liability, might be set to talk or something. Yeah, those are the three that I read about anyway. He just disappeared after this meeting to go sell his boat. Yeah, they found that theory makes sense. They found his car parked in the circus casino parking lot on the strip the next day. And yeah, he’s just gone, disappeared. [10:01]I’ll be darned. I hadn’t heard that story. That is a pretty likely scenario. Say, hey, I’ll drive and let’s run down there and let’s see that boat. I got the money right here. You show the guy a bunch of money and he’ll drop all caution. It’ll go to the wind. That’s how they do it. and got him isolated then. [10:18]Yeah. And maybe it’s a last minute deal. So nobody really knows who he’s meeting and where he’s going and that he’s even going. So that’s, that’s a classic in the mob. Yeah. Apparently he told his wife he was going to go sell his boat, but that’s about it. Yeah. I’ll be darned. Yeah. The, as Lake Mead’s gone down, has there been any other bodies or any other things that have been found out there recently? Yeah, there’s been some strange things turned up. One is a sort of a World War II era airplane, honestly, started coming out of the water. But that was known about for some time. You could see it, I guess, from aerial photos. But other bodies, yeah, there’s a few other bodies, just skeletons, nothing in barrels and no gunshot wounds. And so, people just, I think authorities have identified most of those and suspect they were just drowning victims, unfortunate boating accidents and whatnot. But nothing like this body in a barrel. I think they’ve been trying to identify that body. There’s lots of DNA evidence, right? You got still a pretty intact body. But the problem is back in that era, I guess they didn’t have the DNA database to be matching with. Yeah. So, it’s not borne a lot of fruit. I think it’s still an open case, honestly. Really? The chance they have is if one of that guy’s descendants goes to something like 23andMe and then does that. And I know they’ve come up with a deal where they can start running an unknown DNA through those… [11:44]Files and see if you can come up with a connection and then go back and say, okay, where would this guy have ever come across or be in this other person’s family tree, if you will, and then they can eventually get it. That’s fascinating. Amazing. Yeah, it is what they could do. I had a guy that used to be a professional criminal talking about it. He said, I don’t know why anybody does crime today. He said with the DNA and the cameras and the cell phones and all that, he said, there’s just way, way too many ways to get caught. That’s wild. Yeah. Oh boy. Yeah. I watch a lot of crime shows and I see a lot of that stuff. And everybody watches those crime shows. So they know about those tools out there. So first thing, you got to go get a burner phone. If you’re going to go do something, you better go get a burner phone. And then you better dress up in one of those suits in those English police movies, those white hazmat suits and your whole face covered. Crazy, crazy. Yeah. And then go do it. Don’t use your own car. You better go steal a car somewhere. Man, complicated. It’s too hard. Yes. And even then, if they look at you and say, your phone never moved for 24 hours, but yet you were seen over here or over there. How come you didn’t have your phone with you or your car? You parked your car here for 12 hours and then you came back and got it. What were you doing? [13:08]It is just crazy, isn’t it? Yeah. But tell us, what’s the storyline of your book? Don’t give too much away. You want people to buy it. I understand that. But tell the guys the storyline of your book. Sure, yeah. So the storyline is, it starts out with the true events of 2022, right? This headline that there’s a body in a barrel shows up on the shore of Lake Mead. And my main protagonist, who’s sort of made up from my imagination, his name’s Lenny Battaglia. [13:37]The Body in the Barrel [13:33]And he reads this headline. He’s an old time mob associate. He, at one time when he was young, was connected with the outfit, but ended up getting out of it barely. But he reads this headline and starts to get worried because he’s got a barrel with a body in it that’s his victim farther out in the lake. So this one that he reads about is not his. It’s actually his partners who, in my story, the partners loosely based on Frank Collada, actually. [14:01]And so he reads this headline, gets worried, goes out in his little boat to try to move his victim farther out into the lake because he’s concerned that his lake, the lake’s continuing to drop and the kind of the falling lakes acts like a ticking clock in my story in some ways. I think the Sopranos did something like this. They thought somebody was going to come up and buy some farm, and they had said, these guys have to dig this body up and move it. So that is not out of the realm of possibility, is it? No, no. But what is out of the realm of possibility is this old guy in his tiny little boat actually moving the barrel. So he goes out with just a gaff with a hook on it and tries to yank it out with his little outboard motor, and it just won’t budge. The thing’s really heavy. If you know anything about water, stuff under water is really heavy. Really heavy. Yeah. He’s wrestling with it and ends up falling in while he’s trying to pull this barrel farther out. And so it’s a big failure. And while he’s falling in, he has this flashback to the killing, basically. And so the story kind of goes from there, but it’s really focused on how he deals with what he’s done, basically. [15:10]Crime is no mystery from the beginning. it’s not a it’s not a traditional it’s not a traditional police procedural of where who done it yeah it’s not like that it’s more like kind of what is what’s the aftermath what’s the effect of, a terrible crime like this on even the perpetrator yeah yeah and as I said one of my characters is based on Frank Collada who so he was the story takes place in kind of two time frames right we’ve got the, contemporary time frame, but then we got flashbacks to his time at the mob and Frank was his partner in this hit. We’ve also got a character showing up who’s based on Tony Spolatro. I call him Tony Bonucci, named after one of my favorite Italian soccer players. [15:50]But yeah, so we’ve got this connection to the early 80s, late 70s, and then also this kind of contemporary period. And I understand Frank Collado was actually, he recently just died, right he was he did during covid times i think he he already had copd he was already everything he did he you’d see me to have his oxygen on and so he was already weakened then he got covid during uh during covid that’s a shame you know yeah i did some listening to a podcast he was on in researching my book and it was really fascinating to listen to yeah yeah he is he’s and he’s got his there’s a whole book out there that he mainly just told stories about his life during the whole book. It’s amazing. I did one with him and then added some more clips in from that a long time. One of my earlier ones, I got to know him real early because we had the mob con out there. I knew the guy that was getting it going and I went out to the guy that actually Denny Griffin who wrote the books with Frank Collider, wrote several books with Frank Collider and I’d gotten to know Denny and so Denny invited me to come out and do a program at the first mob conference and I met Frank then. I met him and a couple others after that. He was gruff, but he was a good guy. I mean, he was gruff, I’ll tell you. He wasn’t a guy that just, it was hard to joke around with him. Interesting. Okay, interesting. [17:12]Yeah, I got a bit of that vibe from the podcast of him that I was listening to. Yeah, it’s funny. Just genuine Italian Chicago, like to the core. Yeah, he was that. He was born and bred, born and bred from early his childhood. He was a Chicago mobster. There’s no doubt about that. That’s wild. [17:32]Yeah, Denny Griffin’s book was really helpful to me, actually, in my research. Yeah, the battle for Las Vegas in particular was. Yeah, that’s the one I used. Denny was that. Denny’s dead now. I don’t know if you knew that. I did know that, unfortunately. Yeah, I was pretty good friends with Denny. He helped me out a lot when I got started and got me out there. And he gave me for my first documentary, which was about the skimming, a lot about the skimming. He got me several people to interview, lined me up with them and verified, hey, this guy’s okay and work with him. And I flew out to Las Vegas and interviewed a bunch of people and interviewed him too. But he got me an employee of the Best Casino that knew Lefty Rosenthal really well. She gave us some really great sound bites. I get calls today or emails wanting to know if she’s still around. She’s died since. People are still trying to find her to get to interview her. That’s wild. That’s wild. That’s because old Denny Griffin, he was a good guy. He really was. That’s neat. His book was certainly good. Yeah. Interesting. So what else do you want to say about your book before we get out of here? Besides, go out and buy it. Go out and buy it. It’s on Amazon, I’m sure, and I’ll have a link to the Amazon site. I appreciate that. Yeah, it is on Amazon. What do I want to say about it? I guess the other thing to say is it’s got some, I don’t want to give too much away, but gun violence is really a big part of the book. Not only this single mob hit, but also it wraps in. [18:56]This mass shooting in 2017, the one where the guy was a shooter was in the hotel suites up high and he was shooting across the street into that country music festival. So it’s really funny. I compare it to two things, right? I compare it to Casino, which is this famous Scorsese film from that mobster era, which everybody knows about. And actually, Frank Collado was in. He had a cameo in that. Yeah, that’s funny. But then the other thing I compare the book to is Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which is obviously this sort of towering literary novel. But the parallel is just dealing with this aftermath of violence, right? What happens when you kill somebody and what’s the sort of dealing with guilt and fear and the consequences. [19:44]Exploring Themes of Violence [19:40]So I’d say those are the sort of things I point to as parallels for the book. I don’t know. There’s a lot more to say. Like you’ve said, it’s grounded in true life crime, but it’s also definitely fiction. I’ve made up the better part of it. Yeah. [19:54]All right. Aaron Mead. The book is Body in the Barrel. Aaron, I really appreciate you coming on the show. And guys, I’ll have links to this book down below. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure meeting you and hearing some of your stories. And I’m enjoying your podcast. And it’s been a privilege to be on here. So thank you. Okay. We like to hear that. Thanks a lot, Aaron. [20:17]Yeah, thank you. Okay. Okay. I’ll do a little extra here in a minute. I just want to tell you something. When I went to law school at the police department and my favorite class was water law and I did my, you have to do a 50 page publishable paper to get out of law school. I did mine on Western water law and it was just, I was fascinated by that Western water law and all the things that go into that, the Rio Grande Pact and all the different political entities that are trying to use that water and how they use it. And then how the EPA rules and figured in on using water out West. And the fact that out West, they treated water like they treated gold or some other mineral. If you found the source, you owned it. Whereas they had riparian interest in [21:06]The Complexities of Water Law [21:03]laws back East here, where you have plenty of water. You can use all the water you want as long as you don’t reduce it. But nobody owns that source of water. [21:12]If it’s a big source, it’s just a fascinating topic. Yeah, it is a bit of the Wild West, like applies to water out West. It’s that first in time, first in right thing. It’s pretty crazy. The Colorado River especially is so complicated. You got seven, seven states take water from it. You got the federal government running the dams there. You’ve got Mexico that takes a portion of it. You’ve got this whole hundred year history of law layered on top of each other. And even today, the rules on how the water gets distributed are about to expire in this year. And so we’re trying to come up with new rules. And it’s just so tough because… [21:49]There’s less water in the river than there used to be, and so the old agreements don’t quite work out, and we’re having to take reductions, and, you know, who takes what? It’s just sort of a big mess, honestly. We’re fighting over it. I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up in court, honestly. But that would be not a good outcome, but it seems potentially likely. Yeah. There’s a judge I heard say once that, you better make a deal outside of my courtroom. If you come into my courtroom, my decision is not going to hurt everybody’s feelings with my decision. Yeah. And inevitably, like the folks, the special masters or whatever the justices are that are making the decisions, they don’t know as much about water as we do. If we can’t work it out, it’s going to happen. I know. And there are just so many pressures that are on it. And it’s tough. And plus, one thing we haven’t mentioned is a huge growth in population over the last 20, 30 years out there. It’s true. Yeah, it’s true. Yes, unbelievable how many people have moved to Phoenix and Albuquerque and Las Vegas, especially Las Vegas, but just being such a huge growth in population out. And before it was desert that nobody really, they didn’t live, they didn’t want to live out there. [22:55]It’s true. Yeah. And surprisingly, like in a lot of these cities, actually, the demand for water has not increased. Like in Las Vegas, it’s actually gone down. Oh, really? They have done an incredible job of conserving water. Same in Los Angeles. The demands for water have gone down despite the population growth. The thing that makes it challenging is that the whole pie is shrinking and it’s the agricultural use that’s the highest. I think it’s something like 85% or 80% of the water in the Colorado Basin is agriculture. And so, those are the things you’re going to need to find conservation there, which is harder. [23:30]Like those Israelis did, it was something called drip irrigation where they used, they were more skillful in the way they used their water in their fields down in the desert. Yeah, and some of the folks that’s been, some of the agricultural folks have been converting to that kind of irrigation for quite some time now. So, it’s like we’re wringing out every sponge we got and running out of options. But, yeah, we’ll figure it out one way or the other here. Yeah, I’m sure we will. This is America, after all. [23:59]Or is it still America? It’s hard to know. Yeah, it’s hard to know. We’re going down that path. Looking a little different these days. Yes, it is. Yeah. Oh, my God. Okay, Aaron, I really appreciate it. I’ll get in touch with you whenever I send an email with the links after I put them up. It’ll be, I don’t know. It’ll probably be a month or more before I get it up. Sure. I stay way ahead. I’ve got quite a few kind of scheduled up for the next two weeks now or three. Smart. Two weeks now, one just went up today. So I put it up, video, I put them up on Sunday evening, and then the audio comes out like 4 o’clock in the morning on Monday morning. Okay. Don’t ask me why. I just started doing that. Yeah. No worries. It gets ahead of everybody. Then they can see it. Hey, I’ve got a question for you, if you don’t, if you don’t mind. No. Do you know about any contemporary organized crime activity in Las Vegas? Is there still stuff going on or is it? I don’t. I really don’t. Yeah. Okay. [24:59]Trying to think of a source for you. I’ll check with a source for you. Okay. I know it’s not Midwest folks from your era, but yeah. Yeah, no, probably something up there out at Los Angeles and people that moved out there a generation ago and stayed under the radar. And then, of course, international. Yeah. Those like Russians and people like that out of Phoenix or in Los Angeles, both. Anyhow, I’ll check on that. Okay. Yeah. If you think of something, that’d be great. I’d be interested. Okay. Okay. I will. All right. Thank you. Thank you again. Take care. All right. Bye-bye. Can you go ahead and do, can you exit the meeting? I’m going to do a little ending thing here. I will. Yeah. [25:40]That was interesting, folks. I did Waterlaw in, well, that was interesting, folks. I really liked Aaron and I think his Body in the Barrel book is going to be pretty darn good. [25:53]Concluding Thoughts on Crime and History [25:50]So I’d recommend you try it. I haven’t actually read it myself. I’ve read excerpts from it. I’ve got it here. I need to sit down and take some time and read it. I like when they base it on the real life people and some people that I know something about. It’s kind of like hearing stories about your hometown. Oh, yeah, I know that guy. Oh, yeah, I remember when that happened. And it’s an interesting thing, the lowering of Lake Mead. He and I, he’s a water engineer, and he and I talked a little bit more about it. I find it a fascinating topic, that Western water law and Western water rights and how that all works. It’s different than back east where we have plenty of water. So don’t forget, I’ve got videos on Amazon Prime for rent. Just use my name and mafia, Gary Jenkins Mafia on Amazon Prime, and you’ll find them. And I’ve got books there. Do the same thing. Gary Jenkins Mafia books. I’ve got three books on Amazon and I’ve got them on my website. And I always appreciate when people make comments on my YouTube channel or on my Gangland Wire podcast page. We’re just here to report mob history. That’s all we want to do is report mob history. And in this case, we got a fictional book that’s reporting mob history based on real mob history. I’ll do that every once in a while, too. [27:07]So thanks a lot, guys. I always appreciate doing this show. It’s a way to end my life out, if you will. I’m down to that last quarter, maybe down to the last two minutes one of these days, but we’ll get there. Thanks a lot, guys.

Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history through his unique perspective on the mafia. In this episode of Gangland Wire, Gary Jenkins welcomes an unusual guest from the world of organized crime storytelling—cartoonist Brett Juliano, creator of the Dust Bunny Mafia comic series. Instead of traditional books or documentaries, Brett tells real Mafia stories through short, three-panel comics featuring his unique cartoon characters while staying grounded in historical research and documented sources. Brett explains how his lifelong interest in animation and storytelling evolved into a project that blends true crime history with visual humor and commentary. After moving to Chicago, he became fascinated with the city’s underworld history and began transforming real mob stories into illustrated comic strips that challenge Hollywood myths and highlight lesser-known facts about organized crime. His work draws on true crime books, FBI files, court transcripts, and podcasts, including Gangland Wire itself. Each comic strip distills a real historical moment into a visual gag or ironic twist that reveals the strange reality behind mob legends. Gary and Brett discuss several Dust Bunny Mafia comics and the real events behind them: The “Sicilian Flu” Courtroom Act A humorous look at a tactic sometimes used by mob figures: appearing frail in court to gain sympathy or delay proceedings. Wiseguys who were partying the night before might suddenly appear in a wheelchair, wrapped in blankets or hooked to oxygen tanks when they walked into court. Lucky Luciano and the Myth of “Lucky” Brett examines the legendary story that Charles “Lucky” Luciano got his nickname after surviving a brutal kidnapping and beating. His comic plays with the idea that mobsters often exaggerated their own legends—especially when trying to impress people. The Kansas City Mob Search – Carl “Tuffy” DeLuna One comic comes directly from Gary Jenkins’ own experience investigating the Kansas City mob. When police searched DeLuna’s home in 1979, the mobster calmly offered coffee and eventually led investigators straight to the basement, where incriminating notes were stored. The scene shows how, sometimes, the truth of organized crime investigations is stranger than fiction. Bugsy Siegel in Rainy Portland Another comic explores the obscure story of Bugsy Siegel visiting Portland to meet local crime boss Al Winters, only to endure two straight weeks of rain—highlighting the contrast between Hollywood-style mob glamour and the less glamorous reality of underworld negotiations. A New Graphic Anthology on Kickstarter Brett is now launching a major new collection of his comics titled: “Family Business: An Offer You Can’t Refuse.” The book will include: 130+ pages of full-color comics More than 230 true crime strips Historical commentary explaining the real story behind each comic Additional artwork parodying mob businesses and underworld culture The project will be funded through a Kickstarter campaign beginning March 24, with the finished book expected to ship later in the year once printing is completed. Click here for 👉 Kickstarter Campaign:  Where to Find Brett Juliano You can explore Brett’s comics, books, and merchandise here: Dust Bunny Mafia Website:  Online Store: Brett also shares his comics across social media platforms including Instagram, Threads, and Facebook groups focused on organized crime history. For fans of Mafia history, Dust Bunny Mafia offers a refreshing twist—true crime storytelling through comics that balance humor with serious historical research. As Gary notes during the interview, separating myth from reality is essential in mob history, and Brett’s work uses a creative medium to do exactly that. Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee” Subscribe to the website for weekly notifications about updates and other Mob information. To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent ‘Brothers against Brothers’ or ‘Gangland Wire,’ the documentaries click here.  To purchase one of my books, click here. Transcript [00:00:00] hey, are you Wire tappers? Gary Jenkins back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. I’m a retired Kansas City Police Intelligence unit detective and, I investigated the Mafia and I’m still working on the Mafia only. We work on mafia history now, and I have a kind of unusual, different sort of a story today. I have a man who has been doing. Cartoons based on real mob stories, but he has his own little cartoon characters. It’s called Dust Bunny Mafia. If you’re on my gangland Wire podcast group, you might’ve seen that, and he’s on other places in social media. So welcome Brett Juliano. Welcome Brett. Thanks, Gary. Thanks for having me on. All right, cool. Guys, let me, I’m just gonna give you a little taste of what this looks like. It’s when I first saw it. That, that’s interesting. I appreciate a, a different way of doing these kinds of things. All right. That should be, there you go. All right. There you go. There’s which one was that? That was the Sicilian flu. Brett tell the guys a little bit about, what got you [00:01:00] into this and then we’ll talk about each one of these images that you sent me. Yeah, so I’ve been doing comics and the Dust Bunny mafia for over a dozen years. Long story short, I wanted to be a animator when I was, young. And then as I grew up, I always loved the idea of telling stories through visual form. And then after moving out to Chicago about 10 years ago, I really wanted to connect with the principle of the local history of the Chicago Underworld and retell it through my Dust Bunny Mafia Comex. I try and. Do it in a way in which the I try to break the myths of Hollywood and a lot of things. I try and get my, research through primary sources. So I’ll, listen to True Crime podcasts like yours. I have a huge collection at home of True Crime books, looking through FBI files, court transcripts, things like that. And [00:02:00] I just want to. Find ways to compose those things into three panel comics that kind of address myths and other, aspects of the mafia. So I know you, you came to the Mob Con out in Las Vegas and had a whole display of different things. So you even have a whole little a book too, don’t you? Or you’ve got one or more books that are a little bit longer than just a one three panel? Yes. Yeah, I’ve got, with the Dust Bunny Mafia comic. Overall I am, I’ve done about 10 books total. Okay. I’ve got three big graphic novel trade collections, and then, as you’re aware, the little based on true story booklets like these ones, like where these scripts come in, I now am collecting that into a larger anthology collection that’s gonna be 132 page full color that has over 200. About 230 individual strips with the commentary. Do you have a website or how do people [00:03:00] get hold of you if they’d want to get some of this? Yeah, you can find me comics dot dust bunny mafia.com or Dust Bunny mafia dot Big Cartel is the online store and I ship everything out myself. I’ve done a bunch of crowdfunding campaigns, over 20 of them, and I’ve shipped all over the world with my comics and basically searched Dust Bunny Mafia. I’m on. Like you mentioned earlier, a lot of the Facebook groups, I’m on Instagram, threads X, all the all the social platforms and I’ll guys, I’ll have a link to his website in the in the show notes. Brett, tell us a little bit about this one. This is the or I’ve got the Sicilian flu. Tell us about this story here. What’s the real story here? So that story comes that strip is based on an interview with Joaquin Phoenix, Joaquin Garcia, excuse me who was known as Jack. And [00:04:00] he was interviewed, I believe on the Before the Lights podcast with Tommy Canal. And he was telling a story about Greg De Palma going to court one day and while he was being, while he was being, deposed and brought in for questioning. Basically it’s addressing the myth of the actions and the over exaggerations that mob officers will do to tie things up or misdirect. So he was talking about how. The wise guys will be out eating and drinking, partying, at night or on the weekends. And then they’ll come to court in a wheelchair, maybe have a blanket. Some of ’em will even throw, have a little oxygen tank and, just the absurdity of things that they will, the lengths they will go to to try and misdirect or hope things up. Interesting. Yeah, that’s a common kind of a deal that more not just mobsters do that. There’s other criminals have done that too. I’ve seen that myself. So let’s talk about [00:05:00] two is let be a lady. Get that one up there. All right. What’s the story of luck? Be a lady. So luck Be a lady is talking about the myth of Charles Luck, Luciano’s nickname of Lucky. Yes. And about, how it was one night, one kidnapping that, where he got the scar and the people dragged him into, Staten Island. They. Speed him overnight, tortured him, set him free, and then that’s how it was, that one event is what made him or gave him the nickname. Lucky. When in actuality what I’m paring here is that, he’s trying to impress girls in my comic and, with each drink and stuff, he adds more myth and more legend to the nickname. And. I believe, the event happened. I’m not trying to discredit that. I just [00:06:00] think he, and I’ve seen sources say that he had the nickname long before the beating and like the one night, event. And it wasn’t that instance that gave him the nickname Lucky. Interesting. I never thought about that, what I always thought. I think that was I think he reported that himself in that book that he wrote with another author. I think that’s where that story came from. I’m not sure but I always figured he probably had some coppers tuned him up and, but he had to make it into a much better story and make himself much tougher. Yeah, of course. And they would do that back in those days. They’d tune your ass up bad. All right. Let’s see. Now we got, oh, I know this one. Show me the way I. So this one is based on your account? Yeah, that’s so it’s talking about Carl Tuffy de Luna’s home being searched after Valentine’s Day or around Valentine’s Day [00:07:00] in 1979, where the Kansas City Police department and the FBI. Executed a, search warrant on his house. And so I set it up very cordial in which, my detectives are, being served coffee and then. The line that I loved most from the book was basically where he is like, all right, you might as well come into the basement. That’s where you’ll find the good stuff. And he’s, leading them around the property and everything saying, if you wanna find this, here’s where you’re gonna get this. Almost like it was a art collector or, someone’s showing off a house. And so it’s one of those instances where, the truth is stranger that fiction. And so I was like. Once I saw that, I’m like, okay, I can translate this into a comic and, reach a broader audience. Yeah. Really? Yeah. It’s I’ll never forget, I, he tells his wife, says, Sandy said, fix these officers a pot of coffee. So she was visibly making coffee and he was kind, he would [00:08:00] follow ’em around a little bit. Point stuff out. They went and they come up from downstairs. They brought two or three guns up from upstairs, downstairs hey, tough. Where’d you get this? And then, it was getting like midnight or something and it was like, we are gonna be there. And we were there in the end, almost till four in the morning. And I, and it’s one agent, Shay Airy. He is dead now, but he was a long time mob. Investigator goes back to, to when they first formed the top hoodlum squad in Kansas City. And so he knew Tuffy pretty well. They were familiar with each other. And finally Tuffy says, Shay, you might as well come on downstairs. That’s where the good stuff is. I remember thinking, oh my God. And that’s where they found all the notes that he’d been keeping. See, he knew that was good stuff. He knew the importance of those notes and a little additional story on those notes. The next day or two, he’s meeting with some of these other guys with Joe Ragusa and Charlie Moretina in a restaurant, and they’ve got a bug on this table where they’re at. And he said, here’s what he says. He says, I got caught with a [00:09:00] bunch of shit. He said, I had it on the bag and I was gonna throw it away but man, they, I just didn’t get to the trashing time and I didn’t get it thrown away. He wasn’t got thrown away. He was just one of these guys that kept everything. And and that bunch of shit that he was talking about with those, those notes the infamous notes. All right, let’s see here. I’ll try. This is on a counter rain. Okay, there we go. So this is on a counter rain. So tell me the story on this one. I’m not sure. So this comes from a local myth about Portland, Oregon. And so I’ve got my Bugsy Siegel Ben Siegel character, and then he’s meeting with Al Winters, who was the local boss of kind of crime boss in the area. And apparently the story set goes that Ben Siegel visited him. And he spent two weeks in Portland trying to find a way for them to [00:10:00] work together to open up a gambling casino or something. And the, over the two weeks, it didn’t rain. It didn’t stop raining every single day that Bugsy was there. It, didn’t, it didn’t let up. And so he the idea is that, we don’t have any real good accounts on whether this did or didn’t happen. There’s very little known about, the Portland crime family and those things. There’s only a couple books been written as far as my knowledge. And but it’s just playing with the fact that, the Pacific Northwest and Portland is rainy for a long time, and a mobster who’s more, affiliated with Hollywood and Las Vegas and sunny Southern California, Portland would be a nightmare. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Yeah. And you must have talked to Casey McBride on that one. Our friend Casey McBride from Portland. And ’cause he talked a lot, he’s talked a lot [00:11:00] about Al Winter and he was like the, I think started during prohibition and the crime boss of Portland. If you think of Portland having a crime bus. And it wouldn’t make sense if if he was gonna do anything outside of Portland and even in, even if he had, was making any money. Why, buggy Siegel, he felt like he was a West Coast boss. I got a feeling and anything that happened on the West coast and he heard about it, he probably would be coming around wanting to get a little piece of that action. That’s how they are. They hear you’re getting some kind of criminal action that’s organized and steady and regular. They’re gonna come around, try to get a piece of it. So I would imagine that’s what he was up there doing. And there’s no doubt Al Winter was the. Erstwhile crime boss and we had a guy from ended up in Kansas City, came through Kansas City. He had a relative here named Joe Augusto, who ended up in Las Vegas. But he went to Portland for a while. He was, and he was a Sicilian and he had different scams going. We’d never heard of him when he appeared in Las Vegas, but he ended up [00:12:00] catching a case up there in neither Washington State or Oregon, I can’t remember which one now for some kind of a scam. He was running. He came back down and he got in with the people at the Tropicana and Joe Agosto Somehow I know how he did it. He, and he was connected to Nick Ella here in Kansas City, and he used, he parlayed that connection. With the people that owned the Tropicana, there was several partners in that. And they wanted a big loan to, to amp up the Tropicana, to keep up with the other expansion of the other casinos, and they needed to get this big loan. It’s hard to get loans for casinos, regular banks back then, regular banks would not make loans, but the Teamsters Union would. And so he parlayed his connection with Nick Novella. Claiming, promising that they would get a big Teamsters loan. And then N Novella made sure they didn’t get it for a while as he kept working his way in and getting more employees that he, that owed him into places and then they started to skim. And that’s that’s a little [00:13:00] Kansas City connection to the northwest part of the United States. Yeah. Interesting. Tell us a little more about it. What do you got planned now? You’re putting those little three, three panel true crime ones into will you organize it by family or how will you do that? Yeah, so I’ve got so the collection’s called family Business. An offer you can’t refuse. And it’s going to be crowdfunded via Kickstarter starting on March 24th and run through mid-April. I expect the book to be then available for public demand in June or July of this year. ‘Cause it takes a little time to print everything. But yeah, I’ve got it organized roughly into like geographic area. So I start with Chicago and then I, for the most part will go chronologically. So I’ll find, oh, I see. The strips about Johnny Torrio and Al Capone, and then move up, through the years until you’re talking about Ian Kana, Antonio Caro, and things like that. And that’ll hit each of the [00:14:00] kind of big regions. So I’ve got everything from, chicago in the Midwest, and then I’ll go into down to Cincinnati and hit things on and Newport, Kentucky during prohibition where George Remus and some of the Cleveland Syndicate started gambling dens and things like that. And then I move into New York and do the same thing. But I’ve got. I’ve been working on these comics for this is the seventh year that I’ve been doing these True Story comics, so I’m gonna have over two hundred and thirty, two thirty five in this collection. And then Eve’s Comic has a little blurb, a small paragraph, explaining the true life story that inspired the comics. And so throughout the book it’s gonna be two to four comics on a page or in a spread. And then there’s gonna be different different kind of segues in between in which I’ll have some of the graphic design work [00:15:00] that I’ve done to parody mafia businesses, like ante cigars based on Carmine ante if he had a cigar shop. And I’ll do things like that. And so I’ll have like little interludes or kind of chapter breaks. Between different stories and which I’ll also explain some, give some context for, the casual true crime fans, and you had t-shirts with ante cigar shops and different things like that too, don’t you? Yep. You had those made up for as gifts or what as rewards for your crowd crowdsourcing thing. ’cause I think I’ve got one of those ante cigar shop t-shirts or I used to, I, it’s around here somewhere. I don’t know, sometimes I run through t-shirts and I get some many and I just start getting rid of ’em and starting over again. Oh yeah. I’ve got, I try and get one for each of the campaigns that I run. And and when I do that, I’ve now got a huge stack and I’m like, yeah. Yeah. And it’s just ’cause I want to test the quality, make sure I have good. Product for my backers, and then I’m like, I don’t really [00:16:00] need another T-shirt, but I’m gonna offer ’em. I first started in this first movie I made up a whole bunch of t-shirts. I bought 300 t-shirts that gang land wire, and I think I’m, this is eight or nine years later and I’m down to one or two left of the original t-shirts. Then I discovered print on demand that Printful that you told me about. And so now I just print ’em, I get one done at a time. Yep. For my gang led Wired, I don’t really try to do any other t-shirts. I don’t know. It’s sometimes it’s like you just, it gets so spread, so thin, doing different things that I run outta time myself. Yeah. Now, are these books or are they just the graphic novels, or are they just available off your website, or do you have some of ’em up on Amazon or places like that? Yeah, so Meet the Family. My first dust Bunny Mafia graphic novel is on Amazon. And then the rest of ’em are on my website or on Kickstarter. [00:17:00] When I have the campaigns going, I’ll usually have different add-ons that people can, pledge for to get all the books or the different, like mobster playing cards that I’ve done, things like that. Interesting. Interesting. All right, Brett Juliano, I really appreciate you coming on here and we will get this up and guys if you’re interested in this, get hold of old Brett. I’ll have the contact information. He he’ll be glad to, to ship you out some stuff and he needs, I, I appreciate anybody that does he does, Brett does everything. Characters are not real, but the stories are real. So I appreciate anybody that bases anything on the real stories ’cause there’s so much myth out there and so much bullshit that that, so I appreciate that you do that, Brett. Thank you Gary. That means a lot. Okay. All right, Brett. Good talking to you. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Okay. All right, Brett. I’ll I don’t know next week or two, maybe I’ll go ahead and slide this up there. [00:18:00] No, I appreciate it. I’ll send you a link. I’ll send you a link whenever we, I get it up there. Sounds great. Thanks Gary. Okay. Alright. Bye. Bye.

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

In this episode of Gangland Wire, Host retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins dives into the shadowy intersection of organized gambling and college athletics through the story of Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal.  During the early 1960s, Rosenthal built his reputation by identifying weaknesses in sports systems, particularly among vulnerable college athletes. He met one who could not be bought, Mickey Bruce of Oregon. At the center of this story is a little-known but pivotal attempt at a fix involving the Oregon Ducks. Rosenthal and his associate, David Budin, believed they had found an opening, but they ran headlong into the integrity of Oregon halfback Mickey Bruce. Bruce flatly refused the bribe, setting off a chain reaction that would help expose a much wider pattern of corruption in college sports.   I break down how this wasn’t an isolated incident but part of a nationwide effort by gamblers to influence outcomes and exploit young athletes. The episode explores the mechanics of organized gambling, attempts to fix games, and why college sports became such an attractive target for mob-connected bookmakers. The story reaches a dramatic turning point during U.S. Senate hearings on gambling in college athletics, where Mickey Bruce publicly identified Lefty Rosenthal as one of the men who tried to corrupt him. It’s a rare moment in mob history—one where a gambler is named in open testimony by a player who refused to bend.   From there, I trace Rosenthal’s continued rise in the gambling world, from Miami to Las Vegas, where he would help shape modern sports betting while repeatedly managing to stay one step ahead of serious legal consequences. Rosenthal’s story raises enduring questions about accountability, the limits of law enforcement, and why some figures seem untouchable. I close the episode by reflecting on Rosenthal’s legacy—and on Mickey Bruce’s quiet heroism.   Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee” Subscribe to the website for weekly notifications about updates and other Mob information. To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here To rent ‘Brothers against Brothers’ or ‘Gangland Wire,’ the documentaries click here.  To purchase one of my books, click here. 0:03 The Story Begins 4:14 The Bribe Attempt 7:58 The Aftermath of Scandal 12:26 The Rise of Lefty 14:34 College Sports and Corruption 18:58 The Online Gambling Boom 22:26 The Fall of Adrian McPherson 24:24 Mickey Bruce’s Legacy [0:00] Hey, hey, all you wiretappers, back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, a retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective. I worked a mob for about 14 years, and now I tell some mob stories, as many as I can find. And we all know Lefty Rosenthal. We all know Robert De Niro played him as Ace Rothstein in the film movie Casino. And that movie, part of the reason it was so good that Nicholas Pelleggi, the screenwriter, and wrote the book, was able to spend hours and hours interviewing Lefty Rosenthal in real life. He had gone to Florida by then and it seemed like the mob wasn’t after him anymore. They had one attempted bombing of him, if you remember. [0:41] So it was a really good movie. There’s really good depiction of that era and that system that they had going out there. Let’s go back on Lefty Rosenthal’s history to a guy that he couldn’t corrupt. Lefty Rosenthal thought he could corrupt anybody, but he found a guy that he couldn’t corrupt. It was really one of his early cases where law enforcement, the FBI, and other state law enforcement agencies figured out Lefty Rosenthal was somebody, and he was a pretty big gambler. He was a nationwide gambler. In 1960, the Oregon Ducks had a pretty good team. What a name, the Oregon Ducks. They had a man named Dave Grayson and the quarterback with Dave Gross in the backfield. They had a 5’3 All-American receiver named Cleveland Jones. What a name, Cleveland Jones. They went 7-2-1. They lost to Michigan, and they also lost to eventual Rose Bowl champ Washington. But this was good enough to gain a Liberty Bowl invite to play Penn State. Oregon lost the bowl and played in two feet of snow and freezing temperatures in Philadelphia that year. [1:50] But the biggest news of the season was made during their trip to Ann Arbor to play Michigan. They had this potential All-American player named Mickey Bruce, who really was obscure compared to especially this Dave Gross or this Cleveland Jones, who was an unusual player. He was a president of his fraternity. He was a former Little League World Series star. He was the son of an attorney. He was a team captain. He played halfback and defensive back. And there was two professional gamblers came to Ann Arbor that year and they didn’t know much about this guy, but they did know, one of them’s name was Budin, David Budin, and the other one was Frank Lefty Rosenthal. They didn’t know much about Mickey Bruce, but they had a connection to him. A guy who played for the Oregon State basketball team named Jimmy Granada and knew Boudin from when they were little kids growing up on the basketball courts in New York City. Now, Granada told Mickey that he had two friends staying at the team hotel and they needed tickets. This time, players could then were given tickets and they could turn around and sell them to people. Boudin ended up finding him and introduced himself and said he was Jimmy Granada’s friend and invited Mickey up to the room and said, I’m the guy that needs a couple of tickets. [3:15] Mickey was a little bit hesitant, but didn’t know this guy. He’s probably got a New York accent, probably slick, more than likely. He hesitated at first and booted and said, just take a few minutes. I just want to get you to go and get those tickets. And so he goes him, so he follows him into the room and he finds Lefty Rosenthal waiting there, who he doesn’t know and won’t even have any idea who he is till much later. So they chatted a little bit about the game as people will and ask him questions about the team. And Rosenthal mentioned that Oregon was a six-point underdog. He said, do you don’t think a player could be bribed? Mickey said, I suppose they could. Buden then cut in. He said, Mickey, he said, what do you think it would cost to ensure that Michigan won by at least eight points? Mickey plays along. He says, you’re the big-time gamblers. You should know. So Buden said, about $5,000. And Mickey said, that’s probably fine. [4:14] Mickey said, let me check into this. And he said, I’m late for a team meeting and I got to get going. So they made plans to meet later on about 9 p.m. Mickey was no fool or small town rube. His father had been a Chicago attorney and he now practice in El Cajon, California. [4:31] He raced to catch up with his teammates and told an assistant coach about the bribe who told the athletic director, who then called in the Michigan State Police, who called in the FBI. And they told Mickey to go ahead and show up at 9 p.m. at the meeting in the hotel room. They don’t want to apprehend Buden and Rosenthal right now. They want to get some more information and really get a real solid bribery attempt out of them. So acting on the advice of these cops, Mickey goes back to the hotel room that evening. [5:00] Buden and Rosenthal start talking to him. And so they gave him tips about how to carry out this scheme without attracting any attention. Buden and Rosenthal say, we’ll give you an extra $5,000 and you can get the quarterback, Dave Gross, to go along with this scheme. He said, Mickey, you just need to let some pass receivers get behind you once in a while and let them run up the score a little bit. And you’re not going to win anyhow, more than likely. Get the quarterback to call a few wrong plays nobody really ever noticed. And he said, I’ll give you each $5,000 after the game if you’ll do that. He also offered Mickey $100 a week just to call him at his house down in Florida and update him about the health of Oregon’s team before weekly betting lines were released makes you wonder how many guys did Rosenthal have calling him to update him on injuries and everything on different college teams and professional too. Because I know from doing a story before that Ocardo and a lot of the Chicago gangsters really valued Rosenthal’s tips on making their football bets. He seemed to have some kind of an inside track. [6:08] As he got ready to leave, Mickey said, oh, wait a minute. I gave you those tickets. You got to pay me, which were only worth about three bucks each. And so Lefty gave him 50 bucks for the two tickets. Mickey would remember later that he had to roll $100 bills in his pocket, which is typical for a high-flyer, high-rolling kind of a dude like that, have a big roll of cash in your pocket. And then you reach down in, peel some off so everybody can see how much money you got in your pocket. Rosenthal said, hey, I got to leave tonight, but see my friend Buden in the morning, David Buden, and he’ll give you the money. Mickey agreed, went back to his room. The next morning, while eating breakfast with his teammates, he sees a state trooper leading Buden out of the hotel in handcuffs, and then missed Lefty Rosenthal, who, as he had told them the night before, the Lefty was going to be leaving, and they had made a good bribery attempt. I don’t know what the police were waiting on. They were trying to make an even better case or something. I guess they probably They wanted him to go back in and catch them all together with the money. But then lefty left, and they went ahead and pulled the trigger early. You never know how these things work out exactly and what was at play. During the game, Mickey, I tell you what, Mickey played his heart out. He got an interception for a touchdown. It didn’t make any difference. Michigan won easily, 21 to nothing, and easily covered the six-point spread. [7:28] A player will later be asked about this, and part of the reason was he said the coach had called a late-night team meeting and told them about this bribery attempt and asked them if any of them had been approached. Of course, everybody said no. Whether they had or not, they’re going to say no. But this player said it really shook us. We just had no rhythm. We just couldn’t get together for that game. [7:50] Buden, when he was arrested, it turns out he was arrested for registering at a hotel under a fake name. He ends up paying some little fine and leaving town. [7:58] Lefty was long gone the next day. It’s possible that Rosenthal and Buden knew that just attempting this bribe might have the negative impact on Oregon’s chances against the spread anyhow. All we know for sure is they got off scot-free in the end, and Buden paid a $100 fine or whatever. Lefty, but he did get exposed because Mickey Bruce, he didn’t have any idea of what he was getting drawn into, but it became a nationwide scandal. Basketball and football games, college games were being influenced on a wide scale by these gambling interests and Lefty Rosenthal was right in the middle of it all. Part of the McClellan committee, Senator McClellan of Arkansas convened his select committee just to investigate gambling and college athletics later that year. Because of this Michigan interaction with Lefty and college players and attempted bribery, they brought Mickey Bruce in. September the 8th, 1961, there’s a Senate hearing witness table. And sitting at that table is Mickey Bruce at one side and Frank Lefty Rosenthal at the other. And this was the same Frank he’d met at this hotel room. And he literally fingered Rosenthal as one of the men who attempted to bribe him. That photo that I’ve got in there, if you’re on YouTube, Rosenthal fled the fifth, of course. [9:27] Committee here, meetings like that, really what they’re good for is to stir law enforcement and bring people out and bring out and get the public riled up against organized crime. That’s what McClellan’s committee was really good for. They had several of those committees that finally got local authorities and the FBI to start looking at organized crime. And in particular, this is the mother’s milk of organized crime by now is gambling. And college sports gambling was the thing at the time. There was some pro teams going on, but it didn’t have near the action going down on it that the college teams had. There was a lot more interest in college and a lot more college games every week. Later on the next year, Wayne County, Michigan District Attorney’s Office wanted Mickey Bruce to come back to Detroit and swear out a complaint against the people that tried to bribe him and name him and give statements and everything. Bruce, by then, he didn’t really want to mess with it. He was playing football. He had his fraternity work. He had to keep his grades up because he was going to law school. [10:32] But they had a game against Ohio State that November. Michigan authorities thought, just come in and see us when you’re here. But he was out for the season by then. He had separated his shoulder, and he never really played again when they were playing Stanford earlier that year. He wasn’t going to go back to Michigan. His coaches tried to get him to cooperate, but he said, I’m done with the whole matter. In an interview, he said, as far as I’m concerned, this whole thing should have been dead a month ago after it happened. He conferred with his father, and they both said they can’t really make him do that. [11:05] He said, I didn’t have time to go. I’ve got all these school activities that I’m doing, and I just don’t want to go. And he said, the Michigan police botched this thing from the start. They should have stuck around, and they should have got Rosenthal before they left town. There were several things they should have done, and it was a poorly run investigation that probably wasn’t going to succeed anyhow. And he said it had been over a year, and he said, I don’t really remember exactly what happened. I understand all that, and he could have helped him make a case, but there’s an obscure a paragraph in Lefty Rosenthal’s FBI file. And it might explain a little more about why Mickey Bruce didn’t testify in a criminal trial against Lefty. It already testified and pointed him out in the McClellan hearing. But right after that, his mother received a telephone call in her home in El Cajon, California. Now, there’s some, it says name redacted, but you can easily fill in the name. 1961, September 1961, name redacted, El Cajon, received a phone call from an unidentified male asking if, name redacted, can you fill in, Mickey Bruce, name redacted, answered in the negative, at which time this person uttered an oath and added, you’re going to get it, and so is he. I think it’s pretty easy to fill in the names of Mickey Bruce and his mother easily. [12:26] Bruce stayed home Oregon went to Columbus Lost to the Buckeyes again Wayne County DA Dropped any cases Against Buden and Rosenthal For lack of evidence Lefty will continue During these years To run his sports book Out of Florida He’ll continue Traveling around the country And making contact With people in the College sports world Trying to bribe players And coaches And gather information And. [12:50] Cops in Miami were watching Lefty by then, 1960, New Year’s Eve. Police Chief Martin Dardis of Miami knocked on Rosenthal’s door with a group of guys and found him in his bedroom in his pajamas. He had a telephone in one hand and a small black book in the other. Dardis took the phone away from him and started answering the calls, and they were from bettors all around the country. He remembered that there was one guy named Amos who wanted to place a bet on a football game on New Year’s Day. And Dardis handed the phone to Rosenthal who told the guy that was calling in says you’re talking to a cop you stupid SOB. [13:28] During that raid, Rosenthal complained he’d paid $500 to keep local police from harassing his bookmaking operations. He said, you guys must be kidding. [13:37] Evidently, you didn’t get your piece. About a year later, February 1962, after the Senate hearings, detective knocked on his door again in Miami. He came to the door sporting dapper attire, which he was a really dapper dresser, and he had painted fingernails, according to a newspaper account. He said, I’ve been expecting you. [13:58] The detectives arrested Rosenthal, not for bribing Mickey Bruce, but he and his friend Buden faced charges in North Carolina for offering $500 to Ray Paprocki, a basketball player at NYU, and wanted to shave points in a 1960 NCAA tournament against West Virginia. During this time, authorities had uncovered a nationwide network of fixtures who conspired to influence hundreds of college basketball games over a five-year period. In the end, 37 players from 22 schools were arrested on charges relating to [14:31] port shaving. Man, that’s, boy, that was huge. We’ve got these guys going down now periodically that are getting involved because of the apps. And we’re going to get a little more into that. This gambling thing and college athletics especially, but even pro athletics. It’s a corrupting force, guys. I know a lot of you like to bet on games, but it really, there’s a real potential for corrupting the game. And in the end, if they keep it up and people keep corrupting these games, it’s just going to be like wrestling. You’ll just, somebody will control who’s going to win and who’s going to lose in every contest. That’s what these gamblers would like to get, and they’d make all the money. [15:08] Rosenthal pleaded no contest. He got a $6,000 fine for trying to fix this NYU-West Virginia game. He claimed that David Buden gave up his name and that he said later on, trying to clear himself of that, that that wasn’t really me. David Buden did it, and he would have given up his mother’s stay away from what he had to face. That was when the Nevada Gaming Control Board was after him. [15:33] In 1967, Rosenthal, under the watch of the Chicago Outfit, started acting like his outfit bosses and bring outfit tactics down to Miami. He started intimidating rival bookies and others in Miami who incurred his wrath. He ordered bombings of the territory. I interviewed the son of a CIA operative named, his father’s name was Ricardo Monkey Morales. Look back and see if you can find that interview of the son of Monkey Morales. I think Monkey Morales was probably in the title. And he told us about his father’s relationship with Rosenthal. He told him that Lefty had told his dad that he represented organized crime out of Chicago. And he said that Morales said that Rosenthal paid him. He said that Rosenthal paid Monkey Morales to blow up Alfie’s newsstand with a bookie joint in the back. He also had him, they had him blow up a car and a boat owned by a well-known jewelry thief that the mob was pressuring to do some burglaries for them. He also had him explode a bomb. I remember this, explode a bomb in the front yard of a Miami police officer trying to show his power. I guess this guy was messing with him or something, trying to tell everybody he was connected to the outfit and don’t mess with me. [16:50] Morales would also claim that he’d witnessed Rosenthal meeting with Tony Splatron in Miami in 1967. [16:58] 1970s, he goes to Las Vegas at the request of the outfit, which we all know. We’ll go back over it a little bit. Even legitimate gambling people will say he invented the sportsbook industry in Las Vegas. They didn’t really do that before. And Sports Illustrated once called him the greatest living expert on sports gambling. He’ll die in 2008 of natural causes down in Florida after all the skimming investigation went down and people started going to grand juries and being indicted and going to trials and everything. All the mobsters did. Several people in Las Vegas did. A guy out of the Tropicanda who was Kansas City’s man, Joe Augusto, and a guy named Carl Thomas who worked at both casinos and helping in skimming and several other guys that worked in the casino business. But guess who never was indicted? And guess who never even was called in for an interview? And guess who just hid out? Lefty Rosenthal. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Jane Ann Morrison of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Finally, they get an FBI agent to confirm to her that he was a top echelon informant during all this time. They try to blow him up in his Cadillac, another famous attempted mob hit. A lot of people speculate on that. They’ll always say it was Kansas City because they thought he was an informant all along. and never liked him and never trust him because he really, he brought all the heat down out in Las Vegas. Now, the heat was coming anyhow, but he maybe brought it a little bit quicker. [18:24] There’s a former federal prosecutor out of Las Vegas that once said, it’s been said you should never speak ill of the dead, but there are exceptions to the rule, and Frank Rosenthal is one of those exceptions. He is an awful human being. [18:38] Dave Budin, the guy who first approached Mickey Bruce, Yes. Continues in the sportsbook game and draws his son Steve into it. And by the 1990s, the online betting industry has taken over from your neighborhood bookie and a mob just running everything. It’s a multi-billion dollar thorn in the side of the U.S. authorities. [18:59] 1998, federal prosecutors indicted Miami gambler David Buden, same man that tried to bribe Mickey Bruce, and indicted Buden’s son for running something called SDB Global. [19:13] Which later became SBG. Federal authorities prosecuted Boudin under a federal anti-gambling statute because SDB Global was incorporated in Costa Rica, but it was based in Miami. Pleaded guilty and got a $750,000 fine. In Kansas City, during those same years, the son of the feared mafia capo, if you will, Willie the Rat Comisano, Willie Comisano Jr., They headed up a group of bookies that contained the names and sons and other extended relatives of many Kansas City Mafia members out of the 50s and 60s. And they were using the internet and dealing with either SDB Global or one of the other sports betting sites that sprung up in Costa Rica because they were all over the place. Budins were high flyers in this doing business out of Costa Rica. And they were making a lot of money, a lot of money. In 2004, SBG comes to the attention of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. They sent an undercover in, and they asked an SBG operator why the company required customers to call before wiring each new deposit. And he got him on tape to say, because we change the names in the countries of the middlemen all the time. The agent suggested that the process made it uneasy, and the employee of SBG said, you don’t have to worry about it. Lots of people do it. [20:35] Well, during this investigation, they also found there was a Florida State star quarterback named Adrian McPherson was placing bets on games that he was playing in and ends up getting dismissed from the Florida State Seminoles football team. He was a rising star, a rising young star quarterback. In the investigation, they learned he’d already lost $8,000 to a local bookie who’d cut him off. He was giving him, extending him credit. Guy owed him $8,000 and he cut him off. So that’s when he turned to online SBG sites. Now, you have to pay up front. So he was getting some money to gamble somehow, and he tried to hide this activity by using a roommate, but a review of his phone records showed several calls to STB, and one time was, like, just before, there were, like, two in a row. And that’s how they were, like, trying to hide it and then pass it off to make it look like there was somebody else making the bet. He eventually gets arrested. He pleads to lesser charges. But one of those charges was check forgery. And when a gambler starts losing, many times they’ll turn to those white-collar crimes like check forgery, embezzlement. They’ll start stealing from their work, shoplifting, drug dealing. They can do anything like a junkie, man. They’ll do anything to keep gambling. [21:52] I once knew a guy said he couldn’t even walk into a casino because he just starts getting a rush. He just can’t stay away from the machines once he walks in. So he totally has to stay out. Adrian McPherson, he was also an all-star baseball player. Even though he is kicked out of college ball for betting on his own team, he then gets drafted. The New Orleans Saints in 2005 draft him. They want him as their starting quarterback. But they also drafted a guy named Drew Brees, who ended up leading him to the Super Bowl in 2006. [22:27] Now, later in that season or during that season, the Tennessee Titan mascot will accidentally hit McPherson with a golf cart. He sues him for several million dollars. The following year, he does this. He’s been injured by this golf cart. I don’t know if it wasn’t a career injury, obviously, but they also the gambling thing. And the following year, he appears with the Grand Rapid Rampage AFL team. Then he goes to a Canadian team. Then he plays on a variety of arena football teams, a different one every year almost. And finally, in 2018, the Jacksonville Sharks, which is an arena team, releases him. His gambling led him to a free fall into obscurity. He was on his way up to life-changing generational wealth, and the gambling just got him. [23:17] Let’s go back a minute, you know, all these, I’ll be telling all these stories about these low rents and degenerate gamblers. Let’s go back to the incorruptible Mickey Bruce. He was injured during 1961 during his senior year. His last game was in 1961 against Stanford. His three seasons of Oregon, he rushed 29 times for 128 yards. At one touchdown, he caught 10 passes for 113 yards and three touchdowns. Defensively, he intercepted six passes in the last season, returned six punts for an 11-yard average. He ends up being drafted in the 24th round of the 1962 AFL draft by the Oakland Raiders, but he never pursued a professional football career. Instead, he followed his father’s footsteps. He went to law school and became a lawyer out in California. [24:08] Michael J. Bruce, his story goes really beyond the gridiron. He’s on that very short list of individuals who have implicated gangsters, pointed them out in court, and survived. And he prospered from then on under [24:20] his own name. He didn’t go in witness protection or anything like that. He might not have agreed to prosecute Lefty going back to Michigan for that other case, but he did stand up and point at Lefty Rosenthal and say, he’s the one that tried to bribe me. 1981, Mickey Bruce will get the Leo Harris Award. Presented to alumni, alumnus Letterman, who have been out of college for 20 years and have demonstrated continuous service and leadership to the university. Some of the other, Alberto Salazar went to Oregon. He got it. A guy named Dan Fouts, I know that name, Johnny Robinson, Bill Dellinger. [25:02] So guys, it’s much better to get a Lifetime Achievement Award for doing good than to get a car bomb or to die in obscurity. So thanks, guys. That’s the story of Lefty Rosenthal and his earlier years before the skimming and really the story of a tribute to Mickey Bruce, a guy that stood up and did the right thing when it needed to be done. Thanks, guys. And don’t forget, stand up and go to your computer and order one of my books online or rent one of my movies or look at my website and see what you like there. Make a donation, if you will. I got expenses. Don’t usually ask for. I got ads. They just cover some things and then other things. Some of these FOIA things cost a lot of money and got a few expenses. Anyhow, so thanks a lot, guys. But mostly, I appreciate your loyalty and all the comments that you make on my YouTube channel and on the Gangland Wire podcast group. It’s inspiring. It really, truly is inspiring. It keeps me coming back. Thanks, guys.