Don’t forget to buy me a cup of coffee on your venmo app at ganglandwire. This is the first of a two-part series on the now-famous Apalachin meeting, and I got my good friend retired K-9 Sergeant Cate Kozalto sit in on the show. If you want to learn more about Cate, check out my YouTube channel and see our motorcycle tour of Bonnie and Clyde sites from Iowa to Louisana.

There are lots of questions out there about the famous Apalachin meeting. I have heard every rumor and speculation possible. Kate and I will try to go through this dispel some of the rumors, and get to the truth. We are doing this because I understand there is a movie about the meeting to be released in 2019. First, we need to pronounce it correctly. I noticed that our frequent guest Bill Ouseley always said Appa -lake-in. I looked it up and as usual, he is correct. So I will quit saying Appalachian and say Appa-lake-in

The famous Apalachin meeting has taken on mythical proportions in popular culture. In Kansas City, we brag how New York cops arrested our long-time boss, Nick Civella at a train station very close to this meeting, and he was with prohibition-era Kansas City crime boss, Joe Filardo. This event gave the Kansas City crime family credibility on a national scale.

The earliest mention in popular culture was in the Peter Mass book, The Valachi Papers. The movie of the same title also depicted the meeting. Charles Bronson played Joe Valachi.

The Apalachin Meeting was loosely depicted in the 1959 film Inside the Mafia. This film starred Cameron Mitchell. Inside the Mafia is a 1959 film noir crime film based on a true incident. It was based on the Albert Anastasia murder and the subsequent Apalachin Meeting.

The meeting was comically depicted in the 1999 film Analyze This with Robert DeNiro and Billy Crystal.

Narration near the beginning of the 1990 Martin Scorsese movie Goodfellas Henry Hill, played by Ray Liotta said,  “It was a glorious time, before Apalachin, before Crazy Joe Gallo took on a mob boss and started a war…” In the film, the name Apalachin was mispronounced – Henry Hill’s character pronounces the “ch” in Apalachin like in the word “chin,” but it is correctly pronounced like a “k.” The full name is pronounced “Apple-lake-in.”

Why was this Apalachin meeting necessary? By this time, the mobsters knew that local police, the FBI, and most importantly, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics were using electronic surveillance methods or bugging telephones and rooms. In 1957, the phone was good but not the best, and there was no such thing as conference calls, let alone Skype or FaceTime conference calls. I believe they wanted to look at each other face to face when they made decisions about the future of the National Crime Commission. Transportation was constantly improving, and interstate crime was becoming more accessible. Las Vegas was on the horizon, and other western cities were growing to create more opportunities for gambling and labor racketeering. Narcotics were a question. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics had gathered a lot of information about the various criminal organization, and narcotics was becoming known as dirty money. Was the profit worth the risk?

However, one of the main reasons for this meeting was a struggle for control between the more Americanized liberal factions and the old-school conservative factions of the mafia. The progressive wing wanted to move more into business crime and avoid killings and interfamily wars, while the conservatives wanted to keep everything open.

First, let’s go back and see who some players were and how they got there.

In 1957, a National Crime Syndicate existed. In 1931 after the last old Mustache Pete, Sal Marazano, was killed by Lucky Luciano and his crew, the bosses of the New York 5 families along with Buffalo New York boss Stephano Magaddino and Chicago’s Al Capone formalized the geographic boundaries and created a set of rules, like for example, for a man to be approved as a made man,