Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. Gary interviews author Ronald Fried about his book on Frank Costello. Mr. Fried researched Costello and crafted a novel using actual situations and Costello’s exact language taken from newspapers, court proceedings, and transcripts from the famous Kefauver hearings. He tells how Frank Costello helped the Mafia transition from bootlegging during Prohibition into the 1930s and showed them how to transfer the organization into interstate gambling. Some of the stories he learned were how Costello ensured his slot machines had a step stool for kids to reach the coin slot. We learn how Costello was such a serious gambler that he would drink water and challenge other men to see who could urinate for the longest time. He won every time.

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Transcript

GARY JENKINS 00:00

But welcome all you Wiretappers out there back here in the studio of gangland wire in the studio with me and Ron Fried. Right. Okay, Fried has written a book about the Prime Minister of the underworld. And he was an immensely important man in that transition from the old mustache Pete days on into the modern crime syndicate. He was kind of the, I’d say the brains behind Lucky Luciano, in my opinion. But anyhow, rod has written a book about the Prime Minister of the underworld. So rod, welcome.

Ronald Fried 00:33

Thanks a lot. Thanks for having me.

GARY JENKINS 00:35

So tell me, I know this is a novel, it’s a novelized form, but it’s based on facts. Right? How did you go about, you know, how do you go about doing that? Transport, translating facts into the novelization form?

Ronald Fried 00:51

Well, one of the things that I noticed I worked on a TV show about the history of organized crime, about founding of the New York Mafia, what I noticed is that a lot of the mistakes historical errors or rumors or myths, or plain old nonsense, from One Book To the next book to the next book get repeated, repeated, repeated. So I thought it was really hard to get at the truth, for a number of reasons. One is that it’s not as though like the History Department at Harvard University of study, this is exactly what happened. The other the other problem is that all the people who were there when these events unfolded, were actually criminals, right? And one thing we know about criminals is they lie a lot, right? They do not tell the truth. And they make up stories, and they’re very self aggrandizing. When you’re dealing with the history of organized crime, particularly those sort of mythical days of the 20s 30s 40s, and 50s, is there’s a lot of exaggeration, a lot of lies, there’s a lot of nonsense people want to believe things that simply aren’t true. So I thought that a novel would be would be one way to try to get at the truth. However, I wanted it to be historically accurate. So what I did was, I wrote a novel in which everything that Frank Costello said is, on the record, he actually said, so what he said in court, what he said in interviews, and what he said in the keep over hearings, televised congressional hearings about organized crime in America. That’s all those are actually his words. He gave interviews,