Gangland Wire

By Gary Jenkins: Mafia Detective

Gangland Wire Crime Stories is a unique true crime podcast. The host, Gary Jenkins, is a former Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit Detective. Gary uses his experience to give insigtful twists on fam... more

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September 16, 2024 Wiretapping Carlo Gambino
Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. In this episode, we dive into the captivating tales of Gary Clemente’s father, Peter C. Clemente, who was a significant figure in the FBI’s Top Hoodlum Squad. Peter’s career spanned from 1950 to 1976, and he played a vital role in various high-profile cases within the Mafia. One notable event was the Appalachian Mob Conclave, where top mob leaders were detained, leading to the inception of the Top Hoodlum Program initiated by J. Edgar Hoover. Peter Clemente’s proactive approach led him to have a face-to-face encounter with Carlo Gambino, a powerful Mafia boss. Gambino was surprised by Peter’s bold move and their interaction provided valuable insights into Gambino’s demeanor and voice, essential for future investigations. Another riveting story recounts Agent Clemente’s extensive wiretapping operation on Carlo Gambino while he stayed at a motel in Miami Beach. The meticulous operation involved eavesdropping on Gambino’s conversations with his associates, shedding light on the inner workings of the Mafia. Furthermore, the episode touches on Peter’s involvement in debriefing Joe Valachi, a crucial informant who revealed significant information about the Mafia’s structure. Despite initial reluctance due to mistrust, Valachi eventually cooperated with an Irish-speaking agent, facilitating the gathering of invaluable intelligence.
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Transcript
[0:00]
Introduction
[0:00]Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there and back here in the studio of Gangland Wire, as you can see, this is retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit Sergeant and Detective Gary Jenkins. We have a great story today. The son of an FBI agent who was one of the early first agents that was assigned to the FBI’s top hoodlum squad and worked on Carlo Gambino and talked to Joe Vellacci and some really great stories. He’s going to have a book coming out called Untold Tales from the FBI Top Hoodlum Squad. Welcome, Gary Clemente. Good to see you, Gary. Another Gary. Yeah, really. You know, there was a lot of us named Gary in the early 1950s. Did you notice that? I think so. I think we were all named after Gary Cooper. That was why. I asked my mother once. She said, I don’t know. We just couldn’t think of anything else. But I think that’s what it was because nobody names their kid Gary now. There you go. There you go. I’m Italian myself, and Gary’s not a common Italian name. I know. I know. I was surprised when I saw your first name.
[1:09]Anyhow, Gary, it’s a pleasure to meet you, and I look forward to this interview. I read a little bit about you. I don’t remember how I found out about you on Facebook or I don’t know. I’ve got so many feelers out there for people that have books or have knowledge about the mob that I forget where it came from. But anyhow, I got a hold of you and you graciously agreed to come on the podcast in order to tell the guys about your book and about your father’s experiences. And I looked them up and and he was an early guy in the top hoodlum squad, wasn’t he? He sure was, Gary. He started off in the Bureau in 1950, and his career spanned from 1950 to 19. Just an interesting side note, at that time, there was a little bit of discrimination in the world at that time with Italians. And he was told after he became an attorney, my father was, that by a cousin of his, my father had expressed to him that, hey, you know, I’ve always been interested in being a part of the FBI. His cousin said to him, forget it, Pete. They don’t take Italians.
[2:17]Well, my father did not like that at all. So he marched out of the FBI office. Before you knew it, He was sitting across the desk from another agent being interviewed for a position, and he noticed that the agent’s name was John Garibaldi or whatever Italian name it was at that time. Well, that answered the question about whether they were going to take Italians or not.
[2:41]So from 1950 to 1976, that was the span of my father’s career. The early part of his career was based in Quincy, Illinois. Then he went to Cleveland.
[2:56]
Early Career Discrimination
[2:52]Then he was transferred to New York. And he was born and raised in Brooklyn. So his parents, his Sicilian-born parents, were very appreciative of that. My dad’s early career, very interestingly, was involved with doing security background checks for people applying for sensitive government positions. And the federal government at that time was really interested whether you were a member of the Communist Party USA or the Socialist Workers Party, believe it or not, which they don’t do that now. Now, and I asked my dad, fast forward, very short, later on when he was in his late 80s, I said, hey, Pop, those people that you used to investigate and arrest that were part of the Communist Party or, say, the Socialist Workers Party, that were trying to worm their way into the government, those people are now in the deepest reaches of our bureaucracies or Congress or Supreme Court and the White House. He said, absolutely.
[4:01]So that’s how much things have changed over the years, Gary.
[4:09]
The Appalachian Mob Conclave
[4:05]So the early part of his career was involved with security background checks. Then a seminal event happened.
[4:14]It was the Appalachian Mob Conclave, where all of the top mob leaders were having a meeting in Appalachian, New York, a small town in upstate New York. I’m sure that you’ve talked about this already a little bit, and it’s a famous story. But after the mob conclave happened, my father heard about it, and the FBI was talking about this disastrous meeting. Meeting among all these mobsters these men were running across the field because there was a road block set up on the edge of the edge of the property of joe barbara and they got panicked these were the top mob bosses that were running across the field stepping in cow pies throwing their wallets out left and right trying to evade the police and much of their identification was rounded up. People like Carlo Gambino were there. Mario Lansky was there as well, too. Mario Lansky was not a made mob guy with the Italian mob, but he worked with them. He was there, too.
[5:22]And what happened was they should not have arrested or incarcerated any of these people, which they haven’t. They actually detained them. But word got back to the Bureau. All of this This information got back to the Bureau. My father heard about it. The Bureau was starting to implement something called the Top Hoodlum Program that Hoover was beginning to formulate.
[5:48]My father wanted to be a part of this. He put in for a transfer out of the security detail into the Top Hoodlum squad that was being developed in New York. And that’s how he became a part of all of that. Interesting. Now, you know, we have never said your father’s full name. It’s Peter C. Clemente, correct? Peter Charles Clemente. That’s correct. Correct. And so he was a member of the Top Hoodlum Squad, which was, I remember in Kansas City, I have a friend who was an agent that came to Kansas City. He’s Italian from New York City, and he speaks Sicilian. He grew up with Sicilian grandparents, and he was a member of the Top Hoodlum Squad in Kansas City immediately, and because they knew they needed these guys who were Sicilian speakers.
[6:37]Exactly, exactly. The fact that my father could speak and understand Sicilian, like your friend, was very, very important at that time because many of these individuals were either from Sicily or mainland Italy. Many of these guys were from the Naples area. They had connections with a group called Camorra. The Camorra and the Sicilians really did like each other. They were pretty much rivals. They would have heated problems with one another. But they worked together nonetheless when it came down to this. Money, yeah. Came down to the money, the moolah, yes. That’s right. All those old regional differences just fall away. Al Capone was a Neapolitan, but he had plenty of Sicilians working with him. Exactly. He needed those people working with him to get on their good side.
[7:29]
Working with the Mafia
[7:30]Interesting. So now your father, he starts working the mob, the mafia. There’s one really great story that’s going to be in your book. It’s mainly what your book is going to be about. It’s the first of a series, guys. So start watching for this series. But there’s a story about your father and Carlo Gambino early on in both their careers, really. Can you tell us that story?
[7:55]Well, after my father became a part of the Top Hoodlum Squad in New York, He was the first one ever that the FBI asked him to do summary reports about an individual named Carlo Gambino, as well as Meyer Lansky. So he was the first one ever to put on paper into the government circles about who Carlo Gambino was, his life, his history, where he was born, all of this, to put this on record. So he was the first one to do that. As part of the top hoodlum squad, he had the idea while doing the summary report about Carlo Gambino. He said, you know what, I would like to pay this individual a visit. I would like to meet him face to face. That was his idea. It wasn’t brought down from the supervisors. So one day, Gary, he went out to Brooklyn, New York. He waited outside of Gambino’s home about a half a block away. It was a brownstone in Brooklyn. He waited for Gambino to come out of his house. He saw him give his wife, Kate Gambino, a kiss goodbye. Now, Kate Gambino happened to be Caldwell’s first cousin.
[9:20]Oh, yeah. Interestingly enough. And Kate’s brother was Paul Castellano, who was a very, very highly connected Gambino lieutenant at the time, who eventually became a head of the Gambino crime family after Gambino died peacefully in his bed. Not in a prison cell but in his bed so my my father waited for him to come down the steps after giving kate a kiss goodbye he comes up the the street he’s alone he doesn’t have any body cars wow that’s interesting why doesn’t he have any body cars well he doesn’t need any body cars He is the unofficial boss of bosses of all five Mafia families. I say unofficial, Gary, because at that time, he was never officially named the boss of bosses. Previous to that, several decades ago, when there was the big Mafia war that happened between many of the families, one of the mob bosses was named the boss of bosses officially by the other families.
[10:32]But Carlo was never officially named, but he was called the boss of the boss because he had that much power. His family was that big, over 200 members, which was considerable at that time. So he comes up the street. My father waits for him. He has no bodyguards.
[10:53]He says to him, Mr. Gambino, my name is Peter Clemente. I’m with the FBI. Yeah, I’d like to ask you a few questions if I could.
[11:04]Gambino is pretty surprised because nobody’s ever done this to him. And he has a very, very hot-like face. He has these very beady eyes. My father has always described him in his book as having the eyes of an eagle, of a bird of prey. And he had this very, very distinctive, some people called it a banana nose.
[11:29]But it was like the beak of an eagle or a bird of prey. And my father showing him his identification, his badge, his credentials, he looks up slowly from the credentials into his eyes. And my father could see this is not chopped liver. This is not a guy with a banana nose. You don’t mess around with this guy. Now, my father had a lot of experience in the Bureau at that time. Nothing dissuaded him from interviewing Gambino. This is something he wanted to do. He was an experienced agent at that time, early 30s. He knew what he was doing. Gambino immediately says to him, what is it you want from me?
[12:15]
First Encounter with Carlo Gambino
[12:15]Well my father said well I’d like to ask you a few questions about an associate of yours that you’ve been doing business with and what happened with your associations with him and Gambino immediately says I can’t I forgot to mention this is important the whole time.
[12:35]He was speaking Sicilian to Gambino the whole time. Good. That’s great. Yeah. And Gambino was not used to that in any way, shape, or form. And Gambino said, I see that you’re one of us. You speak Sicilian. You’re one of us. Why are you bothering me? What is it you want from me? He says, well, as I mentioned, I would like to ask you some questions about your association with your business partner. He said, well, I’ve got nothing to tell you. I’m an honest businessman. I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m an honest businessman.
[13:13]And he actually told my father, you should be ashamed of yourself. You are a spiro, S-P-I-R-O, spiro in Italian. In Sicilian, that’s police spy, which is the worst thing you could be, a police spy. You are nothing but a spiro. You should be ashamed of yourself. My father has looked at him and said, my father is not somebody to be trifled with at all. He said, I should be offended? I should be offended. Well, sir, you are the one that should be offended. You have disgraced the Italian-American people of this country, the hardworking Italian-American people that have come over here honestly and legally, like my mother and my father. You have disgraced all of us with the illegal events that you have put yourself through and your crime family through. You’re the one that should be ashamed. A shame. Well, you know, did not like that at all. Says something about.
[14:17]Not very nice in Italian that doesn’t mean I want you to come over and have, you know, a dinner with me. Something like, ma pan di me, F you. And it’s just, you know, he wheeled around. I’ve heard that. That’s right. We all know what it means. I don’t have to get explicit about it. He wheels around to his car. A couple of his bodyguards were in the car at the time. They opened the door. They’re looking at my father like they wish they could beat the hell out of my father.
[14:47]Gambino drives off and that was the end of his face-to-face interview now here’s the interesting part about it why did he do this Gary? why?
[14:59]Does he think that Gambino is going to arrest Gambino? What’s the reason for him having a face-to-face interview? Well I purposely left that out to explain that my father told me son there were two things there were two reasons why I wanted to have a face-to-face with him. Number one, I wanted to see if he was easily rattled or not. I wanted to profile him. I wanted to understand his personality, how he reacted to questions. Was he ruffled easily? Was he calm? How did he respond to my questions? And number two, the most important part was I wanted to hear his voice.
[15:44]I said, why did you want to hear his voice, Dad? He says, well, if we ever recorded him, if we had him on tape and I listened to him, I could identify him. As the man behind the voice in whatever recordings that we had of him. So that was the purpose of that.
[16:02]
Undercover Wiretapping in Florida
[16:02]Yeah, interesting. Yeah. And that kind of brings up the next story about the time that he did hear his voice over a wire, so to speak. It’s a great story. And I guess my first question with that is, it was down in Florida. So did your father get transferred to Florida or did he go down there because Gambino was down there? Well, the face-to-face meeting with Gambino wasn’t Brooklyn. That was in 1957 or 1958, to be exact about it. Two was when they had my father go down to the Golden Gate Motel. They called it a motel hotel. Yeah. And it was a very unassuming place. It wasn’t a fancy, fancy place. Gambino was the type of individual he did not like to attract attention, unlike John Gotti. He maintained a low profile. So he went to sort of a middle class hotel. Now, the Bureau knew that he was going to be there. My father knew he was going to be there. And they sent my father down from New York to Miami Beach, along with another agent. There was a local agent, and the two of them went to wiretap Gambino. Gambino had left his room at one point during his stay there. He was there for six weeks.
[17:25]This was a six-week wiretapping event. And while Gambino had left the room at one point, he was there with his wife, Kate, too. The FBI sound team got into the room and placed wiretaps into, you remember what they were, Gary, they’re called A-blocks. The A-blocks were a small two-by-two block that were placed on the floorboards where the phone wires were connected. This is what they used back then. They had small microphones that they put in the A-block. There was one A-block that they did that with.
[18:04]That’s how they picked up the sound. On the other side of the wall happened to be my father and another agent from the Miami office. And they were wiretapping with a reel-to-reel tape recorder, round and round and round, the conversations that Gambino had with his lieutenants and his associates that visited him during the course of six weeks. Wow, that was quite an early wiretap or early hidden microphone. And it sounded like it was hardwired, which is a lot better. The wireless just did not work very well back then. The hardwired worked a lot better. and they tied it into that phone line. So was he then, then they ran that directly into the hotel room next door. So they had a direct connection. And so they had real-time information, not record it and listen to it later. Is that what I hear you saying?
[19:02]Exactly. That’s exactly true. Now there are some interesting, very interesting stories. Yeah, that’s my next question. Yeah. What was going on? Why was he down there? Was he down there to connect with somebody in Florida. And I don’t think we said exactly what city this motel was in. Was it Miami or was it Tampa? This is Miami Beach. Okay. So why was he down there? Why was Carlo down there? 62. Well, it was never revealed exactly why he was there. For six weeks, I’m sure the part of it was to to get away from the the colder weather in new york but this was in march this was in march of 1962 so it was colder up in new york many of the mob guys came down to came down to florida you know because now as you know gary miami was an open mob city it was not it did not have a mob family. The closest mob city was Tampa. It was Santos Traficante that ran the Tampa outfit there. But Miami was deemed to be an open city. You could not operate there unless you had permission from the powers that be.
[20:17]With the commission and the Tampa guys to do business down there. There were a lot of mobsters that lived there, guys like Eddie Coco, Joe Bruno, so on and so forth. Many of them lived down there and had homes there. It was never determined exactly why Gambino was there, but it was to conduct mob business throughout his six weeks, to have some, to relax, enjoy the time with his wife there too, and to conduct business as well. Well, two of the guys that visited him mostly was Tommy Greco, a.k.a. Tommy Palmer, along with Jimmy Palmazano. Those were two of his lieutenants. And the interesting story was that one day, the three of them came back from being outside in Miami Beach, and they were being followed too closely, too closely by a couple of FBI agents with cameras.
[21:17]They saw the cameras and they got a little bit too close to them they were taking pictures, Tommy Greco, Tommy Palmer and Jimmy Parmizzano were extremely they were infuriated they come back into the room I want you to envision this this is like a movie on one side of the wall you have these mobsters on the other side of the wall FBI agents listening to them they come back into the room and they’re furious and what do you think they’re talking about they’re talking about those SOPs out there the FBI guys my father’s listening to this the FBI guys those FBI guys were following us they’re taking pictures of us blah blah blah F words this and the FBI should die in hell and all their mothers should rot so on and so forth and Gambino was trying to calm them down a little bit. And long story short, while this is happening, one of them said, it was Tommy. Tommy said, you know, they could be anywhere. Down the street, they’re following. They could be in the next room for all we know. Cut to the other side of the wall. My father’s listening to this. He’s on the headphones.
[22:33]And my father says to his partner, Frank, Frank, I think they’re on to us. They mentioned something about the FBI following them. My father said, why are they following? they’re blowing our cover my father was getting angry he’s telling Frank his partner they’re on to us and Frank is a little bit he’s very nervous about this he gets very nervous my father’s more calm about this Frank is a little more anxious about this and he hears that what are you talking about what are they saying my father has to listen to most of the conversation Gary because they speak Sicilian most of the time time. Frank doesn’t know Sicilian, so my father asked him to listen. He had to get out of the headphones most of the time. He says, they’re out to us. The FBI is out there following too close. Why are these idiots doing this? They’re blowing our cover. Frank eventually, over time.
[23:37]He’s trying to convince my father, maybe we should cut this short. We should cut the feed. And we should cut the operation. My father said, no, we don’t need to be doing that. Because my father’s hearing on the other side of the wall, Tommy and Jimmy getting so upset, they’re moving furniture, trying to find a bug. Yeah. They’re looking in the lab. They were looking under the bed. All of a sudden, Tommy said, he picks up something, holds it up. He said, it was a used condom. He was all like, what’s the place? He said, don’t.
[24:17]Carlo eventually calms him down. He’s a true leader. He starts telling them some funny stories. Calm down. Look, I don’t like it any more than you do, but they’ve got a job. We’ve got a job sort of attitude. So he calmed them down.
[24:39]Eventually, everybody went back to New York. Gambino and his luteus go back to New York. My father goes back to New York as well, too, wraps up the operation. But that is more or less a lot of it in a nutshell.
[25:00]
Joe Valachi Interview
[24:54]If you want to read more of the details, you can catch it in my book coming out soon. That sounds great. Sounds great. You know, one more thing, just a quick little story about his, the, the deal with Joe Valachi when they brought him in Joe Valachi spoke to say, and he was to say, and, and they, your father was going to be the guy that interviewed him. But what happened? Tell us one last little quick story about that, which will be in your book. What are your books? Also, I don’t know which one you’re going to have a series of books of these untold tales. So tell us that story. Well, when Valachi was ready to talk, sing like a bird, he was in the Atlanta penitentiary at that time.
[25:40]Vito Genovese was his boss, the boss of his family. And for some reason, Vito felt that Joe was not being honorable and loyal to him. And Valachi was placed in Atlanta the Atlanta pen for drug related charges, Genovese was also in the pen at the same time Vito was, Joe was getting very very paranoid because he thought that Vito was going to whack him in prison to the point where Joe accidentally killed somebody else thinking that he was going to be the killer of him, so he kills this guy well he got nervous to the point after that, That he told the authorities that if they’re going to whack me, I might as well talk. I might as well sing. So they immediately got him out of there. They knew how important this was. They brought him up to Monmouth, New Jersey, which was an army base. Monmouth, New Jersey. They sequestered him there.
[26:48]He was going to talk to the FBI, ready to sing like a bird. And they were going to have my father talk with him. And Joe was not trusting of the FBI at all and wasn’t trusting of any Sicilians at all in any way, shape, or form. He found out that my father was a Sicilian-speaking Asian, and I didn’t want to speak to any Sicilians. I didn’t trust them. I don’t want to talk. Maybe they’re going to have me whacked. So they had a nice Irish-sounding Asian named Jim Flynn. Lynn. Good night. They brought him in. And what happened, Gary, was they brought Jim in to speak with Valachi. He would, over the course of many days, would get information from him. Valachi would give Jim information about the mob, the hierarchy of the mob.
[27:46]We didn’t understand a lot of that at the time. It wasn’t official, official. show. Yeah, we knew there was a boss and underboss and all of that, but, Here was the nuts and bolts of it. There’s a boss, there’s an underboss, there’s a conciliarity, an advisor, there were the lieutenants, the button men, all of that. We hear that from Valachi, which is important. He’s using Italian-sounding terms like capo regime, capo di decina. The head of regime, a lieutenant, he would bring these Italian terms back to Jim. Jim would bring it back to my father. My father would decipher and translate these things, write all of it down. And that’s how we more or less understood the hierarchy of the mafia, how we work in all the terms of what they meant as well, too. So it was a good working relationship between Jim Flynn and my father at that time. Really? Peter C. Clemente was a hugely important agent in that whole developing the top hoodlum squad and investigation of the five families, especially. I can’t even imagine how much he brought to that investigation. It’s just, he’s never really been recognized as much as he ought to be, I don’t think. Do you?
[29:09]I agree. Joe Pistone, who portrayed himself as Donnie Brasco, he’s a true hero. Joe Pistone is, as well as my father. My father preceded him. So my father and the other agents at that time, not just my father, but many, many, many, many other agents at that time, laid the groundwork for eventually destroying the Mafia. Which really happened around 1980, 1989. This is after the chaos of Gadi. So the mob was really pretty much neutralized at that time. It was people like my father, people like Joper Stone, later on that laid the groundwork for destroying the mob. And we, you know, Gary, we don’t, I remember being young and receiving the information that my father had about the mafia, something called the mafia.
[30:04]
Legacy of Peter C. Clemente
[30:05]And I understood it to be very dangerous. It was very dangerous. These were ruthless people.
[30:14]We depict them as being romantic now. Because, you see, these Italians, these passionate Italians, they know how to tell a story and they’re very likable, but they were very, very, very ruthless people. You did not want to cross them. They would kill you in a heartbeat if you said or did the wrong things or crossed their paths in a way that you should not. So, yes, my father was a hero, definitely an American hero that should be learned about as a part of American history. Truly, truly, truly was. I admired men like that. I worked with some of them when I first went in the intelligence unit. And, you know, they just, wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t have known anything. Think they were the ones that that built you know the knowledge base because they had no knowledge when your father started in the 60s in kansas city the local police had no knowledge didn’t pay attention the fbi had no knowledge about who these guys were just had rumors but had no knowledge so these guys got in and they built that knowledge base that then allowed the future investigations all the way up to the commission case in the end and and the family secrets in in Chicago, otherwise those cases had never happened.
[31:33]Exactly, exactly. Well, you know, the FBI and the local police at that time were my father was a part of all of that. And you remember this too during your career. Those people at that time, Gary, they were salt of the earth people. My father’s generation was a part of the greatest generation. These were World War II guys. I met these agents. They were solid as a rock. They were people that you really, really enjoyed being around. Family, they were family men. They had good careers.
[32:09]Wives, children. The 1950s, nothing was better at that time. Now, there are many stories I could tell you about the agents that did have problems. You know, they were human beings just like everybody else. There were people that were, as you know too, you’re working. Other law enforcement people, maybe they drank too much. Maybe they had problems with seeing too many women. That’s part and parcel of being human beings. But for the most part, the FBI and law enforcement back there, they were salt of the earth people, dedicated people. It has changed. We don’t want to get into too much of that right now. But I think you and I believe that much of it has changed. change as far as the integrity and the core values of what.
[32:58]What what they have now as opposed to before yeah it’s just i don’t know it’s just different now i i don’t know it’s it is different for sure so gary clemente untold tales from the fbi top hoodlum squad i really appreciate you coming on the show and telling about your father peter c clemente who was you know no doubt an american hero and an unsung american hero but guys you get this book, you’re going to read about this unsung American hero and really the good solid basis for organized crime and why it was important to investigate them and the early guys,
[33:39]
Closing Remarks
[33:37]the problems they had and the great exciting stories. You can make two or three movies out of all this. I think, Gary, you say you’ve been a screenwriter. Maybe we’ll get a screenplay out of some of these stories, your father.
[33:49]There’s definitely some stories I could tell you. All right. Guys, don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. And if you are out there on those streets, watch out for motorcycles. And if you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, be sure and go to that VA website and get that hotline number. If you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, which goes along with PTSD many times, our friend, former Gambino soldier, Anthony Ruggiano, is a drug and alcohol counselor down in Florida now. And he has a hotline on his website. So that’s, if you go into get rehab with Anthony Ruggiano, give me a call. I want, I’m going to put you on the show. Tell me all about it. You probably won’t, but anyhow, don’t forget like, and subscribe and keep coming back. Hit the podcast. Facebook group up. Got a lot of good people that put on stuff on that. A lot of good mob conversations and we’re on Facebook and the Apple app. Give me a review. So thanks a lot guys. And thanks a lot. Gary Clemente.
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38min
September 09, 2024 Michael Vecchione on Gaspipe Casso
Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. In this episode of the Gangland Wire podcast, Michael Vecchione, a former Brooklyn prosecutor and author, discusses his novels inspired by real-life experiences in the criminal underworld. Gary Jenkins and Michael Vecchione focus on Lucchese mobster Anthony Gaspipe Casso. These two veterans of the fight against the Mafia delve into themes of loyalty, betrayal, and the gritty realities of organized crime in New York City. Former porsecutor Michael Vecchione interviews Gaspipe Casso about his involvement in criminal activities, intricate alliances, and obstacles law enforcement faces in solving cases, which are highlighted, offering a glimpse into the dark world of organized crime. The discussion underscores the challenges of investigating organized crime and emphasizes the importance of ongoing efforts to combat the La Cosa Nostra.
Click here to find all of Michael Vecchione’s books on Amazon.
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Transcript
[0:00]
Introduction to Gangland Wire
[0:00]Hey, welcome all you wiretappers out there. It’s good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins. You know, I’m a retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective turned podcaster. And this has been fun, guys. This is so much fun. And I’ve gotten to know some great people doing this over the last several years. And one of them is Michael Vecchione. Welcome, Michael.
[0:22]Thank you very much, Gary. I appreciate you having me back on. I love talking to you and talking to your audience. You know, it’s interesting, like Michael and I kind of speak the same language in many ways, because he was a prosecutor in the Brooklyn. He was a, you were the chief of the Brooklyn Rackets division, correct? That’s, that’s correct. Yeah. I had before that I was chief of the Homicide Bureau as well. And so I kind of had my hand in, in almost everything that went on in the DA’s office when I was, when I was there. So it was a very interesting experience. I got to tell I can imagine, you know, Michael knows where all the bodies are buried in Brooklyn, political and really, you know, it’s interesting you say that because the guy we’re going to talk about the gas pipe castle, when I spoke to him, gave me some locations for bodies. And, but we’ll get into that when we, when I tell you the story. Really? Let’s talk just a little bit about Michael and his books. First of all, guys, we’ve got a self-talk Mary, you know, and, and you’ll be interested in these books. He was on here before with Luigi the Zip, Homicide is My Business, and that was a big seller, at least for me, and I think it was for Michael, too. And he interviewed this guy who was a Sicilian who did a bunch of hits here who just liked Michael, if I remember right. That was a great show, Michael. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it was. Luigi was a character that I will never forget, I have to tell you.
[1:49]Uh, I’ll have links to all these and to Amazon and the show notes guys at, we had crooked Brooklyn. We talked, I think we talked about that one and we had, uh, did we do murder on the bridge? I can’t remember what was, we did the one about, uh, people were getting killed in a hospital.
[2:07]Oh, that was Behind the Murder Curtain. Oh, okay. Behind the Murder Curtain. Behind the Murder Curtain. Yeah. And Murder on the Bridge, it was a case that I did. And it’s actually part of the novel series that I’m now working on. I made it into a, I fictionalized it. But it started out as, it was a young woman who was walking the Williamsburg Bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn for exercise. And she was set upon one Sunday morning by a junkie who wound up killing her after she She didn’t have any money that he wanted money and she didn’t have any. He killed her and made it seem as if it was a sex crime and then went back later that night and burnt her body to beyond recognition.
[2:47]So it was a very, very important case to the district attorney when I got it because it involved a community that had a lot of votes in it. You know, the Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn is huge. Huge and this young lady was the victim of this guy that that i called and if you don’t mind i could just tell you a little a little bit when i tried the case and i summed up the case was so horrific and what he did to this young woman that all was left on the on the bridge where she was found was a shoe and her bra clasp and and the only way that we identified her was through dental records. It was just horrific.
[3:28]And when I summed up, I essentially told the jury that it was as if the devil
[3:36]
Fallen Angel Novel Series
[3:33]had come to Brooklyn and committed this crime. And that gave me an idea, but later on in my life, and I’m in the midst of it now, of a crime novel series, which I call Fallen Angel. And the premise is that the devil does come to Brooklyn and he is behind and instigating horrific crimes that need to be taken to, the perpetrators need to be brought to justice. And the government forms this committee, this group, to concentrate on bringing the devil and his minions to justice. And they hire a prosecutor. And the prosecutor happens to be the retired district attorney, the head of the rackets division in the DA’s office. So the books of Fallen Angel, book one and two are now on Amazon.
[4:25]And I’ve just turned in book three. It’ll be out in the fall. So I think that your listeners and your viewers will really like it, will really enjoy it. Because all of the cases, all of the crimes in the book that is part of a novel, but all of them actually happened. And I handled every single one of them when I was in a DA’s office. So that’s the spin. And it’s been very, very well received. I sold book one to Hollywood. And I’m hanging on now waiting to hear. year. We have a pilot written. And so anyway, that’s a little bit about what I’m doing at the moment and now talking to you. All right. And what we’re going to talk about is your other book that you did with a retired New York City detective, Tommy Dades, called Friends of the Family. Right, right. We’re going to not so much talk about the two, what we call mafia cops, I believe, Coppa and what was the other guy’s name? Eppolito. Eppolito, yeah. He was the one that was in and Goodfellas, I believe. Those were a couple of characters to us for sure. But we’re going to talk about Gaspipe Casso, who was their kind of control, would you say?
[5:31]Well, yeah, he controlled them. He actually called them his crystal ball because when he needed information about informants or needed something taken care of by them going into the police computer and getting information, he had an intermediary who he would go to and that intermediary would go to the mafia cops and they would provide the information they’d give them the information about who was who the rats were who the informants were and and then on at least one occasion they actually did a murder on his behalf so so those two guys were were quite a quite a pair i mean it was and they’re both by by the way, now deceased. So we can talk about them.
[6:15]Well, they were both in jail when they did get deceased, weren’t they? Yep. Yep. They did life. They got life in prison. They both died in jail. And it was, as my boss, the district attorney called it when we had our press conference, it was the most horrific case of corruption in the history of the New York City Police Department. And it was, it was. I would say in the history of the United States, it was It was the most horrific case of corruption by law enforcement, for sure. I don’t know any worse. Gas pipe was right in the center. But, you know, Gary, I got to tell you, before they went to work for gas pipe, they were working for someone in the Gambino family. Oh, really? And there was a falling out. The Gambinos did something to, I think it was the cousin of Eppolito. And when that happened, he said that he’s not going to do anything for them anymore. And gas pipe was looking for someone like them, somebody he could turn, someone he could lean on. And the intermediary that he went to was a guy named Bert Kaplan, who had been the intermediary between the mafia cops and the Gambinos.
[7:21]And, and, and he talked gas pipe into getting these guys on board. And, and it was a marriage made in hell, not in heaven, in hell. So really, yeah. And, and which brings us to Anthony gas pipe, Casso, a, a bad, bad dude. It started out in the Lucchese family, spent his entire career in the Lucchese family. I can’t remember. I was, he, how high did he get? Of course he had his own. He was the under boss. Okay. He was a concierge. He was all the under boss. And, and at the time that he and his, and the boss guy by the name of Al D’Arco went out on the land because they got word through the mafia cops and through their network that, that gas pipe was, and, and D’Arco were on a list to be arrested. They took off. So, yeah, he was an underboss, but he was a vicious, vicious guy, so bad that the federal prosecutors, when they arrested him and turned him and he became a witness, they called him Lucifer. That’s how bad a guy he was. That was their nickname for him. Really? Yeah. The feds, of course, turn him because they’ve always got the big stick, but he reached out to you or you reached out to him. I’m not sure. Tell us about that. You ended up talking to him after he went, after he turned.
[8:39]
Need for Inside Information
[8:39]So in the midst of the mafia cops, I knew we needed someone on the inside. We had some information, tangential information. Things were going along very well in the investigation. But I knew that if I was going to take the case to trial, and what we were concentrating on, Gary, was one murder that they were involved in. And I have to give you a little bit of the background as to why this particular guy was a target of gas pipes.
[9:11]Back when Paul Castellano was the head of the Gambino family, Castellano replaced Carlo Gambino as the boss of the family. And as you probably know, because you know the history of these guys as well as I do and probably better, Castellano was assassinated on the street in front of a steak restaurant in Manhattan, orchestrated by John Gotti and Sammy Gravano. The whole point of the plot was for Gotti to take over and become the boss of the Gambino family.
[9:49]So they did that. They set up the hit and Castellano was killed along with his driver, but it was an unsanctioned hit. It was not sanctioned by the other family bosses. And that kind of set off both Gas Pipe and Vincent the Chin Gigante, who was the head of the Genovese family.
[10:14]
Assassination Attempt on John Gotti
[10:09]And they decided that John Gotti had to be killed because of what he did. So gas pipe recruits gas pipe knew that every sunday god he would go to a particular social club in brooklyn for whatever i guess to collect money to meet with people in the family that kind of thing and so he recruited a believe it or not a musician a musician a munitions expert a bomb expert that he knew who was in the army and was a bomb maker. And he was also a wise guy.
[10:47]So the plan was for this bomb maker to make a bomb, sort of like an IED, a flat kind of bomb. And the plan was for the bomb maker to meet in this spot in Brooklyn on a Sunday morning. and he gas pipe was going to walk and did walk past the car.
[11:10]That was going to be the car that they were going to blow up because Gotti arrived and left in a car. So he tells me the story about how he was walking down the street, paper bag with what looked to be groceries and Italian bread sticking out and things of that nature. Like, you know, Sunday morning and I’m shopping and that kind of thing. And as he gets to the car, he bends down and he puts the IED under the car. So now it’s all set. He takes off, goes around the corner and waits. The bomb maker who was going to set the bomb off is across a double side a double it was a two-way street so it was a long distance between where he was and where the car was so instead and he was going to set the bomb off with a um with a remote device so instead of doing it from across the street where his car was this moron takes his car makes a u-turn and pulls up next to the car where these two guys get in and one of them he believes is Gotti and the other is his driver, Frankie DiCicco. And he gets, pulls up next to the car, sets it off and blows the car up. Now the idiot was right next to it and his car was badly damaged. He takes off and as it turns out, Gotti was not in the car. Gotti did not go that day. It was someone else.
[12:33]That sets off a chain of events. Gotti now finds out that Gas Pipe and Vincent de Chin, Giganti, were behind this plot to kill him.
[12:45]And since Giganti was a little bit more protected than I guess he felt Gas Pipe was, his plot was to kill Gas Pipe in revenge for attempting to kill him. And the gas pipe one day is driving his car in Brooklyn, of course, stops at a light and a car pulls up next to him. Four guys are in the car. He looks over, doesn’t think anything of it, and all four of them open fire and shoot gas pipe and then take off.
[13:16]Gas pipe doesn’t die. He’s injured. He’s injured very badly. He makes his way out of his car, crawls on the street to a Chinese restaurant that was right near the area, goes down to the basement of the Chinese restaurant and waits and calls someone to come and get him. And they get him, bring him to some doctor, and he gets taken care of. Now, gas pipe now makes it his life’s work to find out who those four guys were in that car and who was behind the assassination attempt. And he finds out. He finds out. How does he find out? Well, the mafia cops help him find out who it was who was in the car.
[14:01]
Mistaken Identity Hit
[14:01]Now, one of the names was a guy named nicky guido in that car one of the people in the car gas pipe goes to the mafia cops they now he wants to find out where nicky guido lives because he’s not he doesn’t recognize the name doesn’t know it and epilito i’m sorry caracapa who was still who was working in i guess the organized crime section of major case squad in the nypd had access to all of this these records and he puts it the name nikki guido gives a kind of a description and an area where he thinks he came from and he comes up with a name comes up with an address and it’s in south brooklyn which would be where they thought that this guy lived and they tell gas pipe gas pipe arranges for this guy Nicky Guido to be hit and it’s Christmas morning and, Nicky Guido is out on the street in front of his house with his uncle showing off.
[15:09]To his uncle his brand new car and a car comes up the block and stops while guido is in the car with his uncle and guido recognizes or sees that they have taken guns at it and now aiming to the car and he jumps on to his uncle to protect them they open fire and nikki guido is is killed saved his uncle. They take off. Turns out it was the wrong Nicky Guido. It wasn’t the guy who was in the car who shot at gas pipe. When the real Nicky Guido finds out what happened, he takes off and goes to California. He’s later found in California. So gas pipe, so that’s one mess. That was a miss. He still didn’t gab the names of all the others, although he ultimately gets That’s the mall. And he fought. One of the names is a guy by the name of Jimmy Heidel. Heidel was kind of a hanger on a guy that was a, an associate of the, of the Gambino family lived of course, and he lived in Staten Island, but he hung out in Brooklyn and gas pipe.
[16:19]It was the order to the mafia cops, find this kid and find out what he knows, and ultimately, we’re going to kill him. So they find out where they go to his home, where he lived with his mother in Staten Island, the mafia cops. And they ring the bell, but before they get to the door, they see a guy who looks like Jimmy Heidel. It turns out it was his brother, Frankie Heidel. They accost them on the street.
[16:52]And they say to Frankie, you’re coming with us, Frankie. He says, no, no, you’re looking for my brother. I’m not Jimmy, I’m Frankie. They say, okay, and they leave. They go to the mother now. I’m sorry, Frankie goes into his home and tells his mother what just happened. She goes out onto the street and they’re still sitting there. And she goes up to the car and confronts them. What are you doing what do you want with my kids that kind of thing and she sees both and they say it’s police business ma’am you know stay out of it we’re looking for so frankie had told him had told the the mafia cops where he thought his brother might be over in brooklyn and and they had a connection over there and they found out that he was in i think it was either a pool hall or bowling alley i forgot now what’s important about that is that years later mrs heidel first of all, she reports all of this stuff to the FBI, to the police, etc.
[17:55]
Hunt for Jimmy Heidel
[17:50]Nothing happens after her son disappears, Jimmy. And what happened is Jimmy is in Brooklyn and they find out where he is. And I think, as I said before, I think it was a bowling alley. And he comes out of the bowling alley and they grab him, the two cops, and they tell him, come with us.
[18:11]He doesn’t know what the hell is up. He just thinks that, you know, he’s being arrested. It’s another bullshit arrest on his part and gets in the car. They don’t drive to any precinct. They drive to a location in Brooklyn to a parking lot behind what used to be a Toys R Us, big Toys R Us store.
[18:29]And there in that parking lot, they transfer him from there to gas pipes guys. And the gas pipes guys drive him to a house not that far away, down to the basement. Where gas pipe is waiting for him and gas pipe tortures tortures the the hell out of him, he gives up all of the names in the car who were in the car and then gas pipe kills him that’s what happens now i mrs heidel by the way never found out until later on where what happened to to jimmy And Frankie Heidel, her other son, was also murdered by a different group for a different reason.
[19:18]And Tommy Dage, the detective who worked on the mafia cops case with me, was assigned to that homicide. And he got to know Mrs. Heidel. And the case broke for us when she decided, finally decided to tell Tommy about the visit in Staten Island by the mafia cops looking for her son. And so we were going to investigate, and we had enough, I believe, to at least open an investigation into the death of Jimmy Heidel. And that’s how we were going to go after the mafia cops, going after this murder case, which carried 25 to life, by the way, Gary, if I convicted him. So the investigation goes on, our investigation goes on, and I get to the point where I say to Tommy, we need somebody else. We need someone on the inside.
[20:11]We knew Kaplan was involved, but Kaplan at that point wasn’t talking. He had turned down helping the feds, even though they offered him a deal. He was in jail, by the way, for narcotics violations. So I said, where are we going to go? So it dawned on me one day, I said, let me give it a shot. Maybe gas pipe will talk to me. So I reach out to his lawyer. And I find out the gas pipe is in Brooklyn of all places now in jail. He’s waiting to testify in a federal case, not for the prosecution, but for the defense. So I call the U S attorney’s office. And I speak to a U S attorney and say, listen, you guys have him here. You produce them in case he’s needed as a witness. I want to go talk to him, but the federal jail Dale won’t let a local prosecutor in. I need your okay to go in and do it.
[21:06]I thought that this was a ground ball. Know what they told me? No, we’re not helping you. We’re not helping you. So I say, come on. And I’m working on him. And I’m working on him. In the meantime, I’m speaking to the lawyer. Because I’m thinking that ultimately I’m going to convince the feds to let me go in to see him. And I do convince the feds at some point to let me go in. So now I’m waiting for the lawyer to give me an answer. Is your guy going to talk to me? I told him I would give him a letter that he cooperated for whatever that was worth. The guy was doing 17 life sentences.
[21:41]So the lawyer finally gets back to me and he says, my guy, I’ll let you talk
[21:48]
Immunity Request for Gaspipe
[21:47]to my guy, but here’s what I want. I want immunity for the Jimmy Heidel murder. I said, well, it’s a state case. You’ve got the immunity. The guy’s doing 17 life sentences. I’m not going to go after him for Jimmy Heidel. I said, no problem. problem he goes well that’s not it not all i want the feds to give me immunity because they could fashion some kind of as he said bullshit charge for the jimmy i delving i said okay i’ll call the feds now i haven’t spoken to them about this yet uh you know about the immunity stuff yet until but they did say that they would have somebody go with me to the jail when i talked to him but of course gas pipe wouldn’t talk to me unless they gave him immunity once again gary they said to me No, we’re not giving him immunity. I said, are you going to really prosecute this guy? You’ve already got him for 17 lives. How much more time can the guy get? Gary, it was not that. That was not the reason. You know why they wouldn’t allow me to go in to talk to him or why they wouldn’t give me the deal?
[22:51]Because he had written a letter after they convicted John Gotti. Gas Pipe had written a letter saying that Sammy Gravano, who was the main witness in the case, was a liar. Lied about this, lied about that. They were concerned that if they gave Gas Pipe a deal, that somehow his claims about Gravano lying in the Gotti case would be used by an attorney to try to overturn the Gotti conviction. Because they had convicted Gotti by that point. They said, no, they’re not giving me. And they didn’t. They were very hard and fast. So I go back to the lawyer and I tell him, I can give you the immunity in state court, but I can’t do what I can’t do. You know, I can’t give you a federal immunity because they are not willing to give it to us. Let me talk to him. You got nothing to lose. The answer was no.
[23:47]So I never got to talk to gas pipe. Gas pipe would have been my witness with all the rest of the things I had in the Heidel case.
[23:57]Anyway, to make a very, very long story short, the feds steal the case from
[24:03]
Frustrations with Federal Handling
[24:01]us. They make a RICO case out of the whole thing. And it still sits. Every time I talk about it, my stomach starts to churn because the feds really, to use a Brooklyn term, really fucked me, Gary. They had no interest in allowing us to do this, to do this case, particularly when we made it and started it. After that, after the case sat for 10 years, the boxes with this case and it sat for 10 years in a federal courthouse or the U.S. attorney’s office never touched it. They never had any interest in doing it. In fact, when we started the case, they said to me, go ahead, knock yourself out. We don’t give a shit. It’s an old case. You know, you’re never going to make this. And then when we made it, when we started to make it, now suddenly, oh boy, now we can get this mafia cops business. And believe it or not, they took all the credit in the world for the case. Wound up convicting them.
[24:57]The first time the case was set aside, by the way, because it was a bogus kind of theory that they used that was then reversed on appeal and the conviction stood. So Pointwood gas pipe was something that always bothered me. I didn’t understand why this guy who was so willing to talk to the feds when they turned them wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t even have me visit. He didn’t have to commit to anything. Let me just talk to you and see if I can convince you. I couldn’t figure that out. I do get the answer and I get the answer from gas pipe and I’ll get to that.
[25:36]
FBI Agent on Colombo Payroll
[25:33]So I go on, the feds steal the case, they go on, do it. And I begin a case involving an FBI agent, a retired FBI agent who was on the Colombo family payroll, who was providing information to the Colombos through a capo named Scarpa, Greg Scarpa. And Scarpa was providing the FBI agent with information about his fellow mafiosi. And it was a again a marriage made in hell quite frankly and so i’m involved in this investigation.
[26:10]And part of the investigation involves i’m sorry a major part of the investigation involves greg scarpa who’s now dead at that time but his son gregory scarpa was alive and in, ad max in colorado he was doing life in not life he was doing something less than life but he was doing it in Colorado, the Ad Max in Florence, Colorado, the most secure prison in the United States. And I send word through his lawyer that we want to talk to him, tell him that I will give whatever letter they want in terms of cooperation. And his lawyer was very cooperative, a woman, a female lawyer, forgot her name. And I get a takeout order from the feds to take out Scarpa and Gregory Scarpa, bring him to New York and have him sit with us as we go through this investigation against this FBI agent, because he was intimately involved with everything his father did, everything. He knew the FBI agent, knew exactly what he had been doing, everything that we needed to make a case. So I brought him in and literally when he walked into my conference room, the first day the detectives had him and brought him in to me.
[27:25]He said, I introduced myself and he says, he says, ah, hi, you’re Mike Vecchione. I said, yep. He said, before I forget, gas pipe wants you to go see him. He said, gas pipe? What’s going on? He said, gas pipe is my neighbor down in, he had to sell next to Gregory Scarpa in Ad Max. I said, really? What’s he want to talk to me about? He said, I don’t know. He just knew I was coming to see you. And he told me that when you’re done with me, he wants to see, he wants to see you. I said, okay. So I go, we, we do our case. We do the case involving the FBI agent and it’s over. and I make an appointment to go down to visit Gas Pipe. He gave me permission. His lawyer gave me permission. Very strange that the
[28:23]
Visiting Gas Pipe in Butner, North Carolina
[28:19]lawyer would allow me at this point to go see him, but he did. He was in Butner, North Carolina in a prison hospital.
[28:29]So two detectives and myself took a trip down to North Carolina. Minor, we go into the prison and the prison authorities had arranged for us to have a room alone. And the detective and myself and one of the correction officers were standing in the room and we’re waiting for another correction officer to bring gas pipe to the room. And then suddenly there he is. He walks in. Guys introduced themselves. And then I introduced myself and he goes, you don’t have to, I know who you are. He says to me, A lot of guys in here have your picture on dart boards that they’re throwing darts at because of what you’ve done. I said, what have I done? Done what? My job. He started to chuckle. You know, that’s. So I said to him, did you read the book? Meeting friends and family. He said, yeah, I did. I said, so? He goes, about 95, 96% accurate. He said, I’ll take it. So we bring him in and and i say okay so here we are what do you want to talk to me about.
[29:35]So what he was interested in, Gary, was he was looking to find some way for us to go to the federal judge, a federal judge, and tell him how cooperative he was in solving old, unsolved homicides that he and the Lucchese’s were involved in. He was hoping that um you know that that somehow by miracle by miracle i said.
[30:07]Anthony you’re doing 17 life sentences what is what am i going to do for you he goes you never know i i really would appreciate you doing it plus he says you know i’m i’ve been in here i i’m i’m having it was like he was trying to tell me that he had some kind of an epiphany you know His whole life has now changed and he wanted to help us. And I said, okay, well, I’ll hear what you have to say. I said, but first of all, you’re going to tell me about the mafia cops case. So we talk and he tells me about how he hooked up with them through Burt Kaplan, why he wanted them on his payroll, what they did for him. Everything that i knew gary he corroborated and told me was you know gave me the imprimatur so to speak the mafia imprimatur yeah that was that was that’s what happened so i asked him i said listen why is it that you didn’t tell me this when i wanted to talk to you years ago when we We were doing the case. He said, Mike, the way I found out that you wanted to talk to me was I read it in your book.
[31:21]My lawyer never told me that you were looking to have me come in and talk to you in the DA’s office. He said, if I had known that, I would have been there. I would have gone. I would have come in and talked to you. It was like, I couldn’t go back. You know, the lawyer unfortunately has passed away and I couldn’t, I really couldn’t do anything to scream at the guy like, you son of a bitch. You know, how did you, how could you do that to me? And, but he said, yep. So I told, so he tells me the whole story and you know, Gary, I got to say that he was, we were pretty accurate. We were pretty, we were very accurate. He admitted to the screw up with, with Nikki Guido and, and told me all about Burt Kaplan, the guy that was his intermediary. He gave me the whole story and told me all about his life growing up and how he started with on the street, little street gang, and then ultimately wound up becoming, he wasn’t a Lucchese to begin with. I think he was in a Gambino family first. And then there was a swap, sort of like a baseball swap between him and someone else. There was a problem and wanted a Gambino’s with him. And so he moved over to the Lucchese family. And the one thing that I did find out is he mentioned how he was really upset.
[32:43]By people calling him gas pipe. He hated that name. He hated it. And I found out. I said, well, how did you get it? Where did it come from?
[32:54]He said, people tell me that my father, his father was a wise guy as well, was a collector, a guy who would go around collecting money that was owed to the wise guys. And he broke off one day, a guy was giving him a hard time, and he broke off the tailpipe of a car. And he beat the hell out of the guy with the tailpipe of the car. And his father was not called gas pipe. But when Anthony, his son, started to come up in the mafia world, they attributed, they He said, that’s so-and-so’s son, and they started to call him gas pipe. But he told me he hated it because I think that at some point, I was going to toss, call him that, gas or something of that nature. And it was like, no, you don’t call me that. My name is Anthony. And the other thing is that a lot of people call him Queso. They were always calling him Anthony Queso, cops in particular. He said, my name is Queso. so. So please call me by my correct name. And that’s what we did. So we spent, the first time we were there, we spent about two hours or more talking to him. And he gave me, he started out, told me what he wanted. He wanted my help. He wanted me to write a letter to the federal.
[34:19]I don’t know, parole authority, federal judge, to somehow keep it on record that he had helped. And I said, okay, I have no problem doing that, but you got to tell me what you’re going to give me. I need something. I can’t just write a letter if you don’t give me anything. So he starts out by telling me about a particular murder that occurred, and he was the one who actually did it. And he gave me this information about what it was. And I got to tell you, Gary, Larry, I don’t remember exactly the facts of the case and it’s not important because what he, what he said, I said, okay, so where, first of all, it’s only you telling me this. I can’t put you on the stand and expect the jury to buy just you, what your background. I said, you got to give me something more. For instance, where’s the gun? What’d you do with the gun? He said, I’ll tell you. I dropped it into Sheepshead Bay.
[35:09]
Searching for the Gun in Sheepshead Bay
[35:10]So are you familiar with what Sheepshead Bay is? Sheepshead Bay is a body of water that’s off the Atlantic Ocean in Southern Brooklyn. And it feeds, it’s a bay, a big one, and it has boats on it, pleasure boats, et cetera. And it feeds into the Atlantic. He said, I drove to Sheepshead Bay. He gave me the street. He gave me the spot. He said, I dropped the gun into Sheepshead Bay right there. I said, well, that will help. He said, if you get that gun, you can compare it to the bullets, et cetera, et cetera. I said, okay, I’ll do that. i said that’s one what’s what else you got so now he tells me about another hit that he does and i said so what’d you do with the body this time he says well we went down to carol gardens which is an area where i actually i was living at the time and and on this particular street he gave me the name of the street there was a sort of a little storefront kind of warehouse kind of thing and we dug up the floor, buried the body in the floor or in the wall. I don’t remember exactly. And then covered it up and that’s where the body is. I said, you think it’s still there? He says, yeah, nobody went to get it. Nobody even knows this, except I’m telling you. But that’s where I put the body. I said, okay. I said, you got other information? He gives me other information. Who else was involved? Where it happened? You know, that kind of stuff.
[36:32]So anyway, I’m going to skip ahead. So we, when we went home, I took two detectives, it was very right near the office where this location was. And we go down to this spot onto the street and I look and I say, oh no, I said, this now was the storeroom for one of the best Italian restaurants on Court Street was the name of the street. It’s a very, very, very well-attended, well-liked, delicious food. In the back was their storeroom for where they would keep their supplies.
[37:10]Mozzarella and tomato sauce and all this other stuff. We go in and we find the spot. We knew because he gave us that kind of details, the way the body was. It was completely renovated, completely bricked over. over everything. I said to the detective, we can’t take this apart. George, George Taro was his name. I said, George, what are we going to do? We’re going to go in this guy and ask the guy in the restaurant to allow us to, and you know how much it’s going to cost us to try to find this body? We’re never going to be able to find it. So we abandoned it. So what we did was we went to the NYPD and asked them if they would allow us to use the scuba team to go to Sheepshead Bay to search for the gun. At least maybe we can make a case with, make that case. Gary, three days of diving into Sheepshead Bay by the scuba team.
[38:08]I mean, it was years, 10, 15 years. You know where that gun probably is down now in the middle of the earth, you know, it sinks in, they never, never found it. So I can tell you one other, one thing that kind of jogged my memory about breaking up the back of the restaurant, when they killed Jimmy Heidel, they killed him after gas pipe tortured him. He killed him in the basement of a home that was owned by one of the Lucchese soldiers. So we knew exactly where or what the home was. We knew exactly where they had done it in the basement. We found all of this information out.
[38:57]
Searching for Evidence in the Lucchese Soldier’s Home
[38:49]And we sent, we said, I sent guys to the home now to see, we’re going to do this case. If we can find even remnants of blood down there, then it corroborates the story that we were getting from our, our informants, the witnesses that we had who were going to tell us all about this. So we get a search warrant for the house. Okay. Go down there, and we serve the search warrant on the owner. The owner now is no longer the Luke Hazy guy. It’s some family that owns the place now, but they said, sure, you can go down and look. It’s no problem, and if you need to, you can search around to do whatever you have to do. So I get a call.
[39:36]Detective calls me and said, actually, it was Tommy Dates. Tommy says, Mike, this place is entirely mirrored. Whoever bought the house after or maybe before put mirrors up all around the walls of the house. The floor was all covered with brand new flooring. He said, we never are going to be able to find any blood here. But we took some samples of some things that looked like blood from the floor and from the wall. And the medical examiner took it. Never turned out to be enough to find out what we did. And then finally, at the end, when I spoke to Gaspar, at the end of the interview, I said to him, listen, before I leave, you’re going to tell me what you did with Jimmy Heidel’s body because Mrs. Heidel deserves to know. He says, yeah, no problem. She says, I’m cooperating. I’m cooperating. I’m no problem. So he tells me that after they killed Heidel, they needed to dump the body. In an area of South Brooklyn, it’s now called Georgetown, believe it or not, they were building this entire new development of homes, blocks and blocks of homes. And they were digging up the earth to get ready to lay down the foundation.
[41:06]And they knew one of the bulldozer operators. Gas pipe tells me, yeah, we knew the guy. And we asked them, we bring the body. We asked them if he would allow us to bring it in there because he was going to, because suddenly he could bury it with the bulldozers. And then the next day, he said, the next day they were going to cement and build the foundation. So the body was dumped. Bulldozer dumped the dirt. Next day, this enormous housing development began to be built with the concrete, and that’s where Jimmy Heidel’s body is. Now, I told, we went home, and I told Mrs. Heidel, she was at least grateful for finding out where her son was. She’d never be able to find his body, but that’s where it was. And that was as a result of gas pipe telling me, you know, telling me what he did.
[41:57]So we we did the investigation to the best we could and we we didn’t come up with anything with gas for gas pipe but we went back down to talk to him again and said told him what the result was and he started giving us other information it was another case involving a an informant and and it was he he it was very difficult gary to to to make cases based on just Just the shreds of information that he was giving us, you know, better than I do. You can’t make cases unless you start to get some concrete information. I remember this happened here and it was this guy. And we’re talking about cases that are 15, 16, 20 years old. There was no way that we were able to do it. So I told him, I promised him, I said, listen, I will, I will, if you want me to, I will send a letter to tell a judge and give it to your lawyer that you did cooperate. You did attempt to help us solve these unsolved cases, as many as we had. I forgot how many he ultimately gave us.
[43:01]But I can’t promise you anything. I can’t go to the feds and say, you need to do something to help this guy. And I can’t make a case. Anthony, I just can’t make a case. So believe it or not, He kind of understood he was upset, but not to the point of, you know, giving me a hard time. He just said, I tried, you know, I tried. And, you know, it wasn’t that long after that.
[43:27]A few years after that, that he ultimately passed away from, he, from, he had, he had prostate cancer and that’s what he ultimately passed away. But, um, it was a, it was two, there were two meetings chock full of information. I mean, getting the whole, uh, attempt on Gotti’s life, the whole story, um, about that. We actually sent detectives to the garage where the, the bomb maker had driven his car after he, after he did the bomb. There was gas pipe said, you know, that car was never moved. It might be still there. He couldn’t pinpoint the actual garage that they drew, drove it to, but we were, you know, at least I would have loved to have at least tried to make a case against the bomb maker because he was still alive and he, he just died now too. But at the time he was alive and I could have, I could have made a case against her and he, you know, it, it, but I never, we could never find the car. The problem was that his information was old and difficult to track down. But he opened up like a, you know, he sang like a canary.
[44:38]
Analyzing Gas Pipe’s Demeanor
[44:39]I have to ask, Michael, about his demeanor. What was your impression, just your kind of gut impression of him, his aura, if you will? Yeah, he was very calm.
[44:52]Very collected, very polite talk, you know, with the, with the very heavy Dick Brooklyn accent, but, but not a madman, not the madman that the feds used to call the, you know, the call Lucifer. Yeah. He was a guy that, you know, he had a story to tell and things to say, and he, you know, and he did. And his, his demeanor was, was very calm. And quite frankly, if you didn’t know what he was and who he was, you would say, yeah, Very polite, nice guy, you know, and with 30 plus, 35 murders under his belt, but maybe more. So, but that was it. That was, there was nothing overt about the guy as far as, you know, giving you a hint that who, of who he was. He seemed to settle in. He was settled into prison life and, and, and actually, I think he probably enjoyed the two hours that we were together, got him out of whatever he was. And, you know, it was, it was interesting, an interesting kind of a situation. So, yeah, they say guys will, will try to do anything when he’s out there in Ad Max in Florence, Colorado, which is bad. It’s a, it’s a lonely existence in order to get out and, you know, mingling around with other prisoners as you’re then transferred and then take his handcuffs off and go into a room and get a cup of coffee with people that are, you know, not, you know, just have a certain amount of freedom.
[46:15]
Communicating Through the Sink: Scarpa and Gas Pipe’s Connection
[46:15]Absolutely. there’s one none i mean it’s an hour out it’s some other cell where you get to walk around you know yeah let me tell you one other thing and it’s interesting he was when he was a neighbor to to scarpa i asked both of them and i corroborate i asked scarpa and i corroborated it with with with gas pipe i said to scarpa how did you hey how did he tell you you know well do you are you because they don’t mingle they’re not because they’re both in segregation he goes you got to to understand he was next to me in the cell next to me and what we used to do was we would take a toilet paper roll when it was finished the paper was and you put it to the in the sink that is all the sinks are all connected and you blow out whatever water is in there and if you talk into the toilet paper roll and the other guy has his toilet paper roll and he has his ear to to his, he can understand what we’re, what we’re saying. He can, he can hear me. And I asked later on, I asked Casso the same thing. And he told me exactly the same story. He said, yeah, we talked through the sink. And, um, and that was, you know, that was, that was it. That’s how we, that’s how they would get messages to, to each other and discuss what’s going on and how things are. And that’s how we told him you’re going to see Vecchione. You got to tell him that he’s got to come back. So that’s my, that’s, that’s my, my, my adventures with, with gas pipe.
[47:41]
The Kansas City True Crime Writer Connection
[47:41]You just never know what’s going to happen. I have a guy actually, he’s a true crime writer in Kansas city. He’s mainly, he’s, he’s got a full-time job as a park ranger out West, but he’s originally from Kansas city and wrote a book about Kansas city. And he was checking on some people who are camping illegally at one of the national
[48:01]
Gas Pipe’s Surprisingly Calm and Polite Demeanor
[48:00]forest where he was working. And it was greg scarpa jr’s granddaughter i believe okay yeah yeah he’s got he has he has a bunch of granddaughters a bunch of grandkids i don’t know how many granddaughters he has yeah frank asker you know i said are you any kin to him because he’s he’s on my podcast group and listens to me and everything and yeah he stays up on this he said oh yeah that was my grandfather father i mean my my year with uh yeah i had scarpa with me for a year during the time that i needed him and what was working with him that was another whole interesting situation about him and and what is how his father treated him and things of that nature another for another podcast okay all right we’ll do that that would be it would be good you spent a lot of personal time with him oh yeah oh yeah that’s hard to find that kind of uh firsthand that’s why i ask you the aura of gas pipe castle So, because you look at his picture, his mugshot and he does look a little bit like the devil and that’s his tough guy.
[49:01]No, make no bone. I make no, you know, I don’t say that he wasn’t, he was, he gave off the idea that he was polite, but you knew that you shouldn’t mess with him. That would be, that would be the way I would characterize it. Interesting. Yeah. It’s always interesting that these guys talk as if you and I are talking about golf or something and talking about killing people or hiding bodies and doing something with the body. It’s just like they’re, they’re distance personally, they’re distanced from that a little bit. They don’t really affect them.
[49:30]Absolutely. Crazy. All right. Well, Michael, that’s your own. I really appreciate you coming on and telling this story and guys, don’t forget to look down in the show notes for links to his books. He’s got several of them and they’re good books. And if you didn’t read Luigi, the zip, that’s a, that’s a really interesting story. Unknown mob story of New York city. I think, you know, everything about New York city mafia, read that one. You’re going to find out a lot more and their relationship. To Sicilians already. Also, that’s another interesting thing is that relationship to Sicilians. I interviewed a guy from Sicily that was connected to the Bonanno family for a while. And he, it was right to me. It was interesting because he talked, he told the story of somebody that nobody knew anything about. He wasn’t really even that much of a criminal. He was a bookie and did a lot of things with them. And it’s just, you get this different idea about what, what that life inside that family is like day to day. And Luigi the Zip, he did that. Luigi was in it, boy. That’s for sure.
[50:35]All right. Thank you, Gary. I really appreciate the time and thank you for the, for the ads, for my books. I really hope that your listeners and readers, I’m sorry. And your, your viewers will, will go to them. I think that they’ll, they’ll enjoy them. All right. Thank you, Michael.
[50:54]
Reflections on Michael Vecchione’s Contribution to Fighting Organized Crime
[50:51]Have a good one. All right. Talk to you later. Well, guys, that was great. Great. I really like Michael Baccione. I really hope we’ll do some more with him and I hope he continues to do more and he has greatest success because he spent his time in the trenches in the Brooklyn Rackets Division. You know, you can imagine what that life was like. And he had some long, hard days as anybody that gets into this fight knows, because it’s 24 hours a day, seven days a week. If you’re going to do anything to help prosecute or to prosecute organized crime or the mob because they’re out there 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Don’t forget. I like to ride motorcycles.
[51:27]I don’t investigate organized crime anymore. I just research it. If you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, be sure and go to that VA website. I’ve got, if you’re on YouTube, I’ve got the screen grab of the website on the screen. If you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, which goes hand in hand with PTSD, be sure and check out Anthony Ruggiano. He has his own website. He’s got a hotline number on that. And he’s a drug and alcohol counselor down in Florida. So that would be cool. Have him be your drug and alcohol counselor. Don’t forget to like and subscribe, you know, punch that button down below. And if you’re on YouTube, so you’ll subscribe and you can subscribe on the Apple podcast app. Also give me a review. If you think about it, it’s hard to figure out how to do. I know that I love your comments on my YouTube channel, particularly. I really love your comments on that. I interact with a lot of people on that. Plus my gangland wire podcast, Facebook group, and it’s a private group. Now it’s got 60,000 people on it and we get a lot of great stuff on there a lot of great pictures a lot of good conversation from people who are in the know live the life or live in the neighborhoods of the life and if you can’t figure out how to get to it through facebook get hold of me and we’ll get you invited to it for sure you just got to be on facebook and like and subscribe like i said and don’t forget keep coming back i got a new podcast every week and quite often i’ll have a bonus episode in between. So thanks a lot guys.
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59min
September 02, 2024 The Gentleman was a Thief
Dean Jobb, author of “A Gentleman and a Thief,” discusses his passion for writing about true crime stories and bringing history to life creatively. He focuses on the Jazz Age thief, Arthur Barry, known for daring jewel heists and his gentlemanly demeanor during crimes. Jobb delves into Barry’s heists, interactions with high society, and relationship with his wife, Anna Blake. The lack of sophisticated investigative techniques in that era allowed Barry to outsmart law enforcement, adding a thrilling element to the narrative. The cat-and-mouse game between Barry and Chief Detective Harold King highlights Barry’s antihero persona, making him a character that readers might root for despite his criminal activities.
click here to buy Dean Jobb’s book A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Heists of a Jass-Age Thief.
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[0:00]Guys, this is Gary Jenkins. As you all know, you regulars know, I’m a retired intelligence unit detective of the Kansas City Police Department and now a podcaster. And I have a couple of documentary films that deal with the Kansas City Mafia. But today we’re not talking about me. Today we’re talking to Dean Jobe. He wrote a heck of a book. The publicist for the book producer sent me a copy of the book. I don’t read all these guys, as you know, but I do start reading them and I make notes from them. But this one, I started reading it and I loved it. I was hooked. I read the whole thing all the way through. It’s called A Gentleman and a Thief, The Daring Jewel Heist of a Jazz Age Rogue, Arthur Barry. Now, Arthur Barry was a jazz age rogue, if there ever was one. So let me, I’m gonna read you a review before we start talking. A top shelf work of true crime, Job tells Barry’s tale with both rigor and pathos. Painting a tender portrait of a crook who was never fearsome.
[1:02]This is liable to steal the reader’s hearts. That’s from Publishers Weekly, and it is a great book. There’s no doubt about it. So, Dean Jobes, welcome, and start off talking a little bit about your own writing history and how you got onto this story and some background on you, and then we’ll talk about the book. Well, I’m a former journalist, and over the years I’d written books. My beat as a reporter was covering the courts, covering criminal trials and anything going on in the courthouse. And my background was in history, and the two kind of collided in a nice way that I started writing features about old cases in Nova Scotia, Canada, where I live, and just got hooked with the storytelling, the way that true crime can give you a window on the past and dramatic events, interesting storylines. But you can also learn a lot about history. So about 10 years ago, Algonquin Books, my publisher, published Empire of Deception, and it was about a Chicago con man in the 20s, the jazz age. I love the era. Connection to me was when his Ponzi scheme collapsed, he hid out here in Nova Scotia. So I had some local ties to that story.
[2:12]My last book was called The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream about a Victorian era doctor who murdered as many as 10 people, most of them women, in three countries over a 15-year span. And it’s subtitled The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer because that was my focus. I wanted to know how he got away with it, which led me to understand a lot about the horrible plight of women in the Victorian era, the privilege that a doctor could use to avoid suspicion.
[2:44]And a lot about the era and the primitive early detection methods and forensics. So I teach part-time in a master’s program in creative nonfiction, and that’s what I bring to my books. The creative part not being…
[3:01]Making anything up, but the storytelling, creatively recreating scenes, recreating people and places, always faithful to, always well-researched and grounded in research, but really trying to bring history to life. And because of my background in legal coverage, I just gravitate to true crime stories. You sure did bring to life Arthur Berry, There’s no doubt about it. And the Jazz Age and the subculture that he operated in, both the criminal subculture and the subculture of the F. Scott Fitzgeralds of the world, of the very wealthy during this time. And so it just came alive to me. It was like reading a crime novel in a way. It was really, really well written. Well, I’ve described it as Catch Me If You Can meets The Great Gatsby, and that’s not really a stretch. Every good croak needs police on his tail, and there’s plenty in this story. But as well, The Great Gatsby was written during Barry’s heyday in the early 20s, and it described mansions and areas and the whole culture of New York’s upper crust on Long Island. In the exact places where Barry was casing mansions, crashing parties to find out where the jewels might be, and then breaking in later to steal what today would be millions and millions of dollars in jewelry.
[4:29]Yeah, it was amazing the amount of jewels that he stole and what it would have been worth. Of course, he got basically maybe 20% of what it was actually worth, which that’s the way a thief is. I mean, then they just go back and steal more. It’s not like they had to invest money into it. So he was truly a second story, man, too, is another thing I noticed about that. We talk about second story, man, this guy, Arthur Barry was a second story, but there’s no doubt about it. Yeah, the term may not be as well known today, but it really, it fit a fellow, Barry Zamo was this. He started out, he’d case a mansion and somebody he figured would have valuables, jewels up in their possession.
[5:11]And while the family was at dinner, he would find a ladder on the estate or nearby and put it up against the window, sneak in, sneak out, and of the second story. So he became very adept at that. And as time went on, he had to get a little more brazen because sometimes when people were home or weren’t home, they had their jewels on them. So he had to pick his time. And he discovered when people were home safely in bed was the time you could count on the jewels being there. So he would try to sneak into bedrooms and if he if he did confront somebody he was always gentle i mean the newspapers were calling him the gentleman bandit they didn’t know who it was but the this this kindly bandit who would assure people no you know don’t worry i’m only here for the jewels i won’t hurt you and sometimes even ask them how their night out was so he would try to put them at ease so he could go about his real job of finding and taking all the jewels.
[6:10]Really? And that Livermore heist was probably one of the best examples of that. So tell us about the Livermore heist.
[6:17]Well, this is one of his later ones, but it’s in the period. He’s for years looted mansions in Westchester County, north of Manhattan, and then in the Nassau County area of Long Island. And often those houses were empty or people were downstairs. But by 1920, his MO is, he has an accomplice to help him because it’s riskier confronting people in their homes. He’s been shot at. He knows the next time he breaks in, someone could have the drop on him and he could be looking down the barrel of a gun. So he gets a little muscle to help him, but he still has this put people at ease. And in the Livermore case, it started to become the heist from hell because they they figured the jewels were in a safe and livermore who was a wall street a gambler of the highest order and probably thought he could think these two hoods kept saying he couldn’t open the safe and one of the guys goes down the ladder again to get a chisel and a hammer to break the safe open so it means barry’s in the room a long time and he’s putting the the people people at ease. But Dorothea Livermore, the wife, starts thinking, you know, maybe I can play on this guy’s natural goodness. And he’s already taken some jewels, and she actually talks him into giving back a few rings for her and her husband that they said were like these pinky rings were so sentimental value.
[7:45]So he gallantly gave jewels back, which prompted his.
[7:51]His accomplice to say, let’s get out of here while we still got something.
[7:54]And they still did get lots of loot. But it was just this very rightly later claim that any other burglar is going to think this is nuts. But yeah, I did it. It seemed like the right thing to do. I gave back the loot as I was in mid-robber. Really. And another story I found interesting was maybe a little bit earlier in his career when he went out and partied with the Duke of Wales, who was the next king of England. And it was partying in one of these Long Island mansions. And, you know, if you’ve ever driven out in Long Island, I would have gotten New York listeners who probably had driven out. I was there once these huge mansions that sit back away from the road and, you know, with large grounds around them and, you know, right on the ocean and, and it would be easy to sneak up to them and then crawl up the side. Your worry would be if one of the staff happened to walk out or something. So, but, but he, they were having parties and he would infiltrate these parties. So tell us about that, his infiltration of parties. He had many methods. He would read the social pages and get a sense of who was around, who was in Palm Beach.
[8:59]He would figure out who’s rich and where they lived. Some wives, socialites, would appear in photos resplendent in their pearls and jewels. So this would help him and say, there’s a good target. But one of his methods was simply to put a tux on, jump over the wall of an estate, sneak up to the house and suddenly blend into a garden party, grab a cocktail like he belonged.
[9:24]And he was handsome. He knew how to dress. He knew how to feign an upper class accent. He was a working class Irish kid from Worcester, but he pulled it off. Incredibly charming. I mean, he was like a con man in these settings. But what he was doing was mingling and then finding an excuse to wander upstairs. And what he wanted to do was, where’s the master bedroom? Where are the jewels likely to be later? Which rooms should I open the window to unlock the window so I can get in? Is there an alarm system? He’s casing the joint is what he’s doing. But at this one particular party in 1924, the guest of honor was the Prince of Wales. Yes, the future Edward VIII, who was visiting Long Island in a well-publicized party holiday, and Barry bumps into him. And the people around the prince, the prince is saying, you know, he’s so constrained by royal duties, he’d love to see the town. And, Barry, who’s calling himself Dr. Gibson quite grandly, says, well, let’s go to town. I’ll show you around the speakeasies of Midtown Manhattan. And that’s what he does. So he spends this incredible night with the Prince of Wales.
[10:42]
The Night with the Prince of Wales
[10:39]And I had to start the book with this because it was just a gift. I mean, it was incredible because it really set the tone for how slick he was. But of course, it’s all leading to, he’ll come back a few nights later and try his luck at the jewels. Yeah, here’s this working class kid from, I guess, the Boston area. But he knew the underculture, underbelly, the seamy underbelly of New York City. And so he brings the Duke of Wales and introduces him around. I can imagine what some of his friends, people that knew him thought, like, how does he do this? Well, his wife later said they went to one of these restaurants or speakeasies and everyone was sort of like looking at Barry and she had no idea why. And even a waiter comes over and says, how’s the prince tonight? And finally fessed up that he’d had this encounter. out or but but it it wasn’t just as a as a patron barry was truly what they called a plunger and that’s the best way to say where that’s playing came from was he plunged into the nightlife of jazz age new york so he’s like nathan detroit a runyon-esque character from guys and dolls he’s he’s playing craps all the time usually losing which means he has to steal more money to to gamble. He probably was probably a gambling addict. He said he enjoyed gambling more than sex.
[12:06]And yeah, he lived that seedy sort of underworld life and knew some pretty bizarre characters, some dangerous, not so dangerous, some other con men. And of course, they, They all, at least on the surface, seemed to not realize what the others were doing. And sure enough, Barry passed himself off as a successful salesman who was pretty good at gambling to explain why he was often flush with cash. And a lot of people seem to have bought into that.
[12:36]Interesting. Let’s talk a little bit about his wife. He was Anna Blake. She was the love of his life. And she becomes an integral part of his life because when he gets caught, it, then he breaks out of prison and they lay low for quite a while. So tell us about Anna Blake. She’s kind of an interesting character. She stuck with him because she wasn’t really from the criminal underworld. It didn’t seem like she was in love with the guy. Not at all. And I was really pleased as I did the book that I was able to find out as much as I could about her because she’s kind of a shadowy character. In fact, to the point where surviving family members of Barry’s family who knew him while he was still alive. He lived till 1981.
[13:19]Young nieces and nephews were young at the time. I interviewed them now and they didn’t know he was married. So it was kind of like a forgotten family secret. But he meets Anna Blake, who is a district captain in the Tammany Hall organization. So she’s part political worker, part social worker. She’s on the ground responsible responsible for several blocks of what was then sort of the southern edge of Harlem. And she’s recently widowed. She meets Barry, falls hard for him. And I think truly, she had no idea what he did. Like everyone else, she thought he was just a successful salesman and gambler. But he’s obviously smitten with her because in 1927, after the Livermore or robbery we talked about, he is arrested and Anna’s with him.
[14:11]And worse, he’s made the mistake of giving her a ring he’d stolen. It wasn’t particularly valuable, but it was identified as loot from an earlier robbery.
[14:22]So she was about to be charged as an accessory. And certainly the police and the DA were putting the pressure on using this threat as pressure.
[14:35]
Anna Blake: The Love of His Life
[14:33]So Barry confessed to make sure she walked free. And so gentleman to the end he did a gentlemanly the gallant thing and she you know she talked about how you know this this destroyed her world but she stuck by him as you said and within a couple of years he’s going to break out of prison to be with her and that part of the story again as a writer of of non-fiction you know you want to you can’t you can’t make up things to fill in the gaps, but you keep researching and hoping. And I found seven or eight installment of my story, my life of love and fear with the world’s greatest jewel thief is what it was. It was headlined, but it was Anna Blake’s confessional. It was everything from how they met to what happened when she found out what he really did to their life on the run for years. And a lot of that material I would not have found. And of course, I had her voice. She was telling it firsthand. So yeah, she was a remarkable character. And a very strong woman, endured incredible heartbreak with dignity. And she was reviled in the press. A lot of reporters made it clear they did not believe that she wasn’t an accomplice, but I believe her.
[15:55]Interesting. Another thing is, you know, cops at the time were not the most professional and he didn’t have the scientific advances. Of course, there’s no cameras, there’s no DNA, none of that. And a sophisticated criminal like this can pretty easily duck most policemen, especially back then and most law enforcement. Now, they started hiring private detectives to go after people,
[16:23]
The Great Retrievers: Private Detectives on His Trail
[16:21]Some are former cops, I think. And so tell us about, there was a pretty interesting characters of those private detectives. Tell us a little bit about those private dicks that would chase after him. The private detectives, the insurance companies would often hire private detectives because they were looking to, well, recover jewels if they could. So if someone could find out who did it, they might get the jewels back. There became sort of an underground, less than honest way of doing this is if you could pay, if you could find the crooks and pay them, say, the 10 or 20% they get from a fence, you could get the jewels back and you don’t have to pay out any more money. So instead of paying the full $750,000 to replace jewelry insured to that level, you might pay $75,000.
[17:09]So Noel Scaffa is one of the private detectives who was actually, he was nicknamed the great retriever because he was so good at retrieving jewels. And Barry dealt with him in one of his big heists. And for a jewel thief like Barry, well, this is great because he doesn’t have to fence the jewels. He doesn’t have to worry about getting them out of settings or whatever. He’s got a guy who’ll just pay him, basically act like a fence good. Another private detective, well, the Burns Detective Agency was put on Barry’s tail by Percy Rockefeller, nephew of J.D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil fame because Barry robbed his place and again they didn’t know exactly who they were looking for but they were on his case but Barry’s biggest nemesis became in the private detective world was Val O’Farrell who was a very shady character in the 20s a former New York policeman let go for shady dealings I found a lot of material in FBI file on him that made it clear that the licensing authorities in New York were desperate to pull his license, but they couldn’t quite pin anything on him. But Val O’Farrell becomes important in a couple of ways. He is instrumental in Barry’s arrest through some of his contacts, and then when Barry’s on the run.
[18:37]He accuses Barry. In 1932, Barry was hiding out in New Jersey. And the crime celeb of that year, of course, in New Jersey, was the Lindbergh kidnapping. So with Barry on the lam, and the newspapers every once in a while when there’s a major jewel heist, they’d say, must be the work Arthur Barry.
[19:01]Now, he’s not. He’s not pulling these crimes, but his name is out there again. So, Val O’Farrell just weaves this thing and says, well, the kidnapper went to the second floor, used a ladder, wasn’t heard. That’s Barry Zemo. Now, Barry never kidnapped anybody, let alone a kid. He was a jewel thief. But this stuck. And actually, when Barry was finally caught, he was treated like a serious suspect. And this was before Bruno Hoppen was eventually arrested and put on trial for that crime. So, so yeah, private detectives were always in the background here, but Barry’s biggest nemesis was a guy named Harold King who was chief of detective in Nassau County. And he was a really progressive cop and he was under a lot of pressure from a lot of rich people to stop these, these, this marauder. And I mean, other than a brief shootout, he never really got close to him until 1927 when he finally, by luck, there was a tip-off and Barry fell into his hands. Well, that’s quite a story. I tell you what, Dean, I really enjoyed this story
[20:12]
Wrapping Up with Dean Jobe
[20:09]and I enjoyed having you on, talking to you in person. It was a great book, guys. A Gentleman and a Thief, the Durian Jewel Heist of a Jazz Egg Rogue named Arthur Barry.
[20:20]So you might want to take a look at that. He truly was a second story, man. I really appreciate you coming on the the show, Dean. Okay. Well, thank you. Look, I appreciate the chance to talk about them. If there’s any other little story you want to tell, feel free.
[20:36]No, I just hope readers, I hope realize we haven’t given it all away. There’s lots here to unlock. But I was really drawn to him because he’s an antihero. He’s a bad guy. Yeah, but he never hurt any of his victims. I mean, he invaded their privacy, maybe shattered their security. But these were people who could afford jewels and probably had them insured. And that means I think readers can’t help at times, a lot of times, rooting for him. you know, and as he, as he one-ups the, the rich and powerful and famous. Really? I believe. Well, guys check this book out and don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. So watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there on the street. And if you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, be sure and go to the VA website, get that hotline number. And if you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, go see our friend, former Gambino soldier, Anthony Ruggiano is now a drug and alcohol counselor down in Florida. There’s a hotline on his website and like, and subscribe and come back, tell your friends about the show. And one more time, Dean Joe. Thank you. Thank you.
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22min
August 29, 2024 Sal Locascio: Master Of Making Money!
Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. In this episode, Gary shares a captivating story about the Gambino family’s best earner, Sal LoCascio. He highlights the family’s significance as big moneymakers, like Family boss Paul Castellano, a major earner. Jenkins shares intriguing details about a surveillance video he came across showing mob members at the Ravenite, sparking his interest in a moneymaker named Salvatore “Sal” LoCascio.
Locasio’s frequent visits to the Ravenite drew attention to the Gambino family’s activities, leading to an investigation that uncovered a high-tech scheme in the late 90s involving internet and telephone services. Jenkins tells how LoCascio and Richie Martino orchestrated elaborate scams, including creating deceptive porn websites that charged visitors through hidden fees. The interview explores the intricate web of fraud, spanning from porn sites to phone cramming operations, all orchestrated by members of the Gambino family.
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Transcript
[0:00]
Introduction to Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police detective
[0:00]Hey, all you wiretappers out there, Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective and sergeant by the time I got done, by the time I retired. Anyhow, I’m back here in the studio with another story about the Gambino family. You know, Gambino families were really a hell of a family. They were big moneymakers, you know, and Castellano was one of the bigger moneymakers. I don’t know what God he was thinking of. He wanted the power, but Castellano, under him, they really made the money. I’m going to tell you about one of the bigger moneymakers that I just stumbled across.
[0:39]A lot of you guys may already know about it, but I was watching some video on YouTube, and I saw this surveillance video. It was really good. It was like they were right there on the street of some cars and people coming
[0:53]
Introduction to Sal “Tor” Locasio at the Ravenite
[0:52]and going from the Ravenite. And this was after a guy he had taken over as you know if he’s going in and out of the ravenite and it showed a guy pulling up in a big black lincoln and looked like a mafia staff car and going in so i made a little short on it and i threw it out on my youtube channel and i said who are these guys and so they named this was sal salvator or tor locasio was going into the ravenite and actually that’s what brought all the gambino family into this conspiracy because he was in and out of the ravenite so much he had dumb ass john god he made everybody come in there all the time and you know say hey there’s a mob guy now let’s go see what he’s doing i’ve done that you see a guy coming and going and he’s talking with with you know real deal mafia members and he may or he may be a relative and then in this case his dad was frank locascio who was uh.
[1:51]Longtime Capo and longtime Gambino family member and became Gotti’s consigliere. Locasio kind of, you know, he hadn’t really been that high profile during his time. Sal, or Tor, as they called him, Tor Locasio, had not been that high profile.
[2:07]That was one of the reasons that the Gambino family ended up going down. Because, you know, what you do is you see that guy and then let’s go take a look at him. Let’s go get his trash. Let’s go follow him around a little bit. but let’s go see where he’s going when he’s not here. And then you see him at, you know, certain business, and you start looking at that business, and it just keeps, you know, the blocks just keep building and building and building. And, you know, in the end, many of these Gambino guys, and especially in Bonanno guys, even more broke ranks and became government witnesses. And Gambino, most importantly, it was, you know, the guy with the podcast out there, he who shall not be named, you know, Sammy the Bull, I don’t mind naming him, and the government went after him on some of these more complicated, sophisticated things, not just the gambling, which is easy. Throw some wires out there and you know some bookies and you kind of run the string out and take off some gamblers. And then all of a sudden that’s done when they go in and come back out in a few years. Just this ongoing battle, kind of a cat and mouse game, which I used to love. To me, it was just a game. But it has been extremely profitable for a lot of
[3:24]
High-tech scams involving internet and telephone services
[3:17]these guys. And here’s a high-tech scheme that came out in the late 90s on into the early 2000s. Salvatore “Tore” Locascio and a guy named Richie or Richard Martino, he used to call him Richie from the Bronx, orchestrated some elaborate scams involving the internet and telephone services.
[3:37]And these guys, they exploited unsuspecting telephone users, cell phone users, and web surfers out there. There are people who like porn sites in particular, and they took in over $400 million over about five years’ time. Now, what they did is they created several porn websites.
[4:01]Now, these sites lured visitors with the promise of free tours around the porn site to see if you wanted to sign up, but you had to give your credit card information. How many times have you like gotten a free thing, you know, a trial version of something, but you had to put in your credit card information. You’ll think, well, I’ll go, you know, I’ll go watch the movie for free and with my trial version, but then you leave your credit, you’re now you’re signed up. So they get the credit card information and what the, the sites did, they disabled their browsers back button and trapped them on the website as they’re running out of charges. as they navigated through the different content. They think they’re just on this free viewing platform, tour of a porn site and they’re not, they’re getting charged like crazy.
[4:51]This has been other websites have done this where they make it really difficult to exit the website and they want to keep that credit card in there. You know, what’s funny is Locasio was under house arrest from another case, an old case, when they started working on this, him and this Richard Martino or Richie from the Bronx, became the largest consumer fraud at the time in American history. They found a guy named Norman Chains who was a direct marketer and they developed this network of porn sites and they had to get an age verification check so you could get a free preview of the sexual content. Now, that’s like they spread out this banquet and you have to jump through a suit. Okay, I’m of age. I can get this free preview. you. I mean, it’s, it’s scamming at its best, put your credit card in there. And then they hit each one of these people from anywhere from 25 to $75, you know, later on, they get this charge a month or two months later. And, and, you know, that’s, you know, that’s it. So they also started a phone scam thing as known as cramming. I don’t know if you remember cramming and this actually ended up in Overland Park, Kansas, right here in Kansas City. I remember getting some leads for us to go out and look at some buildings and write down some license numbers in connection with this back then.
[6:17]What they did is they had 800 numbers. Now, you remember the 800 numbers, and they would charge you a lot of money, but they’d make it look like it was free.
[6:30]
Deceptive 800 numbers and phone cramming scheme
[6:27]It was like for sex talk, sex lines. Uh, I know somebody that got their parents got a huge charge for a sex line thing, psychics, horoscopes from these 800 numbers instead of free services, which are promised, uh, whoever the, uh, has the phone gets this huge bill and it’s a recurring bill. Many times they’ll put it on there. And then if I have a hard time getting it all, and then they’d have shell companies out there and those profits would be go through the shell companies and then come back into the mob. Of course, um.
[7:01]They did this all over the Midwest primarily and charged people for services that they didn’t request, didn’t want. And like I said, the billing came back through something called USPNC in Overland Park, Kansas. I thought Michael Franchise, or not actually, the father had some piece of this action. It probably was maybe more than the Gambino family. These guys, they worked with advertising people and sophisticated publishing executives to execute their plan. They had all these peckerwoods, these scorejohn-looking people on the surface, and everybody was making a lot of money.
[7:39]And, you know, they, this Locasio, he really had, you know, he’d been a gambler before, but he grossed millions and millions of dollars on this. The company, his telecommunications companies that created several companies, were in a converted carriage house in Manhattan in the Murray Hill area on East 39th Street. They had a two-car garage, and they converted that into offices. And they say this Richie from the Bronx would drive around in a white Rolls Royce or had a black Mercedes. And we know we saw, and you see, if you’re on YouTube, I’m playing some of this video of him and his, uh, of, uh, tour Locasio and his black Lincoln coming in. It looks like I called a mafia staff car. And I tell you what, here’s how much money they made. Oh, Locasio’s income.
[8:32]Started at $2.8 million that he reported is adjusted gross income, $2.8 million in 1995 1995, by 1997, he’s earned around $6 to $7 million. It was crazy, crazy. This Richie Martino, he had been a major earner for the Gambino family for quite a while. He had really expensive homes in a couple of different places. One of them was Southampton in New York. They said he wore Prada shoes and a $1,000 pair of shoes and drove the Mercedes.
[9:02]Just been involved in petty crimes. Sometimes he started out with audio text. He supplied customers with what they called pay to listen 900 numbers for sports weather and spicy chats, you know, the old sex lines. Then they had these deceptive 800 numbers that appeared to be free. And they would route these through carriers, you know, from to Kansas to Dominican Republic. And and he hired a bunch of women to talk dirty in several different languages, depending on what your language was. And they would always have the X rated call center in tax exempt free trade zones. And and it was I mean, these guys were smart. This Martino was was a pretty smart dude. And a lot of a lot of the other people were going in and out of the raven eye too and martino and again that’s you know fbi starts seeing these people and seeing them together and what are they doing one thing i read that new york daily news got some records and and they said that like five of his phone numbers that he had out here they were earning money drew a half a million calls, 500,000 calls a month.
[10:13]He was pulling in, Martino was paying himself on the surface $3 million a year, and I declared salary. It was just crazy. Of course, at that time, federal and state regulators are swamped with complaints about this.
[10:31]
Investigation and prosecution of phone cramming operation
[10:28]Parents are mad, but nobody can figure it out. It’s all these attorney generals throughout the different states and nobody really puts it together until, you know, the feds can put it together, tied in the mob, and then they can take one long look at it. But by the time they get around to all that, you know, they said that they grossed about $500 million in this phone cramming operation. And the sentences weren’t all that much. Ocasio got two years and Martino got nine years. I mean, it’s just crazy what they did. It was just unbelievable that when they prosecuted this case, the defense was that a reasonably prudent customer should have, or consumer should have figured out what was going on and avoided these extra charges and been able to, you know, more like it was a computer glitch or like, you know, they just, the customer didn’t know how to work the system. Government said, you know, Hey, this is organized crime and those video surveillance of Gotti’s Raymond night club and all that kind of stuff. And, and the, the people that work there who testified, you know, they had to agree that they all whispered and joked around about their boss’s rumored mob connection. They said this.
[11:42]Richie Martino, at one time, he dressed down a co-worker with a voice that was very hard and had a cold quality, and it was very, very creepy. And in the end, 11 Gambino family members and associates pled guilty to multiple crimes in the scam. And another thing that Locasio, kind of a little personal thing, you know, I interviewed Mikey Scars at DiLeonardo. He was part of the operation that was extorting money from this Scores Gentleman’s Club in Manhattan. They made it, Gambino’s made a ton of money off of that, you know. And Michael at DiLeonardo, they didn’t make a case on him. They made a small case, and they didn’t have much of a case on Locasio. And he pled guilty to some kind of a tax thing in that, I believe. But that’s, uh, he’s out of prison now and Martino probably is too. Uh, so, and I know what happened to him. They’re, they’re pretty old now, but anyhow, that’s just a little story about, uh, one of the many scams that, uh, the, the white collar crimes that the Gambino family did, even though, you know, uh, that was Castellano saying, not Gotti saying, but Gotti dang sure took the money. You know that. And yeah, so thanks a lot guys. Uh, don’t forget I like to ride motorcycles and if you have a problem with ptsd and you’ve been in the service be sure and go to that va website get the hotline number drugs and alcohol which goes hand in hand with ptsd.
[13:08]Go see our friend anthony rugiano son of a former gambino man and i think anthony maybe he was a gambino soldier himself there’s some disagreement about that whether it was actually made but anyhow he’s not made anymore he’s doing alcohol and drug rehabilitation he’s a counselor so and he’s got a hotline on his website remember like and subscribe and tell your friends about the show and then send it around you know I’m always trying to get more listeners more viewers you know I hate to say it but I hate I sound kind of like bad I feel you know I work for the government too long but i make more money and you know i like to make more money and it kind of gives me more incentive and all these great comments that i see especially on youtube but facebook too and people seem to like this stuff and you know i i like doing it i really enjoy looking into these cases and it’s almost like you know my last little uh foray into being a policeman or being an investigator and coming up with schemes and putting them together and and then sharing it with other people. We just don’t prosecute anybody anymore. So thanks a lot, guys.
...more
16min
August 26, 2024 Mrs. Mandelbaum and New York Organized Crime
Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. Margalit Fox joins the Gangland Wire podcast to discuss her book, “The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized Crime Boss” which delves into the story of the early fence Mrs. Mandelbaum. Mrs. Mandelbaum operated a successful New York City criminal empire focusing on stolen luxury goods and bank robbery for 25 years, evading jail time. Margalit explores how Mrs. Mandelbaum treated property crime as a business, offering discounts on luxury goods to cater to the middle class. The interview highlights Mrs. Mandelbaum’s organizational skills, elaborate front shop for her operations and involvement in major bank robberies. The discussion showcases Mrs. Mandelbaum’s strategic planning, financial investments, and the blurred lines between legitimate business and criminal enterprises at her dinner parties. The interview provides fascinating insights into Mrs. Mandelbaum’s pioneering role in early organized crime, shedding light on forgotten aspects of women’s history and criminal entrepreneurship in the 19th century. #newyorkcity #organizedcrimegroups #organzedcrime
Click here To Buy The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized Crime Boss.
Support the Podcast
Subscribe to get new gangster stories every week.
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”
To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here
To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here.
To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here
To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos.
To subscribe on iTunes click here. Please give me a review and help others find the podcast.
Donate to the podcast. Click here!
[0:00]Well, hey, welcome all you wiretappers out there. It’s good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Sergeant. And I have a another story for you today from the author of The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum. Now, you guys know what fencing is. If you don’t, a fence is a person that buys stolen goods from a criminal. And it’s extremely lucrative. I mean, it’s really, really lucrative and it’s hard to investigate, hard to really make a case on anybody. And my guest today, Margalit Fox, has written a book about one of the earliest fences in the United States who was, again, immensely successful. So Margalit, welcome. I really appreciate you coming on the show and telling the guys about The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum. Thank you so much, Gary. It’s my pleasure. So The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum, which was just published by Random House last week, tells the true story of the first major organized crime boss in America. Now, all of us, when we think of a crime boss, we either think of Tony Soprano, or if we’re a certain age, we think of something from The Untouchables, a big, strapping, tough guy with spats and a Tommy gun during prohibition and emphasis on the word guy. However, the first.
[1:28]Big deal. Crime boss in America was none of those things. It was a nice, zoftig Jewish mother of four named Mrs. Mandelbaum, who came here in steerage in 1850 with nothing more than the clothes on her back, and two decades later was running the most successful, most lucrative, one of the most extensive crime networks in America. She operated with complete impunity for 25 years, not spending a day in jail. Her modest haberdashery shop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, disguised a criminal empire that centered on stolen luxury goods like silk and silver and diamonds, and eventually diversified into bank robbery. She had working for her an army of the country’s foremost shoplifters, housebreakers, and bank burglars whom she had personally recruited.
[2:46]She was so motherly with respect to her cohort, bailing them out if they were arrested, providing getaway horses and carriages when they needed to flee a robbery they committed on her behalf.
[3:01]Whining and dining them at her groaning table.
[3:13]
Beginning of Mrs. Mandelbaum’s downfall
[3:05]So motherly was she that the press and criminals alike called her Mother Mandelbaum or Marm Mandelbaum. And she operated this way until 1884, when the tide turned in New York, reformers came in, and she was finally arrested. But there’s more to the story even than that.
[3:28]Really, she was quite a character. I love this description, the product of a congenial liaison between a dumpling and a mountain. Frederica Mandelbaum was a big woman. Even now, she would be considered big. And back then, when people were generally smaller, she must have towered over New York. She was described in contemporary accounts as being almost six feet tall and weighing between 250 and 300 pounds. She dressed impeccably and elegantly because she could afford it. In sweeping floor-length gowns of the finest silk, ostrich feather-topped hats, sealskin capes. And just to give you an idea of how lucrative fencing was, as Gary pointed out, her.
[4:24]Storefront haberdashery shop, which was the front for her clandestine business, in the 25 years she operated, was said to have handled $10 million worth of stolen merchandise. Now, that’s $10 million 19th century dollars. It’s equivalent to about $300 million today. day. When Frederica Mandelbaum died in 1894, she had a personal fortune of up to $1 million. And again, that’s $1 million 19th century dollars. So she did very well. I know y’all know everybody likes something that fell off a truck that you can buy for about half price. And she took advantage of that. We like those, especially those luxury goods, those things that make us appear that we are more wealthy than what we really are, a fur, some kind of diamond jewelry or silver or gold jewelry. And you could buy those really cheap from somebody, a fence. And that’s what she took advantage of. She saw the market and tapped into that market, wouldn’t you say, Margalit?
[5:34]Absolutely. When I first came to this story as a journalist a couple of years ago, I knew, Obviously, it was a historical true crime story. I knew it was a story about old New York, and I knew it was a story about this forgotten piece of women’s history, because few people know Mrs. Mandelbaum’s name today. day. What I hadn’t realized, and the epiphany I had when I got into researching the story, was this is a business story, almost more powerfully than anything else. Friederike Mandelbaum, who would have been educated…
[6:15]At home probably in the old country in what is now Germany. Her family were poor Jewish traders and peddlers. They had nothing. So she certainly didn’t have a college education. She certainly didn’t have a business school education, but she was clearly incredibly smart and incredibly savvy once she got to America about putting her finger to the wind and seeing what the social climate of the times was encouraging people to want to buy. And for instance, she got into silk right away. At the time, there was no ready-to-wear clothing for women. I learned to my amazement that a woman could not go into a shop and buy a skirt or shirtwaist off the rack until the 1890s, And she couldn’t buy a dress off the rack until after World War I.
[7:14]So every woman in America, rich or poor, either sewed her own clothes at home or had them made by a dressmaker. That meant that fine fabrics at discount prices were in great demand. The economics of a transaction, which again, Frederica Mandelbaum put in place in her business operation very early, worked this way. A thief would steal a load of fine silk from a New York waterfront dock or a textile emporium at night.
[7:51]The swag would be brought covertly to Mrs. Mandelbaum. She knew the wholesale price of every one of the luxury goods that passed through her hands. Silk, diamonds, silver, sealskin, cashmere, all of the stuff that the emerging middle class in the second half of the 19th century was being taught to crave, but didn’t want to pay full price for. A thief brings her bolts of silk, she pays the thief 25% or even less of its wholesale price, say 10% to 25%. The thief can now exit the equation in relative safety. She’s the buffer between him and the cops. She then covertly, through her agents, sells to one of her extensive list of waiting customers that same silk at half cost.
[8:47]To two-thirds of wholesale. So the client is thrilled. He’s getting an enormous discount, and Mrs. Bandelbaum is still making a huge profit. And it became very clear to me that there had always been property crime, but she was one of the first, and the only one I know of to do it in such a complete and sustained way in that period, she was one of the first to treat property crime as a thriving capitalist concern and as a scalable business.
[9:22]
Mrs. Mandelbaum’s organizational skills
[9:23]Interesting. Yeah, she did. And she organized. Another thing I found interesting as I went through your book is how she organized people and looked out for them. It’s like this is before the mafia, guys. As you know, the Italians don’t arrive on the scene until late 1900s and turn of the century and you know they’re gonna move in on these kinds of of uh rackets if you will but this is before them and and so as it’s the immigrant way you’re kept out of the normal kind of businesses but crime is always there and you can always make money and and that’s she figured that out because she was you know she couldn’t have gone and got a job she couldn’t opened a store, uh, couldn’t have done anything, but this was open to her. And then she starts organizing all these guys. She, she saw beyond just a slam bang crime. She saw beyond it and organized pickpockets and burglar gangs and bank robbery gangs. So tell us a little bit about her organizational skills, if you will. That’s right. To speak first to your point about there being few opportunities in the so-called upper world, the world of legitimate commerce, that was true, of course, for all immigrants, men and women. There was tremendous xenophobia. Friedrich Mandelbaum was disenfranchised three times over. She was a foreigner. She was a woman. She was Jewish. There was also tremendous anti-Semitism.
[10:52]In the upper world, men, immigrant men, were pretty much only able to get jobs that were dangerous, dirty, and demeaning, digging ditches, hauling hods of bricks on their shoulders. There was no job security. If the weather was bad in construction, there was no pay. People got injured and killed all the time. For women, there were even fewer opportunities in the upper world, mostly back-breaking domestic work for little more than a dollar a week, or working as a seamstress and going blind, making these tiny hand stitches by the thousands by candlelight.
[11:32]So some immigrants, as you say, turn to the underworld, the so-called crooked ladder, as a way to provide for their families and to advance socially and economically. But here again, there were vastly more choices for men than for women. Whatever we think of that life, women who chose for whatever reason to enter it really barely could. Men could run bucket shops, run numbers rackets, run all kinds of gambling joints. They could be hired muscle. They could be people who got out the vote for Tammany Hall ward healers. Women, there were literally only two job opportunities open in the underworld. And guess what they were? Shoplifting, which was not lucrative, and prostitution. Clearly, Frederica Mandelbaum resolved not to remain in poverty. That eliminated shoplifting. She was a proper married woman. That eliminated prostitution. So she…
[12:37]In order to ascend the crooked ladder, first had to build her own ladder because she was a woman. That I find fascinating. So what she did, as any good solo entrepreneur would do, was she started small. You don’t come straight out of business school and expect to be made the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. You start at the bottom. So she started with the cohort of female shoplifters that were already circulating in department stores. Department stores had started to blossom in big American cities in the mid-19th century. She recruited them to work for her. She gave them steady employment, the promise of bail, coaching if need be. She worked out all sorts of modus operandi to help women steal things efficiently. They would bring the swag to her, and she would disguise things if necessary so they couldn’t be traced back to their owners and sell them on at a profit. When that proved not lucrative enough, then she expanded into silk. Now, silk comes in these big, heavy bolts, 40 or more yards of fabric wrapped around a stiff cardboard core. So you can’t just have a woman sweep that off a department store counter and stash it under her long skirt. So then Mar Mandelbaum recruited a cadre of men.
[14:05]Daytime shoplifting continued as a mainstay of the business, but now she expanded into after-hours nighttime burglary from warehouses, from textile emporiums, from docks. After that, She eventually expanded into housebreaking, and what’s so wonderful is she would have these elaborate dinner parties at her palatial apartments above the modest haberdashery shop on the Lower East Side. The invitations were as sought after as to any party Mrs. Astor might give up town. Down one side of her long mahogany dining table would be the leading lights of upper world commerce, Wall Street men, captains of the mercantile world, captains of industry, in evening dress, laughing, whining and dining. Down the other side of the table, also in evening dress, would be the creme de la creme of the criminal world. Housebreakers, bank burglars, shoplifters, all whining and donning and laughing together. And so the question becomes, was there really that much difference between what these two cohorts were doing? It’s just that the work of one was considered legal and the work of the other was not.
[15:29]
Mrs. Mandelbaum’s fencing front
[15:29]Eventually, she recruited into her employ the foremost bank burglars in the nation, and as the book explains, she staged several lucrative bank burglaries where she served beforehand as a kind of angel, giving them seed money, buying them tens of thousands of dollars of bespoke burglar’s tools, and then after the fact, also a crucial job for fences as a laundress, laundering that dirty money into clean.
[16:05]She even had a dormitory or something that she had as part of her headquarters there, secret compartments to get in and out. Describe that fencing front that she had back at the back and down underneath. need. That’s right. If you walked into her haberdashery shop on the corner of Clinton and Rivington streets on the Lower East Side, you would just see an ordinary-looking shop where people in all innocence would walk in off the street, and you could buy a length of lace or a piece of ribbon or a spool of thread, although I suspect the customers must have of marveled at how deeply discounted everything was, but that was a plus.
[16:50]At the back wall of the haberdashery shop was a stout oak door and also a window overlaid with iron bars. And behind that door and window was a whole secret warren of rooms where the real criminal operation took place. She had, for instance, in the parlor, just on the other side of the barred window.
[17:14]A fireplace whose chimney had a concealed dumbwaiter in the back. So if Marm, looking through the window into the shop, saw a rare police raid take place or saw any kind of suspect character enter the shop, if she was in back there going over a load of swag, she could just pop it into the dumbwaiter, hoist it up out of sight to the floor above. There was a warren of rooms that together comprised the infrastructure of her business, which was really to run a wholesale mail order fulfillment house. There were rooms where employees packed goods into crates and barrels to dispatch
[18:02]
Mrs. Mandelbaum’s secret criminal operation
[17:59]to waiting customers around the country who were buying them on the cheap. There was indeed a dormitory with beds and a washstand for visiting thieves from out of town. There was probably the most interesting room, which I called the effacement chamber, in which a hand-selected team of German artisans very carefully removed stolen stones from their settings and effaced any engravings. If a watch was engraved with the owner’s name, well, obviously, it would be too dangerous to sell that on. But these brilliant artisans would engrave a whole picture over the back.
[18:39]Completely obscuring the name of the man from whom the watch had been stolen.
[18:46]
Mrs. Mandelbaum’s entry into bank robbery
[18:44]That was her business model. So Mrs. Mandelbaum got into bank robbery. One of the most important robberies she bankrolled was in 1869, the burglary of the Ocean National Bank in Lower Manhattan.
[19:03]It took months of planning and the investment of many tens of thousands of dollars on her part, including putting the bank burglars in a rented office on the basement level of the bank, conveniently below the office of the bank president, and surveilling the bank, the comings and goings of bank employees, people on the street, the cops on the beat for months months at a time, and then buying a set of bespoke burglar’s tools with which her foremost bank burglars from the basement could slowly chip their way into the bank president’s office through his floor, and then at night, working by the light of a cigar so they wouldn’t be seen through the windows outside, getting into the bank president’s office.
[20:05]Stringing the lock on the vault, which they had already figured out how to do, and getting themselves into the two safes within the vault. That was a very lucrative robbery, earning them hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is.
[20:29]Mrs. Manderbaum then boyared, keeping in some accounts 50% of the proceeds. All of this and more is discussed in my new book, The Talented Mrs. Manderbaum, which is just out from Random House and available through Random
[20:50]
Conclusion
[20:47]House or at any place where you buy books. So thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Those are some great stories. And guys, you know, I’ll have show notes or links in the show notes to get this book. That was Margalit Fox, The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum. It’s a really interesting book and a really interesting look at back in the days when fencing first started. And it’s an overall good view of early days of organized crime in the United States before the mafia people even got here.
[21:23]Before the, actually the early Jewish mob got here. She was the first. And so I highly recommend you get that book. It’s entertaining as heck to read. A lot of good images in it. And she did a lot of great research. Thanks a lot, guys. And don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. And if you have a problem with PTSD, be sure and go to the VA website. And if you’ve been in the service, then you can get a hotline number there. If you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, hall go see our friend mr rugiano down in florida he’s a former gambino guy anthony rugiano i have a, hotline number up there if you’re on the youtube and his website has a hotline number his youtube channel has a hotline number don’t forget to like and subscribe share this with your friends that’s the best way for me to get new listeners and more new listeners we get the better we like it And I appreciate all your support as it is. Thank you, guys.
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24min
August 22, 2024 10 Legendary Black Gangsters
Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. In this episode, I explore the history of 10 Legendary Black Gangsters, highlighting key figures and organizations from the 1920s to the present day. We discuss the evolution of black organized crime in cities like New York, Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia, focusing on prominent individuals such as Nicky Barnes, Samuel Christian, Frank Matthews, and Larry Hoover. The narrative also investigates the international connections of figures like Jeff Fort, founder of Chicago’s El Rukan, and Demetrius Flanory of the Black Mafia Family (BMF). Finally, I look at the emergence of street gangs like the Crips and Bloods in South Central LA. Additionally, we touch on iconic figures like Ellsworth Bumpy Johnson and cinematic portrayals of gangster life in popular media.
#blackgangster #gangster #bloods #crips #mafia #organizedcrimegroups #elrukan
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Transcript
[0:00]
Introduction to Black Gangsters
[0:00]Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there, back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. As most of you know, this is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective. And I have a story today.
[0:15]Correction on that. I have a show today that’s going to… Correction on that. I’m going to talk… Correction on that. Today, I’m going to talk about the top 10 black gangsters in all of kind of recorded history, if you will. Now, going back before the war, back in the 30s and 20s, there were black gangsters, but nobody really talked much about them. Going on up into the 40s and 50s, especially the 50s, newspapers started covering that kind of thing. And so there was quite a few pretty well-known guys that were part of their community. And they were, you know, professional criminals. They had an organization. They weren’t exactly the mafia, but they had something going on. It was all built around drugs, I believe, because that was the crime that you can make some real money at. So a big rise of this in the 60s and 70s as civil rights came in and, you know, like after the riots of 1968, There’s a huge shift in really in the black communities and in covering by the newspapers and covering black crime and by the police and their response to black crime. So let’s talk about those days, you know, New York, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia are kind of the most well-known cities when it comes to the history of black organized crime.
[1:42]There were syndicates like the council headed by Nicky Barnes in New York and Philadelphia’s Black Mafia. You may have heard of that. I think I did a show of us around the more later Black Mafia with Sean Patrick Griffin. A man named Samuel Christian led that one in Philadelphia and, you know, illegal gambling and drug drug trafficking. But they also got into fencing, you know, and in Kansas City, we had a Black Mafia or at least what we did. The newspaper’s called the Black Mafia, led by a guy named Doc Dearborn and his partner, Eugene Richardson. And then the Kelton brothers had an organization. And I remember we even stopped a kid named James Calvin Bradley who just got out of the penitentiary. He was an armed robber. And the Kelton brothers had not only a heroin organization going, they had crews of young kids that were going out robbing banks.
[2:40]
Rise of Violent Lifestyle
[2:36]And they were supporting them with cars and guns and laundering the money for them. And James Calvin Bradley, when he was arrested, he had a piece of paper in his car that had all these different rules for an organization laid out, much like the mob. And they were broken down into a couple of crews and they had leaders of those crews and they had rules about, you know, don’t snitching, don’t snitching, don’t talk to the police.
[3:05]You know keep a low profile you know drive a uh cool car uh you know dress in you know normal manner don’t don’t get too loud and too you know now it’s pan sagging back then it was uh really big bell bottoms and some things like that and so you know don’t go out too big of a fro the different rules like that in order to keep the police from paying any attention to them at all now.
[3:34]They were extremely violent because this is a violent lifestyle out here in the drug world, particularly the armed robbery world. Uh, it was really a violent lifestyle and, and some of the leaders became, you know, they kind of did away with some of their own stay under the radar rules and became flashy, especially these big guys in, in New York, like, uh, uh, Nicky Barnes, who was so well-known, and Frank Matthews. They were just so well-known. Now, Frank Matthews, let’s talk about him first. He was referred to as the Black Caesar. He also had another nickname called Pee-wee. He was probably one of the most famous black gangsters in America, mainly because the press covered him. He had a large scale of heroin and cocaine drug operations. He started in the middle 60s, 1965, and he disappeared in 1973.
[4:28]And they say, and he did have an extravagant lifestyle in his prime, you know, leather fur coats and jewelry and showing up at the big prize fighting matches. They like to show up with an entourage at a prize fighting match. And he had $20 million in savings, supposedly. You know, he was born a poor country boy, as they say, down in Durham, North Carolina, just like any other mobster you ever heard of. Left school when he was like 14 or 15 years old. Started in with a little teenage gang. He was stealing chickens down there in the country. Moved north to Philadelphia, which there was a huge move north back in the 50s and 60s by black folks. And got into the numbers because the numbers in poor neighborhoods, the numbers is a big moneymaker and the number one crime that’s going on. It’s only a crime because the government made it a crime because, you know, we have the lottery now. He then fell in with something that was already there, a guy called Major Coxon, who I don’t really know anything about. And he had this drug operation going. It was calling itself the Black Mafia by then.
[5:46]He started dealing heroin in 1965. At that time, in 1965, the American mafia, the Italian mafia, controlled the main heroin supply, like, you know, out of Turkey, out of through Montreal, maybe through Cuba at one time. Well, he got a relationship with a Cuban mafia boss, Orlando Gonzalez, gonzalez and uh he got it direct from south america through miami and then he was able to bring it up and and had his own network he had a much better you know connect the connect is the thing if you’re gonna run a cocaine and heroin business you gotta have the good connect uh gonzalez will die and and frank really like took it all over himself and and just just kept going and going and going he had two vast huge drug operations in brooklyn one was called the ponderosa the other was the okay corral corral that if you think about it the ponderosa was a rancid and um oh i can’t even think of the name of it now with hoss and little joe and paul and all them uh and uh you know gunfight at the okay corral so you know they kind of like based on those movies which were extremely popular they had a lot of westerns when i was a kid it was It was all Westerns on TV, and Western movies were really popular.
[7:11]The DEA will say that he handled…
[7:17]All the heroin in all the major cities on the East Coast.
[7:20]Got indicted in 72, charged with tax evasion and distribution of heroin. He didn’t show up in court, and nobody’s ever seen him since.
[7:31]
Frank Lucas: Harlem Crime Boss
[7:29]He’s probably dead by now. So number two, Frank Lucas. Frank Lucas became the main crime boss in Harlem, New York, in the late 60s. And he got into the heroin trafficking business at an early age. He had to deal with the Italian mafia. mafia uh he also came up from north carolina uh mainly because he was running for the law or maybe a lynching down there he didn’t know but he had to had to leave that country area and came up into the city and saw this this huge heroin business and and he actually he realized he had to break the italian mafia’s monopoly on the heroin trade in order to really make any money Otherwise, he was always going to be subservient to these mafia guys, which, you know, had this long established organization. But the Italian mafia can only establish so much in the black community because black community is, you know, pretty insular and have their own rules. And the white guys are on the outside looking in. They have to depend on the cooperation of black guys to move into that community. Now, he makes a connection with a U.S. Army sergeant named Leslie Ike Atkinson.
[8:47]Went to Bangkok and seen, you know, we had all this, all these planes going back and forth between Southeast Asia and particularly Vietnam during the time. We’re right in the middle of the Vietnam War. They figured out a way to put drugs in furniture and bring it back.
[9:06]Just crazy. You know, they made about, I don’t know, 50, $60 million. He bought property, had expensive cars and clothes and several homes. He gets indicted in 1976.
[9:19]He gets 70 years. He eventually goes in witness protection, testifies against some mob guys. And, you know, if you think about it, if you realize this, the 2007 American Gangster movie with Denzel Washington is based loosely on the life of Frank Lucas. Now, here’s another guy, Leroy Nicky Barnes. He founded something called the Council, which was a black organized crime syndicate. He was always called the untouchable out in his neighborhood because he could always evade arrest and he was always getting out of different charges. And of course, you know, the New York City Police Department at the time was you might be able to slide a little money here and there. And the DEA was not that big a deal early on in the 50s and 60s. He also got into international drug trafficking. He was partnered up with the Italian American Mafia in New York. And he really at one time he was the dominant drug lord in Harlem. I know in Kansas City, we always usually had one guy who was kind of the kingpin. To be a different guy, you know, it was Doc Dibbon for a while. It was Aaron Gant, maybe, in a certain area. The Kelton brothers had their own operation.
[10:42]
Larry Hoover: Chicago Street Gang Leader
[10:39]Farther out south, there were some different guys kind of by neighborhoods. They would be known as the kingpin of narcotics in that particular area.
[10:48]You know, at a young age, he was in prison in 1965 for drugs, and he met Crazy Joey Gallo at the Colombo crime family. And that’s the guy that, you know, when they talk about Joey Gallo made connections with black gangsters in prison, it was Nicky Barnes is who he made a connection with. Now, maybe Nicky Barnes provided the guy to kill Joe Colombo. I don’t know, but Gallo taught him, you know, room, more professional drug trafficking, and they partnered up in that. Uh, he started recruiting people when he got out and formed something called the council had seven guys in it, uh, spread out to Pennsylvania and Canada. He laundered money. He said, uh, he got front companies that were car dealerships. Uh of course he started extravagantly spending money and they say now get this i don’t know supposedly he had seven over seven million dollars worth of clothes that he owned according to the new york times back then got convicted got died and convicted in 1978 in prison he turned informant.
[12:00]Claimed that the council were mismanaging his assets and one of the men in this was having an affair with his mistress so that’s why he went into witness protection he implicated 100, some people including all of these council members went into witness protection and died in 2012 from cancer larry hoover now we go to chicago now larry hoover was born in 1950 on the south side of chicago and he was a leader and one of the founders of the black gangster disciples which was the a major street gang in the city at the time and really kind of goes on today. The Black Gangster Disciples has been huge. It kind of came out of two different Chicago-based street gangs, the Black Disciples and the Supreme Gangsters. But under his leadership, he brought them together. He got things professionalized, shall we say, and got into drug trafficking, which drugs, again, it just gives you so much money, and it needs organization. You’ve got to have suppliers. You’ve got to have people for transport.
[13:10]
Jeff Fort: Chicago Street Gang Leader
[13:07]You’ve got to have people to package. You’ve got to have people to test. You’ve got to have people to go out and sell, and you’ve got to have people to collect money when buyers go screwy on you, and violence is wrapped up all around in that.
[13:25]He was a smart guy in Chicago. On the south side of Chicago, if you’ve ever been there, there’s all these projects that just run for miles down through there. And Chicago and Chicago politics and the community organizers and the community down in these black projects to keep the vote coming out. They put a lot of money into it and programs. So he got involved with that and portrayed himself as a community organizer and promoted social programs within his gangster disciples. I mean, he it was his image in the public was complex, shall we say. I read a book about it was an academic that spent about a year in one of these projects. And he talked about how these, these gangsters, these black gangsters would be part of all the, the housing or home committees in a particular project building. And they were, you know, on the surface, they were helping with projects and helping with social programs and, you know, providing, helping to bribe babysitting and access to food programs and all those kinds of things. So it’s, it’s always a, uh, uh.
[14:40]Dual-edged sword, if you will, for some of these guys. They’re complex characters many times, but the bottom line is always money. It’s always money and power. And there he got political power, and he was making a lot of money off the drugs. He formed something. He had vision. This Hoover dude had vision. He formed the Folk Nation Alliance, and he united a lot of different street gangs gangs, uh, under, you know, particular ideologies and, and their symbols that they use and put them together, uh, extended clear out to Kansas city. We had black gangster disciples down in Kansas city at one time and Latin Kings. And I think that came out of Chicago and started seeing their graffiti appearing here. He had real strategic vision and influence in shaping that landscape of street gangs in Chicago.
[15:33]Even after he went to prison, he went to prison for murder in 1973, but he continued to control the black gangster disciples from behind the bars, behind bars.
[15:51]
Big Meech: Detroit Drug Trafficker
[15:43]And, you know, finally in 1997, the feds got him and he got conspiracy to engage in racketeering. And they really forced, they accused him and got into this.
[16:00]Running the gangster disciples from prison and other activities, illegal activities out of the prison. And he got a long time of incarceration in the super max and ADX Florence. And I don’t know if you know anything about it. If you’re a high level dangerous professional criminal or terrorist, and you go to ADX Florence, you’re locked down, buddy. You are locked down. You’re in one cell and you have your own little private exercise area. You don’t even talk to other prisoners. You don’t go out in the yard. It’s something else. So now let’s go on to Chicago. Another name that I was pretty familiar with was Jeff Ford. He may be, he’s more famous to me than that other guy. Jeff Ford, he’s saying, there’s what I read. His name is synonymous with the dark underbelly of Chicago. Chicago, he came in later on and later on in the 19 or 1900s, um, born in 1947, started, he founded something called the black P stones gang in South side, Chicago in the 1960s. That’s how big South side of Chicago is got the black gangsters disciples, but you also got the black P stones, both a major, major street gangs, uh.
[17:22]You know, under his leadership, they became a powerful force in all criminal activities and drug trafficking, racketeering, gambling, just keeping everybody in line with what the gang wanted. They also reached out beyond Chicago. They had some influence down in Kansas City, and he really was a significant player in the national landscape. He was quite a guy.
[17:52]It turned a little bit of a darker turn, and he got involved in politics, and I’m talking about international politics. And in the 1980s, Jeff Fort was convicted on federal charges for conspiring with Libya to perform acts of domestic terrorism in the United States. Now, think about that. This is a revelation that highlights the intersection of American street gangs and international terrorism. Terrorism uh i mean these guys you send the terrorists you get a bunch of iranians and you come to the united states well if you don’t have some place to hide some connections some way to figure out what’s going on think about yourself if you went to iran and you went to syria what would you do you got to make connections with somebody and he made they libyans were making connections with Jeff Ford and the black gangster disciples, uh, oops, black P stones. I got wrong, messed up on that one, black P stones. And then that gives them, you know, a lot of, of connections to, you know, buy dynamite, buy guns, hide out, get false, false IDs. You know, these guys, uh, you know, that you have to operate with criminals and the international terrorist network. work, you have to figure out how to operate with criminals. And so if they don’t have that, but they got that with, uh, with the black P stones.
[19:21]He ended up in, guess where, Supermax, ADX Florence, Florence, Colorado. That’s probably the last we’ll ever see of Jeff Fort. You know, when he was out in the more general population, he was running his gang like crazy from Leavenworth or Marion or wherever he was from. Another guy called Big Meech, Demetrius Flanory. He he was a co-founder of the Black Mafia family, which was a notorious drug trafficking organization, didn’t rise to prominence till the 1990s in the early 2000s. And their hometown was Detroit. But they reached out to other major cities in the United States. I tell you, this drug thing is just talk about just it’s just rips in the fabric of society, the narcotics addiction.
[20:13]And, you know, in a way, I mean, these guys, they see a way to make money and they’re willing to pay the price. It’s more like you can’t do anything about the supply, the demand. You know, maybe I talk about at the end of every podcast about getting into recovery. Maybe you can do something by reducing the demand because they don’t have the demand. They’re going to have to do something else.
[20:41]
Thomas Fischer: Apollo Theater Owner
[20:37]These guys, the Black Mafia family was was kind of a unique organization. Organization and they, they were into politics. Uh, they blended into street operations. They, uh, they were really marked by their extravagant lifestyle up there in Detroit, flashy cars, luxury property properties, you know, and then Detroit, uh, you got a big music industry, especially back then. All the black musicians that started out by Motown Music. And so they were connected with the music industry. And, you know, pretty soon it’s the rap industry. And it’s just a huge amount of money there. Plus the large-scale drug distribution and money laundering and other racketeering. They were pretty unique because of this, their ostentatious display of wealth, they tell me.
[21:31]Me again big meets not 2008 catches some federal charges drug trafficking money laundering and racketeering and he’s got a federal sentence a life sentence that fci shared in the last i heard of i didn’t go check it for sure here we got a guy thomas guy thomas fisher our friend guy thomas Thomas was born in the Bronx, and he started out at Nicky Barnes in the council.
[22:01]His operation, he continued on after Nicky Barnes left and really, well, it got big. He purchased the Apollo Theater in 1977. First black man to ever own it and run it. It was like the most famous venue for black artists for years and years and years.
[22:23]Years. Well, Guy Fischer, he fell when Nicky Barnes fell. Nicky Barnes became an informant, and he brought Guy Fischer down. He goes down for life, and actually, he was out. He got out on a medical pardon there in 2020, so he’s out and about. I’d be curious. He might know anything about Guy Thomas Fischer, what he’s doing today.
[22:46]Stanley Tookie Williams, one of the most infamous gangsters in america uh spree killing terrorizing people he and a guy named raymond washington co-founded the notorious you know when the notorious crips gang well i remember when this crips and blood first started hitting it been going for a while before it got out to the midwest but it eventually got here and it was the first major major black street gang in american out of south central la uh i mean he grew up you know on the streets middle of a lot of drug abuse and and drug dealings and gambling and betting on anything neighborhood guys dice games to social clubs that that had a lot had a lot of action going on in social clubs in a black community he was a good street fighter he had a heck of a reputation you know again he, went in and out of the system several times and he ended up with this raymond washington and they formed his crypts of course the the crypts were a disparate group of really smaller set what they call sets and but they they were marked if you wore blue you were a crypt.
[24:05]And then some of the smaller gangs didn’t really want to be part of something else. And they like red. So they formed the Bloods. Now, I don’t know exactly, you know, who formed the Bloods, but the Bloods and the Bloods were always the Bloods were more of an organized one gang, whereas the Crips were a whole lot of different sets. So it’s a lot, lot looser. And both of them are not really as near as organized as these other people I’ve been talking about. When they moved into kansas city you know they moved in with one set of some crips and they started they had their own connection they started bringing kilos of cocaine cocaine and we end up taking them off uh off the train actually they bring them in on the train there’s la to chicago train that comes through kansas city and they were bringing them through the train i went down we were going to go do the surveillance on that daily train that comes through and i went in the bathroom and there was all this blood and crimp graffiti in the bathroom of the Kansas City Union Station. It’s like, oh, my God, they are here. No doubt about it.
[25:28]One of these guys that formed the Crips, Raymond Williams, was convicted in 1981 of murder and robbery, and he got the death penalty. He appealed it, maintained his innocence, but he finally is executed. This guy, Erson One, is executed by lethal ejection in 2005.
[25:48]
Ellsworth Bumpy Johnson: Harlem Crime Boss
[25:48]Here’s one. Let’s go back a little bit again. Ellsworth Bumpy Johnson. He was born in 1905. He’s one of the early ones. I probably should have started out with him. Now, we all know Bumpy Johnson. If you saw that Godfather of Harlem movie with Forrest Whitaker and I can’t remember the guys that played the chin gigante.
[26:12]But that movie tell told about Bumpy Johnson. He was one of the main crime bosses in Harlem during the 30s and 40s before all these other guys came along. Suppose they had a big bump on the back of his head. That’s why they called him Bumpy.
[26:27]
Samuel Christian: Philadelphia Black Mafia
[26:27]Uh a he uh had a real bitterness and hatred against whites he let people know that of course by you grew up a black man in the 30s and 40s and 20s i can understand grew up in the south of course people were being lynched all the time mother sent him up north to live with his sister had already come up north to harlem dropped out of high school the usual deal started doing shady deals and some other gangsters took note of him. And pretty soon he got into the numbers racket.
[27:00]He became a principal associate of the numbers. Queen Madame Stephanie Sinclair was the numbers queen, the biggest, uh, uh, numbers operator in Harlem is a huge amount of money. And then they had this crime war with Dutch Schultz. Dutch Schultz wants to take over kind of like Sam Giancano took over from Teddy row. And there’s another guy in, in Chicago, Dutch Schultz in New York. He’s going to take over the black policy, which cause there’s so much money and all kinds of murders and kidnappings. And 1950s Johnson gets convicted. The government catches him in a drug conspiracy, a heroin conspiracy, gets 15 years. That’s kind of the end of his crime career. He comes out in 1963, same year I graduated from high school, died of heart failure by 1968. Okay, we’re up to number nine. Samuel Christian, also known as Suleiman Bay, the Philadelphia Black Mafia, born in Philadelphia in 1939. He formed the Philadelphia Black Mafia. I did a story on the more modern Philadelphia Black Mafia. I was talking about that earlier.
[28:14]Of course, they were doing heroin because that was the drug of choice in the black community. Before crack came along, black community’s drug of choice was weed. But the really bad drug that took people down was heroin, a lot of heroin addiction.
[28:31]He kind of gets political, too. He gets real political. He gets into the Black Panther Party in the 60s. Then he joins the Nation of Islam, which is a black nationalist organization based around Islam, formed by Wallace Fard Muhammad. We had our own black Muslim program here, and there was a little set of them, a crew of them that were robbing banks. They were involved with some heroin trafficking in Kansas City, too. So the Black Mafia’s members of the Black Mafia joined and converted to Islam, and they called themselves the Muslim Mob, probably one of the most violent and cold-blooded operations in Philadelphia ever. Kept everybody in check. Murdered a lot of people.
[29:22]
Raymond Thompson: Crips Gang Co-Founder
[29:22]He died in 2016. he was never really convicted he had his murder charges in the 70s got out in lack of evidence okay the other member of the and co-founder of the crips gang raymond thompson he he was a fistfighter in south central l.a and and joined these different one of some different different little gang one called the chain gang and the AC Ducey and the avenues and kind of, you know, like each block had their own gang. Then they started unifying the gangs and, and that’s, you know, how, kind of how the Crips were formed. But again, like I said, they were not one formal gang. They were a variety of sets and a lot of fighting between the two of them. Not they didn’t really become some kind of any kind of a major kind of an influence on society is all other than on the younger kids now younger kids all became cool to like wear your hat like that or like that and have blue or red whatever and i think even to this day there’s there are certain things about those colors and saw the movie colors great movie by the way i worked I was working our street gangs on loan, and my attack squad was on loan to the narcotics when we went after these guys when they first started moving into Kansas City.
[30:51]So some of the movies about these. There’s American Gangster. I mentioned that one before with Denzel Washington about Frank Lewis. New Jack City. I remember seeing that not long after it came out. It wasn’t bad. Director was pretty good, Mario Bum Peoples. and Wesley Snipes was the charismatic drug lord in that.
[31:11]Dealt a little bit with the consequences of addiction. Menace to Society, that’s a pretty good movie, too. As they say, I read this unflinching portrayal of life in South Central L.A., and it was unflinching. Harsh realities faced by a lot of young black guys and systemic issues within that society. You’d probably say I’m a flaming liberal, but there are problems. Them. So I go into city court as a lawyer. I’m like the only white guy in there. Many times, all the defendants are black super fly. You remember super fly. I’ll tell you a funny story about that. We had a young black policeman at the time and I knew his buddy really well. Um, and, and all of a sudden this young guy quit the police department and he started pimping.
[32:01]We’d see him on the street and he had two or three girls working for him. And I was talking to his He’s a buddy, and he said, you know, he said, we went to see Superfly, and this dude changed. And from then on, he wanted to be a pimp, and he did. I don’t know whatever happened to him. I think he was driving a bus. Last time I heard of him or saw him actually driving a bus, this was the blaxploitation film they used to call those. It was like the best one of all those blaxploitation films out of the 70s and 80s. Peyton Fool, it’s on YouTube. They say, I don’t know anything about this. It’s about a Harlem drug dealer. Of course, the one, Mobster’s Godfather of Harlem. I thought it was a series on Netflix or Prime. I can’t remember. One of those streaming channels. I thought it was pretty good. I mean, you had to suspend your reality sometimes. You had to believe things that probably weren’t true, or at least to get into it. Hoodlum, that’s another story about Ellsworth’s Bumpy Johnson. Lawrence Fishburne plays Bumpy Johnson. City of God, I saw that once a long time ago. It’s a Brazilian movie, and it’s set in what they call the fabulas, which is the ghettos in Rio de Janeiro.
[33:31]Again, it kind of catches the life, real life in the slums in Rio and how crime affects each continuing generation. Kingdom Come, that’s on YouTube. And it’s not a traditional gangster film, but it kind of talks about familiar relationships of people from the streets. It’s got LL Cool J and Jada Pinkett Smith, Whoopi Goldberg, pretty top-named people, which means it has good production values. Training Day, oh my God, Training Day, that movie, I really never knew any policemen who quite liked Denzel Washington. Could you believe Denzel Washington? I mean, he was that guy. he was not the denzel washington from you know any other movie i’d seen him he’s that good an actor he was scary he was he was something else they say he was morally ambiguous well yeah no shit and ethan hawke won his new new first roles and he was good you know the harsh realities of policing as they say in south central la uh it was denzel put on a hell of a performance i don’t to get an award out of that. I don’t think so.
[34:46]Belly, it’s on YouTube. I don’t know much about it. It’s more up in the rap and hip-hop era. Not really my cup of tea. So that’s kind of a little extra story about the top 10 black gangsters in the United States. So don’t forget to like and subscribe. And if you have a problem with PTSD, if you’ve been in the street gang, I don’t know where you go. You have to go get your life of crime. You have to go get your therapy somewhere else, but go get it. There’s help out there. But if you’ve been in the service, go to the VA website and get that hotline number. And if you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, go see former Gambino soldier, Anthony Ruggiano. He’s got a hotline on his website. He’s a drug and alcohol counselor down in Florida.
[35:37]If you like to ride motorcycles, join me one of these days. Let me know, take a trip and come through Kansas city. We’ll get some coffee and we’ll go for a ride. I’ll show you the good rides around here. And, but if you’re in the car, watch out for motorcycles and like, and subscribe. If I think I said that before, I don’t know guys. Anyhow, I’m just having fun here today doing a little extra show and a little something. I think I saw a, maybe there’s a YouTube or a newspaper article or something about the top 10, uh, black gangsters in the, in the United States. And I found some stuff online, of course, and thought I’d bring this to you. Thanks a lot, guys.
...more
37min
August 19, 2024 Joe Massino – Died in Witness Protection
Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. In this episode, I start with FBI agent Doug Fencl telling the story of revealing Joe Pistone’s true identity as an undercover agent to Bonanno-Capo Sonny Black. This revelation set off a chain of events leading to the downfall of high-ranking members of the Bonanno crime family, including boss Joe Massino. Delving into Joe Messino’s background, we explore his ruthless rise within the mob and the cunning maneuvers he orchestrated to maintain his criminal empire. Despite his affable facade, Joe Massino proved to be the most dangerous among his peers, orchestrating numerous murders and hits. As we encounter the seemingly unassuming Joey Massino, we witness his surprising criminal activities and his eventual rise in the mob scene, earning him the moniker Big Joey for his illicit ventures. Bonanno boss Rusty Rastelli mentored Big Joey as he went into various criminal enterprises, showcasing his intelligence, adaptability, and willingness to resort to violence. Through interviews and investigations, we uncover the intricate workings behind Joey’s criminal operations and his ascent within the mob ecosystem, from truck hijackings to becoming a trusted fence for stolen goods. The narrative delves into the power struggles and violent actions within the Mafia, precisely honing in on Joe Messino’s team and their meticulously planned murders, including the hit on three capos and the involvement of Donnie Brasco. Joe Messino’s adept money laundering tactics and his unwavering loyalty to Rusty Rastelli come to the forefront as we witness the intricate web of crime and consequences within the Mafia unfold. Ultimately, financial investigations and FBI infiltration led to the demise of Messino and his cohorts like brother-in-law Sal Vitale, underscoring the treacherous landscape of organized crime. Our exploration extends to Barry Weinberg, who evaded millions in taxes through illicit means before law enforcement capitalized on his vulnerabilities to transform him into an informant. This catalyzed a series of revelations about mob activities within the Bonanno family, culminating in the shocking turn of events where Joe Massino, the powerful boss, transitions into a government informant. Through strategic legal maneuvers and riveting courtroom drama, the formidable mob empire crumbles, bringing Massino’s reign of terror to a dramatic end. Join us as we unravel the chilling narrative of betrayal, survival, and the downfall of crime lords, shedding light on the dark underbelly of organized crime.
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1h 12min
August 12, 2024 Peter Savino Takes Down the Chin
Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. Larry McShane joins the podcast to discuss Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, focusing on Peter Savino, a key player in convicting Gigante. Larry wrote a book, “Chin: The Life and Times of Vincent Gigante,” detailing Gigante’s rise to power in the Genovese crime family. Gary learned that Savino went into Witness Protection and lived out his life in Kansas City. Savino’s role in the Windows case, where mob-operated companies rigged bids for window contracts in NYC, is discussed. Despite health issues, Savino’s testimony against Gigante proved crucial in court. The dynamic between Gigante and Savino, including their business dealings and personal connection, is explored. The podcast delves into the intricacies of organized crime, witness protection, and the downfall of Gigante, showcasing Larry’s expertise in mob history. Larry’s other book on Philadelphia mob boss Ralph Natale piques interest for future discussions.
Click here to get Larry McShane’s Mob books. The Chin!
Support the Podcast
Subscribe to get new gangster stories every week.
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”
To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here
To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here.
To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here
To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos.
To subscribe on iTunes click here. Please give me a review and help others find the podcast.
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Transcript
[0:00]
Introduction
[0:00]Well, Hey guys, welcome back to the studio gangland wire. I’m on the zoom call here with Larry McShane. We were going to talk about the chin, but we’re going to talk more about one of the guys that, that really locked in the conviction on Vincent, the chin gigante back in the day and, and forced him to actually admit that it was all an act. This crazy bit was all an act. Larry, I really appreciate you coming on the show and you kind of are the, one of the experts on Vincent the Chin Gigante, you wrote the book. So first of all, tell us a little bit about the book. And I’ll put pictures of it on the YouTube and I’ll have links to Larry’s book and the show notes, guys. Yeah. The name of the book is Chin, the Life and Times of Vincent Gigante.
[0:49]And it sort of traces his ascension from, you know, the son of Italian immigrants who settled in Greenwich Village, to his rise to the top of the Genovese crime family in the early 80s. I think the Genovese were kind of regarded as, I think the term they used to use was like the Ivy League of the New York mob. He ran it for a good long time until they finally convicted him in 1997, I believe. And one of the reasons, the biggest reason his reign was so long is because he managed to perplex prosecutors by pretending that he had a mental illness.
[1:39]And his lawyers would argue in court that he was not mentally fit to stand trial. And this dragged on for a long time. I mean, there’s famous stories. The cops came to arrest him one time, and he was standing naked in the shower holding an umbrella over his head. And he would wander. He lived on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village. And for years, he never left there. You know, and you could see him. He had a social club right across the street from the apartment that he shared with his mom. And that’s where he did his business. Conversations about business were not done inside the club. You know, they were very worried about bugs or surveillance. And he and whoever he wanted to speak to would wander up and down Sullivan Street, you know, gigante in his ratty looking bathrobe and slippers. And again, this he took over in 1981 and it took 16 years before they could finally prosecute him.
[2:48]You know, and this is at a time where Rudy Giuliani was really full board taking on the five families in New York. Yeah, Rudy, you know, he started off with the he really built on the windows case. We’re going to get into that guy’s famous windows case to get to the commission case. But, you know, what what got me interested in this, you guys out there, is I found out that one of the main witnesses against him, Peter Savino, did his time and witness protection here in Kansas City. Like, go figure. I got an email from a retired judge friend of mine that said that a gal he went to college with was talking to one of Savino’s daughters about writing a book. And so I started looking into it and I talked to that lady and and she didn’t know much more. She was trying to find the FBI agent who was the control for Peter Savino,
[3:46]
Unveiling Peter Savino
[3:43]Dick Rudolph. And Dick Rudolph, if you’re listening to this, we can’t find you. And that daughter would really like to talk to you and just have a conversation. She has a lot of, like many mobsters, kids have a lot of questions about their dad and how a lot of this happened because it was all a big secret.
[4:01]And then I found another guy that did some business with Peter Savino in witness protection here in Kansas City, and it did not end up good. And the guy is still kind of scared about his mafia connections. And so he was he must have been kind of a bad dude or at least could come on as as a dangerous dude. And that guy won’t talk to me either. That’s how powerful this mystique of the Genovese and Chinchilla Gigante family is. I mean, it’s just it’s a really powerful deal. So, Larry, I’d ask Larry to come on here and let’s talk about this. Peter Savino and where he came from and, and, and how he came up to be that close to the chin to get him put away. So, you know, Larry.
[4:48]I looked him up a little bit and he kind of starts out as a look like a drug smuggler and cigarette smuggler and some things. So on lower level crimes as usual. So tell us a little bit about the early beginnings of Peter Savino. Yeah, he was a guy, as I think you mentioned, that. You know, it was kind of off the radar of both law enforcement and I think like. You know the hierarchy of the genevese family where he eventually found a home you know what i mean and uh you know he uh i mean he’s a guy that wore a wire once the feds brought him in to to get evidence and uh you know gigante had dodged prosecution and conviction for years and uh uh, Savino wore a wire and collected conversations and he was really, you know, at the, at the Ducati trial, they brought in, uh, Sammy the bull, um, and they brought in little Al Diarco, you know, mob bosses to testify against him. But it was really this capo that nobody knew about who delivered a lot of the most damning evidence, uh, against the Chin at trial.
[6:09]How did he get into this Windows case? He developed a company called Arista Windows, I believe. He’s more of a white-collar criminal, if you will. I mean, he certainly would kill somebody if he needed to, but he was more of a white-collar criminal, which the guy here in Kansas City learned. He developed a company, started a company called Arista Windows, I believe was the name of it. Started selling windows to the housing development or the housing, public housing in New York City. Can you remember what about how he got into the windows case? Yeah, he was kind of the architect of the whole scam. This was they set up a bid rigging operation and there were 13, I believe, mob operated companies who were involved in this conspiracy. What they would do is they would get contracts to install windows in city housing all over the city. If you were not involved in the mob cartel, there’s a tax imposed on you of $2 per window.
[7:16]We’re talking about Manhattan, Queens housing, like big developments. You know what I mean? So there’s a lot of money involved here. According to reports at the time, anyone who blanched at this would have their window shattered by the organized crime guys. You know what I mean? And I went back and did a little looking, and it was an enormously lucrative operation. The mob got $151 million in Windows contracts between 1978 and 1989. And Savino was kind of the guy who was running this whole thing. Wow. And for some reason, uh, He’s not a guy that I think people knew until probably the window post case. Gigante just took a shine to him for whatever reason. I’m sure the fact that he was a big earner had, had a lot to do with it.
[8:14]And, you know, chin was a notoriously secretive guy. And, uh, eventually when he went on trial, you know, Savino was one of the big witnesses against him at this point. Uh, Savino was sick and, and close to death. And, uh, so that was kind of his last, Last big shot in the whole war against Chin when he came in and testified, despite his failing health, you know?
[8:39]Interesting. I noticed, and going back over research in this case, the early investors in this Windows case, because all the families or most of them got involved in some manner. So it’s like the Concrete Club, like they were all in the Windows business too. And Vic Amuso and Gaspipe Castle from the Casey family were some early investors
[9:01]
The Rise of Arista Windows
[8:58]in this. they saw the opportunities in Savino. Yeah. Savino was a sharp guy. You know what I mean? You think of the mob and all the things they’re involved in and the idea that there was $151 million waiting for them to scoop up from installing windows in buildings around New York is kind of insane. It’s definitely one of the great mob tales that they got in there and I mean, there’s two things. One, they’re able to gain access. And then two, through threats and violence, they’re able to make the legitimate places sign up for their program. You know, and speaking of violence and that kind of thing, Musso and Casso were some of the most violent guys out there, especially Gas Pipe Casso. And so as one of their guys, 400-pound Pete Scioto.
[9:56]Big Pete. Big Pete. What can you tell us about Big Pete? That’s kind of like the beginning of the end with, uh, with big Pete and, and gas pipe and, and Lucchese is, you know, because of the feds, they put more energy into something. Bodies start falling. So can you remember, what do you remember about that?
[10:15]If I remember this correctly, I mean, big Pete was a guy who flipped after he got riddled with bullets, right? He survived a murder attempt. Yeah. Right.
[10:26]You know, that was at a time where, I mean, there was a time. And particularly within the Genovese family, where the idea of an informant from the inside would have been unthinkable. You know what I mean? You saw what happened when Giuliani came in, and all of a sudden the RICO Act is a thing. And I think guys who were, well, look, any guy that gets shot at and lives has a real motive to go to work for the federal government. You know what I mean? Exactly. I think there was a lot of that going on back then. And Savino was a guy, he never got, in the book I wrote about Giganti a few years back, like Savino was kind of terrified when he got called in to meet Giganti because he didn’t know what to expect. You know what I mean?
[11:13]
The Survival of Big Pete
[11:14]Instead oh look money changes everything right uh so their their relationship was forged in the fact that they could make a lot of money off these windows really you know i remember that big p chiodo he’s 400 pound guy and uh his uh little aldearco really was the one that was given the job to clip big p and and he sent some guys they caught him at a gas station and filled him full of lead, as we used to say when I was a kid. In the cowboy movies, they filled him full of lead. You know, he’s a great big guy. They didn’t hit any vital organs, so Big Pete survived at this gas station. He’s got 400 pounds of armor on him, you know what I mean?
[12:00]You know, great big 400-pound guy, you know, you got to hit the right, you know, if you don’t get him in the head, you know, you may just take out a whole bunch of fat, huh?
[12:09]
Little Al Turns Witness
[12:10]Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, little Al, there’s another guy who found the light of the federal government and became a super devastating witness for them. He did. He did. How did they turn to him? What do you remember about that? I don’t really know much about him myself. He was sort of the acting boss of the family in the absence of gas pipe. And he just started to feel like being the boss of the family is not, you know, it’s a dream come true, but it turns into a nightmare, I think, for most of these guys. Yeah. And he became convinced that he was going to get.
[12:49]He was going to be murdered, you know, as the acting boss. He was at a get together with a couple of guys and he started feeling hinky about the whole thing. He went out, you know, left this meeting and he contacted the feds. And, you know, he emerged as as like one of the first big name, for lack of a better term, witnesses. Very devastating because he had a lot of time inside the family. He had become the acting boss of the family. you know he was a guy that could give you a history of the mob back to uh you know when his finger was pricked at the induction ceremony yeah um and he turned out to be a really a really really devastating witness um i’ll just tell you a funny story i was i was meeting with these guys he used to be federal prosecutors about something and i mentioned uh diarco’s name and the one guy said uh you know would you like to talk to him for your story i was like hell yeah sure absolutely so he calls the number and he puts a he puts it on the speakerphone and the prosecutor’s like i got this guy here who’d like to talk to you al larry mcshane and he starts yelling you know that guy wrote some story about me and the prosecutor took him off took him off you know the speakerphone. So that was the end of that. Al never spoke to me.
[14:13]Al, too bad. That could have been really interesting. I was looking forward to it. I can tell you that.
[14:19]I can imagine. It’s interesting how some of these mob guys will follow their press and then even actually know the reporter, know him by name and follow the press. We had it here in Kansas City, and this one guy, Bill Norton, and the boss, Nick Civella, knew him by name. And actually, Bill lived about five, six blocks away from the boss of the family.
[14:48]I knew Bill pretty well. He’s always a little bit nervous. I didn’t know that Al was following my work. He wasn’t. He wasn’t very happy with at least one story. Yeah, and Muzo and Casso, they were like, they were on the lam for quite a while, but I guess running the family through Al Diarco. That’s exactly right. When those guys get out of New York, I think they went to Pennsylvania. Yeah. Yeah. That’s when Al was bumped up to run the family. And I think this happens in a lot of these things. It’s like, you know, your dream of running the family quickly turns into a nightmare. You know, what do you remember about this Ironworkers local 580?
[15:36]
Labor Involvement in the Scam
[15:32]It’s like that was an integral company in this whole window scam, if I remember right. And the mob guys, Peter Savino, that’s one of his first jobs was in labor or iron workers, local 580. So remember anything about that? I don’t. But, you know, yeah, you make a good point, which is, you know, Savino’s representing the union.
[15:57]And he’s representing the corrupt operation that’s running the union. You know what I mean? Yeah.
[16:03]And, you know, I would say that’s probably a pattern, right? Somebody gets their foot in the door, and pretty soon they’re kicking it down, and they’re shattering the windows of people who don’t want to participate in their scheme. That’s the new world, right? We’re running things, and you’re not, and the Genovese family, and these other 13 companies that were affiliated with the mob are all getting a piece of everything. Yeah, and Sabino was right in the middle of all that. That’s for sure now he was called in uh some meetings with the chin you mentioned that and i i’m looking up about this one after this uh vincent papa was killed and and there was a guy who was claiming control over savino named uh salvatore palmieri uh sally young and and there was some kind of a sit down with gigante that uh peter savino went into and he later would say he He didn’t know if he was going to come out of that alive or not. And, and do you remember anything about that meeting? Well, I mean, I, I think that, uh, Papa, uh.
[17:15]Kappa was hit because there was some drug money involved. Yeah, there was some kind of a drug money. Yeah, it does. But yeah, other than that, I don’t really know all that much about it. Well, Palmieri was actually demoted. He was a Kappa at the time. He was actually demoted to soldier at the time.
[17:34]And that’s when Savino, they called him in to talk about this, and Gigante took a liking to him. And actually, he was transferred then to be part of Gigante’s crew, to be close to him he probably saw the the money making ability in him there was another meeting i believe where uh somebody was accusing savino of coming over to the government and and they burn him and gigante were trying to burn him and gigante even like pulled him in closer because he just couldn’t believe it yeah for whatever reason um you know and as we talked a little bit savino was a little unnerved at first by being that close to Gotti. But for whatever reason, well, I shouldn’t say for whatever reason. There’s a reason. He was a guy that made a lot of money. Chin kind of just embraced this guy to his own detriment, as it turned out.
[18:27]
Savino’s Cooperation Revealed
[18:28]Gigante was a guy who was super paranoid about wiretaps, obviously did a lot to maintain the crazy the act you know the whole thing kind of unravels to some degree, Because Savino, a guy that he brought in, decides to become a cooperator. At that point in time, it seemed like Fat Tony Slerno was people like, Gigante wanted him to be the out front guy. He was like he was the boss.
[19:03]That’s 100% correct. He was the face of the family. The FBI, if you looked at documents from back then, would list him as the head of the family. And Giganti took over in 1981, which, of course, by staying off the radar, he then avoids the big commission trial. Yeah. You know, where the heads of the family, or in the case of our guy, the purported head of the family, takes the weight for everybody. You know what I mean? Right. And in the commission trial, but then the windows case and everything else with Gigante is because of Savino was, you know, it was percolating along all this time. Savino’s wearing a wire on Gigante. It’s just it’s crazy that how that came down. It is crazy in a lot of ways. I mean, one of them is, you know, as we’ve discussed a little bit, Gigante was. was really paranoid about wiretapping. His social club there on Sullivan Street was scanned for bugs.
[20:20]The famous thing is no one was allowed to say his name. They would point at their chin, right? And yet he meets Savino, And, uh, you know, for whatever reason, like I said, they, uh, well, I say for whatever reason, he sees that this guy could be a big earner. Yeah. And, uh, so he brings him aboard, you know, He must’ve just liked him personally too. They must’ve just clicked personally. Then kind of like a sides and that kind of thing for him to put this complete trust in this guy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and I think at the time, too, the family was, and Chin was, very much an anti-drug deal. They didn’t want the Genovese family dealing heroin or anything. He gets a guy like Savino. He’s in the local union. He’s got an inn. And he’s got this plan, right? You know what I mean? And eventually they bring in three of the other families to join in. You know, the Bananos, who were a mess at the time, are not asked to join it.
[21:31]And, you know, they set up this whole bid rigging thing with a penalty for legit businesses who want to come in. You know, they kind of go from there, right? Yeah. I think Gambino’s came in. I believe Peter Gotti kind of got the, if I remember right, Peter Gotti got the nod to kind of represent them. Yeah, that probably sounds about right. You know what I mean? Although I think at one point John Gotti was griping that they weren’t getting a good piece of the whole thing.
[22:02]
Gotti’s Induction Misstep
[22:03]Can you imagine that? I’m looking here at an old clip that I pulled in a conversation in the Ravenite. Gotti says, I never made a dime.
[22:18]I’m sure that might have been exaggerating for effect, but you know. That’s interesting. Everybody else, they made $150 million in windows and just a 10% of that, not even all the little asides you can make off that would be a ton of money. And God, he’s complaining he never got a dime off of it. That’s because he turned around and gambled it, a typical gambler. I talked to a guy who’s a drug dealer and runner, and I said, well, what’d you do with all that money? Because they didn’t have any money now. Now, he said, you know, every time I’d bring a load, I’d go to Las Vegas and then it was just gone. So in God, he was doing the same thing. Yeah. And of course, the chin, you know, as I said, was really no fan of Gotti. You know, he ascends, he ascends by whacking another boss, you know, and at that point, Gigante was was the boss of his family. And not only killing the guy, but in the most public. Right. Yeah. Christmas time. Midtown Manhattan. and I was working that night when it happened. We got a call from our guy at police headquarters. I was at Associated Press at the time.
[23:23]And, uh, he’s like, I, we hear there’s been like a shooting outside spark steakhouse. So they, they tell me to run over there. It was like about five blocks, you know, as you’re getting like closer, you see, there’s all these giant Klieg lights lighting up the street. It’s kind of crazy. And then, uh, and then you get there and there’s the two bodies, you know, Castellano and driver Tommy Pilati, and they’re just splayed out in the middle of the street. Wow. Yeah. It was kind of crazy. That was the first big organized crime story I covered. You know, and what I understand is what really turned Savino was some of his old crimes he had been involved with really before the windows case. It wasn’t really the windows case. That was that was what he had to offer. But I understand that there were some murders. He was involved with this Bobby Ferenga and another guy in some drug and other different kinds of cases where somebody got killed. And, and they, they were, they were making a case cause they turned this guy named Bobby Ferengen and, and, and he was going to give up Savino on some murders that he was involved with earlier. And then that turned him and, you know, the chin probably, you know, he didn’t really know about that. This other thing was going on, you know, he testified kind of interesting case, kind of the final Peter Savino story.
[24:39]If you will, he’s back here in Kansas city, but he gets throat cancer or cancer of the tongue one something around his mouth right he is so sickly by the time gigante actually comes to trial that he’s going to testify and via camera from kansas city although they didn’t know nobody did that at the time except u.s marshals and the.
[25:02]It’s funny you say that i didn’t know that i mean what i remember is he’s in some you know undisclosed location yeah you know he’s he’s he’s appearing as like the star witness at this thing they have a closed circuit set up right beaming it into the courtroom he’s in a wheelchair at this point he can’t even walk this is the testimony right from the guy gigante was like dozing off, uh at the defense table which it raises the question like is he really dozing off is he pretending to doze off, you know what I mean? Defend disinterest. But at the end of the day, the Savino testimony, you know, I mean, Gravano at that point and Al Diarco to some degree.
[25:47]Had almost become like uh professional witnesses for the government right they had both testified for the first time against john gatti in 92 and uh so so by the time and particularly gravano uh came to testify against chin you know the defense lawyers had a plan for him you know what i mean let’s let’s go over the 19 murders and this lie or this scam and you know and they They didn’t have anything like that, really, to use against Savino. You know what I mean? I think he came across as a guy. I mean, he looks terrible on the feed, right? He’s very sick. And I guess the jury wouldn’t have known it, but it was fairly clear that he was on his last legs and he wasn’t going to be around much longer. And I think his testimony, even more than the star witnesses.
[26:36]Was really, really bad for the Chin’s defense. Yeah. Yeah, I can imagine. I think you could also testify that he had clear and lucid conversations with the Gen Gigante. He wasn’t really crazy. It was all. It’s really an excellent point. Yes. He was a guy who was face to face discussing mob business on multiple occasions with the head of the Genovese crime family. And there’s not a lot of guys around. Yeah. Who would be able to tell that, you know what I mean? He had he had the sit down firsthand. You know, he was right there. there yeah yeah it made him to your point i think a much more devastating witness as a part of you know the end of gigante and making him forcing him to admit that yeah this was all an act which you would finally do in the end i understand uh they yeah that was uh that was a big uh that’s a big deal uh i went out there for that hearing and uh his son pleaded with him And it was just so weird, you know, because he had to stand up and he didn’t give any speech or anything, but he had to stand up and basically acknowledge, you know, that he was lucid and that he was pleading guilty of these crimes. And.
[27:52]
Gigante’s Admission
[27:52]Yeah, it was quite a thing, I mean, quite an end to a really incredible story. Yeah, there’s another story that I can’t remember where I saw this or who’s reported this, that he was at a meeting with John Gotti and John Gotti was bragging about how he inducted his son into the Gambino family. Because I got a story about that, that, you know, Sammy the Bull actually ran that induction ceremony because Gotti thought it looked bad. It didn’t look good that he was inducting his own son into the family. And his son he was in business with but he did not really want his kids to continue on as the mafia or members of the mafia and so he said you know I’m sorry for you or sorry you did that he said I’m sorry to hear that.
[28:46]Uh, which, uh, but again, in the end, he, he finally, you know, when he’s behind bars and he’s, his options are limited, he finally does get the son involved and the son has to take a plea and do some jail time too. So, you know, even the smartest of them at a certain point have a misstep that, you know, God, he had about 10,000 missteps, which is why he didn’t really last that long. Well it’s amazing he did stick around for seven years right 85 was a hit and he went to jail in 92 which is incredible given the amount of tension that uh tension that was on him and uh yeah you know he he beat three trials before they convicted yeah he was uh he was a survivor that’s for sure, vincent the chin gigante talked to a guy from another city he was a kind of a uh loosely mostly affiliated through some his grandfather and he said oh yeah he said we don’t we we just do this he still didn’t want to say his name he said we just do this like damn this guy hadn’t been in new york since he was a little kid but he still remembered that you know we do this.
[29:59]Yeah it’s uh yeah the ivy league of the mob right interesting interesting long long tradition in the Genovese family. I mean, that’s when I first got into this, when I was like in my early 20s, just reading books about the mafia. And it’s like Vito Genovese was like the mafia in New York. He was the big duck. He had such a reputation. It was just unbelievable. Yeah, different time, you know? Yeah, really.
[30:30]Genovese family was always a force in, even among the other families, yeah.
[30:38]And look at all that happened around him, you know, it was because of Genovese that Joe Veloci came in and was the first guy to really lay all this out.
[30:48]Yeah. Yeah. Well, there’s plenty of them now. They’re all writing books. Writing books, had podcasts. Yes, exactly. You see them on TV. Yeah. Gravano has turned it into a very lucrative business, you know. Yeah, him and Franchise both. I mean, it’s really lucrative for those guys. They got whole big film crews and everything working on their sets and all that. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I’m actually, um, it’s funny you mentioned, I spoke to both of them.
[31:17]
The Last Colombo War
[31:18]Uh, I’m working on a, I just finished a new book that’s coming out next year on the, uh, last war inside the Colombo family, uh, which was, uh, Vic arena against, uh, Carmine Persico. No. Yeah. Yeah. That it’s a very personal war. Those two families were very tight for a long time. And then Persico goes to jail in the commission case. He wants to keep somebody in the family atop the company, even though little Vic had been approved earlier. And it just sets this whole, the last of New York’s mob wars. It sets all the wheels in motion. Wow. All right. I look forward to that. Look forward to interviewing you and talking with you about that when it comes out. So I’ll watch for it, Larry, and get a hold of you. All right, guys. I know how to get you.
[32:08]
Reflecting on Age and Loss
[32:09]I know how to get you. Just don’t die between now and then. We’re getting to a certain age. We’re watching our peers drop off, right?
[32:20]All right, Larry, it’s been great. Once again, I like talking to you and guys, Larry McShane, remind us of the name of your book. I didn’t write that down. Yeah, the Chin book. It’s just called Chin. Chin. And then the other one that we talked about before. The one that’s coming out? No, didn’t you have another book besides the Chin, another mob book? But I did a book on a Philadelphia mob boss, Ralph Natale Natale. Yeah. We need, we need to do a whole show on, on that one too. One of these days. Oh, I got some stories about Ralphie. All right. I’m going to hold you to that Larry. All right.
[33:03]
Farewell and Book Recommendations
[33:03]Thank you. Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you so much, Gary. It was a pleasure. All right. So guys, uh, don’t forget, check out Larry’s books. You just go to Amazon and type the name Larry McShane in, and you’re going to find his books. And you’ll have a link in the show notes down below. So check those out. They’ll be worth a read, really good information. Larry is a guy that was right on the scene at the time when a lot of this happened and in the court systems and out of the court systems and had his own sources on the street being a New York reporter. So you need to get those books if you care about New York mafia at all. Uh don’t forget i like to ride motorcycles if you see a motorcycle out there why give it some room and watch out for them and if you have a problem with ptsd if you’ve been in the service go to the ba website and get that hotline number if you have a problem with uh drugs or alcohol you know our friend former gambino soldier angelo ruggerio is a drug and alcohol counselor and he has a hotline on his YouTube page and on his, uh, his, uh, uh, website. So get ahold of him. If you, if you use him as a drug and alcohol counselor, get ahold of me. That’s a pretty good story in itself. I’ll put you on the podcast.
[34:18]Oh, I know you won’t want to do that. I understand. Uh, so, uh, be sure and like, and subscribe. I can’t even think what else I want to say. I have to edit this Larry. Like and subscribe and come back and see us again. Thanks a lot guys.
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35min
August 05, 2024 Mafia Shootout in Kansas City
Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. The Kansas City Mafia enforces their rules on bar owners like Ferris Anthon even when they have to resort to deadly and drastic measures. In this episode, we recount the harrowing experience of Sheriff Tom Bash, a fearless lawman in Jackson County, Missouri, during the 1930s. Witness the gripping account of Sheriff Tom Bash’s confrontation with the Kansas City Mafia in a deadly ambush, showcasing his valor and dedication to upholding justice. Through a riveting shootout, Sheriff Bash emerges as a local hero, shining a light on the pervasive mob activities and corruption of the era. Despite facing legal challenges and political interference, Sheriff Tom Bash’s legacy of courage and integrity perseveres, symbolizing the unwavering fight against criminal influence and the steadfast commitment to the rule of law.
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Introduction to Kansas City Mob Incident
[0:00]Hey, all you wiretappers out there, and this is going to be a special bonus episode about a Kansas City mob incident that had never happened before, and it’s never happened since. Here’s the situation. An armed police officer is taking his family home after an evening out, and he drives right in the middle of a mob hit. Now, what are you going to do? Oh, my God, I got my family here. This guy he was a sheriff and and i’ll i’ll go back over a lot of this because i did this before i did this story before but i need to do a little opening a new opening because something else would happen anyhow what i want to do is give a shout out to a couple of gangland wire fans i met the other night now steve saint john my friend steve saint john’s been on the show several times you know he’s the guy that that actually my squad worked on him helped put him in the prison forgot God, he was there about 10 years and came back out. He’s gone straight, done pretty well. We’ve become friends. So he asked me to go to the Kansas City Goats game, which is our arena football team. His son, Stephen St. John, is like the top sports radio broadcaster. He has a show, Stephen St. John Show, here in Kansas City.
[1:15]And so we’re watching the game. It’s a lot of fun. And all of a sudden I look over and I see to my right, there’s this beautiful girl or woman coming up. She’s got blonde hair and she gets closer. She’s got these beautiful green eyes and she’s smiling and looking at me and nodding like she knows me. And I’m thinking, I don’t know this. Who is this? And so she gets right to me. She stops and sticks out her hands and introduced herself as Connie said. She was a longtime podcast listener. She grew up in Kansas City. She grew up over what we call the Northeast. Her family knew some of these different mob associated people. And so I’m trying to keep my composure. And man, beautiful girl. She thinks I’m cool because I have this podcast. But it’d be that I’m not. I’m not. Steve’s sitting over here. He’s cracking up because he knew this was coming. He had run into her. He knew her from somewhere else. And he ran into her at the concession stand. She’s working at the concession stand as a fundraiser for St. Pius, which is the big premier Catholic high school. And so lots of times they’ll take over a concession stand and run that stand and they get to keep all the profit out of it.
[2:27]So we talked quite a while she tells me a couple stories about you know growing up over in northeast and then she has to get back up the concession stand and i had to go up i went up the concession stand later on and she’s oh come here you know you can’t buy anything i said well you know i don’t mind no no come here i said what do you want so she gave she gave me a big one those great big salty pretzels which is what i want and a coke and she kissed me on the cheek too then later on i’m I’m sitting, I’m going back, I’m going back down to my seat. And a guy appears, his name’s Luke, and he was talking with her. And he said, oh yeah, he said, I listened to that podcast too. So he came down and we chatted for a while. So big shout out to Connie and Luke, a couple of Kansas City podcast fans and St. Pius Catholic High School supporters. And thanks to Steve St. John and his dad, Stephen St. John, for the tickets. And I had a great time, brought my old partner, Bobby Arnold, me and Steve St. John and my old partner from Intelligence Unit, Bobby Arnold, another retired copper, Frank Armillio, whose son is actually the works at St. Pius and play golf with him all the time. So we all went to the arena sports football game, the Goats. And don’t forget to check out Stephen St. John’s radio sports talk show in Kansas City.
[3:53]
Story of Sheriff Tom Bash Begins
[3:53]That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it, guys. This is going to be a story about Sheriff Tom Bash. He was the sheriff of Jackson County, Missouri, in 1933, during the Depression, right after the Prohibition, when the Tom Pendergast political organization and the Kansas City Mafia joined together and basically ran the whole city and the whole county. Now, Bash, it was not totally sold out, as you’ll see from this story. It was a different time, folks. It was a totally different time. Just because you were connected to the political organization did not mean that you were totally owned by the mafia in Kansas City. But yet, you might do some things for the mafia in Kansas City.
[4:36]It’s never as black and white as what many times the popular media may depict in real life, these connections. I was recently asked some questions about the Kansas City police in the 50s and 60s. And I knew some of these guys they were talking about and some of the reports about them. And, you know, as I explained to this guy that’s writing a book about the, he’s calling it the, I think the mob and the Kansas City police or something like that. I said, you know, it’s not exactly black and white like we like to think. It’s a lot of gray areas in there. A lot of people may do some things, but wouldn’t go. But so far doing other things, I would never cover up a murder, for example, but they certainly may turn turned a blind eye to an ongoing regular gambling game because, you know, they may have relatives that like to go to that gambling game. So anyhow, this is going to be the story of Sheriff Tom Bashand a particular incident in his life that shows you that he personally did not walk away from everything that was mob connected. He was from a farm town just outside of Kansas City, kind of a well-to-do farm family. He was a good shot. He’d been a hunter all of his life. He was of course approved by the Tom Pendergast Organization.
[5:51]He was kind of a man about town, shall we say. He could hang with the swells, as they used to say back in those days. August 11, 1933, he and his wife, Jenny, had gone to an ice cream social, a lawn party and an ice cream social at a kind of higher-end residence in Kansas City. It was a fundraiser for the ladies’ auxiliary of what was known as the Cooperative Club. I don’t know what that was. that didn’t last in the present time. But it was a fundraiser for residents of the girls’ home in Jackson County for wayward girls and girls that had been abandoned. And they had a guest, a teenage girl named Melva Taylor, who was going to go home with them and stay overnight at their house. I’m not sure what their connection was. I think she was a daughter of a friend or something. And I think maybe they didn’t have any children, he and his wife. So about midnight, after attending this ice cream social and lawn party.
[6:52]Tom Bash agreed that they would escort the money to some safe place. They’d been raising money all night, probably like a golf tournament. A lot of you guys have probably played in golf tournaments where there’s constant selling of this and selling of that. And it’s always cash, so I’m sure that’s what was going on back then. They didn’t even take credit cards, of course, back then. So they would have raised a lot of cash. And Tom Bass said, I’ll escort the money and whoever had the money to wherever they were going to get it safe. And then he turned and headed south toward his house from where they were. He lived in what was known as the Troost Avenue, which was kind of a big time street back then. Now, it eventually became the dividing line between black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods for a long time. Now those lines are starting to blur again. in. But 3400 Block of Troost is about where he was, Armor and Troost, which is the same as 35th Street. And following him, he had an old Dodge. And following him were a deputy, Lawrence Hodges.
[7:56]And then they had Jenny Bash and Melva Taylor in the car. And he had guns aboard the car. I think he was a typical lawman of any time. Well, most of the time I was on the police department. If I I was out moving around the city. I had some kind of a gun around me. They happened to see a car. They first drove around the block looking for any kind of surveillance or anything, which is kind of interesting that there’s no explanation in the accounts of that, why they were so safety, security conscious that they would maybe look for a tail and see if anybody was sitting out front of the sheriff’s house. Went on, came back around, and as they came back around, all of a sudden they heard gunshots ring out. And then they heard a woman scream, and then there was more shots.
[8:42]Bash pulled over the car. He had a deputy with him. They jumped out and said, you know, hey, man, we’re running into something. We better be ready. This was about Forest, which is one block east of Troost. It was a bar right there. This was kind of an entertainment district, if we will, around 35th and 34th and Armor Boulevard and Troost. There was also a lot of these big apartment buildings that people lived in. They were almost like hotel apartments, more like a big city back then where you had doorman down in front. And they had apartments all about five or six, maybe eight, ten floors of apartments.
[9:25]
Gunfire Erupts on the Streets
[9:21]They would have daily trash pickup at each apartment building. They had these half-louvered doors that you could open your door and open your window, window but still be secure to have a wooden louvered door that would let air go through your apartment they were kind of interesting old apartments still a lot of them down there and a lot of people live in them there they went way down now they’re they’re on their way back of course it’s becoming a hip place to live so they jump out tom bash has a shotgun a right what we call a riot gun and the deputy had his 38 caliber revolver they started toward the noise his wife Jenny Bash and Melva Taylor were told to get down on the floor. So Ms. Bash threw her arms over the child and told her just to be quiet and lay quietly on the floor. You can imagine their hearts were just beating like hell when a crazy ass husband and his deputy jump out with guns to go into some kind of a possible gunfight. As they’re walking toward armor and truce, they’re about, oh, I’d say 50 yards away as they get up to this area where there was a joint right there and a, oh, there was like a athletic club right there. It had a swimming pool in it. They used to give scuba diving lessons back in the late 60s and early 70s. And then they went to have this one joint called the merry-go-round. I remember going there, say 1963, 64. A Buick all of a sudden.
[10:47]Pulled out, headed north on Forrest toward Armour and was going straight into the Bush Auto. And one of the passengers reached outside the Buick with his gun and started firing it at Bice’s Dodge.
[11:01]Bash was out on the street by this point in time. Here this guy is shooting at the car with his wife and that little girl in. He pulls up his shotgun and starts blasting away at the car. And he hit the driver right away was a guy, as it turned out later, named Sammy Scola, Sammy the Hog, who was a driver for the top mob guys in Kansas City at the time, and he blew off the driver’s head. That guy was done. He never even moved after that, is my understanding.
[11:28]Cranked another shell in the chamber and started firing again, hit the windshield, hit a passenger. The gunman’s car, the Buick crashed off into the sidewalk and into a light post right there, and almost on top of the sheriff’s car with Ms. Bash and Melba Taylor in it. It had to be crazy. A third gunman came out of nowhere, started running at Bice, firing a revolver at him, but missed with every shot. Bice leveled his shotgun at him, and all of a sudden, the gunman dropped his weapon and started pleading with Bass. Sheriff Bass says, oh, don’t shoot me. Don’t shoot me. My God, man, don’t shoot me. The sheriff was a good guy, apparently. I don’t know. I might have gone ahead and had that hammer dropping down by this point in time. But he lets him give up, puts him under arrest, grabs the pistol laying on the ground. And the fourth, there’s a fourth man out running across armor on foot, firing at the deputy, a man named Hodges, who engaged in a gunfight with him and and chased him between a couple of houses. He drops his pistol along the way, and he ends up disappearing. They don’t find him.
[12:37]Hodges finally quit chasing him and went back to the sheriff to make sure he was okay. He found the rot revolver that had been dropped, handcuffed the gunman already, or I think the sheriff already had him handcuffed by then, went back and checked on his wife and the little girl, and they were okay. And, of course, by then, people had poured out of all those apartments. The whole traffic clogged Armor Boulevard, they said, and all the people coming out of the apartment to see what was going on. And, of course, they called the Kansas City Police and I’m sure other deputies down there and have a crime scene and a car and a dead body. And what they would find out as they get into it, they find that they had stumbled into a classic mob hit. Now, this was the heyday of machine corruption and mob corruption.
[13:22]And it’ll be years before there’s any real ability to bring any of the perpetrators to justice. Now, remember, there’s one under arrest. As it turned out, there was a minor gangster named Ferris Anthon who had ended up getting on the wrong side of a mob faction that was challenging the authority of who was the guy that was the mob boss at the time, Johnny Lazia. And Johnny Lazia was so powerful politically and with the mob that he would be the one that gave the okay for the Union Station massacre to go down. They went to John Lazia, this Vern Miller went to John Lazia and said, you know, we need to break our friend Frank Jelly Nash out because they’re taking him back up to Leavenworth to the penitentiary. And they’re coming through Union Station here in Kansas City. And he gave his okay and helped him get away. Johnny Lazia also had a office in police headquarters right down the hall from the what they called the director of police at the time. and he really had say-so over who was hired and who was fired and what the Kansas City Police Department did.
[14:28]Anton had been a bootlegger and an arsonist during the prohibition and kind of got his feet on the ground and got a name during that. He was a known arsonist. He had a nickname because he was from Kansas City, Kansas, called Tony Kansas. He did a lot of his operating over there, but he had interest in taverns and restaurants all over the city. He owned a thing called the Arena Buffet at 15th and Truce and the El Travatore Cafe close to Armour and Troost, which was probably where he was coming from, where they jumped him up. He was involved in a mob faction headed by a guy named Joe Lesko, and their political connection was a guy named Casimir Welsh, who was a Pendergast kind of rival, but not rival. They had their own little Eastside group, and Lazi’s group was what we call Northsiders. They had been challenging Lazi’s dominance in bootlegging and other racketeering activities.
[15:26]Lazio Group had decided at this point in time that they needed to make an example out of somebody, and Ferris Anthon’s number, his number came up. He was put on the spot, as they called it back in the day. Figured once they killed Ferris Anthon, then the rest of this Lusco crew and Casimir Welch would get the idea and fall in line with Lazio. Anthon was heading home. He was along with his wife and his mother, Ella Betts, and his seven-year-old little brother, Elvin. They’d been at the wrestling matches downtown, stopped off at the buffet. Mainly, they sold alcohol at this buffet. This is just like the last year of Prohibition, I believe. I think it ends in 1934, and this is 1933.
[16:12]They’d kind of driven around Kansas City. His wife would tell the police later, said he was in high spirits and didn’t seem to have any worry about anything. thing. They live in, like they explained about these apartments down here, cavalier apartments where a lot of people would, you know, they’d have like five and six bedroom apartments and doorman and trace pickup and kind of a higher
[16:33]
Ferris Anthon’s Murder
[16:32]end buildings at that point in time. He had parked next to a nightclub. Apparently they were waiting on him as he, his passengers, his wife and kids got out, whoever else that was with him, his mother got out and they started walking into to their apartments as he locked his car, a Buick approached, somebody jumped out, walked toward him and started shooting at him with a .45 caliber pistol, fired at him five times and he dropped dead on the ground. Wife and mother and little kid ran off and ran inside the Steuben Club, which is still open.
[17:08]Now, the two men, there were two other men in this Buick, and they sped off, leaving a couple of guys, as it turned out, on the street. They were maybe panicked by seeing all the residents come out and see what was going on. But that’s where they flipped around, went around the corner and ran right dead into Sheriff Bash and got in a gun battle. Now, Bash killed two people in the car. That was Sam Skola. I mentioned him. The other one I forgot to mention before is Gus Fassoni, who was a nightclub operator and kind of a passenger in the car. Now, the two men who were out in the street that actually did the hit, that they got in a gun battle with, they were the important ones. They were the heavies in Kansas City Mob at the time, Charlie Gargotta, who will end up being killed in a mob hit in 1951, I believe, in the murder of the two Charlies. He was like kind of the underboss, if you will, and a close associate to the mob boss, John Lazzia. He operated the Chesterfield Club downtown where supposedly the waitresses wore only clear plastic aprons and shoes. First totally nude bar in Kansas City, maybe. I don’t know. And the other guy who ran off, the deputy chased and got away, I have a connection with. His name was Gatano Lococo or Tano Lococo, who was another, you know, what we call the Five Iron Men during the Prohibition time, or the Sugar Shack gang, or the Sugar House gang, rather. They were the main bootleggers of that point in time and ran the mob in Kansas City.
[18:37]Now, when they start questioning Gargotta, he’ll claim that he’d just been visiting a woman at Cavalier Apartments thereby and was on his way out when he ran into this shooting, and he pulled his gun to protect himself. And it’s reported that as he was being driven into the police station, one of his guards.
[18:56]Struck something in his coat pocket. Apparently they had not even shook him down or had not even frisked him at all. And they found a 45 caliber pistol fully loaded, which had not been drawn. Now he’d had another gun that already ran out of bullets. And he just threw that down at the scene when the sheriff took him into custody. During this time, the authorities, as they searched the crime scene, they found five other 45 caliber automatic pistols. And these were the Colt 911s that the U.S. Army used. Later it’ll be learned that these weapons all been stolen from a National Guard armory over in Kansas City, Kansas about a year before.
[19:30]Ballistics tests showed that several of them had been used to shoot at Anton. I guess they shot at Anton and then threw those guns down but then had other guns as they ran off, which kind of makes sense. Typical mob guy, when he used a gun in a hit, he wants to get separated from that gun as quick as he can. And back then they didn’t have the forensics to do all the DNA and even fingerprinting. They could do fingerprints, but they weren’t very good at it. And it’d be unlikely that you would get any prints off of it. Plus, they would have owned the Kansas City Police fingerprint guy. Anyhow, Sheriff Bish, of course, the newspapers report this and he’s like a local hero. And he’s just proven to everybody that regardless of his ties to the machine, the political machine, he will enforce the law. Harry Truman, who was a Penn and Tom Pendergast favorite, was the Jackson County chief executive. He made a public statement, says, the county court is proud of you.
[20:29]Mrs. Bash will give a statement to the press, a simple, short statement. She said, in my husband’s business, there are things that cause a wife to think. I can imagine. I don’t know. My wife would be, oh my God, back in the day. I don’t know. Well, one of the wives, anyhow, Yeah, they might not have stuck by me. Of course, they didn’t anyhow, but I didn’t stick by them. I don’t know which one we’re talking about. Ms. Bash also will report that Melba Taylor, the teenage girl, the young girl, I think she was like 14, said she kept her courage up. She did not cry once and was stoic about the whole thing.
[21:04]
Aftermath and Recognition
[21:05]Later on, Ms. Bash will tell people that she got a telegram from the ladies’ cooperative that sponsored the garden party and said, Congratulations on your brave act. We’ll have another garden party sometime soon.
[21:17]
Legal Proceedings and Corruption Exposed
[21:18]Now, the after effects of this murder are what’s interesting. Now, you would think the sheriff stumbles into it. They got the guns. They got at least one shooter. They will determine that that was Tano Lococo that they chased off. They will not charge him, but they definitely have one of the shooters because the guy gave up and he had a gun in his hand when he gave up. They get ready. They try to go to court in 1934.
[21:46]Jury will listen to testimony from a Kansas City police evidence technician named Leonard Claiborne and he will testify that the pistol that had been placed in his evidence had a tag switched on it and they don’t know for sure which pistol is the actual murder gun and he’ll end up getting fined not guilty. Now, over the next couple of three years, feds will get in on this. They’ll prosecute this Charlie Gargotta for possession of stolen government property. And that’s that .45 caliber pistol that was in his pocket that was stolen from the National Guard armory. Even with Claiborne, It was proven later on that he lied about these evidence tags, that they charged him with perjury. And he testified at his trial that he’d been promised by a department higher up that he would be given a promotion by Johnny Lazia if he helped get Gargotta out of this case. Claiborne’s the only one that really did any decent time. He was convicted of perjury and he got four years in the penitentiary. Gargotta was convicted of the possession of the stolen gun.
[22:57]1934, but that verdict was overturned on appeal. He was charged with assault on Sheriff Bash, but that trial was delayed and delayed and delayed. And the prosecutor, a man named W.W. Graves, who was a Pendergast machine prosecutor, kept asking for continuances. He asked for 27 total continuances. And finally, in 1938, four years later, five years later, he just asked that all the petitions of court and has all the charges against Gargotta dismissed. State officials launched some kind of investigation in the crime in Kansas City, and they created a grand jury who will indict Gargada and the prosecutor.
[23:39]But six years after Anton murders in 1939 and Tom Pendergast goes to the penitentiary, Gargotta will just go ahead and plead guilty just as his trial begins for the second trial on the assault on Sheriff Bash. He gets three years in the penitentiary. He serves seven months and is released from the penitentiary after his sentence is commuted by the new governor, Forrest O’Donnell, which, like I said before, Gargotta and the boss of 1950, Charlie Bonagio will be murdered in a famous murder called the murder of the two Charlies. It’s never been solved.
[24:15]
Sheriff Bash’s Legacy and End
[24:15]Tom Bash will live to 1952, go back to farming in rural Missouri.
[24:22]He had a heart attack in 1952, and that was the end of the murder of Ferris Anthon and justice for the mob under Tom Pendergast. Thanks, folks, for listening. Don’t forget to hit me up and Venmo, buy me a shot and a beer, or you can go onto my website and PayPal and make a little donation there. You know, I’ll have my little final thing here where I talk about different things. But if you have any problems with PTSD and you know, and you’re a veteran, then you know, go to the VA. If not, go to the VA website or just Google VA hospital PTSD, and they’ve got a hotline and they’ve got a lot of resources. And even if you’re not a veteran or if you just know a veteran, you can go there and find the resources. You’re not a veteran, you can go there and find resources. Music provided by our good friend and super fan from Portland, Oregon, Casey McBride. Thanks, Casey.
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28min
July 31, 2024 Nick Annunziata – The Man Who Played Johnny Roselli
Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. In this episode of Gangland Wire, I speak with Nick Annunziata, known for his role as Chicago Outfit member Johnny Roselli in Mafia Spies. We discussed his experience portraying Roselli. Nick relates that part of his preparation was to contact Albert Anastasia’s son, who knew Johnny Roselli. We discuss some JFK assassination theories involving Roselli. Nick shares insights on working on several Sopranos Episodes. He played Eddie Pietro, underboss for Rusty Millio, played by the well-known singer Frankie Valli. In season six, titled Luxury Longue, Nick describes the scene in which Sicilian gunmen murder Rusty Millio and Eddie Pietro, as well as other memorable Soprano events. Nick emphasizes the value of authenticity, camaraderie among cast members, and staying true to his principles in the entertainment industry.
Among other things, Nick Annunziata is a world-class poker player, a certified weapons instructor, a musician, and a screenwriter.
Check out Nick’s music – AnnunziatA- “Los Angeles” on ITunes, Spotify or Amazon
#mafiaspies #mafiahistory #organizedcrime #chicagooutfit #johnnyroselli
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Transcript
[0:00]Hey, welcome all you wiretappers out there back here in the studio of Gangland Wire and I have a really unusual different show for you and I know you’re going to like it. If you watch Mafia Spies that Thomas Meyer I interviewed a couple of weeks ago wrote that book and they created this docuseries about Johnny Roselli being involved with the CIA and trying to kill Castro and it’s a great docu-series. I just finished it myself, I think, this last weekend. Well, you got to watch it. Now, I have the actor, Nick Annuzziata, who played Johnny Roselli. Welcome, Nick. Nice to be here, Gary. Thanks for having me. So, Nick, you know, let’s talk about you playing Johnny Roselli. I just want to compliment you, first of all, and I don’t usually do this, as these guys know.
[0:51]Thank you. I’m like Italian parents, you know, you got to do a lot to impress me. I mean, that’s the truth. You really captured without having, you had no lines and you have really captured the, dangerousness and the coolness and the kind of, you know, suave and deboner, as we say out in the country of Johnny Roselli. You really captured that and got it across the audiences. There’s no doubt about it. So tell us about playing Johnny Roselli. Oh, Johnny Roselli. I’ve heard his name throughout my life in stories. His affiliation as far as the JFK assassination, you hear these things.
[1:37]Albert Anastasia. Everybody has heard of him, obviously, the Listen to You show. Okay. A friend of mine is friends with his son, and he’s still alive. He’s in his 80s. I’m not going to mention names. But I told him I was playing Johnny Roselli in the Mafia Spice series. So he connected me with this individual. So I get on the phone. He goes, hey, I hear you’re playing Johnny Roselli in the show. I said, yeah, it’s wonderful. Tomorrow I’m actually doing the scene where I get the call that JFK was assassinated. He laughed. I go, what’s so funny? He goes, what do you mean get the call? You’re the guy who shot him. I go, what do you mean I shot him? He goes, I was there. He ran right past me. I’m telling you. Johnny Roselli put a bullet in JFK’s head. I was like, oh, my God. I’m hearing it from a guy who said he was actually there. What does he have to gain by lying to me? I’m watching another podcast this week. I run across this guy. Now, this guy has been all throughout the mob folklore, if you will, and conversations because he was part of the Godfather. Gianni Russo. He just did a podcast. I just came across it last week. And he’s saying, JFK, let me tell you right now, it was Johnny Roselli. Johnny Roselli’s the one who put the bullet in JFK’s head. And I’m going, wow, a year apart, these two guys, I don’t know if they even know one another. Do we even know who really did it? There’s, you know, theory.
[2:59]You have all these quote unquote experts. Can we really trust these experts anymore? I mean, look at the climate of the world right now. Everybody’s full of shit. it yeah you know you just basically had to say all right well i personally see two trees there you’re telling me there’s five who do i believe really right so you got to come up with your own assumption i think there is some truth to that my personal opinion only because of someone telling me this that had nothing to gain from it and the same age the age not the same age but the age makes sense yeah um.
[3:39]And it was a little more detail he got into with me. And I was like, wow. So the next day I go on set and I go to the director and tell him, I said, you’re never going to believe who I was talking to yesterday. And they told me Johnny Roselli killed JFK. He was one of the shooters. There was like 13 shooters or something. It was not just one guy. And I’m like, whoa. He’s like, yeah, we found him. I think you said he was about 80 years old. So he would have been about 25 to 30 at the time. So he would have been. And he was there. Yeah. I said this to Tom and Tom’s like, yeah, we kind of heard things like that, too. But we don’t want to get too into the conspiracy aspect of it. I said, well, there’s no actual hard proof who did who did it still. I don’t believe. Right. Yeah. I mean, not there is it. So it’s basically I guess if you get enough people telling the same story, then that becomes the truth. Right.
[4:37]
Portraying Complex Characters
[4:33]Agreed upon set of facts. They could be a lie. But if we all agree on it, that’s history. Right to play this guy who happens to be doing nefarious things to make a living and also be charming at the same time was uh interesting it’s my wife who doesn’t give out compliments we finished watching the show this week and she said to me after the last episode she said you know something you were really likable your character in spite of what he does he’s likable almost it’s the same thing like james gandolfini as tony sopretto in spite of his menacing and violent ways to make a living you like the guy you’re cheering him on because you find that he has a there’s almost like a just quality like he’s doing it for the better good even though he’s a bad guy david chase always reminded people you know with the violence these are not good people.
[5:27]But they’re still likable i mean there’s a lot of actors unfortunately who don’t play these characters well and they play them very two-dimensional and they play like and i think i was lucky because of just who i am gen you know my general makeup i don’t have to play certain elements of myself the physicality takes care of it and there are a lot of people who play into to that a little too much and it looks a little farcical i to me i i think when you’re playing a non-fictional character and you’re playing with that world you it’s it’s not over the top unless it’s supposed to be a comedy or a satire kind of thing i these guys are very subtle they’re family people first and foremost there’s always a motive why they do things it’s not like they’re all.
[6:16]Sociopaths i mean there’s definitely a tinge of that and blended with narcissism of course But… They’re doing it to provide for the family. That’s the old way, right? They would immigrate here. They do what they had to do so they can give their children a better life. And I think those lines at times get a little crossed and people forget that.
[6:39]And I remember being on The Sopranos. People would say, oh, that episode was kind of boring. Why?
[6:45]Well, no one got killed. I’m like, that’s not what these guys do all day long. They don’t just wake up and go, hey, who’s on the hit list today? You know it’s not how it works it’s about providing and making money but i found the most endearing with being on the sopranos was the family aspect the dynamic of the family i found it more endearing because i felt like i was peaking in on sunday dinners at my my nanny and pop-up’s house you know being around my family every every sunday dinner you know two o’clock you know the house it was standing room only in the dining room but i always sat next to my grandpa i’m I’m named after my grandpa. I didn’t even understand that world.
[7:24]And I didn’t even understand I was probably around it most of my life without any knowledge of it. It probably helped you quite a little bit in seeing that people, and we all have this quality, men especially, have this quality of you want to protect your family. You want to protect the people around you. You want to provide for them. And you go out at home and around your friends, your one person. I used to be like this. You go over in the city and you’re another person because you got to earn a living and you got to do what needs to be done. And so you probably internalized a lot of that growing up, which you could then translate that without having to act like a tough guy. You just have it innately in you, I would bet. Yeah, it’s well, I live in Los Angeles now. So growing up on the East Coast and then moving to Los Angeles, there was a big shift. I almost felt like for the first truthfully, for the first 10 years living in California, I felt.
[8:17]Like a fish out of water. I felt like I didn’t have an identity because being in New York, the neighborhood I grew up in, people knew my family. They knew my grandfather. I mean, I made my communion. Actually, my parents got married in the church.
[8:33]My grandparents, that’s their parish. Then I made my communion there. I got to tell you a funny story about my communion. So I was born in Frankfurt, Germany. My dad was drafted and his brother were drafted during vietnam you can’t take both siblings to a war zone so my dad went to germany and my uncle went to be so i’m born in frankfurt come to the states two years later when i was two i come back to the united states my parents get divorced that’s like an infamy that’s not something you do in italian especially in the late 60s 1969 1970 you don’t get divorced that that’s like no no but my mother god bless her soul 100 pounds soaking wet five foot nothing my father 6’2″, 240 pounds, my mother’s the strongest person I think I’ve ever come across in my life. You want to talk about a primal instinct to protect somebody, meaning me. My mother never spoke bad about my father, but yet when I would have visits with my dad, he would throw under the bus all the time. And then my mother said, listen, what happened between me and your dad is between us, he’s your father, respect your father. I never knew anything, never knew how they met. And then I heard stories, I’m like, all I can tell you is this, My mother’s fault was walking my mother down the aisle. I’m getting somewhere with this story. Don’t worry.
[9:48]And whispers in my mother’s ear, you know, you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. All right. So fast forward, seven years old. I make my communion. I am so nervous, Gary, because now I have my stepfather there who I considered my dad, who I can, you know, who he’s the one who just passed away last year. My biological father, that whole family, and then some. Now you’re usually only allowed to have like you know five to ten people from each kid’s family in the church right, This is my grandfather’s parish, mind you. My grandfather’s neighborhood.
[10:20]
Childhood Communion Mishaps
[10:20]Half the freaking church was there for me. I had no idea. I am so nervous because that’s like, oh, my God, I’m put in a situation. I don’t know who to show loyalties to. And this is at seven years old. I didn’t even understand this dynamic. I’m on the altar. Priest is coming to take my catechism book. I fainted on the altar, Gary. Oh, no. Oh, no. The next thing I know, I wake up. I’m outside. Side my dad’s got smelling salts under my my nose and i’m like what the heck happened i hear the story when i fainted my dad my stepdad it hops over the pew now the priest has got the microphone on right he’s he’s down he’s like jesus christ these stiffers are bored the whole church is here.
[11:05]So these are the stories i hear from that but growing up so like you said picking up subtleties around these guys with no neck you know big freaking sausage fingers i grew up around that my whole life i didn’t even understand what these people were to me they were just good people working on the sopranos now yeah you play you played a uh was it the underboss yeah for frankie valley with frankie valley played uh i can’t remember rusty millio rusty millio and and you You were the underboss of Eddie Prieto. And so how did you, I mean, you went to, you have kind of a good story about getting that role. So why don’t you start talking about that? Oh, yeah. So I was in New York recording an album. My hair was so long. It was like Jim Morrison from The Doors in the 60s. And I’m in the recording studio. And my agent calls. I was in New York at the time. And he says, hey, I got an audition for you for The Sopranos. Oh, my God, that’s wonderful. Great. You want to send me the material? Said oh no don’t get too crazy it’s just one line like really one line all right what is it because i thought monks made it they’re talking about grappa right, I’m like, all right, I got it. They go, no, no, no, no, there’s more. I go, what do you mean there’s more? They go, your name’s Eddie Petro. You’re an underboss. I’m like, wait a second. If it’s just one line, why do I have all this backstory already, right? So I’m like, okay. So the next day I go in. I slick my hair back in a ponytail. I’m wearing like a shirt out of Goodfellas.
[12:33]And there’s these Guido kind of guys from like the Jersey Shore show sitting there. Like with the ripped muscles and the T-shirts and all this stuff. So I walk in and they’re like, they thought I was like part of the show already. You know, like, who’s this guy walking in? So this producer comes out and she says, hey, guys, sorry, we were running late. Who’s next? And these tough guys. Well, you go, you know, I said, well, you figure it out. I’ll go because I wanted to get back to the recording studio. And I go in, I go, hey, how you doing? Nick Annunziata, Eddie Pichot. I thought Monk’s made it. What do you want me to act? It’s a fucking throwaway line. And I walked out. I just left.
[13:08]A couple hours later I get a phone call from an agent I go well they want you at Silver Cup tomorrow okay great no no no hold on you got four pages of dialogue now whoa so now they were very close to the vest.
[13:21]That show they didn’t want their storylines out you know people having auditions saying you know hey look i gotta audition for sopranos so i go in i see all these guys that are getting you know for other parts there and i’m like i’ve seen these guys in mob movies like goodfellas and vinnie bella and try to think who else was there that i can i can’t think of yeah vinnie bella was the one that just keeps coming to my head but this woman comes out and she’s talking i hear her talking to one of the guys that was in the room with me the day before and i see her backside on and all i hear is what do you mean you don’t know who frankie valley is what’s the matter with you what kind of an italian are you and i’m going frankie valley what the hell is this having to do with anything yeah i’m really excited yeah so now so she comes finally comes to me and she’s like yeah you’re frankie valley’s on the bus i’m like oh my god i’m like you like i’m a little excited more for frankie valley than the sopranos right so i wind up going in i do my thing frank’s there everybody in the that’s big on the show is in that room i do my audition they’re like hey nick you know so tell us i go yeah call my agent and i walked out i just walked out i’m like i am not gonna blow this i want them wanting more so i just left yeah i go back to the recording studio i get a phone call i see oh agent new york all right tell me something good they go all right you booked it and i was like whoa you know wait i lost there you go yeah i was like whoa frankie Frankie Valli, that had to be a dream come true for you. Oh, my God.
[14:45]It was like checking off two things on my bucket list. Like, I got on the Sopranos, and I’m meeting a legend of music that I grew up listening, because my dad always had Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons on. You know, I love, you know, Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You. Every time I hear that song, I think of a scene from The Deer Hunter. It’s just like, it was like, this is not real life, what’s happening to me. It was so surreal. To this day, I mean, I respect when I meet actors that I really admire their work, I’m not…
[15:15]What they call i’m not a star fucker i’m like i’m like oh like a dumb yeah you know yeah but i’m like you know what i treat them normal hey i really dig your stuff and i think because i have this ease about myself um and i’m not i don’t want anything from you i just want to say hey i acknowledge your your your work and i just want to say thank you you know some of them are very very very uh sincere and grateful i’ve met a couple where i wish i had never met and it’s unfortunate because you’re in a position where you should just be grateful where you are and without people saying they like your work you wouldn’t be there yeah so tell us tell us about that scene where you and Frankie Valli get killed by the Sicilians oh wow they’ve imported in Johnny Sack has got Tony Soprano to import some Sicilians in or zips as they used to call them yeah to kill you guys so yeah that that was pretty dynamic scene now tell us about that how did that go down how do they do that it looked real okay so it’s funny i i’ve been most of the time when i work a lot of directors look that come up to me when i first started hearing this i thought it was a negative thing they would say hey nick you’re a one take kind of guy aren’t you and i thought i took it as a what do you think i don’t have range you know i looked at it and they’re They’re like, you nail it. So we got to the set.
[16:39]We know it’s our last episode. And this is what I mean about how gracious and how wonderful everybody on that show was.
[16:47]A lot of people that weren’t even filming, the late Frank Vincent, Tony Chirico, they came to the set in Brooklyn.
[16:55]
Filming Intense Scenes in One Take
[16:56]To wish us well and thank you for being part of the show i mean how gracious is that to come on their day off to brooklyn on a location to watch us finish our run on the show but the funny thing was we i get there and they have 11 pieces of car glass because they thought they were going to have to do this yeah scene so many times so in my head i’m going man that’s a waste of money, they’re not going to use all that glass.
[17:29]We do it doing the scene boom one shot I’m a firearms instructor for a long time I grew up around weapons my whole life a lot of people anticipate a shot right, a lot of you know I don’t know what your background is I mean were you in law enforcement yeah a cop yeah okay so you know a lot of people anticipate recoil right oh yeah that’s that’s what throws you off at the range as you, jerk a little bit just before it goes so yeah yeah so i don’t anticipate a shot i never anticipate so when you see my reaction when you see the shot it’s it was spot one piece of glass one take gary one take one take wonder i tell you what nothing’s better than one take i know that And Frankie Valli pulled it off too, pretty well. Oh my God. We had such fun. We used to sometimes.
[18:26]Because we both lived in California. We both would fly in for the show because it was filmed on location in the East Coast. But there are times in New York where we’d have an early call and we’d meet for breakfast in the morning in the city at the hotel like where he was staying at. And then we’d get picked up by the crew van to take us on location, which was great. He was so generous. Still to this day, he actually called me like a month ago and said that Nick Vallelonga is rewriting Jersey Boys, the movie. To redo it um he wanted he wanted the original the one that clint eastwood directed he he wasn’t a, huge fan of he wanted it a different way he wanted his story told differently and i guess you know the artist you know subjective it’s everyone everyone has their an idea but it’s his life so i can understand him wanting to do it his way and so they’re rewriting it and he called me says Nick, I’m rewriting it with Nick, who won the Oscar for Green Book, the true story of Tony Vallelonga, who drove Dr.
[19:33]Shirley, the black musician, through the South during the 60s. Great movie. But Tony Lip, Tony Vallelonga, the irony of that, did you see the tie-ins? He was actually on The Sopranos, which was really interesting. But Frankie called me and said he wants me to be part of the show. Yeah. So he’s always thinking of me. He actually got me an audition after they won the Tony for Jersey Boys.
[20:05]I mean, like literally the next day he called me up. I’m like congratulating Texan. I’m like, oh, that’s so awesome. Right. Because he said to me, he goes, you know what, Nick? You’re Tommy DeVito. You are him. And I didn’t know how to take that because I really didn’t know much about these guys other than the music. I didn’t know their personal lives. But I guess Tommy is similar to Johnny Roselli, very, very outspoken guy, fun, charming, but a little dangerous. So I got the audition for that to do it on stage. I was offered the understudy. I turned it down, you know, respectfully. They said, why? I said, listen, you know where I come from? I said, if I tell someone I’m in Jersey Boys on Broadway and the guy who just won the Tony is not sick, I’m never going to get to perform. Yeah. You understand the people I know. This guy is going to fall down the stairs. I’m telling you that kind of element you can’t learn in an acting class. I mean, I just just the subtleties, the funny stuff, I guess, is what makes it. I’m real. That’s it. I just I just I internalize it. I don’t think about method. I went to school. I had wonderful teachers, but a very short time of school. I was already doing stage work. And I said, I need to know what these people are talking about. I feel so out of my element. I wound up going to HB Studios in the village. And I wound up, my teacher I auditioned for was Ann Jackson, Eli Wallach’s wife.
[21:31]Another big Broadway person had no idea who these people were so I didn’t get my own way like oh my god I’m with so-and-so you know that never entered my my system and then I kept on hearing about this woman Uta Hagen I’m like who’s Uta Hagen my fellow student classmates were like you’re in her school stupid I’m like where do I know I’m 25 years old or I have no idea but I was raw Gary I was raw all and i was real as can be so i wasn’t confined to rules and that’s how i am with music too i’m not confined to rules i don’t read music i know how to play it and i know what i want to i hear it in my head and i sound it out and my friend brian who i write music with for the last 20 something years he’s like i never thought of that i said yeah because you guys are schooled i don’t know the rules let’s just play it and see how it sounds it’s either there’s no right or wrong it’s either good or bad i mean that’s that’s how i and that’s how i view acting as well, there’s no right or wrong it’s good and bad when people ask me what’s my method what’s what’s your what’s styled i’m like i don’t even think about that i don’t i show up and my imagination.
[22:47]Is so vivid and i have a lot to pull from because i’ve lived my life i’ve been around some really, character type people in my life you know so I have a lot to pull from and people ask me they go what’s your favorite kind of class I said you know what life I observe people I watch people.
[23:06]You know and that helped me yeah playing johnny roselli now you you really like i said before i think you exuded this charm but yet dangerousness and you said you you know a lot about guns so i thought when johnny roselli handled a gun i thought damn he does that pretty smooth where everybody you know a lot of people you stick a gun in their hand and they you can tell that they’re they get they get tense up just a little bit you’re pretty smooth with that had oh when i when i was when i was at the uh when i was holding the m1s and yeah yeah it’s even when i was on set people they’re like oh my god this because what what do you know this from handling firearms all is an extension of your hand right so if you make it an object it’s going to be an object and it’s going to look awkward but i i understand the functions of it i know what it It does. It’s a tool. I don’t look at it any other way than it’s a tool. It’s funny after Mafia Spies. I just I did two other projects just recently that coming. What is coming out at the end of September? I played a colonel in World War Two. Really? Yeah. So it’s called 24 Hours to D-Day. And I star opposite Eric Roberts. Yeah. Yeah. So I don’t know. You guys probably know who he is, right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
[24:26]Julia brother yeah connection to g again you talk about making those connections you get your connection to julia there there you go but i didn’t bring any of that up he was so fun to work with um i mean the guy’s a legend he’s, Yeah. He’s a lot of stuff. Oh my, more than any other actor, I think. Yeah. Um, but the funny thing on that show, on that movie, I probably would have worked three to five days on that shoot. I had to do everything in one day. We had, we did all his scenes in one day and I’m in every scene with him. That was an experience I never had in my entire career. And I thought that, wow, that was kind of interesting. You know, good thing you’re a one take wonder. Yeah, there you go.
[25:10]They knew they got their money’s worth with me like all right we gotta because i originally went into to audition for another part and then the casting the casting person reached out to me and said listen we want to offer you another role and i said i thought i was being downgraded and i’m like uh okay what is it they go no no you’re gonna be opposite to the movie star and i said well who is it they’ll we can’t tell you i said what do you mean you can’t tell me you’re asking me if i want to do it you’re not going to tell me who it is so they tell me i’m like i’m in sure so but they go here’s the catch you’re doing all your work in one day so that to me at first most people go oh that stinks because they’re looking at the financial aspect of it i looked at it as wow they trust me enough to know that i can actually do that all in one day yeah so that that made me feel good and then i did an action movie right after that in the same week so i went from 1944 to 2024 and I’m going back to gun stuff, you know, but, but Johnny was, I didn’t prepare for that in the, in the, in the traditional sense. I didn’t read the book. I did not want to have a fixed idea of how the author portrayed him in the book. I wanted to take what I had, the knowledge I had from knowing people in that world and.
[26:29]And bring that character to life, but still maintain, you know, his charm, his danger, without being unlikable. And at the end, like I said, my wife never gives a compliment. She says, you pulled it off. You were likable. Yeah, you did. You did. You really did.
[26:47]And also came across, you were patriotic in a way, because that’s what was interesting about that story is how patriotic Johnny Roselli became. Actually, they say that Sam Giancana called him some kind of a name about being patriotic, and you really pulled that off, too. Your friendliness with your CIA handlers and those Cubans. Oh, Bill Harvey. All without saying a word. I mean, you, I tell you, it was a heck of a story.
[27:15]
Silent Performances and Cinematic Appeal
[27:15]Thanks. Yeah, that’s what I tell people. I said, look, this was an exercise for me in a way you don’t even need to have the volume on. You can watch those scenes and you know what’s happening yeah i agree it’s a hearken back to, you know charlie chaplin buster keaton the silent era movies right and it’s very it is shot very cinematic so it’s wonderful you know i had a great pleasure last week we were in new york doing press for it and i got to meet bill boggs you know i grew up as a kid watching him he was all over with the television when uh tom the director said hey we’re gonna go to this restaurant, with me you and bill let’s go i’m like oh my god really he goes and then i hear bill in the background is that johnny roselli tell him he was awesome i was like oh my god that’s so great i’m like yeah he loved your character he’s like that’s so nice to hear that you know and i’m genuinely like a little kid it’s like wow you like me.
[28:16]Because it is It’s so much fun to do it And then to see people’s response to it Is fun And I guess sometimes You never want it to end, what does Picasso say? You know, your job as an artist is to become great and give it away. Yeah. So if I’m fortunate enough to keep working and keep a roof over my head. Yeah. That’s, that’s, that’s, you know, that’s, that’s all I, I want. I’m not a very demanding guy.
[28:47]As you know, that entertainment business is a tough, tough business.
[28:55]
Navigating the Entertainment Industry
[28:51]I’m just in it a small way. And it’s like, man, this is hard. It’s very hard. hard the good thing is all the years that i’ve been in it now i’ve i understand how to navigate it better oh yeah in the beginning you think oh you did the work the phone’s gonna ring off the hook right that’s a bunch of nonsense and i like you can see i’m a straight up guy just tell you how it is i don’t know how to i didn’t i didn’t at the time i didn’t know how to navigate that and still keep my integrity because if i’m out with you and say you’re a producer at time this is when i was in my early 30s and i’m on a show at the time because i did two soaps as well i was on two soaps i was on days of our lives for a combined two years two different characters yeah and then i was on general hospital for two years straight i was on television i’d be out and i’d be on tv at the same time right and people would and i would think that uh some acknowledgement maybe i don’t know like get me more work it did and i didn’t understand you have to invest in yourself you have to promote so this i all those years of doing all this i figured it out that works for me where i don’t feel like i’m compromising my my integrity because i don’t i don’t want to put myself in a situation where i fence offend somebody by me just being myself.
[30:12]But after a while you get over the fact that hey look this is this is something i read recently And it really resonated with me. And it said, stop trying to be liked by everybody. You don’t even like everybody. So, you know, and it really like, man, at my age that I have to learn that lesson. But it really it’s those one liners. It’s those things that the light bulb goes off where you finally get it. You understand it, but it doesn’t internalize until when it’s ready. Yeah. It worked for you to get in that soprano’s role. old it seems to me like yeah you said it’s all right why said it worked for you getting that soprano soprano’s role didn’t it yeah and it wasn’t so that character wasn’t about the dialogue it was about the essence of the sky because i’m in a room of characters who are legendary so i can’t get swallowed up on the screen if i can’t have if i don’t have a presence right yeah so i have to be able to hold my own. I got some wonderful advice from an actor who passed away. His name was Joe Santos. He was a character actor. He’d been in tons of movies and television. I think he was on the Hill Street Blues for a long time. One of those cop shows.
[31:28]Just a wonderful actor. But I, when I knew I was going to work with him, see, that’s what I’m saying. I got so lucky to work with such people that I grew up watching. And I’m like, I’m sitting right next to the guy. And he’s talking to me like a regular guy. Yeah. So it was wonderful. I was very spoiled in that fact. I met a couple of movie stars, I will tell you, that are huge, now huge, that are so full of shit. And so self-serving. Yeah.
[32:00]And envious even though they’re where they’re at are threatened by people because and meanwhile these people have i mean they’re worth over 100 billion dollars and yet you’re still worried that you’re not going to eat really i’m one of these guys guy look if i’m at that level i send the elevator down i’m a big fan of success i love to see people succeed i genuinely am happy when i I see people accomplish something. I’m really clapping for you. I really am. I do not have any jealousy. What I do have is if I see you doing it and I know you and you’re doing well, I’m very happy for you. But it also inspires me because I’m like, if you can do it, I can do it. This is how gracious people are on that show and how wonderful they were. And it was like a family from everybody, from the craft services to James Gandolfini and everybody in the middle. People were very, it was a family. looked out for one another and i remember guys like the late frank vincent tony shiriko these guys came to the set on our last episode wish us well and thank you for being part of the show taking pictures all that nonsense we found out we knew that was going to be our last scene on the show they call it they’re wrapping our characters when we’re done right we shot that in brooklyn and i’ll never forget so we get to the set and they have like 11 pieces of glass for the car window where the bullet goes and hits me first. And I’m thinking to myself, what a waste of money.
[33:27]They’re not going to use all those pieces of glass. We did it in one take, like I said earlier, in regards to, you know, I don’t anticipate the shot. And we got it in one shot. It was wonderful. One shot, yeah. I’ve watched that. I have to think about, like, you didn’t anticipate the shot, but you know, you and Frankie Valli both know then all of a sudden, the shit’s going to hit the fan if you will, the glass is going to be crashing and there’s going to be sounds going off and guns are going to appear which I don’t know, you guys did a heck of a job I can’t even imagine what that would have been like. Yeah, well that glass actually did, I mean there was a charge on it like to pop the glass right?
[34:08]
Handling Firearms on Set
[34:09]So it was behind me so nothing went towards my face Which was great And it’s sugar glass Yeah So it doesn’t cut you But I’m sure I mean if it hits you in the eye It’s not a good feeling But We were able to do it Without any injury One take.
[34:28]You know maybe i should have done it a few times i got some overtime i don’t know really yeah you and frankie you and frankie valley had kind of a bonding experience you used to you talked about seeing him out in las vegas after that and having coffee with him anything you guys are buds now aren’t you yeah we look pretty good for two dead guys right you know.
[34:47]Now i have to say you said you had breakfast with him many times before you went to the set now Now, did you maintain your boss and underboss characters? Did you stay in character off set? You know, actually, we didn’t. We would talk, believe it or not, we would talk music. Yeah. And he would tell me stories. And he would tell me even stories about the four seasons and when they were coming up. I’m not Jewish, but he’s a mensch. You know, he’s a good guy, you know? He’s a real paisan he’s a you know and and he lives he lives literally like 10 minutes from me like we live we live relatively close when i was in new york last week when i was in east hampton doing the the mafia spies press thing uh he was in westbury doing a show it would have been so good to see each other again on the east coast i would have loved that but he’s so generous he’s He’s such a good guy. I love that. I mean, I have a story right now. I’m trying to get finished. We’re doing a pilot, a comedy pilot, a mafia pilot. I said to him, I said, Frank, I want you to play this role.
[35:59]He’s like, I’m in. I’m like, do you want to read it first? He goes, Nick, I’m in. If you’re doing it, I’m in. I’m in. I’m like, how giving is that, right? That’s good, yeah. Right? And the trust knowing that I’m not going to make him look foolish. Yeah. And so I wrote something so spectacular and funny. And I think the audience, hopefully we get to do it and the world gets to see it. And then one day you and I’ll be talking about, hey, remember when I told you that? Yeah, yeah. Well, you get that out and we’ll have to do a show to promote that. And we’ll talk about that. That’s great. Okay, one last story. Yes, sir. What was it like? Everybody will want to know what it’s like to work with James Gandolfini. Is he as good a guy as everybody?
[36:45]
Fond Memories of James Gandolfini
[36:43]You know, he’s got the rest of his soul. He’s dead now. But everything I’ve ever read, he’s just a prince of a fellow to work with. Was it like that? All right. I’ll give you a couple of quick ones. Meeting him on the set, him and David Chase came up to me, like I said, and they introduced themselves after the first table read. Totally made everything feel like an equal playing field. Very gracious. Jimmy said to me, he goes, listen, where do you live? I still live in Los Angeles. He goes, well, when I’m out there doing movies, you should come to the set. Just ask for me. I never took him up on that. I’m not one of those guys. You know, I don’t bug people. I just, you know, you’re there to do a job. I appreciate you inviting me into that. And maybe I should have taken him up on that.
[37:25]So we didn’t talk for a while.
[37:29]Episode one of season six, the last season of the show. I’m in that first episode. Me, Frankie, we go to a funeral and we talk to James about the guy that’s in the coffin. Right. And we’re talking about how everybody’s a rat. And I say to Jimmy, yeah, W.R.A.T. Like they’re all got a radio show. so that day so that that season was only negotiated for like i think 10 episodes that’s it right.
[38:00]Now we’re shooting in belleville new jersey the streets are blocked off there’s people i mean this was like you’re like you’re at the super bowl i mean that’s how many people are like watching see they can see somebody and we’re wondering why is this day taking so long what’s going on what’s going on the first day on the set hbo decided that they wanted more episodes than 10 and james said listen i negotiated 10 episodes that’s it that’s all i’m doing i made more money that one day of work than i did in all the episodes together pretty much i mean i got to check that day i was like i was afraid to catch it i was like uh did they make a mistake here they could ask for in his back because jane why they were negotiating this is the kind of guy jimmy was he was a fair guy he he and i relate to that i he’s an underdog kind of guy it’s like listen he paid for people when he were out of work he gave them salaries he gave them money out of his own pocket he that day because of him negotiating and not we turned into overtime double golden time triple golden time Penalty, penalty, penalty. So I literally, I made five figures that day on that one day on that episode. It was crazy.
[39:18]So now I’m in L.A. He’s living in New York. And we’re talking about things. And he’s like, you know, what are you doing out here? I said, listen, I got to make a living. So he started talking to me. He was putting together a television show about police officers and first responders. And he wanted me to be part of it. And I was very grateful for that because he was very into veterans, police, firemen. He was very giving in that world. He was a good guy. So five days before he passed away was the last communication he and I had because I had picked something up for him. And he said, yeah, I’m going to Italy with my son. I’ll be back. And then, yeah, I’ll see you there. I’m like, great. And then all of a sudden, like two days later, I knew exactly where I was. I was in a store and a friend goes nick come here i was like oh my god are you kidding me that’s the way it’s like wow what a loss good guy just a good guy, if he liked you he liked you he’s one of those guys nick annunziata it was so generous of you to come on my show here i really enjoyed talking to you thanks yeah i felt you know i felt like we We were just, the only thing missing was a couple of sandwiches, you know, having lunch. Really?
[40:40]All right, guys, don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. So watch out for motorcycles when you’re on the streets out there. And if you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, go to the VA website and get that hotline number. If you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, which goes along with PTSD many times, go see Anthony Ruggiano, you know, former Gambino guy. He’s a drug and alcohol counselor down in Florida and he has a hotline on his website and on his YouTube channel so don’t forget like and subscribe watch Mafia Spies with Nick Nuziati plays Johnny Rosselli and just an excellent excellent docu-series so thanks a lot guys and thank you Nick all right Gary thank you so much.
...more
47min

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