Gangland Wire

In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins pulls back the curtain on one of the FBI’s most troubling scandals—the case of Joe Stabile, a corrupt FBI agent whose fall from grace revealed just how deep organized crime’s influence could run.

The story begins in November 1978, when Stabile pled guilty to corruption charges. But as Gary explains, that plea was only the tip of the iceberg. Behind it lay years of whispered rumors, shady deals, and quiet payoffs—stories that painted Stabile not as a straight-arrow G-man, but as a hustler working both sides of the law.

Drawing on conversations with retired FBI agents who once worked alongside Stabile, Gary explores the tangled web of mob connections and compromised investigations. Listeners will hear how mobsters slipped him bribes to make gambling cases disappear, and how his background as a New York City cop may have set the stage for the choices that pulled him deeper into the mob’s orbit.

The episode also highlights the work of honest agents, such as Tony Villano, who began piecing together the truth about Stabile’s corruption. Through case files, informant accounts, and law enforcement interviews, Gary demonstrates how the FBI struggled with a culture of silence that often protected its own—even when integrity was at stake.

As the story unfolds, the lines between right and wrong blur, exposing systemic cracks inside federal law enforcement during a time when the Bureau was shifting its focus and fighting for credibility.

Gary closes with reflections on the lasting impact of the Stabile case: what it meant for the FBI’s war on organized crime, and how Stabile himself may have continued to live in the shadows after his conviction—a man caught between two worlds, crime and law enforcement, never fully belonging to either.

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0:06 Introduction to Joe Stabile

[0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers, Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence

[0:04] Unit detective back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. I welcome each and every one of you. I’ve got a story that it’s really interesting how I found out about this. That’s part of the story. Let’s go back. Here’s what I’m talking about. A corrupt FBI agent named Joe Stabile. That’s S-T-A-B-I-L-E. November 1978.

[0:26] It was a Monday and FBI agent Joe Stabile was pleading guilty in federal court to corruption charges. Now, you don’t hear about this very much. I know a couple of three here in Kansas City over the years that got popped for doing something. A couple of them were involved in a stolen party or a stolen property ring. A couple of others were one of them was just running his mouth too much and he was drinking too much. I don’t think they actually end up charging him anything, but he did run his run his mouth way too much. Joseph Beal only admitted in this guilty plea that he lied about some money transactions, but that’s just a tip of the iceberg in this, folks.

[1:03] The U.S. attorney for the Eastern District was sitting in the spectators that day, and afterwards he would say, you know, this just shows the determination of the Department of Justice to root out misconduct wherever it may be found in federal law enforcement.

[1:16] Well, you know, that’s a pretty strong statement after. So you’ll find that they kicked this under the rug as long as they could. Absolutely as long as they could. The head of the organized crime task force there at the time said that there was a bunch of money that Stabile could not account for. He was writing some checks. He was taking some money in and then paying some money back out in a deal. And it was dirty and they had him, but they didn’t have him that good. So they dismissed some other charges and charged him with perjury, and he denied receiving any illegal money. He had actually been involved with a New York City policeman and got a $15,000 payment for dismissing getting a case handled for the Clumbo family. But it really, in the end, he wasn’t really convicted for that. It was a gambling deal involved. He was involved with New York City policemen.

[2:06] Now, during that time, there was another New York agent named Anthony Avilano, who had made several allegations of wrongdoing against Joe Stabile. They both worked in the Colombo squad early on when they first met. And really, this became, there was a lot of agents sticking up for Stabile, just like I found that with that H. Paul Rico. There were agents, and they never really found any agents. There were policemen who made a case on him for being involved in a murder, a contract killing. He was a Boston agent. But there was a couple of agents that I interviewed and wrote a book several years ago, and they swear that he didn’t have anything to do with that. So that was part of that whole filthy Boston office where John Conley ended up getting popped out of. And anyhow, they tried to say this was a Sicilian feud between several agents that were of Italian-American extraction. Well, that’s a good way to pass this off and denigrate people. But it really wasn’t that. This guy, this guy was dirty.

[3:10] He ended up, he got about five years in the penitentiary and a fine. But let’s go back and take a deeper look at this case. And here’s how I got into it. I was having breakfast with a couple of local retired FBI agents. I mentioned this book, Brick Agent, and asked if they had ever read it or heard about it. And it’s written by a former agent who was assigned to the OC squad in New York City in the 60s and 70s. His name was Tony Villano, and it’s a pretty good book.

[3:39] It’s hard to find. It’s really hard to find, folks. So good luck if you go out and try to buy it. I’ll put a link to, I think there’s one that’s like $35 or $36, maybe $40. I can’t remember. I was able to find it online. If you work real hard, you can find it in the Internet Archive online and get a look at it. But it’s hard to do. Now, Volano, I started looking at Volano partly in this book and got interested in him because he was actually the first agent to develop Greg Scarpa. And he worked with Scarpa for quite a while. And when Villano retired and really with no, you know, no smell of any kind of hinky panky going on, like what later happened with Scarpa. Uh, but when he retired, Scarpa refused to be introduced to another agent, carry on any kind of relationship with the FBI. Uh, several years later, this Linda Vecchio made a run on Scarpa and brought him back in as a top echelon informant. And then they did a lot of stuff with him. Now, now, uh.

[4:41] Villano is the guy that sent Scarpa down into Mississippi, and in his book, Brick Agent, he tells that story a couple of different ways with some slightly different twists on some of the things that have come out since. And he also names two different people as the informants that they sent down to the south to do these different undercover things on the Ku Klux Klan and try to find those bodies down there and the three civil rights workers down in Philadelphia and solve the murder of Medgar Evers. And there was another one, too. And he names, Villano names two different people trying to cover for Scarpa to make sure nobody can trace this back down to this one guy and it was Scarpa. So anyhow, that morning we were talking about Brick Agent Book and the name Joe Stabile came up because Bill Owsley has read the book. And he said that he worked with Joe Stabile when he was a pretty new agent here in Kansas City who was assigned to the OC squad in Kansas City. Now, Bill has two books on the Kansas City crime family, really great books. You want the whole overall picture of organized crime in Kansas City, his book Open City.

[5:53] And then concerning his career, the second book is Mobsters in Our Myths. And that really starts about the time he got here in the 60s. And he was a case agent on the straw man case or the guy that really started the whole thing that brought down the Midwest crime families from skimming from Las Vegas casinos. Bill Owsley was the original case agent on that. You know, it’s funny, by the time they actually had their trials, he was retired. And an even funnier story, ironic maybe you might call this, he was retired and he was doing different jobs in retirement. He worked for the NFL, I think, and maybe the NFL.

[6:32] Major league baseball but he did some of those kinds of things and and alan glick came to town to testify now alan glick was a guy that got the 62 million dollar loan thanks to the bob and was kicking back through lefty rosenthal to put him in the context and and bill owsley he needed a bodyguard and a chauffeur so bill owsley took the job of bodyguarding and chauffeuring uh alan glick back and forth to the court when he came in to testify and you know uh you know so much for the mob’s going to go out and kill you if you testify against them because they never did anything to this guy. And he did hire some off-duty policemen out in San Francisco and he hired Bill at the time to do the bodyguard. But he didn’t take great pains to get protection. But I digress. Let’s go back to Joe Stabile. And he remembered this Joe Stabile, a new agent with him in the 60s. And he had been assigned in Portland. And he said they both related really well. They’re both from New York City, grew up in New York City.

[7:29] Stabile was not really ever happy here. And he always worked every angle he could to get back to New York. He had a lot of family and friends. He said he was from a cop family. He used to be a cop, I believe, in New York. And he had a lot of friends in law enforcement there. And eventually he remembered that Stabile did get transferred back. And he said, you know, he said he and Stabile and his wife and he and Bill’s wife, they socialized together. And he was a great storyteller and, you know, just all around good guy to work with. And he lost track of him until he read about him in this brick agent book by Tony Villano. Tony Villano was the kind of guy like Lindy Vecchio. He developed Greg Garpa first, of course, and he was the kind of agent in these offices. Some agents are really good with informants.

[8:11] And he’s a guy that was good with informants, could relate to people and get them to trust him and give him information. And that was one of his strong suits. And he, like I said, He said he developed Greg Scarpa early on, early, early in Scarpa’s career. Now, the other agent I was with, this is kind of interesting, Doug Fensel, ended up in Kansas City after spending many years in New York City in the organized crime squad. He came long after it, long after Owsley retired. I remember Doug as my last go-around in the intelligence unit when I came back as a sergeant.

[8:44] And Doug worked with us quite a little bit, mainly we were working drug cases by then. And he remembered working with DeVecchio. He said he was a really good guy. He was a great agent. He did remember that his demeanor when he was on the phone talking to informants, he said it was more like one mob guy talking to the other. But, you know, he never really suspected.

[9:02] And I don’t know if DeBecchio was really, you know, what they claimed he was. I don’t know how corrupt. I don’t think he was that corrupt. I think maybe he might have talked out of school a little bit and, you know, trying to talk like another mob guy. I understand that. You try to go to their level, but don’t get sucked into it. And he actually, DeBecchio, was tried and found out guilty in a corruption case involving Scarpa. But I’m digressing again. Now, we’re going to look at this FBI agent Joe Stabile. Howdy said, you know, what happened to him was exactly what Hoover tried to prevent by not allowing agents to serve in offices from their hometown. Like he had been raised in New York City. His first office was Portland and his second and last office was Kansas City. He never got back to New York.

[9:48] But Joe Stabile did get back to New York. So in Brick Agent, Tony Villano writes that he got a call from another agent who he never names. And the guy said, who do you think in your squad? And he was working the OC squad. Who do you think in your squad might be on the take from the mob? They talked about it a little bit and finally said, you know, he said, it’d probably be an ex-New York City policeman. It’d have to be a pretty savvy guy.

[10:15] And then he said, you know, a guy I can think of on the squad would be Joe Stabile. Well, this agent now knows he’s on the right track because he continues telling Berlano a story that he’d heard from an informant about Joe Stabile. And it made him pretty suspicious. The story goes that a Genovese-made guy approached an off-duty NYPD copper moonlighting as a bartender in the Fulton Street Market area. Now, this copper had been working gambling cases on duty. He told the officer to give a certain sergeant a call about a gambling case in which that sergeant would be a witness and this copper knew about it if this case ever went to trial. So the cop calls the sergeant and he shows up. The sergeant shows up shortly after and he offers this off-duty officer working as a bartender, part-time, $1,500 to not testify or alter his testimony a little bit. The guy took it and he looked into the case later on. He really didn’t remember exactly what it was and he found out it was a pretty good case on a Columbo guy. And he went back to the sergeant and he complained about that’s kind of short money for, you know, putting a spin on a really good case on a Columbo member.

[11:30] And the sergeant said, well, you know, the majority of this goes to an FBI agent named Joe Stabile. He’s a guy that’s going to really put the fix in on this. Well, from this story, Villano said he was getting convinced. This guy, you know, he got this story. He’s an ex-NYPD copper. He’s very savvy. He’s a good storyteller.

[11:49] He’s a raconteur, as we call him. That’s what Bill Ouseley said. He was a very savvy guy and a good storyteller. Villano remembered that Stabile had been transferred to the Organized Crime Squad because he had come from the OC squad in Kansas City. And they said he remembered that they had an ongoing friendly rivalry when they first got there, and they were both young agents, and they tried to see who could get the most informants. But Stabile wasn’t very good. Villano had a lot of informants pretty quick. Stabile didn’t have any. Villano kind of felt sorry for him and said, you know, he tried to help out, you know, his goomba, I’m going to help you out here.

[12:21] And he knew about a guy who had had an argument, Joey Gallo, while both of them were in the prison, and Gallo had called him a rat. So, you know, maybe, maybe this guy might be that guy who would talk. The guy had tried to hang himself after that. So, you know, it’s like, here’s a weak link. Guy had come out. He was out by this time. He was under Charlie the Sidge LeCicero, who was in the Columbo family. And the Columbo family, by this time, were sworn enemies of Joey Gallo. So, you know, here’s a guy who is in the Columbo family and would be an enemy of Joey Gallo and was weak. It looked like he had some weak links there. some little places you could stick a knife in and twist a little bit and open him up and get him going because you need those you need those openings you need those little weak spots in a guy to open him up Stabile approached a guy with another agent actually and the guy refused to talk he just blew him off so forget about that Lano Stabile still doesn’t have any informants Lano then got with Stabile they started following another guy in an attempt to turn him he remembers and found him and a guy disappeared into an apartment building and and.

[13:29] Villano parked the car while stabile ran inside to see where the guy went and stabile said he lost the guy and then they went floor to floor until they heard him talking inside a room so they figured out where he lived and then they came back later and tried to turn him but it couldn’t get him done this guy still doesn’t have any informants the bureau transfers him to the gambling squad where they give you cases maybe informants aren’t so uh important as they are in organized crime gambling squad you just get complaints you get complaints from they get cases from the local PD vice units and things like that and work them up. And during this time, Joe Colombo had started the Italian American Civil Rights League, and Stabile was really vocal in his support of that. Now, this first agent that came to Villano, he didn’t really want to get involved.

[14:14] They came back to him and told him another story about some New York City police officers. Some NYPD detectives had raided a gambling game. And shortly after.

[14:23] While they were still there, a Sergeant Lombardo arrived. And then Lombardo takes one of the Columbo gamblers named Salome out into a back room and then just kicked him loose. And he left. And then the Sergeant Lombardo comes up front and takes one of the detectives to the one side. He said, here’s something for you. And gave him 200 bucks. And then he says, we got $15,000 to fix the case for Salome. And the detective looked, well, wait a minute. You only give me 200. He said, you know, i only get part of this the bardo said i only get part of this man the fbi agent on the case to be he gets the major piece he’s going to do the fix well just like before might even be the same story he got conflated i don’t know but there’s a same kind of a story twice it comes to volano you know they they remember this and they keep watching internal affairs will later bust this sergeant lombardo and extortion ring called the sergeant’s club volano remembered stabile’s name had been mentions a guy who had gotten money from this previously mentioned bribery and so he went back to this other agent who so far he’s not named and doesn’t really want to get involved in this but knows all these people.

[15:31] And he went to this other agent and got this agent to go to Joe Stabile and mentioned this extortion ring thing called the sergeant’s club and this big internal affairs bust on the deal.

[15:42] Remember the gambling bribe and the cop’s name? And then he says, I heard you made a big score on that. He says, Stabile kind of played dumb at first. But then the agent mentioned a lot more money than Stabile must have gotten. He must have mentioned like, you know, $25,000 bribe went down or something. And Stabile got in since. He said, that motherfucker held out on me. You can just see that. That motherfucker held out on me. I can see that now. And he started complaining how somebody lied to him and held out on the deal. And he thought from the agent’s demeanor, the way he was talking to him, that he was not being critical of this. He just was interested and curious. And maybe he wanted to be in on that, get some of this action. And he tried to sell him on helping sell information and fix cases for mob. He said, man, he said, there’s a lot of money in it. Well, the agent played dumb and didn’t go along other than listen to the guys he expounded on how much money was to be made. He said as much as $100,000 just for naming where a wiretap is and who was the target. This agent continually, he does not want to get involved in ratting out a fellow agent. You know, talk about Omerta, bugged a mob, all these FBI agents and cops are even worse, probably. Even though the guy’s corrupt, corrupt as hell. There’s no doubt about it in his mind. And so he puts it back again, back on Volano. It’s partly because I think he was Italian, but I think they were all Italian. And Volano was known to be a straight shooter, and he worked in the organized crime squad. Volano still doesn’t really act on this hearsay. He just keeps his eyes open and keeps watching Joe Stabile for any other clues.

[17:11] Well, it wasn’t long after that, Volano worked a case in which a Columbo member named Salome, our same guy, is named in a general kind of gambling and racketeering indictment, along with other Colombo family members. Shortly after, Stabile came to Volano and tried to convince him that he was just developing this Colombo guy, Salome, as an informant. He ought to let him off. And I’ve seen this before, where they say, hey, this is my informant. Hey, let him go.

[17:39] And we’re always a little bit suspicious of that. Volano got back with that original agent that brought him this story. And the guy told Volano, he said, you got to do something. He’s still putting it on Volano. You got to do something. You know, Stabile was originally with the Colombo squad. It was with you guys. He knows the names of a lot of informants, and he was probably going to start selling those names one of these days. And so Vellano then kind of stepped it up, and he got his supervisor involved because all these rumors, stories, his suspicions. Supervisor instructed Stabile to use this arrest of the Salome as leverage to extract more information from him. He said, we don’t really have a very strong case on him anyhow. Well, Stabile, you know, he’s kind of set up Stabile, and there was never any information that came back Stabile’s approaching Salome who you know they’re just playing dumb that they don’t know they really have a relationship and, But again, they don’t really want to create waves. The supervisor didn’t want to create waves, and the Bureau was fine with that, mainly because at this time, the Bureau was in flux. Hoover died. The old Patrick Gray was the acting director. There was all the Watergate stuff going on, and nobody wanted to make any waves like a dirty agent. I mean, talk about dirty. They do not need any more bad headlines. Volano and his supervisor, after being rebuffed and hearing all these rumors, they confronted Stabile himself, and he denied everything.

[19:01] Then they approached a corrupt New York PD sergeant who was involved in that earlier payoff in which they claimed Stabile got this $15,000 in the largest share of a payoff to fix a gambling case for a Colombo guy. And he admitted knowing Stabile and claimed that he and Stabile were members of an investment club with a small group of cops. And Stabile was just trying to get in the Italian food business. And, you know, I know him and, you know, we have him on any things together, but, you know, he’s not going to admit that they’re taking any money from the mob. Vellano went to an informant who dealt in swag with many mafia figures and he asked him, he said, you know, we’re hearing that there’s an FBI agent who is corrupt, who’s dirty. The informant trusts Vellano, but he doesn’t trust him that much. So he said, well, he said, I, you know, I might give you some clues. He said, he’s a former NYPD cop, and he’s Italian. So Vellano blurts out, is it Joe Stabile? And the informant says, bingo.

[20:02] All right, you know, how much more do you need? The informant then told him about a time that Stabile approached him and claimed that he knew the exact date and time of his death. And he mentioned the name of his clumble friend, Salome, and that Salome could

[20:16] help prevent this murder if the informant would do the right thing. Well, everybody in the game knows when a corrupt cop back east says… Do the right thing, they’re asking for a bribe. Villano then confronts Stabile again. He denies everything. They, you know, they interview his Colombo contact, Salome, and he denies everything. By this time, our former Kansas City police chief, Clarence Kelly, is a director. And he’s, you know, he’s Mr.

[20:43] Square jawed, you know, do the right thing all the time. And I don’t mean by taking a bribe, but he, I mean, with Clarence Kelly, he was, but he did, he was kind of easy on people. He was a little too easy on people. He had a big heart, didn’t want to ever hurt anybody’s feelings, and anybody that was at least acting like they were trying to do what was supposed to be done. He’s a director by now, and he really wanted to kick the whole thing under the rug, his brand-new director. He does not need this, and he doesn’t mind kicking some stuff under the rug. Vlano started hearing that a lot of the supervisor dismissing this whole thing as an Italian vendetta between a couple of Italian agents. Later on, Villano left the bureau. The U.S. attorney indicts the bill for taking the payoff in that very allegation that we just talked about where the sergeant came in and he supposedly Villano got $15,000, a much larger amount of money than what the police officers were getting.

[21:37] They ended up making a deal. He takes a hit, like a five-year sentence, and dismisses most of the charges, and he has to pay a fine and that kind of a thing.

[21:50] It was really about almost like money laundering, a really minor case. It was a felony, and like I said, he did get five years, but nothing like what he had given up on. if they’d really been able to make a case on him. He’d have gone away for a long time like John Connolly did. You know, and what later came out after that, you know, whenever somebody… Takes a hit and it hits the papers other stuff start coming out well there’s an informant under uh colombo capital named wild bill kudlow uh he came forward with a story and he said he had often heard mention of joe stubbs or joe the fed as a colombo source inside the fbi he said he even once saw a guy write down the name joe stabile when the guy was writing down a name of their federal contact to get in touch with him to learn some information he also claimed that joe the fed was connected to greg scarpa now uh villano he didn’t know anything about that uh the informant said joe the fed had been transferred to boston and would be handled by whitey tropiano which is true uh that all happened and stabile was transferred to boston the informant said that while bill claimed joe the fed was being paid a grand to five grand a month depending on what kind of information he gave him one time the informant said he’s part of a hijack team and they’d been provided with a list of car truck descriptions and license plates and said that these were.

[23:11] FBI vehicles, the ones they use for surveillance. The Bureau of Work tried to make a connection on this, but never did. But they ended up in some 302s or some of their reports that I was able to find. So that’s the story of Joe Stabile, a former Kansas City FBI agent, moved to New York City, becomes an informant for the Colombo family,

[23:34] makes a little money out of it. And I often wonder whatever happened to him. My buddy, I bet he did his time, did a little bit of time and got out and probably had some kind of a business and lived out his life more than likely. The guy was a hustler and he was a pretty savvy guy, just like Owsley said and the other agents around him. And he was a savvy guy and he knew the streets. So, you know, it’s kind of hard to get somebody that is really savvy and knows the streets and then make a brush up against mobsters all the time. And there’s a lot of money to be made there. You know, they’re always ready. They’re always ready, man. I know I had an informant you just mentioned about. Well, that’s a nice coat you got. Oh, he said, yeah, I got several more at home. You want one? You need a watch? Oh, you know, is there anything I can do for you, officer? Oh, you know, one hand washes the other. I mean, they’re a constant. A friend of mine was eating, and one of our local mob guys was in there. He was eating out with his family, and he had seen it. They kind of knew each other from back when the cop was on the streets. And they chatted a little bit and as the mobster went out he stopped off and paid the and told the uh.

[24:41] And waitress caught her and said, hey, he said, and he gave her some money and said, here, I’ll take care of that guy’s bill. So when they got ready to leave, well, he had already paid for his family’s dinner. I mean, it’s just a, it’s a constant thing. I’m trying to, to see if they can’t get, get next to you and, and, and get some kind of a handle on you. So that’s, uh, that’s the story of agent Villano, agent Joe Stabile. And thanks to Bill Ouseley and Kansas City Police Department. Don’t forget about his books out there, open city and mobsters in our midst. And my good friend, Doug Fencl, who was the guy who went to Sonny Black and said, hey, Joe Pistone, Sonny Brasco is Joe Pistone, and he’s really an FBI agent. He’s not an informant, and you guys need to lay off of him big time. Joe was going to have to come out from undercover, and I think what precipitated that was he had gotten the contract to kill Bruno Indelicato, who was the son of Sonny Redd.

[25:40] And I think he was supposed to be at that meeting where the three captains were killed, but he didn’t go. Joe got the contract, and they decided it was time that he should probably come out. It was getting too dangerous for him. They wanted to try to roll somebody, and Joe thought the best candidate would be Sonny Black, who he thought was a pretty reasonable guy. They were trying to figure out who they wanted to go talk to him, and they decided on me because Sonny Black had told Joe before that I had talked to him on several occasions, and he said, for an FBI agent, he’s a pretty stand-up guy, so…

[26:23] They decided I’d be the guy. We had a conference before we did it. And at that conference, we took pictures. It was me and Joe. It was the case agent down in Florida. Joe was also down in Florida and had cases down there. And then I think it was the case agent in New York, maybe. But there was three of us. And they wanted to get him alone. And, of course, he always had his people under me, the captain. So he had people always with him. So we would go out early in the morning and sit in the car. It was summer and hot. And we’d sit in the car, and the surveillance team would be on Sonny’s apartment, and there was always people around. So we were there for about three days before. In the morning, they determined that nobody was there except Sonny.

[27:11] So then we went, and I banged on the door at the bottom of the steps. And he said, who is it? And I told him it was me.

[27:20] And he’s very cordially says come on up so myself and the two other agents went up and he said have a seat and we sat at his uh like a little living room table so we all sat there he didn’t seem anxious or nervous or anything you just what do you guys want and i said do you know uh donnie brasco and i can’t remember if he acknowledged he knew him or not you know he was a he was a tough guy and he knew how to play the game. I said, well, Donnie Brasco is really Joe Pistone. He’s an FBI agent. He was like, it was nothing. I mean, he’s like, oh, okay. And just like I said anything, I thought he was going to jump up and down, fall on the floor, but he just took it like I was telling him today’s Sunday. We got done, and if I recall, I didn’t have to tell him the picture because he didn’t say anything that I don’t know who he is or anything like that. So I thought that he probably acknowledged the fact tacitly that he knew who he was. We were leaving, and I gave him my card, and I said, Sonny, I said, you know better than anybody what this is going to mean. And he didn’t say anything, and I gave him the card, and the two agents before me walked down the steps, and I was leaving the door, and he goes, Doug.

[28:45] I said, yeah, and he says, you know better than anybody. I can’t do this. And then tried to turn Sonny Black, and Sonny Black told Doug, he said, I did a story on this. So I told Doug, he said, you know, he said, you know what that means? I can’t do that. You know, it wasn’t shortly after that, Joe Messino had him killed. So thanks a lot, guys. Don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. So when you’re out on the streets there and you’re a big F-150, watch out for those little motorcycles when you’re out. If you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, be sure and go to the VA website and they’ll help with your drugs and alcohol problem. If you got that problem or gambling, if not, you can go to Anthony Ruggiano. He’s a counselor down in Florida. He’s got a hotline on his website. If you’ve got a problem with gambling, most states will have, if you have gambling, most states will have a hotline number to call. You just have to search around for it. You know, I’ve always got stuff to sell. I got my books. I got my movies. They’re all on Amazon. Just go. And I got links down below in the show notes and just go to my Amazon sales page and you can figure out what to do. I really appreciate y’all tuning in, and we’ll keep coming back and doing this. Thanks, guys.

This is a bonus episode that contains a sample from the new, exciting podcast Chinatown Sting.

The Chinatown Sting is a gripping investigative show about a group of mothers who took down Manhattan Chinatown’s drug kingpin, Machine Gun Johnny. Lidia Jean unravels an entire network of women who were roped into Johnny’s criminal underworld and found themselves playing the ultimate high-stakes game. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Listen to a preview of The Chinatown Sting now and find it wherever you get podcasts. Binge the entire season, ad-free, with a Pushkin+ subscription—sign up on The Chinatown Sting Apple Podcasts show page or at pushkin.fm/plus.

In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins sits down with Dan O’Sullivan from the new podcast The Outfit to discuss the incredible story of Ken Eto, known in Outfit circles as “Tokyo Joe.” Ken Eto was unique: the only Japanese American member of the Chicago Outfit, and the only man to survive being shot three times in the head. Eto was the Outfit’s gambling kingpin on Chicago’s North Side, controlling operations along Rush Street, policy wheels in Black neighborhoods, Chinese games in Chinatown, and the Puerto Rican “bolita” numbers racket. His empire generated millions of dollars each year, placing him among the highest-ranking members of the Outfit. But success had its price. In 1980, the FBI caught Eto in a sting, and his Outfit bosses grew nervous—especially since he had ties to a cocaine deal with the Genovese family. Invited to dinner by a mobster who had never broken bread with him before, Eto knew it was a setup. Two gunmen shot him three times in the head. Miraculously, he lived, and his survival changed the history of the Outfit.

Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app.

Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire

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

In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins sits down with journalist and author Rich Gazarik to explore a little-known corner of mob history—one that ties the Pittsburgh Mafia to Fidel Castro, stolen guns, and even the Kennedy assassination.

Rich’s latest book, Gun Smuggling, Castro, and the Pittsburgh Mafia, shines a spotlight on Sam Mannarino, a Pittsburgh mob captain under boss John LaRocca, who hatched a wild plan in the early 1960s: supply Fidel Castro with hundreds of stolen weapons in hopes of carving out a piece of Cuba’s casino action. The scheme included an audacious plot to rip off 300 rifles from a National Guard armory in Ohio—an operation that quickly unraveled into chaos.

From there, the conversation broadens into the Pittsburgh mob’s stranglehold on its city, including political corruption, bribery, and intimidation that reached into the mayor’s office and the police department. Rich recounts how Mannarino and his crew maintained a façade of respectability while ruling through violence and fear, leaving a lasting mark on Pittsburgh’s civic life.

Drawing on decades of investigative journalism and declassified JFK assassination files, Rich also connects the dots between the Pittsburgh Mafia and broader mob influence in the 1960s. We discuss how figures like Carlos Marcello and Santo Trafficante emerged in congressional investigations, feeding speculation that the Mafia’s reach extended into Dallas on November 22, 1963.

This episode uncovers a forgotten piece of organized crime history where local corruption, mob ambition, and Cold War politics collided. If you want to understand how Pittsburgh’s underworld tied into national events, you won’t want to miss this deep dive with Rich Gazarik. And get his book Gun Smuggling, Castro, and the Pittsburgh Mafia here.

Subscribe to Gangland Wire wherever you get your podcasts, and join us each week as we uncover the stories buried beneath the headlines—and the bodies.

Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app.

Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire

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

[0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers out there, this is Gary Jenkins,

[0:02] retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective. I’m here in the studio of Gangland Wire, and I have a story that is kind of topical right now because there’s a movie being made about November 1963. And this isn’t exactly about Kennedy assassination, but it’s all around the Kennedy assassination. And it’s about mob guys having connections down in Cuba and with Castro and out of Pittsburgh of all places. Now, go figure that. You know, I always think of Tropicante down in Tampa, and you’ve got Marcello down in New Orleans. You’ve got Ardo up in Chicago, and you always think of them, Giancana, having those connections. Well, there was a Pittsburgh guy named Sam Mannarino who had extensive connections down in Cuba. So welcome, Rich Gazarek.

[0:51] Thank you, Gary. Appreciate it. Good to have you. Rich, tell the guys the name of your book. I don’t have to. I’d have to lean over here and read it. It’s a little bit long. So tell the guys the name of your book and a little bit about what it’s about. It’s called Gun Smuggling, Castro, and the Pittsburgh Mafia. And it was a faction of the Pittsburgh Mafia.

[1:11] John LaRocco was the godfather of the Pittsburgh Mom. Sam Mannarino was one of his captains. And Mannarino and his brother Kelly had a casino in Cuba, San Suu Kyi, outside of Havana. And they didn’t do very well with it and they eventually sold it. And at the time, Fulgincia Batista was getting a little bit greedy and he was on the outs with some of the mobsters because he wanted a bigger cut. And Sam Mannarino was wondering, what if I helped Castro in his revolution? Do you think he would.

[1:51] Benefit? And do you think he would be gracious and maybe reward me with some influence in the gambling industry? And he had a longtime gambler friend who was managing by the name of Norman Rothman. And Rothman said, hey, I think we should go with Castro. Let’s put our chips on Castro. But Sam wasn’t a very right guy. And what he didn’t realize is that Fidel Castro hated the mob as much as he hated Fulgencio Batista, and there was no chance.

[2:21] But nevertheless, he wanted to try to ingratiate himself with him. So he came up with this harebrained scheme to provide Castro with guns. Mannarino went around looking for a crew to steal some weapons, so they centered on a National Guard armory in Canton, Ohio. And one night after the armory closed through the day, Somebody simply walked in, opened the door, and walked out with over 300 guns. No force break-in, no evidence of any kind of destruction. They simply must have had a key or an inside man. Put them in a van, drove off, never saw them again. They brought the guns to Kensington, Pennsylvania, which is a mob town just north of Pittsburgh. And they stored in Sam Mannarino’s son-in-law’s beer distributor.

[3:19] And then they drove, now I’ll explain to you a little geography here. I was raised in that area and I was 10 years old when this happened, but I wasn’t far from New Kensington. The Allegheny River separates Allegheny County from Westmoreland County. So I lived on the Allegheny County side and I spent my misspent youth in New Kensington in pool halls and gowls. Half-hour’s costs. So let me ask you a question a little bit about this now. John LaRocca, he was like the godfather of this entire area, really, even down in West Virginia. He was into eastern Ohio, all of western Pennsylvania, and northern West Virginia. Yeah, but he was not involved. I just want to make it clear. He was not involved in this. This was one of Sam’s, one of his many harebrained schemes, and he was on his own. Sam and Kelly Montarino, they ran this New Kensington area, which I hear you describe was a little bit like East St. Louis or Kansas. You got the main big city, but then you got the seedy side of town. That’s what I hear you describe, like Cicero to Chicago. Right, exactly. And it was big. I mean, New Kensington in its heyday had gambling casinos throughout the town, houses of prostitution. But one of the things that was interesting was It’s.

[4:42] Alcoa was headquartered in New Kensington for a number of decades now. Yeah. And as long as Alcoa prospered, the mafia prospered. They made a ton of money because they had bookies on the shop floor at Alcoa every day up until noon collecting bets. So they were both intertwined a lot. And that’s part of the theme of the book is that the interconnection between the mafia and Alcoa. Because when Alcoa eventually left in the early 70s, the mob died. It just stopped, became the town. The FBI wasn’t even that interested in it anymore. And they had spent a lot of time investigating the Manorinos. So they get this group together and they steal the guns. And then they brought them over across the river, Allegheny River, into Allegheny County. And it’s funny because I lived close when I was a boy. It was 10. I lived close to that airport. I remember reading the papers. It was big news to get this thing to come in. And they make all these arrests, all set for San Mannarino. They got all these people. In the woods was the state police, customs, and border patrol agents.

[5:56] They were waiting for the guns to come. So the guns come. They’re loaded on the plane. And just as they’re about to move in on them, the plane takes off.

[6:06] Now, it was overweight. didn’t have a full tank of gas. So what they did was the pilot decided he was going to scoot down to Morgantown, West Virginia to refuel.

[6:17] Border Patrol called the West Virginia State Police and they were waiting for the plane. And then the Border Patrol commandeered the plane and flew down and helped make the arrest. So everybody thought, well, this is it. It’s done. But it turns out there was a lot more to it. Sam wanted to continue to buy weapons for Castro, but he needed a way to finance it.

[6:44] So he turned to his mafia brothers in Canada. They went up to Brockville, Ontario, and got a crew, and they broke into a bank and stole over $12 million.

[6:58] Now, part of that haul was over $2 million in bearer bonds. And they thought, you know, we can use this as collateral. So Sam sent one of his colleagues to Switzerland, and he goes to this bank and said, we want to borrow some money, and we’re going to use these bonds as collateral. Well, the bankers got a little suspicious. They looked at the bonds, and the edges of the paper were singed from fire from when these guys broke into the vault and used settling torches to get the boxes open. So, they called the Swiss police, the Swiss police called the Interpol, Interpol called the Mounties in Canada, and the Mounties called the FBI. And we have this international intrigue going on with Mannarino’s people meeting

[7:52] Castro’s agents in Italy to pass the bonds to him. Of course, at the end, Sam and all his colleagues got arrested in the United States for possession of those bonds. They didn’t get arrested for breaking into it because they weren’t in Canada at the time, but they did get arrested for possessing those stolen securities.

[8:12] So they went to trial in Chicago, and Sam’s luck held out, and all but one guy was acquitted, and he walked on it. By that time, John LaRocca was fed up, and so was Kelly, his brother, who fed up with the publicity that Sam was generating, and it kind of retired and put him on the shelf, so to speak. And Sam started talking to the FBI Having these long conversations.

[8:39] And at one point When I was going through these FBI records I started looking at the end of the reports They always mention who the informants are Not necessarily by name But they mention this guy and they give a number.

[8:53] And then they say what his experience is. Well, one of the things they forgot to redact was Kelly Sam Mannarino’s name. He was a registered FBI informant. Now, just as a footnote, whether he knew it or not, I don’t know. Or if these FBI agents did that just to get good with their boss.

[9:13] But, yeah, he’s listed in the files as a snitch. and i’ve seen that before up in chicago where they list the guy as an informant giving some small information but he then he lives his whole life not being an informant but then when he dies and somebody it comes out that this report that he was an informant and so i i say what agents do sometimes is they talk to a guy get some tidbits just bullshit you know conversation and then list him as informant because that’s a coup that’s a feather in their hat if they got it it’s for informant so go ahead well i had interviewed that one of the agents his name was tom of course size the third and i remember i called cold called him when i was working on a series back in the mid 90s at the newspaper and he was really nervous because i i know that they did a black bad job on the manorinas they broke in one night and yeah yes and you know he got really really nervous and kind to read us and talk, but I got some stuff out of him. At that time, though, I did not know that he had listed Sam as an informant. If I’d have known at the time, because those documents weren’t released then, I would have asked him. They’d been interested to see what he said.

[10:26] Because Sam did give them a lot of information. He was careful never to implicate his brother or his son, but he told them a lot about murders and bombings that were done and things like that. And he even told the FBI at one point, you know, he says, I did a lot of hits in my day, and I really kind of liked it. He’s a character. Great family. Only a guy like that would then think that he could. Could somehow ingratiate himself with Fidel Castro in order to, you know, become the gambling czar. I think his, I’m reading about your book here, I think his idea was he would become the new gambling czar. He would be Castro’s gambling czar who would oversee all the gambling, and all the mob bosses would have to come to him. He’d be the new Meyer Lansky. Yeah.

[11:19] But Stan just was not what you would call a student of foreign affairs. It was a long season. Really? People implicated in this. This should never have been involved. Yeah, really. And I remember at the time that they did a whole magazine spread. I believe in Life Magazine. Some reporter got down there and went up in the mountains and took these pictures. And Castro at the time was seen as a freedom fighter. It was not seen as what we see him as today. And I’m sure that Mannarino saw that. and saw him as a freedom fighter that he could then help.

[11:58] Sam knew nothing about revolution. Sam knew nothing about the economic situation in Cuba. He didn’t realize that the Batista government and his cronies were just siphoning all this money from the poor. They had a terrible—at one point, they had a pretty good economy. They had a pretty good standard of living, but the mob and Batista bled them dry. And he got these people involved that were all professional gamblers or connections to the mob, and they just wanted to continue to suck money out of Havana and out of Cuba as a whole. Sam Mannarino ran his casino, San Sushi. He wasn’t very good at it. He was not a good businessman. And eventually, he ended up selling it to Santo Traficante Jr. In a deal that was brokered by Meyer Lansky. Because at the time, Lance Traficante was buying up. He had like four or five different casinos that he was running. So they added the Sanssouci to his. And Sanssouci was a nice place. I mean, it was a very elegant casino. Manor unions couldn’t make it go. You know, they were used to the underground illegal type casinos like they had in New Kensington. And they just couldn’t make a go of it.

[13:13] Interesting. Now, a lot of these documents that you used to create your book came from the document release on the JFK assassination files. Is that correct? That’s correct. And we were just talking about this before a little bit about the House Select Committee was totally different from the Warren Commission on investigating this thing. And the House Select Committee had a different idea than the Warren Commission on this. Talk about that a little bit. What’d you learn about that? Well, there’s a book called A Cruel and Shocking Act that came out a few years ago, and it’s an inside story of the Warren Commission told from the point of view of the attorneys who work for the Warren Commission. And what’s shocking is that the FBI covered up so much, and Justice Earl Warren was not aggressive enough, and Gerald Ford was not aggressive enough in trying to get important information into the report. For example, they let Jackie Kennedy off. They didn’t want to bother her. They didn’t get a lot out of Bobby Kennedy Jr. For whatever reason, maybe fear he didn’t want to talk.

[14:35] And they had the problems with Oswald in Mexico. So there was a lot of things there that the commission was just not aggressive about. And they didn’t do enough to try to look at the mob connections.

[14:49] One of the things that surprised me was when I was looking at the initial documents, the commission wanted to talk to a number of mobsters, but they wanted to talk to Kelly and Sam Annarino. And what surprised me was the commission had interviewed a man named Alberto Ardura, who was a Castro aide who had broke with Castro, defected, and moved to Florida. They Ordura told them he heard Safficanto Traficante say we killed the wrong Kennedy DeCarlos acted rashly meaning Carlos Marcello and.

[15:29] They wanted to know if the Manorinas, he had ever heard the Manorinas say that because of their connections to Cuba. So it didn’t turn out to anything, but it was still the fact that here’s these two mafiosi in this small industrial town in western Pennsylvania being connected to the Kennedy assassination, albeit very arm’s length. Yeah, that Frank Regano, the lawyer for Traficante, in his book, he alleges that Traficante made a revelation to him that led him to believe that Traficante had something to do with that and Marcello had something to do with it. So in a manner, and the Warren Commission didn’t go down that path, but the House Select Commission did. We were just talking about this. They believed, I believe this is in your book, the House Select Committee believed Marcelo, Traficante, and Hoffa had the motive, means, and opportunity to assassinate the president. Oh, this was written by Ronald Goufarb, who was, Goufarb worked for Kennedy in the Organized Crime Division at Department of Justice. And he’s a pretty well-known name in investigating this assassination, if I remember right. Right.

[16:40] Well, Marcelo, when you talk about had the motive, he hated Bobby Kennedy. You know, Marcelo was born in French Algiers, no, French Morocco, but he had a forged birth certificate that claimed he was born in Guatemala. And so Kennedy says, oh, you’re born in Guatemala? We’re sending you back to Guatemala. So Kennedy had him deported, but he got back into the country and he hated Bobby Kennedy. So you have Travagante, you have Marcello, you have the means, you have possible motives. So, yeah, it’s very possible. And that’s what the Hustle Committee looked into very, very deeply. Yeah.

[17:17] And their files are all part of the JFK files that are out there. They’re so voluminous. I looked at some of them myself. I had a person that I know whose dad was in the Teamsters, and her dad’s name was mentioned in the JFK files. He got home and said, could you believe this? Oh, yeah. Some of the stuff that I saw in there was amazing. Some of the people that showed up, I would have had no idea. I mean, one of the guys that showed up, which is very surprising, was Art Rooney Sr., the founder of the Pittsburgh Steelers football team.

[17:51] He was a snitch. He was a government snitch. He was big into the mob, big into gambling. Yeah. He always played down his role, but I’m going to tell you, he was a very, very big time gambler. Not just on the horses, too, either. Sports gambling, a huge no-no. Oh, huge, huge no-no for somebody like that, man. I found a report. He told the FBI that he says, sometimes I’m shocked about the amount of gambling I’m interested in. And he was referring to horses. But I’ll tell you, there was a story that there was this hotel in Pittsburgh, a Fort Pitt hotel. And a couple mobsters had a wire room there. And police in Yonkers, New York called the Pittsburgh police and said, hey, you got this major international racewire gambling syndicate operating in this hotel room in Pittsburgh. You guys, we thought you’d like to have the tip. It was two years before the police moved and only because it was found out. And it was in the same hotel where Art Rooney had his offices. Yeah. And the house detective was a Pittsburgh police officer who had a room on the same floor. He knew all these guys, but yet they were able to operate. The mob was allowed to operate. Well, that’s… Gambling was in Western Pennsylvania.

[19:13] That’s how you do it at certain levels. when you got enough money to corrupt people. That’s how you do it. It was like that in Kansas City in the 30s and 40s. And in early 50s, it kind of started changing by the 60s. And time I came on in the 70s, that was pretty well all gone. We had a couple of holdouts from the old days, but it was pretty well all gone. But most police departments were, you know, they were in bed with the mob to a greater or lesser extent. Not the entire department, But some of the right ones were, at least that’s the way it was here.

[19:45] I just, I don’t know. They’re so powerful because they got into politics. And I’m sure that John LaRocca was heavily involved in politics in Pittsburgh area. Oh, yeah. There was, I found reports, and this is not in this book. It may be in a subsequent book. Mayor David Lawrence of Pittsburgh, who later became governor, his police department during his tenure as mayor. was terrible. There were constant, constant allegations of bribery and corruption, which later proved to be true. But Lawrence always kept arm’s length from it. But he had backdoor connections to John Araca. He had people who did his bidding. And those names are in the FBI report. So his reputation really is tarnished by that. I mean, because for people who who aren’t familiar with Pittsburgh history. David Lawrence was one of the motivators of the Pittsburgh Renaissance in the early 50s. And he’s been credited with that for decades and moving Pittsburgh from a shop in Beertown to a gleaming metropolis with computers, research, and medical research. But he had a very sinister little background himself.

[21:06] Not only him, but his predecessors as well. Yeah. Well, it’s, I always say it wouldn’t be a, if you didn’t have a little corruption, it wouldn’t be a big city. So that’s, that’s what he said. He actually said something that he’s unwilling

[21:19] to tolerate a certain amount of corruption. Right. To make us a big city to move. It’s a big city. Got to put up a little bit of corruption. And you know, that speaking of those cities, like all those, you talk about Alcoa aluminum, when they went down, all those Rust Belt cities, Youngstown and Cleveland, Cincinnati, as that.

[21:40] Those factories, you know, lost out and, and went down and lost business and started closing up, then the mob, they didn’t have that source of income from all those union guys that had these big paychecks. And, and I didn’t really realize that Pittsburgh was, was a loom. I always say kind of was a steel town, but also New Kensington was aluminum town. Yeah. And it’s funny because when Alcoa closed, Mannarino, Kelly had told an FBI agent, they talked all the time, which surprised me, all these informal conversations they had with Kelly. He says, yeah, New Kensington’s a dead city. No gambling here at all. And there wasn’t. Why bet on a horse? I mean, there’s just no money to spend. Why bet on a number? And he didn’t exactly provide unemployment insurance for his workers. And you had all these guys that worked in the casinos. They were now unemployed. They had to find a real job.

[22:38] Huh interesting so tell us something else out of your book that you you found particularly fascinating i guess well it was this whole thing about the the gun smuggling you know i had done like i said i had done a series in the mid 90s called mob rule about those fbi files i didn’t have all the records because they were released later on but and i had done a story earlier much minor story about the gun smuggling. And it’s always been the premise that this was the first flight out of that airport when they got caught in Morgantown. My records indicate that is the second flight. Actually, the same plane came in a month earlier, winded, and flew out somewhere, probably. They surmised to went to South Florida, and from there, they’re not sure. But what was surprising was the amount of gun smuggling that was going on. Castro’s agents were buying guns out of sporting goods stores all over the East Coast, getting them down to Florida. And there was a whole fleet of planes flying under the radar by mercenary pilots. And one of the pilots was a guy named Stuart Suter, who was caught in Morgantown. He was flying for the Manorinas.

[23:58] And there was so many stories. I mean, one of the planes involved loaded with machine guns and ammunition crashed in Guantanamo Bay.

[24:09] And that’s how they found out about the new Kensington connection. One of the documents in that crashed plane, which the Navy salvaged, was a list of these tail numbers. And one of the tail numbers was the plane used in the smuggling. And it was on a wanted list, and it had made a number of smuggling trips. so, There was a lot of money made by rogue pilots and mercenary pilots that were flying in and out of Cuba, which I thought would be very dangerous, but apparently it wasn’t all that dangerous. They were able to get into the country very easily, drop their loads, and get out. Yeah, I guess that was before the big cocaine clampdown on southern Florida. You couldn’t do that today, but before that. Even the drug smugglers, the early cocaine days, they found it really simple and easy because there’s, you know, have all the different coastlines in Florida and, you know, it could fly a little bit inland to a rural airport. And then all the ways you could drop boats, bring things in and go out of Florida. So it was probably relatively easy before the modern drug people, the modern DEA and border patrol and Coast Guard and all that got into the narcotics business. Well, the other thing, Gary, that really surprised me was how deeply influential the Manor arenas were in local government.

[25:35] They controlled the mayor. They controlled the police department. They controlled city council. They controlled the school board. They decided whether or not your taxes would increase or not. There was one instance where city council said it was going to increase the business privilege tax. So some representatives from the chamber of commerce went to see kelly.

[25:59] Kelly called the mayor yeah i’m seeing another mayor’s announcing there’s not going to be a tax increase i mean it was it was amazing he had they had the man arenas had people so frightened, that the fbi early on was trying didn’t have photographs of the man arenas.

[26:18] So they went to this business across the street from where the Manorinos had this scrapyard. And they asked the owner, he says, look, you’ve got an office on the second floor. Could we use it to stake out the Manorinos? And the guy got very nervous. And first he said yes, then he changed his mind and said no. And then first thing he did was he went to the Manorinos and told them that the FBI wanted to get their photographs. So that’s the kind of fear they inspired him. Sam had a source at Bell Telephone.

[26:51] And so, of course, he kept the list of everybody who called the Pittsburgh office of the FBI or the Internal Revenue Service. Oh, my God. And they would pay. They were looking for one guy. They were going to smash him if they could have killed him because he had been making calls to the Pittsburgh authorities. So that’s how deeply they were embedded, and that’s how scared people were because they were—he said, well, yeah. And when I was doing the story back in the 90s, people would say, you know, Rich, you’re wrong about the manner of dessert. They’re not that bad. They’re low-key. They’re not violent. And I said, bullshit. I’m calling games on that one. They had a guy, a bookie in Wheeling, West Virginia. And he was taking bets at Waterford. And the owner of the track got in trouble with the IRS over taxes, so the government seized it.

[27:44] They sold it to a consortium in Detroit where two of the members were whose parents, whose fathers were mob royalty. Yeah. Told this book, you’re cutting $30,000 out of our take on horse bets each week. Stop it. Well, he wouldn’t do it. So Sam calls this guy, his name was Nick Miller, says, Nick, come on up to New Kensington. We’ve got to talk about some business. We’ve got some business we want to talk to. I said, okay. So he goes up, goes into the house, cordial conversation. They go downstairs to Sam’s family room. Two guys grab him, hold him in a chair, and Kelly and Sam strangle him to death. Take his body, dump it in his car, and take it to Pittsburgh and let it sit there for a couple weeks until flies and the smells start massing. And, yeah, they did things like this. I mean, they were killers. It just didn’t come out at the time. So all that stuff about them being benevolent godfathers is BS. It’s not true. They were extremely violent. Very violent.

[28:48] And they had that town wired. Man, they did have that town wired. Literally wired. They wired council meetings. They wired city council meetings so they could hear what was being said. The FBI would come in the city, and these two agents that were there all the time would stay at this local hotel. Yeah. They owned the mob, but ran the motel hotel. They had their rooms wired so they could hear what the agents were talking about. That’s how deep and suspicious these guys were. It was amazing.

[29:21] Crazy, crazy, crazy. And guys, I’ll have a link down below to find this book. It’s a fascinating look at this time in Pittsburgh history and national history, international history, if you will, as you heard it. You know, this guy was stealing barrel bonds in Canada, taking them to Switzerland and dealing with Castro’s agents in Italy and Florida and other mob families. So it’s quite a book. So go back over and tell us a little bit about yourself, Rich. I was a journalist on a newspaper for 42 years before I retired. And I’ve written, this is my seventh book. I’ve written two biographies. I’ve written a book on Prohibition in Pittsburgh. I wrote a history of corruption in Pittsburgh. And I wrote a history of jazz in Pittsburgh. And I wrote a story about a serial killer. He was known as the Phantom Turnpike Killer who would drive along the Pennsylvania Turnpike killing sleeping truck drivers. And so they caught him and convicted him, and he went in the electric chair. But he was a very famous guy. It was in the 50s, and it was the Greensburg, Pennsylvania’s version of the O.J. Simpson trial. It was a very big trial at the time. It attracted a lot of national attention. Interesting. And I spent about a number of years on the newspaper as an investigative reporter.

[30:45] I’ve written about organized crime. I’ve written about public and governmental corruption. I’ve written about corporate corruption. And I just did a lot of them. I covered the courts for 10 years, and I covered more murders than I wanted to ever be involved in. But, yeah, it’s been an interesting life. I enjoyed it. Great. I’ll have a link, actually, to Rich’s Amazon author page. So you go to that, and you’ll find all of these books. I bet a lot of people are interested in two or three of those other books. And this book is Gun Smuggling, Castro’s Cuba, and the Pittsburgh Mafia, published by the History Press. So, Rich, I really appreciate you coming on the show and telling us about it. Gary, I appreciate you extending the invitation. It’s very, very pleasant to do this interview. All right, great.