The History of the American Mafia: How the Mob Built Its Empire in the US, with Former Gambino Crime Family Associate, Louis Ferrante.

In this episode, Mark sits down with former Mob associate Louis Ferrante to discuss his book, Borgata: The Rise of Empire: A History of the American Mafia.

The history of the American Mafia, known as La Cosa Nostra or simply "The Mob," is well known. Prohibition in the United States during the Roaring Twenties saw the rise of characters who have since been mythologized in Hollywood: Charles "Lucky" Luciano and his close confidant Meyer Lansky, Al "Scarface" Capone, Arnold "The Brain" Rothstein, Dutch Schultz, Giuseppe "Joe the Boss" Masseria, and Salvatore Maranzano.

What makes Borgata different is that it was written by someone who lived "The Life," providing a unique perspective. Lou discusses the formation of The Commission, an underworld ruling council that controlled the Five Families of New York (now known as the Gambino, Genovese, Lucchese, Bonanno, and Colombo), The Outfit in Chicago, and the Philadelphia Mafia.

Lou talks about the rules, the use of violence, and how the US government looked to tackle the growing power of organized crime, spearheaded by the likes of prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey.

We also hear about Lou's own life in La Cosa Nostra and how he and his crew committed some of the most successful heists in US history, which ultimately landed him in prison.

In prison, he began to read everything he could get his hands on, including history, philosophy, and the great classics of literature. He never turned on his former associates, but when he left prison, he also left "The Life." Now he speaks about his experiences with the Mob and has become a successful author (Unlocked: A Journey from Prison to Proust), including his new a huge three-part history of the American Mafia.

In this episode, Mark and Lou discuss the first book, Borgata: The Rise of Empire: A History of the American Mafia.

====================================================

Louis Ferrante's book 'Borgata: The Rise of Empire: A History of the American Mafia' is available here: https://a.co/d/cDcxOQ2

Audible version: https://a.co/d/2VHu3Ht

====================================================

📱 Youtube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/@UCP-lqJdhM-9iDKkswuVcXZA

🌎 VISIT US! Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime - https://globalinitiative.net/

🎧Audio version: https://link.chtbl.com/7c27X1CM

🎧WHY NOT TRY OUR OTHER PODCASTS:

🎧Deep Dive: Exploring Organized Crime - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXSX1Xu1kM0spSX0QUq7j0NmIZOqyDTZQ

🎧The Index - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXSX1Xu1kM0uc_4CftGl8PrwHA3IK5WeI

===================================================

FOLLOW US

X - @gitoc

LinkedIn - @Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime

IG - @gi_toc

===================================================

Welcome to underworlds from the global initiative against transnational organized crime.

My name is Mark Shaw, and in today's episode, I'm talking to Louis Ferrante, a former mafioso himself who has written a magnum opus about the rise of the american mafia.

Bogarte is the name of the book.

Louis himself recounts some of his own personal experiences in relation to the mafia, and he gives a fascinating historical account over to the conversation.

Louis, really a pleasure to have you on the show.

And the book is amazing and a great read.

It contains, honestly, some of the best one liners in the business.

Louis.

I mean, do they just sort of come out of your mouth or you, is that like a mob thing?

Or do you work on the text to shape them?

I don't want to give them away.

I was going to read some out, but they are just brilliant, I have to say.

Where do you get them from?

Thank you.

I guess when I'm writing, I try to be as natural as if I'm hanging out with you somewhere in a social club, let's say.

Because I'm back in those days when I'm writing.

And we used to laugh a lot and we took everything very light.

For example, one time we were playing cards around a table and somebody came in with the news that somebody was killed.

And somebody said, son of a.

Son of a sob.

You know that.

I can't believe it.

And I said, you knew him that well?

And he said, no, he owed me money, though, you know, so, like, you know.

Yeah, so, you know, it was all a joke.

Even in.

Even in prison, we made light of the situation.

We always laughed.

You know, I think it's.

Is it Augustus Caesar, when he was checking out in his final moments, and he said, you know, I depart the comedy of life.

And Italians also have an attitude that they look at life as a comedy.

And the comic moments sort of lighten up the tragic moments.

So, as I said, even in prison, we laughed.

We were one time in a holdover in an underground, sort of like a holding pen, and we're all chained up and it's a miserable day.

And my friend from the Colombo family, you know, he said, you know, he looked around at all of us and we were all grim and, you know, tired and worn out, exhausted.

We wanted to get back to the jail.

And he says, well, we got them right where they want us, you know, so, you know, it took a second to figure out what he said, but we all cracked up laughing, you know, so, you know, we made light of the situation.

So I did the same thing when I'm.

When I'm writing.

When I'm writing, yeah, it might be somebody just got killed.

And if I can find some rumor in it to lighten up the scene and lighten up the moment for the reader, I do.

If there's something that comes to me, I write it.

Why hold it back?

So that's.

I appreciate, though, that you enjoyed that.

You know, as a reader, you read through it, at least me, and then you read that line again, and it's beautifully crafted, right.

And it brings an argument together in some ways, or it's just funny or it's a bit irreverent.

So for me, that that made the book, in many ways.

Louis, you have really an interesting backstory, which perhaps not everybody knows about.

So you've written volume one.

I want to ask you about volume two and three, as I understand, but volume one, which is the history of the american mafia.

But what's your backstory?

What qualifies you to write this?

I got involved with stolen cars when I was a kid, as a teenager, and that led to chopping up the cars and selling them to auto body collision shops for parts.

They would buy parts from me and my friends a lot cheaper than they would buy them from General Motors or Ford Motor Company.

So it was a good business.

And from the chop shop business.

I was in an auto body collision shop one day when there were these giant toolboxes that these snap on, and Matco were the companies, the brand names of these toolboxes that stood as tall as I am.

And they were loaded with tools, obviously, and they were for the mechanics and the body work, you know, the bodywork guys.

And I said, wow, look at the size of this.

And a friend of mine goes, they go for about five or six grand apiece, and the truck comes, you know, every now and then.

And the trucks probably got, like, $100,000 worth of tools on it.

And I said, you want one?

And he said, sure.

And I started hijacking trucks.

That was the first time I got into truck hijacking, and I realized that of all the cars that I was stealing and piecing them out, parting them out, bringing them to the collision shops, I could hijack a truck and within ten minutes, make as much as I was making in a matter of months.

So it was obviously, the math wasn't hard to figure out.

This was something new.

And I was young and stupid, young and ignorant.

I wasn't concerned with the consequences or the people I may have been victimizing, which was sad, but when we're young, we don't think, I think as much as we are when we're older as much as we do.

So I saw a way, I didn't consider the risks involved or the people I was hurting, and I saw a way to make more money, so I went with it.

And from hijacking after one hijacking after another, I'm meeting more and more people on the street because you have to sell your merchandise now, and you need a fence.

And then you meet guys in the mob, and you meet guys who are sort of associates of the mob than real mobsters.

And before you know it, I'm involved with the highest, the biggest mobsters in New York.

And the reason being is because they are the underworld government.

And as an underworld government, they've even been called, I think, by Senator Estes Kefalva as a government within a government.

And I think Bobby Kennedy, as the attorney general, called them a private government.

And they are.

They are indeed.

So as a government within a government, they want to know who's making money and who's earning.

And they look for you.

They'll find you.

You don't have to find them.

If they see that you're hijacking a lot of trucks and you're making a lot of money and you start to get a name as a stand up kid, and you're kind of like halfway there.

And then the other half is, if you want that route.

And I did at the time because it opened up a lot of new doors for me.

That's interesting.

I mean, were you, when you were growing up, were you aware of mob figures, if you like, in your neighborhood once you began your, let's call it, criminal career?

Basically, what you're saying is they reached out to you.

They saw you as a successful.

And word got around that you were very good.

You were running this business.

You had to talk to different people to defense the goods, and they found out about you.

When do you think they found out about you?

I mean, I'm sorry, there's two questions there.

Oh, that's okay.

So I think it's a, I think it's an entire subculture that you're introduced to and you learn as you go.

So there were a lot of friends of mine that were involved in, quote, unquote, the life, which is la cosa nostra.

The whole understanding of that subculture they had with them from early youth, if not birth.

You know, I remember one time I was at a funeral for somebody who died in the life, and there was a kid who sit next to me, and he was asking me questions, and he says, where are you from?

What do you do for a living?

What kind of car do you drive?

And it was just a kid asking curious questions.

And the father leaned over and he said, what are you, a cop?

Leave the man alone.

You know, this is how the kid is taught from when he's young.

So, you know, I said, no, it's okay.

I said, you know, it's okay.

I realized he's just a kid, but the father admonished him, don't ask so many questions.

So it's the life that they're raised in.

Whereas I was learning as I went.

And there's somebody, there's a sociologist who I read in prison.

I can't remember his name, but he wrote about how it's an entire.

Each subculture you get involved in, whether it's drug cartels, the mafia, maybe the African Americans who sell drugs within the projects, those are all three separate, different subcultures that you have to learn.

You can't just walk in off the street and think you're going to speak the lingo and understand how it works, and they'll spot you in a minute unless you become part of them.

It's a world you become part of.

You become absorbed into that world.

And that's what happened to me.

So did I know mobsters beforehand from the newspapers?

Nothing really big.

As I started to branch out and go to different neighborhoods, there were neighborhoods surrounding my own where you saw a guy on the street who had a tan in the winter because he's always traveling to nice places.

And he has three or four cars.

He has a Mercedes Benz BMW, a Cadillac.

He has all this gold he's wearing, and he doesn't work.

So you start to realize, do I want to be like my parents who break their asses every day and they can't even afford to pay the bills?

Or do I want to be like this guy?

And for a young person, it's an easy decision.

For, as you know, as you get older, you realize that there's long term consequences to that man's lifestyle.

But you can't see that when you're young.

When you're young, all you see is what's in front of you.

And we do have.

My country is very materialistic.

So you're raised materialistically.

People who are considered successful are people who have things, who have money, who have toys.

You know, they're not necessarily.

You're not taught from my neighborhood.

You're not taught that maybe somebody could become an astrophysicist or somebody, you know, this is a.

He's a professor of such and such.

So he's, he's an icon, you know, that you should follow.

You're not, you're not aware of those people.

They're not around you, and you're nothing.

They're not accessible to you.

Those people.

Those people are something you see in a book or on the news.

The people you do see are on the corner in front of the social club.

They're the guys who are making money.

So they're sort of your like, go to.

As far as psychologically, they're your go to to achieve success.

You want to be like them.

You want to.

You want to sort of like to mimic them, and that's what you do.

So now, when I got involved with the mobile, there was a lot I had to learn, but I was a quick learner and I'm already making money.

So that's the biggest thing, an earner.

And the other thing too, is you have to be willing to commit violence.

And I was.

Unfortunately, I was violent.

As when I was young, I had no problem fighting with people.

If there was a fistfight that I wanted to fight.

And then if somebody had a knife, then I happy to pull a gun.

If somebody had a gun, I was happy to pull a bigger gun.

And then you learn to be what Machiavelli called virtue, which is nothing like virtue as we know it today.

It's more sort of like cunning.

And you learn to become a cunning individual to outsmart other people, which is something that I wanted to decompress and get away from when I finally changed my life in prison.

And to complete the question as to my background, eventually I knocked off some of the biggest heists, probably in us history, as I'm told.

I got involved in.

I was pulled in in California on the eve of knocking off an armored car.

Me and my crew flew to California.

There are surveillance photos of me and my crew in California floating around on the Internet now that the FBI took.

We were down there to knock off an armored cardinal.

And then I was accused of doing other things that big.

And at some point or another, we had an excellent crew.

Everybody in my crew.

I was in my early twenties.

Everybody in my crew was in their thirties, forties and fifties.

And the fences that I regularly went to were in their sixties and seventies.

So everyone was older than me.

And the reason why they took me seriously was if I put a plan together, let's say, for an army car, for example, if I put a plan together and we.

We hatched the plan, and then we were successful pulling it off, it gives you a lot of sort of, like, mojo in the underworld that goes on your underworld resume, and you become somebody who's extremely in demand.

And my creed that I put together, too, they were really the best at what they did.

They were good guys.

As close as what you'll see on television.

Although what you see on television is completely dramatic.

You know, it's all fake.

You know, where guys are talking in little things and, you know, before a heist, and then they walk, you know, they have a suit and tie on and, you know, there's.

There's stuff I laugh at when I watch that.

But.

But we were a well oiled machine.

We did our homework.

We did our research before we made a move.

I didn't even know what the word research was back then, but we were smart enough to case a place out, see what was happening, and then assign the right people to do the right job.

So then I was successful pulling off all the heists at the time.

Yeah, it's a fascinating story.

This underworld reputation, which is built by doing stuff, doesn't that also make you very vulnerable?

If your name is in and around the underworld, the state in all its forms is talking to the underworld itself through informants and others.

Doesn't that.

Isn't that a point of vulnerability?

You both need that reputation in the underworld to bolster yourself.

But that's something that, in the end, can be pretty dangerous.

It's a great question that leads into the next stage of my life.

I was unaware of the consequences.

I was under the impression that once I committed a crime and got away with it, and we ditched the truck over here.

Let's say we hijacked an 18 wheeler.

Once we unloaded the 18 wheeler, and it was before the age of tracking, they just started to do tracking when I went to prison.

So it was before the age of gps devices and stuff on trucks.

It was starting to happen, but not entirely.

So let's say we took a truck, we unloaded it in a friend of mine's warehouse, and then we ditched the truck.

Once I left, I thought that the crime was finished.

I didn't understand the law.

I didn't understand that the federal government will allow for an informant to go back several years and say we did something, and that's considered evidence, you know, just the hearsay even of an informant.

I wasn't aware that there were informants circulating around us.

And those informants were regularly reporting activities to the government or to the.

To the state authorities.

At some point or another, they dropped the hammer on me, and that's when I was indicted by the state.

I was indicted by the federal government twice, the FBI and the secret service.

So I found myself with three indictments, and basically authorities were saying, we need this guy off the street.

We need him off the streets.

We need him off the streets one way or another.

If we have to indict him 100 times, we will.

So I had three indictments, and I had a superseding indictment, which could be arguably considered a fourth indictment.

And between those four indictments, I knew then at that point, I was going to be facing the rest of my life in prison, which I was.

And then they started to go around to people that people the FBI was interviewing would call me when the FBI left, because they were still loyal to me, they were friends.

And they would say, look, the FBI just left my house.

And these are the questions they asked me, or the FBI just left my house.

And they, boy, do they want you.

You know, Lou, watch out.

Maybe you should just like, you know, go to Europe or something, you know, get the hell out.

They're looking for you.

And then at some point, the FBI started to offer people the witness protection program.

And that's when I knew I was doomed, because I said to myself, it was the first real wake up call.

I said to myself, if the FBI is willing to pay somebody's upkeep to maintain somebody's lifestyle for the rest of their life, with so many thousands of dollars a month out of a government.

Out of government resources to get me, I'm in trouble because I don't have equal power to confront that.

And I knew that I was doomed.

And at some point, they came after me and they put me away.

And I did face life.

I hired the biggest attorneys money could buy at the time.

I don't know if you're familiar with the radicals.

He was considered a radical civil rights attorney.

William Kunstler, he represented Malcolm X, he represented Martin Luther King.

He represented.

He did the Attica negotiations.

He went into Attica prison.

During Attica prison riots, he represented some big, big, big people.

And I.

I hired him and he took on my case.

He said, any friend of.

I went there.

I was referred to him by somebody in the Gotti family, and he said, any friend of the Gottis is a friend of mine, and I'll take your case.

And he did.

You hired the best lawyer.

If you wouldn't mind saying where you got the money to hire the lawyer.

Is this from the takings you had?

I mean, how you did it?

Did you receive wider support?

Yeah, I mean, the money came from obviously illegal activity.

And all of the lawyers out there.

I mentioned in a biography about William Kunstler, where the biographer said that William Kunstler always said he never took money for a case, but yet here are six or seven mobsters that paid him.

And I'm one of the persons on the list.

It's an excellent biography, um, about Kunstler.

And, uh, um, you know, I didn't.

It was to my surprise when somebody brought that to my attention that I was in the book.

But, yeah, I paid him a lot of money, and I paid other lawyers a lot of money, too.

I went through seven attorneys.

I paid some of the biggest attorneys, the big money.

And all of the attorneys, on contrary to what they may say, they take cash.

No criminal defense attorney will turn down $100,000 because it's cash.

You know, they may try to ask you to figure out how to pay them.

You may have to get some help from friends to wash some money.

But they took my money, and no one questioned anything.

I handed a law.

I heard.

I handed a very big attorney who's still alive.

I can't say his name.

One of the biggest attorneys in the United States.

I handed him 25,000 once, and he literally went like this in his office and slipped it into a drawer.

So I watched that.

My own eyes.

I handed it to him.

No one can tell me different.

And he's lauded as one of the great us attorneys.

Not a us attorney.

I'm sorry, a criminal defense attorney in the United States us attorney would be a prosecutor.

So this is what happens.

But I had a lot of money.

I spent a lot of money to fight my cases, and I went broke doing it.

I didn't care if it cost me millions of dollars.

What's it worth if you don't have your freedom?

I realized that pretty quickly.

And people do the same thing.

If you're in there, you're with a lot of people.

I don't care if they're the leader of a cartel, the Medellin cartel.

I don't care if they're the boss of the Bonanno family.

I don't care if they're the boss of an international opium ring from Asia.

They will spend everything they have to get out of there, because all of the money in the world isn't worth it to stay there.

There's no life.

You're just existing.

You're breathing.

So I've seen it time and again, and I've done it.

I've lived it.

So after hiring and firing seven attorneys and becoming very frustrated with the system, I studied law, and I was able to reverse one of my own cases pro se with the second Circuit court of appeals on a technicality, not because I was innocent, but I found a technicality with the help of another friend of mine who was my cellmate at the time.

Brilliant guy who was doing a 35 year biddennesse, and he became an absolute legal genius, better than any attorney I've ever been in contact with.

Here's a guy, half black, half white, from Connecticut, convicted of drug dealing, sentenced to 35 years.

And I could tell you right now, out of the seven attorneys that I used, all seven of them combined didn't have his intelligence and understanding of the law.

And I think a lot of it comes from when you're in there.

You have definitely a different understanding of the law because you're part of the law's punishment.

You're not part of its oppression, you're not part of its.

You know, you're not pretending to be part of the defense against its punishment.

And what is the law?

Obviously, philosophically, the law has been considered just public vengeance.

Right?

So you've been on the receiving end of that vengeance, even if it's deserved.

It's just been described as that.

In my case, it was deserved.

I would call it well deserved vengeance from the public hammer.

I deserved everything I got.

But then again, it does give you these insights that you're able to get.

I don't even believe that judges who sit on the bench can understand the law as well as I do.

Not unless they were put in prison for a month or a week or a day, sit there and understand it for 24 hours, and then tell me what your opinions of the law is.

So anyway, he was an absolute genius.

I was able to reverse one of my cases on a technicality, and I was able to cut down a much larger sentence, and I was able to get out after eight and a half years of prison.

And in that time, I served time in some of the worst prisons.

I was a Lewisburg penitentiary the very first day in the general population, the aryan brotherhood hacked to death and gutted two black Muslims inmates.

It was in the middle of a race war that I landed there for, which was horrible.

These are things I'll never forget.

You know, blood and guts all over the walls, all over the tier block.

You know, they show you pictures of the dead bodies and ask you if you know them.

The next day you're locked down for months.

You have to carry a machete in defense of your own life.

And then I would say to people, but I'm not an aryan and I'm not a black muslim.

Why should I have to carry a, you know, machete?

Well, you could be hated by both groups.

And if you're in the way, you're dead.

And if they have to get somebody to save face when they're going back and forth with vengeance, they will kill you and say, well, we made a mistake.

So it's a dangerous place, and people were killed for a lot of different reasons.

I mean, so in the prison, it's tough for you, but what comes through the book, right, because clearly something starts to happen to you in prison.

You are unbelievably well read, right?

This is clear from the book.

You have read everything.

When did you start?

Were you, were you reading as a, as a young man before you were hijacking trucks?

Were you reading while you were hijacking trucks?

Or did you start reading in prison?

Because there's a depth of reading that comes through here, which is quite phenomenal.

And I'm not talking about reading on organized crime.

I mean, you've already, you know, mentioned you've read this book on sociology and other things.

So you're reading philosophy, history, sociology, the history of organized crime.

Do you start this in prison?

Yes.

I never read a book from cupboard a covenant and not before.

No, I was literate.

You know, I was taught how to read and write.

Obviously, I went to school as a kid, but I'd never read a book in my life.

And it's not.

So when you come from a family that doesn't.

My family.

No one ever went to college.

No one ever went to university in my family.

My mother and father, you know, they never went to college.

They couldn't afford to go to college.

They didn't come from a family that went to college.

My grandparents didn't go to college.

And I remember the first book I wrote my memoir when I came home from prison.

It was the absolute first book that my father ever read in his entire life.

And he was in his mid sixties at the time.

So just to give you an idea of if you don't come from a home where education is sort of stressed and there are no books around the house, the only reading material around my house were magazines that my mother, on her way home from work, would lift out of, like the garbage from a dentist or a doctor's office, you know, she would see the magazines in the garbage, and she'd carry them home on her way home from work, and she'd look through them.

And that was the only reading material in my house.

So, I mean, I never was up for better homes and gardens, you know, so I never read those books, those magazines, rather.

So the first time I do read is in prison.

Sorry to interrupt.

Where do you get the depth of literature that you start to read?

I mean, prison libraries don't ordinarily have this sort of stuff, surely.

No, just explain where you started to read.

I mean, were you reading what was there first, and then you started ordering in additional books?

Yeah, so it's a good question.

It's a combination, basically.

I had a friend of mine who just passed away last year.

His name was Fat George Dibello.

His nickname, his mob nickname was Fat George.

He was the caretaker of John Gotti Social Club in Queens.

And I called him up, and he had biblical.

He had tattoos all over his body from head to toe, and he had biblical verses, different parts of his body.

He would have Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, you know.

And I said, well, he must have read, you know, I'm in jail, and I wanted to read.

I came out of the hole, and I was in the hole for something that I didn't do.

And the hole is solitary confinement, right?

Solitary confinement, that's correct.

Yeah.

So I'm in solitary confinement, and it makes you think.

And I had words with somebody, the captain of the guards.

And I reached through the food slot, and I went to grab his necktie, and I gave it a yank.

I pulled it, you know, and I cursed him.

And the necktie pulled off his neck because it was a clip on.

And I threw it back at him through the food slot.

And I said, you know, you son of a bitch, it's.

Get my language.

It's a clip on.

And he said, you think we'd wear real ties with you animals in here?

He said.

And he says, look at yourself.

He says, you're an animal in a cage.

And as if the cage of this prison isn't big enough for you, you have to be put in a smaller cage, something to that extent.

And I realized that I was an animal, that my mother didn't raise an animal, that I've been acting like an animal for many years in my life, that I do belong in prison.

That was a big realization, too.

Everyone denies that they belong in prison.

Everyone swears they're innocent.

I think it was a big step in my mind, in my mental evolution.

To realize that I belong there, to realize that I did do things wrong, that I had no right to do them.

I have no right to put a gun to a man's head and take merchandise, even if it doesn't belong for him.

I justified it by saying, well, it belongs to a big company.

It's not his.

He just drives for the company.

So I would tell, usually we were as nice as we could be to the driver of a truck.

We're not after your stuff.

We're after the, you know, we don't give an f about the company.

We don't want to hurt you, though.

And that, to me, justified our actions.

But you're still traumatizing someone.

And when I was in prison, I realized that.

And I realized that I had no right to do those things.

And that was a big wake up call.

So when I came out of the hole that time, after you had called me an animal, I called up fat George.

And I don't mean that in a derogatory way.

That was his nickname.

I said, hey, can you call me?

Can you send me in some books?

What are you looking for?

Big bulbs.

Big, big bucks.

What are you into?

He thought I wanted what we would call short eyes pornographic material.

And I said, no, no, I want to read a book.

I've never read a book before in my life.

And I've seen you book.

He says, yeah, I've read the Bible.

I've read a few other books.

I'll send stuff.

Books.

He sent me in my hump by Adolf Hitler, a biography about Napoleon, boulder part by Vincent Conan, which I probably still have somewhere in my bookshelf back.

And Julius Caesars, gaelic wars.

And I said, what?

I called him on the phone, I said, what the frig did you send me?

I had no idea.

And this is big reading.

I was looking for probably something like child Mark Twain or something.

I don't know what I was.

All of his travels, I don't know.

And even those are adult books, but something like maybe an adolescent version of those.

He said, I went to the store.

I told abroad, quote unquote broad.

That's how long ago.

I called, I told abroad all about you.

And she pulled those books off the shelf, said, what did you tell her?

He says, I told you, you're short, boss.

So she sent me to the girl.

Yeah.

So anyway, I pushed through those books.

I understood nothing of what I was reading.

But I did push through them and I bought a dictionary that was missing, I think maybe x and Y or x y z or whatever.

And I would look up every vocabulary word each day that I would never pass a vocabulary word.

I made that as a promise to myself.

I'll never pass the vocabulary word without studying it, knowing it before I move on.

And then each night I would study my vocabulary words and I kept reading.

And eventually, in the beginning, it doesn't make sense to you.

Who is Julius Caesar?

Where does he fit in time?

Who's Napoleon Bonaparte?

Did they know each other?

Did they?

Did they, you know, were they friends?

But you don't understand that till you start reading the bigger part of history.

And so as I went, I kept learning and I started loving what I was reading.

And then I realized that there was a bibliography in the back of each book and that would lead to other books.

And then I would call home to family and friends and say, hey, can you send me, can you do me a favor?

I just read Napoleon apart.

For example, can you send me something about Robespierre?

Can you send me about something about the reign of terror?

Can you send me something about maybe Jean Jacques Rousseau who maybe wrote stuff that led to the french revolution.

Can you send me something about the french bourbons who were thrown out by Napoleon?

Can you send me something about and maybe Julius Caesar.

Can you send me something about Hannibal who fought the Romans?

Can you send me something about Scipio Africanus?

So one book would always lead to another.

And then I was able to continue to read and put the pieces together.

And then I realized at that point that this most tragic event in my entire life, which was placing me in a prison cell and almost for the rest of my life, I just missed that because I did face the remainder of my life in prison.

And how that happens, just to take a short detour, how that happens is each time you commit an armed robbery, it's a ten year statute.

Each time a gun was used in the commission of a crime, it's an additional five years.

If you have ten armed robberies, that's 150 years.

And I did face that 150 years.

So it does happen.

So getting back on track, I realized that this being the worst tragedy of my life turned into the biggest blessing in disguise.

I think Churchill said something about something.

I think when he I think his daughter, when he.

When he.

At some point or another, there was a tragedy in his life where his daughter said, it's a.

It's a disguise.

It's a blessing in disguise.

And he said, it's.

It's absolutely brilliantly disguised.

You know, this was brilliantly disguised as well, because it's very hard to see the penitentiary where people are killing each other as a blessing.

But it was.

Although it was brilliantly disguised, it was the biggest blessing in my life once I found books, because now I had 18 hours a day to read.

And I read.

I carried a book to the chow hall.

I carried a book to the yard.

I carried a book everywhere I went.

I was never without a book.

And then also, too, I mean, God put things in my way.

I was.

One time, I had just finished reading war and peace by Leo Tolstoy, and I went to the bathroom, and there was a broken urinal in the penitentiary, in the bathroom.

And in that broken urinal, which wasn't, you know, there was no urine in it for I don't know how long.

It's probably broken for years.

So I didn't.

I washed off the book, but I literally took Anna Karenina out of the broken urinal and walked back to my cell, washed it off, and started reading Anna Karenina.

What are the odds you found Anna Karenina after you finished war and peace and a broken urinal in a penitentiary?

These were things that got in my way, the things that are put in my way, that you have to wonder.

There was another guy.

His name was Richard Messina, may he rest in peace.

He was a corporate attorney.

He was an absolute brilliant man who was well read.

He was in there for something he shouldn't have been in there for.

But he was brilliant in the sense of.

In literature.

He knew everything about literature, and he helped me.

So one day I walked up to him and I said, yeah, I'm reading this book, the Red and the black, you know, it's pretty cool.

And he says, le Rouge at le.

No, what a beautiful book.

What is Julian Sorrel up to now?

And I said, wow, you read that?

He says, oh, I may read it again when you're done.

Send it to my cell, you know.

And then I began paying him visits at his cell, and he would say, did you read this?

Did you read that?

And he was sort of like a guide to the western canon.

And I found all these things, and the more you searched, the more things came to you.

And as I said, I was reading 18 hours a day.

I fell in love with history.

I read history, philosophy, I read religion.

I read science.

I read.

And not only my.

A lot of people fall into the trap where now and then I would ask somebody if they wanted to read something.

If they were spanish, they would want to read spanish history.

If they were asian, they wanted to read asian history.

And I would turn them on to, you know, here's a biography about Mao Zedong.

Here's a biography about Cho and Lai.

Here's a biography about Sun Yat sen.

But I would also say you should read about other places.

Don't just read about your own.

Because I was never into just the United States or Italy.

My heritage being italian.

I got around to eventually the history of Italy.

I got around to the history of the United States, but I wanted to learn about the bigger world.

So I would always push that on people.

There might be a friend of mine who's african American.

I would first give him a book on Martin Luther King, the autobiography of Martin Luther King, a long walk to freedom about Nelson Mandela.

But I would also then push other books on that person and say, why don't you read something about Italy?

You know, that's my heritage.

Maybe you'd be interested in it.

I loved yours.

You should read mine.

You know, so there would be, I would try to get people to sort of, like, expand into other things and read other things.

And I think that was a key to me understanding a big part of the world through, you know, just constantly grabbing other things from not just my own, my own little world, my own little heritage.

And I love science.

I wrote a book about science, too, called the three pound crystal ball.

It's about a theory I have about the dreaming brain.

It ties in physics.

It ties physics through Einstein and psychology through Sigmund Freud.

Freud, who's been debunked for the most part.

He's sort of like a hostile witness in my theory because he believes the theory couldn't have been.

And I bring him in and I prove, as sort of like, Freud's my witness, understand?

And I prove that the theory should have been, and I debunk him in this sense.

But he was also brilliant in other regard, too.

Let's turn to your book, right?

And I know it's the first of three volumes, right?

As we.

As we said earlier, and you've written.

You've written the three.

I mean, you wrote, as I understood from the acknowledgments at the back, in fact, you've written 550,000 words.

This is the first one out, the second one is coming later in the year.

It's a huge achievement.

There's lots of characters.

Give us a sense who are the key people that emerged from this name.

Some of the key characters, if you wouldn't mind, as you make your way through the story of the mafia.

Sure.

So the way I view history is that it's driven by originally men and now men and women.

History is driven by individuals.

And if we look at, let's say, for example, there are always people who stand out in history.

Let's say we look at the history of the british empire.

We may find during the napoleonic times the people who stand out.

Maybe Pitt, maybe Nelson, maybe Wellington.

There are people who always stand out.

So there are people, there are driving forces that sort of push history forward.

And it's the same thing in the mafia.

So in the history of the mafia, I wanted to focus on individuals who were the most, who made the most monumental impact on the mob, driving its history forward as it evolved.

And in the first book, it happened to be Lucky Luciano and Mayelanski, who were really, really an incredible pair.

Luciano, being italian, was able to get into the mob, into la Cosa nostra, which was the strongest ethnic underworld group at the time.

And Mayelanski, who was Jewish, would not necessarily have been allowed in the mob at that time.

But he was so respected by Luciano and he was such a close friend to Luciano that he became his partner in so many things.

And the genius of Lansky, he became quickly accepted by all mafia dons because he knew how to put together something and make money for everyone.

And that always holds weight in the mob.

The mob has really, at its core, they don't see color, they don't see religion, they don't see ethnicity.

Only in the sense that you have to be full fledged Italian to become part of La Cosa Nostra, part of the family that, that said, they will partner with anyone.

We took over.

We took over a club, me and my friends, in midtown Manhattan, many years ago, before I went to prison.

And the guy who owned the club before us told us, look, your best night is gay night.

Make sure you keep gay night.

The gays are very big spenders.

They don't cause problems.

They don't get into those stupid fights you're gonna have on, you know, what men and women, you know, men want to fight other men over a woman at the bar, over what she's.

You'll have a great night.

Keep gay night.

We looked at each other and said, we keep gay night.

We don't care.

So the mob maybe is portrayed now and then as well.

They don't like gays.

We really don't care.

You know, that's not to say you could be gay and be in the mobile.

That was.

That was probably the dividing line.

It's about making money, Louis.

The issue is if you make money.

Correct.

You're good.

Correct.

But the one thing that's, you know, it's interesting because we, I think at, you may know, in different places, and including in South Africa, where I'm from, we are counting criminal assassinations.

So we are counting when organized crime kills somebody, whether they're in organized crime or whether it's a journalist or outside or whatever.

And I was very, very struck in the book, and there's countless photos in here of bodies of members of the mafia who have been killed.

I mean, explain the level of violence to us, because you tell fascinating stories of people knew they were going to die.

There's a decision by the commission that somebody must die.

People are dispatched to kill somebody.

Inevitably, the hitmen are themselves killed.

I mean, it's an incredibly violent story, brilliantly told.

I must say this, the sort of underpinning of violence.

What's the purpose of the violence, in your view?

I mean, is it needed?

It's central to your story.

You know, it's always about money and power and.

Right.

Yeah, always.

And what I tried to do out, I tried to use, I used clue talk as my model for when people, Plutarch, obviously did the lives of Greeks and Romans, and what he did was he pointed out their vices and virtues, and he would point out what they did right or what they did wrong.

And I wanted to use that as sort of like a template for this book, whether it be a mobster or a mob boss, what he did right, what he did wrong, how he let himself into a trap, how he got himself killed, or how he avoided that trapden and how he was able to live.

Lucky Luciano died in an airport of a heart attack.

Why does he die in an airport of a heart attack?

When Ben Siegel is gunned down and blown, his eye is blown out of its head and plastered against a wall in California, and he dies such a horrible, tragic death.

What are the differences between these two people?

And I wanted to make sure that throughout the book and throughout this history, I always point out to the reader the mistakes or to their credit, what they did right, to either find themselves in that predicament or avoid it.

And I think that's a big thing right there.

And the other thing is why are so many people killed, as you asked?

And is it a common thread?

Does it continue?

It does.

And whenever there's money and power at stake, there's murder.

And we don't like to admit that even as members of polite society, we live in democracies.

But the government kills and the underworld.

Government kills.

Those are the only two entities that kill, really, in this world.

This is, in a way, in both cases, it's a form of regulation, is that what you're saying?

The underworld acts against people who are moving outside of its bounds, who are a danger to it, who have broken its rules.

Exactly.

If you.

If you belong to an organization that kills, you know what the stakes are.

So, you know.

Yeah, I mean, you're well aware of what the stakes are, and now you have to live within the guidelines of that organization now, have you?

I wasn't aware until I was in prison.

I was naive enough to believe before I went to prison that if you broke the rules, those are the people who died and disappeared.

I thought so.

For example, let's say, mark, you're my friend.

Mark disappears.

We hear about it the next day, and we say, well, gee, what happened to Mark?

Well, you're told, first of all, a story that's probably propaganda, and you don't realize that Mark died for a different reason.

You're told he died for something or you're not told at all, or you don't ask because you're not supposed to ask.

Why are you asking?

Are you informing?

Are you reporting to an FBI agent?

Why would you want to know?

So you might only ask close, close friends that trust you enough, but you won't go.

You won't go sit at a card game and go, hey, why did he die?

Everybody in the table will look at you, say, is he out of his mind?

You're not supposed to ask those questions.

So when I was in prison, a lot of people who I die, who I felt or understood or thought died for reasons, because they did something against the bogata, they did something against the family.

They were either about to inform, or maybe they slept with someone's wife.

They broke a cardinal rule and they had to die.

You believe that now I'm in prison.

And once I learned the law and I studied law, I reversed one of my own cases from prison after having studied law.

So a lot of people came to me and asked my legal advice.

And I would help other people file briefs.

I would help other people try to get them out of jail.

And in some cases, I was successful.

But I had a lot of indictments laid bare for me, and they were.

And as I understood it, a lot of people now, I realize, died for power or money.

And, you know, somebody might have mislabeled Mark a rat because he wanted Mark's business, he wanted Mark's rackets.

And now he kills Mark, and then he gets everything that Mark had.

And now maybe then.

Then two people, now maybe protest.

Gee, Mark was a good friend of mine.

He was never a rat.

He shouldn't have had to die.

Well, maybe we have to kill those now, too.

Yeah.

So those.

Those two just asked for it, too.

Now, you'll see a lot of that in volume three when it becomes the wild west.

But now we have to kill Mark's two friends because they're inquiring a little too much.

So that's where you learn to keep your mouth shut, too.

You don't want to be on the list, right?

This is an underworld government.

But, hey, look, volume two gets deep into the Kennedy assassination, and a lot of people who did not go with the flow were found to.

There were, like, an inordinate amount of, quote, unquote, suicides.

You know, where people are just, you know, one guy shot himself five times in the chest.

You know, how many times can you shoot yourself in the chest committing suicide?

So, you know, you don't go against the narrative.

Whether it's a government or an underworld government, there are guidelines, and you have to learn them.

One issue which is interesting, and I wonder if organized crime, at least as we're considering it, has sort of broken those boundaries.

I think it's landscape you quote somewhere, or one of the key figures who says, oh, it's Siegel.

Actually, I'm not sure.

Well, we never kill outside of the mob.

I don't know if you remember that sort of phrasing.

I mean, was that true?

Would the mob have killed a journalist in New York at the time similar to what is regularly conducted in Mexico?

Are there sort of rules that have now been shattered as organized crime has grown and the old sort of proper regulations have been broken?

Or is that all nonsense, that this is a very violent organization and will use violence against whoever opposes it?

Speaker one.

Yeah.

So for the most part, it's.

It is true.

Siegel was the person, as you remembered.

And he did say.

He said to a developer that he would.

He asked this developer to build the Flamingo Hotel and casino in Las Vegas, and the developer was leery.

He said, I'm not gonna get.

The guy was scared, right?

Yeah.

He said, I'm not gonna get myself involved with this wild gangster.

And Eagle said, don't worry about it.

We only kill each other.

And for the most part, that was true.

And even in my own day, it was still, for the most part, true.

You know, we kill each other, and we hope that the government then will leave us alone.

You know, there was a.

During the Gallo war, which I talk about in the second book.

It's volume two.

One of the judges was holding Gallo, Joey Gallo, who was part of the war that was taking place on the streets of Brooklyn, a big part of the war, an integral part of the war.

And the judge said, I don't want to let this guy go, but I really don't have a reason to hold him.

And the prosecutor said, we'll just hold him because.

Because we know he's part of the war.

We don't want to let him out.

He says, look, these guys are going to handle their business their own way, no matter what, let them do it.

And, you know, the judge was very, very pragmatic in the sense that he understood they're going to kill each other.

They're not killing citizens.

And you used to, if you accidentally did kill a citizen, you would be killed.

You know, there.

There are instances where stray bullets hit people, and that guy goes in and he's done.

You got to get rid of him.

Now, that's how it goes.

Seemingly.

How it breaks from that.

That circle is you may see once in a while, like in Chicago, that a sheriff got killed and.

Or a judge got killed, but those people have.

They've sort of, like, wandered into our world.

You don't.

You don't necessarily kill a judge because you're in front of him.

You would say that a journalist who was covering Lansky, Siegel and others would have been fair game in this era, would you think?

Well, no, no.

Most of them were never touched.

However, there was an instance where Vito Genovese was in Italy, and he sent word to one of his guys in Greenwich Village, New York, Manhattan, and told him, look, you got to kill this journalist.

He was doing it as a favor to Mussolini, but he did not seek out approval from who was in charge of the Borgada at the time, which was Frank Costello.

So Frank Costello had taken over for lucky Luciano when Luciano was deported.

Now Costello is in charge of the Borgata.

Vito Genovese is supposed to send word to Costello and say, I'm looking to hit this guy.

Costello would have knocked it down.

He would have never allowed it.

Never.

And I write that and reasons why he wouldn't have never allowed it.

He knew that it would have caused too much heat for the mob, which it did.

He would have knocked it down.

But Genovese was in Italy, and he had to ingratiate himself to Mussolini, and that was the best way to do it.

So there are times when people say, the hell with it, I'm doing it anyway.

And it happens throughout.

There's a time in volume three where Carmine Persico is in prison and Carmine Persico orders a judge to be hit, or a prosecutor, rather.

This is not supposed to happen.

Overall, it's against the rules.

It's not supposed to happen.

I also talk about somebody who killed an agent.

Never supposed to happen.

And that guy was killed in return.

In response, there was a mob guy.

I was friendly with the family.

I knew the family for many years.

They're a good family.

They're a beautiful family.

However, the guy was a little bit of a wild mandehead.

He killed someone thinking the guy was an informant.

He did not realize he was a DEA agent.

And once he killed him, the mob said, well, they were tossed about it.

He didn't know.

Some people stuck up for him and said he would have never done it intentionally.

We should keep him alive.

And then there were others who said, whether he did it intentionally or not, at the end of the day, he did it.

And the only way we're going to release the heat from us because the DEA and the FBI have not stopped with us now, is to kill him and leave the body somewhere.

Let them see that he's dead, and we'll call the heat off of our organization.

And I talk about that in volume three as well.

I get deep into it, and I knew the major players in real time.

So I was privy to a lot of stuff that happened, a lot of the conversations that took place.

And I discussed that in volume three.

But as a rule, the mob knew that.

This isn't Sicily where you could blow up judges, you could kill prosecutors over here.

The public won't stand for it.

The american public did not want that.

And I make that very clear in the beginning of Borgata volume one, where we talk about Chief Hennessy in New Orleans.

Chief Hennessy involved in the mob?

Yeah, he got involved with the mob.

He weighed in for one side, and the other guy felt pushed up against the wall and he killed Chief Hennessy, as I believe it.

As I understand it, a lot of innocent people were picked up for that murderous, the italian.

The entire italian american community in New Orleans was absolutely put through the wringer for that murder.

And the rule was you don't kill the chief of police.

And they felt though he got involved in our world, so he's fair game.

This is fascinating.

I mean, how would you, I mean, in the research community, we are studying organized crime, of course, not the mob in the circumstances you have described, but in many different places where hits are very common, individuals are killed should, and they come in spades.

Revenge, counter revenge.

I mean, how do we read that?

Is that instability in the underworld when there are no hits?

Is that a period of control by somebody?

You talk about the symbolism of violence.

You leave the body or people are killed in certain ways, which clearly is meant to send a message.

I mean, how would you look at hits from a, from a research perspective outside of the mob?

Because it's such a key part of your book and you write around it in so interesting ways, and you've explained it in very interesting ways.

You sort of explained the rules and the regulations, but fundamentally, it's violent on top of all of that, although there are sort of tram lines which control it, particularly in the us, perhaps not elsewhere.

But how would you read it in a research project on sets of violence around the criminal market?

I would say if you're seeing, if your researchers are seeing a lot of violence in a particular area or around a particular racket, that definitely is a sign of disorder.

There's something going on.

There's usually a power struggle behind the scenes.

If one person is in power, then usually once in a blue moon, that person will exhibit his strength by killing someone, even, even the most during the most peaceful times.

Usually when a boss goes to jail, I write about that.

If a boss goes to jail, there's always a hit or two on the shelf and they pull one off the shelf and they kill somebody.

The reason why they do that, and people are terrified when a boss is going to jail.

Who?

People who are on thin ice because they know the boss is sending a signal.

I still will have reached.

Just don't get out of line.

I may be in a cell.

So they will kill somebody.

Usually one or two hits happen.

When somebody big goes to jail, that happens.

This is symbolic of reach.

And these are, these are people on which there's been a long person, a may have done something wrong two years back.

The boss kills them now.

And the message is sort of, don't cross me while I'm in.

Is that, is that as simple as that?

Correct.

The boss is sending a message that, you know, he knows.

The boss knows that people are going to be starting to circle, you know, what they perceive as a caucus, right.

The boss is going to be dead.

He's going to be pretty much removed from the scene.

So the people who want power are going to look for that.

They're going to say, well, here's an opportunity.

And they're going to start to.

Machiavellian intrigues are going to start to creep up behind the scenes.

And the boss is aware of this.

So what he usually does is he sends a signal to the underworld before he goes to prison or right after he's in a cell.

And it always happens, always.

And a body will pop up.

In my time, not too long ago, I knew a man named Wild Bill Cottolo, Billy Cotolo.

And he was the underboss at some point of the Colombo family.

But the boss knew that if he goes away, he knew Billy's personality, he knew Billy's character.

He knew Billy would make a move.

And in the past, Billy did make a move.

So he knew that there was something that, you know, Billy was going to do.

So what happens?

Billy's invited somewhere, and Billy was killed.

And that's sort of like, not only is he getting rid of a threat, but he's sending a signal.

Don't.

Don't anybody get smart while I'm away.

I'm in charge.

And then there's Louis.

And I guess part of this is that.

And you recount it, at least in volume one.

I haven't read the others, but that some people know they're going to die.

I'm a dead man walking is a couple of characters say, I mean, this is, they people know they've broken the rules.

They know somehow that.

That the system will act.

Yeah, there are some people who are out and out suicidal, and you have to wonder why.

It's a character trait that people have.

By the way, just to give you an idea, I was in solitary confinement at times for a fight or something I had done on the compound, and I'm putting a hole.

And then you would hear a guy screaming and yelling nonstop.

Then he would start to flood the toilet, and then the whole entire tear block was beginning to get flooded.

And you'd say to the guy, you know, I'd yell, hey, buddy, you know the goon squad's gonna beat your brains in, right?

And he continued to go, and continue to go, hey, buddy, they're gonna be here any minute.

They're gonna beat your brains in.

And he continued to go.

And he continued to go.

And you'd say, this guy's suicidal.

And then at some point or another, the goon squad comes out and you hear them go in the cell, or if you could see it sometimes if it's across from you and they beat his brains out, I mean, they literally drag him out by his.

By his ankle.

You know, there's nothing left of the guy.

He's barely.

He's basically begged, you know, clinging to life.

And you say, my gosh, he had to know.

We're young.

We're telling him it's coming.

So that happens also in the mob where a guy, you know, just spits in the face of somebody, you know, maybe goes with somebody who's very powerful, goes with his hits on his wife or goes with his daughter and mistreats the daughter and abuses the daughter.

That happened with Castellano in volume three, where, you know, the guy's abusing the daughter, he puts his hands on the daughter.

You got to know, if you hit the don's daughter, if you punch her in the face, you're going, buddy, you got to know that.

And you know, you can't resist it.

So a lot of times, people are suicidal.

I think it's just their character where they're out of their minds.

And a lot of times, people do think that they could get away with something, and they push the boundaries.

I think that's common as well, where, you know, they're going to.

Maybe if I push the boundaries, I've always gotten away with it, so I'll push a little more.

Maybe someone steals and they steal money, and they figure, you know, I've stolen it plenty of times before.

I'm not going to get caught.

You're going to get caught.

Eventually it's going to come out.

And when they catch you, it's not going to be a misdemeanor or a felony.

It's going to be your life.

And that happens.

I'm very interested in this issue of, well, your experience, the sense of this massive, the sort of targeted killings that, as we would term them now, that take place through the book.

What's gone, maybe it's a bit of an unfair question.

What's gone wrong elsewhere in where organized crime becomes incredibly violent?

Let's take Mexico.

Disappearances, women, children, people in the criminal environment.

And you've been in, let's say, the mob is relatively regulated, organized.

What's gone wrong elsewhere?

Is this normal?

I mean, have you thought about that, reading about watching, seeing the level of violence attributed to organized crime elsewhere?

Yeah.

I mean, what are your thoughts on that?

So I think.

I think that one is there are different parties contesting for power.

So I think that's the start of it.

When you obviously, when you see murders like that, and then also, too, you see 30 heads on the side of a road in Mexico.

I mean, this cannot be tolerated.

So who has the strength or power to stop that?

Only the government.

And if the government needs help from someone else, then maybe the government isn't strong enough that they should call allies then and help them.

Look, we need help or do their best to stop it, but they don't.

So what's going on there?

It's obvious that the government's involved to some extent.

It becomes quite apparent, you know, if the consequences aren't being.

They're not being.

There are no consequences or they're lame.

The consequences.

That's your immediate understanding that somebody bigger is involved, that the government, and it might not be the government, meaning the people who are elected officials, you know, the government just.

They just got a new government in Mexico, a new president in Mexico.

She may not know the cartel people, but there are people behind the elected officials who are really the power, you know, the donors, the people who are behind it, the money.

And those people may be working to some extent with people who get away with that.

And then they are fighting Mogadia audience involved.

Because don't forget, what I established throughout is the mafia could have never gotten away with what they did without participation from the government.

And how that was handed to them, to be quite frank, was during prohibition.

During prohibition, the mafia before prohibition wasn't thought of as anything sexy or romantic, and public officials didn't want to do business with them.

Once in a while, guys were being left on the curb in New Orleans and New York and Chicago, and it was disgusting, but it was Italians killing Italians.

So we wouldn't we really care about that.

The american public let them do it at some point or another.

When they made this error by prohibiting alcohol, most Americans thought that that was ridiculous and wanted to drink.

The Irish, the Germans, the Italians, they all.

All these immigrants from different places thought that this was draconian.

How could you take alcohol away from us?

So they, the bootleggers were the mob, and the mob now needed the politicians and the law enforcement characters to allow them to run these operations.

And they didn't feel it was a big deal.

You know, the mayor, the governor, you know, the congressman, he was like, you know what?

People want to drink.

I'm drinking.

I go home and open up the liquor cabin.

As soon as I get home, there's even evidence that I think Teddy Roosevelt's daughter Alice said, everybody in Washington's going home and opening up the liquor cabinet and having a drink at night.

And they're the ones who voted for this.

You know, she pointed out how hypocritical it was.

So once the mafia established those contacts in government, in law enforcement, when prohibition was repealed, they had those contacts, just basically had their handout going.

What's next?

I've been getting 50, $60,000 a month for years now.

Is there anything else we could do for you?

Sure.

We want to open up casinos.

We want to gamble, we want to do this, we want to do that.

Okay, sounds good to me.

And we would continue, the MoF would continue then to buy those officials.

Then we have, midway through the book, we have Frank Costello running the entirety of Tammany hall, which was the politically corrupt machine in Manhattan, in New York, and putting judges on the bench.

So you have the biggest mobster in America putting judges, appointing judges to the bench.

And it's proven.

Frank Hogan, who was the prosecutor, couldn't believe when he heard that a judge called Costello and thanked him when he tapped his line.

Frank Hogan heard this and he said, gee, thanks for a point getting me appointed to that bench.

And he said, sure, we're always friends.

And then he goes to the Tammany hall people and he says, look, you know, what's going on with Frank Costello?

He's pointing people to the bench.

And the head of Tammany says, I have no idea what you're talking about.

Little did Frank Hogan know that Frank Costello put in the head of Tammany as well.

Louis, tell me, because what's.

I mean, you write brilliantly on prohibition.

The story is very well told.

And of course, with the characters coming through and the sort of business decisions they've made, as you've described now, and how that opened up space.

Tell us about Dewey, because you, in fact, as I read it, actually give him, he's pretty hardcore.

He has a real impact on the mob.

And I think you treat him very sympathetically, actually.

And in our work, I read that as well, actually, a few good men can make a real difference to an illicit market, which is violent, out of control, corrupt and the like.

I mean, what are your thoughts on that?

So Dewey, Thomas Dewey was a central figure in book one.

He was the first one to really, really launch a concentrated attack on organized crime.

And he did it.

I mean, no holds barred.

He was ruthless in his pursuit of them and it was warranted at the time.

And Dewey, though, at some point or another, Dewey, I think, realized also, too, because he lightened up on them later as governor of New York.

And so it was obvious that he was doing it as a means to hire office.

Looking back, no one knew that at the time, but he would target a central, you know, a big figure, a prominent mob figure.

Lucky Luciano, Lefty Bukolta, Dutch Schultz, and he would take them down, and he would get all of the media that went with that, because Dewey's had an eye on the White House.

And at some point or another, Dewey gets into the governor's mansion in New York, and then he starts to say, well, I'm good with the mob.

And he deports Luciano.

He's a lot easier on the mob.

People wonder, was he getting donations?

Did they donate to his campaign as governor?

But Dewey was smart enough to know that they ran Tammany hall.

So even though they would allow for a prosecution of one prominent figure, he didn't really dismantle the entire mob.

They're still in control.

They're still running Tammany hall.

And he still needs Tammany hall to become governor of New York.

So he does.

He goes on to governor.

He takes a shot at the White House.

He doesn't make it.

But basically, Dewey was as a prosecutor, that really, really first guy who attacked them, but as a politician, he had a different view of them.

And in volume two, we see that with Robert F.

Kennedy.

Robert F.

Kennedy.

The Kennedys were in bed with the mob through the father.

And the father reached out.

And he said, look, I need to carry Chicago.

Who owns Chicago?

The Chicago mob.

Sam G.

And Connor, at the time, controlled all of the major wards in Chicago, and he controlled Mayor Daley.

So at that time, you needed Chicago, then you need to make a compromise with the mob.

They did that.

And the mob thought in return, they would sort of have a hands off approach.

Sure.

Bobby Kennedy was horrible towards us during the McClellan rackets committee hearings.

He put us.

He embarrassed us.

He did everything he could to put us in jail.

But as if the Kennedys get the administration that they want, they get into the White House, it was believed they would look to bigger problems in the United States, like civil rights.

Civil rights was long overdue in the United States.

We needed a president to address that.

They would look towards nuclear proliferation.

We were having this horrible race, nuclear race with the Russians.

Somebody had to stop to put the brakes on that.

So the mob thought that the Kennedys will move on.

They were blindsided.

When Bobby did not move on, Bobby became attorney general, and he continued to go after the same mobsters who helped put John F.

Kennedy in place and that I'm laying the groundwork for volume two, which I get deep into that.

But usually what happened?

The mob's experience with Dewey Washington.

Once he gets what he wants, once he gets the publicity he wants, he moves on.

Senator Estes Kefalva.

Estes Kefalva ran the Kefalva committee, which attacked the mob across the United States.

But by the way, he avoided his own state, his own home state.

He didn't go near his own home state.

So there's always a little politics involved.

But when SD Scafalva got his presidential nomination, he wanted to be the president.

He was nominated.

He won the democratic primary.

Uh, he beat John F.

Kennedy at that point.

I think it was in 56 or 58 or 56.

I'm sorry, 56.

And then he moved on.

Estes Kefalva no longer wanted to chase mobsters.

He wrote his little book.

He got his book deal, and he moved on.

So the mob figured, okay, if they come after us for political reasons and they get what they want, they move on.

And they believed the Kennedys would do the same thing.

The unfortunate thing was that they didn't.

Part of the reason was that the father who made a lot of the underworld deals with the mob, he suffered a massive stroke, and he was incapacitated.

And at some point or another, the Kennedys, who always, the Kennedy children, who always listened to the father, the patriarch, they didn't have the patriarch telling them, hey, you owe some favors through me and back off.

They no longer had that.

And I think that was a key part of their downfall, really.

The story you've told now, these big historical sketches, is there enough written on the influence of the mob on politics historically?

Now, is this a sort of.

Do we have the story right?

You're quite.

You're quite critical of scholars, broadly.

Is the.

The term you use or people have written on organized crime in the book with some, again, quite funny and well crafted side comments.

Do we know the full story?

Will we ever know the full story?

Do we need to know the story?

Is that your purpose in writing the three volumes?

It's not my purpose, but I can't avoid it.

So it's basically, there are relationships.

The mafia today is no longer.

It's a mere shell of what it once was.

And the reason being is that they don't have judges.

They don't have politicians in their pocket anymore.

It's very difficult to bribe a judge.

When a judge makes a quarter of a million dollars a year with all kinds of benefits and he goes to galas and he's the most respected man in the community, what is he going to get by taking $50,000 from a mobster?

He's not going to throw a case anymore.

You're not going to get that.

Do you have judges who are in bed with corporations?

Maybe there are some judges who should have recused themselves from major corporate cases and they have stocks in the corporations.

Seems maybe that they've moved on, you know, but, but no one wants dirty money from a mobster anymore.

Far as police, you have a, you have a policeman who maybe is a local policeman, and you used to be able to give him, you know, a couple hundred bucks here and there, and he was in your pocket.

He'd turn away when he saw a gambling, you know, a casino, under an illegal casino, he wouldn't really care.

He maybe even come in and gamble a little.

And, you know, everybody knew him back in the day.

Now the cop says, yeah, I make, you know, $70,000 a year with all kinds of benefits.

I got an excellent pension.

I got, I'm not throwing it away.

I got medical, you know.

So things in society have gotten better in the United States, where it's much more difficult to bribe somebody.

I mean, what was the turning point?

Because at the end of volume one, I really look forward to reading volume two and three.

But at the end of volume one, you sense the mobs decline, right?

It's there.

These key figures have been, it's partly due to state action, but it's also due to the mob killing each other.

As you end volume one, what's the turning point?

Does that come in volume two?

What's this big social change?

When does this occur?

The turning point is volume two, and that's why it's clash of titans.

It's a clash between the biggest people internally in the mobile, and also between the mob and the overworld.

And this is, I feel like it's a microcosm of any empire.

Empire's rise and fall.

And if you study the rise and fall of empires, whether it's the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Carthaginians, the Romans, you'll always see.

You'll see a period of growth and evolution.

As Arnold Toynbee brilliantly pointed out, there are always crises that have to be met, and then a small group of people will usually meet those crises.

Head on to continue the growth of that civilization and that civilization.

Obviously, Toynbee is talking about not empire, but there are parallels to be drawn.

And then at some point or another, you reach a point where the growth is, they've reached maturity.

And what happens when you've reached maturity is then there's conflict.

More conflict than ever.

Sure, there's been conflict in the past, but now the conflict is internal.

And now, you know, in the United States.

Look at us.

We've been a great empire for a long time.

We don't like to admit we're an empire, but we are an empire.

I mean, we certainly are.

We meet the definition of empire, and now we're in conflict.

We can't get two parties to agree on anything.

We're at each other's throats in the United States.

I see it objectively because I see it as an historian.

I try to view it without ideological, you know, an ideological horse in the race.

I see it as someone standing back.

And I see it as the natural degeneracy now of empire.

We've reached a part where the dollar is printed.

We're printing dollars without anything backing it.

The economy isn't what it once was.

A lot of people are suffering, and there's nothing that people, they wish that the government could do something about it to curtail it.

But really, there isn't anything either party could do about it.

We've reached a point where we're at each other's throats.

Now.

That will happen in volume two in the mob.

If we imagine the mob, which I have done as an empire, they've had their growth and maturity.

Now they've reached their peak.

They've expanded as far as they could expand.

And now what happens?

They fight to.

They kill each other, and then it starts to contract.

And that will happen.

I think it's a period the United States is going through right now as we speak.

Believe it or not, I think the british empire did it as best they can.

When they retracted, they followed it followed world War two.

When the Brits were told by FDR, you can't be colonialists anymore.

You got to stop this stuff.

You know, Churchill.

Churchill, who I love, by the way.

I'm a fan of Churchill.

But Churchill was for colonialism to a certain extent.

And they said they realized they had to retract from that, that idea of colonialism.

They couldn't continue, and they did it as peacefully and gracefully as possible.

But usually it's not that peaceful.

And the mob will be in volume two.

You'll see the clash of titans, as I call it.

And in volume three, you'll see everyone is at each other's throats and what they're basically doing.

Sir Arthur Helps, who wrote a brilliant four volume history of the spanish conquest of the Americas.

He wrote in one of his introductions something to the effect that after the animals of the jungle have killed the carcass, what's left is them to fight with each other over the remains of the caucus.

And that's where we are in volume three, in the mob, the caucus.

It's the rancid caucus of empire that's left, and they're all killing each other over what's left.

And it so happens that that's when I was part of the mob.

I saw a lot of it firsthand.

I was much lower in rank, but I was friendly with the people at the top.

So I was definitely sort of like a fly on the wall for some great conversations, and I saw things unfolding in front of me.

And then when I went to prison, I was away with a lot of the people who talked openly about things that happened.

And it was, once again, I was put in a perfect place for the person who could not only write volume three as a historian, but someone who was there and saw it with my eyes and heard it with my ears.

But I think it's a natural.

It's the natural life of empires.

And it happens whether it's in the geopolitical world or it happens in the mafia, which I sort of portrayed and which has been called by Life magazine, Time magazine, it's been called an empire by others.

It's not just me that I pulled that out of thin air, but it really could be considered an empire in America.

Louis, thank you very much.

The life and times of the mafia, the american mafia, the three volumes, this huge piece of work.

We look forward to reading volume two and volume three.

Thank you very much for the discussion and the back and forth and the very candid views, Louis, both about your own personal time and struggles and then this rejuvenation yourself through books, interestingly enough, and then writing your own books.

We are really appreciative.

You'll see.

You'll find a link to Louise's book at the bottom.

Summary Bogota, rise of empire, a history of the American Mafia in the video summary below.

And for more research about organized crime, head over to our website@globalinitiative.net, dot rui thank you very much for being part of the discussion today.

Thank you for having me, Mark, and thank you for the work that you and your organization does greatly.

Appreciate it.

Keep up the good work.

Yeah.

Tip my hat to you guys.