Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - How Do You Live Decently In An Indecent World with Don Winslow

Episode Date: April 27, 2023

International bestselling crime writer Don Winslow joins Anthony to discuss his brand-new book and his penultimate, City of Dreams. Rhode Island and Long Island; Italian and Irish; Mob stories and the Classics. Anthony and Don reveal everything and more in this conversation, including how Don Winslow was way far ahead of Anthony on who Donald Trump really is.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is open. open book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe, wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know I can roll with the punches, so let me No. Anyways, let's get to it.

If you haven't read one of Don Winslow's novels yet, stop what you're doing and order one right now. I'm a huge fan of Don's, and I can assure you they are all unput-downable. In his latest bestseller, City of Dreams, he combines two of my favorite things, the classics and Italians. You could also say I Italians, whatever suits your fancy, but I say Italians. Okay, the Irish are in there too, and I love them as well, but you know I'm partial to the Italians.

And perhaps maybe Don Winslow is too. We'll have to find out, although Don himself is of Irish heritage. All jokes aside, Don is a master of his craft. And I was honored to speak with him on today's show. He's also particularly outspoken against Trump, something we've clashed about in the past. But Don was right all along, and we need to put an end to the Trump story.

Joining us now on Open Book is Don Winslow, who is an international bestsell. author and is writing a new crime trilogy, which is absolutely fabulous. The second book is out last week, City of Dreams. It is the sequel to City on Fire, but previous bestsellers include the border, the cartel, savages. Don, a long time ago, I met you at one of those premieres. Oliver Son had invited me. I took my daughter with me. It was a pretty intense movie. My daughter was yelling at me. It was probably 17 at the time. She got mad at me. But you don't need an introduction. You've written over 25 novels. You've won't.

pretty much every award. You're also a former safari guide and a private investigator. So you've had this amazing life experience. How did you transition all of this into becoming a novelist, sir? You know, Anthony, I've always wanted to be a novelist since I was about six years old, but it took the world a while to agree with that assessment, you know, and nobody stamps your passport to become a writer. So I just did a lot of other things that you alluded to, but all the time writing, trying to keep it up. My goal was to write five pages a day no matter what. I wrote on buses, trains, tents, Buddhist monasteries in China when I was leading hiking trips up there all over the place. I finally had a book. The first 15 publishers disagreed, but finally the 16th hit me and I was on my

way. So, first of all, you know, I love your writing styles. I want to talk a little bit about that before we get into the specific book. You tap into a vein of human emotion and understand. standing about how human beings actually are. You know, we present ourselves to the world a certain way in the terms of the way we would like people to see us, but there's a seamliness to all of us. I mean, let's just face it, there's truth to all of that. There's a carnal nature to all of us. Why are you so good at that?

What is your gift, sir? Well, again, thanks. I don't know that I have a gift, you know? I think I've worked at it. I spent 15 years on and off as a private investigator working all kinds of cases from arson cases through homicide, fraud, child sexual abuse. You get to know the, if you will, the darker side of people in that regard. You get to know that most people are neither all good or all bad, but, you know, the famous shades of gray. The way I view my job is to bring the reader into

worlds he or she couldn't otherwise enter. And the way that I try to do that is to see it through those person's eyes, through the character's eyes. You know, and that requires not object But subjectivity, but subjectivity. I'm not trying to be objective when I'm writing a character. I'm trying to portray their point of view. However distasteful at times, we might find that. And I appreciate it. And it's one of the reasons why I love reading your books. So you've been working on this trilogy for 28 years. Take us back to the initial inspiration. You know, the funny part about this is a year ago, I was steeped in the Iliad and the Odyssey. And the reason was one of my kids was, um, insolite. school and they were reading it. I was a classic minor at Tufts. So I had read the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Orstedia, the all the plays of Sophocles, the, you know, Clytemestra. I know what happened to Agamemnon's daughter at Ephigenia. You know, I can take you through all that stuff because it was my studenthood at Tufts. Yeah. But when I was reading your book, I said, okay, I've got to figure out

who is who in the book. Okay, figured out quickly that Danny was Aeneas and obviously Liam was Paris. we can go through the different characters, but why? What caused you to use the Homeric epic poem as the subtext for this? Yeah, unlike you, it was not my minor or my major in college. I majored in all things African history, so I had this very kind of narrow education. Later in life, though, I decided to try to educate myself and go to the classics, and I, you know, early on, obviously you hit the Iliad and the Odyssey. It struck me so forcefully. Anthony, the similarities between incidents in those classics and real-life crime incidents that I grew up with growing up in Rhode Island. And so I started to wonder, you know, could I write a trilogy that would stand

alone as a crime saga, you know, that you could read without any reference of the classics at all, but at the same time that tracked the stories and the characters and the themes of those great classics, because I was so fascinated with them. You mentioned the Orstea. That's a noir plot. If you just look at it, you put a trumpet behind that and put it in black and white. You know, you've got a noir movie. Guy comes home from the war. His wife blames him for their daughter's death, as you alluded to.

They kill him in the bathtub. She and her lover. You know, the son comes home and kills them in revenge. Absolutely noir. And so that launched this 28-year Odyssey, no pun intended, to try to accomplish that. You know, I'm obviously, I mean, I did the DNA test. I'm 87% Southern Italian. And apparently I'm about 13% Greek. Of course, my mother says that has to be from your father's side. But, you know, this area that you're talking about is laden with Irish and Italian immigrants. The underworld is in Rhode Island. There's a major underworld in Boston and New York and, you know, some parts of Philly. But Rhode Island really has a undercurrent of the undercurrent of the world. You grew up with this. So how much of this is based on your real life experience? You know, experience would be, would be an exaggeration, I think. You know, I was a kid. I grew up around it.

I knew some of these guys. They were always around. You know, Rhode Island, as you know, is about the size of a Walmart parking lot. And, you know, I've always thought that the state motto should be, I know a guy, you know. You wrote that. I think, I think that city on fire, I think you put I know a guy in there, which made me laugh because we all know a guy from the neighborhood I grew up in. Right, exactly. So, you know, it was always around. Listen, I mean, we're not Italian, but I grew up in an Irish Italian neighborhood. My parents used to joke. We were the only family, you know, in five blocks. It didn't have a vowel at the beginning or the ends of the thing. And so I was very familiar with the culture, you know, and loved it, loved both of those cultures.

And so Danny, Ryan, the protagonist of this look, I've known the likes of Danny my whole life. And I played hockey with them, you know, surfed, went to the beach, went to the bars. So this was really familiar to me. You know, the beginning of the book captures everybody's imagination. The first sentence is, Danny Ryan watches the woman come out of the water like a vision emerging from his dreams of the sea. That's in City of Fire, of course. That's the first book. And this is the precursor to City of Dreams, which we'll get to.

But that is, he's describing Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world. And, of course, she has her misfiring, Helen, the famous Helen. She leaves with Paris. She breaks off with her husband, Anelaus, the brother of the king of Greece, of at least the Federation of Kingdoms. And she leaves for Troy. And so this is sort of the mix-up that happens. The Italians think she's dating one of the Italian princes, mafia princes.

But she ends up with Liam, who's pretty self-centered, like our famous Paris from years ago. So let's talk a little bit about this. Danny wants an ordinary life, but he's not allowed to have one, is he? No. No, and that's all he wants. You know, Danny's a pretty normal guy, and he just wants normal, but he wasn't born into that. You know, his mom abandons him when he was two weeks old. By the way, the same as Aphrodite abandoned him is. He's left with his very alcoholic and distant father. His extended family is this Irish crime family, but all he wants is his wife and his kid in a home somewhere. But, you know, the conflict between the two mobs takes over. He ends up being a soldier and then eventually not to get too much away a leader in a losing war.

Yeah, you write about him. And, again, I don't want to give away the plot because it's just so enjoyable. But I want to talk more generally about life. We're planning our lives, Don, and then other things happen to us, right? We're expecting something to happen. And then we get punched in the face is like Mike Tyson says or you're making plans, God's laughing. Your book is really about this. Isn't it, isn't the Iliad, when you think about the guidebook that the Iliad is

or the guidebook that City on Fire or City of Dreams happens to be, it's about unplanned lives and your reaction to that. Is that fair to say? Is that true for all of us? Yeah, I think it's true for all of us. I think it's absolutely fair to say that the first person actually was picked up on that that I've talked to about these books. You know, as were Greek and Roman literature, largely about fate, largely about our, our

arguments, if you will, with the gods, you know, and what happens to us in our life and how we literally, in those classics, get blown from place to place, you know, with no control. I always think about this, you know, when we're making prognostications on politics or the future or even sports, we always kind of think we know what's going to happen based on what has happened. Right. And then something just comes out of the sky, you know, whether it's COVID or whatever and changes everything. And that's certainly what happens to Danny. You know, he's laying on that beach. It's a beach I grew up on. That first sentence, by the way, hasn't changed in 28 years. And he sees this woman come out of the water. And he sort of unconsciously knows nothing's ever

going to be the same. Right. There you go. And that's how our lives go. Certainly that happened to us with COVID. The Godfather, the Sopranos, good fellows. It's hard to make a gangster story fresh these days. You know, you also, I went back and looked at some of your interviews. I think you were one of the journalist compared to the Godfather to Henry the Fourth, which is Shakespearean play. And so I actually did not catch that. And I've read The Godfather five times. I've read The Godfather five times. I've got to go back and read Henry the fourth. And of course, it's right there. All of the hidden totems are in there. You also said that there's about 12 or so storylines that we have in life that we have a tendency to remanufacture. So how did you make this

so fresh and so compelling given that? And again, thank you. That's why it took 20 years, you know, Because I kept failing at it, Anthony. You know, I doubted my ability to do it for a long time. And for a long time, I was right about that, you know, because I wasn't getting it done. The issue was trying to figure out what are the contemporary, what are the modern equivalents of these ancient events. You can't have a Trojan horse being pulled into Providence. I don't know who Aphrodite and Greek goddess would be in Providence, Rhode Island in 1988. And so it was a matter of trying to find the very modern and very human aspects of those stories to try to make it fresh. I had a test. I would reread a chapter after I thought it was finished. And if you could read it with no reference to the classics at all, then it passed and I put it in the book. But if I couldn't, if I thought, ah, this does not make sense without reference to the Iliad or the Odyssey, then it had to be rewritten. All right. So I'm going to test myself here with the very famous Don Winslow, okay, Sal in the book is Achilles.

Yep. Pat is Hector. Yes. Okay. Danny is Aeneas. Yes. Liam is Paris. Yes. Okay. Who is Odysseus in this book? Chris Palumbo.

Okay. There you go. Okay. I think you've figured out that I'm an aficionado of the classics and I've read all of these. Apparently. And it's, you know, it's important. Like I teach my kids. I forced my son who absolutely hated me for it. I forced him to take a course on Dante, Dante Alleghen. I forced him to read all three books.

And there was a professor at Tufts. He was a very famous professor. He went to Tufts after me. I said, you've got to take this course. And he hated me for it. And he's now about 10 years out of school. And I was in his apartment, and he had the inferno open. Oh, my gosh.

And he had it earmarked. And I said, what is this? He says, well, I'm going back into the inferno because of Dante's description of human beings and what human beings are actually really like and what the layers are of the human beings. You know, you mentioned Dante in book one, the seventh circle of hell. You had that spot for certain people. Of course, we know the ninth circle is where Judas and Brutus lived, the betrayer of the state and God. They live on that frozen lake. If I'm going to ask you, this is a little bit of a weird question, but I'm thinking about this is a release of Don Winslow,

you are doing something, at least I think, one of your legacies will be, you're a great storyteller, but I think there's something else here. Your legacy is you're taking these stories and you're making them contemporary, and there's a message in these stories. I think I know what the message is, but I want to hear the message from you. It is about the unplanned life. It is about fate, but there's something else going on. So what is it, Doc? I think it's about sin, if you will. You still believe in that concept and the possibility of redemption. I think, you know, listen, I was raised Catholic, sort of the Irish branch of that. I think that, you know, however you feel about that later in life, you never leave it, really. Well, you know what the Italians say about the Irish, right?

I mean, they took the Catholicism way more seriously. I mean, when we were kids growing up, you guys were doing everything, you know. Yeah. We were half faking it most of the time, you know? Right. Well, you know what I said about the Irish looking forward to our next defeat. Yeah, you said that. I think that was in book one as well. Yeah, but, you know, but I think that there's always that thought about what have I done, should I have done it? And if I did it and it was wrong,

can I ever come back? You know, can you find forgiveness? But I think that the major question of crime fiction and maybe the major question in my fiction, without getting too heavy about this, is the question, how do you live decently in an indecent world? Yeah, exactly. I mean, and ultimately, where are your morals or if they're not coming from God, is there something internally about yourself that's going to allow you to have certain morals? Right. And can you navigate that world that often, you know, is not always that easy of black and white and what's right or wrong? Yeah, no question. So I have a lot of young listeners,

and so hopefully we'll get a group of young listeners introduced to your books and not only these two, but others, but, you know, for the young listeners, the Aeneid is an interesting book because Augustus, didn't like the idea that the Greeks had these two wonderful tomes, the Iliad and the Odyssey, several thousand years old. And so he went to Virgil, who was his poet laureate, if you will. He was really the government's poet. He was always pissed at Ovid. If you remember the acts of love, he banished Ovid. He didn't like the immorality in the acts of love or the metamorphosis. But he liked Virgil. I mean, he had ups and downs with Virgil. And he said, you have to create a epic about Rome.

And so he tied it back to Troy. And so I have to ask you this question because when I read the Iliad, the Trojans seem more valorous than the Greeks. The Trojans, particularly Hector, has more of a moral integrity to his personality. You know, there's a scene in your book where I guess the Hector figure is Pat, his kid is frightened of him. It's very famous in the Iliad as well. From the Iliad, yes. But I guess the question I have for you related to this. is, is there a tome for America? We know now there's a tone for the Greek civilization. There's a

to tomb for the Roman civilization. If you said it's a thousand years from now, Don, and somebody was looking back at the American era, is there a piece of literature that you could look to and say, well, that's going to get to the pantheon of the Iliad the Odyssey or the Aeneid? I don't know if there is an epic. I think if we look at a trilogy by John Dos Passos, the 49th parallel and the two books that surround it might be the closest to that. Yeah, it's interesting, yeah. I think in terms of sort of larger history of a certain era, if I were to look at certain American authors that I think best describe in a way our history and culture, it would be the late Jim Harrison. Sure.

And I think one of the most underrated novels ever, The Road Home, and also the maybe the collective writings of Richard Russo. Sure. Who I think's written, you know, about a certain aspect of America, the sort of northeast small town, you know. But I think those would be my... Did you ever read Winesburg, Ohio? Of course, sure. Yeah. And a lot of people would, I think, talk about Philip Roth.

Yep. But for me, I think that Dos Passos and Rousseau and Harrison really stand. out. But in terms of a fictional work that would be analogous to the Iliad or the Odyssey or the Aeneid, I don't think that there is one. And I think there was something about epic poetry that's so particular and so specific. And as you alluded to, I mean, the Aeneid was basically written for political purposes. Yes. You know, to justify the Augustine reign. Yeah. And certainly did that. Yeah, but it's interesting, you know, because Virgil in his off-writing some of the Aeneid, why did he pick Troy? Again, one he felt was valorous, the other one was being driven by ego, Achilles, Agamemnon, the rivalry, the wrath of Achilles, ultimately him not fighting. I don't want to give away too much of this book, but this book, the second book is equally phenomenal because he's now your protagonist, who is Danny, he's now transforming. There's some tragedy that he's had to face in his life. He's had the crimes and the situation that happened to him in Providence. And now he's seeking this.

an escape. The same way Aeneas was running through the tunnels at Troy as the Troy was burning. And of course, it was Aeneas himself that had to explain to everybody what happened at Troy with the Trojan horse, how they got full. It was never in the Iliad. Thank you for saying that. Thank you. No one knows that. Yes, thanks. Yeah, you see that? I just, it's not just the hair in the face, Winslow. I actually have read a lot of bullshit in my life. You see that? You know the stuff inside and out. Everyone thinks it's in the Ilya and it's not. No.

It's Aeneas talking to Dido and he says, sorrow, unspeakable sorrow, you ask me to bring to life once more, my queen. So here he is. This is a righteous. He is a moral guy that has done immoral things, your protagonist, but he's primarily righteous and he's in search of something. What is he searching for in City of Dreams without giving up the plot? A place to put his feet, you know, a place to finally put his feet. He's got a senile father. He needs to take care of.

He has an infant son that he needs to take care of. And so his dream is as modest as it is impossible. He wants a normal life. He wants some security for those two people in his life. And that's what he's looking for. Yeah. And he accidentally finds love. So it's an amazing story.

It's one that you can't stop reading. America loves a criminal, Don. That's my reaction to America. I want to get your reaction. You're a crime writer. There are so many different criminals. Why does America love a rogue, love a criminal? Listen, we are famously a country of people who fled from other places for a variety of reasons, whether it was economic or legal or religious.

So I think in America there's always been an affinity toward the rebel soul. You know, that's certainly true of the Irish. I think it's probably also true of the Southern Italians as well. And so, you know, a big part of our culture, at least from the Anglo perspective, comes from the Robin Hood stories and then cowboys and all of that. I also think that there's a wishful film that we all have. You know what I mean? You've got a big problem. Be nice to go to some guy with a white cat on his lap and have him take care of it.

You know, you want to get that ticket fixed. There's the noisy neighbors. Sometimes there's, you know, far more serious problems that, thank God, most of us don't. take those solutions, but I think there's a wish fulfillment, you know, and there's a part of us, let's be honest, that would like to. And so I think that reading about people who do it is on some level attractive. I also think that crime fiction talks about humanity in extremists. It's so often about life and death. It's so often about serious issues of right and wrong that I think people find compelling. It's interesting. You know, I, you know, it would be remiss to me not to talk about

the former president. I think that you and I had one point had our signals crossed, but I think you finally got my vibe. I was trying to help him, and I did make a mistake, which I have apologized the American public for. We, through cognitive dissidents, we let too many things go, but at least I have been man enough to admit that and apologize for them. You know, many, many of my peers, which would include Pompeo or Nikki Haley or any of these other acolytes have not been only, they will not admit the mistake that was made. I guess the question I have for you because you're a crime writer, you know, Trump is a fully frontal criminal. I mean, just, there's, there's no question about it. I saw it up close and personal. But yet, there's an appeal to a very large group of people,

despite what the prima facie evidence is in front of them, Don. So what your life experience as a crime writer, your life experience in the world, politics, family, what is that? Why is that? I think you're talking about a group of people who are afraid, afraid of the future, afraid of what they're seeing. It comes out in their language, you know, replacement theory. You will not replace us. And they're frightened. And I think frightened people search for simple solutions. And Trump is a master of the elevator pitch.

He's a master of those one-line simple solutions, almost all of which are horrendous and evil lies. Yeah. But I think that people who feel confused, feel that they're left behind. Some of them I have some sympathy for a lot. I don't, by the way, that, you know, that that's tremendously appealing. And in times of uncertainty, people look for that strong man. So despite my trials and tribulations with him, I'm embarrassed to admit it to you, but I'm going to admit it to you. Because I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood not too dissimilar from the areas that you're describing in Rhode Island.

There were Irish and blacks and Italians. my dad was a crane operator. I would say by and large, my family is pro-Trump. Despite my explanation of him, his mendacity, his criminality, what he's like as a human being, they're pro-Trump. Because of that fear that you're talking about. We went from working-class economic aspiration in our country to working-class economic desperation. Exactly. And a result of which is a very large group of people that feel that he represents them, even though he's not offering a policy solution, at least he's providing a finger in the eye of the establishment. He's a metaphor for their anger.

He's acknowledging them in the ways that the Democratic Party has failed to do in a large part. But used to, though. Those people voted for Lyndon Johnson. They voted for FDR, those people. Exactly. You know, I mean, I grew up in the same way. And my mom had a Kennedy button, you know, on my shirt when I was six years old. And you'd walk around the neighborhood making up poems about Kennedy and Nixon.

I grew up in exactly the same way. Now, you know, I live half the year in Rhode Island and half the year in the rural area outside of San Diego. 76% voted Republican in my little town. Now, my neighbor across the fence, old Wayne, old cowboy, you know, he and I would have our discussions about Trump. He phoned me up two weeks ago and said, I'm done with him. I mean, out of the blue. Yeah, that's starting to happen. You know, even my buddy, Sean Hannity.

I grew up with Sean. Did you really? Yeah, it's finally admitted to me that he went overboard with Trump. And then he, quote unquote, is starting to see things more consistent with the way I see them. I think that's as much as you're going to get out of, Sean. But you have any political ambitions yourself? I'm assuming not, right? No, no.

I had to ask that only because you have such a good touch for certain things that are going on. I appreciate that. But no, none whatsoever. My podcast is famous for our five words. I'm going to read you these five words. Okay. And then you'll react to them, okay? You'll give me your reaction, okay?

You can be short and sweet or long if you like. Let's talk about tragedy, Don. Tragedy always has to do with the tragic flaw. Do you know, classically that an individual has one weakness that brings him down, you know, symbolized by the Achilles here. I have this feeling that very, very, Very often our greatest strength is simultaneously our greatest weakness, that our tragic flaw is also in some ways our heroic strength.

It's interesting. You know, what about the universality of tragedy, meaning that as members of the human race, our humanity itself is tragic. You know, this life is really on the road to dying. Right. And the source is a result of which we all, we all know where we're going. I mean, Mel Brooks has a funny line, you know, relaxed, none of us are getting out of here alive. But the truth of the matter, this mortality weighs on us.

Could it, and obviously it influences our behavior, right? Sure. Listen, I think I know now in ways I didn't used to that I have more days behind me than I have ahead of me. This never ends well. So for me, the point is, you know, I mean, that's a cliche, is to live every day, less and less to get too concerned about the small stuff. Right. I don't know. Exactly.

Listen, I mean, let me go to word number two. You're ready to love? I think love is an attitude. You know, I don't, listen, I fell in love at first sight, Anthony, with my wife and. Yeah, I've seen, I've seen you on social media. You guys are together 38 years, right? 38 years. Congratulations.

Yeah. Thank you. Now, she wasn't instantly in love with me. I hastened to add that took a while, you know. But for me, you know, you grow on people. You wear them down, Don. What can I tell you, right? You grow on them.

Right. Well, that's my thing. I'm a toe fungus. Now that I'm in your life, it's going to be very hard for you to get me out of your life despite your, you know, whatever you paint on your toe, you're still stuck with me. You have to come up to Rhode Island. We'll hang out. I would, I would really enjoy that, by the way. I think. You know, I would enjoy that because. I would enjoy that too. We'll talk about the classics. That'd be great. Yeah, no, I, you know, they're lining my wall here, these, these books. I mean, they were a big part of my life, you know, because my family, we weren't readers in my hands. house. And so in order to get the education, I had to force myself through good discipline to start

reading. And so, and then I said, all right, there's 5,000 years of very smart people that are, some of it the Catholic Church burnt up, frankly, but a lot of it is still remaining. I mean, I think there's only six or seven oesophically's plays. I think he may have written 35 to 50 of them for all we know. Six or seven survived. You know, during this process, I would take online college courses. Yeah. About all of these works, which were, you know, what about, what about Elizabeth Van Diver? Exactly. Yes, I took Elizabeth's courses. Okay. Each of those, each of those works, enormously useful. You're, you know, you're, you're reading and listening to the same things that I listen to. I mean, I'll give you a funny part of that. So one of my classmates at Harvard Law School,

we were studying for the bar exam, and we got these tapes, and the tapes were on tour. And the tapes were on torts or contracts and you'd put them into your little Sony Walkman and you would study. And he turned to me and said, you know, somebody should really do this for the great professors in the universities. And so when he graduated from law school, he built something called the great courses. Get out of town. I'm an addict on those. Yeah. So he is, and now, you know, he's got this web, this web app called OneDream. I was listening to it before I got on this interview. Yeah, so I'm a big subscriber to OneDream as well.

But Elizabeth Van Diver, another person I'd recommend to you if you haven't listened to him is Rufus Fears. The great heroes of Greece and the great heroes of Rome, the rest of Rufus Fears is extraordinary. All right, three more words, sir, then I'm going to get you out of you. Are you ready? Conflict. The essence of crime fiction, the essence of all fiction, no conflict, no story. Corruption. An American way of life.

But really a way of human life, no? Absolutely. And listen, I think we can get very, you know, sanctimonious about corruption. Right. But let's be aware that there's a certain kind of corruption that has made the world run, and in some cases made it run better than it was. So one of my made friends said to me that American corruption is when you actually bribe the person and they do the thing for you. He says the Chinese corruption is you bribe the person

and they don't do it for you. Okay. And he says, you know, ultimately, if we start having corruption that doesn't work, it's going to be more damaging to the society. Anyway, it's a very cynical view. But my last word for you, which is you understand about as well as anybody, is the word crime. You know, crime is a fungible concept. You know, we have a certain kind of crime, but then there's sort of massive economic crimes that are committed against entire classes of people. And our concept of crime changes all the time. So you have people in prison now serving time for offenses, I guess air quoting on the podcast doesn't work, offenses that are no longer crimes. Right. You know, so when we say crime, it's not like that's carved in marble.

It used to be a crime to run numbers in the neighborhood, right? You probably remember. of those people. Well, they still exist, believe it or not. There's still, sure. There's still cash-only restaurants where I live because of that, right? Of course. They're laundering their offenses. They're laundering their offenses, Don, okay?

But Shaw said, you know, any crime society can't control, they turn into a virtue. Yeah. And so now we have, you know, the lottery. Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. I mean, quote unquote, helping the education system, right? Right. Before I let you go, let's talk about T.J. Newman, who is.

a mente of yours. She's written two phenomenal books, and I've got her coming up on my podcast. So I'd like you to tell us a little bit about her, and then I'd like you to come up with a question that I need to ask her, that of course I wouldn't be able to ask her if I didn't know Don Winslow. Let me see if I can do that. First, let me describe T.J. I mean, she was a flight attendant for many years trying to get published unsuccessfully. She's a terrific writer. An extraordinarily nice person, smart person, funny person. Listen, Teage never needed my help learning how to write. Let me be very clear about that. Okay. What Teage needed, I call it Teach, T.J. What she needed was a little help on the business side, you know, and so basically, you know, my job was putting her and my agent,

our agent, Shane Salernar, and her together. Shane also wrote, like, is a playlist screenwriter in his own, you know, write, wrote little books, little movies rather, like Armageddon. And then all the sequels to Avatar and that kind of thing. And then Shane got her the right kind of publication and the right kind of deals. What you might want to ask, depending on how you're feeling in your podcast on that particular day, is asked TJ for her grossest airline flight attendant story. Okay, well, you know I'm going to be asking that, okay? The grossest.

The grossest moment she experienced on an airplane and then sit back. All right. See, this is value added from Don Winslow. Yeah, come on. You've got another book coming out. The final book in the Danny Ryan trilogy, City and Ruins, is coming out in 2024. Yep. Anything else you're thinking about publishing? No. All right. I'm retiring, you know, to focus on some of the issues that we were discussing. And I think you've got Elvis Presley coming up, right? He's going to be the protagonist.

Yes, yes, Austin Butler. Incredible Austin Butler. And I've got a TV series coming out that's based on my three big fat drug books called The Border on FX. I just watched the pilot yesterday. Oh, yeah, no, I read The Border. I was a great airline. I was talking about an airline read. Savage's and the Border, I think I picked those up in the airports as I was traveling around.

Good for you because I was told for, you know, 25 years that I was not an airport author. Yeah, no, they're in the airports. And I took it. So this book, City of Dreams, is a fantastic novel. There's a write of passage in this book. It's a journey. But I think the most compelling thing about your writing is that you identify what people are really like. You know, I had Robert Green on a few months back on the laws of human nature, the 48 laws of power. And we pretend that we're somebody that we're actually not. There's this, what had Herman Hesse once said, there's an abraxas in our personalities. There's a good and an evil like he wrote in the story, Damien. And it's a, it's a, It's the best among us can control the evil parts and excel at the good parts, which, of course, you do a great job of, Mr. Winslow. Thank you very much for joining us on Open Book.

Thank you for having me. Listen, I've really enjoyed this. What a writing career Don has had, prolific writer, 25 books, all of which have gone on to be bestsellers, these latest two books, New York Times bestsellers. Maybe I got a little too excited this week in referencing the classics. Some people get mad at me because I think I'm patting myself. the back for being like a know it all smarty pants. It's not that. I just have this insatiable intellectual curiosity. And I think the message that Don Winslow was conveying through the classics is that our lives

are molded by ourselves, but also by fate. And there's many things that are happening in our lives that we can anticipate, whether it's an illness, an untimely death, a piece of good fortune. So many different things happen to us in life that we don't control. And what's so masterful about Don stories is not only is he explaining how people react to these unexpected consequences, but what is really behind the facade of most people? What are human beings really like? Of course, this is why I brought up Robert Green in this podcast, because Don, you could see right away as an aficionado of Robert Green as well. We have a lot of nonfiction books on here, but I believe reading fiction is just as important because it's the fiction writers that are the best psychologists, the best sociologists,

The fiction writers explain the quiet part of the mind, the stuff that you're thinking but afraid to say, the stuff that you want to act upon, but perhaps there's biases in your personality or social controls that prevent you from doing it. But yet in a murder mystery or a crime drama, you see that unfold in a real human way and explained by somebody as brilliant as Don Winslow. So amazing story. Pick up a copy of City on Fire and City of Dreams. These two books are, uh, sensational, and you'll read them very quickly. So today I spoke with the international best-telling author, Don Winslow, who is, he writes crime thriller's mob, and he's writing about the mob, okay? So he's writing about the Italian and the Irish mob. Okay.

So who do you think is worse, the Italian mob or the Irish mob? I think the Sicilians and tell them where. Okay, tell me why. They're the original of the mobs and the Irish copy of the Italian. So you think so. So the Irish copied the Italians? I don't know. Maybe the Irish, maybe we copied the Irish.

No? No. No? Okay. So what do you think of the Irish mob? What do you know about the Irish mob from your life experience, Mom? They're totally different than the Italian mob. The Italian mob, I have been in their company.

So the Italian mob is very flashy. They have, their wives have diamonds. and all kinds of birds and all kinds of stuff. And the Irish people are not as ostentatious as the Italians. The Italians are very ostentatious. Who's more religious? Are the Italians more religious or the Irish? I don't know.

I really can't answer that because I'm not sure because the Italians have the feast of St. Janato and they put a lot of money on the saint. Right. So I would say the Italians. Yeah, but that's like materialism. The Irish, I don't know. I always felt when we were kids going to St. Peter's, the Irish took it way more seriously. I don't know. I really don't. I can't answer that right. Because I'm not sure.

I mean, some of my Irish friends are getting killed if they didn't show up in church on Sunday. You didn't really care. No, that's true. But the Italian mob are phony enough where they go to church. Right. And they give money and stuff for the sins that they do when they do bad things. They do a lot of bad things. Right. What's your favorite mob movie, mine? Have you watched any of these mob movies? Yeah. Which one do you like? The godfather.

The godfather. Okay, why do you like the godfather so much? Well, I like the actors. I like Marlon Brando. Right. And my brother, Sal, used to be called Marlon Brando when he was young, when he was very young. And I was very close to my brother. And I have a feeling when I see Marlon Brando.

But you know, Brando was not Italian, right? You know that, right? Everyone thinks he was Italian, but he was not Italian. Well, was he Spanish? He had some Spanish in him. He was also American Indian. Indian, people said. Oh, okay.

Yeah. But you like Brando when you were a kid, Ma? He gave you the Hots? Yeah. Because he was, he was like, he looked like the motorcycle drivers that I was used to. Streetcar name Desire, right? He was driving around like that, right? Mm-hmm.

Yeah, definitely. What about Pacino? You like Al Pacino? Not so much. No? What about James Kahn? He played Santino. No, I like Marlon Brando.

You like Brando the best. What about the violence in the mob, Mom? I think it's awful. Okay. I think it's terrible. And I think that they can't... Are you proud of me that I stayed away from all that bullshit? Absolutely.

Because you know some of it was in our neighborhood, right? You know that, right? Of course. Right. Right. I mean, San's Point was loaded with it. Right. No, exactly.

So, Ma, if the Irish mob was fighting the Italian mob, who... The Italians would win. Tell me why? The Italians are built different. The Irish are kind of more genteel. The Italians are... They're rougher. And they're a little crazier, right?

All these Southern Italians are little nuts, right? Yeah. I was involved. You want me to tell the truth? Not really. When I used to, okay. Whatever you want, Mom. You can tell me whatever you want.

You're 86 years old. At this point, you can say whatever the hell you want. Well, when I used to go to the pier hotel with one of the head ones, I used to find it fascinating because I was a kid, and I used to find it fascinating. and there was this crazy nut wife, and I didn't have a mint coat. And she insulted me, and I didn't understand it because she said that you're supposed to have furs and diamonds. So what happened is my husband bought me a mincote every 20 years of being married, and she didn't

get it because the mob women were treated like gold, even though they all had girlfriends. You tell me, I should tell the truth. I know that for a fact. All right. I didn't grow up yesterday, Ma. That's why I went for the big education, Ma. Wanted to get away from all the nonsense. Right?

But you did. Right, exactly. But you were worldly, though, because you hung around with the ghost people, and you learned a lot of tricks from my brother because my brother was fearless. And I think you developed that, which is a good thing because people, to Anthony, people can't, people can't relitle you because you have the answer for everyone, including Trump. Okay. We're going back to Trump. You had everybody laughing when you're telling him that he, should I be his vice president? or should he be my vice president, Ma. Go ahead.

He should be your vice president. Okay, I love you, Mom. And then the country would be safe. All right. Absolutely. All right, all right, Ma. Keeping it real. Tell David, I'll call him back.

Okay, I love you, Ma. David, he'll call you back. He'll ask me questions for a show. All right. Go ahead. What else you got to ask? So that's it. I think that's perfect.

What else could I ask you at this point? All 86 years of Marie Scaramucci right there in one podcast. Okay. Love you, Ma. I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was, is open book, thank you for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends and make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. While you're there, please leave us a rating or review. If you want to connect with me or chat more about the discussions, it's at

Scaramucci on Twitter or Instagram. You can also text me at Plus 1, 917, 909-29-9-6. I'd love to hear from you. I'll see you back here next week.