PBD Podcast - Mafia States of America | Episode 5 - "The Fall of the Mafia"

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

In Episode 5 of Mafia States of America, the bosses dissect the fall. From the RICO Act to Joe Banano’s book that gave prosecutors their blueprint, Patrick Bet-David unpacks how Giuliani weaponized the law and crushed Cosa Nostra. Sammy and Michael face the truth of how greed, pride, and arrogance ended the life they once ruled.----🎙️ FOLLOW THE PODCAST ON SPOTIFY: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4g57zR2🎙️ FOLLOW THE PODCAST ON ITUNES: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4g1bXAh🎙️ FOLLOW THE PODCAST ON ALL PLATFORMS: https://bit.ly/4eXQl6AⓂ️ CONNECT ON MINNECT: ⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4kSVkso Ⓜ️ PBD PODCAST CIRCLES: https://bit.ly/4mAWQAP🥃 BOARDROOM CIGAR LOUNGE: https://bit.ly/4pzLEXj🍋 ZEST IT FORWARD: https://bit.ly/4kJ71lc 📕 PBD'S BOOK "THE ACADEMY": https://bit.ly/41rtEV4👔 BET-DAVID CONSULTING: https://bit.ly/4lzQph2 📺 JOIN THE CHANNEL: ⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/4g5C6Or💬 TEXT US: Text “PODCAST” to 310-340-1132 to get the latest updates in real-time! SUBSCRIBE TO: @VALUETAINMENT @ValuetainmentComedy @theunusualsuspectspodcast @HerTakePod @bizdocpodcast ABOUT US:Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

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19 plus Ontario only. Please play responsibly. Concerned by your gambling or that if someone close, you call 1866-3-3-1-2-60 or visit comixonterio.ca. And all of a sudden, this book comes out, he had a chart. And the chart had all the commission members, their pictures. And he explains the commission in detail. So you see that chart right there. It goes up to 1963. If I can fill in the people up to 1983,

I have a rego case. Oh, that good, breathed, proceed to shine and see. Omerta is more than a word. It's a way of life. It traces its roots back all the way to the Roman Empire. Omerter is handling your business like a man, keeping your mouth shut. and choosing death over dishonor.

Staying true to Mertha wasn't hard when getting pinchment. A little stretch in the can. Three or four years, come on, they can do that standing on their head. But when the government started putting people away for centuries, guys not only started singing, they started composing. What caused the fall of the moment? Was it Pistone? Was it Giuliani?

Was it Valachi? Was it Tomasso Bichetta? Was it arrogance? Was it not staying low-key? Was it Joe Bonano's book? What was it that caused the fall of the mob? For me, mid-80s, racketeering law. When the government changed or leveled the playing field to a degree that we just couldn't

keep up with it, with the racketeering law, the bail reform act, you didn't get any bail the sentencing reform act where all of a sudden they abolished parole you're doing 85 of your time the sentences went through the roof the racketeering law until today i believe it's unconstitutional i had three racketeering indictments a lot of things happen as a result of those laws and uh you know that's what put everybody away was it was there something before that that brought up the rico but like i'm trying to go to the like to the you know the seed what cause the ripple effect to get to the RICO? You know, Patrick, years ago, before the racketeering laws, and I think Samuel

will bear me out, a guy gets convicted, he gets 10 years, 15 years, he makes parole, he does 7, 8, 9, anybody can do that kind of time. Everybody did that kind of time. When you change the playing field to where you bring in a law like the RICO Act, that's very hard to defend. To me, it's unconstitutional. To me, it's, they're able to use any, you need two. predicate acts in the RICO Act. One has to be within the five-year statute of limitations.

The other act could be something that you did 30 years ago that you got convicted of that you did your time for and everything else. RICO basically makes it a crime to have a crime business. So I can go rob a bank, that's a crime. You and I could agree to go rob a bank. That's a conspiracy. We give an extra penalty of this. But suppose we agree that for the next 20 years we're going to rob five banks a year. Now we've established a RICO enterprise. We've established, basically we've established an informal business to commit crime. Now what does that allow you to do? It allows you to put them in prison for a lot longer. But the most important thing it allows you to do is to seize their property. And the

biggest problem with the mafia now was for a long time Hoover ignored it. Then they started prosecuting But all they were doing was helping the line of succession. They'd take number one out. They'd take number two out. There'd be a little gang war. And somebody else would take over the multi-billion dollar business. There's nobody affected the numbers rackets, the fixing of boxing matches, the skim from Las Vegas, the drug trade.

Nobody's doing anything about that. So, unconstitutional on that regard, but what happens, it was a lot of the drug trade. What happens, it was a very hard law to defend. It was very expensive to defend with the lawyers. And the amount of time that they gave out. You know, anybody could have done the amount of time that we did prior to the RICO Act. But after that, you know, you're telling guys, hey, you're doing 20, 30, 40 years. You're never getting parole.

That's it. You know, that was the end of it. A lot of guys cooperated as a result of that because they say, I'm not going to spend the rest of my life in jail. You know, it goes to this whole thing. of love and fear, which is a more powerful emotion. They're both powerful, but I think in the end, I disagreed with Chas Palmetry on this in the movie.

I think what happened with the government is that the fear of the government overpowered the fear that we had on the street. And as a result, a lot of guys went the other way, and you just couldn't overcome it. You couldn't overcome it. Absolutely right. Absolutely right.

And along with the witness protection program, exactly. changing people's names, moving them, giving the money, doing a whole host of different things. It gave them a way out. And all of those names that you had mentioned, Donnie Brasco, and all of these names, it started to deteriorate in a big way. So now when guys were getting pinched,

going back to what Michael said, a lot of them are betrayed by people. So when you're being betrayed, it's easy to say, well, I'm not doing this. And now the government gave you an avenue to get out. Years ago, during the commission trial, Carmine Persico, who's a pretty fierce boss, said in the trial that we should admit there's a mafia.

Because belonging to an organization, as long as you put it forward, like the CluClock's plan, and so many other different weird organizations. It's not illegal. It's your actions that are illegal within that group. So you can be, he said, we could say that all of the old-timers who are bosses.

He's a boss, he's an underboss, he's this. But we don't do anything wrong, and we're good guys. Now you've got to prove that he did something personally. not just this RICO law that they invented and everybody can get caught up in it they have somebody can't take into stand this is the mafia the boss has got an old cat

even if he didn't he sucked into it and that was all successful they used different equipment bugs and tapes that were phenomenal here's what I need to do I need to break into Fat Tony's house or a Social Club I need to do this

the same thing with Persico. I've got about four or five little things here where I got it. A lot of this work is going to be breaking in. I knew that I couldn't get this all done with just the FBI. So I said to Bill Webster, Bill, you got to go pick for me, 20 guys on the national security side, the guys who were busting in on the communists.

Because I used to be in charge of them too when I was associated in charge of time. And I did the first Pfizer warrants, all basically for Russian communists. They said, those guys are better than burglars. I mean, we don't have burglars in the Arctic as good as they can get in any place. They go up sewers. He gave me 22 of them. He moved them over to the criminal side.

And there was a lot of stuff to put that case together. But they were the key to it. I mean, we got into Fat Tony's, we got into Fat Tony's Social Club for nine months. It was like a studio. It was like a recording studio. And consider, we're talking about 1983 technology. Imagine what we can do today. What made that legal?

Meaning prior to the RICO laws, what Blake you wrote in 70, would that have been legal to do prior to that? No, it was a period of time when it would have been done illegally, but it wasn't illegal. Got it. They just did it. So was there a part of what you? Then there was a period of time they realized, stop it.

We can't do surveillance without. warrants. So then they set up a law. If you want to put a bug in a house, if you want to put a camera in a house, a whole big wiretapping bugging statute. That requires you to show probable cause, go to a judge, the judge has to approve it, only lasts for one month. You've got to go back to the judge and show him that you're getting evidence and that you're using it appropriately. You're not just spying on the guy. It was a very, very disciplined statute, which is what got me so angry with the Pfizer stuff that went on because it was like totally inconsistent with the thousands of hours we used to work on this to make sure it was just perfect because if you made a

mistake they throw the whole thing out there goes a four million dollar investment and all this boom because he had his wife on the phone to all all of this stuff combined changed the whole thing now the bosses didn't agree with carmike persico every single one of them said no why we will not admit that's part of our oath that we will not admit that there's a mafia no matter what and I know that it was such a bad strategy because every juror I mean you got to be living under a rock if you didn't have a preconceived notion of what the mafia was all about you hear mafia you hear al capone you hear all bad names and you know it's a criminal organization just a normal guy so they didn't understand that okay he just admitted that he was in the mafia

He must be a criminal. Right. That had to be in their heads right off the bat. So it was a bad strategy. You were guilty all those movies, Godfather, Goodfellers. Everybody knows there's a mafia. So when you went in, you were half that. But what I was told, Sammy, what I heard after was that the tapes were so bad

that there was no way they could have got around saying that there was no mafia. They had to admit to the existence of the mafia. I think it was the first time in a trial, especially of that magnitude, that guys ever admitted there is a mafia. I mean, other than, you know, Velocci and people that could understand and said it, but defendants, I don't think it ever happened before. They admitted that there was a mafia. What happened there is that we were on the street, me, Franklin Chico was alive, and we went to the Genovese family. Messages came out. they want to admit.

And all the messages went back and said no. Everybody said no. Now, what happened is Carmine Persico didn't take that note. He got his lawyer, honestly, and told his lawyer to admit it in court. The lawyer admitted it on closing arguments, I think. It was.

And they had a fit. He tried to blame the lawyer. They grabbed this lawyer. on the street, put a couple of guns to his head, and he admitted that Carmine Peresco told him to do it. Later on, Wild Bill, when the war was on, the Colombo War, he said, why are we fighting over him? He's a rat.

He made the lawyer admit. Wild Bill got killed because of that. Like any other great organization, they were, from their point of view, they were fortunate to have Luciano and Lanski, one financial genius, the other one could have an organizational genius, put together a structure that was better than anybody else, and if you followed their rules, they might still be. They had all remained low-key. Yeah, like I'm running the olive oil business.

So what brought him down? Would you say Valachi, you know, Banano's book? Would you say Tomaso Bouchetta? Would you say Sammy? Would you say Blakey, the professor from Cornell, the Rico laws? Would you say the arrogance of flamboyant, me being out there for you to see kind of what I'm doing? Or would you say Rudy Giuliani brought him down? What brought these guys down?

All. Is there one that's the first domino effect? All of that. I'm not even sure I know how to evaluate. them in terms of what is most important. But I think the most important thing that brought them down that brings down almost any group was their loss of discipline.

Their loss of discipline. Yeah, like the end of the Roman Empire or possibly what's going on with America now. They had a good set of rules. The set of rules got them through 30, 40 years with minimum scrutiny and even legitimately fooling people. And then some of them just had the egos, just had to play Colombo. Colombo did them great damage with that whole Italian American Civil Rights League.

It was such a farce. And it was so obvious that really just offended people that he would do something like that. Joey Gallo. What's part of it? Can you unpack that a little bit? Joey Gallo got killed because he was sitting there talking about a Broadway play about him. How ridiculous is that? I mean, you do that, you're just challenging authority.

I mean, Colombo decided he'd put together something like the Anti-Defamation League for Italian-Americans. I mean, that only works if you have a legitimate source of prejudice. It becomes absurd if the people leading it are the people that are the actual people that you should be prejudiced against, the people who are killing others. So I think Colombo really, really hurt. I think Joey Gallo really hurt. They were the early ones that got a lot of publicity. And then that challenges the FBI and the police to do something about it. They got a little bit too big.

Like often happens to organizations. They get arrogant. The collapse of the mafia was happening. all of these reasons put together. What they didn't realize is that maybe there was a truth to say, maybe we should make this legitimate. We were talented in different ways. We could go legitimate and make money.

We could stop killing one another. So I think you asked me once, well, what would you do? How do you stop this? If you don't kill them, There's no penalty. There is a penalty. You're no longer a main guy

by all the families and all the people, you're disgraced, you're out. You out them. Instead of killing them, period. And then, when you kill him people all the time, bodies all over the place, again, like he just said,

you go into a jury room on a murder. They know that's what we're doing. They find the guy in the trunk. Oh, that's the mafia. They find a guy a certain way. Oh, that's the mafia. So you, how do you beat cases anymore?

And then you're going to do that kind of time. Now it becomes life without parole. And not only that, Patrick, if you were to listen to some of the tapes, you didn't even need informants at that point. You guys convicted themselves. I had a, my Giuliani case, we had 16 co-defendants.

I had one guy who was in the union. Sammy, they mentioned his name in the opening argument. They never mentioned his name again for three months that I was on trial. Never mentioned it again. We're about to give closing arguments. Last day of drop, we left. There was a bunch of us, guys who you know that.

And they put the case on against this guy, and it's one tape. And in the tape, he was in a conference room. He was a union guy. He was in a conference room, and he was sitting around a bunch of guys. And he's making a speech. He said, listen, everybody needs to know this. What we're doing here is a crime. If this office is bugged, we're all going to jail.

This is criminal activity. That's what he said on. on the tape. He got convicted, he got seven years. That was the only thing I said about him. He convicted himself. Yeah, he did. And that happened time and time again.

Tony Ducks with Sally Avalino and the tapes were horrible. Even the ones that Casa Stork, that we are with Jerry Light, they were horrible. Paul's house was Terrible. Tremendously bad. I mean, in a whole bunch of different ways. They were disgusting some of them.

But, and those came from John Gotti and his Lower Giro's tapes. That's, it all started with that. And it all started with drugs. So Rudy Giuliani, Joe Pistone, Joe Bonano, who hurts you the most out of those three? For me, look, I spoke to Giuliani directly, had a conversation with him, and he kind of, you know, he confirmed what we believed at the time,

and you probably heard of it, that Joe Bonano wrote that ridiculous book to try to compare our life life like it was a family and like he was a father and it was so ridiculous it was so absurd men of honor was a man of honor something like that made of honor something like that so i'm going out of one job going to a new job and i know that the fbi has all this material on organized crime i don't know it in detail i just know it for my supervisory role so i asked them to read the files so they sent me a lot of the files and all of a sudden this book comes out an autobiography

I'm sure ghost written about Joe Bonano. So I said, gee, it might be interesting to read this book. So I pulled the book, get it, start reading it. I'm about one-third of the way through. And he had it organized into sections, like one section was this early life. Second section was being made. Third section was coming up. Fourth section was the commission.

It was four chapters. He had a chart. And the chart had all the commission members, their pictures. going back to that original he was one of the original 1931 guys that lucky put on and he explains the commission in detail so first of all i mean he definitely had pretension of grandeur he would say you know we're really like heads of state myself and uh and carallo and castellano we're like heads of state and um the commission is like the united nations for us and it was a very good eye that Lucky had. I've always been in favor as a little killing as possible because it hurts

business. So I'm reading the thing and my wife is upstairs and I say, Don, I come down here, I want to show you something. So you see that chart right there. It goes up to 1963. If I can fill in the people up to 1983, I have a regal case. Professor Blakey was the one who realized about 15 years earlier only way we're going to stop this thing is by taking away their unusual peculiar infiltration of business

we've got to take those businesses away and then they just become another organized crime what inspired him to do it because I'm curious was he somebody that didn't like the mob what was because it was a 19 Cornell University professor like what motivated him? That's very very interesting Patrick I knew

Professor Blakey pretty well but not intimately but I I did know the rationale of it, and I had talked to him many times about it, and then when I was going to do it, I called him. And I said, I want you to look at the book and tell me, if I'm wrong, isn't this like what you passed it for? He just handed me, because the first thing you've got to prove, you've got to prove the business. So we're not going to have articles of incorporation, and we're not going to have a charter. We're going to have an oral agreement. Well, he just laid it out for me.

And I said, he's going to be my chief witness. He's going to take care of the number one part of the case. We'll show the organization. Then it's my job to take each one of those charts and make it current. Went over to the Bureau. I started going through their files while I was still there. I realized they had a lot of stuff. I realized there were a couple good investigations going on in the state.

And by the time I got there, I had a lot of other things to do, but this was my project. and I did a chart and the chart had all the banana stuff and then I put in the guys we had to get who we had to get to fill out the Genevice family

at that time it was run by Fat Tony Salerno so we had to get Fat Tony Corallo each one of them Castellano Persico each one of them and then what do we have So we had already a wire on Castellano in his house.

The state prosecutor of corruption had a wire on Ducks Corralo, on his jaguar, where his driver would pick them up and why they were important was every time they'd have a commission meeting, they all go somewhere and talk it over with the boys. He would talk it over with it. He'd walk out of a commission meeting, and then we'd hear the whole commission meeting. His version of it, Fat Tony, once again, Fat Tony won't murder anybody. I mean, I don't believe in a lot of murder, but we've got to spill blood sometimes, you know. Then you'd hear the same description by Fat Tony

when he went to his social club in East Harlem, Fat Tony would say, God, I don't know, I don't know. That guy would kill his mother. You'd get these great conversations. So I looked at it and I said, okay, let's make a deal with the state. They come in, we make a task force. The guys on the street during that time, I remember, I only heard Joe Bonano's name with a purse word next to it.

Everybody. Everybody that I knew at that time. And what Giuliani said afterwards is that he was one of the original architects of the racketeering law with this guy to baking. It was on the books for over 10 years. I think 1970 was when it was created. created. They didn't know how to use it. The FBI didn't know how to use it. The government didn't have to use it. This is a Cornell law professor. Correct. Ed DeBakey, I think,

his name was. All of a sudden, Giuliani reads that book. He gets inspired. He leaves third position in the government to come down to be the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, strong position, you know, very high profile, because he had aspirations beyond that. And he reads that book and he says, Bonano gave me the whole case. He put the RICO indictment together. He put the racketeering law together for me so that I, he admitted to the commission. He said he allowed me to construct that law or interpret that law in a way that I can go after the entire commission. And he was a guy that did it. So Bonano to you, then Rudy, then Pistone.

You don't think Pistone had that much of influence. Look, we disagree. Pistone was an agent. He went in there. He did his job. He went undercover. Our guys did not check him out. And Sammy said it earlier.

They didn't check him out the way he should have, the way they should have. And he was smarter than we were. Good guy? Would you say Joe's a good guy? Look, I know Joe now, and I like him. I like him. I mean, look, back then I wouldn't have liked what he did. I'm glad I only met him one time.

We joke about that. But I don't believe he framed anybody. And look, we always said this. I mean, I've had countless discussions with FBI agents. We said, look, you do your job. We understand the job you got to do. We may not like it. We may not want to be you.

But if you do your job right and you don't frame us, that's your job, we get it. Just don't frame us. I agree with that. Here's the, here's where I change directions. You could put bugs and taps. If we're stupid enough to talk on certain areas in certain places, we deserve what we get.

When I got pinched, I didn't hate the agents, as long as they did their job. In my case, and when I cooperated, they were clean, so I didn't really hate them. They were doing their job. But this guy here goes undercover, and there's nothing wrong with that either, to an extent. But when he comes over your house,

and he meets your wife, and your daughter, and your family eats with him, and he's fucking wired to the guilt. And then he's putting words in your mouth. You know what we could do, Michael? your wife is in the background talking that turns my fucking stomach I can't like it

even today till today Joe can't like him I can't like him even till today I will give him credit for this first of all there was no contract on him I think that was all bullshit well Sammy let me ask you this that's a good point I always say this when we got into that life we were obligated to do certain things

If we were told to do something, they didn't say to us, hey, do this and we'll give you $10,000, or do this and we'll give you $50,000. You were told to do something, you had to do it. I don't know of any time in my 20-plus years in that life that anybody was paid to put a contract on somebody. I don't know of it. I'm not saying it didn't happen.

No, it's not the point of being paid. From when I understand that this guy, and I don't know him, you know him, I don't really know. But he went out. I didn't, new agents who knew. He went way above what he was supposed to do. And that's what, then he went out. He wasn't even supposed to write a book.

He left the FBI. They were almost throwing him out because he was giving away secrets and writing a book about what he did. So he had a little greed in his ass. I don't know if I believe, look, the government gave me a check for 500 bucks when he went undercover for six years.

And look, I said this. Why are we made at that? That's what he was supposed to do. No, no, but I would say this. Listen, the guy had balls. I'll do him that. Any, Patrick, any day, a neighbor sees. Five and a half years.

Anything could have happened. It's a long time. Where he could have walked in the club the next day and got a bullet in the head. Five and a half years. Yeah. And not only that, his family, he didn't see his family for four or five years. So I look at this guy and say, what kind of guys is this? What kind of an obsession?

His wife stayed with him until today. Almost, almost, but what kind of guy is that? And what's the obsession, would it? And then, like I said, once he comes in the house, I just can't see it. If I meet Michael's wife, from what I understand, she's a beautiful woman, but she's a beautiful woman inside. it kills me to want to hurt him

I may want to hurt him legitimately once I meet the wife kids I know the life I know I'm destroying when I destroy him I'm destroying them what frustrates you most what he did what Rudy did or what Joe Bonano did because they each hurt the family in a different way

I would say this with Joe Pistone he's indoctrinated into that life the way we were indoctrinated into our life. He's indoctrinated into the FBI. Same thing. He was told that we're the bad guys. And whether he volunteered, probably volunteered to go on the cook. He didn't volunteer.

He just told me that he volunteered in doing these things way, way overboard, going into the homes and doing certain things. In other words, going by a club, planting a bug, telling them about a meeting. I think he went way overboard. He's doing his job, though. He's doing his job.

Well, way overboard. How about if I come and kill you in your house, right in front of your fucking family and everything? I'm doing my job to kill you. What about if I do it right in front of your family? Goes in Austria, I will never kill you in front of your family. But his job is to... Kill us.

In front of our families. That's his job. His job is to manipulate you and to thinking he's one of you. He's not, he can do that anywhere. He can do that in any club. See, I see what you said, if he would have had the wife on tape,

kids on tape and tried to involve them or use the wife against the husband. They didn't do that. They didn't do that. They didn't do that. They didn't need it. They had so much on them. But they did have those tapes. Did Rudy, what Rudy did, does that bother you at all?

Rudy Julianne? Yeah, of course. Of course it bothers me too. Why Rudy? Well, Rudy was another guy. You know, these guys, again, you're a prosecutor. Someone brings you a case. So be it.

He takes the law and he invents. invents ways to, like he says, it's unconstitutional, to corrupt the law to hurt these people. The key to doing the commission case and getting that high up was, in fact, the FBI's. Number one, having RICO, number two, having a great deal of intelligence that they were gathering, but they were really just going to use it for the purpose of putting the guy in jail. and then my adding to it every time we do one of these cases we bring a civil case

and we take away the Fulton fish market we declare it an illegal operation and the government takes over ownership of it. We took over ownership of Umberto's Klam House because it was owned by

organized crime. We actually ran it for a while and I think one of the funny newspapers the Daily News of the Post said the worst thing about the federal government taking the food stinks the food now stinks but the big things we took over was fish market the garment industry and how about the teamsters we removed the entire board of the teamsters and brought in legitimate people

that extricated them from Las Vegas then I was able to follow through on some of this when I became mayor so when I became mayor of New York I set up a system much like Los Vegas with casinos, if you wanted a license for private carding, you had to get it from the city, and the city would do an organized crime background check on you. And we removed all the organized crime groups. And we made it possible for little people to come in and do it. And we also made it possible for the national companies to come in because they were afraid to come into New York. And when I ran for re-election for mayor in 97, I gave out posters to all the merchants saying Giuliani got the 30% mafia tag back for us.

We love them. Giuliani got the 30% mafia tax back for us. Because it was a double tax. You're paying the government and you're paying the money. Yeah, so let's say. They were essentially a form of a government. Yeah. Let's say it would really cause $1,000 a month to take the carting from a pharmacy,

which is a little expensive because you've got to worry about medicine and stuff like that. They would make it 30% more. 40% more, 50% more, and just keep it for themselves. It was like the biggest tax deduction never got. All of a sudden, $1,200 bill is now $700. Wow. And then the better companies came in, and that kind of really straightened that out.

He's Italian. It's got the same roots and race that I have. Now, he'll say, look, you heard to Italian people because of your name and things you did. I cleaned it up. No, you did. No, you didn't. You did it in a different way.

And if you don't think you've killed certain people, then go to see Sonny Black's family. Sonny Black, as soon as he found out what happened, knew he was going to get hit, left his race, his watch when he was called. He knew he fucked up. And he walked in and got killed. and there was others

who got killed with his actions so how fucking proud are you and don't tell me about people I killed when you killed fucking just as much and don't tell me

how many families when you hurt 10 times more families Rudy Rudy and you were telling you and then I can't stand when they fucking win like that

and they hit each out of five one thing I like about the Pistone story that it supposedly said and I don't know if this is true that it hurt him when lefty guns was hurt and was going to go to prison. And the only reason he didn't get killed is because they intercepted him.

They intercepted him. He was arrested and he went away. Now, lefty guns, I knew him well. His granddaughter, Ramona, is my niece. When she used to hang out with my daughter, there were kids crawling in the house. She grew up like that. She's not my legitimate niece. She's my unadopted niece.

I love her like, I love my daughter. And they're like this till today. That's her grandfather that you destroyed. So I look at that and just like this, people must hate me for what I did. Why shouldn't I hate you? Sammy, so you call out Pestone. You call out Giuliani,

but you don't say anything about Bonano, who wrote the book? I went to Paul's. He took me on the side and he said, Mr. Bonano wrote a book. I said, I heard him, but I didn't read the book. I knew who he was. I knew he wasn't in New York anymore,

that he was in Arizona. And Paul says, I think I'm going to send you down there and he came, like to do this. Me? Yeah. as a boss, another one. Okay.

Not that I knew anything about him, not that I disliked him. Again, an order. So I'm going to do this. I wasn't too happy about it. I know nothing about Arizona. I really didn't know nothing about him. His son was with him,

Salvatore Bonano, who is his concier. And some guys who were so well-liked, made guys who left with him. So there's a crew of him down there. I'm not too happy about this. Paul in the day backed off and said to me, it's the banana people, it's their problem. Forget about what I told you, which is great.

He wrote a book. He was changed. He wrote a book. I mean, he explains some things. I remember, I don't remember the book, but I did read it. I remember at the end of the book, he says, this country doesn't need a president. needs a father, meaning like he was the father of a family.

I believe in that, but they used that book. When they wanted him to testify, they came out on Schrecher going to the hospital, he wouldn't testify. So the book did hurt them. They used it, I believe, in the commission case. That's Giuliani found a way to manipulate the whole thing, even though the guy was gone all the fucking years, but he used the book. Another thing I don't like about Giuliani.

The guy was gone. It was over. We wrote a book, I know, we could smile all we want, but I don't dislike him all that much. You say you don't dislike Giuliani? No, but I don't. But I don't. When I got out of prison the first time,

and I went to Arizona myself, I cooperated, everything was behind. I get a message that Joe Bonano wants to meet with me. Okay. I'm willing to meet with him. Now, he's sitting with his son and some other guy. The other guy is a confidential informant in his wife.

So he tells his son that Sammy DeBoot, I hear he's down in Arizona now, in Phoenix. And I want an appointment with him, I want to talk to him. So Salvador Bonanno tells him, this is all I'll take. What do you want to talk with him for that? Well, I want to make sure that there's no problems. Well, Kim, he's a rat. He tells his son, he never understood the life.

A rat? If he's here and he wants to take over, some of us are gonna be found in the trunk. That's this guy's style, that's how he'll take over. So he's, meaning me. So he says, I wanna meet with him. So I get this message. And I ask what's it about.

And they tell me what's about. I said, I have the utmost respect for him, as an old-timer, and I'll meet with him. But there's really no need. You could tell him I have no intentions of taking over Arizona. I have no intentions of hurting him or his family. All I want is to be left the fuck alone.

Me and my family. And that nobody bothers my family. That's the only way I will be a problem. So he goes back and he tells him. And he says, great. And he sends me a message. That'll never happen. If somebody gives you a problem, send me a message and I'll help you.

The agent's got in touch with me. Sam, are you going to meet with you open out? Yeah, what? He went for all, first of all. And then what were we going to talk with him about? I said nothing. He was a little concerned of what I was going to do. And I told him I wasn't going to do nothing.

And we never met. So I have a little bit of respect for him that he wrote a book. He left the life. When he left, I didn't hate him either. Mike. When he left the life, I had people talked. I never wanted to hire him. He's going to be calm, famous, he's going to write a book, or whatever he's going to do.

He's going to go into the entertainment business. It didn't bother me. He's gone and he's out of life. Get over it. Now, this happened up until now. The mafia collapsed at a certain point where you're talking about all of these laws and all of these things. I actually think it's a good thing. The mafia shouldn't collapse.

We should get rid of it. We don't need it. You're tired of people. It only hurts this. There's a lot of guys in there who could think. Now he's been pretty successful in what he does. He changed his life. I changed mine and I'm doing pretty good myself.

And there's a lot of guys in there who could think and use the hedge and go into legitimate business. We have a little bit of an edge because we look at business a different way. We use common sense. I don't think they teach that in school, college or nothing. or nothing. We learned that in the street, common sense. We learn how to sit down in negotiations like we're doing right now. And it gives us a different kind of an edge. I don't have a Harvard degree I have an eighth grade education. It's pretty good at business. I said he's a racketeer. He's a good racketeer with a good head on his shoulders. And I think every mafioso could do that

in a way. Stop killing. Stop all that bullshit and go into business. Coming up on Mafia States of America. When somebody tells you, you got to go kill this guy. I don't even know this guy. What are I going to, well, you don't have to know what happened. Go kill him. What do you do? Never mind, just go kill him.

Okay. That's not normal, sir. It's not normal because you don't understand the beginning of goes, I know sure how this thing you could start. And what was? Say, man, I don't care if it started a hundred years ago. I'm not smirking at you. I don't care if it started a hundred years ago yesterday.

It's not normal. To you, it's not normal. It's not. Good. And keep that in your mind, it's not normal. But yet you'll break that not normal to defend. They go kill somebody who will fuck with your family. Are you sorry for the things that you did in that life?

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