The Jordan Harbinger Show - 588: Sammy "The Bull" Gravano | Mafia Underboss Part Two

Episode Date: November 18, 2021

Sammy "The Bull" Gravano (@gravanothebull) is the host of the Our Thing podcast, former second-in-command of the Gambino organized-crime family who played a major role in prosecuting "Teflon Don" John Gotti, and subject of Peter Maas' Underboss: Sammy "The Bull" Gravano's Story of Life in the Mafia. [This is part two of a two-part episode. Make sure to catch part one here!] What We Discuss with Sammy "The Bull" Gravano: How does someone growing up in a relatively "normal" family get involved in a life of crime? What compels someone entrenched in the comforts of the gangster lifestyle to reject it? How has the code by which the mafia lives changed over time? What kinds of people do you meet when you spend half a decade behind bars? How true does on-screen gangster life ring to reality? And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/588 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Well, my advice, you want to be me, want to make money, do what the fuck you want. Shoot guys, rob guys, rob, do whatever the fuck you want. But I will tell you, I got 22 years of my life in prison. You're going to shoot one of your friends, maybe your best friend, they're going to shoot you. You're going to do ugly fucking things. You're going to have the government on your back 24 hours a day, seven days a week, until your ass is in prison.

If that's what you want, want to be me? Go ahead. Enjoy it. Do what the fuck you want. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories,

secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with people at the top of their game, astronauts, entrepreneurs, spies, psychologists, even the occasional arms dealer, tech mogul, or underworld figure,

and that's what we're doing here today. Each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better critical thinker. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, and I appreciate it when you do that. We now have episode starter packs. These have been a huge hit with y'all. These are collections of your favorite episodes organized by popular topic that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on this show.

Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start to get started or to help somebody else get started. Today, part two with Sammy the Bull Gravano. If you haven't heard part one yet, go back and listen to that. Part 2, even more crazy tales from one of the mafia's, well, most famous ex hitmen. I don't even know how you begin to sum up Sammy in one sort of catchphrase, so I'm not even going to try. This is the rest of our conversation that's always crazy with Sammy. I've known him for a while. You're going to hear me tease him and him get really annoyed with me later on in this part of the episode. If you're wondering how I managed to book all of these great authors, thinkers, creators, every single week, it's because of my network.

I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com. it's a non-gross, sort of non-sleezy way, digging that well before you get thirsty. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, subscribe and contribute to the course, aside from the mafia hitmen, of course. But come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here's part two with Sammy the Bull. Is the extortion racket that you see in movies from the mafia authentic where you go to a business

and you say, hey, give me 10%, or is that some old thing? No, there's guys who do that. I mean, there's, listen, there was five families. So you're talking about, maybe 4,000 made guys, God knows how many associates. So there's guys all over the place. Some guys are real thugs or real idiots and do things like that. And I'm like, I don't want to call them an idiot, but because they do that.

But some people do that, some people don't. I find if you're going to threaten people and do this kind of shit, you're going to jail. Sooner or later, somebody's going to give you up. Everybody hates you. The whole neighborhood hates you. And sooner or later, you're going to scare somebody to death with, I'll kill you in front of your wife and kids. There was just this pinch on the Colombo family,

and I heard it on the news and read it in the paper. One guy wanted some of that money out of the union benefit fund or whatever, and he tells the guy, you don't give me that money, I'll kill you in front of your wife and kids. Now, a guy, a legitimate guy, may turn around. You may scare him personally, But when you were involved in saying, I'll kill you in front of your wife and your kids, that guy's libel to go to the fucking feds in two seconds. For sure. Yeah, absolutely.

You know what I mean? And you can't blame them. You know, don't call them a fucking rat. You're a fucking imbecile. You knew created that monster. So I never did that. You know, maybe as a kid, I was a thugger a little bit. But that was my mentality. It seems like small money, too. Like you get collected from 20 restaurants. And one thing that really bothered me about that, I always remember my father being threatened with them fucking. Union guys. Exactly. And my father killed himself for us, working fucking not 40 hours a week, 60, 65 hours. And my mother, too, sewing clothes, your seamstress. You're going to go in there and threaten them? Right. That always stuck in my head. So I said, I'll never do that. Never.

Did your wife know that you were a gangster? I mean, she must have had a clue, but how much did she know? She knew nothing because I told her nothing. I mean, but she had an uncle who was in the mafia, Bayonne Joe. I think he was a captain. Most of the time he was a. in prison. I never met him. But she knew a little bit coming from that neighborhood, but I never discussed. I lived two lives. One with my wife and my kids and one in the street. Now, they knew, they're not idiots, but they knew, but I never had any kind of conversation. And part of my thinking is that if it all caves in, they can go to my wife or my kids, and they could legitimately say, I don't know. So anytime she's...

She asked me a question. I told no. I told you, don't ask me questions. You can ask me questions about almost anything. Don't ask me questions about anything that happens. I told my wife right before the Castellano thing, I'm going to go on the lamb. I'm going to go somewhere.

Where? I can't tell you. When are you coming back? I can't tell you. I may never come back. You'll be all right. Stay in the house. Eddie, our brother-in-law, will come.

and see you, Big Louis, who's a captain, he was very close with me. He'll come around. You'll be okay. Don't believe anything you hear we'll see in a newspaper and don't ask no questions. Take care of the kids and I give a hug and a kiss and I walk out. That was my relationship with my wife. You want to talk about the kids who didn't go to school or this or that or allow life or whatever. We talk about that. You want to talk about parties, invited, or this or that. You know, but she understood. She just understood that. I'm not going to answer questions.

Did she grow up around all this, or was this new? The whole neighborhood knew what was what? Yeah. I heard my wife one time had an argument with a sister. The sister said, well, we didn't know a lot of that. Come on, we used to go by the 19th hole. We always used to see those guys there. We knew what it was, but we didn't know the facts.

But we knew them. We seen them with their pinky rings and their suits, and we knew their names, and we knew not to fuck with them. Come on. But of course, we didn't know the facts. You could say that. Because you really didn't. But we know what time it was.

Especially if you grew up in a neighborhood and it's body in a trunk, body in a trunk, body in a trunk, body in the river, body in a trunk. It's obviously related. In the 70s, maybe I'll go back to the 60s, 70s, 70s and 80s. It was like the Wild West days. You know, a lot of times, it's a shame. Somebody just found somebody in the trunk. Really? Who is it?

Didn't even fucking faze me. That's not that abnormal. Oh, God. Who's that? Joe Bro. Really? Nah, shame. He wasn't a bad guy. And go right back to drinking coffee and because you were numb to this. That's what happened. What do you think your dad would say if he knew that you ended up, you know, the underboss of the Gambino family? I assume he wasn't around at that point. No. No. No. He was around when I got made and when I was an acting captain.

But no. And he was older by that time. He was sick as well. So he never even asked anything like that. Once or twice he'll ask me. You know, what are you doing? You're with that? No, no, no, no, no worry about it. Period. The conversation would never go there, you know. How would you react if your son was like, Dad, I want to join? It looks amazing. I saw Goodfellas or whatever. Or he just said, hey, I want to make money. I know you make money. Tell me, you know, let's do this. What would you tell your son? No, absolutely no. I would never. I didn't put my son into life in any way, shape, or form. My answer would be no. I would tell them. You know, people want me to talk to kids, to talk to them and tell them, you know, stay away from life, do this, do that. I'm not doing that.

Here's what I tell them for advice. What my advice? You want to be me? You want to make money? Do what the fuck you want. Shoot guys, rob guys, rob. Do whatever the fuck you want. But I will tell you, I got 22 years of my life in prison.

You're going to shoot one of your friends, maybe your best friend. They're going to shoot you. You're going to do ugly fucking things. You're going to have the government on your back 24 hours a day, seven days a week, until your ass is in prison. If that's what you want, want to be me? Go ahead, enjoy it. Do what the fuck you want.

I'm not going to tell somebody, don't do it, don't do it. I'm telling you, do what the fuck you want. It's your life. You want to throw it away? Go ahead. And if you don't think I threw it away, watch when you go to prison. When people tell you when to take a shit, went to eat, went to go to bed, went to get up. Watch how much you're going to enjoy that.

But that's what you're going to enjoy. How many years were you in the life versus how many years you spent in prison? It's almost like 50-50, right? If you don't count the gang days when you were younger. Probably. Yeah. Probably, yeah, almost, maybe a little less. But 22 years of my life in prison.

I did six and a half fucking years in the hole starting my prison time. And I tell people to that, go in your bedroom, in your house, bring a nice portable TV, we'll feed you in your bedroom, do it for six weeks. Tell me how you feel. I did it for six and a half years. And it's not, I did it for six and a half years. There's a lot of fucking guys who did that. So that's what you got to look forward to.

Do it in your bedroom for six weeks. You or anybody. Go in your bedroom for six and a half weeks and don't come out. See if it don't drive you fucking nuts after a while. So that's my advice to kids. You want to be me? Go ahead. Enjoy it.

Enjoy what's about to happen in your life. But do it. I'm not going to tell you not to do it. You're not my kid. Do what the fuck you want to do. If it's my kid, I would tell them the same. think. That's what you want. That's what's going to happen. If you had a do-over, would you just get a construction job and just be like none of this violence, none of this mob shit for me?

What do you think you'd do? I don't know. It's Monday quarterback that question. Yeah, yes. You know, and I've been asked that a lot of times. There's a lot of things, you know, anybody who says, you know, you wouldn't do something different, it's probably full of shit. Because everybody, no matter how legitimate, no matter how something, you may have an argument with you. You might have an argument with your wife and you may say something. And three months later, you may say to yourself, I wish I didn't say that. I was mad. I was pissed off. But this is a bigger, this is a bit like more of your choice of career path. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I really don't know. The question, here's the question. If you weren't dyslexic, what would you do? I don't know. I know I have

capabilities of learning. I'm not stupid. I'm just dyslexic. I gave a great example once. I gave somebody a paragraph it was in writing, print, nice, beautiful. And I said, read that. And the person read it. Yeah, I got it. I got it. You're going to ask me quite?

No, I'm not going to ask you none. I got a blank piece of paper and I scribbled on it. Just draw lines on it. Just drew lines, scribbling. And I said, read that. So they looked at me and he says, I can't read that.

It's scribbling. I said, you see that? The thing you can't read? That's the one, this printed thing, that's what that looks like to me. That's being dyslexic. So the way you can't read that, I can't read this. Now, if you have an interest in that, you should help people who have it.

They do help people. Yeah, that's what my mom does. It was a special ed teacher. Oh, really? So that's great. But back in the day, you could ask your mom. They didn't know what the fuck it was. They didn't do it.

She's your it. They didn't really, I mean. No, they didn't have it. They didn't know what it was. Yeah. So. They said these are the smart kids and these are the dumb kids. Right.

You can get, instead of going from the second grade to the third, you can go right to the fourth, or you, I got left back in the fourth grade. It was humiliating. I got left back in the seventh grade again. School was done, finished. But I have a great memory for details and things when you're talking to me about things that happened 40 years ago. Maybe there's something about that. I could see something or hear something, and I can remember it, and I could learn. you're not stupid, it's just that you have this disability in learning. It's a learning disability, and it's a shame. Of course, a lot of people have it. Now it's out of the shadows, and a lot of people know it, and a lot of those people. You know, I find that some people tell me, I'm dyslexic. Really? The guy's like a fucking great artist.

Yeah, sure. Fucking great. So he's good in other areas of life. I don't know, but I think that's what hurt me right in the beginning. I mean, Richard Branson is dyslexic. You know who that is? Yeah, yeah, yeah. A guy, billionaire.

There's a lot of famous dyslexy people. Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of them, and they have what that, they found a different way to learn. Exactly, yeah. You know, and if you can catch that early in life with your kids, whoever's listening to this, God knows what your kid could actually be. But he's going to be handicapped in certain areas, reading numbers. You know, a three used to look like an eight.

I used to get it wrong. Everybody would laugh. There was a three. What is that number, eight? and everybody would laugh. After a while, they'd show me something that looked like a three to me. I was laughed at so many times.

I would say, an eight. Not that I looked like an eight, but I was wrong so many times. I kind of got it. This fucking three is not a three, it's an eight. And I would say, hey, that's right, Sammy. That's very good. It's like looking at Chinese then.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is, actually. And there's all different degrees of it. So mine was numbers, letters. I can read letters now, But after a while, my eyes onto the second chapter or whatever it may be are, everything is starting to get really blurry to me. So I guess, and I put the book down. And I've done all that time in prison.

I read a lot in prison, a lot of stories. But I would read a chapter maybe or something and it would get blurry and I put it back down. Then I do it. Sometimes I had to read it again to really get it. Uh-huh, to let it sink in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You mentioned that the people you killed, they broke the rules. What type of rules, you know, not kicking up money to the boss, for example, or what else?

No, that's not a rule, no. That's just a cultural thing? Well, it's not anything. You're supposed to kick up. You know, if you're greedy or selfish or you're supposed to kick up because it goes and also, like a lot of people told me I was running the teamsters under John. Got him. And I said, he gave me 20% to run it. And he got 80%.

But it belongs to the family and it belongs to the boss. So the agents asked me, didn't that bother you? No. Why would it bother me? He owns this, the family and hemp, not me. So he gets $800,000 out of the million, and I got $200,000. You think I should be mad at him that I was put in position turned $200,000? It's nothing.

Supposing you were Trump's son-in-law and he put you somewhere and you were making $500,000. He made $10 million, $20 million. Are you going to be mad or jealous that he gave you a fucking position that you are in 500,000? Right. If you are jealous or mad, then you're a jerk off. I'm not a jerk off. It was a good job. I made $200,000 a year and other powers that it gave me.

So, no, I wasn't mad. So it all depends on how you look at things, I guess. What were the rules then that got people killed? You know, you mentioned you're killing people that you love, killing your friends. You know, they broke the rules so they had to go. What kind of rules are we talking about? You can't raise your hands to another friend of ours, another main guy. So no fighting?

That's interesting. You can't raise your hands. The first guy who threw a punch, the guy could defend himself, and if he can kill you, you'll kill you. And if that don't happen, and they know that you raise your hands first to a friend of ours, then you could be killed for that. Go on with somebody's wife or kids is the death penalty. Me and you are in the mafia.

You're my brother. Your wife is my sister-in-law. your kids are my nieces and nephews. That's the way we have to look at it. Now, if you violate that in any way, I don't care if your wife is the biggest pig in the world, and she's coming off to me. There's no excuse for this.

I don't care. You have to be man enough to walk away from that. And as a man, I understand, men, we like women, but there's a limit. So you cross that line. You're supposed to get killed for that. Most of the times you can and you will. Sometimes you might be able to,

escape it for whatever reason, because every situation is different. Your daughter, I see your daughter in the bar. She don't know me, but I know who she is. She's drinking. She's maybe 18, 19. She's a little bit out of order. Maybe some guy is slobbering all around her. I come over you. Get the fuck out of here. You know what way? Get the fuck out of here. Go away. To the guy. And her, sweetheart, I'm going to make somebody take you home.

You're a little drunk. Who are you? My father's friend. Forget about who I am. Let's get out of the bar. And you, bartender, no more drinks for her. Stop. That's what I'm supposed to do. Because she's my niece. I value that.

Now, your niece at 23 now, she's really sexy and beautiful. Maybe she's a turn-on for me a little bit. I make that fucking blunder and look at her in that way. I could go and should go. So there's a lot of things. Then there's street things that come up, but there's violations. and the mafia that of death penalty. Now, we use each other, like,

we don't go looking for a guy and shooting them out. This isn't a gang. You're going to go, you broke the rules. I'm being given an order to whack you. Take you out. Now, maybe Joe Blow is going to be the shooter, but me and you a friend. I'm going to be the guy to bring you into this meeting

or wherever. We're not cowboys. We're going to make this hit real easy. You're going to come into this meeting with me, hey, well, and Joe Blow's going to shoot you. Right. It's not a car bomb. Or you're not part of my house down.

And that's a lot of room. We're not supposed to use car bombs. Like they do that in Italy and other places. We're against that because you can kill innocent people. We're not into that. We're worried about killing innocent people. We're worried about what we're supposed to be. Men of honor.

That's not very honorable. If I kill you and I kill a woman and a child who got in the car with you or it was by the fucking thing, oh, drive-by shootings. Shoot them in a motherfucker. fucking that's your target not some kid that's a woman so there's rules of how we kill and unfortunately that order from the boss and if you you disrespect an order from the boss you die you're listening to the jordan harbinger show with our guest sammy the bull we'll be right back thank you for listening and supporting the show your support of our advertisers helps keep the show going to learn more and get links to

all those discount codes and all those deals you heard about so you can check out the sponsors for yourself visit jordanharbinger.com slash deals. We recently redid this page. Let me know if you have any issues with it. It should work well on mobile as well. Jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. And don't forget, we have worksheets for many episodes.

If you want some of the drills and exercises talked about during the show, those are all in one easy place. That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. And now back to Sammy the Bull. But you can't refuse an order at all because then you're just as you're, guilty of breaking a rule and then somebody else just has to kill you too. And then that same person you were supposed to kill is dead anyway. Yeah.

You can't stop the head. You could go do a boss is telling me to kill you. I could talk to the boss and say, please, let me talk to you. There's a situation. I grew up with him. What he did, I could talk to him. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And I could try to straighten this thing.

If the boss tells me, Sammy, no good. Take him out. And use this guy or that guy. I don't care what you use. Get him out. Take him out. He can even tell me to get rid of the body. He could tell me a lot of things.

Put him in the trunk, throw him in the street. Whatever the thing is, if I disobey his order, I go. And you're going anyway. Yeah, so it doesn't even, it's like,

you might as well do it because if you like me, you can be like, all right, I'm going to make sure he's dead, I'm going to make sure he's not drowning in his lung fluid

or freezing the dead outside. Yeah. That's what I'm going to do. That's the way I can help you is make it super fucking fast. You won't even know what the fuck hit you. If I had to die tomorrow morning, I would choose that way.

getting shot right in the fucking head, especially with a decent-sized caliber gun. You wouldn't even know what hit you. You wouldn't even know what hit you. It's the fastest way to die, in my opinion. But what really gets to me in this thing is that as much as I like you or love you, oh, you know the rules as well as I did.

Look at what the fuck you did. I mean, you knew this. And I blame you because you knew I would probably be the schmuck that has to bring you in. You felt like killing yourself. Why don't you just go hang yourself some fucking way? You knew what this was going to bring. And that happens a lot.

I got to be sick. Oh, my God. How did he do this? He's doing it to himself. Right. That's how we look at it. You did this to yourself, bro. It's not I woke up this morning, I want to kill you.

It's not that we don't kill for money. So it's not like I want to kill you and take over your business or take your money. It's too fucks about your business or your money. You know, if we're friends, I hope you are rich and I hope you are powerful because you're probably going to be helping each. other that way. And that we do a lot. So there's no reason for the money or the greed. Some assholes will do that, but there's assholes in every fucking walk of life. Cops, politicians, there's all kinds of fucking assholes in all walks of life. And the mafia is not excluded from

that either. But if a guy is, you know, you're doing this for money, either out of your mind, then there's a line we're killing. Some people in our life, like Roy D'Amah, and people like that, They crossed the line to us. He became a serial killer. He's killing people, innocent people, for no fucking reason now, or stupid reasons. And we killed him. To show the best of a problem. Because you became a serial killer, you don't deserve to fucking live.

Whether you're a maid guy or not, we don't do things like that. If you're a child molester and you're a roommate guy, you're going to go if we find out. If you're a rapist, you should go. There's things that were questionable, and guys got just put on the back burner. Not enough maybe to kill the guy, but put on the backburn. But if you're a full bone, trauma molester or rapist or a serial killer, we're going to kill you. That's not us. So whether you're in our life or out of our life, we will kill you.

If you're coming in our neighborhood, you'll have those traits. We'll kill you because the neighborhood is our neighborhood, our people. We protect it. Did it bother you when you had to kill people? or did you feel like stress or anxiety? Absolutely. Yeah. And I said this in my podcast.

I said this many times. I think a piece of me died on every one of those murders. Almost every one of those murders. Some of them I didn't really care. I'll be honest. But a good part of them, a piece of me died with every one of them. It's a scar in my body. I feel it.

When I talk about it in my podcast, maybe I'm getting old. I actually become emotional when it almost brings me to tears. It just rips at me. It's like I open up that. scar when I start talking about it and I become emotional, which I don't really want to. I'm not a person who normally cries, but it brings me close. Maybe it's the old age. I don't know what the fuck it is, but those scars are buried and I open them up when I talk about these things. Yeah, I understand that.

I'm not going to make you go through that. I was just wondering because some people will think, okay, well, you're a sociopath, you killed all these people and you don't even care, but it sounds like that's not the case. I know you think a lot, or you had to think a lot anyway about planning a hit, how you're going to deal with it because it was your job for a long time. When you're planning someone's murder, what are you taking into consideration? Is it like you've got to have a way to get rid of the body, for example, but what else is there that the average person might not think of? Make sure they don't suffer, that kind of thing. Well, that's not my first thought, is not make them suffer, to be honest.

Planning of a hit is that when I get a hit on someone, everything in my life stops. I get blinders on. The only thing on my mind and the only thing I could see is you. I now start researching in my own mind. What do you do every day? Where do you go every day? Who do you meet with? If you're married, do you have a girlfriend on a sneak? Do you have a gym that you go to every day?

All of these things. I'm researching for the place that I'm going to kill you. I get other guys in different positions, a crash car. Backup shooters. So you're going to come in here. You'll have that door to run out. You have that door to run out. There's going to be people there. You can't get out. I'm going to make sure you can't get out. I have a start button. No stop button until you're dead. I don't think about business. I don't think about money. I don't think about family. I don't think about getting laid. I don't think about nothing but you. The only thing that makes me stop thinking about you, is when you're dead. The hit is over. And I go back about into my life. And it's hit is behind me. What's the timeline? Like if you get an assignment, is it like the guy's gone in three days, three weeks, three months, or it's flexible? I don't think there's any timeline you got a hit. You've got to take all the possibilities. I don't want to hurt any legitimate people

in the process of doing killing you. I mean, I'll give you an example. One guy we were going killing me, who are hard to get. I made an appointment in a lawyer's office. I was going to meet him in the lawyer's office and be in a conference room talking to them, just like I'm talking to you. Two, three guys would come in with ski masks, screaming to people, get down, get down, I'd get down, they'd blow your fucking head off and leave me. I could stay there, the cops will come. We were talking about business. Fuck, oh, no. People came in with scheme masks and they killed him. I don't know what happened. And that's what the people in the office. would say. And we couldn't get him. So that's the only place we could have got him. So I was going to do it. Make sure you don't hurt the woman at the front desk and don't hurt nobody, whatever. So then the guy came back and he says he's going to come. There's one problem. Well, he's going to come with his daughter, who's a lawyer. So she's going to come with him to this meeting. Oh, yeah. Good. Cancel the whole thing. And I canceled it. So that's what I do. As a hit guy. Because you didn't want to kill him in front of his daughter. That's

I'm not going to kill him in front of his heart or in front of her. That's not going to happen. That's off. So I will continue working on you in different ways. And that's what goes through the mind of a hit guy. So I'm jerk off. Maybe he'll do it in front of the daughter. Maybe he'll shoot the daughter too.

I don't know what he'll do. Yeah. But a true hit guy plans a hit, make sure it works properly, and takes into consideration every option that could happen and how are you going to defend it? Cops come. There's a guy in the car with a license, legitimate car.

You're going with your car. Cops are right behind you. As soon as he can, he crashes into the cop car, and you can go. A block car. Turned down a small block. That block car is waiting for him.

He sees him. He sees the cops coming. He goes right behind him. Halfway down the block, he stops his car. He's having trouble with the car. The cops come out. Move that car. Move that car.

I can't move it. It's stopped. And he's got his license. He's a legitimate guy. There's different things a hit guy will do. It's not only to kill the person. It's how he can't get away. It's how you're going to block and protect the shooters, whoever the shooters are. So a lot of people say, you were part of that hit and you didn't pull the trigger.

Of course I didn't pull the trigger. It doesn't matter. Who pulls the fucking trigger? Any moron can pull a trigger. But it's who plans the hit? Who makes the whole thing happen? Now, I might be the shooter or I might not be the shooter. In the Castellano, I wasn't the shooter.

But I planned the whole thing. They came to me to plan the whole thing. It's like a military operation. Yes, CIA, military. I don't care what I kind of, they have operations, and they plan these things and do them. I would do that in my head in two seconds for it. Just like I said, I'm talking to you.

I'm pointing to that door. I'm pointing to that door. Now, I'm talking to you. Of course, I don't mean anything by it. But in my mind, I'm planning this hit. Right now, if I wanted to hit you, I could hit you. Zaza would come across with a shotgun. You're not even looking at her.

She would shoot you. You don't expect it from her because she's a girl. I might expect it from her, but you're right. Your point is well-taking. Yeah, now this all makes sense. It's like a second nature. Is it something you still sort of think about, not killing people, but is it still like a background operation in your head after all these years?

It's just a way of life for me. I get an apartment. When I get an apartment and where I'm going to live, I look at everything. I look at myself as the target, and I go outside and I look. Where would I take myself out from my mind as being a hit guy? Yeah, I don't like that alley. Or I don't like this. This should be lit.

Or this is where I'm going to be watching when I do walk out or get in or do this or that. I can't even get rid of that. That's in my head. Now, I do it subconsciously, mainly I don't purposely get up in the morning. I'm going to look at this. It's subconsciously I do it. When I go into a restaurant where I sit subconsciously, I want to see what's coming in, what's happening. I don't sit with my back to a certain point.

I immediately would tell my wife, or you, I'd like to turn around and could I sit there and do this? Did I juggle a little bit when we walked in? Oh, for dinner the other night? No, actually. I was wondering if you were going to, but we sat on the other, wait, actually, I was sat on the other side and you were like, oh, I'm going to sit in here. But some of that was a function of our director not fitting into the table, no names mentioned. Yes, yes. Some of that was logistics.

Two of them were big enough. There's a little back room if you took notice in the back of that restaurant. Yeah, there was. And with a curtain over it, right? That's almost it would be better to sit on that side. to look at the front. Right? Right.

But I don't know who's behind that curtain. Right. So I'd rather sit where I was sitting because I could see that curtain. If somebody or something was coming in,

now you've got to come through 50 people. Right. You don't think they'd be screaming this, that or whatever's fucking going on? I would know just even where I was sitting.

Normally I sit there if there wasn't about that curtain. I'm not too crazy about that curtain. Yeah, there was a curtain. That's interesting. I wondered if you were going to switch sides and you did actually. Yeah, that's funny.

That's funny. We talked about the seating, but we did. We were trapped into... Right, yeah, we had a different logistical situation. So you got to make considerations for that. Yeah, for people at all... Once in a while, you've got to drop the bomb shit and sit where you've got to sit.

That's right. If it happens, it happens. Yeah, for people who are wondering what we're talking about, we sat with a couple of big guys that were... The table was attached to the wall and we had limited options of where we could sit. Otherwise, we're going to have to have them pride out of there with the jaws of life after dinner. But they're good people, so we may do. All right. I'm going to skip some of the, like, killing the...

Paul Castellano, Gotti, that stuff you cover in your podcast, which will link in the show notes. You've told those stories a million times. Right. I'm not going to ask you that same stuff again. Good. I am curious about the witness protection program because not many people have asked about that. What is that like? Obviously, you testify and they're like, okay, we got to hide you because somebody's going to come and pop you.

I did it for eight months. I had a lot of money. I didn't want to go into it. I got a very short sentence five years on the first time I was in prison. they were begging me to go in because the government would look bad if you don't go in and come on, let us, I did it for eight months. I didn't like it at all.

Some people like it. I didn't like it. It changed your name. There's a million restrictions. You can't talk to anybody in the past, whether it's family, whether it's friends, whether it's anybody. That's just not my nature.

I don't like that. There was 8 million thousand rules. I didn't like any of that shit. I'm at a prison. I understand. I only did five years. but I don't want to be told what to do and how to do it every fucking minute of every day, where to go,

who not to talk to. I'm a personable person, believe it or not. I talk to every fucking body. I don't like hiding. It's just, you know, I might as well go into fucking boonies somewhere in a nice little cabin and with a dog and I go hunting, fishing. If you really want me to fucking bunk in, I'll do that.

But I'm not worried about dying, especially now at my age. I worry more about cancer, corona, virus, all these bullshit things when you get older. I'm not worried about dying with a gun. Like I said, it's probably the best way to go. And I don't think that's going to happen. I think the mafia right now understands what I'm doing. I'm on a fucking podcast.

I think half the world is listening to me. And I think that there's so many people who cooperated. There's so many tapes. And FBI and NYPD, organized crime, strike force. Everybody knows exactly what happened, what John did. all my life I've been busted. I never cooperated. I didn't look at it as cooperating.

I walked away from him. I walked away from the life, and I switched sides and did what I had to do. And people know it, so I don't think there's that many people who have met him. A lot of the murders that I was involved in, you know, a lot of people say, like I killed them all, I'm part of the murder. I didn't kill them all. And I never woke up in the morning wanting to kill somebody. It just wasn't my thing.

I'm a little more friendly than that. So I don't even know what the fuck I was answering or whatever I was doing. Well, I was just asking about the witness protection program. You answered the next question, which was it was torture to hide and be away from everybody. Family and everything. It's just. Because when Richard was like, hey, there's this guy you should have on your podcast, Sammy the Bolgarvano. I was like, you're getting played, man.

This guy's not just run around having dinner with us at Olive Garden, right? Like, give me a break. And then I researched it and I was like, okay, maybe it seems like he left the Witzek program, Witness Protection Program. Because I just thought, oh, this guy, I'm like, Richard, come on, man, be smart. This is some, like, dude who put on a hat and sunglasses and bought a pinky ring at a flea market and is now telling you he's a mobster. Like, get smarter.

But it turns out it, I was surprised to find that it was real. That's not a flea market pinky ring either. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Sammy the Bull. We'll be right back. And now for the rest of my conversation with Sammy the Bull. By the way, did you get plastic surgery in the witness protection program? I've always been this beautiful. Really?

Okay. Because I've heard, because I heard Diane Sawyer say like, oh, you got disguised. And I was like, disguised. He looks the same. The difference is you don't have a hair. Other than that, you know, you're a little older. But, like, you can, I mean, people recognize you everywhere we go. You know what happened last night after we ate?

I went with the guy Vito. Uh-huh. And they stopped. I was going to get a pack of cigarettes. So I go in. and there's this big guy he starts talking to me your podcasters

and your videos are fucking great oh so we shake hands right video's looking and then he goes before me and then I go and then there's two Indians a guy and a younger girl

I guess it's his daughter he looked a lot maybe it's his girlfriend who the fuck knows but anyway he says yeah you don't want to make that mistake you're the boo yeah so I said what

what you're the bull you're Sammy the boo right He grabbed me, hugged me, gave me a kiss on the cheek, and his daughter was there, and she's shaking my hand. So Vita, when I went out, he says, what the fuck was that all about? Yeah. I said, I think they recognized me, bro. For sure, yeah.

He says, does that happen a lot? I said, yeah, listen, I don't look like when I was younger, I aged a lot, and I aged a little fucked up. You know, I got sick in prison. But now with this podcast and everything that's going on, I'm being recognized a lot. The best was, I was with my ex-wife, we went to dinner. another Indian couple the woman is looking at me looking at me and looking at my eyes

says I think that woman's looking at you so I look I said you're not going to like this what I've been dating her I can't believe she can't fucking follow me right in the joint my wife was nuts

but she knows I've been ball breaking you know so she started laughing yeah yeah sure enough the woman got up she was Indian Native American Indian and she's looking listening to my podcast too, her and a family and all the rest of the people sitting at the table waving to me. It's crazy, but I'm being spotted here and there. That's, I mean, it definitely

happens in a positive way. Yeah. People are liking, you know, what I'm doing. I'm sure. Some people may not like this interview. They might not like me. The interview is great. You're good. But some people are like, you know, this interview and stuff like that. Maybe some will like me, some more. I don't know. How did you get the nickname, Sammy the Bull? I should have covered that in the beginning, but since you bring it up. So my mother and father bought me a bike. They were broke back then. It was a big deal to get a bike.

It was a Schwinn. I had to take care of it. Fucking Thursday out, somebody stole it when I went in the store. Two days later or whatever it was, my friends come running to me, Sammy, the bike, your bike is down the block near the fruit and vegetable store. I go running down there. The bar is right across the street where the wise guys hung out.

So I grabbed the bike. These kids were older than me, bigger than me, and they tried to get it away from me, and I wouldn't give it up, and I started fighting. I were fighting the two of them. I was crying, I was getting beat up a little bit, but I was fighting like a bastard. One of them guys from the Crozier Street

walked over. Hey, come here, what's your name? Sammy. He says, your father's Jerry and Kay, your mother father? Yeah. He chased these kids. You robbed the bike. It's your bike.

Go get your father. And bring them here. But they couldn't bring their father there. They stole the fucking bike. So anyway, they chased those kids. Another guy from across the street yelled to him, what's going on? He said, no, and this kid Sam, you see him? His father and mother, Jerry and came from up the block.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know what happened? Nothing, he was fighting these fucking kids. You see the way he was fighting? He's like a little fucking bull. That name stuck my whole life. I hated it when I first got it because my friends were team. He said me to the bull and put the fingers on the head like I had a horn. Joking and I hated it.

Cops, when I got in the gang, will come looking for me. Where's Sammy the most? So that name just stuck to everybody, no matter who the fuck it was. Whether there's law enforcement, people in the street, friends, and whatever. That's how I got the name, you know.

And it stuck. I mean, then the newspapers got it and never stopped. Now I'm stuck with it, so, you know, it's part of my show. It's not a bad nickname. I mean, it's better than Jimmy the Weasel. That's a shitty nickname.

Yeah, yeah. Or Frankie Frankenstein. Yeah, that's bad too. That's not a real hand lame. Another good nickname, though, is the chin, because then you touch your chin, you make the see, and then you don't have to say his name. That's clever, right? That's pretty clever. See like I'm doing right now?

That wants to see you. That's all I got to do. That guy wants to see you. So if there's tapes or whatever, it's just nobody has a clue. Nobody's on tape. Nobody has a clue. Who you're going to go see and whatever. That's pretty brilliant.

So this is a little more obvious, like Bull wants to see you. That's a little, now there's video, so it doesn't make it. Yeah, it's a little bit weird now. But I had a little nickname to be a little cautious was the little guy. There's a lot of guys who are little. So the little guy wants to see it. Yeah, that could be like. But I didn't enforce it like Chin did.

Some people said it, you know, if you're on the phone, everybody was afraid of phones, bugs. So if you're on the phone, but nobody actually called me the little guy. Right. It didn't stick. Yeah, so Vinny the Chish, what was it, Vinny? the chin gigante? Gigante, yeah. So that was a, people can Google that. We'll link that up in the show notes as well. This is an interesting little take here that nobody's talked to you about so far from what I could see. You said one day you saw David Koresh, you know, the Waco cult in Texas or the Branch

Davidian, and you said, how can people get so brainwashed that they join this cult? And then you said you looked in the mirror and you realized maybe that you had also been a little bit brainwashed yourself. What do you mean by that? I think it's self-explatatory, but I'll explain it this way. When I was in the military and I was training to go to Vietnam and fight, I was being trained to kill. And the government told me, they're communists. They're coming to this country.

They're going to rape your mother, your sisters. They're going to take over. Isn't that brainwashing by my government? And I bought it, box stock and barrel. And if I would have went to Vietnam, I probably would have killed people. and through the years, I look back or think back and say, now, I never met a bad Vietnamese person, man or woman. The woman, they do nails, cut your toenails, your fingernails,

they all seem very sociable, sweet, nice. What the fuck happened to all them communists and Vietnamese people who were going to come and do all those things? I don't think it ever happened. But we fought that fucking war for a long, long, time, did a lot of fucked up things. We were brainwashed. The same thing with David Koresh, the people were brainwashed. The mafia has a way of when you look at it and look up to it, you can call a brainwashing as well. How did your parents get to the United States? Do you know?

My father was an illegal alien. He jumped ship in Canada, crossed the border, and I think he was in the country 30-some-odd years before he became a citizen. And my mother came as a woman. She was born there, but she came as an infant, so I'm not sure she came in a suitcase, or she came with somebody, and automatically you were a citizen, but she spoke perfect English. She was, you know, most of her life she was here, almost all of it. What do you think of these, like, gangster wannabe kids who think that the mafia is so cool, it's romantic, it's so badass. For me, it's a little weird that adults and kids are obsessed with this stuff.

I get that there's history, but I feel like there's a lot of weird guys that romanticize the whole thing and have kind of an immature and naive view of what that life was and is. I don't know. I think it depends on what area you come out of. You know, you get people that come out of ghettos. I mean, they live in a rough neighborhood. They grow up a certain way,

seeing certain things, a drug dealer, a pimp, this or that, you know, to take, and it has effects on people. Why do you go to Montana? Why does every fucking kid in Montana go to college? Because they all go to college. So when they go to the mall or wherever the fuck they go, they go along with their environment. Okay, I see.

So the same thing, if you take somebody in a undeveloped neighborhood or a ghetto or a tough neighborhood. The mafia went out of ghetto, but bodies all over the place, like you said before, you might as well call it a ghetto. And you're growing up with that. That has an impact on your life. Nobody grows up believing mommy and daddy's the best they know every fucking thing. Everybody thinks their mothers and fathers are wrong. And sometimes they are. Sometimes they tell their daughter, don't do this, this, this, and this.

They could be 100% right. Or they could be 100% wrong. You can't be mad at them because their intention is to help you. So, but that's society today. And that's what's going on. But that's why in Montana, they always, grow up, go into a mall. Kids are going to college.

You're like, if you don't go to college, you're like a misfit. In Brooklyn, New York, where I grew up, if you went to college, you were a misfit. Why don't you stay in the street? The girls love us. They love bad boys, bro. Even now, I'm a bad boy. I get a lot of women sending me messages. They love bad boys.

Like women your age or like young women online? Listen, I'm not prejudiced at both. I take them all, bro. Yeah, I know. Young and old. We had to hold you back from the waitress every time to go out. Right? I was playing with the waitress.

Yeah. I do it all the time. Yeah. So I tell some of them not. The young ones, take it easy, bro. I'm fucking 96 years old. If the mafia could kill me one night with you, I think I'll be dead. Take it easy, like.

So that's about it. I know you got documentaries coming out. You got the podcast. We're going to link to a bunch of that stuff in the show notes. But how can people get a hold of you? The website and everything will be linked in the show notes. What are you working on right now that you're excited about? I have a website that we've just designed. It took us five or six weeks. Usually it takes months to put together what we put together. There's a few niches in it that we're working on every day, straining it out. It's sammythebill.com and we're working on everything. There's different platforms within it. One platform is my podcast. One platform is my videos. One platform is going to be the bullpane.

Let me explain the bullpen a little bit. It's going to be the way the mafia and myself looks at everything, society, all the things we've just been talking about. We're going to have a sports channel in it. Eventually, it's not out yet, but we're working on that. I'm even working on, it almost compares with like Netflix type of thing. It's not that big, but it's, the idea is that we're going to have different things where you can see videos, stuff like that. We're trying to set up this platform. And not trying, we have it about 90% for, it's open already, but there's still a little king carer there. We have a place shop where you can go there,

see the things that we sell, cups, artwork, all kinds of different things. As you know already, I got about 412,000 subscribers. We have 54 million views. On YouTube, yeah. on YouTube, and we're on a few channels. So that's what I'm working on. Plus, I'm working on with some heavyweight people in Hollywood now. They want to do my life story. It's a story in my life from start to finish. Something like the Sopranos, but more truthful.

Not that they lied, you know, the Sopranos was based on 10 or 15% truth. There was a family in Jersey, 85% was Hollywood, I call it, bullshit. I won't mine reversed, 80, 85%, truth, and you can't stop 10, 15% Hollywood. They're making movies. So I'm working on that. So I'm working on a bunch of things. Well, it's been fun, man. It's been really interesting.

I know you've told fragments of these stories at dinners and stuff like that, but it's good to be able to sit down and get a lot more of it out. Right. And we meant this is the second time. I think the third time. Yeah, maybe. Third time. I don't know.

It's hard to remember. You're a good guy. And you're a good interview. I was just telling them when you went to take a picture. He's a good interview. You are. Thank you, man. It was my pleasure.

I know the big body gun. I asked him before, do you have a gun that you're watching him all the time? He said, no. I said, but Zaza's got a gun. Shoot him if he moves. That's right. Yeah, I brought my friend Caleb Bacon in the studio. I know better than to show up to a meeting alone.

I think you maybe taught me that. Never show up alone. Yeah, yeah. Always be someone. Thank you very much. All right, bro. Take care. If you're looking for another episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show,

to sink your teeth into, here's a trailer for another episode that I think you might enjoy. Anthony Luciano Ramondi was born into the world of organized crime, spent much of his life as a mob enforcer, and played a part in heists and assassinations, allegedly. Here's a preview of my conversation with a former Italian mob enforcer. So I'm in the club and I'm putting some of the envelopes together. This guy walks in. So I get up, I say, excuse me, can I help you? Because yeah, I want to talk to you, pulled out of the gun. I still got the first scar right over you. This guy beat me so bad. I don't even know how I made it back downtown. I was crawling out of the place. Literally, I was crawling out of the place. And I remember him saying, you come back here,

your mother's going to have to have a close coffin for you. I'm going to blow you fucking head off. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. P.S., my cousin takes me up from the hospital about five, six days later. They told me who this guy was. And when they seen Joey D, we went to the basement, all weapons. His family were gun runners. I mean, if you want to be 52 bomb, he'll tell you, I'll get it for you in three days. I've heard the doorstep. I mean, they have bazookas, they had hangar. I mean, they had stuff like you never saw it. He goes to me, pick out something.

I take them a cousin's car, and I drive for 3rd Avenue, and I park. Right in front of the place, there's a parking space. I got the gun on my waistband. I got to go in, and doke you the bartender street. He goes, what are you doing here? I just, don't worry about him. I just don't worry about it. I said, I want to talk to him, but I figured I would really talk to me.

When I walked through and I turned around, I seen him. He had his bat to me. And he was talking to this girl, Cameron's schools. I never forget Cameron. The music goes down and I hear her tell him, she says, Anthony's behind you. For whatever the reason, before she said it, I had the gun in my hand. This guy gets up. What did I tell you, you dirty, motherfucker?

Your mother's going to have a close coffee. I'm going to blow you a fucking hell. He opens his jacket, and I seen the gun in his waistband. He puts his hand on it. I just picked up my hand like this and I need the whole clip into him. Joke him a drink. He gives me a 7-and-7. He goes, look at this kid.

He goes, he just killed somebody. He's sitting there as a cucumber. For more with former Italian mob enforcer Anthony Raimondi, including the many creative ways mobsters have gotten rid of bodies over the years, check out episode 425 on the Jordan Harbinger Show. So this was quite the marathon, Sammy got it a little tired at the end. He and I go back a few years, so I really thank him for being way more open on this than he was with literally anyone else. There's a lot of stuff he talked about with me,

both on the show and outside the show, that he just doesn't share a lot. So this is kind of a treat, an interesting inside. look. And some of the mafia beefs, I got to say the stuff you heard on the show and some of the stuff you did. It just sounds like high school. It's like these guys use ice picks and set of spitballs, but a lot of it is, you know, this guy disrespected me, but it's like, you know, he was drunk at the time. It's just silly. It just shows you how cheap life is in that culture. And he got a great deal from the judge, from the prosecutor of the Justice Department, five years for a man who confessed to 19 murders. Now, you might say, what the hell's wrong with our justice system? That shows you that

his testimony was so valuable that they realized that this was a deal that they could and should give him. Unbelievable. After the show, we went to dinner, and I asked him if he kept any of the money that he had made from his past life. And he told me that almost nobody does. They never really keep anything. They never really save anything anyway. It's about being showy and blowing a lot of the money. And a lot of the rackets that they run, they're profitable, but it's not like then you launder the money

and you turn it into a nice retirement savings. You just blow it on stuff. and since a lot of it is dark money, you can't do much with it anyway, and if you go get locked up, sometimes it'll get stolen by people that you know. It's just, it's not a great living after you get locked up. You're not coming out to a nice cushy retirement plan. He also said that he never bribed cops and judges. He always paid his end of the deal, even if he could get away with shafting somebody, and I asked him why. And he said that reputation was important, and it paid to be known as a so-called honest crook. You want people to be able to do jobs with you, go into business

with you and not worry that you're going to stab him in the back. He also admitted that he did threaten and bribe jurors in cases, but he never actually bribed cops or judges. When he got out of prison, Sammy said he didn't even know how to interact with the world because of technology. And he made a kind of a funny observation. He said, when I went in, if you talked to the TV, people thought you were crazy. Now, you have to talk to the TV to get Alexa or to search Netflix, which, I mean, touchet, pretty accurate.

I would say, even me as a tech-savvy, 41-year-old. I'm like, I just use the remote. I don't talk to the TV, but I'm sure that my kids, or even in a few years, everyone else will be doing that. I just, it is weird to talk to an appliance. I'm not sure how comfortable I am with it. Sammy also said that he looks at the government

as almost different crime families. Now, I'm not so sure this is a development, outlook on things, but the system, in his opinion, is unfair. And he said, if it's a fair system, maybe it wouldn't make people like me. Now, every system has its imperfections, and I think we heard a lot about that here on the show today, but all we can do is strive to be the best that we can. And I would say that most of y'all listening probably agree that we as a society, as a country, or just as a global society, we certainly have a long way to go. For those of you wondering, what happened in the Mafia Code? Adam Carolla, he had an interview with Sam, and he said

of something that, very Adam Carolla, but also sums it up quite nicely. He says, the mafia code used to be like how people dressed up nicely to go on airlines, and now it's just flip-flops and sweatpants. That's what happened to the mafia code. And Sammy pretty much agreed with that sentiment, I think, you know, it used to be this thing where you would die if you said anything, and people got popped for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person or to anyone. Now it's write a book about it. Sammy, of course, had already flipped on John Guy. gotten in and out of witness protection. There's no code left, and there's no reason to be quiet about it.

In fact, this is the only way probably that he can make a living. Speaking of witness protection, I asked him how they pick where they put you. And he's not 100% sure, and of course the FBI probably doesn't go and tell you what criteria they're using, but they look for a place that doesn't have a lot of mafia running around, at least not the same organized crime groups that you used to be a part of. They don't want you to get spotted. They don't want anybody to get suspicious of anything. they do have you lay low, but Sammy sticks out, you might say.

Now, he's out of Witsack now, you know he left the program, but he sticks out. We go out to eat, and older people, they know something is up. And he's such a character that pretty much everybody knows something is up, but they can't quite decide what it is. But older folks will come up and say, you know who you look like? Or they'll look over and they'll do a double take, and then they'll do a triple take, and then they'll get kind of uncomfortable sometimes, especially if they're from the East Coast where they probably know San.

and they go, that guy looks, oh gosh, that's the guy. We have that a lot when we go out to eat. It's like they know who he is or they have a clue anyway. And, you know, he's very friendly and outgoing and gregarious now. But I think when you know who he is, it makes you a little uncomfortable if you're sitting there with your wife and kids, which I totally understand. The mafia, of course, is less violent. The Italian mafia anyway is less violent now.

Sammy thinks this is smart. I asked him why. He says, because the FBI isn't chasing them as hard. There's less heat on them. and they can get into more legitimate businesses without as much distractions. So this conversational thread came out of the idea that I asked him, I said,

there's a lot of these young guys who think the mafia's so cool and it's easy money, and we poked a lot of holes in that in the show in the episodes that you just heard. But the idea that some of the top mafia guys would say, hey, it's smart to get into legitimate business tells you everything you need to know

about illegitimate business in the mafia, right? If they're thinking the highest level is to have legitimate business so that there's not heat on you, you and you don't have to murder your best friend or get murdered by your best friend. The idea here is to go into a friggin legitimate business. Now, when the mafia started, a lot of times Italians couldn't get hired for much and it became a corrupt influence on the whole society. We're better off without this type of organized crime and Sammy agrees. And some of you have asked me in the past,

does the mafia stay away from drugs? I actually had that same question. I saw that in the godfather. In an interview in the 90s, I think with Diane Sawyer, she said, I heard the mob stays away from drugs. Sammy said it's BS. He said, guys will do just about anything to make money no matter who it hurts. This is one reason why Sammy would never recommend anyone make a life out of organized crime. Last but not least, I asked him about celebrity prisoners in ADX because he was in that Supermax prison with Robert Hanson, the FBI agent who gave secrets to the Russians for so many years. That guy's never getting out. The Unabomber is in there, I think. And he said it's so lonely in there. We talk about prison a lot at our dinners.

It's a common theme for him. He spent over a quarter of his life behind bars. He said that it gets so lonely in there that he would start talking to the guards, and they're not really supposed to socialize with you, but they feel bad, and sometimes they're bored too. And he said, one time a female guard reached through the bars to give him something, and he grabbed her hand so hard, and he was like, don't go, don't go. And she said, Sammy, you got to let me go.

You're going to get in trouble. I don't want to have to write this up. And he just sort of, I won't say broke down, but, you know, had a long pause and said, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. And she said, I know, I know. That gives you an idea of how lonely it is in prison when these ice cold killers just will grab any human contact that they can. You never see anyone. He always tells us that when we're out to dinner.

He goes, you never see anyone in there. You see a guard occasionally. You never talk to the other prisoners. You never see anyone. You never talk to anyone. It's the worst thing he can imagine. It's a worst thing he's ever been through. It's a worst thing in the world.

So if that's not incentive enough to stay away from the mafia, I don't know what it is. Be sure to check out Sammy's podcast. It's called The Hour Thing podcast. link to it in the show notes. Please use our website links if you buy anything from guests. Those do help support the show, books especially. Worksheets for the episodes are in the show notes. Transcripts are in the show notes. There's a video of this interview going up on our YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or just hit me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems and tiny habits

over at our six-minute networking course. The course is free. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course is where you'll find it. Dig that well before you get thirsty. Most of the guests you hear on the show, subscribe and contribute to the course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. This show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Millio, Campo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's into the mafia stuff, definitely share this episode with him. I hope you find something great in every episode of this show. Please share the show

with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show. Okay, maybe not the hitman stuff, maybe not the bribing the jury stuff, but a lot of the other stuff you can apply safely so you can live what you listen and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by What Was That Like podcast? If you're looking for a new show to add to your rotation, something that'll make you stop mid-dishwashing and go, wait, what that actually happened? You got to subscribe to What Was That Like? It's real people telling the most surreal moments of lives and they're not just giving you the highlights. They're walking you through it from the inside as the person who actually lived it, which means you're basically getting a front row seat

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