Anthony Russo on Gambino Mob, "The Mafia Takedown," Cooperating with Feds (Full Interview)

all right here we go we have a former crew member of the gambino crime family anthony hootie russo welcome to vlad tv thank you for the invite flag well you're a very interesting story so i want to start in the very beginning so your mom and dad were from sicily i was first generation with both sicilian parents my mother's family was here before world war two my father came in the 60s okay so you guys are growing up uh in new york and i guess your family never even taught you italian no no no it was a they came here as i was told by them like real immigrants uh you're gonna be american you speak the language you live like americans you respect the rules of america and that's how my father explained it to me and he said when immigrants first came here they were frowned upon the sicilians especially i mean you've heard the old stories of new orleans how they would just take them out to the swamps and hang them and we got looked on worse than any other and my father was afraid of that and he spoke it in the house the sicilian dialect you know it's nothing like northern italy it's totally different uh but they never taught us it and then you know my father got sick when i was young my mother died in 91 and they just never really got a chance or got around to it okay and you grew up pretty poor yeah okay what was like the worst that you kind of went to living in poverty or worse well for a lot of years we didn't know that we were poor when you're a kid you're running around the neighborhood you eat three meals a day uh we didn't have doritos in our cupboards like i didn't know any of this until like i've never really went to friends houses when you lived like that you know where we lived i lived on a walk up 10 minute house other people lived in world cups there was private homes in that area but very rarely so you didn't know what other people had so until i seen that later on then i realized that and um when i was about 10 and i was supposed to play for a traveling baseball team i was waiting for a phone call i tried out for the team and my [ __ ] didn't know anything about it and somehow our phone was on this month for some reason we everywhere that phone bill was always getting [ __ ] that was like the first thing they didn't worry about paying you know the electric and the rent was more important and then putting food on the table but for some reason we had a phone and i left that number with the coach that i tried out for the team and the coach called it was called the astros and the asara family owned an astro fence company that's what it was called and my mother thought at 10 years old that an astro fence company called me for a job and i i couldn't believe it and i made the team they said you got it so she thought i got a job and i said no mom that's a baseball team a travel and baseball team we travel throughout all new york city the five boroughs that we play against all the cities other neighborhoods and she says oh no then you better go down the actual friends company next them for a job because we can't even afford the rent anymore that's when it hit me i had no idea okay what were your parents doing for a living my mother was a stay-at-home mom okay and you know cooking cleaning and my father was a carpet of all trades electrician plumber but he just wasn't making the wages that he should have been making and for some reason one of a couple of his brothers went to work for like local jobs city jobs one of my uncles was a sanitation worker but my father could speak three languages four or four if i remember correctly four languages it was very hard to write in english and he spoke broken english up until he died and um he just couldn't get on those test levels very smart math read a ruler you know he could read you know but like something like this lexi but he wasn't dyslexic so he never tried out for them one time he did was called urban renewal and the guy was doing something wrong the trainer and he tried to tell the guy how to do it correctly and they asked him never to come back so he went into business for himself and they treated him like an immigrant you know he didn't get paid the wages he should have been okay and you grew up in ozone park which i guess is the largest mafia area in the world yeah it's yeah i grew up in a place called city line my family originally you know came from brooklyn and we lived it's kind of weird how to explain it i've said it you know to a few people and some people understand it we lived on a block called drew street and one side of the block was brooklyn and across the site was queens so i got i went to school in brooklyn with all the guys that i hung out with in brooklyn east new york that's the that's the part of brooklyn that we were and then i had all my friends and queens who went that lived across the street and a couple blocks over then went to all schools in queens so i kind of had like the best of both worlds because i didn't realize that it was not really that good of an area okay and i guess by five years old you want to be a street guy as soon as i was able to remember to remember i wanted to be a street guy okay and then i guess as a kid there was a guy who died on your doorstep yeah was that a murder that happened yeah it was a guy uh joey courier his name was and he was a tough kid neighborhood kid like you know used to be out on the on the blocks this at this point now we moved over my father had a job with the bread companies to deliver bread calls uh called costelli's bakery which one became rosemarie's bakery so we moved like two blocks into ozone park now i'm living on 76th street and 101st avenue and there was a fight between couple spanish guys and a couple of italian guys and two of them came back and they caught this one kid joey and they cut him up with machetes and right outside my window if i look like i said i woke up tenement on top of a bakery and he was bleeding to death at my doorstep and i heard my mother yelling and screaming at the news reporter i don't know if it was connie chung it was definitely one of the famous uh news reporters and you walked downstairs and back then they used to leave the bodies outside because i had i actually seen my cousin as my father's cousin as well um back in 87 got his back of his head blown off in another famous murder barbershop murder in my neighborhood and they used to leave and that was fresh that was like in the middle of the night and like by the morning my mother and a couple other people were washing the blood off the concrete from the front of my house okay so you're growing up in in this you know fairly poor family in an area that's mafia ridden and i guess by 13 you start selling drugs yeah yeah what was in the beginning um at five i was trading bb guns and chinese stars and doing you know black jacks and we used to have uh knives called double 07's they were big knives like you know pocket nice but really big i mean i was messing around with all that stuff dark guns all types of like karate weapons from like five to ten and then like 11 i meet up with a couple guys on the brooklyn side and they uh teach me about selling mescaline mexicans come in little pill forms which was i learned i didn't even know a thing about lsd yet didn't have no idea and which is home for five hours a piece he actually took me when i'm on the train to harlem 110th street right outside central park it needs to be a guy there we buy a hundred hits for a hundred dollars and we used to come back and move the whole hundred i would hold them by the time i went to middle school i was finding ways to hide them i cut open the old school big pens i mean they still make them you pull out the ink i would cut that piece off and since mescaline was a little pill form i would hide them inside that pen keep it in my hat i always had a yankee head even going back to back then keep it in my hat keep it in my ear even a couple times i got patted down i had it on me and they never knew and i would hold it for him he'd call me over you know one two hits three hits and it was like you know young kids coming down from all walks of life and we would just be selling the mescaline all weekend long friday saturday sunday but at one point you actually got into selling crack yes my mother dies in 91. uh we moved to an area called woodhaven uh there's some famous guys from there that you have interviewed like uh johnny a light and uh some serious guys up there and i had a cousin that uh married a spanish guy from far rockaway and we were getting cocaine and you know moving little pieces and i started to be around them and we learned how to cook together first you start out with a gram and to an 8-ball and then after i left him i went back into the old neighborhood and got with a couple dominican guys and got to connect and i was buying ounces and i started moving it by a pizzeria called mr g's pizzeria which also another famous spot where a lot of tough guys hung out and by 1415 i took that pizzeria over and the guy that was in the place was a sicilian that owned it and he loved me his name was jack arrested solely's dead now uh always protected me you know i was the only one allowed inside through snow storms and rains you know you weren't allowed in the pizza unless you bought a slice of pizza to be 50 kids hanging out on a tuesday with no money so they're all hanging out outside the pizza you couldn't chase them away and i'd be inside sitting at a table i hid my drugs in this toilet bowl inside a ziploc bag and i had guys selling it for me and then eventually i moved up the ladder by 16 17 and i started buying weight and i was bringing it back into brooklyn i couldn't sell it i mean i had light hair light eyes you know fair skin i would stick out it wasn't that there was any race or situation like that easter it was just that i would have stood out standing on the corner so i went just opening my own spot getting a couple young kids and by then we're working off people okay and when you're talking about crack a lot of violence usually comes with that yeah did things get a lot more violent when you moved into crack no no absolutely no i you know what there was so much competition out there and so many people doing it and no one really knew that's what i was doing guys close to me no i had powder for them so they would see me on a friday or a saturday and i would still always keep it an 8-ball you know even though i was you know taking ounces by now and just going out there you know selling ounces on a corner probably was i think it was 75th street at the time 101st avenue and it was right before you get into brooklyn a block before east new york so as the crackheads were going to walk down 101st avenue to liberty avenue we would stop them and sell to them and a few times guys came by because someone must have said you know how come you guys ain't coming around no more they always look for their crackheads i mean crack dealers no and eventually they came by looking to see who was selling and there was a big corner they sold weed on it they sold everything in it and all types of drugs and still the masculine kid that i was working with selling masculine and i would hang out there was a building there was buildings over there or a community center and i'd be sitting on the steps just waiting get a beep run to a payphone i had a payphone on the corner that actually rang back back then and for some reason i went under the radar with that never had any beef show with a crack game okay and when you talk about buying weight you're buying kilos eventually okay by the time i was 18. okay now but by 17 you started getting affiliated with the mafia well i was not no 14 14. right i grew up around them first it was the bonanno family with vinnie osara he had a he had a club on liberty avenue full belt and uh my mother was friendly enough my mother loved the life and i guess that's what kind of drew me into it my father hated it hated everything to do with it couldn't stand it his cousins were actually involved in it and my mother loved it she glorified it she introduced me to sonny francis when i was in kindergarten i don't know he might have been home or he was on the lam at the time it was my grand grandmother's wake and she loved sonny sonny was a good friend of my grandfather's who i didn't associate with so i didn't know that part of the family but he was involved with the colombos as well but i was never whatsoever involved with the columbos and i met sonny one time and i was a kid at the time so getting back to that venusaur was like the boss of city line ozone park at the time he's a lot older he should be in his 90s by now maybe older so i always thought i was going to be a banana guy but the gambinos were the rock stars they were the major leagues to me and ronnie one arm i didn't know at the time wasn't a wise guy but he he conducted himself as a boss everybody in the neighborhood feared him he had a partner at the time and they owned the bar his partner was johnny eli and i thought that they were both gangsters at this point i didn't know johnny was an albanian his last name ended in the vowel so to me could have been a northern italian my house everything was sicilian and sicilians and nobody dons they both don't like each other you know one thinks one's a peasant one thinks the other one's a garbage pail just it's crazy because it's the same country but right that's just how it goes so i i didn't know and in 89 ronnie gets straightened out and then i find out that i don't know a light at all just known from around the neighborhood so to me ronnie's the boss and i thought that this was his partner so they were both bosses but it didn't work like that finding out years later when a molder at a light went down 101st avenue a little further to the red doors that's what we call the bergen hunt everybody calls it the bragging hot button if you're from the neighbor we called it the red doors because the doors were painted red that was our little thing that we called it and from that moment on i wanted to be with ronnie my whole life i just i knew he had drug dealers around them they owned the bar that i was told to cross the street when i walked past it and then crossed back over because there was a sandwich shop called sapienza's on the corner of this bar and it was the most famous sandwich shop in our whole neighborhood and that's where we used to go for lunch so but i'd have to cross the street and cross back over because you never know when bullets were going to come flying out of it and that's what it was known for and i wanted to be around them i mean i went from realizing there was a difference between a street guy and guys that would say today i don't call them that mafioso but they don't exist in this country that's back in sicily they made guys respect the guys that's what they are okay why the name ronnie one arm when he was a kid he had a childhood accident and he fell down in the streets playing around and got his arm ran over so his arm never grew i'm sure in this day and age they probably had ways to fix it but probably when he was a kid they didn't and it just stood like a baby's arm curled up yeah right and your name hootie came from cutie cute hoodie yeah yeah in the hoodie yeah yeah i hung around a lot of older guys when i went over and got into the life i i wasn't around ronnie per se i wasn't around ronnie on record at all but everybody knew that i was with him i go over to a park later on now i'm living in woodhaven i got the spot on mr g's and the kid invites me over to 88 park now i know ada park to be a tough tough park like these kids don't play around if you're not from there they're going to give you a beating just street toughs no gun play no nothing like that these were kids that kept their neighborhood good and clean and just didn't want any outsiders in and he invited me to come to come there they opened up a social they opened up an arcade which eventually when i get there turns into a social club and out of the back they were taking action it was an office taking action is taking sports bets loaning money taking cash bets and i wound up going over and these guys were about between seven to ten years older than me and they introduced me to him actually if i wanted a job in the arcade that's just sure realizing that if i get paid 25 a shift i got a crack business at 14 i was killing it with that and the weed business because the weed was what really you know i used to go into brooklyn after the mescaline in between the crack and buy nickel bags and sell them to the kids back in queens for twenty dollars because the jamaicans wouldn't sell to white people they always thought they were cops or setting them up and i'd go in there and i get i'd buy ten nickels and he'd give me two for free they were jamaican guys fulton and nickels one of the best sweet spots ever it was the worst weed ever but i never got into smoking but that's all everybody said but they were so big these called pillows pillow sacks yeah and i would come back and sell them to the kids for 20 i made a fortune my first year high school for selling nickel bags okay so as you're getting into your late teens now you're getting kind of deeper with your mafia connections still not yet we're we're actually fighting against the mafia kids but because i'm taking action out of this office i find out it's nikki corrazzo's office and it's across the street from fat andy ruggiano's house who if anybody knows who that is he was albert anastasia's first number one bodyguard and was straightened out by albert anastasia considered the mad hatter for his time he used to do suicide missions that means killing somebody during the day in broad daylight and uh murdering he was around all of that and he lived right across the street and one of his sons was a knock around guy in the life and the other son was a legitimate tough guy who used to have a huge pop business that was just wrapping up in that park at the time because they were chasing drugs out of the pocket this time when i got there at 14. okay by 19 i guess you went to mexico yeah it's not going to mexico you snuck it it's not canada okay and that was to get close to the drug cartels i was trying to just to get a connect i didn't i realized that what i was paying was so high because if you watch the how it fluctuated the cocaine price is like gold in the 80s a kilo was like 50 000. wow somewhere in the 90s they went down to like 27 28. i mean it it fluctuated they watched it's like it was like gold up and down up and down and i was like why not just i have the ability to speak to talk why not you know not realizing that it was such a dangerous territory and i think but this happened in colombia pablo just got killed maybe a few years before i don't know the timeline i want you know the years when he got killed but i was going now mid to late 90s and i get into mexico and i'm with a kid with me spanish kids spoke spanish and he was a latin king a ballsy kid i had 50 000 cash on me so i was gonna look to make a buy and then try to find the pipeline not realizing how the whole thing worked that you know you get to connect that's coming into the country because i wasn't on that scale you know throw my 1 000 kilos a month maybe 100 kilos a week at minimum and i would strike it out striking out and i get close to juarez you know and hearing stories there's no internet you only you know newspaper articles maybe a couple of news car you know news you watch the news a little bit a couple you know stories on the news not knowing how terrible and how bad the area was that the cops didn't even go in there you know worse than any ghetto or hood that new york or any of the cities that we come from could ever have so i almost make it into juarez and young spanish guy mexican guy stops us he's talking spanish with the kid that i'm with and he's like listen he said you don't want to go in there he says your skin color i had a yankee fitted on like he's like the way you look he goes they'll sell you for body parts forget about if they want now i got the money hidden in my pants we used to fly like that when we used to go to vegas had the money hidden in my pants so it was it would have to strip me down to find the money but he's like they would take your body parts forget about anything else you know he was but he knows somebody that might be able to help us so he introduced us to something like this little outside cafe maybe about 10 miles from juarez and we wanted to hook it up with an old guy fernando his name was right passed away by now i was only i met him only one time and he had some kind of connection into the cartel and he kind of broke it down for me he had a circadia around him you know a hit man and you felt it in these guys like i've been around killers and murderers that probably shook their hands after they just finished the murder who knew you know and you would think they were just regular guys playing handball in the park shooting basketball but these guys you felt like the crosses and the demons that they were bearing you know and he was a serious guy he didn't speak much we wound up talking a little bit but not really much but now i'm getting the gist of i'm in the wrong place like this is some serious bigger than closing also even though cosmos are killing you in a second as well but these this is just some serious torture this is where i realized that i'm totally out of my league so now what do i do here do i just give this old man the 50 000 and get my ass out of mexico i don't know or from some of it you know he was a nice enough guy farm-like house and he explained the game to me you know down there he's like these cartels don't play around he says we don't like you know he asked me about my background i think what saved me was i come from an immigrant family that does it helps a lot in certain situations and uh he was talking to me about that a lot and then after that he kind of broke it down for me he was like listen once you're in with these guys you're in for life he goes and they don't like to deal with you know closing ocean guys and i'm like listen i i do i know closing our shirt now it's pretty tough cuz today but i grew up in at this time the beef between ozone park and how beach have been squashed i was friends with you know certain gutty family members and a lot of you know high ranking members from howard beach so they didn't like that and they like you it's too much heat nobody ever deals with people and causing nostra and you're in the wrong place kid you know kind of like that you go and he explained to me says listen do we want to go to an american jail absolutely not he goes but you're kind use line up to go to jail he goes what can a guy possibly be worth he goes you look at me right you think i'm poor right because you couldn't imagine the money that has flowed through here and now he's talking to me on a serious level he's like well you usually do it for no reason you know with all these conspiracies and rico and everything else he goes really and you just bring nothing but heat to everybody else just for being italian and part of that you just get extra jail time he goes guys here in mexico they don't want to go to jail at all in america which i that i could never understand because the jails they were horrible but so he explains it to me he goes you get into this business you get away from closing australia you move away say you move 100 kilos a week right you're gonna get a longer run than you'll ever get doing anything with causing austria so you're worth 20 million 25 million by the time they come and get you after four or five years and then you go do a 10-year mandatory minimum because that's what the drug charges were for certain amounts of powder cocaine and heroin was a little bit more meth which i've never seen that in new york yet was even more than that and that's what he told me he was like if that's what you're gonna do that's the route you go he says but other than that he goes you'll be locked up in a week and are they gonna trust you to not tell on them no they're gonna they're gonna kill your families you know what's been said i'm sure you've seen it on tv and explained it to me and i got out with my life and three kilos oh so you got three kilos got three kilos came back in through arizona and never went back to mexico again okay now were you moving more kilos once you got back yeah okay and where were those coming from from a dominican okay yeah what was the most you got in any one one shot i should get 10 at a time that was the most kilos were going for what 17 20 some at the time 19 21 okay so you're talking about you know almost half a million dollars yeah 210 220 190 000 you know each time yeah yeah but that's you know you got to build that it's not something you get for every week okay along the way were kilos disappearing were the cops busting any of them was i was breaking them down and taking them to people that i did not do business with in my own neighborhood now big eights close friends certain family members uh called a key that's the most that i would break down and give to somebody that was around my neighborhood a lot of it the most i've ever cooked up was a half a key and we pushed that to east new york some parts of long island and i try to stay under the radar keep myself known as a pot dealer okay and at this point are you affiliated with the gambinos yes okay so now is it ronnie one arm who are you working with that's your that's your boss now you yourself even though you're sicilian we're not a maid man was it brought up yes okay what was the first time um when we went into the life together i meet ronnie's son at 17 after you know everything calmed down i was i should stay with uh peter gotti peter gotti is john senior's youngest son and he became a friend uh he wasn't into the life but he was a street guy he was a boxer he was a good fighter uh he tried to keep his neighborhood clean beating up all the drug dealers and you know things like that but he wasn't involved in the life he had his own social club it was around the corner from his father's club on 99th street and al walks in one day and i never had no idea that ronnie had a son that was my age he had a nephew who i thought was his son but then found out that it was his nephew but he was a lot older and i get introduced to him and he takes a liking to me after a few visits we used to play college by peter and he takes a like it to me with another gentleman called michael rockefort rock no i sickens me to even say his name because he's a good friend of mine and i don't like to talk about him but yes they wind up taking a liking to me and we wind up becoming really close they invited me to their first house that they had it was a house that they took action out of he was opening up a bookmaking office at the time his first bookmaking office and he invited me and the rest was history for me i went one night not specifically that night but about a week or so later and he kind of like took me away from peta you know and i liked it i knew his father was i liked the gang i liked the crew and we just grew so close i thought and we were going to follow allen to the life he had the potential he had his father's name she was well well respected in its own right where people get made today he wasn't even skipper yet he was just a regular mate guy people get made today and they're just regular made guys where guys back then got made they were bosses they controlled their areas of their neighborhood or wherever they're from they controlled and we thought of him as a boss until i seen him be yelled at by his own skipper i had no idea that he didn't have the power i thought he had but he still controlled a lot of power more than most made guys and that's who we went with you know they were taking action i was selling drugs and you know he introduced me to his father as an older man myself being older as someone that can help him with his collections he shook down a lot of drug dealers a lot of shady characters a lot of cd areas and his son and the guys he had around them they didn't fit the profiler you talk with the guys like that so that's what he asked me to do okay but you yourself were never made no i guess what four different times three different times three different times it was brought up but you were never made no okay is there a specific reason why you're never made because you are a sicilian right which allows you to be made right um why did it never happen before i got arrested for the first time because i wasn't on record ronnie would call me his friend he would never say he was with me or around me but his the boss at the time and the consigliere they all knew that i was with him and around him but didn't officially put it on record because i came around known as a drug dealer because they just knew throughout the neighborhood if it was cocaine or marijuana because by the time i'm out of the crack game i'm not even now i'm frowned up you know that's a that's a frowned upon drug you just stay away from it but i was known as a party of my whole criminal career and that's what they knew me as so they didn't want to affiliate that and also that i'm collecting from drug dealers for a may guy and that's what they texted me to do and the agreement was i would never have to kick up whatever i earned okay now how violent were you during this whole time not violent at all fights baseball bad i've had my teeth knocked out i mean regular street stuff i didn't carry a gun never had to use a pistol nothing like that okay and at one point you started getting arrested yeah when was the first arrest um they opened up a book making office another one they knew they had a move they found out about wyatt taps in their fir in their second office so they move into further into ozone park we were in south ozone park they came back into ozone park closer to brooklyn and i was selling marijuana at the time i probably had one of my best months ever with marijuana it was october i made a hundred thousand dollars for that month and in november they asked me to come over get away from the drugs the whole point was you came with us i would go in first and one of the time we'd all get straightened out that's when it was brought up that was the first time now that first time was brought up again stay away from the drugs come over work the office and i already had my own guys in costa rica i had a little sheet going on by myself paid 23 dollars a guy and that's it maybe 20 guys at the time so i said all right i'll come over i'll work the office this is the life i wanted so the month of november i go over i make 2 800 in the month of november working for them and in three weeks we get pinched that's my first pinch like i've been stolen property cars you know things like that i've been arrested for before but all fireworks just misdemeanors and stuff like that but now it bookmaking's no longer getting tickets and community service we had an anti-crime unit that in the new york state that chased guys around like us and it was an organization unit and they got onto them i guess for a while and just happened to be the first month i worked is when they pinched us okay and the book the bookmaking business was making millions right that that first operation had it like 30 million a year wow right but it's not 30 million 30 million is what you take in good or bad you figure the guy that's running the whole show which was al took in three million for your 10 percent and then whatever we made the sheet guys you know you guys a half a sheet quarter sheet 40 30 so 30 million was what they had what we took in that year okay and then by 2005 you got busted for drugs yes okay what did they get you with i was dealing prescription drugs on a large level on a large level now i get a 6'5 of it we all plead out uh top guys like al his father they all get won the trees i get a 6'5 i could have walked out with an e felony and a conditional discharge not even probation but i stood on a global plea that means i'll take more time so the top guys get less time so i get a 6'5 they all get one to threes i'm home or you get home in 120 days on a 6'5 and then you got the five years probation to work out it's not like parole you go in you do a hand print in new york state back then you go in every week then they go every two weeks then every month after a while for five years you put your hand print in punch your name in your social security number and you leave that was it so they're all in jail at the time me and two other guys are on the street and one of the guys on the street's brother is holding a safety deposit box in his name for al it was about 110 000 at the time maybe he's away six months at this point maybe three months that's what the bookmaking took in three months his end that's paying all the bills that's the guy being nice and putting money aside for him because a lot of guys wouldn't have did that so there's about 110 000 in it this kid's younger brother turns around and runs into a swindler that sells tickets it says i can flip the money for you can you get money can you do this can you do that and he says i think i can get my hands on some money so the kid without permission goes to the safe deposit box takes out the 110 and gives it to this guy now the guy doesn't realize the kid's brother's a wise guy and the money belongs to an acting captain in the gambino family and takes off with the money but now his brother wasn't made yet but he was on his way to be made the guy that took the money in the lucasie family so everybody was entwined they all knew each other they find out he gives his brother a they find out who the guy is they grabbed the guy the guy says i had no idea i was really looking to invest the money the whole night now it's a [ __ ] story he says but there's something i could do he was i work at pharmaceuticals because i get a pill called vicodin and i get large quantities of it he goes i can give you that to knock the money off the bill and at this time the wise guy friend of mine is not involved in drugs at all so he brings it to me because i got to get this money back it belongs to al he says can you meet this guy every week takes whatever he gives you flip it for me to whoever you know that can take it and just bring me the money he goes i'll take kerry on the front end and this guy says he'll take care of you on the back end when it's over so i do some research i find out about the pill i found out that just hitting the scene hard so i tell him yeah i told him yeah no matter what as soon as he said it to me it's like yeah anything you bring to me like that i'm just gonna try it anyway so but i do my research after that and i find out there's a market for it i wanted to find a guy who was the president of a rehab facility that had connections to the hell's angels and could take these pills so i get them he's giving me 5 000 a week and they're coming in large jaws like this thousand thousand thousands of them just but each shot held a thousand so i'm moving 7.5 that's what they were vicodins after three months i find out he gets 20 to be exact because i say 30 000 i rounded up 27 000 pills a week but the kid that was selling it for him wanted to move his family out west something a little shady about that i didn't find out the situation until way after he comes to me with it he goes listen you're doing pretty good taking these pills from me without you never you know you say nothing he goes how about you become the only guy i deal with and then he tells me the whole plan he gets 27 000 bills a week he doesn't tell me where he gets him from or how he does do i want anything to do with it i say yes right away so with that i bring it to the guy that i'm selling the pills to and he says yeah of course he goes these guys at hell's angels they can use as much as you got you know i said all right i take the 27 000 for throughout the whole year for the rest of the year besides the three months that he was giving me between a thousand and five thousand and i'm doing phenomenal i got my own thing going on this is just something to pay but this has nothing to do with them he's still just getting his thousand a week two thousand five thousand you know whatever he gave me for their end i would make sure they got and back then i was only making fifty cents a pill so now at twenty seven thousand it was rounded off the third fifteen thousand a week almost from these things it was insane how fast they went he gave to me and i gave to somebody else an hour later just like that and it was phenomenal i got book making going on i got the [ __ ] going on you know we got a ton of things going on because there's a few guys in jail so we're collecting you know making more money for collecting because they're not on the streets so they only got a certain amount and was we were doing phenomenal you know they had no idea that i was taking the 27 000. they just thought that i was taking enough to pay back their money uh they come home al comes home he finds out the whole situation there's about another five or fifteen thousand on the table there was fifteen thousand on the table like i think i brought them five thousand he finds out how they were getting the money back and i think we're on tavern on the green if i'm not mistaken and you know because we're not supposed to see each other he's on parole so and we're called defendants so at this point he you know we go out to the back there's like a wooded area back there and he was listen the drugs are done he goes i don't want to be affiliated with it and he made so much money between the gambling and joker pokers and card games it was like he was selling drugs so he never wanted to be involved in the drug game with that he tells me to stop takes the last five thousand dollar payment he wouldn't even accept it he made somebody else take it from me but i think there was 15 000 left on the table and i also got this whole thing going on with the other rest of the pills that he's given me don't call him back don't return his phone calls stay away from him whatever you want no problem he calls me that monday which very rare he's like listen we got to meet up i'm back around i'm like all right i says we'll figure it out i'm around too i just happen to get back from miami i says i'm around two an hour lady shows up at my house he's never been to my house before i never ever that's where my kids were my wife my family never allowed anybody to come by my house to do business he's in front of my driveway double parked i've lived on a big avenue and uh i run outside i'm like what are you doing here he's like oh he goes i got i got something for you to take care of that money the balance for them and we can go on and move i'm like listen i said i don't do this by my house let's just get their money out of the way now i don't know if the greed kicked in or it was just sitting in the trunk i didn't know what he was going to hand me he handed me 5 000 pills i kind of thought it was going to be money or maybe a thousand pills he has me a blue bag with 5 000 vicodins in them pops his trunk it's broad daylight the summer june and he hands me the bag i grab the bag like an idiot i go to walk in my house from the corner of my eye i see them sitting on me i run in bolt the door i jumped the fence in my backyard i put them underneath my neighbor's garbage bill i had a a false bottom where i used to keep cocaine they could never find it they ringing the bell they're ringing the bell they're ready to kick the door down i open up the door i let them in they don't have a search warrant they only have an arrest warrant and they have the camcorder they have a camcorder at the time and they show me the camcorder they're like we know what's in that bag where's the blue bag i said i don't know what you're talking about they bought the camera they show me the video recording now at the time my brother-in-law who i didn't get along with was at my house he should have never been there we didn't get along he just came home from jay was home maybe a month maybe not even he shouldn't even have been around me my kids were there my wife was there my in-laws were there it was awful he opens up his mouth in those offices listen i'm on parole should i get out of here or is this going to be a problem they ran with that they couldn't go in the house they're at my doorway now they said listen we're going to take your wife in and we're going to take your brother-in-law and violate parole for being around you and put this down as a drug house i was never gonna give anything up the drugs nothing now i'm in a predicament this guy's whining about his parole my wife i know that was just gonna be [ __ ] a couple hours she would have been fine i give in that's all right but i have to get them i'm not going nowhere my family's right here let me go get them i jump over i get them i come back with them i give them the pills put the cuffs on me and they take me in how much time did you get for that i called it two flag two years they would charge me an eight and a half to fifteen or was it oh they were seven seven seven and a half to fifteen they were looking to give me but it was they now they were giving out flatbeds for non-violence and drug crimes but this was when they thought i was the kingpin they thought that that was the main guy we happened to go to ragas island this was my first experience on reicazan i wind up in one of the worst buildings ever called the beacon not only was i the only italian i was the only white guy in this whole building gang related my classification was a 27 nobel this was my first serious pinch and i got no bail it was insane and they have and the highest classification you can have at this time was 30. i was a 27. so i get no bail a month goes by my classification changes i get sent to the annex which is i don't even know there was nothing on rikers island it's nice but this part of the building was a lot nicer than where i was they weren't stabbing and killing each other i could tell you that so i'm wondering now i got schooled a little bit when i was in there if your classification drops something happened with the case or your code went bad so the top guy was bad he was walking around filming that whole day he had got pinched i guess a while back and he was filming all his guys that he sold to and it wasn't as big as i thought he put away pharmacist he had a bunch of middle eastern pharmacists that would give him all their viking because they weren't back then they weren't getting rid of him like today and that's what he had he'd go around to maybe 10 different pharmacies and get 27 000 pills a week and that's what it was he gave up the pharmacist he actually called me to reverend ross's office that was uh there was a reverend there uh irish guy and told me he's like listen you were just a small fish in a big pond they have no idea who you are i told them what you were doing which he told him i was collecting money for the gambinos through his drug operation none of them would return my phone call didn't help with lawyers nothing because even though i got most of their money back less 15 000 whatever it was because he told me not to go and deal with them again they used that as an excuse and that was another reason why i was shot down to be straightened out okay so you get out i guess what 2007. uh late 2007 2008. okay i hit work release okay and then a few years later 2011 the biggest one-day bust in u.s history 127 suspected mobsters were arrested it was called the mafia takedown yes 90 of them were made men yes taking off your glasses and you got swept up in this i did okay now weren't most of these guys a lot older well except micro yeah a lot of them this this diamond went back to 91. okay most of them were over 60. yeah so but you're only made yeah well act the boss at the time was uh bobby glasses he was there uh big louis who was sat on the three panel with him uh the conciliate was jojo carazo it was all of us it was topped all the upper echelon of the gambinos were there we had the biggest crew that got pinched out of all the five families on that pinch okay what were you specifically charged with the whole rico act okay i got every charge in rico they at the beginning they hit you with everything and what you plead out is most likely a rico with a lesser charge or whatever they come over at the end at the beginning you're charged with everything they try to look at you okay how did you feel when you were swept up in this thing we knew it was coming they standing outside a park in queens talking with his handler they drove past them like eight nine months before the pinch and seen them talking first they seen his car they said oh circle the circular block maybe uh howie's out which was weird because they didn't even like him they used to avoid him he was annoying he was from the old school they did well the generation before us they never nobody liked them in our whole crew big mouth annoying but for some reason they wanted to see where he was so they circled the block and by the time they got halfway around he was walking around the block with his handler okay his fbi connected and they seen them they all locked eyes okay so everyone knew that this was coming down the line did you know that you were gonna be part of this no well because you were not a made man well it had nothing to do with that i was in the crew no matter what but i wasn't around them anymore they told another crime family that came looking for me uh a bonanno a captain uh ronnie giolenzo that i wasn't with them they never went on record with me so i thought i had no i thought i was fine i came home from the drug pinch and i went hard into the bookmaking operation that i had and i built it up uh i was working a regular job for the union i had a no show at one point and i wind up taking the job on full time because i had to work now i had three years of supervised release and me and al had the same parole officer at the time okay you're talking about alfons chuccio yeah okay and you worked he was the gambino capital now he was an official captain at the time no more acting and you were working underneath him no no working from at all i never worked for him at all we were always friends aha but they were trying to put you together with him well they put me with his father they put me with the with with the you know ronnie's crew that's what we were considered because you never see two maid guys and a captain in one crew usually you gotta get split up captain hangs around associates and may guys got a bunch of associates around them you never see two main guys and a captain in one crew so alphonse truccio he was charged with racketeering drug trafficking extortion assault loan sharking and gambling uh i guess he was sentenced to eight to ten years and uh he had a famous quote i guess when he was being escorted uh back to jail he drive snitched he said they can't take my honor oh i thought that part yeah that was after he already he blamed his friends for being drug dealers not him because he had to plead out the drugs okay there was another famous quote in the courtroom that made the papers where he said their drug deal is not made and he talked about his own friends aha so he essentially turned on you in prison he turned on me okay now you yourself you're tied into this huge bust mafia people and how much time were you facing at that point it's it's it's insane how the story goes because i'm in the box two days wondering what i'm even doing there they're wondering what i'm doing there they thought for some reason maybe i saw drugstore undercover uh maybe i was doing something behind their back that's why i haven't seen these guys we didn't get any discovery yet we don't have no idea what this indictment is even about we knew that it was coming down but we're saying no one ever did anything with the co-operator we had no idea why so many people from our crew were put onto this bench because we didn't understand it no one the cooperative never did business with any one of us no one would trade baseball cards with the guy and we're all pinched and i remember my friend rob at the time was my friend he was a may guy and i come in behind him and he looks at me now we're all at the armory in brooklyn because they they couldn't hold us anywhere there's no place to hold that many guys he's on an army base and he turns around he looks at me he's cuffed and he says what the [ __ ] are you doing here and then he looks up at the two agents and they were pretty young under armour turtlenecks they look like you know athletes and he goes oh that's why you're here he goes because i would have sold drugs to them if i was in the streets so you must have sold drugs to them and i says nope haven't touched it since i've been home and that was it and that's probably like one of the last conversations we had before we were booked and then we got split up and i had no idea what i was doing there two days into the box they pull me out tell me that i'm gonna go i have to a one day arraignment for career criminal now i'm like what now i know a little bit about the feds the laws and you know the mandatory minimums i had no idea about this i guess this is like the tree strike rule that they use in california or whatever i have no idea now i'm the only one charged with this out of my whole crew so i gotta get ready it's a one-day hearing they take me the next day it's like a totally different fight if they find you guilty of being a career criminal you're mandatory minimum before they charge you with everything else that you get convicted of is 20 years wow okay just for being arrested in the feds with a with a rap sheet or that you were just a criminal like your whole life with anything you ever did you didn't work you don't i got tax returns thank god i did i had tax returns i worked and they and you know what the prosecutor didn't go hard on me for the career criminal now you know people say i was bad i'm this i'm not if i wanted to go bad that's the day i would have went back i'm looking at 20 before they even give me the mandatory 10 that i was supposedly looking at which they were looking to turn to 20 because there was so much so much drugs involved but none of it had to do with the gambino family i did it all on my own people i sold drugs to people i bought drugs from well had nothing to do with causing australia so i go for this hearing now i'm in the box for now 72 hours three years working building a bookmaking operation nothing to do with drugs staying away from these guys i get pinched and now i'm looking at a queer criminal charge out of my mind i had tax returns i made sure my wife got him to my lawyer represented him didn't even really need them the prosecution didn't go hard with it the judge said no no way they threw it out the prosecutor didn't object to it let it go turned around to me and says yeah but you got no shot for bail now i'm still i'm still baffled lad i don't know what's going on i'm like oh no shuffle bail now bail on the fed's signatures property it's not money like in the state of new york where you could put up a half a million dream you know whatever it's property how much property you can put up they weren't even offering that because they took my whole bail package out the window i told them i wore an ankle bracelet i would do whatever they wanted because i didn't want the truth of the matter is i didn't think that i was going to get that much time or i might able to got it dropped because i i never even had a conversation with this guy the co-operator so i wanted to keep my benefits my job i had a family so they didn't want to give it to me i go back to the box now like you said there was a lot of old-timers there and i was with one he was a captain high-ranking captain and this guy's crying i don't deal drugs they got me affiliated with guys like you i'm looking and i'm like this guy's a captain he's like and then he gets to they're gonna stop my social security check wow the hack passed by on his 20-minute walk co these guys are actually nice guys and i said listen i'll do an extra two weeks in the box if you can get this guy out of myself this is a captain of the gambino crime family whining about his social security check okay so now you're facing all these charges and at one point you start to cooperate never cooperating you never cooperate no stepped away from a global plea what does that mean a global plea was something that i took for them on that first case now i i go to one of my friends in there he's a may guy and i say to him what do i got to take 10 years i says i have no idea what i'm doing here we start to find out about the discovery it was you know three or more people going to either go to the grand jury or they testify on the old and they all tree got the same story about me that's how i could get indicted the 400 hours of tapes i'm not on one minute of the 400 hours but there's a bunch of people on there talking about what it is that i do for the crime family and this was before i got pinched in all five so it wasn't anything new but they talked he sells drugs he doesn't kick up he does favors for that he collects christmas money that's what it was called i collect the envelopes of christmas and i collected once while i was home i got a phone call asked me to do my favor i went and did them a favor they couldn't get paid no no so i went i got the money from i gave it to whatever i had to give to and that was the one time i did it when i was home from 2008 to 2011. so i guess i wrapped myself back up in the conspiracy and what what a guy's right yeah i did the things they said i did i did but i didn't do it under the closing officer's flag i didn't it was my own and i wasn't doing it anymore i was bookmaking and i had all the same charges that you just read off that alphonse had i had all the same charges and i was the only guy that looked at the career criminal so it was all surreal what was happening it felt like a movie and it feels like they were never going to open up the doors and let me out so i get my my senses together i'm talking to a few people is this what i got to do everybody's starts blaming everybody else everybody's dry snitching everybody's holding you know co-defendant meetings you can hold if you got a lawyer your lawyer comes up with other lawyers brings you down and you have a co-defendant meaning what a bunch he is and you just try to strategize on what you're gonna do in order a global plea with as many guys as we had they put these together five and one group three and another for one another and they break it down like a b and c you know the captains the may guys the associates however they want to break it down as serious as your crimes were they thought i was involved in a lot more serious crimes than they were they tried to get me on you know hitting a guy or you know there was murders on the case and they did they were going all over the place now i'm getting scared you know because it's like whoa you're not scared like nervous scared like they getting the story wrong they put me on it put me on a murder i had nothing to do with thinking i was you know if there was four guys on a three guys whatever i was one of the guys that was there or i mean things are going crazy you know lined up guys went to trial on it my name didn't get mentioned they knew i had nothing to do with it but i was getting blamed for this stuff so you know nervous nervous like wow they're going to get this wrong they're going to get this wrong drug dealer you want to give me that from 15 years ago i'll take that but don't stop putting heinous crimes on me that i didn't do that would never be part of and i said you know what i spoke to my lawyer i said i want to jump off the global plea and charlie kennedy's comes to me at he's a big-time lawyer with two other big shot lawyers you know he's i don't talk you know bad about the debt now because he passed away but comes to me with three other high powered attorneys i mean if you were a million dollar defense attorney you are on this case you know and he comes to me says listen your lawyer's friendlier with an fbi agent and the fbi than some of us are kind of trying to hint to me that like my lawyer's a rat lawyer and the guy was the furthest thing from it he's like we could give you recommendations for all the lawyers and i went to this guy and told him i wanted to jump off a global plea and he says i don't represent guys that do that and left on his own all right that's how much of a stand-up lawyer this guy was and these guys were cursing them in in the co-defendant meeting behind his back and i thought that was wrong and then i'm watching guys talk about they heard the tapes and they wanted to blame it all on two people the two main people that were talking on the case let's put it all on them you know they're the ones that are talking about the crimes that we've committed because the five guys that got serious time on the case never did a single thing with the co-operator wasn't even on tapes talking about primes other people on tape talking about crimes that's the difference between the feds and the state all it's got to be is a conspiracy three or four people come in talk about the same thing in separate occasions and you get indicted so i wound up getting a court appointed lawyer told him i wanted to get jump off the global plea bring it to the prosecution i'll confess to my crimes and what i've done wrong and i throw myself an emergency to court okay and you admit it to the drug dealer drug dealing book making [ __ ] and whatever i took whatever i took me myself and i did it okay and how many years did you get for that 16 months five years five years right in the process did they offer for you to cooperate against the other gambinos that you knew and worked with my lawyer when you get a court appointed lawyer he'll get pretty close to the u.s attorney's office and they ask and listen you can really help yourself out here now they call something queen for the day where you going and you talk with the fbi yeah i went in and i talked with the fbi so i'm considered a rat which to me a guy who got paid a guy who was informing on his friends not a single person got taken off the street a single person got superseded and there was never new charges against anybody that i ever did business with guys are still walking around that i did business with that never spent the day in jail because of me but i wanted to go in and i wanted to talk because i wanted to straighten out what i did wrong right and make sure now like i said the things that they were accusing me of i needed to get out and they needed to ask me on the old right the queen for a day that's a proper agreement certain not everything's a profit okay you could go in you could talk on the oath they could take notes about it it's just you're taking oath and you're being recorded or they're taking notes 302 in is giving information uh voluntarily just going in and talking about other people and other people's crimes um i've never signed a proper agreement that i i don't know how it would be justified i'm not trying to justify it i know what i am i know what i did okay and i know nobody was hurt by it right but generally the queen for a day agreement means you come in and testify to everything you know and you can't get charged for anything you implicate that's immunity that's not queen for a day that's not queen for a day nah that's when they give you immunity and you come in and you testify against all the crimes you know of others and yourself okay i guess i'm a little confused yeah yeah that's that's i've always for a day they call it is sitting down with the feds any way that you sit down with the feds even if it's not being recorded if you're driving around with them if they pick you up in your neighborhood and you're talking to them you're playing queen for the day yeah i mean according to i mean to wikipedia a proper letter or proper agreement aka queen for a day a letter which is written agreement between a prosecutor and defendant or prospective witness that allows the defendant or witness to give the prosecutor information about alleged crime while limiting the prosecutor's ability to use that information against him or her yes that's what they have it on wikipedia absolutely but queen for a day means so many other things not just that got it so you did work with the fence you did i sat down with them you sat down with the fence i did and in the process what exactly did you tell them all the crimes that i committed and the crimes that i knew of but not about other people okay meaning like they blame me for certain things that i was on and i said no i wasn't on that and then if they want to charge a guy with drugs and the guy doesn't have anything to do with drugs they're not going to ask you a question you don't volunteer anything they ask you and you just answer the questions honestly and if you don't want to answer the question you plead the fifth okay but isn't it set up where after this if they see that what you said wasn't accurate then the deal is off correct well no that the deal is off you could be charged with obstruction of justice okay there's no deal there's no deal on the table okay because i never got a 5k one letter when you cooperate you get a 5k one letter okay i never got a 5k one letter okay so you talked to the feds but you didn't technically cooperate right well it's cooperating no matter what okay i don't know how anybody wants to look at that it's cooperating i would have called myself a rat i would consider myself not an informant not a rat but a cooperator because i did go in and speak with them okay however however they want to justify it i played queen for the day i went in i spoke to them regardless what i spoke to them about you're not supposed to speak to them whatsoever yeah bottom line just plead the fifth no you're the first to not say anything not saying whatever they throw at your butt i want it off the global plea and i wanted to tell my side of the story okay ultimately you got five years yeah for that now when you talk about the mafia and you know the gambinos obviously part of that isn't there a death penalty showing for rats sure made memphis well they go a little bit harder on made members than they do on associates okay and i was never on record even as an associate you're a crew member i was a crew member still there is this aura of kill all rats absolutely within the mafia so after you cooperated and went to prison and eventually got out was there a feeling of there might be some level of revenge retaliation there's a price on my head anything of that i mean i knew one day and i ever to this day i say it one day some kid i'm still living in my old neighborhood i still go to the same pizzeria i still go to the same bakeries can walk up behind me and put one in the back of my head and probably do 20 years for it because i probably won't give a [ __ ] about a guy like me let him plead it out he'll come home a hero 25 years old will come home when he's 40. and they'll straighten him out i mean that could happen any day yeah listen i can't i'm not afraid of it i don't think about it doesn't i've lived my life twice i lived good i was rich i was poor i owned the cars i want the houses i lived the life i had the women i had the jewelry what else could i ask for if i get my ticket punched now or if i have a heart attack in 25 years i don't i don't look at it as any other way or am i mad about it something i deserve i chose to be in that life i wanted to be a maid member i wanted to move up through the ranks and what wasn't that the treachery or the backstabbing it was the guys who i thought were my brothers we went into this together and we told each other that that wasn't gonna happen with us right because ultimately with this massive 127 member bust most people cooperated right it was a lot of cooperators i don't know the number or like i said i was i was there the whole time i fought the whole case out to the end by the time i went in and jumped off the global plea everybody's pleas were on the table already so i couldn't even have the only way that they could anything that could have happened with me they might have to supersede them and nobody was superseded because of me and there was guys that actually turned themselves in while i was still in the building with them and then after i jumped off the global plea they never got no new charges they considered they considered it a regular time right i mean because i remember i interviewed michael franzis a couple of times and at one point his own father okay to hit on him and his brother for cooperating against him well i know i know him i never heard about the brother the brother the brother the brother actually cooperated against against sonny francis and i never heard he even put a hit on him i heard that he did okay not put one out on michael but he okay he okay well he didn't it's not his blood he didn't uh well there's something and that's there's some controversy over there well he's not his blood who might michael's he's not his blood he adopted him loved him like a son but when it when you come down to it you're not killing you're not killing your own bloodline uh or okaying it or michael i actually brought that up in our interview and michael said he's not sure there's never a dna test whether he's sonny's a son or not all right i don't listen i don't know michael i don't want to talk about michael's business yeah because that's not my thing i don't talk about other people right you know what i mean but but i mean with michael's brother uh who was a drug addict john john who ended up testifying against his dad and put him back to prison when he was like close to 100 years old yeah or something like that there actually was a hit on him and i mean ultimately he ended up not getting i don't know i don't know i don't know who's getting the way that information is coming from it came from michael but yeah he wouldn't know michael hasn't been in the streets in 30 years no one's telling michael anything it's what i'm saying is it's pretty dicey yeah with a mafia absolutely i mean listen uh there was a colombo case where one brother testified against the other out in philly in the molino crew right the two brothers one shot the other one yeah because they were in different cruises i mean cause of notice cause of no [ __ ] right what comes first the life yeah before your own family right when you listen i sat outside a lot of guys being made i know the old backwards and forwards you know my friends were all made at one point i was probably the only guy when i looked around one time that wasn't so yeah this life your wife's on ready to give birth to your child and we call you you're at your father's death bed and he's about to take his last breath we call you the life comes before anything and nobody's larger than the life you know when you look at some of the guys that you were around you know for example you mentioned john daylight right oh by the way i was talking to jimmy calandria before i got here yeah he knows you really well he told me to say hello senator's best that's what it is yeah um but you know for example john a light is essentially a mass murderer not mass you would say a serial killer maybe mass is when you kill large groups okay well he killed a lot of people yeah he did over he's known as yeah and he's from my neighbor i've woken up and seen the bodies that he's shot when i was a kid you know what i mean yeah he's yeah and there's no [ __ ] behind it you could go i just filmed an episode hey you're right i just filmed an episode with him on my own show and he talked about all of them exactly so you're around these guys that are that are murderers or repeat murderers this is what i was telling you about when i'm at the psychology wow i felt that that's what he was and i was around guys that probably just got done doing murders as a kid and playing handball in the park with them shooting basketball eating dinner being insane and it didn't feel like that you know does it feel like that now i talked to a lot of guys that changed their lives and came out of life that was just serial killers i mean how else could you put it you killed more than three people what do you consider right you know and there's a lot of guys out there that have done that yeah i mean when you look at that now and you think about you being mixed up in all this and how you know these guys are so trigger happy they'll turn on you for anything everything you know i mean you you they think you're cooperating they heard something there's a rumor you look like you're meeting with the feds whatever else you know like what was the movie i think was it uh what was it goodfellas you know where he said you know why why take the chance you know or they just say yeah it'd be easier just to kill to kill a guy like this you know when you think about you being mixed up and all this how do you feel and do you think that at any point you were almost killed or was there a rumor over you know you potentially being a danger to the organization never uh but i was almost killed in the life uh one of my childhood friends one of my closest friends i stuck up for fought for uh set me up to be killed i actually walked into a room really with plastic and everything the guys they he wound up getting killed the guy you you walked into a room and there was plastic on the floor i had tech nine in my chest as soon as i hit the door really and i knew it actually that feel i was young and it was that was like probably a surreal moment meaning like is this really happening right now like my nerves didn't kick in and i knew the guy was a murderer i was a killer you know and he had he was strapped up he had a guy sit on the couch strapped up there was a kilo on the table and a guy brought me there that supposedly didn't know that that's what he wanted to talk to me about and when we rang the bell he says did you bring hooty with you and i told the kid you got to take me home i got to get a vest on a pistol if this guy's looking for me he goes nah i don't always worry about it so i i knew going up once he said my name because why would he even say my name and uh i went up there and he uh put a technine in my chest it was plastic on the floor okay you talked your way out of it no i just talked the truth he asked me what i got i just he didn't know the level i was on i was actually moving more weight than him and it was about drug dealing he asked the kid that i grew up with to sell drugs from and he says i can't he says the kid who he has the whole thing on lockdown he says who's this gedudi he says he has that whole it was the whole section of the city line and that locked and he found out who i was and you know he was he was actually around ronnie at the time i wasn't officially around ronnie yet and he how can i not know what this kid is doing we're both from the same neighborhood forever and uh he didn't like that and this was a guy that i've seen killers be scared of you know kids that i know that were out there putting work in were scared of this guy and i went anyway and he put the gun to my chest and he asked me who were you to sell drugs in my neighborhood and i said i've lived in this neighborhood my whole life and i don't know what you're talking about it's just as much as your neighborhood as it is mine and the kid was jewish so i said i'm sicilian the boot i was actually rubbing him the wrong way but he actually liked it a little bit the whole point was he was trying to get me on his side to sell drugs for him because he had a good operation and he winded up liking me so much that he wasn't even collecting the money for a while i was like i can move announce here announce that break him into 20s so i would take like an ounce a week off of him just to make him happy and after a while he wasn't even coming to pick up the money and and then eventually the kid that told on me he came to me and told me he says you know you got to take care of that kid you know i wanted to give me a pistol and everything i was like yeah all right so that's not my game oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and then like two years later or something like maybe a year i'm not long ago uh he was shaking some kid down and the kid clipped them well a lot of people you grew up with ended up going down yeah uh ronnie one arm how long did he get mental life you got life uh another guy uh nikki carrazzo a little nick he got busted um i guess he got tied to a murder at one point i guess a guy that had uh robbed him uh they ended up killing him and a bystander that was with him he got busted for that i think he recently got out um i mean essentially everyone around you ended up dead or in prison for decades yeah well i mean everybody i looked up to yeah my men that i you know i would consider mentors you know i ronnie one of them was actually a protege everybody thinks even though john senior loved ronnie and he was probably the only guy he ever approved that didn't do a real bid that that's which is tough because you know he was involved in the bonnie clyde murders so he knew that that ronnie was a stand-up guy and he approved that uh nikki carrasco was his mentor and you know he was everybody says it was john cena it was nikki corrado that's what he came up with right and uh so yeah mostly everybody all my mentors were a lot older and dead yeah and then you know uh gene barrello who uh john eli brought with him during his interview who was an enforcer uh for which which crew been out of crime family both ronnie giolanzo specifically right and this is a guy who you knew very well you brought it very well yeah it did yeah i chose into the drug game yep and he ended up getting busted again since our last interview violation violation yeah we had nothing to do with it by the way everyone always says my tv's defense uh our interview had nothing to do with him i did a big fact check on you vlad yeah i can let the i can let all your hip-hop guys know at home you're definitely cooperating and you ain't uh listen they can use these videos against you but that's not your fault they come on and talk it's their fault you're not putting nobody away it's just they take anything off of social media and they play it at your trial that doesn't mean that you'll cooperate with anybody by a legal standpoint you have to turn it over or they can just go on youtube and watch it themselves right a lot of people they don't think would sense that's the problem maybe they should sit in a room with a few lawyers yeah i have no uh i i don't cooperate with the feds i remember at one point the feds actually tried to seize a video that we had that was that we had taken down and we end up i actually spent like 10 grand in lawyer fees fighting the feds and managed to stop them from seizing the video uh we have no uh we do not want our i guess we do not want our guests to end up getting busted they're not co-signing any cooperation to help them i i decided this i know from the point oh you actually looked up you actually looked at my records yeah and you know what it's a bunch of [ __ ] because even what they come up with they can actually just go speak to a lawyer and find out there's there's nothing that you you're asking them questions you're an interviewer yeah they're answering them right so when they come on here and they say those things about i've seen a few years within a few guys and i'm just like listen that's not the way it works they got it backwards and all jokes aside i'm going to tell you how it really works and cause an australian you're a civilian we expect you to cooperate if they come to you and they ask you a question you're not a guy that's supposed to go to jail you can be held for obstruction of justice for not cooperating with them so you all you have to do is tell the truth meaning you didn't commit the crime with the person but if that person sat here and spoke about his crime all you can do as a civilian is say i heard him say such and such such and such on an interview that's even if they ever came to but they wouldn't they could watch it themselves right uh i never speak to people about crimes off camera no no i'm talking on camera and if it's on camera it gets publicly released so whatever information whatever authorities want could really just watch youtube yeah listen they may not like your form how you work your structure of questioning and they use that as an excuse but retain a few lawyers tell these guys and go sit down next time the legal standpoint of that you're a civilian number one if you ask the question you're gonna answer it honestly because who are you to have to go to jail for somebody else not that you're not committed to properties guys it's public knowledge because now it's on youtube or whatever channel or your website so you you've seen when i told you a few things before we came in that i know i've looked you up i've seen you i've talked to people yeah no but as from from a legal standpoint vlad is not cooperating with any association whatsoever there you go how many years did you do total i wind up i did the drug program and they knocked about eight months off the feds have no programs i mean all together in your life oh ten times too much yeah ten maybe okay and you're how old right now i'm 43. you're forty-three thousand quarters you're still twenty my bad the entertainment i think so nearly a quarter of your life was spent in a dirty cage surrounded by men boxes eating shitty food uh with essentially the worst of the worst of society around you when you look at everything you've gained over the years and you mentioned the women the money the jewels the trips everything else the women was out the money i was able to do that without the money and not the fame but you had all the perks of being a criminal but you spent a quarter of real life in prison and gambled away all my money gambled away your money on top of that do you feel like it's worth it or do you feel like you made a big mistake early on now it's worth it because i'm helping people so i had to go through all of that to get where i am today i don't believe in the life i don't believe in the street life anymore i believe that people like me were left here to mentor and help people that are in the life i don't try to preach to people about not getting into life because everybody's after everybody has to full you know take the training wheels off and fall once or twice before they listen and i'm not ready for that i try to talk to people that will like me and tell them head it up i do the numbers figure out how much you made and then figure the jail time it comes out then less than minimum wage you could have went to work at mcdonald's and people you know the way i tell it and people understand it i mean i have a guy here today with me i wish we could introduce him he's come such a long way bill stacks he was a gang member he was going nowhere you know recover an addict and he turned his whole life around when he reached out to me and he's like i'm really proud of him he's doing the right thing and i take him everywhere with me and um anything i do on the hoodie platform which there's a few people on it that i'm looking to help and listen i'm nobody to be preaching but if i could take what i've gotten from what you just said and use it to help others to get out then it was worth it one person gets the message what you're saying yeah it was worth sitting in them holes eating that shitty food being abused by guys that i wouldn't walk past and spit on if they were on fire absolutely it was worth it and you said you gambled away all your money yeah i was a pretty bad sports gambler and i was terrible at it i actually thought it was an addiction i thought i was addicted to it okay but i don't have an addictive personality i don't like alcohol that much what's the terms that they use a degenerate gambler no the general sellers clock on his wall or bend up oh listen i was upside down with so many bookmakers i beat so many bookmakers i wouldn't use the word degenerate i was definitely i thought i was addicted but it was part of the life you know 20 000 on a game like it was the action so i you know when i put my last bet in when i couldn't pay any more i stopped yeah and i realized i wasn't addicted it was a lifestyle and i guess that's what people do with drugs i don't know i was never addicted to drugs so i don't know how that worked but i ran to find out i wasn't addicted to gambling if i would have just stopped maybe a couple million before i would have been all right so you lost millions again about three million in my lifetime three million that's what i yeah i used to keep notes i was a big note keeper three million and i had it about three million when i stopped betting sports and i had no clue and it was all about a professional athlete was gambling with us in our main office and he tried to bet on his own game they were out of the playoffs they couldn't make it and we chased him after that you know he was a pretty good gambler like we didn't mind having him he lost he won he lost and i said could you imagine this i've been betting my whole life and these guys are calling up to bet and they're playing in the game i says this could have been going on in any game i've ever bet and i've lost all this money and i put my last bet in and never gambled again so you're saying the actual players were forbidding on their own or against their own teams one player was betting against his own team who was this i can't say that what team there's a are the jets the new york jets yes it'll be in my book okay he was betting against his own team against and he actually showed on the pass we called it alligate arms and they didn't cover the spread and we even though he was a good we chased this whole sheet he had a sheet he was on a guy's sheet we chased the whole sheet crazy and just seeing that and then there was there was other plays again with that he was just the only one that gambled on his team they were totally out of the playoffs one year just not even close so i guess he was looking to make a few dollars well anthony hootie russo uh appreciate you coming in and telling the story uh you know and i think it really kind of illustrates how you know especially with the italian mafia it's so romanticized in the movies because you have such great films about the mafia uh it's also none of it's real right you said you said bronx sale was the only one because that's sonny was like ronnie one i'm in my neighborhood yeah you know i protected and they watched the neighbor we considered him abortion he was just a may guy but regardless of how factual these films are they're all time classics they're oscar winners you know when you ask most men their favorite all-time films goodfellas or casino would probably be in that list well golf followers are you know the godfather that's what i'm saying like scorsese really took a very underground you know secretive organization and really made everyone want to be part of that life just because of how the guys are portrayed the de niro's you know the the joe pesci the little guy that was crazy and would do anything that's all the times you know what right did they say you know so uh i think hearing the actual stories by people like yourself or the michael franzis's or the john a lights or whatever you know that show like yeah there is some of that in that life but here's what you lose in the process and that's my message live prison time uh you know the the families being torn apart the drug addiction the gambling addiction the the killing the the beating up you know of of various people along the way um let's not forget the biggest one as soon as you go to jail and they find out you're getting enough time to try to [ __ ] your wife your girlfriend yeah steal your money that too your best friends are ringing a bell you need anything it needs to be a rule for that when guys are dropping off envelopes of people's wives or family they just have to go in twos and you see a guy showing up with one you know what that is a [ __ ] snake did that happen to you yes absolutely so the best man at my first wedding he started sleeping with your wife he tried he tried he tried yeah yeah there you go the reality of the life this is what it is yeah and you know what that's what i'm here for i want to tell people because i was on the inside i've sat with bosses i broke red with brushes i was at sit-downs and i'm here to tell you get out now whatever you're doing because i came from the crack life i've seen the gangs i was in jail i did it i seen it all ends off the street and i'm trying to pull these guys out as fast as i can you know and i'm not talk listen there's good people in everything but there's more bedding and just because i don't hear it spoken about a lot when people say the life is watered down now and they ain't what it used to be the life has always been watered down the life has never been what it used to be when the mafia stood in sicily and the cause of norse came to america because there's no such thing as an italian mafia because mafia is mafia and it means my daughter in a sicilian dialect that's not italian it should never be called that it was watered down when they got here yeah i mean uh larry mazza when i interviewed him recently and we talked about him cooperating he said i was the biggest rat ever to my family when i joined the mafia right i actually had a conversation with him yesterday about that yeah i was talking to him i was talking to a few of them before i came on here and you know he actually told me that he actually said that without you know saying that he said it on here yeah yeah that's part of our interview yeah he's right well hooty appreciate you telling your story man and uh i hope that this will change someone's direction whether they go you know if they decide to go into any level of crime because we interview so many criminals so many kingpins everything else like that and not a single person says it was the greatest thing ever i'm glad i did it i walked away with millions i'm rich now i knew if i was right i'd be guilty i'd feel guilty vlad if i was rich yeah there you go hootie all the best until next time appreciate it

Channel: djvlad

Views: 532,764

Keywords: VladTV, DJ Vlad, Interview, Hip-Hop, Rap, News, Gossip, Rumors, Drama

Id: YZ-veBF618g

Length: 89min 19sec (5359 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021