Gambino Mafia Underboss & Hitman Sammy the Bull Tells His Life Story (Full Interview)

all right here we go today we have salvatore gravano aka sammy the bull former mafia hitman and underbust welcome to vlad tv how you doing i'm good i'm good glad to finally get you here we've been working on this for a while quite a while quite a while i think maybe like two years right right finally happened well i had a lot of things going on certain things i couldn't talk about and i'm still a little bit in that situation but we put it together we'll just put it together all right it's our first time sitting down i want to start in the very beginning so you're born in 1945 yes and you grew up in benson hurts brooklyn yes uh and both your parents are actually from sicily yes so what was bensonhurst like in the you know the 50s and the 60s a lot of italian and jewish people in the neighborhood uh it was entrenched with mafia type of people when my father came here he jumped ship in canada he was an illegal alien families introduced him with my mother they got married and they stayed in bedford north brooklyn and i had two sisters and uh and then i was born i actually had another two a brother and a sister but they died before i was even born they died of pneumonia back then that's what happened and then the other two sisters were born and they lived and i was born later right and uh your dad i guess was a painter at first at first he was a painter right and then i guess the paint started to make him sick back then they used to use lead in the paint he got lead poisoning and he couldn't go near paint and paint lead was in all the paint so my mother was a seamstress she did some work for a jewish contract in manhattan she was so good at it that he told her they used to call her katie katie open up a factory in brooklyn and i'll give you all the work if i mean if you put together quality work like this and uh she talked to my father and she said why don't you just quit painting come in with me and we'll open up a small little factory i think everybody who's italian came from italy especially sicily was a seamstress so ants and all different kinds of people they knew they put together a factory and they were in business right and your real name is salvatore uh which usually you know sal would be short for that but you actually look like your uncle sammy well i resembled him a little bit and they used to call me uh he was big sammy they used to call me little sammy right so that's how i first got the name sammy okay so you're going to school but i guess later on you figured out you were dyslexic well i i i it would happen right away i got left back in the fourth grade and uh they found that i was dyslexic but they really didn't know what it was back then or how to treat it or what to do with it and school really wasn't for me anymore and in the seventh grade i got left back again and just before that i joined the gang the ramp is and uh i hardly went to school anymore i was in a gang mm-hmm so didn't you uh break the principal's jaw or something like that well one day we went out we played hockey again we didn't go to school and we got caught by true officers they took us into uh the principal's office and he had people there and and uh he was talking about us we were sitting down and he used the term uh these grease balls and it's a slur racist slow like you would use the n-word against blacks it was decreased balls it's hours slow and uh it didn't bother me too much i heard that a lot of times mentioned and uh in explaining to them he said this is how their parents are and this is how they grow up when i heard that he was like attacking my parents and it's the word grease ball again mentioned it bothered me enough to get up and to tell him it's got nothing to do with my parents has got to do with me i'm playing hooky i'm a [ __ ] up and not them they're legitimate people working hard and uh he said the word again told me to sit the [ __ ] down and i cracked him a shot and i wound up breaking his jaw you were howled i'm not i'm left back twice i'm probably 15 14 15 something like that okay so you get kicked out of school at that point yeah and you're hanging out with the rampers the local crew and at one point your bike gets stolen well this is way before the ramp is i'm 10 years old a younger kid and uh my family was broke once a week if we ate meat it was like a big [ __ ] holiday um so my father bought me a brand new schwinn bike very expensive bike told me you got to take care of this we don't have a lot of money you got to take care of it i took it out sure enough i left it outside one store and i went in the grocery store and i came out it was gone a day or two or whatever it was later my friends came running to me your bike is down the corner near the grocery store and right across the street was a bar where all these made guys would hang out almost like good fellas shooting dice in the street police car over there talking to them and i came down and i grabbed the bike there was two kids from around the corner a little bit older a year or two older but a year or two when you're 10 is 12 year olds is a big deal and i'm fighting them i'm not going to give them the bike they're trying to get it away from me i'm fighting the two of them one of these street guys walks over and stops it and what's going on and they told him it's my bike i'm not giving this [ __ ] thing up these kids really couldn't explain it and uh he told the kids he says go get your [ __ ] father if this is your bike and as soon as they heard that they took off and one of the guys screamed across what's going on over there and my father's name was jerry this is jerry's son this is uh what's your name sammy sammy he says look at him the way he was fighting he's like a little bull that [ __ ] name stuck i hated it when i was young once my friends would make fun of me and uh later on in life when cops were looking for me they would look for sammy the bull when newspapers came out it was amidable it stuck like glue i couldn't get rid of it and i mean your father wasn't affiliated with the mafia at all right no no he knew somebody his gumbada a goomba was like they came from the same town in sicily or supposedly i found out later a maid guy in sicily and a maid guy in new york and he was friendly with him it was his gumbada they knew each other from sicily and italy and uh but he was not affiliated at all okay i mean after those guys came in and got your bike back and everything else like that did you start to kind of affiliate with the mafia guys or did that come later no that came way later when we were in gangs matter of fact for us when we were in a gang it was we didn't want to we knew what mafia guys were we knew they were dangerous we wanted nothing to do with us we were young guys we all got tattoos and it's us against the world [ __ ] the mafia [ __ ] the cops [ __ ] everybody all that type of attitude so we really weren't affiliated we knew who they were what they were about but we really didn't want to get involved it became later on um if you want to help me to hop to that right no no we'll get to that part we'll get to that part so there was no mafia affiliation it was just you and a group of kids running around right causing problems essentially okay well then at one point you joined the military yeah this is at i don't join the military i got arrested one time and i went to court and the lawyer came out with this thing that if it's they call it a wayward minor treatment um if you give your word that you're going to join the military the judge will cut you loose and i i was about 17 bordering 18 years old so i said i would do that the case was dropped i didn't join and i didn't want to join it was a scam with the lawyer and everything like that but 19 my name must have been down to the court 19 i got drafted and i went into the military i was drafted when you joined is for three years when you got drafted it was only for two and it was during the vietnam war so i went in i was in tremendous really good shape all my life especially as a kid so the military was good for me i enjoyed the training everybody who came in from boston or new york or whatever wherever they came from harlem benson east wherever they came from we kind of stuck together because there's people from all over the country and i i actually enjoyed it and i trained that's where i learned how to kill okay but you were stationed in south carolina right fort jackson that's where i did basic training right so you never went to vietnam you never had to shoot anyone or anything else like that during that time but they trained you and went to louisiana for jungle training and stuff like that and they train you to kill you're gonna go into the war when our whole unit came down to on orders to go i wasn't on it with a bunch of other guys now we went in why aren't we on it what happened and you had to have one year left of active service to be sent there because they ship you with ships and i only had uh eight months left so they don't want to ship you you stay there for a little while and they're shipping you back they don't want to do it you have to have at least a year so me and whoever wasn't on those lists we didn't have a year we didn't go that's why i didn't go got it and then after two years you got an honorable discharge and you went back to brooklyn yes okay so right back into the rampage right into it right the only difference is the ramp is started hooking up with street guys now it wasn't us against the world so and this is where a friend of mine came to meet tommy spearow and told me my uncle shorty spiro wants to talk to you okay okay and who are the spiros associated with spiros were with the columbo family shorty sparrow and most of the spiros were in a couple of mafia wars and they were legends in the neighborhood they were big names so i did meet with shorty spearow and uh he had told me so sam you're a tough kid you get into fights all the time you're gonna hit the wrong guy one day and they're gonna get you're gonna get killed he says you don't have any backup no protection no nothing you don't belong to nobody he said if you join us we're a family we'll have you back you'll be part of a family i'll never lie to you i'll never double cross you i'll never backstab and sometimes when you're asked to do something i knew what he was talking about i may go with you i'd do that myself it was music to my ears family a brotherhood relationship like that and i shook his hand so i became an associate in the colombo family okay and was carmine the snake persico the head of the family at that point no carmen the snake persico was shorty's boss he was a captain and his crew was fighting the gallows in that war so he was a very powerful captain later on joe colombo became the boss of the family right so now you're affiliated with the mafia but you're not a maid man at this point you're just a associate associate right and during this time you were doing larceny hijacking armed robbery that type of thing absolutely what were some of the the most violent things you were doing during this time i think when you do armed robbers and all that stuff for hijacking those these things are all pretty violent but uh i never killed anybody right at that point but i guess you were breaking arms and legs and well yeah fights but go there with a bat one time one time called my person called called me down and uh this guy who owned the a washing machine factory commercial stuff was banging somebody's wife and uh it upset carmine persico and he told me he says i'm going to give you a contract to go after i want you to give him a terrific beating and i want you to take back his ear i said okay i got in the car with shorty and i said but for real bro i mean i'll give the guy a beat we're going to let me take his hair back that's [ __ ] crazy he said that's what he said if you can get his [ __ ] ear take it back we went to this factory me and his nephew tommy spiro and um we had a plan we walked in tommy would talk to him about buying commercial dryers and we're going to open up a store and he pointed to a piece of paper where the guy would lean over to read what he's talking about and i hit him with a blackjack across the head he went down but real big guy and he started to get up when he was getting up he used the counter to put his hands on the counter and i whacked his hands i didn't want to get up and one of the fingers flew off and uh i jumped over i started hitting him but his workers were coming out from the back one guy made it to the door i backhanded him with the blackjack hit him in the face jumped back out it was time to bail out i was losing control of this thing we got away and uh i looked for the finger for a split second or two i couldn't find it i was gonna bring that back um i saw shorty told the story and uh we went down to report to carroll street to speak to carmine persico and i started telling the story and he started laughing he said one of the guys on the inside one of the workers is one of my guys i already noticed all he said you tried to frighten this figure i said it was yes but there was just too many of them coming out and and i had to take off he said but i know you i i know you knocked his finger off i got this give me a hug give me a kiss so i became in his eyes because he was very violent a rising star okay and joe columbo who was the boss at the time he liked you as well yeah uh did he have you go and like pick it fbi uh headquarters yes okay because he was doing the whole italian american civil rights league initiative yeah yeah well shorty told me he said um we have to go down and pick it we're gonna pick up the fbi building and uh it was for a guy named sonny francis he was the boss at that point he got arrested on some [ __ ] accounts that he's saying he wasn't guilty or whatever and uh and a few other issues so we were going to go down i think there was 12 guys the day we went down me shorty sparrow his nephew tommy sparrow and about eight or nine other guys i saw a blonde headed woman i think she had blond hair walking and a bunch of guys around her and i remember asking shorty who's that and he said that's sonny's wife she's picketing with us um there was fbi guys hanging out windows taking pictures and i remember telling shorty shorty we're committing suicide bro these guys are taking pictures of us we're all going to go to prison here doing this this is [ __ ] nuts i know i know two days later three days later shorty must have talked to carmine and they pulled us off we we didn't have to do it anymore and uh we walked away from that but these things went on for a few years it started to build up and uh you know there was more meetings and marches and all that [ __ ] yeah and at this point the books were still closed on made men i guess the books have closed in 57 no mentioning available it being opened so i didn't it was the last thing i thought of okay so then 1970 rolls around and there's a guy named joseph calucci tell me about this whole situation joe calucci was married to this girl camille she was pretty hot and she was having an affair with shorty's nephew tom my friend tommy spiro joe calucci put it together he knew it but he couldn't do anything because he was afraid of shorty he went to another guy in the crew named frankie and he told frankie i need your help frankie said fine doing what he says i want to kill uh shorty and i want to kill sammy so frank you said you know we all know about the affair so he says is this you're talking about the thing with your wife and yeah but why would you want to kill sam he's not banging your wife and shorty he's the boss why would you do that he said if i kill tommy sure he'll put it together and who's he gonna send bo he's gonna send sammy so if i kill the two of them now i'll start some confusion six months later i'll kill tommy that's his ultimate goal he he gets this whole plot together frankie don't buy it and he goes directly to shorty and tells shorty what he's being asked to do shorty goes to carmine persico carmi persico goes to joe colombo joe colombo gives an order to go back down to do the hit and have this kid sammy do it shorty comes to me tells me about it and uh he said would you take this hit and that comes into life when you come made you can't refuse but as an associate you could but you'll be washed out and i agreed to do it a whole bunch of nights went by we were working on it i never did a hit before and uh one night we were out late after hour clubs drinking three four in the morning we left we went to this cafeteria famous caritaria they called it famous cariteria cafeteria in uh brooklyn on 86th street when he went down to the bathroom i told the guys tommy you get in to drive the car joe calucci will sit in the front i'll sit behind joe calucci and frankie you sit behind tommy we had it planned out perfectly when he came up we went out we were doing just that but instead he opened up the front it was a two-door car and he said sammy don't sit behind me sit next hit behind tommy and i did that and frankie sat behind him we were driving down the block and um there was a beatles song playing tommy had it loud like he like he's trying to drown out something i took 38 out i pulled the trigger and i hit him in the head he didn't do anything didn't even move i didn't know what the [ __ ] happened i hit him again now his body shook and slid to the side a little bit towards tommy and sliding down a little bit tommy pushed him up a little bit and uh i said go to rockaway and we'll go dump the body over there out of our neighborhood and lower that [ __ ] radio and open the window you could smell the [ __ ] powder in the in the air we did that when we got to rockaway there was nice homes with lawns it wasn't like brooklyn or there was more residential i told tommy i said open the door and kick him out and tommy's nervous and sammy's dead i knew he was panicking i said i know he's dead frankie open up the wind they rolled the window there wasn't electric windows he rolled them down i jumped through the window i got out they opened up the door i put one arm around his neck and one arm around his legs he was a pretty big guy but dead weight showed me how heavy it could be felt like he was a thousand pounds to me i picked him up put him on the grass in front of this house got in the car my hand hit the seat it was covered with blood and my hand slid across it i closed the door i opened the window i put the gun out and i shot him three more times in the back just to make sure he was dead just to make sure he's dead well you described the situation um in other interviews you said that you're actually excited by the whole situation like an animal going after its prey i said that later in what happened when we were done we got back i saw movies that when somebody does a murder that they're sweat they're nervous they're scared and i expected that to happen i thought that's what happens to you so when we got back we went in the apartment the gun was gone he was dumped the car was being cleaned i went in the shower i was in the shower with the water running on my head and down my back and waiting for that to happen i said it never happened it never happened to me at all when i went to bed i slept like a baby the next day when i got up people were yelling in the house in the apartment they killed joe colucci they found them in rockaway i remember asking the girl did they know who did it did they get arrested she said i don't know i don't think so it's not in the paper when we went on the corner i felt an out-of-body experience that i was above the crowd watching and looking at them and there i felt power i felt power over life and death i was an animal the night before with my prey i didn't have any negative thoughts or feelings and i thought well the movies are wrong or maybe this is just me i don't know and uh that's what basically i had said those words maybe not exactly the same but that feeling well uh i'm gonna skip ahead a little bit later on you actually started to work with joe calucci's son years later right i didn't work with him i had i was in a con this was later on i was out of the colombo family i was made a guy in the gambino family and i was doing construction work and the kid was doing concrete work people's front of people's houses and things like that and uh i tried to take him under my wing and get him some work he worked with my brother-in-law eddie and uh they they knew the story so i said help let's help this kid so we i we did help him and uh i stayed friends with camille his wife i never went with her but we were friends and i helped her in a few situations as well she never knew i'm i was the shooter she never knew i killed him she never knew who did what he did the kid jack at that at that point yeah well now you just did a hit for the mafia and uh persico really really liked that you did that yeah so now you're kind of getting you're moving up the ranks you're still an associate but now you're let me give you a little example about moving up the ranks and how they felt towards it when i would be down carroll street with shorty shorty would say i'm going to stop on 86th street i got to see joe columba who's the boss of the family so he would i would be driving on like his driver i'm driving it i would park a little bit up he'd walk back and walk over and talk to columbus i'd get out of a car stand by the car 100 feet away 80 feet away 70 feet away never go over there it's not my place and i would just stand there and associate i'm nobody after the hit maybe a week after the hit i don't even know the exact time tidy truth we were going to do that message thing again i parked he got out of the car i stood where i was supposed to stand and joe columbo yelled sammy come here get the [ __ ] over here and i walked over and he said you don't like me i said no joe i don't know who's telling you that i think the world you i really do i i took the world to you i mean i don't know who would say something like that he said listen from here on out when you come and shorty don't stand by the car come with shorty stand right here don't open your mouth when people are talking i don't need your opinions just stand here shake my hand and stand here so it changed now going to a club we were kids were always in [ __ ] fights they didn't want us in these clubs so i went to a club one night with my friends we were in the back of the line a bouncer comes out he looks at us and uh i said oh he's gonna go in and get the boss that they're gonna probably tell us you can't come in sure enough the boss came out with him and he came over and he came right to me and he said hey sammy shook my hand and don't stand on the line come on in i got a spot in the vip room for you you what for me you sure i don't even know what he was talking about so we're walking in the club and one of the guys lenny tells me so see me what the [ __ ] happened but you killed somebody i said nah he killed nobody i said i don't know what the [ __ ] uh what this is about but rumor had it it wasn't so much that they know i killed somebody it was that now i'm standing with a boss cards would pass 86th street holy [ __ ] you see sammy standing there shaking hands with the boys because i'm not on that level i'm not a guy i'm not one of them yet but that's where i'm a rising star and they're thinking about making me and that's where i have problems with shorty's brother ralph okay and then you know before we get to that in 71 you actually got married uh to deborah scabeta yes you had two children yes and if we fast forward your daughter uh karen ends up being in uh mob wives on vh1 in 2011 that was a lot of years later and then you know in 2013 she actually released a book called mob daughter the mafia sammy the bull gravano and me okay so that whole situation happens and then there's a situation with ralph sparrow who was uh shorty's brother i guess he became somewhat envious of some of your success he was jealous and envious and i i remember guys telling me he had an argument with shorty his brother he's saying why the [ __ ] you keep taking sammy down to cairo street to meet junior when i want to get my son made when the books open up why are you doing that and he says i don't do that i don't he says he's asking for him specifically and i put him in the car and i take him down there with me so anyway ralph was very frustrated with this whole situation but he didn't know how to undermine me i didn't really stay with him um and we had a guy in our crew ralphie ranga real tough guy got out of prison great guy really a good guy matter of fact we had a case going we had a problem he robbed somebody at a bank you know the bag they used to have a bag a zipper on the top he robbed it he never even took the lock off and looked at it he threw it on the table he said see if this is enough money to pay for the lawyers so i said ralph that could be 20 30 you know back then until 2030 was a lot of money there could be 20 30 000 in there he said use the mob whatever's left from the lawyers give it to me it's a great guy he goes on a robbery himself and he gets in a shootout with cops and he's killed in the street and uh two weeks after that i'm in a bar in shipshape bay with johnny rizzo senior main guy in the gambino family louis molito who's in the gambino family my gumbada alley boys in the genovese family and the car my mikey mozzarella a few guys and i know them all and we're all a dinky little [ __ ] and we're all together talking having a drink and this uh woman comes in blonde teased hair short mini dress real sh it wasn't that many the back then but this one was super short high heels with some guy muscle guy in and rizzo says sami that girl's checking you out now we always break balls amongst ourselves so i just come on john she's with a guy you're gonna start with that [ __ ] i might go over we'll wind up with a fight with the guy come on leave alone leave it alone but she was looking at me now when the guy went to the bedroom she got up and started moving towards us and lily molito said sammy i don't think the old man's [ __ ] and she's coming straight for you you don't notice brood no i don't and then rizzo hit me go over and talk to her then i went over to talk to her when i got from the distance from me to you maybe even a little closer i it was ralphie wrong his wife i was dumbfounded i couldn't believe it so i told myself what the [ __ ] you doing here bro your husband just died she said sammy life goes on yeah life goes on my [ __ ] ass he's not even cold yet give it a chance the guy was just coming out of the bathroom and she said you know sam i remember how you look at me i could get rid of him me that was a [ __ ] douchebag i never looked at you in no [ __ ] way i loved your [ __ ] husband you you [ __ ] man i was on fire the guy started coming over he says what's going on as soon as he got over everybody stood up four five guys stood up nice quiet so i said listen bro get the [ __ ] out of here with this douchebag get out listen to me why you can get the [ __ ] out with her it's got nothing to do with you get him and get the [ __ ] out of here when she went back to ralph she said that i abused him and all this [ __ ] ralphie sparrow called up my wife and said sammy try to make ralphie's ex-wife his wife and uh carmine persico knows about it sammy's gonna get killed and he blows this whole thing up to create a story that's not true he doesn't know all them guys are there so when i go home my wife tells me the story i said this life is very technical make sure you tell me every word exactly what he said that carmine's going to kill you and you try to make uh rafi ranga's wife i said we're going to try to make her she's [ __ ] rag i chased her but you're sure that's what he said yeah and i went in my room i got a gun i got my car i went right to [ __ ] ralph's house and i got out of the car i put the gun behind me by my ass and i now we were like good fellows in it out of each other's houses i i rang the bell his wife ann came i said in who is ralph i need to talk to him something important as soon as he was going to come to the door i was going to shoot him so she said sami i don't know if something happened he left did he come back is there a problem no no no and there's no problem and i turned to walk away she saw the gun and she told ralph oh shorty sammy came here with a gun looking for ralph this whole thing exploded into that what i was going to do now they were going to hurt me but when carmine who was in jail his brother ali boy patrick oscenia was running the family and he said ralph told your wife that my brother called my personal was gonna kill you he turned around too short he said you know what if sammy got killed his wife would have thought my brother did it i'm almost [ __ ] sick that he didn't get your brother and kill him he deserves to die for what he did and he lied because there's other people coming in witnesses that were there he didn't try to make this guy's wife he glues the [ __ ] out of her and chased her but being it was shorty's brother they held on killing him but they knew we could never be together again johnny ridzo's senior had gone up the ranks in the gambino family talking about me talking about the whole situation seems like carlo gambino got involved and two families talked how they resolved it was i would give my word i would never hurt ralph and they would transfer me with no restrictions over to the gambino family and i would be under this guy named todd orello who was a very powerful captain i actually grew up with his son i never met the old man but i knew his son charlie boy for years and years and years so that's where i was going to stay and taro the day we went down and this meeting happened and i was formally put over with them on the way home he says i want you by my club every day if you got a job quit he says i want you to every [ __ ] day i'm gonna know everything you do when you're gonna get laid if you get a pimple anything you want to do you get into a fight an argument everything you do i wanna know you embarrass us once there's a lot of people talking for you we'll kill you immediately but i want you at my club every single day and he was going to school me for the old man carlo gambino i would become a gambino and i would learn their way their way was different columbo beat him up bring him back here shoot him beat this guy up [ __ ] that guy up robbed this guy they were business unions all kinds of things taro out of his mouth in some meetings we had personally said violence we can use violence but always as a last [ __ ] resort we listen to the stories we make up our mind and we don't react to one side those two little things on the side of your [ __ ] ears is god gave you those two ears to listen to both sides of the story then you make up your mind so so i think you owe me a few hours more for the story so now you're with the gambinos yeah okay so you're rolling the gambinos and then they're a situation where someone claimed that you're responsible for a double murder in 1969. yeah it was a false accusation but but here you are you get actually indicted for the murder for a double murder right and you didn't have enough money for lawyers no so you went on a spree a robbing rampage a spree we run anything and everything that wasn't nailed down um it was constant matter of fact i was out on bail hundred thousand dollar bail we had each each guy in the murder um i got arrested two more times out on bail for what one time we was robin and we call it uh trunking we'd go into trunks and we would rob everything the new cars take the spare tire after we found golf clubs we had it out for golf clubs or bowling balls or anything you had in there we found people who stashed money in there people who had drugs in there no matter what we found today we took one day when we were doing that in manhattan in a really wealthy area there were so many cars hit and because those other crews doing things like that um some guys come running down the block and i yelled to my grandmother ollie boy jump in hurry up he jumps in the car the guy was right on my bumper he didn't have a uniform but he had a gun out so i ducked down under the seat hit the [ __ ] yes but by the time i came up i hit a string of park cars i must have blasted six seven eight park cars i didn't break my nose i shattered my nose i almost went through the steering where those i know now you can't even break those [ __ ] things um i hit it that hard i was in the hospital i came out and uh we're on bail for another case so i told my good mom we gotta just keep going now now that is lawyer more lawyers more bail bonds and uh we're in the car we're going to go out he said goombah let's take tonight off i said we can't bro we need this [ __ ] money we have to he said look at his t-shirt bro the thing is all bandaged my most it's leaking now your shirt is full of [ __ ] blood for cop passes he's gonna see that blood he's just saying he's saying you got too much ball stop bro let's stop let's take the night off hearing that from him he was the baldiest guy michael bottom but i stopped a month or two or three later we hit on a snowy night sears tire store we took a hundred and something tires rims everything at night and we had a garage a four car garage from the tides we would steal hitting cars plus this it looked like we had a hundred and something almost 200 tires and we got busted in that drop okay and that was another case another bail right but going through this whole spree uh your boss uh taro uh aurello was actually impressed and is that when he started thinking about actually making you a maid man when the books opened i don't know what point he started to think that i was i was so close to him it was crazy i mean he was like a father to me he was the same height built as my father and i loved him as much as i loved my father and uh i don't know when he thought that i know when he sympathized i could tell when we were out stealing and getting busted he's still getting in trouble it was like we were going down the tubes and he was trying everything to tell people buy tires for your cars well i don't need him buy [ __ ] tires off him he was [ __ ] demanding people trying to help us in every way he can help us and uh so but came a time when i beat the cases and i was done with everything and uh one of the colombo guys seen me sky sally ebeneze in a bar he came over he hugged me he said sammy i miss you how you been with that guy a guy toddler's a good guy i said great guy i love him he had his arm around me he said sammy tell me the truth bro you're gonna shoot right ralph right in front of his wife in the house bro if he came to the door i was so [ __ ] mad bro i would have did something stupid like that i think i would have you know but uh he says listen taro's got uh something nice he's gonna do for you what now i can't tell you but i'm telling you if he ever tells you wear a suit a white shirt and a tie i got a meeting you're to come with me you're going to enjoy that meeting he knew because they passed your name around he knew that tyler was going to make he didn't tell me but he said it in that form and i kind of realized and the same night i went to go get made charlie boy her son was dressed in a suit a white shirt and a tie and we were going together so we got made the same exact time same day that was 1976 yeah so now you're a maid man in the game you know uh crime family what changed now that you're a made man as opposed to an associate at that point well the whole the whole i mean it takes time for people to realize it you're not you're not telling nobody but the whole world seems your whole power structure changes now you remain member in the mafia everybody and every family is your brother not just your own family by goes in usher's laws so you become a [ __ ] powerhouse just the mere fact that you're a main guy people know you're going to get in fight you hit a made guy you're going to get killed they'll be [ __ ] 40 guys will look to kill you so it it's the power structure people know about it and becomes huge and then it opens up business things and unions like he's been teaching me that no is i already had a plumbing company i was opening up a drywall company now unions i was getting stronger with unions not only for myself but for joe blow let's say you ran a union and you're another may guy i would tell you bro i need some help in this area yeah see me i'll take care of what you want me to do your power is growing by the [ __ ] day by the minute and people not being told but seeing that seeing very powerful guys now coming over to you grabbing you with both hands kissing you on the cheek well they never did that to sammy what is it something though no you want to know i bet you they made this guy and then rumor comes out you're a made guy especially cops everything changes you know so it's a big deal and i guess right around this time is when you met john gotti yeah i met i met him in late 76 i was in frankie chico was a made guy a real tough guy his father boozy was a made guy frankie had a club a gambling club i would go there to you know always promote and help him with be there and uh boozy was me and them were drinking at the bar they were gambling in the back of crap table and he said uh john gotti came in with an entouriser four or five guys six guys he says you notice kid johnny gotti i said no i heard of him he actually helped a friend of mine in prison but uh i heard of him that's him yeah and he came in and then he came over to man boozy we bought him a drink i said i hear a lot of nice things he hooked a friend of mine in prison um something with the black guys they were dealing drugs and he stiffed them or something the black guys were going to go to work on this guy pretty good and john stuck his two cents in straightened it out gave them the money helped this guy out and uh so i said i appreciate you did that you know you didn't have this as soon as i heard your name he says i i talked to them he says they were good guys it really wasn't your friend it was your friend's friend and he got sucked into he stood up a little bit and these guys would have hurt him for sure so i thanked him for that and then he said this uh same thing to me i hear some really really good things about you sammy i says well i think you're gonna have the same uh situation stuff like that so that was and he didn't get made i think it was until that was late uh 76. he didn't get made till 77 right okay so now you're a made guy in the gambino uh family and like you said earlier the gambinos really liked businesses and you know construction trucking garbage and everything else like that is this when you started getting heavy into the whole construction business and so forth like i said i was always in construction i had smaller business my businesses were growing my power was growing within unions and stuff like that and yes my businesses grew tremendously uh my drywall company i had 200 carpenters working for us at one point it wasn't me alone it was this guy joey madonia was uh really a good guy he ran the company owned the company but i became his partner we had 200 employ not employees competitors there was other people office workers and everything else we're not even counting them so my companies were growing like crazy right and you became a multi-millionaire around this time yes right you got a you built a big estate in uh ocean county new jersey you bought horses and you also bought a disco called the plaza suite yes and that was sort of your headquarters in a way well my my it was it was a pretty big building um it was about 5 000 square feet on each floor so downstairs i had my office and a carpet place place was the carpet place was the corner one and everything else was my office uh and then upstairs was the plaza suite it was a disco right so it was 5 000 square foot disco okay so then in 1980 a war broke out in philadelphia yeah uh the philly boss uh angelo bruno got killed along with the consigliere antonio capenigro uh without getting permission from the commission so i guess with the commission in order to kill a boss they have to sign off on it and that didn't happen is that accurate it's always accurate in other words to kill a bull you can't kill the boss that's one of the golden rules the only way is that if the commission gives you a hit uh the hit um they did that without albert anastasia years ago it it you know it just don't happen uh and uh so it doesn't happen because of boss no matter how shitty he is the other bosses don't want to say okay then kill them because that puts them in the same position and somebody could come up with the same argument about them so they want to make that rule as ironclad as possible okay and uh well his consolieri uh antonio caponegro was the one who actually did the murder the commission summoned him to talk to him about it and he got sentenced to death for doing it and i guess he was tortured and killed at that point yeah philip testa became uh the new boss in philly with the nikki scarfo as his conciliary so then the commission uh placed a hit on all of uh capenegro's co-conspirators including a guy named uh johnny keys aka john simone who happened to be uh the cousin of bruno and the simone contract was given to you there's a whole series of events that happened leading up to that point angela bruno was killed tony bananas i call him sacred nino whatever his name was and his brother-in-law joe salerno was killed phil testa was killed um believed by uh johnny keys nikki scarface lined up there and he was left the commission was backing him against keys and then they couldn't kill him the whole five families and the family in philadelphia couldn't kill him and there's guys in our family bunked into him had a meeting with him it went to the commission the commission said well if your people can meet with him then you have the contract get it done so again another original thing that a commission gives a hit to another boss to do a certain hit and i got that hit i was given that hit right and i remember i think uh in an interview with michael franzis we talked about how you know in certain other gangs like you know the crips or the bloods a lot of times when you get a hit there's usually money associated with it okay 20 000 30 000 and so forth but in the mafia you don't get paid to do hits no it's respecting then it's not respected it's part of your job in protecting goes in austria has nothing to do with money and if you do that then you're not doing if you're gonna it goes in austria you doing it for money so uh yeah that's that's uh just about a golden rule in the mob it's not about money right so you get this uh contract uh to kill uh johnny keys so you actually get to know him first right i have i don't i don't really get to know him i have a couple of meetings with him and i'm not friends with him or anything like that but i get to meet him a couple of times the only reason i'm meeting with him is i'm going to kill him right and i'm trying to know what he is he's not like uh in the street but you could just kill somebody he's in a war he's got 20 30 guys around him they're at war they're not looking to fight they're looking to kill so i just want to meet him to know who i'm who i'm hunting we're going to be when we meet two samurais i'm young and uh up and coming i'm a hit guy he's much older i'm told he's got 50 hits under his belt he's smart he's cunning it's dangerous and uh if he smells something wrong he will [ __ ] kill you in a split second but first they'll torture the [ __ ] out of you to find out what you really know i was advised not to go to the meeting i said i need to i need to know who i'm fighting i need to look at him in the eyes i need to be with him how much how the [ __ ] am i going to kill him he's got 30 40 guys i don't even know who what the [ __ ] he's about and i had meetings with him so when you're saying i'm you know i didn't make friends with him but i had meetings with him twice the third meeting we had he died right i guess uh you had two guys with you uh milito and d'angelo yeah i had more than that okay i had a few others a few guys yeah and uh you guys were at the yardley golf club in pennsylvania if that's the name i don't remember the name right so you essentially kidnapped them basically yeah snatched them snatched them up you took them out to this wooded area in staten island and uh before he was killed he actually had some requests yeah what were they if i didn't if i wasn't the guy to pull the trigger he wanted another a made man to kill him and i'll give you something that maybe is not expecting he knew he was a samurai and he knew he lost the battle and he was going to die with honor that's what he wanted the other thing he wanted he wanted a few things so he wanted a maid guy to be able to shoot him he wanted to die goes in osha style he wanted me to take off his shoes and i asked him why and he said my wife isn't stupid she knows i'm in the mafia she knows there's a war going on i would tell her calm down i'm gonna die without my shoes on so don't worry about this meaning that he's in the street he gets killed his shoes are still on so he's trying to calm her down and tell her that and now what he's doing is sending his wife a message hours minutes before he's going to die that if his shoes ain't on she'll know that i was thinking of in my last minutes it blew my mind this wasn't a regular story no more this wasn't head stories like gangsta [ __ ] movies was a [ __ ] love story here i had so much respect for him that it's insane yeah he showed me a few things in the time period that we were together he showed me the real side of godzilla he showed me how to die like a man yeah i've questioned myself my whole life after that could i die like that like he died blew me away i'm gonna say another thing that's gonna maybe blow some people away in that 12 hours i was with him i fell in love with him the respect i had for him was off the charts i wasn't happy about killing him i felt dirty i felt i killed the epitome of our life which was supposed to be he was that yeah so let's get further into it before i start getting a little [ __ ] uh a little disturbed every time i tell the story and think about him and see his face it bothers me yeah so well uh by the early 80s uh the plaza suite uh discotheque was was doing great um you know you were having lots of live acts like cheffy checker and the four tops uh performed there and a guy named frank fiala who was a wealthy businessman and also drug trafficker uh first he offered you 40 grand to rent the plaza for a birthday party right who did you talk to how do you know this information huge you got some good information yep all right um but then i guess a couple days later he approached you said he wanted to buy the club from you yeah yeah yeah there's a little story in there but yeah okay and i guess uh he offered you a million dollars yes and the club wasn't even worth that much it was worth like 200 000 i guess in your eyes the club was worth about 200 000 the whole building may be worth five yeah and he wanted to buy the whole building club at all for a million dollars okay got it and uh so he put a deal together with you it was a hundred thousand dollars cash uh 650 000 in gold bullion which is going to be paid under the table to avoid the taxes on it and then 250 000 at the end of the closing right yeah but after you know the deal was made and before the transaction was actually completed some problems started to arise yeah explain there's so many problems he wanted to throw himself a party in the plaza suite and uh we let it happen he was going to invite 300 people he was going to shave his head in the middle of the party everybody was going to get coke and orca was gonna have a raffle with boats and motorcycles all kinds of weird [ __ ] i was against it but everybody was in on it so we let it happen i had my guys in there who were bouncers my regular guys and i brought more guys in because i was afraid that this this guy was a complete lunatic and uh more or less true tonight it was true first of all it wasn't 300 guys maybe 100 people and uh everything that i mean he brought in chinese food tons of it with no utensils people eating chinese food with their hands his chris i said they're all crazy and when we went through the night without any major troubles and then i said let's close it down let's end it he was going to give us a check i didn't think i figured the check wouldn't go through so anyway i called him over well michael the bat went and talked to him about it and he said he wasn't going to close it so michael the back came back to me then i wanted to talk to him and i talked to them i was sitting with four five six of my people and i said bro it's over the party is over i went good all your friends some of them are leaving now we're not down to two too much we gotta go we gotta close it up and that's not the other thing he didn't want to go then he got insulted he went to a an attack shake case and uh he came over and he had a medal a military medal and he says who the [ __ ] do you take you on he threw this [ __ ] medal at me my guys went to get up i said sit down sit down and it bounced off my chest and uh that's when he came back the day or two after that and asked for uh to buy to buy everything he wanted to buy me out and throw me out now michael the bat the same time that thing happened went into his box and he had a gun he took the gun so i had asked michael though check his stuff he says i already did he had a gun i got it under my boat you want it no no i don't want it just hold it so he did so many crazy things it would take an hour and a half just to say the things he did and he was controlling this little i believe they were checklists to walk in or something like that gang drug dealers and he had a business where if the ship got in trouble he would send planes over with parts and stuff to fix the ship at sea so it was a perfect vehicle for him to take drugs and he was in the drug business so he kind of three quarters of the way through the deal with the the things the things that were happening were worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and uh finally i got a call it was my sister she was working for me she said he just came in with a bunch of people and dogs they're breaking walls they told us all to get out that if he owns the building and he wants us all out he's in there now breaking walls yeah i still own the joint i said listen get all the girls and get out go home tell everybody close it up don't get in the list close it up so i went there with my brother-in-law and uh he was there and as soon as i walked in there was guys breaking holes in walls i i never seen anything like it so he's she's come with me to my office and he's walking he's going to my office it's taking me to his office it's my actually my office we walk in my brother-in-law is dark-skinned it's a saiyan and i'll tell you why i'm saying that this guy goes behind my desk opens up the drawer and he takes out an israeli a jewish uh machine gun and he turns around he points to us my whole [ __ ] chest tightened up i think any second i'm going to get blown away my brother-in-law in the dark skin turn white he's just waiting in my [ __ ] like when i wear a white t-shirt and he tells us shut the [ __ ] down we sit down and i he didn't shoot so i started talking i said frank what the [ __ ] are you doing put that away bro what the [ __ ] you doing we got lawyers working on this [ __ ] it's it's your struggle we go through some [ __ ] what are you getting so hard about it's yours you could take it but what are you doing now you acted stupid now again he's not shooting his talk he's still got the the machine gun in his hand and he's still talking but he's calming down so finally i said listen we'll go to the uh tomorrow with the lawyers and whatever you want we'll straighten it out it's a lawyer [ __ ] bro it's not us and then you're breaking the walls what are you gonna do go from the the office up the back thing to the into the disco that sneaky [ __ ] that's that's cool i should have thought of that and i'm trying to throw him off and i do and we're leaving even as i'm working out i got my back i'm i'm stiff as a board i'm i'm thinking i'm gonna get hit this [ __ ] guy's gonna shoot me i guess and we get out i tell my brother as soon as we get on the sidewalk call my people tell them to meet me at the bar say what are you gonna do call everybody who's with me put my crew together and get them to meet me by the [ __ ] bar i'm gonna kill this [ __ ] tonight that's what i'm gonna do and i don't want your advice i'm not asking you something i'm telling you what to do so go do it and i do kill them that night right you put together a crew with uh garofalo melito uh d'angelo uh nicholas marmando and michael de bat and um and hulk okay uh as he's walking out um someone said hey frank how you doing he turns around sees you and then melito comes up behind him and shoots him in the head melito and stammy are in uh alleyway me and eddie are leaning against the car michael the bad is the bounce he's he's the next football player he's holding the door when he when it's gonna happen he's gonna close the door tell everybody get run get get upstairs we have the whole place i got people on the corners crash cars i got people sitting there who's gonna take the guns right after the hit so the cue is that when he comes he's with three four guys all the time i'm gonna say frankie what's up as soon as i say that he's come out let's go that's on do it do it if these guys move in any way shape or [ __ ] form go for a gun or do anything shoot them too take them all down that's what we're gonna do the other guy's going with him they hightailed it they didn't know which [ __ ] way to scramble to run and we hit him we didn't have to hit these other guys there was no reason for it so we hit him got rid of the guns cops came put yellow tape around the whole joint me and my beloved got caught in the yellow tape they were there that fast well i mean from what i understand after molito uh shot him in the head he stood over the body and fired a shot in each of fiallo's eyes yes and then you walked up to the corpse and urinated in his mouth no that's natural that's not true no okay that's just a ruler yeah that's not true that's kind of crazy when i heard it yeah yeah no that's not true what about the matter of fact the cops came so fast as soon as louie and then they got rid of the guns they got in cars everybody was gone me and eddie were just about to walk away in order to michael the battery could open the door let people run or go away or do whatever you know the cops came and they just spun yellow tape right around us they must have been a block away when this thing happened it was there that fast i couldn't get away i was standing there me and my bundle but the shooting in each of the eyes that was true that was true that was true was there a reason for that i don't know until today and hit him one in the head then he hit him in in both eyes i really don't know why he did that yeah i didn't i didn't even ask him when it came out in the paper i don't know why he did that well allegedly you were never charged for that crime because you paid off the the lead homicide detective five thousand dollars for in a nypd well we paid people off to mind their [ __ ] business and do certain things but there was a an [ __ ] in the neighborhood this guy stevie something or other and my guys came to me send me we got to talk to you what that kid stevie big stevie yeah he's bringing he did it good let him break keep keep your mouth shut let them run around and take the heat brag that you did it when the [ __ ] feds come i don't know what the hell he's gonna say but let him take the heat that's the heat is off of us and it didn't look like it was us because we owned the joint i owned the building my office was there everything was there but they they they knew it was us they closed the disco down they closed my office down and closed everything now right well because this was an unsanctioned killing essentially so castellano had a problem with it well it's the way you look at it yeah catholic had a problem with it he took it as an unsanctioned history i didn't ask his permission first and we didn't he didn't talk to me for 19 days and then i went to a meeting with uh uh louis molito he was with tommy blotti and he talked to me about it and uh i said paul i knew you would give me permission i didn't want to go from what he did to me in that building to your house back to that club that same night and kill him you're they're watching you they're watching me they if they see that movement not even going to think i went to you i try to protect you tommy belotti looked and looked at paul and paul looked at him and he kind of shrugged his shoulders like that's a good answer bro so paul said i'm going to forget it but you can never ever do another on sanction it without asking me i don't care what the thing is you could have gotten killed for doing that that hit an odds actually yeah absolutely okay but let me go further a little bit good because louie molito was sitting next to me and and he said you will never do this again and i said i can't say that paul because if it means for me to protect you in some kind of a way like that i will do it again then you might as well kill me and tommy looked at him and now this time he was like that's the right answer paul you want to punish and punish him but that's the [ __ ] right answer and i didn't get punished and that thing was over now god so that's it okay so that happens and you start to focus on the construction business more yeah i'm always focused you're always focused on it um and essentially you you were controlling almost all the concrete manhattan i mean donald trump actually had to work with you in order to get some of his buildings built right sooner or later everybody who's you know what is our the teamster team in 282 on the buildings you know the fence that goes all the way around and then the trucks line up and they go in there in the morning and bring their stuff i controlled that union 282 and i had teams performance in all these places if i wanted to slower the job down or stop it i would grab my team's deforming because they go in there late nine o'clock or whatever open everything up have coffee hang out [ __ ] people leave the thing open lunch time they eat their lunch to go home and get paid leave it open they don't they don't break balls but if i tell the guy do your job be in there six in the morning stay until six at night i want every truck you check if the union dues are up to date check the brake lights check the tire the pressure on the tire i want every truck to sit in there for a half hour by the time you do your job job and he's done and you're done don't do it in a bully way do it legitimate so no matter who the contractor was would have to call up and say to the president about bobby sasso you're killing me bobby sasso could say listen what do you want me to do the guy's a teamster for me he's doing his job so if there's bugs or there's an anything and somewhere in the conversation they'll say listen you know who i saw i saw the little guy i heard he was bidding the drywall job did he get it oh no no listen listen tom i got a job coming up let him give me a holler it's as simple as that okay so by 83 the fbi really started to look at the gambino family and then in august of that year uh three guys from john gotti's crew angelo ruggiero john carneglia and gene gotti were indicted for heroin trafficking and castellano the boss didn't want any drugs any drug dealing in that family and that started to cause some problems yeah uh i guess castellano is planning to kill uh gene gotti and ruggiero for drug trafficking i don't think so no no okay um but i guess at that point casano found out that there was some surveillance tapes of of these guys talking about you know the gambino crime family and that became a big issue the tapes in angelo's house became a tremendous issue it wasn't surveillance it was audio what he talked about was not only drugs he talked about all the bosses in the commission all the under bosses paul castellano himself these tapes that came out of angelo's house and john's mouth in some of these cases and that whole crew affected every boss on the bus and cozier in the mafia yeah so they these tapes that they were went to judges and judges listened to them and gave the government authority to debug his house his house his house his club his car everybody was getting slaughtered with these tapes and when paul found out about the tapes everybody was getting cases he asked angelo and john he wanted those tapes he wanted to hit him right he wanted those tapes but that would you know had he really listened to him they would have killed uh ruggiero as well as john gotti's brother right allegedly i think they were going to kill and i'll be honest with you i think he was going to kill john his brothers and that whole crow he was going to wipe that whole [ __ ] crew out right and then uh castellano got indicted uh for his connection uh to roy demaio's stolen car ring and as being part of the the commission then he found out his whole his own house was bugged right uh based on the evidence from the ruggiero tapes yeah right so now it's becoming like a [ __ ] right he's caught in the middle of all of that and he's getting pressure from all the other bosses the commission everybody that everybody's getting busted that commission case all the bosses on the bosses because the ass they're all on those cases on that case and a lot of them tapes and a lot of those things created that from that situation is that when gotti got the idea to kill uh paul costellano to protect his brother and also uh ruggiero i don't think at that point he really gave a [ __ ] about material but be honest with you but i think at that point they knew they were talking with neil already they knew they were in big trouble so it was run leave the country leave the state leave some run or kill or be killed the only problem they hit another brick wall with uh neil he wouldn't approve a hit on paul he was straight up cause you know so you don't kill the boss he he had told them in a meeting there's a lot of government tapes here now again because neil's house was bumped got bugged so at one point ruggiero actually approached you and said that him and john gotti were planning on killing castellano and asked for your support yes when they approached you and said that we're going to kill a boss without authorization from the commission how did you react to it well i knew but it wasn't they angelou had an appointment with angelo by himself when i went to him i knew they had problem already but uh when he said uh sam i need your help and i said to do what we're gonna kill paul you're gonna kill paul castle on the boss of bosses yeah and we need your help you and john gotti yeah of course then where the [ __ ] is he bro why ain't he talking to me like you are he's your boss he said he's doing something oh this is not all this is not a big deal what's he doing shooting dice while you're asking me to kill the boss of bosses your ass can be this like uh like uh you want to do me a favor and pick me up a quarter milk on the way home for me this is the boss of bosses you're talking to me about and john in here i'm gonna tell you what i'm gonna do ange i'm not gonna tell you yes i'm not gonna tell you no i'm not gonna tell anybody we had this conversation but i'm going straight to frankie chico's house i will discuss it with him and you could tell john if he need things he's in trouble and he needs help he don't need a spokesman he better come and talk himself and i left well you left but the talk continued and i guess they they couldn't really approach the commission because if they really talked to the other bosses word would get out and then all hell would break loose so i guess they try to approach people sort of indirectly with the boss and try to get i guess they got like three out of the five families with people in those families to somewhat agree to it but not really that came later okay the next meetings he had is with me and frankie to chico [Music] he had to get us on board if we weren't on board he was done and he knew it there's no way he could have done this but he did get me and frankie on board he also got joe piney on board who was one of the guys who was in the pizza connection case heavyweight old timer we had joe piney on board um we had joe gallo on board who was the ghostly in a in a sneaky way but he was on on outside in a sneaky way he was the big real betrayer of paul couldn't get neil to agree with this right but then neil died and that's when he's now asking other bosses right i guess gotti was was upset that castellano didn't attend uh neil uh ryoma across his uh funeral we all were yeah this is your underboss well he was there when he was asked why he didn't go he said you know there's a lot of cops i got my trial he had no idea the only thing that was holding him up from being killed was deal because neil wouldn't agree and we had no intentions of killing neal first of all he was right so he had no intentions of killing him so that's what actually kept him alive so it's ironic that he dies and you don't even go there this is the guy who kept you alive right and then on december 16 1985 you guys put together a crew of 11 people to do this hit castellano invited uh uh tequicho the chico uh to a meeting uh a spark steakhouse yeah what happens next he invited to a bunch of guys you can't just say the chico he's going to have a meeting he's going to have a meeting with uh jimmy brown danny mourinho johnny gamarano uh him and tommy bellati frankie chico uh tommy tommy gambino so he's inviting the some heavies in the family god knows what he's gonna say because he never said it but he's not just the chico because that makes him look like the betrayer which he was never to betray we just knew about the meeting and being frank he was going to be in there we decided i decided stay in there with a gun as soon as the shooting starts if they get up just growl at them frankie frank he was a super tough guy sit the [ __ ] down they're gonna know when you tell them sit down so he's not a b he was never a betrayer of castellano because he was closer to castellano i was closer to him to them then i'm a betrayer too so anyway but that's how the war broke broke down and that's how it came down so go ahead well he ended up getting gunned down and yeah you were across the street when it happened yeah while i was on the corner across the street on the corner in a car i was the guy on the walkie-talkie i planned to hit i controlled the hit i had a 357 magnum i was a backup shooter as well and john gotti was my driver right so now the boss is dead yes and the new regime starts yes uh i guess the only person left from the original crew uh was gallow yeah as far as the administration yeah yeah but at that point john gotti was essentially the boss of that crew yeah um and then in january 15 1986 he was a you know john gotti was officially made the boss of that family what date uh january 15 1986. all right sounds about right and then uh the chico was made the underboss yeah and you got actually elevated to capo yes so now you're the capo of a major crime family what changed at that point i mean everything changed everybody's life changed the newspapers were down hour backs the fbi was down our back state organized crime force was done outbacks other families were talking us to negotiating everybody and their mother all over the planet was talking about this hit for not just when it happened for days and weeks and months it never went away when you guys assassinated paul castellano as an off the record hit on a bus was there a big push back from the commission over this happening not really we won the commission seat without restrictions but they was making sneak hits frankie chico was killed four months later blown up in the car right i want to talk about that for a second yeah so frank dico was blown up after a car bomb was was put in his car essentially put it under the car under the car and this was kind of a no-no because the mafia had banned bombs yes um i guess when you become made they tell you you could never use a bomb right i guess and i forgot who i interviewed about this but bombs were being used by the black hand originally the the guys you know it was like bomb alley i remember at one point there were so many bombs going off like early on it was used in italy yeah and um and in this country the only time i've ever heard or seen it really even used was with uh al capone yeah hatred bombs and machine guns he was he thinks he was fighting world war ii or something right okay so dichico gets killed so there's no underboss so gotti made angelo rogero and you co-under bosses no no no explain what happened there john and i sat down and right and then though everybody in the family was [ __ ] the old timers everybody was what the [ __ ] is going on paul castellano tommy bellotti boom frankie the chico war is on what the [ __ ] we have to calm it down i took over the role of the godzilla of the family so joe gallo we took him down he just went to prison we didn't go yet i'm sorry but joe gallo we were taking him down i was going from captain to kozuya we talked and we said let's get joe piney it's an old-timer everybody likes him everybody's comfortable with him everybody's at ease with them i think this will ease everything down john told me i said it's a great move we'll run the family but as a figurehead let's put joe piney in that's exactly what we did after frankie died joe piney became the official on the boss and i moved immediately almost the same time to acting quincy concierge and i was looking for a spot to fill my spot big louie was going to fill my spot as a captain but that was in movement still so that's the way it helped d'angelo never made the position of anything um angelo had [ __ ] up everybody was human with him i literally stopped john from killing angelo twice d'angelo had cancer towards the end john wanted to kill him and i said bro he's a childhood friend everybody knows that we're gonna look like animals here bro you are let him die of cancer leave it alone put him on a shelf leave it alone let him die of cancer and he did when he died of cancer i went to the funeral with john and he didn't even want to go to the funeral and i said bro everybody thinks that you and him are like this everybody's going to be there guys in other families under bosses bosses captains and you're not going to show and if you're not going to show i'm not going so it's going to look horrible for us bro he's dead it's over let's go to the [ __ ] funeral and end this so he had him on a payment on mindless it wasn't for me he would have killed angelo and i'm not trying to take credit i don't give a [ __ ] about angela one way or another so if it wasn't for me he would have killed him and if it wasn't for me he wouldn't know what to wake okay so the next person that ended up getting a hit put on him was nicholas nicki cowboy marmando and i guess armando had gotten addicted to crack cocaine yes and i guess he accused you of getting one of his friends addicted also no no he he got michael the bat hooked on it as well right when he came into my crew he made a promise because he was with other people i didn't want him at first that he would nev he'd stop doing drugs and he didn't he started doing crack he did it with nikki uh michael the bat and and they both became crack addicts behind my back and uh michael really fell deep into it and i had to kill him right i guess you felt that he knew too much and you couldn't take a chance because he was not right how could i how could i face you guys or in my crew and i know that he's a crackhead and i know that he gets arrested they dangle a little bit of crack in front of his face and he's writing that when we're in the cell what do i tell you man i didn't think it would happen but he knew all our secrets here man he's right on the bottom of the barrel with the crack we can't have that but you didn't do nothing and that's why we're sitting here so that's the situation i'm in and i didn't make that happen he had to kill him and i loved the kid i did i thought the world of him i had he had to go and then nikki had to go because he's the one who did it to michael and brought that [ __ ] into my crew so i got rid of both of them right and you know with the with the nikki cowboy situation i guess it was done by joseph peruta yeah uh prudent guy in the backseat of the car and shot uh nikki cowboy twice in the back of the head corpse was throwing a vacant lot they found it the next day okay and then by 1986 gotti gets arrested and charged with rico yeah rico is one of the scariest charges to have because hard case to be yeah 98 conviction rate with the feds you don't have to be doing anything you just have to be affiliated with someone next thing you know you're in a rico facing 20 30 years um now by that time when gotti you know went to jail awaiting the charges you were essentially running the crew for him while you're on the outside yes okay it's not the crew the family the family um [Music] and then at that point gotti ordered the the murder of robert uh de bernardo yes because he had made uh negative remarks about him those are all [ __ ] but yeah but that's all [ __ ] i mean is that really all it takes i mean to get a murderer just a couple of well it seemed like when we were making him from a maid guy to a captain well frankie was alive john was reluctant he didn't want to do it there must have been some hidden [ __ ] way back number one number two he really wasn't talking about him he had an argument with angelo and he and when frankie died angelo said i brought up with john i'm going to be the underboss db told him no james you got a lot of balls but you're [ __ ] dumb and he got really mad at that in a club other people heard it and there was an argument and he said who's going to be the other best you he said no not me they know is it my opinion yeah your opinion i think sandy sammy should be on the bus that was the whole argument so he wasn't talking behind john's back while he was in but that's the argument they were saying he was talking behind his back he wasn't talking about his back he was just angelo opened up his [ __ ] mouth that he was gonna be on the bus and db checked him gave his opinion and then you know gotti's trial ended up in a mistrial with a hung jury john gotti walks out of his first of three beaten trials yeah um [Music] but the only thing is you don't beat the trials right we rigged the trials we brought people the first trial was that rigged as well every [ __ ] trolley how was that first trial rigged which one the one with the the the woman well the one the one in uh 86 that's the one with uh willie boy johnson was a a rat is that that case i think that was the third one i think well i'll get to that in a second tell me what case i'll i'll get it well okay regardless he ended up beating he had he ended up beating the first trial now he's back on the street again is this the one where he beat up a guy i'm not sure it was a ricoh case well they make a ricoh case with anything but okay 81. so so then by 87 you were actually put under fbi surveillance no i've been on the i've been on the eight it's free isis okay so that had been going on forever they opened up an office in staten island what they called the twins frankie maddie two agents and i was that lead target they opened an office for them so they could be there 24 hours a day seven days a week so i didn't just start in 87. i had heat on me for years and years and years from when i was starting to deal with uh after i got made i had heat right and i guess around this time you start a sense there's a little bit of jealousy over some of your businesses the legitimate businesses even though you're kicking up about two million a year to gotti i i think it was a little bit less than two but two is a good number i mean i think it was a million half for whatever it's close enough a lot of money yeah yeah a lot of money yeah well he was saying things with other people that came back to me that i sensed that there was either he was starting to become a little bit afraid of me a little bit of jealousy envy but it was by what people said i'll give you an example a guy went in there from the genovese family and he said to john boy you really know how to pick them and john says what are you talking about sammy you can't do a [ __ ] job in the city unless you get a wink of a nod from him and john was completely thrown back and annoyed with that because he's got this ego instead of saying yeah that's my man i'm making money from this guy no [ __ ] the money i'm that's my man you want something done i'll get it done for you yeah wouldn't you want your man to be a [ __ ] king out there who could control the city or could control whatever in the street you're in that makes you a powerhouse you're an absolute pioneer boss right this guy has got connections all over the place and regardless of how much he's that's just icing on the cake how much money he's bringing in he's a powerhouse and if you're controlling him then what are you but he looked at it backwards yeah well and i guess you had said that he was making up to about 20 million a year during his heyday probably i wouldn't doubt it right and you were really like his man like you described yourself as his pit bull and his friend right oh absolutely you would hold the umbrella for him when when you guys are outside in the rain open the doors of course that's respect yeah i tell my guys a couple of times this thing come out with an umbrella i said you know my guys we did things together you think i'm a punk no sammy come on well then i hold an umbrella and i open the door i'm not afraid of him why am i doing that it's respect if i can't show him respect then who the [ __ ] am i and when you guys see that me holding a thing then don't have a [ __ ] problem of holding an umbrella or a door for him or your mother or your father that's respect it's not fear yeah nobody's going to be afraid so you're going to hold the guys you know but i heard it so many some morons to say [ __ ] like that but that's they don't have the idea what the word respect or loyalty or anything does now i would i hold the umbrella for john not over my head his head and would i get wet yes right does that make me a dog if that's what you think then you're a [ __ ] well then at one point with john gotti's permission you actually set up the murders for tommy sparrow and some other gambino associates i didn't ask for permission uh jimmy brown and louis fats came to john and asked for permission to kill tommy sparrow spinelli o sparrow it's their cousin he was a may guy john he was going to go to a uh grand jury meeting and tell the truth john called me over and said sammy listen to this and i listen to it he says listen take this guy out before he goes to that grand jury meeting i said all right i said john let me talk to you a bit about jimmy uh louie excuse us one minute they moved away i said john why am i on this head he's a captain he's a maid guy the cousin's a made guy he's in there crew let's let them do it what the [ __ ] am i doing i'm the [ __ ] underboss of the family why am i on this head shaming i'll never get it done so i didn't ask for this [ __ ] hit he's giving me these hits i'm the i undermine supposed to be on hits no more unless there's something personal for me and i want to be on the head i'm not i don't i'm not supposed to be on these things right that's for an associate a maid guy maybe even a captain but not even them anymore especially on the administration level you'll never see paul castellano or neil or any of these guys on the street in a murder yeah he's got me on the street and i didn't ask him his permission for those things i didn't want to even be there nowhere near him he's putting you on those things he's putting me on those rights and around this time like gotti is really enjoying being in the media he's lovely he's wearing you know two thousand dollar suits he's on the front page he's seeing people look at him he's like oh those are my fans and this is bothering you because you're like we're a secret society we're not supposed to have fans right absolutely a lot of people are being bothered by this a lot of the mafia guys are being bought so many people and today's facts that came out every [ __ ] most everybody's caught on tapes the things they said beyond his back then around now everybody hated i could say that everybody hated it yeah and they hated him for what he was doing okay so then john gotti gets another racketeering trial and during this trial there's a guy named george pape uh that actually approached you to sell his vote on the jury he didn't approach me he approached this guy bosco okay who was the head of he was the boss of the west westies they had a very close relationship and he approached him and bosco came to me then i met with him and made a deal with him for 60 000 to buy his vote twenty thousand right away immediately twenty thousand in the middle of the trial twenty thousand at the end of their trial and then i would get him a job and the teamsters zoom and teamster foreman anywhere between 65 and 75 000 a year right and he did what he was told yes and john gotti beat the case right and at that point the media called him the teflon don yes because he had beat trial three times he was actually on the cover of the newspaper the teflon don right was everyone really rolling their eyes when they saw that well because that was that is not something you want out there what he's doing was destroying the mob and all the old timers the sir you know young kids they want to imitate them but all the old-timers and the serious pete dudes were sick over this yeah he was doing more damage than 15 people cooperating at the same time so in 1989 a guy named youssef hawkins a 16 year old teenager from east new york um went to bensonhurst when he was there him and his younger brother and two friends were attacked by 10 or 30 uh italian youths with about seven of them having baseball bats one of them who had a handgun and this is the fama you know this is a um this is joseph fama had a handgun and ends up shooting him in the chest twice and killing him um and i guess you had convinced his brother for him to actually turn himself in for the murder i don't remember this too well but you want to know something i don't know why the hell i would do that anyway the more i think about it why would i tell him to go confess whether i give a [ __ ] what he did i'm not going to tell anybody to go confess and go to prison for the rest of your life or i would never tell anybody that so i don't i don't know if that's what i did i i don't know it sounds confusing your name was thrown in they had a documentary about him recently and it it said that you were the person that can you know was involved in convincing the shooter to actually turn himself into police because at that point it turned to a huge thing in new york there was protest you know al sharpton was involved and there was a speaking out and it created all these racial problems and so forth yeah i i do remember now when you're talking about al sharpton yeah he was going to come down and he was going to protest in our neighborhood we'll get around 20 inventions walk down 28th avenue now i'm starting to think and gas pipe came to me the under bush of the lucas fit me and he said this al sharpton's going to come down you want to kill him i said no what do you mean kill him in the middle of the street because he's protesting yeah no no get the [ __ ] out of here no that's that's insane because if that's what you do then there'll be four million of people protesting the next day what are you crazy or what can't do something like that just let him walk through let him protest and walk through and do his protest and whatever i wasn't even sure what happened with the thing so what this i guess is that now this is related to the hawkins kid yeah so the people are saying that i told this kid to go confess or go turn himself in so i'm trying to make peace in the neighborhood that [ __ ] i wouldn't do that okay i [ __ ] the neighborhood i wouldn't do it okay if the neighborhood explodes it explodes and if i did that i must have been drunk okay well 1990 december 11th uh the raven night social club gets raided yeah you get arrested along with gotti and lecacio lucasio la casio you end up pleading guilty to a superseding racketeering charge uh gotti gets charged with five murders bellotti uh de bernardo molito and de bono along with conspiracy uh to murder vestola along with loan sharking illegal gambling obstruction of justice bribery tax evasion according to all the fbi tapes everyone was denied bail um [Music] and i guess the attorneys were disqualified from actually working with you and gotti because they were saying the attorneys were part of the evidence so and then these tapes start to come out when you hear john gotti badmouthing you when you first heard those tapes what'd you think i knew he was betraying me behind my back i know exactly half the [ __ ] he's talking about didn't make sense and wasn't true then i find out later on after that that there's a plot he was looking to take me out towards the end so now all those lies and all that [ __ ] is making sense so what is he gonna use you can't kill your underboss you can't kill a major guy in the family who's bringing in a ton of money doing work doing everything he's supposed to do and you kill him if you do that as a boss it backfires because everybody looks at you and says oh my god if he could kill him he didn't kill any of us and and the thing reverses on you everybody becomes a little skeptical of you a little afraid of you a little it's not a good thing so he's making up all these stories about what i did and now i find out the other parts of it now i'd find out parts of it where he was going to send me on the lamb and before he was going to send me onto the lamb he gave me an order to kill chin a boss of another family but his plot was really really great he told me to kill chen he says he's behind this frankie the chico thing i love frankie you're talking about uh chinchigante yeah so if i would have killed chen on his orders now i'd come back in how'd you make out i got him last night he would have killed me immediately now he has the answer he was doing all these things killing people taking over things he lost control of him i loved him like a brother but he lost his mind and then he came to me he killed chin i had to kill him so it's understandable to everybody now number one number two he goes to the genovese people and he tells them he came in and told me that he whacked him he wanted to take over and i i had to take him out aha so the plan was to essentially blame all the murders on you and then kill you and then he walks away free that's what he was going to do with the case now like i said you don't you don't have to call my rat but that's a rap move when you're on trial these are both fighting for the same thing now if you're going to back up the government's tapes your tapes that the government has and you're going to back up all these things and you're going to tell me right to my [ __ ] face you're going to be found guilty and that sets me free well it's not a rap move it's a rap move it's not a rat but it's a rap move who the [ __ ] does that well was it because of that you ultimately decided to cooperate yeah and this was in 1991 yes we got pinched in what november no december of 90. i cooperated in november of 91 right almost a full year later yeah november 13th 1991 when you agreed to testify right they gave you a plea deal for your cooperation yeah was it uh 20 years 20 year cap okay that doesn't sound like that great of a plea deal on the surface 20 years i know it's a cap but still it's up to the judge's discretion at the end of the day right yeah why would you take a 20-year plea deal because i'm facing i'm you didn't read my charges i'm faced with a three-four murders conspiracy to murders and a whole bunch other [ __ ] too so i'm facing a life without parole i'll never see the street got it so i go in when i'm you're going to count them when i went in i was like let's say 40 uh in 90 or almost 41. so 20 years i can get out 60 61. even when it's 20 years ends there's good time so i'm going to do like 17. right so it's not the end of the world yet it's not it's still a lot of time but okay and then the next year in 1992 uh gotti's trial starts the jury selection starts and um it's actually an anonymous jury because they're so worried about jury tampering because it's happened so many times before this is i guess you've never seen this in a brooklyn federal case before like they're really kind of almost changing the rules in a way because of what happened before um the prosecutors begin playing the tapes you know where gotti's discussing gambino business all the murders he approved um you know talking about how he hated castellano you know so the motive to actually kill him um and then you actually get brought to trial on march 2nd here you are where most of your life you're told you know you should not cooperate you take a blood oath and you know cooperators are getting killed for this type of thing how hard was it to really say okay i'm actually going to cooperate and take the stand how hard it was it was something i was against every principle in my life something i never even thought of doing i've been arrested all my [ __ ] life and i faced cases and i've been offered that a hundred times every time i was pinched and i never did it but i i'll be goddamned if i'm gonna turn around if goes in austria is that we kill each other we do this we do that and then when we get pinched you're going to throw me to the wolves you want me to do the time so you can hit the street and i ain't doing it i quit the mafia i quit him and i didn't give a [ __ ] what happened to me i would deal with whatever had happened well when you took the stand you confessed to 19 murders and you implicated uh john gotti in four of them yeah and i'm not sure if that's the true number but god okay uh gotti's lawyers cross-examined you uh called you a junkie uh talked about you steroids and everything else like that but after days of of sitting on the stand you pretty much maintain your story the whole time uh during the trial you and gotti would look at each other sometimes yeah how is that well we're not that far from each other i mean when we're talking sometimes we'll glance and look at each other sometimes we'll literally growl at each other sometimes we would like to have a [ __ ] pistol each and shoot each other i mean it's not an easy situation but you know what's weird i think about and i never get to ask this question is that you sat there you just said across from each other testifying and people say i was unflappable and you couldn't break my story [Music] that was in 1991. 2001 2011 2021 that's 31 32 years ago and whatever i said and did 32 years ago after 100 different people cooperated and tons of [ __ ] tapes and everything else nobody ever turned it over or never disputed anything i've ever said so that's a little weird maybe too another little fact yeah well then on june 23rd 1992 uh john gotti uh and locatio was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole yeah plus the 250 000 fine or whatever that's worth and then you testified in six more trials could be yeah i cooperated for two years and good faith my deal was two years in good faith after two years it would be up to me and i never cooperated after the two years only if a trial balanced over the two years because it was postponed or whatever but i never cooperated again right and based on uh sorry that oh good well uh based on the cooperation um vincent the chin gigante got convicted yeah um who's the head of the geneves yeah uh crime family uh colombo family uh little vic arena got convicted a bunch of other mafia guys uh 11 captains a crooked cop and the head of the teamsters local um with a total of 38 people ended up getting convicted now when you look at you know the people that ended up behind bars you know we understand the situation between you and john gotti he's on tape and he's saying this down the third about you and you know he was going to turn on you he's going to kill you he was going to try to pin the murders on you the other 38 people did you have personal beefs with any of them or was it just i gotta do my job and so forth no i didn't have no personal beeps on that but another part of my agreement is that i wouldn't cooperate and i didn't cooperate against any of my family or any of my crew or a woman who helped me rig a trial because my crew came with me on a hit because i ordered them and told them to come with me so i couldn't i i never cooperated against them that's a fact my family or that woman and a lot of those people could have maybe and should have took a [ __ ] plea who went to trial and did certain things uh the jurors some of those people didn't even get hurt that you're talking about and i had no control over that um and they do what they want to do you know and it's it sounds like that i put them in jail it sounds like that they put themselves in jail let's yeah let's talk about that let's talk about chen i'm not the only guy who testified yeah al diaco testified other people testified they had tapes they had everything under the sun so i i was a part of that but when they say you put 38 people away i could have put 338 people away in reality and i didn't so when i look at myself what i did i mean the guy who set up and rigged the trial do you notice let's call out his sense what he got this is me in the background telling them this guy was a mope bro you know don't hurt him that bad he got three years three years he got three years so look at some of the sentences but let's look at one thing that's even more important the government don't like me right now if people think they're like hey i got nine nine cases that i testified for the defense against the government since that agreement that's been going on for years but that's not even talked about well based on your deal and the cooperation you did for those two years you got sentenced to five years in prison yes way less than the 20 that you were potentially facing and since you had already served four years you basically got less than a year i think i i think a good time and everything when i when i finally got sentenced i had seven months to go you know people were outraged that someone who admitted to killing 19 people got less than five years when you hear people say that how do you feel i don't give a flying [ __ ] about them to tell you the truth i don't really care what they say or what they do i live my life i do my own thing i could have got 20 years when people sit down and say you know i i heard judge gleason's remarks and he said some of those people would have came out they would have been doing murders for all these years so in essence what he said and did may have saved hundreds of months now i don't want credit for doing [ __ ] like that i don't believe in it but you could say whatever you want what i will say is that you know i hear people talk about black people and say something negative or whatever or of course they live in a certain neighborhood or certain thing and i say you gotta you gotta live in a man's shoes you can't put people down for what you think in your little basement with your little crappy ass computer live in those people's mind and other people's shoes before you open your [ __ ] mouth and what would you do if you were in my shoes and you were facing murders and getting set up what the [ __ ] would you do mr hero mr guy who turns around and badmouths other people who don't even know what the [ __ ] planet you're on or what you're talking about with your little [ __ ] computer you know in a whole someplace and you want to pass a remark some people uh won't like i'm sitting here with you some people don't like i do my own show i don't give a [ __ ] about them i don't do it for them you know if people can't look at someone and say the guy is doing the right thing he changes his life whether it's me whether whoever it is not just me there's guys out there um who are doing the same thing and and and changing their life look at michael frenchy he's changing his life he's changing it in a good way in a positive way i become a little friendly with him now right you guys had an interview together we did that interview together and uh so uh and now we're we're talking together in a good way but we don't we don't sit there and knock each other i don't knock what he does he don't knock what i do it's you know but it's always the people who say those things go back and look at them their failures they can't stand somebody makes a little bit of success michael franzis in uh one of our interviews actually said that you killed a guy and you went to the funeral and blamed him for killing him yeah yeah can you say who that was or is that part of your deal or no well it's in another store that's who it was is unimportant okay i'll tell you what you actually did what it was what it is is that we have rules that we live by so we know if we break the rules like when i cooperate i broke a rule i don't blame a guy to come and kill me he was my friend he's in the life he's supposed to why should he die i broke the rule his job now is to kill me so when i looked at the guy in the coffin i told him bro look what you did you know you would get killed and you know more than likely be me or joe blow who's pulling the trigger this is what you did look at your kids look at your family you did this we do these things to ourself you go to prison i was in prison for 22 years of my life with hundreds of guys different races different everybody mexicans everybody you name it we do it to ourselves bro what are we who are we blaming now who do we get to blame it just don't even make sense to me well you get your your prison time yeah you get out and you get into the uh the u.s federal witness protection program yeah originally in uh tempe arizona your name was jimmy moran at the time yeah but then you end up leaving after about a year or two eight bucks eight months at the point that you're out are you you know are you hearing there's a price on your head or or anything else like that the first time i got out before i went back into prison i in arizona i knew john would pay somebody or do something to make a move and they did some guys came down to do what they had to do they had me for four or five months it didn't work they were afraid to come near me but it didn't work so guys were actually in your area trying to kill you yes do they ever shoot at you do anything they didn't get close enough they were i had little precautions and that they knew that it was it was going to be like a mission impossible how did you know they were there i didn't know they were there i just protected myself knowing it would happen okay and i put myself in a good position but how did you find out there was guys there to kill you is what i'm saying and they got pinched oh one guy got pinched for drugs and he ratted on all the rest of them and just before i went away i got pitched in 99 in arizona and i was gone and that was the end of me okay and that's all folks remember pokey pig that's it right let's go well um in in in 1997 you actually wrote a book in 1997 you wrote a book called underboss yeah and you know you talked about the whole situation uh the families trying to file a lawsuit against you uh from the prophets of the book do they ever get those profits no they they they failed on the son of sam law it didn't work right later on i got pinched throughout the things and yeah and everybody got some money right then in 1999 uh you get arrested for some drug charges you get 20 years and now you're back in prison again and this time you're an adx and is this when you were in solitary confinement for like six years six and a half years what did that do to you six years of solitary confinement in a super max look at me it made me better looking and maybe stronger what the [ __ ] it was [ __ ] up at six and a half years i i'll tell somebody go do go in a room stay in this room and i'll give you all the conveniences you want for six and a half weeks these girls get stuck crazy you don't want to stay in there right and then oddly enough in in 2003 there was a new indictment for a 1980 murder 1980 murder of nypd detective uh peter calabro by contract killer richard kaklinsky aka the iceman right that's a hell of a story but you have to stay tuned because that's i'm under contract that's going to be in one of my stories that i'm tied up like a nut fair enough as good as this man is i can't give it to him fair enough unless he gives me another and then you finally get out in 2017 yes after serving almost 20 years almost 18 years i have served 17 years seven months to be exact and at this point you're completely done with your life of course i'm done i'm done i'm done so forth i'm 77 years old i'm done i'm doing stuff in hollywood i'm working on some shorts that i'm doing actually i'm doing a podcast where i talk about stuff and i'm on video now i took it to a whole new level i'm doing shorts it's a little 12 minute clips five or six of them and uh we made up a story about uh a serial killer the fbi comes to me and go after the serial killer now i got two act two hours of acting classes and i'm in the movie and i'm acting my brains out so i'm gonna do that so i'm doing great things nice things and uh but i love i love doing these uh shorts and uh they'll be out on sammybull.com we're gonna give you the link and everything to check it out there you go and there we go final question when i spoke to a lot of mob guys over the years the one guy they really put in the highest regard was carmine the snake persico he was supposed to be the real coastal nostra hardcore gangster who played by the book never cooperate and so forth but then on august 21st of last year it was actually revealed that he was an informant i saw that newspaper article i don't know if it's true or full false but i don't i have him and i was under him for a long time that's why i ask so i don't have him in very high regard you know they killed a [ __ ] woman when you start killing women i'm not going to say he killed a child because he didn't but when you start killing women and innocent people and [ __ ] like that my i think you crossed the line that's not causing offshore anymore i don't know what that's a serial killer if you just lost touch with yourself we had guys in the gambino family i think he was cold-hearted very vicious just like when i was a kid he sent me on a thing bring back the guy's ear his ear buddy because he was [ __ ] somebody you want me to give him a beating i'll get my beating or or two of us could go three of us could get my bear why would you want to cut the [ __ ] guy's ear off yeah i mean would you consider yourself a serial killer 19 people then you admitted to killing well you would admit to killing 19 people you don't consider yourself no no no no of course not mass murderers uh what mass murder i don't like the sound of that but i mean you can call me that called me whatever you want i'm fighting for goes in austria i never killed a woman a kid an innocent person i kill people in the mafia other soldiers so what do we do yeah other soldiers what what do we do to soldiers now should we sit them down when they come home from these wars and tell the guy you killed 20 people 200 people he's using bombs and everything are you a serial killer should we ask him questions like that i don't think that's it okay they're fighting for that country yeah it's most of them are young stupid and they're bullshitted by our government that these guys are the enemies when i was there i was going to fight in vietnam well that's when i was in the military go kill them they're going to come in here they're going to rape your mother and your sisters and i was give if i would have went to vietnam i would have killed them now i've been in jail 22 years i've never seen a vietnamese person in prison so they're either very good crooks or they're not bad people and the only vietnamese people i've ever known and i'm not a kid i'm 77 is women who do your nails and your toenails and they're very polite so the government i think was bullshitting me all the while you know they'll tell you things about italians they'll tell you things about black they'll tell you it's it's it's a bunch of [ __ ] yeah it's a bunch of [ __ ] but you do you know you go across and you live your life you do your thing and uh you you keep your mouth shut you know as much as you could and go through with your life if there's consequences you take your consequences like me if they want to shoot me in the head shoot me bro i i got it coming god well sammy the bull um i think you know when i have people like yourself on this show you know the italian mafia in particular gets so romanticized by the movies you talk about people's favorite movies they'll say goodfellas they'll say casino they'll say the godfather too uh so you have this romantic element of these group of people that are almost inhuman in terms of their principles and how they are and they don't function like everyone else but as i've seen time and time again these are all people and if you go and commit to a life of crime it usually ends very badly uh it ends with a lot of prison time or it ends with death or the people around you getting killed or going away forever absolutely uh you know i've never met anyone that walked away and just rode off into the sunset with millions of dollars i've never heard that not without a lot of losses along the way and interviews like this i think really proved that that's true i mean i i believe that you know they asked me to talk to kids i talked to kids i mean i said i don't know what to say i'm going to sound like a fake or a phony and i don't like [ __ ] but i would tell kids you want to be me you want to be sammy to be i got 22 years in prisons i was shot on two different occasions stabbed once shot my friends be me god [ __ ] do whatever you want be me to talk with a kid don't do that they're not gonna listen to you say hey you want to be me this is me i saw a black guy just recently doing a video like that and uh he's behind bars and he's talking to the kids bro go out there get your spots make some money look at this cell this is where you want to sit with me and he's right that'll scare the [ __ ] out of people yeah you know that'll wake kids up so that's the deal that's the sorry part of it and uh you know it's not who cooperate who did this who did that i mean this country we're giving out billions of dollars now to ukraine this is a [ __ ] joke we got homeless people everywhere we're not giving them a dime we got ghettos somewhere we ain't giving them a time but we can give ukraine because we feel bad for them 40 million billion not million billion dollars we don't want to take care of our problems there's no [ __ ] milk for babies i mean this country's going [ __ ] we we're going in the wrong direction and they got people everybody's arguing with everybody for some reason or another i think it's created it's not necessary but we'll see what happens that's how we'll end it sammy the bull appreciate you sharing your story thank you very much peace

Channel: djvlad

Views: 1,619,525

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

Id: dmo06w2vGL4

Length: 139min 44sec (8384 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 26 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Firm_Result4110]

vlad is such an incompetent interviewer i fucking hate him.

[u/MickyB6827]

Sammy: “I murdered 4 people that night. Stabbed 2, shot one, strangled the other. It started a big fight within the family”

Vlad: “Okay”