Larry Mazza on Him & Grim Reaper Doing Over 20 Mafia Hits (Full Interview)

all right here we go we have larry mazza former made man of the colombo mafia welcome to vlad tv well thanks for having me well you have a very interesting history and a very interesting story uh but this is your first time here so i want to start in the very beginning so uh you grew up in brooklyn in the 60s yes i was born in 61. okay and from what you've said you have a very normal family a firefighter father your mom worked at a bank nothing really crime related or anything of that sort that's very true i uh some people uh described it as a leave it to beaver if you remember that tv show my dad was a lieutenant in the fire department my mom like you said worked in a bank uh myself my sister and brother all went to catholic school uh you know we did well uh well provided for and uh you know and as soon as i got a little older i got jobs i was working you know from a newspaper delivery boy uh right on up right and your family's originally from sicily and naples but like third generation yes yeah okay so you're growing up in this very kind of normal household in brooklyn uh you go to high school you graduate uh you briefly go to college i guess you go to john jay john jay college yes criminal justice of all things yep can't make it up yep uh but then something happens in 1978 when you're working at a supermarket right well i it was i was still in my last year of high school i was going to graduate that summer and go on to uh john jay so i wasn't quite 18. uh and i was working for a supermarket and while i'm working there one of my jobs has me delivering groceries box fulls of groceries to houses and one of them that i delivered to uh was to a very attractive woman a little older than me at the time uh and it started out you know as a little friendship there became a flirtation and then a you know a seduction in some way because again she was about 32 i was 17 and we wound up having an affair that lasted almost 10 years okay that's all good and well uh for a 17 year old high school kid he's got this older woman that he's messing with but unfortunately linda is married and she's not just married to a regular working guy she's married to someone a little different so let's uh i describe who that is i left you with that lead-in but that's perfect uh the funny thing is she lied and told me she was 29 and i lied and said that i was 18 because being under 18 there was some legalities and things so she never thought i was under 18. and yes i find out that she's married and at the beginning i'm not overly concerned because if she's okay with it i'm thinking the guy must be a doctor a homeless guy that travels or whatever uh but as time went on and we got closer and she started wanting me to meet him to make lives easier uh and we'll be touching on that i'm sure throughout but it turns out that he is a high-ranking member captain boss uh of the columbo family and his nickname is the grim reaper he's uh uh one of the most feared if not the most feared gangster maybe ever in new york right uh gregory scarpa aka the grim reaper uh who allegedly murdered over 120 people i don't doubt it he told me he stopped counting at 50. and you know as time went on uh hearing more and more i i if you told me 220 i wouldn't blink right i mean not only would he kill people but i guess he would leave the number 666 uh the number of the beast on on his victim's pagers no no really what happened with that was when you know we're fast-forwarding to the war which we'll get to uh and back in those years we didn't have cell phones we had beepers so everybody had a code if we if somebody from 13th avenue got beeped it would be 0-13 so you knew it was them they'd give you a restaurant to meet at whatever but our code was 666. so when we did some damage or we had a meet after that we beeped and he put in the three sixes and that yeah so yeah it's a funny number to use for the grim reaper right right well his other nickname was the mad hatter the mad hatter we called him hannibal uh there was all kinds of names uh we called called him schwarzkopf for a while if you remember the general from desert storm he became our general during the war we got him a hat and he wore it proudly and he liked we called him schwarzkopf so he had a lot of nicknames okay the mad hatter came from the general hat yeah okay so here you have this guy uh gregory scarpa who's a hitman uh for the colombo boss at the time persico and you're sleeping with his wife and actually he gave you permission yes what happened was at the beginning when i didn't know who he was i didn't feel that overly uh that that sense of betrayal or that i was doing something so horribly wrong not that it was right but as i got closer to him and he started doing things for me putting me in businesses and helping me earn money and becoming my friend now i felt that i felt like i was not a good friend i was doing something wrong i felt guilty and linda saw that and it started affecting our relationship i would not go there as much i was trying to sort of keep my distance i was getting paranoid too because now i knew who he was and he saw that and ultimately he uh they must add some kind of conversation and he sat me down one day and told me that uh let me walk you through this because it's a pretty scary moment in my life i would go to the club with him every day about 12 30. we would get there first and the rest of the men would come around one o'clock so while we're driving there and something just happened that i was really really a nervous wreck he had called me to bring him downtown to see one of the other captains scappy and i didn't show up to bring him i convinced myself that he was going to kill me that night so i didn't go linda called my house all night i heard he was calling me and getting messages on the old messages used to get on the phone so that next day when i went he knew i was really off my stomach was not right and he starts telling me that you know larry i'm gonna have this conversation with you uh you're very mature for your age i know linda loves you i love you i know how you feel about linda and as he's going my stomach is turning because i know what he's leading to and i've said this a few times and i'll i'll say it now too that i always had in my the back of my mind that he would try to convince me to admit it and i would never give in just like out of the godfather if you remember that scene with michael corleone telling him just don't insult me tell me you did it and i'll let you live so i remember driving there and saying this in my head i'm not going to admit i'm not going to admit it anyway we get to the club we walk in we sit down at the desk and he's continuing and he's saying what i'm about to tell you i want to leave it has to stay between us but i know what's going on with you and linda so my heart almost jumped out of my chest but i i for some reason something told me in my head this is my moment of truth i loved her i didn't want it to end but it is what it is okay so i looked in my says greg you know i have a lot of respect for you and i think you're far from an idiot but only an idiot wouldn't see what was going on he busted out laughing he gets up comes around the desk puts his arm around me we walk outside together now we get to the front and we go lean on the uh the parking meter there's a parking meter there that we would lean on a lot and the sun's hitting us and he's explaining to me that he can he's okay with it but nobody else outside the three of us can ever hear about it because if that happens the two of us will be killed so that's the first rule i learned you know not formally but that was one of the rules that was being broken already and later on uh as i got closer to him i was introduced to his first wife who lived in lakewood new jersey and i was told about his third wife who lived in vegas and manhattan she was a wealthy socialite and uh there's a whole story there too between uh how bail became wealthy through her uh for added to the wealth but in hindsight i wonder now if i was just making his life easier he had all these wives to deal with now he was 20 years older than linda he was in his 50s early 50s she was around 31 whatever and i was younger so when he was out with his other wives which is four or five nights a week bouncing around i was with her she didn't complain so that's one of that's one of my theories as to how he allowed it okay and uh greg's story is really is really interesting because i guess before you guys ever met uh he's kind of tied into the whole mississippi burning uh story right and this was in the 1960s where uh there was a three civil rights workers that were killed by the ku klux klan and the fbi couldn't figure out how they've been killed or even find their bodies right so they decided to bring the grim reaper down to mississippi uh gave him a gun and some money and said go ahead and find out who who the killers were and in the process uh he actually kidnapped one of the clan members and tortured him and and found out who it was yeah that was a little bit more i was told that uh he did unspeakable things to them that's the words that we used and before he got to that final piece he had to go through a few lower level klansmen so i don't think he was just brought to that guy because they probably if they need if they had to find out who that guy was who knew so he went to some lower level guys and did like i said unspeakable things ultimately they got to the guy that had the goods and uh what you just said is true he took him in threw him in the car and uh you know i wouldn't want to be him that night i could tell you that right and he actually found out where the body he found the body and i guess in two years later in 66 they brought him down to mississippi again over another murder case over a fire that was set by the clan yeah and uh i guess at that point things didn't quite work out because he wanted more money or something like that yeah there was he had i learned about that later on obviously and then he he sort of backed away from them for a while but i think that there's a little bit of a difference i think before that historical moment he backed away from the feds he had dabbled with them before but once he made those deals in mississippi he had caught lunch and he was able to do whatever he wanted in the streets and uh never have to worry about being arrested caught blanche so here you are you're you're messing with one of greg's wives and he's okay with it and now you guys are becoming close and now he is sort of bringing bringing you in into the whole criminal lifestyle and having you start to do various jobs for him so how did that whole situation start well the first job i had with him he put me in charge of a legitimate company that was a sales uh company that serviced fire extinguishers uh sold products cleaning products paper products to you know any kind of business so it was easy for us to get local restaurants and local stores just from his influence so it started out good somewhere along the way that went the corporation dissolved and the business went to put i don't know why i understand there was a big explosion in one of the buildings so maybe it turned out to be an insurance job so now i'm i'm in no man's land because i i was early on i was on the fire department test and i had plans of doing that uh but i did take the position i was making money and i thought i had a bright future so now once that does happen greg uh linda says well you got to do something for him what are we going to do now he has no money coming in so he invites me into the numbers business which is the lowest level of businesses in in the rackets uh it's it's just like the numbers you get in a 7-eleven you go and pick three numbers and they pay you the only difference is we paid more and we always paid the right odds where the state doesn't pay the right odds and they tax you so uh they probably never make as much money as we did in that but uh so i started with that and as i was doing the numbers i now met people who were interested in gambling you know so uh they sort of tied in together so i started becoming a player in that business and i was very uh improvising i went to local otbs off track betting and i recruited people to get numbers for me and to get i take their horse action and i would pay track price where otb didn't so i i was already uh good with numbers so i started doing that uh eventually the door opened to shylocking and the way that happens is somebody doesn't pay a sports debt so they have to go borrow the money from greg to pay me and i get a piece of that interest each week then i became a sherlock on my own as time went on uh so yeah the businesses uh every day there was something going on there was nothing he wouldn't do to earn you know we had fake credit cards we had uh fake tokens in the bridges uh and tunnels uh that's a story uh you know we were selling more tokens than the mta in in in the city uh and the mayor was up in arms over that and they put police at the toll booths it didn't work and uh they were on the news one one night and finally they uh had to recall all the tokens and come out with a new system and all the people that bought the tokens from us got beat they never got their money back but uh there was not you know he he had a a a little key that would get him in the phone boots remember the old days when the phone boots every corner down drive down a major highway he would drive with the guys up and down i-95 or the garden state turnpike uh and just pulling into rest areas and opening up the foam boots and taking all the change i mean you know we when when cabbage patch dolls were in demand they weren't on store shelves we had a whole club full of cabbage patch dolls people coming in for christmas so there was nothing nothing he wouldn't do or what a club didn't do to earn but i was basically in those more i would like to say thinking rackets where you had to use your head with numbers and build up a business and a rapport with your clients okay but when you talk about gambling and shylocking and so forth uh you know you have degenerate gamblers who are constantly betting more than they have happened and then they try to duck you and you have to you know you can't just sue them or you know or go to a collection agency you have to get the money back another way so was there violent experiences during that time absolutely and it's it's it's funny too because uh you're not thrust into that you're watched you're groomed and then you get to a point where now you understand okay and you can't show weakness so he would start me out with a small job i'll give you one crazy example i had to give give a guy a flat tire once okay he told me gave me the ice pick to do it showed me the car i thought nothing of it i figured the guy parked in his spot or disrespected him somehow so i go and i give him a flat tire the next day in the newspaper man killed fixing flat he knows i saw that he knows i know it but it's unspoken he wants to see if i come in nervous i made like i didn't even know anything about it let it go but i knew that was the first little inkling of something but before that there were some beatings there were beatings and typically they're personal somebody abused an old or somebody's grandparent and you got to teach this guy a lesson so you go with his son and two other guys so you think you're doing a good thing for the neighborhood but to your point what happens is now it's money now a guy owes money it's a little different it's extortion now you're not beating a guy up because he disrespected somebody and same thing there you'll go with three or four other guys and they're gonna report were you part of the beating did you stand off to the side so you start getting acclimated and you do and later on you justify it by something you said if you owe a mortgage payment the bank comes and takes your house we can't do that so we break your arm or your leg or worse and some people prefer that they'd rather recover from their broken arm and still own their house so i'm not saying it's right or wrong but you're right that was our method we had to hurt people that didn't pay and at the beginning it was hard for me but then it became i hate to say it second nature it was almost like they caused it not me okay and you start rolling with his son greg greg jr yes who who had his own crew of politics basically yeah yeah they were very capable crew okay were you mostly around them or around i was around greg senior and greg was gonna put me directly with greg jr and i get along with greg jr to this day we talk a lot uh i'm trying to help him get some play and maybe get a little break and and come home to die he's in prison but uh anyway we were very close we still are but linda would not allow him to put me with anybody but him i had to go direct to him which helped me along the way you know i was going direct to to the to the top of the pyramid so but no but yeah yeah greg did have a crew of his own junior greg jr okay and you referred to greg jr as a stone cold killer yeah yeah and and i'm going to tell you he if i had to learn and i had to produce and i had to not show weakness and i was only like a son imagine how he felt he had to impress his father uh now when i say that i'm not trying to make it right for him or myself i know what i did was not a very nice lifestyle we know that most of us have come around and understand that but when you're in it and you have a boss like greg scarpa you cannot show weakness we're a father like greg scalpa he was even worse to his his youngest son joe joey my godson later on we'll get to that okay so at what point were you a made man did they actually bring you in officially okay i was proposed when i was about 27 years old uh and what happened was soon after there was a split in the family so i was okay i was approved at that point but nothing could happen because the family split apart so as the war was going on jimmy and i my partner jimmy were doing everything with greg we had probably 12 shootouts uh probably four or five actual hits we were at every meeting every sit down we were with the boss of our acting boss who put in charge so there were things just out of tradition that couldn't be done if jimmy and i weren't straightened out we couldn't go to these meetings and they couldn't ask us not to be there so long story short a message was sent through one of junior persico's brothers teddy persico that uh joe t would like to get jimmy and i brought in junior sent the message back his exact words would get those two guys recognized so we had a big meeting during the war where uh joe t was sworn in as our acting boss different guys were putting positions jojo russo may rest in peace was the underboss other guys who made captains greg was officially made a captain at that meeting because once a guy gets straightened out they have to be put with a captain and greg insisted that we stay with him so we went downstairs at the back of the sheraton uh in uh at the meadowlands in new jersey and we had it was a lackluster ceremony it wasn't like the movies it was sitting around the table uh we were private but it you know with aids we had a bypass brick in the finger uh we did burn the saint uh there was actually a napkin that got caught on fire too so it was really a little you know but later on guys were getting straightened out in the can in prison uh guys were getting straightened out over the phone so it it got weakened that's why i talk about it and i almost joke about it it's it's not what it probably once was but we left that meeting officially goodfellas we were introduced uh and we were directly put with greg is our captain so they didn't have to move us okay now uh michael franzis who i've interviewed a few times he was a captain uh in the colombo family as well uh did you know i did not he was before my time uh believe it or not i met his father one of the few occasions he's been out of prison uh and i knew of michael i knew of him i knew his conquest i knew the money he made uh and i you know but i'd love to meet him i would love to meet him i i understand he's really uh become a different person now and i i don't know really if he's if it's true that he's a minister and all of that but uh god bless him if he is ah now i also just interviewed uh frank de mateo uh and he was part of the columbo family with with the gallows did you interact with him at all you know i know the name and i'm not a hundred percent sure because there's a few demattios there's a mikey demario that i know uh and some pronounce it di mateo uh but mikey was mike dematio uh i i don't really know for sure to be honest with you so you you're rolling with greg and he has this really kind of crazy lifestyle with three wives and you know he's he's a captain in the mafia and so forth uh and then in 1986 he becomes hiv positive yes talk about that whole situation okay greg was like a swashbuckling type of person he lived with his own rules his own laws no ethics even in the family just did things the way he wanted and he liked to live so we would have drinks at night none of us were overboard none of us were drunks i mean we'd have two or three have dinner with a bottle of wine but he would like to go to the bar every night and have his scotch on the rocks or vodka martini and whatever he drank we drank so i didn't have to think about it but he would take three andersons without water he just popped the andersons in his mouth yes brian anderson i guess it's similar and he did this every day since he was in his 20s because he didn't want to get a headache he didn't take him if he had a headache he took him to prevent the headache what happened over all these years those aspirins were digging holes in his stomach ulcerated his stomach and it came on pretty sudden that he had they all burst at the same time so he gets these bleeding ulcers and he gets rushed to the hospital i get the call that he's in there and after two or three operations his whole inside stop bleeding again wind up is the surgeon had left one of the arteries hanging so he's close to death he needs blood so they call in all his friends and family the hospital wanted to give him their blood because it was screened already and this is early on and age this whole hiv thing was new pretty much like today with the corona virus it's still you don't know so he insists laying there half dead that one of his men give him the blood and his thinking was he knew none of his men were gay uh not that there's anything wrong with that but he preferred knowing that was at that time the possibility of where it was coming from uh and he knew that it would be in his head his best shot being fearful of the disease so about 30 30 of us show up everybody gives blood there's one match and it's one of his guys paulie paulie was a handsome guy he had more girls uh uh but he was a weightlifter and we found out later on he used steroids back in the day and they shared needles so the one out of 30 was paulie and he matched so he gave his hiv tainted blood to greg and greg became hiv-positive okay did anyone know that at the time at first no they kept it themselves after he got home from the hospital and i was with him every single day every day helping him nursing him along along with linda and one day he calls me in and him and linda are sitting at the table they sit me down and the first thing he tells me is i want you to know you have absolutely nothing to worry about he says something happened when i was in the hospital and that's where it came from because he was i didn't know what he was talking about and he told me that he was infected with hiv while he was in the hospital bad blood i remember crying feeling so bad for him and you know there was a strange closeness there too because i remember him telling me you know i told his oldest kids he said you're the only one that cried i mean that's a little peculiar to me to this day but you know he i was supposed to be like a son to him so it was it was it was very it was bad news and i and i i felt horrible for him but that's you know to get to the point that's where he he got the aids and uh ultimately it took his life but he lasted a lot longer than they thought because he made it through the whole war and uh which we're getting to and uh uh into prison even you know he lasted in prison longer than they thought by 1991 that's when the third columbo uh family war uh started right so talk about the start of this okay well that happened that's a very important point because you know just the general public or readings or people that aren't weren't involved don't realize that the war started sooner way sooner although there was no shooting there was tensions after vicarina became the acting boss some people weren't happy with that but they had to listen because it was junior's wishes junior personnel so as time goes on and this is what i was talking about where i was proposed there was about a year or two where vic arena from 87 86 87 88 was only straightening guys out making guys bringing them in in his area in queens and long island he wasn't making brooklyn guys anymore he was making captains bumping goodfellas up giving him their stripes again that were closer to him closer to queens so we saw the power thing happening we were talking about it with our captains who were junior person goes nephews and sons and uh brothers but there was nothing serious that happened about 88 give or take maybe even 89. and like i said there's a lot of rumblings there's rumblings there's bodies turning up that were uh that somebody didn't make a payment or he he was disrespectful but it was more power play and greg was telling me this you know and he and in hindsight as we know he had pr information so the things he was telling me were accurate so there's a very historic meeting he gets a call uh actually a guy comes to the club that i know chips and tells me that jimmy who's jimmy angelina our official consul year for many many years would like to see greg tonight at his club so i bring the message to greg i get in a call with greg that night and i bring him to jimmy's club now jimmy was that was it was a was the type of console yeah that uh what you're supposed to be you're supposed to be trusted by all the men your job is to save lives so if they call you to a meeting you have no problem going i mean that's just the way it is if it's two o'clock in the morning you go there knowing you're not gonna be killed okay and that's the feeling everybody had about jimmy he was trusted so we go to this meeting and i'm about to walk away with chips but greg he's so he's always smart he's always that step ahead he says larry you could stay he says jimmy you don't mind do you and nobody's gonna disagree with greg he says no no larry could stay so i'm standing there with him and they're talking and jimmy explains to greg that vic arena asked him who he would side with if he decided to take the family position officially we need all the captains unanimously so greg i'm thinking to myself this guy just got out of the hospital after two months he's half dead he probably doesn't even know what's going on he looks at jimmy and he says jimmy he says i i am sick i'm half dead he says i will i will line up wherever the chips fall i i will stay in line he couldn't take a position so jimmy says all right greg well uh we'll we'll get back to you whatever we drive off now i was close enough to greg the ass i scraped why don't you declare yourself and he looks at me and he says if i would have said yes that i would back vic jimmy is the family consul year if he goes back to junior and says that vic is uh recruited greg and greg is going greg's dead okay if he says no i will not jimmy's going to tell vic greg won't come over vic has to kill him he and he digested this like that so now i'm saying to myself wow what treachery less than two weeks later jimmy's disappeared nobody knows where jimmy is you don't kill console yes it's it's taboo uh it's almost worse than killing the boss okay so no but eventually we find out he's not coming around he's done he's gone vic arena now makes carmine cesar the new concierge he knows this will make greg happy because carmine cessa grew up under greg we grew up in the same club together for 12 15 years nah 12 years me and carmine and we did hits together we did meetings together you know and here he is he's not a concierge so vic asks him now the same question he asked jimmy go poll the captains see if you can get them to come over to my side go see greg he comes to see greg greg starts laughing at him he says you see what just happened to jimmy he says you're not going to get these guys to come over they're relatives they'll been under junior for 20 30 years he says it's impossible you're going to get clipped next so carmine panics now fessa he puts a quick team together if he was smart he would ask greg should we take vic out he probably would have says no not yet but if if he really wanted to take vic out he should have told greg vick would have been dead there would have been no war instead he goes and puts a team together that for whatever reason they weren't successful vic spotted them on the in the street i wasn't there so i don't really know uh they take off and now there's an official split that lasts about a year negotiation one negotiation after the other so we're in a cold war and there's a lot of things going on like businesses stopped amongst each other and there were beefs over number runners like one of our number guys died joe sapp good fella i think he got bumped up to captain under vic he had a huge numbers business like 300 000 a week that came to us because he was also grew up under greg so once he dies wild bill a captain under vic arena we could go on with these names it'll get a little confusing uh decides he should get those numbers because joe was under him at the time he was like the underboss billy greg says tells the runner you bring the numbers to us so we're sent for uh a meeting to go meet with wild bill we go to his club i'll never forget it it's a thursday night there's seven of us we pull up we turn the corner this is gonna sound almost pathological but anybody there's a few people that were there and they'll tell you how many there had to be a hundred guys lining the street waiting for us when we pulled up i remember saying to myself and i tell you about weakness that i'm in the front seat with a friend of mine joe fish the middle car is jimmy and greg the back car has four of our heavyweights so there's about seven of us whatever it was maybe eight and i remember saying to myself i think i should just keep going but i s in the back of my mind i said if i pull over greg will rip me and no one in front of everybody so i pull right into the driveway we get out there had to be six or eight guys surrounding us with guns i see a gun behind uh billy's lincoln it's like an ak there's guys on the roof of his club pointing rifles at us and i'm not exaggerating one iota i i promise i almost feel silly saying all this stuff greg gets out of the car they surround him i had to tell them when they told me put my hands on the car i looked at the guy says you cops am i under arrest and they laughed it sort of reduced the tension a little bit i said greg is here to talk to billy so they escort him in we're out there for about two hours and during the two hours the guys that are around us are coming over to me and jimmy because we're like the eldest guys now we had to recruit uh guys younger guys from the neighborhood to be with us because greg jr's whole crew is in prison so they're coming to me for advice and i remember telling them we had one guy there was an ex-cop and he had a glock that shot like 16 or 32 rounds i don't even know we all had revolvers because we were underfunded for this war uh so i remember telling them if any shooting starts you know just fire as i told uh the dean who had the the big gun i said you just fired the guy with the machine gun and we'll all run i said we can't win i said we got to just try to survive so we're nervous we spread out in case they started shooting after about two hours and i'm watching one heavyweight after another show up to this meeting joe scopo patty amato joe waverly nikki black i mean every heavyweight and it's just greg in there if it was the other way around and there was this war situation greg they would have never walked out of our club it would end the war right there so he comes out arm and arm with joe scope or the on the boss from that side he comes over he gets in the car with me this time and we drive back and he explains to me what went on in there and uh we're in good position they think they're with them but we're not so now we played the middle for a while but once we get back to my pool room i remember telling greg on behalf of all the guys and i said it to him just like this it's greg don't ever do that to us again because i think he was forgetting that maybe he was old he had a couple of years left to live all those guys were young young families young kids we could have walked into a slaughter and he left he says i had it under control so i said all right whatever but a couple of days later and it shows you what i call this i think in my book was the uh the cold war the war of will who is going to be show more strength the same thing happens with another number situation and this fat south from the other side says i'll come and see you tomorrow meaning one of our runners so we go there just the four of us me jimmy greg and i think another uh richie or somebody there was four of us and i'm standing out front with jimmy i'm waiting for sal to pull up we see his big white lincoln pull up as he pulls up i opened the door and i said greg you see it greg starts walking out the door the guy takes off so we won that number thing too so we had all the numbers and nikki black was upset with that i remember him saying i thought we weren't going to do business with these people but joe scopo said not greg greg doesn't count the way the way i understand the war sort of progressed and you could kind of fill in the blanks for me was that uh vicarina believed that uh persico was sort of out of touch and he had found out that he was doing a made-for-television uh biography and that was going to put the family under a microscope and cause people to get arrested right well there were there was there was several things okay uh i did hear something about that book i don't know that it ever came out uh but what happens is when a guy's looking to make a power move like this uh we see it in politics on a daily basis you start slandering the other guy so vic started putting out some bad things about junior he actually called him a rat now the guy's doing 135 years you know maybe you could use a different word out of touch maybe he's losing it maybe we got to be careful but to disrespect him that way was not right uh although i have a little gripe about that and i'll tell you guys at the end uh they were upset that junior uh represented himself at the trial and his trick was you can't take the stand you're not allowed to take the stand so as an attorney he can get the things out that he wanted to get out and one of them one of the things he did say was that yeah i'm a made guy which is taboo but i'm not the boss he was trying to get out of that commission hundred years and because of that joe scopo's father ralphie scopo got a hundred years also because now they put him is in charge of the commission and things like that so that's why joe scoper had a great with junior persico but uh yeah so he slammed at him because he wanted all the captains to take his side uh and some of the other families had their own little reasons like john gotti was big behind vicarina because he had a problem with junior uh he could never be boss of all bosses while junior was alive or the chimp was alive so he needed that extra vote at the commission and uh he was hoping vic would have got in because he grew up with joe scopo a lot of people don't know that and if vic would have won there's a good chance they would have killed him and joe scorpio would have wound up being the boss okay well you know i think you touched on this already uh persico ordered a hit on arena but arena managed to you know escape that hit and then you know arena turned around and he sent his younger brother mickey brown and uh his two other sons michael and willie boy into brooklyn on a murder mission and based on that uh 15 people disappeared well if it was their side i don't know if 15 guys on our side that got killed are you saying they did that or that was a total for the whole war uh i'm not exactly sure yeah well don't use a fairly convoluted story yeah well you got me i'm not sure about that because like i said i knew there were a few bodies turning up that were claimed to be killed for some reason but it was really paving the way for this takeover okay but 15. that's that's way more than i know and i'm not saying it's not the case but i didn't know about those yeah yeah uh i mean because they're saying that overall 30 people got killed throughout this war um i i don't think it was that many now again i know it's more than the the newspapers wrote about i mean you know greg jimmy and i uh killed four ourselves uh shot injured several others and there were a few guys that got killed on our side but i don't think it was 30. now again it depends on how many were killed during the cold war and like i said i know of two or three that turned up then it wasn't you know it was because of that but i don't think it was that many uh depending on where you got that from like you know uh it could be somewhere in the middle somewhere in the middle yeah okay well you just mentioned that you were involved in various hits can you can you talk about those situations well during the war yeah i guess those are easy to talk about the ones before the war i'm not proud of i don't like that i was involved in them uh it was that weakness thing where you had to do what you had to do and and i got over it and i did it but uh okay but the war yeah the warheads like uh the nikki black kit he nikki was a heavyweight on on the arena side uh as a matter of fact he was going to be the next console yeah won the fam if if vicarina won and i had an uncle albert that uh just died recently at about 94 years old and he was a dinosaur with the colombo family right from around avenue and he sort of got bypassed for nikki black because nikki was very big in the unions and made a fortune and uh i guess it was joe colombo that made him uh but junior persico put a stipulation in that he'll he will never rise above goodfella he'll never be a captain he'll never be an administration uh for some reason he didn't like nikki um and that's why nikki went to the other side so anyway he's going to be the consul yeah and we're winning the war at this point uh because this was a hit later on we've did a few hits earlier which we could backpedal to but nikki was uh sent a message to my uncle albert uh well he told him right in the club and somebody else in the club was there that that echoed it so we knew it was accurate that if you they called me butchy at the time if your nephew butch he doesn't come over to our side i'm gonna kill him so we got the message and i went to my uncle albert's house that night and i'll never forget him telling me this he says butchy don't you ever forget blood is sticking in water he was telling me he says you got nothing to worry about with me uh but it was said and he told me be very careful so i said all right i appreciate that thank you we went nikki became our number one target now so we were now staying out because this is like later on in the war it's raging we can't stay in brooklyn so we were staying out in jersey i might i was actually staying with my family and each day we would drive into brooklyn meet greg in his house and drive around the neighborhood looking for our enemies like hunters i mean we were really just uh hunting them now so we pull up to a spot where we had a shootout we killed a guy recently there uh we uh injured a guy there and while we're sitting there i got the binoculars we're about a block away and i'm we're looking at the club because we saw a couple of cars we recognized but as i'm looking at the club i see this land cruiser or a land rover it's a toyota pulls up right in front of the club and i said these are my exact words that's nikki black i couldn't believe it it was like we found our lost dog and greg says let's get him those are his exact words so we start driving down the block jimmy's driving greg's in the front i'm in the back greg puts the fake siren in the window we had the coffee cups we always wanted to look like we were doing surveillance so as we pull up behind him nikki's pulls out he pulls to the red light makes a left we're close jimmy's got it under control greg's getting a little crazy hurry up pull up pull up but you know jimmy's smart he knew when we when the move would be made so as we follow him around the triangle he comes all the way around and starts coming back to where he was coming from and he stops in front of the house where all the cars are parked that we recognized one of the guys comes out his name is anthony that's all i know him as as he pulls up he's handing an envelope into the car a big thick envelope probably obviously his money we pull up alongside nikki i'll never forget i can't believe to this day how during a war okay where you're threatening people and you're shooting people and we're shooting each other back and forth because we wouldn't do it we had watch the mirrors if a car pulled up on us two guns were out ready this guy was looking forward and he never turned his head i could only think he thought we were cops and he was probably telling his nephew who was sitting there joe they're rolling up on us like we they probably thought we were the law they probably saw us following them so anyway we pull up greg has a rifle and i got a shotgun he's got two buttons to push now this is laid on him too because he's starting to lose his mind greg from the aids the dementia was setting in and he was doing lots of clumsy comical things so we pull up and he points the gun out he hits the clip all the bullets come out he hit the wrong button he was supposed to hit the safety catch he hit the clip and the bullets fell out but i was already hanging out the window i had a bandana on and a baseball hat and glasses sunglasses i lean in i was probably less than six inches from the back of his head with a riot control shotgun and he never turned blasted him uh you know i remember seeing his whole face hit the the windshield and you know the nephew started screaming we drove down the block and as we got down the block we still heard joey screaming that was his nephew joe and uh i remember this you know again because it was during the war it was kill or be killed i was actually feeling very satisfied that this guy just told my mother's brother that he was gonna kill me i mean and he would have done it so he he he invited that you know he made himself the number one target so you know uh we we drove off uh i remember dropping greg off and then jimmy and i believe it or not had a time constraint we had to go babysit his daughter for about an hour so right after that we went to his house we bought we poured a scotch we sat down we watched seinfeld and baby sat his daughter for an hour when the wife got home we got in another car and we drove past the scene and i remember it was surreal there was literally maybe a thousand people the neighborhood everybody knew nikki black it was like john gotti to queens you know it was and uh i pulled up and i asked these young kids teenagers i said what's going on here and i wrote about this in the book this exact moment because i'll never forget it i uh remember opening the window and tell and saying to them what happened and they looked at me and said oh my god they got nikki black there's a big mafia wall going on i said no kidding wow i shut the window and as i shut the window i sort of saw myself real quick and i looked at myself and i remember saying yeah there's a war right i says i say you know and it was very i was like floating away saying to myself and i'm like this high of a target and i'm this much of a prominent player in this war never would have dreamed of it just five six seven years ago you know i'm still not even 30. 29 years old right you know because you just killed a major guy in the market it was the biggest hit in the war it was the biggest hit in that family probably almost you know since joe gallo uh it where it cracked their base they s some guys started coming over to our side they started second guessing themselves and we heard it and we heard it from greg sauce we heard it from uh other guys coming over from the other side uh we you know and it was obvious too it was you know they were falling apart did everyone know that you were responsible for this hit unfortunately yes and i say that because jimmy and i were getting concerned with having these we were the only ones doing anything we already killed two or three guys already during the war okay this one was like there was one more after that one uh and we would go to these meetings and jimmy and i would be standing there and i'll never forget it greg would be telling the details to not only carmine who's the consul yeah i don't know why he was telling him but okay he was the console yet but he would tell other guys other captains and goodfellas so now there's like five six guys that already know we everything we're doing and we jimmy we would just look at each other and roll our eyes and like say what are we to do i mean he's the boss what do we do you know there were times in the car after that later on a few months later where jimmy and i would look at each other in the mirror because it was getting out of control this whole war was getting out of control it was beyond out of control where i s you know he knew what i was thinking jimmy i could kill greg right here and this war was over you know not that i would do it i didn't do it obviously but we would look at each other in the mirror when he would come up with some silly thing to do like you know uh he wanted us to dress as fbi agents to go get somebody out of the house and i said how are we gonna pull that off i says you know we can get guys cheap suits and they don't recognize or whatever but you need credentials he looks at me and he says i can get them don't worry about it so all these little hints are being dropped we had the scanner if you remember that we had a scanner where we were listening on a top secret code it frequency it's like a five digit number you pick it out of the air we had it and we're listening to the fbi talk to the police force the task force the nypd they're following us we're following them as they're following somebody else we find out where they're doing surveillance on victory so we're getting addresses and places where to go so uh you know it's just crazy crazy time okay well this was the big hit but there was four hits total during the war well yeah the the the first one we got was one of the guys that was on the the botched attempt on greg early on his nickname was vinnie venus and we were driving the neighborhood and we were finished it was the end of the day we were gonna head back to the pool room which i owned at the time and call it a night and just go have a drink all be together where we're safe and as we're pulling down the block we see his car and then off to the side he's hanging a christmas wreath on his garage door so we drive around the block we set up this plan it was a simple plan that to jump to when we get to the corner we're going to put a piece of tape on our plate because we have no crash car we're in a legitimate van as we come around we forget that we don't stop and cover the plate we're supposed to stop and three of us uh are gonna get out greg myself and one other guy is the plan greg already got the window open with the rifle out the window we pull up and i'm about to open the door and i had a shot and he looks at me goes like that i said okay i'm not going anywhere now he shoots him two more times the first one knocked him dead i mean he was down on the floor he was finished but he hits him two more times we go back to the pool room that was the first one where we retaliated uh the next one after that was uh nikki black uh no but in between we shot joe waverly twice but he lived we shot uh flinsie d'ambrosio that's where uh another fella got killed that was a member of the the genovese family but he was in a colombo social club he shouldn't have been there and that's the message there was no problems it was okay because he should have been there uh uh like i said there was numerous shootouts and stuff so the first one was vinnie venus then there was the waverly shootouts uh then we got um nikki black a few months later we we really shot up joe waverly again but he still survived this time we hit him like with six shots in the behind in the stomach but what happened he was there was an ambulance having a coffee break right on the corner and came and they immediately hooked them up with ivs and and blood and whatever they had and they saved his life they took him to they took him to where the police get taken normally they would take him to coney island hospital and he probably wouldn't survive they didn't have a trauma unit they took him right to the uh where police go when they're shot so he he survived but he he uh he has to wear a bag to go to the bathroom and things like that today he's he's not in good shape he just got released uh and then the last one we did yeah it was all this somebody else got another guy in long island on our side but later on we got larry lampasey there was a little personal issue there too with greg but this one was we were so frustrated jimmy and i i mean we just were being used and overworked i mean for lack of a better term just 12 hours a day with this grim reaper mad hat or whatever you want to call him and it was worse than a job i mean it was every day so we started saying i said we got to send the message i mean we gotta i mean what do we do and i made a joke about it and i i don't mean to say to joke about it but i said we gotta massacre somebody i mean we to just we got to send them now we we don't want to just kill you you know it was nothing was changing so we get the information on this guy larry lampasey we get his exact time he leaves the house exactly how he locks his gate and he got this from his source because they were doing surveillance on him and they passed it along to greg so we get there this night at about 3 30 we're sitting there less than 10 minutes because that's what they said somewhere between 3 30 and 3 40 he comes out because he goes to his bus yard he has school buses so he's got to be there like four in the morning and in no time we see the lights on the caddy back out so we pull up greg's already got the rifle out the window he hits him but the guy's crawling away so the three of us jump out we walk over to him and greg and i were firing the shot i had the shotgun again he had the rifle and i remember at the end of it jimmy went and put one like right behind his ear so this was a bloody mess this last one and uh like i said we were a lot of it was frustration it was now we were just in the twilight zone it was a nightmare we were living through and if nothing else was going to end it maybe something like that would but soon after it got ended by the feds now there are four hits that happened during the war before the war can you say how many hits you were involved in well i i didn't count them but like i said from a lower level up to being involved uh probably again from a very small level to probably 20 that i knew there's one that happened right in the club that me carmine bobby zam and greg jr we're standing in the club we know greg's upset with this guy coming in we don't know how upset guy comes in and apparently he had made a comment to somebody that greg is a red we didn't know anything about this we're standing in the back room with him and we were told to be there because we knew he was upset with him so after he collects the money from this guy counts it barks him off goes through his whole business routine he says so bonnie what is this i hear i'm a wreck you saw the blood come out of his face he says greg no i was drinking it i didn't mean anything like that greg asks him he says do you have any paperwork do you can you prove that statement he says no of course not never as soon as he said that the gun came out he shot him right there now do i count that do i not count it i don't know you know i was there you know there was a bunch of those type of things uh but the the funny thing about that is that's a rule if a guy calls you a rat you could kill him on the spot and most guys won't do it i probably won't i'd probably tell the guy or you know maybe give him a beating or but greg would go with the rule you're not supposed to call somebody that you know unless you can prove it okay how did it feel to be involved in your first murder like when the dust settled and you you know well really it's it's it's it's there's sleepless nights i said i it's it's not easy and for most guys in in the life for most guys they don't like doing it uh there's a few that get pleasure in it and they get crazy nicknames like the grim reaper louis haha he laughs every time he kills somebody i mean that's weird but that's how he got his nickname louis haha uh no i but you know there was some like one of the first ones i was on was uh where greg's daughter was almost raped if she didn't handle the situation the right way it probably would have turned out bad but she handled it right got herself home called us we went that day to the car service and we beat the guy close to death and i remember driving back with greg and he was still upset we should have killed this [ __ ] this and that i says greg you know i think we taught him a serious lesson i i could talk to greg at this point he trusted me i was sort of his mini console yeah and he always told me that because i was maybe a little different than the average man and i said you know if he had done what he set out to do i says yeah without a doubt i said but i think in some ways it's better he knows what happened to him for that thought of raping a 14 year old girl and he agreed with me but then that night i think maybe between him and linda and the upset in the household the next day he came back and the plan was set up to kill him so this was one of my earlier ones and it wasn't that hard because again if it was my own sister i would have done the same thing i would have gave him the beating you know if if if maybe i would want to kill the guy you know i wouldn't needed greg i would have just protected my sister so it wasn't such a bad i didn't i didn't lose sleep for nights and nights and nights over that i found later on that little linda did because she feels like she caused it and you know there's a lot of psychological things in his life and problems and stuff you know families deal with so uh then there was another one where it was a it was a friend that was told to get out of town because he killed a good fella in the gambino family and you can't you can't you can't make that right so scappy had to sit down for him and i remember you know we were all on pins and needles hoping scappy could save him and scappy comes back that afternoon comes walking in the club and this still gives me a little feeling in my stomach he says gentlemen we have good news and we have bad news the bad news is tony's got to go we pretty much knew that the good news is we get to do it that's pretty i'm saying where's the good news in that but i understood later on if the gambinos would have got him they would have tortured him they would have left him in the street for everybody to see we were able to to do it quietly uh you know hit that grave that was dug at wolf's pond you know by gregory's house and you know that one hurts because he was he was one of us you know later on joe brewster had to get killed i was very indirect very indirect on that one but uh nobody wanted to see him get hurt he was loved by all of us and uh you know uh but but greg also knew the ones you could handle and the ones you can't like when he had to kill the the girl that was uh possibly going to expose alley boys hi to whereabouts when he was on the land which is not uh 100 sure anyway they thought she may i remember greg there was a bunch of us won't even take us he said uh i know who has his stomach for this one and a few of them went and they killed the girl and i remember scappy coming in the next day after that one and saying we're all going to hell for this one you know so it is you know it's it's there's a lot of like i said psychology and there's a human element to it all that people don't realize you know you because of the movies everybody's not that cold-blooded and i only became a hitman in the eyes of the public during the war and i've said it some places i says you can't describe me that way before the war i didn't kill for money i didn't kill for revenge i wouldn't kill because somebody you know it had to be directly in the world we were in uh i wasn't in the killing business but during the war if you want to call me a hitman go right ahead because they were trying to hit me okay well greg scarpa was loyal to persico yes and in 1991 uh arena actually sent some men to go kill greg talk about that whole situation well it's funny that's uh we had the pool room and we had a ritual where we would all meet at greg's house about 12 o'clock have a cup of coffee get in a car or two and drive to the pool room we would never go in one car for some reason or another i was still going to the gym working out whatever and i was going to walk because it was a nice fall day i was going to walk from the gym to the pool room and i remember everybody saying be careful then i said i got my gun whatever uh so i'm walking to the pool room and i get there and i see jimmy and another friend tom in front of the pool and you know it's thank god i didn't sneak up on them and kid around like hey bang you know they had their guns in their hand i didn't know but i i didn't kid around golf a bit and i said they just tried to kill greg they told me so i said what what are you talking about where so they explained to me what happened so i shot over to the house right away when i get there there's feds cops all around but we go into the house and greg is sitting down with two or three agents and he's telling them that no there must have been some kind of drug war between two groups and we got caught in the crossfire they know he's lying we know everybody knows but what happened was they had they knew the time we left every day but that day there was my call wasn't there and i don't really know the reason but i remember greg saying to others he didn't tell anybody i wasn't there this is how he thinks he says the one day you're not there they try to kill us he says i know i'm telling you larry so you were there you make sure everybody in the family knows you were there so that was like a scary thought to think even for a second that you know especially at that point you know uh so he comes out and he's got his year-old grandson in his arms and he's walking down the steps with his daughter the hit team should have saw this and called it off we would have and we did several times we had situations where there were innocent people and even though greg says no no no we're gonna get this done we drove off and we had our little argument whatever you know uh but that's arguable they say all is fair and love them more it's arguable we would have called it off they didn't so as they get down into the cause linda takes the baby back and goes in her car greg gets into lincoln and there's about four or five guys in the lincoln there's one the big ones in 91 you know you can fit five big guys so they drive down to the corner as they get to the corner a truck comes and cuts them off and i remember danny boy telling us i knew it i said it's going down that was his words it's going down we knew it was coming but the guy so when the truck stops there they all jump out of the car and they see four or five shooters with masks on a shotgun shooting at them so they start shooting back nobody's that brave so everybody stopped they didn't want to get closer and get shot either but they're shooting over linda's car with the baby in there she dives down she told me this several times and covers her baby and she hears the pings hitting the car and the ping's hitting the other car and there's a shootout going on over her car so now our guys jumped back in the car the truck driver left enough room at first we thought it was a mistake later on we found out there's a guy named peanuts that liked greg a lot and he wanted to give him that out to get out of there don't know how true that is we heard that later on so greg gets is able to get through the mercedes is a smaller car is able to get through these guys were in a big van they couldn't fit because they had like six or eight people in this van so they get stuck there they have to leave the van run to their getaway cars and one of those cars was vinnie venus so after they drove off he drives past the pool room and where in front of the pool room and he drives by he thinks the hit went down because he heard all the gunshots he doesn't even know he was like a crash car whatever along with the getaway cars he gives us the thing he flashes us the finger as he's driving by thinking greg is dead we didn't know really what he meant by that uh but i guess it was just like a little farewell so he sort of became a little bit of a target after that and that's the first guy we got okay well the war kept going until 92 and then arena was convicted of a racketeering uh the uh sarah murder in 89 and other charges he got three life sentences plus 85 years right yeah well uh i mean by that time um 58 soldiers and associates were sent to prison uh 70 members were convicted uh because of the war right and i mean everyone's roster got down to to much slower it became yeah it became it became at that point every man for himself uh you know there was no more loyalty there was no more looking out for each other uh you know it came a point where when it came out that greg was an informant for 30 years while i was in i was in in there for about a year fighting my case and uh i'm approached by vicarina and he asked me he heard something about greg that he's a red and i went after vic i went after him i wasn't going to stand for that and sky gets between us a friend from the neighborhood mike he's a good fellow with another family actually moved up a little bit and uh he stood between us he says no just listen it's it's a rumor we don't know for sure so i moved i was sleeping in the same area in the in the dormitory as vic i moved my bed away i didn't want a part of them anymore somehow or another they moved me they moved me to another floor back to where i'm with ali boy junior persico's son and the heir of parent who's supposed to take over this whole thing but just before that right before that two days goes by it comes out now in the newspaper that greg is bad they call me in the bathroom again the same guys vic mikey and another guy named lesterino frankie lastorino and now they show me the newspaper that he admitted that he was iraq for 30 years or an informant whatever word they want to use and now i got to put my tail between my legs now i can't go after him i can't so i'm still on the other side of the unit but i get moved now that's it's nothing that unusual about being moved that bounce you around you go to ordersville back then you know for whatever reason i wanted it back on the floor with ali boy and some of the my closer guys and i remember talking to ali about it you know talking about greg and what is this going to do to us he tells me that him and his father knew about greg for 20 years when he told me that my heart came out of my chest again it came out the day i heard greg was bad and now to know that the boss and his son knew about it and allowed this man to exist these are all pretty bad things you know i've seen guys get killed for a lot less like i said you know i spewed him that i talked about uh and here he's an informant all those years and you let him exist he's ruining lives you know so they had approached me several times to talk to them and i you know had no no intention whatsoever until uh they after he flipped and i heard about uh you know that these guys knew about him they the feds needed information on the corruption because it was about to be exposed so i at that point i was able to make a deal i say but i i wouldn't do it without bringing my partner jimmy in under my so-called umbrella and i walked out on them three times because they weren't gonna let jimmy come in but finally uh they did and they they were really interested i i couldn't give him anything greg already gave him everything carmine cessa the one i mentioned before arkansas yeah was the first one to flip uh then probably five or six captains and 20 they they said the colombo family clogged up the system with guys trying to cooperate so i was lucky in a way because like i said i had you know uh information on the uh not exactly who it was but what led them to greg sauce and it was very important they sent these high-level justice department people to come see me and uh you know and i did my 10 years and i'm home you find out that that the grim reaper had been an fbi informant for like 30 years and from what i understand he had like a partner in the fbi uh he got i think 158 thousand dollars over the course of uh probably more and they would actually tip him off to like where his enemies were so he could go and kill whoever as well as letting him know when he was about to get hit uh and so forth now by this time you were uh basically facing life uh already oh yeah in prison yeah absolutely so i was never what were you were you already convicted at this point no i was fighting the case i was fighting the case uh you know had some heavyweight attorneys i had investigators i had a supportive family uh thank god but uh you know when all that came out i was also now a good chance i was gonna be mocked by my own family because they were already wondering they were asking me didn't you know about this and i'm denying it i had no clue i you guys didn't know i mean i didn't know and there were gonna be sacrificial lambs to put the family back together and it would have been me and jimmy so you know i'm not making excuses but i i'm giving you the reasons i i made a business decision you know i could i was fighting to get 17 18 20 years you know they were 25. we were 15. and i would have settled and jimmy said all along whatever you do i do whatever you do i do and at the end i got a message out i told him go check for that treasure map we had a little secret place to get messages i said go see and there's a treasure map there and uh hey line i let him know that what i was planning cause of corruption and he he you know he was flying me whatever you do i do so okay and you became a key player uh in scarpa's corruption case yes yes okay now there's three rules in the the costa nostra uh number one was never have an affair with the boss's wife right which which you had already done right uh never get involved in drugs right i didn't do that which but you didn't do that the crew did number three the crude the crew did but number three is never to rat well don't forget though number three is you never go against the family your boss is your boss till the day he dies they killed paul castellano while i was around they tried to kill vicarina he tried to take over the family so he must have been told the rules too vic right when he got straightened out but yet it was okay for him to try to take over the family so that's another rule and the rule of of of uh talking to the law yeah yeah that's that's one but they're all broken okay how did you feel to to cooperate with the feds well i i sort of laid it out a little bit for you uh i there's a lot of way there's a lot of ratty things to do okay i never grew up snitching on my fellow friends i didn't expose anything i fought for the family i went into into the courtroom and paid all the monies and borrowed money and was paying lawyers i was a trooper till the very end when it came out about greg i knew i had to make some kind of decision when i heard that alleyboy and his father knew that's pretty ratty i mean you could throw that word around but there's a lot of ways of ratting and guys were admitting that they were part of this family which they weren't supposed to admit because now the first thing they had to do was prove there was a family at war to make it racketeering so if nobody admits there's a family guy started admitting it so there's a lot of things to do it becomes more of a business decision and it's you know uh and a survival decision you know like i said i wasn't born to tell on people i mean you know uh but i'm lucky that they came to me and they needed the information they wanted to know about the scanner they wanted to know about the the phone numbers we had who we were calling before hits greg was calling his his uh his handler to find out where fbi was so we could go do a hit so there was this was going on you know uh but and also you know while we're away this is one thing that a lot of people don't know or should know we're fighting this war we get pinched jimmy and i were planning on going on the land i get arrested down in florida he goes he's on he's hiding out at that point we were earning about 7 000 a week in different things 3 500 each less expenses to people who are running it for us while he's on the lam and i'm facing life in prison our own friends are trying to take over our businesses and cut us out little by little so a few months goes by that seven thousand thirty five hundred each became four thousand two thousand each says all right i understand things you know three months goes by 500 each a couple of months left they give jimmy and they don't give it to him they give it to somebody to bring him a go-between because nobody has to know where he is a hundred and eighty dollars okay i remember the conversation i had with jim he drew somebody over this i said if you go back you're gonna have to hurt somebody or bring your gun to collect and take what's ours or you're going to get arrested i says i think that's what they're hoping for i remember saying to myself these rat bastards are trying to get my partner jimmy to come into town to get arrested so they could just take our business that's the thinking and that's why there's a lot that you know when i was the worst rat ever when i joined this life what i did to my family and the parish i grew up in the kids i coached the kids i taught karate to i'm a bigger rat to them well you were facing how many murders at the time well four uh i was you know considered a trigger on 120 conspiracies because everybody on the other side that was a target is a conspiracy to commit murder you know they only had to prove three of those so you know it's okay so you were essentially a mass murderer who ended up getting 10 years i would definitely not consider myself a mass murderer uh because again i said in the life if i was killing innocent people like the son of sam or i was killing uh you know i could have been a sniper in the army and killed 50 or 100 people it's the cause is different i understand but you're not gonna call that sniper a mass murderer either i killed people that were in the life that broke the rules that that are as guilty as i am for doing it don't break the rules that we all knew that and then during the war you're not going to call me that because the mass murders were trying to kill me too it was killer be killed uh serial killer would you take that title either of course no no i was i was a mob guy that did what he had to do that was groomed taught how to act taught how to be a good fellow and i lived it okay but here you are a multi-murderer is that is that a parent no absolutely absolutely okay you're a multi-murderer who most people end up getting double triple life you walk away with 10 years that's the deal and then with that deal basically you could talk about whatever you did because that's part of the deal right yeah yep i had okay tell on myself and the corruption but i know we i go ahead i think well this was when you made that deal what year was this i was a year in i guess 92 early 92 maybe february of 92 okay so this is 92. you become a cooperating witness against the scarpa case and then the next year scarpa ended up pleading guilty to three murders right conspiracy for a bunch of other murders right and he got the same 10 years he got 10 years well he originally was sentenced to life but because by this time he was blind in one eye oh okay i didn't know that yeah i didn't know that you know that i knew he had the 10 years but i knew he was going to live through it anyway so it didn't really matter well yeah he he got he originally i mean from what from what i researched he got he got life in prison but his health was so bad between the blindness and the aids at this point he had full-blown aids yes and uh in may he was actually the sentence was reduced to 10 years but a year later in june 1994 he ended up dying yeah so he ended up serving like a year or so before he died something like that yeah yeah right uh when you found out that he died how did you feel um you know uh i wasn't heartbroken obviously i mean i was my whole my whole uh feeling for him soured uh it went from a betrayal to uh you know just a fraud as you know is as strong and tough and ruthless as he was you know it turns out you were fraud you did it all with that protection you know uh so but there are parts of my inner recesses that i think back to you know the camaraderie and some things that you know i i'd rather think about that but it's hard but if you don't mind i want to touch on something we i thought you were heading with the 10 years you're a hundred percent right about that yeah i got a second lease on life but i didn't invent the system okay i want to know what comes first the chicken or the egg carmine cesar had many more murders than me okay because he came in and ratted on the whole family he got four years okay uh and he was the consul yeah there were it's a long list of guys okay where do you start and where do you stop you know you want to say 50 guys ahead of me that were above me set the example and greg you gave him caught lunch why don't we ask the corrupt agent whoever he is that enabled greg to live that life so i'm not supposed to i'm supposed to feel bad after you know hundreds and thousands of of guys were given this deal where does it start if you want to go way back go way back and the first guy to give the deal to don't give them that deal if you don't give them that deal nobody does it you don't pay that way you know i'm supposed to take a life sentence at this point in the game after everything coming out the things that i exposed about the corruption and i mean you know it's their system i don't agree with it i'll tell you that much i wish i could go back in time to the old law where you could cop out to 20 and do 11. you know but it's it is what it is and we had a president that was trying to change things too for the better but who knows what's going to happen with that if you want to get into politics you take this 10-year deal right well no it was zero to life it was zero to life i could have gotten it you know if i come in and i mess up by lying or being a wise guy or or trying to play them like gas pipe they can go as high as they want but i know once i made the decision i said i will do what i have to do okay and you end up getting 10. yes so you still have to basically serve the rest of that 10-year sentence and you're in prison and i assume at some point word starts getting around that uh larry mazza has cooperated against the mafia and not only do you have other mafia members in prison but you have associates you have guys that could pay off other gangs uh a very violent environment uh were guys trying to get at you at that point and how how was that at the very beginning the very beginning i was on the uh in a protective custody i didn't go into the witness protection i didn't change my name any of that and they bounce you around where you can slip in they know where you could slip in places okay ultimately when i was finished uh well i didn't get sentenced till like i was in for five years already maybe six so i only had like you know four left or whatever it was i was in yazoo mississippi okay and i'm not going to mention this man's name because he's a good man and he may still be involved in one of the families uh but he was in i could tell you he was in the genovese family a high-ranking well-respected guy that comes into yazoo mississippi and naturally you gravitate the italian guys together whatever and it's not a heart it's not a high level place anymore so you know there's a lot of guys in that made deals or or uh please that were very favorable where they might have hurt somebody and they're not looked upon you know they have these places so i'm in this place i don't even know why this guy came in so we start walking the track together and he starts talking to me like we're in the street i had to stop him and i'm going to call him buddy and i'm going to say buddy you realize i didn't go out like a hero he stopped he looked at me he started spitting at the floor kicking dirt like billy martin used to do when you have these arguments with the yankee games he said you and jimmy were 110 percent men he says greg scarpa tomb he starts spitting and spitting like he's violent inside he says he says i don't even want to hear any of that anymore i said well let's let's just not talk about business i'd feel better so he said i understand we start talk walking again walking walking an article gets sent into him from jerry capisi and at the beginning jerry capisi and i were fine he called me he wanted to write a book with me and stuff and you know uh but something happened where he turned a little bit and he wrote i mean one of the very few bad articles about me i mean most of the articles they don't call me bad names they just tell the story and let it go so anyway they send this article in he brings me into the bathroom just me and him he shows it to me he says you know what they're expecting to me right so i says yeah i do buddy he rips it up throws it in the toilet bowl starts spitting at it kicking the toilet pole flushing it the life was ruined it wasn't ruined by me i'm not i'm not you know it was too late in the game where the thing had just fallen apart okay and if i had advice for other guys trying to keep it together get out while you can leave i got a friend a young guy named larry he's in and out of jail for the last 20 years you know one of the uh lawyers said he's gonna do life on a consignment he's gonna wind up doing life on a consignment plan come out do ten come out eight come out 12. you know it's done it's done okay well eventually you get out yes and were you offered witness protection at all or no no well i was early on but i told him i told him early on i don't want it because i have less faith i have more fear of the fbi coming after me because of this whole corruption thing and and making my life miserable or hurting me then i'm worried about because like i said before they if they if the family really wants me they gotta want 50 guys before me really you know and you want to spread out and find 50 guys whatever and and i'll you know if and i hate to say this but i'm not the easiest target if i'm even somewhat expecting it you know i'm going to keep you know but i don't want to go down that road i i like to think they they know better now don't get yourself a life sentence or a death penalty just go on with your lies and try to survive like i did okay so did you ever hear about a hit on you or anything else like that i haven't no no okay well uh you go and write a book yes and at one point you run into an actor uh armand asante yes yep and uh who's been in a bunch of movies uh he played a mafia boss an american gangster yes uh he was in the hoffa movie with jack nicholson and he actually played uh john gotti in the 1996 tv series great great version yeah okay and he actually uh started working with you uh with a few things yeah well let me tell you a little bit about armand i met him at a restaurant very chance meeting and i heard the buzz behind me so i looked and i recognized him right away but i'm not one to go running over or anything like that i'm not going to do that i could see babe ruth walk in and i wouldn't do that i just you know i'm not going to do it so after it all settles down i'm walking to the bathroom i got to go to the men's room and i see him looking at me and i just give him a little wave and i keep going i'm not again he's going to sit down and eat finally he's got a little nobody's bothering him coming back from the bathroom he's still looking at me so i lean over and i says you did a great john gotti i'll never forget it and he looks at me says you think so i said yeah and i should know he says well what do you mean what do you mean sit sit i sit down i tell him who i am he starts pulling his hair out he says you're i don't believe this he couldn't get over because he was working on something a story about the fbi and how they intertwine with the mob and stuff and when he heard that that was me greg scarpa and i was the one with the wife he couldn't believe it so we we sat there for two hours and talked about different things i gave him the book he loved it he wrote a great uh uh testimonial in the back page i don't know if you saw it if you look in the back page of the book you'll see a testimonial and he was very honest about how it moves forward it's going to take a long time but he was very helpful i could call him now he'd call me right back he's a wonderful guy uh and he gave me some tips on how to you know go about making it uh a success well eventually you end up starting to work with robert de niro and scorsese on the irishman movie okay what happened with the irishman was uh there's some of the cops i told you about i grew up with some uh cops that were on the task force they knew me they were looking for me during the war and other guys and it fast forward to 20 years they were retired and some of them were working for robert de niro's private security so when he was getting ready to do the movie the irishman he asked if they knew anybody from the life that can help him with some technical things about getting rid of weapons and how do you hit a guy that's in trouble and he knows he's coming into a bad meeting you know things like that so i gave him a lot of he used about a dozen different things they even changed some of the script uh and he read the book he told me it was terrific three different times he can't believe i did it myself which i did and uh obviously i had an editor help me at the end and then i got a small role in the irishman and all of this has been helping me because he sent me to scorsese's house afterwards uh and then he sent me to nick pileggi's house and nick pelagi and i also hit it off he loved the book he told me his exact words where you wrote a mop classic kiddo he calls me kiddo i mean he's much older obviously and i'm honored to say that he is in the process of writing a screenplay for me based on my book uh to be hopefully a tv series i have a producer named joe paletto that uh he sees it and he's he's doing everything you need to do put his money where his mouth is uh promoting it and uh you know once nick writes the script he's gonna approach uh the heavyweights netflix hbo showtime paramount so right and you're a technical advisor and a consultant on the irishman uh and i guess you and de niro actually worked together and uh you would kind of explain to him this is why i use one guns instead of two right right right that's how you do the whole getaway car thing and you know and so forth um you know the movie comes out and is is very much applauded as a as a masterpiece uh i believe it won a bunch of awards and so forth yeah it didn't win any woods oh it did it did not win okay but you're right it was it was nominated yes yes it was it was nominated yeah it was it was a shocker that it didn't win anything and if anybody should have won an award i thought joe pesci because he was not his normal crazy guy he was out of character playing uh subdued boss that was been around for a hundred years so uh you know daenerys was fine but i think he was just his typical robert de niro he could roll out of bed and play that part you know well i interviewed michael franzise uh frank de mateo as well as uh alan gunner lindbloom you know who was assassinated my buddy the detroit the detroit mafia and all of them have their own kind of connections to the jimmy hoffa story in their own way but all three of them have said that that movie is entertaining but just fiction like it's just not true it was good it wasn't epic it wasn't the godfather it wasn't good fellows or i don't think it was in that level uh and i can tell you that the story was a complete lie there's no truth to the story yeah certain little things that happened were you know but sheer hand did not kill um jimmy alpha pupil [ __ ] yeah it was entertainment yeah but you know into hollywood hollywood's good yeah but it's all [ __ ] the irishman is a joke the irishman was a freaking fallacy you know what i'm saying i mean that's what eric sean he said what do you think irishman i said it was a freaking joke the whole thing was a made-up story by some pathological liar named frank sharon who nothing he's ever said was confirmed ever not a single murder nothing yeah as far as a jimmy hoffa thing i would have to take their version because they're from there they have more input than i do and i tend to believe that that it's not accurate uh and the reason is that joey gallo hit was totally totally made up the guy he had i don't know why frank sheeran's name even came up and it everybody knows who did it you know uh and i remember nick telling me even marty knows who did it but yet they went with the book and and robert told me de niro that they wanted to follow the story the way it was written in the book they see you know it's not his position to say what's true or not he followed his so i understand that it's hollywood but no like there's no way you go in and i told him this you're not running into a place where joe gallo is in the middle of a war and he's got bodyguards with two guns like clint eastwood i remember saying that to him i said no you may have a backup gun and you probably will but you got to worry about firing one gun and hitting your targets you know uh but he went with that also like you said the crash car there's no way you send the crash car around the block anywhere no less manhattan where there could be a garbage truck you get stuck at a light the cops tell you to wait i mean and now you come out of there and it's funny because there's a picture in the post the new york post a couple of days after i told them this they were filming that scene he runs in they go through the whole thing he comes out and the car's not there just what i said happened and they had everything closed and he still couldn't get around and the pictures him he's standing out with his two guns in his hand his hands you know and he says uh where's my getaway car so i was right but yet they did it that way and there's no way you're gonna send you're gonna let the the guy leave that's your you know your getaway were you actually in the irishman movie at all i was i it turned out it was a we filmed the scene 40 times and i you know myself and uh another actor named craig defrancia great kid was in the irishman uh he was in power tv show power and he was in uh the green book so he's got a little resume uh but we had a small part we had a walk up steps down the corridor walk in and shoot uh albert anastasia the original mad hatter and 40 times we did this and wound up they really edited it down because i don't think they were comfortable with the the barber uh the the the guy in the barber seat albert anastasia when he got hit he has to jump out of the seat run towards the mirror break the mirror because he thought that was us he was just disillusioned with all the shots in him and it just wasn't looking good i guess so they sort of took that whole ending out and they just showed us walking up you see us going in and and then you see the flowers like a funeral arrangement and then you see actual footage of uh the newspaper clippings so but it was good i was originally supposed to play the part of joey glimko this would have been monumental because i would have been in a scene with him al pacino and then bolted them together introducing them and some of the things i said there's two things that happen in the movie if you watch on the scene and you know who got it bo dietl got the part beau deitel he was in the wolf of wall street you probably know who he is uh he comes and he's a a good fellow from chicago that makes the introduction and i'm supposed to explain to them and i told him that jimmy doesn't drink i said he's an irishman but he don't drink and nobody around him has got a drink so i go through this whole thing on camera and i and i'm while i'm doing this i'm carving out a watermelon and at the end of it i'm carving out the watermelon and they say we want you to add one line he don't drink and he doesn't like he don't like watermelon either okay that's the script they say now add this but i do so i know where they were going so i go through the line and i say he and he doesn't like water he don't like watermelon but i do i grabbed the bottle and i said i like drinking i added that myself and i poured it into the watermelon because that was the whole object the spike in the watermelon they left that whole thing in with bald then i had to explain the part where when frank this big massive guy walks into a room a crowded room he says he'll walk right down the middle of the room and it parts out of the way everybody he doesn't even touch a person i threw in he parts the parts everybody out of the way like moses from the red sea they added that into it so there's a lot of parts uh the part where they get rid of the guns i had told daenerys i said if they ever went over the belt parkway causeway i says with divers there'd probably be enough guns to start another war so he says in the movie you got to watch for this now because it's mine he says uh he says there's enough guns down there to arm a small nation so he changed a little bit but you know another one i told him where uh something greg would do like if he's putting a guy to rest to i mean at ease not to just you know he would he's have a gun so once you go for the gun the guy's going to run he already knows he's in trouble so greg would sneeze or cough and reach for his handkerchief now the guy's relief oh my god it's only a hanky he's got a cold when the hanky goes back in he comes out with the gun so he did something similar in the movie when he had to kill that guy outside the front of the store or something so it was it was uh it was pretty good and then i got a part playing a corrupt ex-cop in a tv show called the perfect murder and there i had a lot of lines uh i was behind the bar and i was being sarcastic with cops i was an ex-cop and they come in to question me about a a murder that they i was a a suspect in and then you never seen all the movies somebody pops out of the back seat with a gun that kills me i laugh all the time i says how do these people always get in the back seat you know but i had that scene i got to pop out and put the gun to the guy's head and tell him start driving keep your hands on the wheel and all that stuff but it was good it was a good little it was a good scene for me i got a lot of good reviews well larry uh a hell of a life yeah a hell of a life uh you know it seems like you've gone through so much and you're extremely extremely lucky i mean number one to be alive absolutely uh and number two not to be doing life in prison yes i'm blessed uh i'm blessed and i don't say that it worked out a little bit different it would have you know one situation slightly different outcome some person had a slightly different thought during that time yep uh yeah i think things would have been over a long time that's why i say you know somebody was watching over me for sure and uh you know i'm not like like like i said my franchisee he found god and all that when i say i'm blessed i mean it from my heart uh and i thank god yeah well i appreciate the time and i appreciate thank you very much and uh you know looking forward to the whatever movies or other projects that are made about your life can i can i mention the website for my book is that okay please do thank you it's www.larrymazzadashthelife.com book comes signed by me absolutely thank you absolutely all the best to you thank you so much let's talk

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Published: Mon Jan 18 2021