Mob Stories from The Underground with Michael Franzese

we're going to get started here uh those of you that don't know me i'm jonathan allman i'm the president and uh ceo of the mob museum uh this is a really really special occasion for us uh most of you i believe know that we did not open the underground uh uh until just last friday last friday was the public opening so this is our one week anniversary one week anniversary and and the very first public program that we've ever held in this space so uh it's really special to us that you are all here to share that with us we have a really extraordinary panel here uh and for those of you that have a drink i hope everybody's getting a drink those of you that have a drink well love to toast you all in our first program in the underground so cheers and with that jeff schumacher thank you mike yes come on schumacher good evening everyone my name is jeff schumacher i'm the senior director of content for the mob museum and i am so pleased to have our first event in this space i i wanted with a show of hands let me ask how many people have been to a museum program and a speakeasy anybody ever no okay well then you're at a historic event because this is the first in what we hope to be uh many events that we hold in this space uh it feels a you know when you when you're up here on stage it feels like you're like like a comedy club or something like that it's very intimate uh everybody's looking at you like you know you need to prove yourself or i'm going to turn around and go get a drink so what i want to do tonight is sort of moderate a panel of people who are going to tell mob stories okay these are uh everybody comes from a different perspective but they're great storytellers and they have great stories to tell and it's going to be very what i envision this being is very casual and and then we'll take some questions afterward but you know the idea here is everybody can you know have a drink have a good time if you need to get up that's fine if you want to come back that's fine if you need to get up you can you can get up so that's the way it's going to be and after a while we'll take some questions and and we just have such an interesting uh panel that i just imagine you have all kinds of you're curious about all kinds of things i'm going to start somebody immediate left gus rousseau is a veteran investigative reporter documented documentary producer screenwriter and author of several books his books include the outfit the role of chicago's underworld in the shaping of modern america and supermob how sidney korshak and his criminal associates became america's hidden power brokers he also collaborated with former new york gangster henry hill if you've heard of henry hill on gangsters and goodfellas a sequel to hill's biography wiseguy which was the basis for the 1990 movie goodfellas gus's latest work is best of enemies the last great spy story of the cold war which will be released in october so everybody please welcome gus russo thank you thank you to gus was left in 1986 michael francis son of a mafia underboss with the colombo crime family was named quote one of the biggest money earners in the mob by vanity fair magazine at age 35 fortune magazine listed him as number 18 on its list of the 50 most wealthy and powerful mob bosses just five behind john gotti tiring of the life and meeting the love of his life francis walked away from the mafia taking the wrap on racketeering charges with a 10-year prison sentence after leaving prison he became a motivational speaker and author of several books about what he learned while in the mob he is probably best known for blood covenant the story of the mafia prince who publicly quit the mob and lived please welcome michael francis [Applause] now our last panelist is suzanne daylets and now originally uh scott ditchy was going to be filling this space scott unfortunately had to return home and so we were so fortunate that suzanne happened to be coming to the event anyway she's absolutely uh if we if scott weren't going to be here suzanne was going to be here so we're so happy to have suzanne daughter of the late mo dalets and has an incredible story to tell uh tonight about her life and her thoughts about uh you know her father and the role that he played in las vegas and and you know sort of really about how that has affected her life in in many different ways so please welcome suzanne baylor [Applause] so i thought we'd start with michael if that's all right and basically before we started before we put together this program i asked each of the the panelists hey what are some stories that you could tell that would be funny interesting uh maybe sad or or even horrific perhaps about experiences that you've had well michael certainly was was in the life and and has some uh incredible stories to tell i thought we would start maybe uh with you talking about the the gas tax fraud scam that really you're really well known for for people who have read a lot about you yeah well way back in the day you know there was always this uh kind of fallacy where people thought that guys in the mob we would sit down in our social clubs and we would plan on how we were going to defraud a business and uh it never was that way at least not with me most of the time it was somebody that was involved in business that wanted to do for this company and figured i was somebody that could help them out protect them get money or whatever so i happen to be uh long island was really my base in new york i grew up in brooklyn and manhattan and uh guy comes to me who's got a a couple of gas stations he was a big guy he was like he was 500 pounds six foot six big guy real well and he comes to me and he says mike you know he says i got a little way that i believe i can defraud the government out of tax on every gallon of gasoline now you gotta understand something i like the government back then you know i grew up my dad was a very high profile figure he was the underboss of the columbo family major target of law enforcement kind of like the john gotti of his day so i grew up really not liking law enforcement and when i heard that um you know we could defraud the government it was appealing to me so he had a couple of guys from another crew that were um were shaking him down trying to extort him for some money and uh i got rid of the guys not get rid of them i mean got rid of the guys i made them leave i would say and uh i put some guy by the name of vinnie who was my butcher big guy he had a scar across the top of his head and i said let's figure this thing out i said stay with larry his name was larry i said let's see what kind of thing we got so every saturday vinnie used to bring me me you know he's my butcher so one saturday he comes to the house and he's got a box on his uh his shoulder and he rings on the bell and he comes in and i said man what are you doing with all that meat we're going to have a party or something he says no chief it ain't meat come in the kitchen go in the kitchen he puts it down on the table 380 thousand dollars he said this is the first week's take in the gas business it all smelled like gasoline but whatever i don't care what it smelled like back then but uh make a long story short um for a seven year period i connected with a lot of the russian mob guys in brighton beach and uh i ran that operation we built it from 380 to about 10 million dollars a week and you know that's ultimately what i took a plea on and took a plea to racketeering 10-year prison sense i had a 15 million dollar restitution and went off to do my time but i really don't think that there will ever be anything like that again it was uh it was a complicated operation you could ask later i don't want to get into all the details but if you're curious about it i can tell you how we kind of you know worked it out and uh it was it was complicated but the government could not figure it out we always were a step ahead of them and they couldn't figure out the way i eventually went down my partner got the big guy uh got indicted on an unrelated case ended up turning informant and that's how the whole thing went south normally so that's awesome you know we're going to jump around a lot tonight but ultimately there's going to be this narrative thread if you're you're paying attention then we'll see where these stories go um gus uh is a journalist right so and an author and an investigator and so he's not in the mob but he's had an amazing number of uh or uh as far as we know but not talking he's had interactions with people in amazing ways and so why don't we talk can you sort of tell us about uncle louie and give the context yeah this is a little involved i i've done a lot of documentary television in addition to books and uh in 1997 i got into a documentary with peter jennings the late peter jennings and cy hersh you know seymour hurst the great pulitzer prize winner he was looking into the dark side of jfk and it ultimately became a book called the dark side of camelot and we did an accompanying documentary uh two hour show for abc i was in i was a researcher the lead researcher on it and uh one of the things we wouldn't learn about was the kennedys in chicago uh yeah some of you are familiar with the fact that joe kennedy had the merchandise mart in chicago they were rumored to be connected to the chicago outfit and may have helped in the 1960 election and my job was to go there and find the people who knew about it so i go into town and uh sorry this takes long but it's it's got a good punch line i uh i go into town i call up the giancana family to get started because sam giancana was the guy in 1960 and his family sam was deceased but his family his cousins his lawyers they were all around so i figured i'd take them all out to dinner and get them to like me and feel like they could talk to me and see if i could win them over to get their cooperation so we went to they suggested a place in highland park where these guys really love to go the uh the italian wise guys and we went out there must have been 12 or 14 of us this big long table the giancana sisters and their cousins and on the ends were the two bodyguards who didn't say a word the whole four hours they just sat there staring at me you know like this and drilling the you know right through me and i'm just really worried about what they're thinking those you know i'm watching the family's doing okay okay before we actually before we went into the restaurant this is important to know uh sam giancana's attorney was there and we were walking into the restaurant from the parking lot and he walks up to a tree and relieves himself and i said what's that you couldn't wait and he said well no no this is this guy we hated he got whacked here and i i hated the guy i do this every time i come here i said okay it's gonna be that kind of night so then we go in you know and uh so so the thing is we're talking and talking about two hours into this thing the bodyguard that i've been worried about who's just been staring right through me he comes up behind me he taps me on the shoulder says we gotta go out to the parking lot the parking lot where they whack people and i'm going like oh my god what did i say what did i do did i dishonor them somehow uncle this guy's name was louis uncle louis he was sam's bodyguard in the old days so we go out to the parking lot and uh uh he says yeah we like you we're going to help you yeah yeah i'm dying i'm sweating bullets i said you could have told me in there and so that's part one of the story okay so i we finished the dinner everything goes great i got back to my hotel and there's a message there from uncle louie and i called him up and it was gus uncle louie just calling to check make sure you got in okay you're part of the family now and uh just well i have three questions is anybody bothering you anybody i should talk to you know uh you need you need any booze you need any women i said no lou everything's great good night next morning i wake up there's a call from uncle louie anybody i should talk to anybody bothering you and everything's good you didn't need women you need some booze no louie everything's great well this goes on every time i go to chicago there's always a message from uncle louie asking the same three questions anybody bugging you everything's good okay years go by we're getting to the big punch line uh i stayed close with the family and we antoinetti and khan and i spoke a lot and three years later she calls me and we're talking about this and that and she says uh so how are things doing god said things are great but i said you know this first book that i wrote uh the publisher he's not paying out his royalties to his authors on time and it's really bugging me i could use the money and say oh that's too bad and we talk and we talk we hang up a minute later guess who calls uncle louie gus i heard you're having a problem with your publisher he said he said i already checked the uh the plane schedules i can be there at 10 a.m tomorrow you'll have your money by 10 30. how much does he owe you i said no i talked him out of it but he was really insistent he wanted to come and and the cool thing was he said to me he said i said louie i don't need people threatening people i don't want to deal with any of that and he said he said i'm loving louis we don't threaten people what do you think i am i said how are you going to get the money he said i'll just look him in the eye and say give my friend his money and it's the way it's very important though because those guys they could stare you down they could look right through you and say it in such a way you know please pay my friend and you'll get your money i won't have to threaten him i said no please but that went on for years if i was ever in chicago he knew about it and there would be a message from him wow you need any help anybody bothering you how recently have you heard from uncle louie oh it's been about i guess 2006 i guess but for about five or six years all the time amazing suzanne now jeff you uh for those that everybody know who mo dallas was all right [Applause] needless to say a complicated story uh but suzanne uh why don't you talk about sort of if you could about growing up in las vegas as modalities daughter and then sort of i don't i feel like there was a bit of a protective shield around you at that time and maybe you could talk about that you didn't really know fully what was what was happening uh yeah thank you hi everybody um i did not grow up in las vegas i was born in las vegas and um it was a very turbulent time the kennedys bobby kennedy was starting a process of targeting organized crime and he had a view toward las vegas and a view toward my father and the idea was to move my father's generation of gamblers he was a licensed casino boss and hotel owner right so the idea was to move them out of the business and to move wall street in but um it was uh during those mcclellan hearings the threat around my dad in las vegas became really really excruciating and my mother had had enough so she moved me to mexico and so my experience with las vegas was one in which i would come for parental visitation so it was in sort of phases that i would experience las vegas you know when i left it was a crisis when i came back my father had sold the desert into howard hughes and all of a sudden we were entering a new life then my father started building the las vegas country club sunrise hospital boulevard mall and doing all these development projects he was on a path to becoming a city father so my story is not a mob story it it exists in the shadow of the mob without ever having a direct experience like antoinette giancana would have had and so i mean i just have to say that i am i am so grateful uh to my father for his path toward legitimacy you know and he chose the town where it was possible for him to he wouldn't have done that in new york they would have never let him do it but las vegas was this sort of morally ambiguous place where a guy like him could actually be licensed go legitimate become a philanthropist and a city father leave a big foundation do good works and become an urban legend so um right um [Applause] so that's one part of the narrative and then there's all this other shadow material and by going to mexico and by leaving and going to boarding schools in europe i was kept very much away from the details of the other story and so it would be something i'd have to come back to later in life and we'll come back to that we'll come back to that next time we come to you um i i think michael though there's like a trying to somewhat be cr uh go to a chronological telling and i might be a little off but i can't resist asking you you say uh the night i got made were you willing to discuss that how that went down well you know originally um my dad didn't want this life for me wanted me to go to school be a doctor and i was on that path until the 60s he got in some very serious trouble he was indicted several times very serious crimes in the state i think twice for grand larceny once for homicide went to trial in all three of those cases was found not guilty then in 1966 my dad was indicted in federal court for masterminding a nationwide string of bank robberies after a lengthy trial he was convicted 1967 sentenced to 50 50 years in prison and it was the longest sentence for a bank robbery conspiracy case ever given up to that point 1970 he loses all his appeals they ship them off to leavenworth penitentiary in kansas to do his time and i was a pre-med student at hofstra university at that point and um i was devastated my dad was 50 when he went in i figured 50 on top of that he'd never come out of prison alive just as an aside my dad's 101 years old today all right yes he did 38 years in prison since 1970 he was in and out five times each time on a parole violation and he's time for associating with another felon or somebody alleged to be an organized crime you can't do that when you're on federal parole when i was on parole i had 526 people on my separation list feds actually give you a list with people you can't associate with some of them on the list i never heard of some of them were dead they don't even let you go to a cemetery and meet with anybody says it's tough right my dad had a problem with that he'd come out he thought he was being covert they'd surveil him he'd meet with people they locked him up five times i'll never forget about uh six years ago he was on his fifth violation and they put him in the penitentiary in milan michigan i go to see him i said dad come on man you're 93 years old you got to stop meeting people it's getting ridiculous he looked at me and said son what do you want me to do i don't know anybody it's not a felon he said even you're a felon but uh it was fine i was number one on his list took me two years to get off the line feds don't care your reform they don't care about that but anyway um so joe columbo was the boss of my family at that time i obviously knew him very well i got very close with him he kind of took me under his wing started to meet a lot of my dad's friends mike what are you doing going to school if you don't help your own man out he's going to die in prison so i was very affected by that and by the way when my dad was released last june he was the oldest uh inmate in all of america federal and state system and now he's the oldest living mob guy in america he's kind of a legend in his life goes back to the days of luciano and costello he took the old 66 years ago i believe but and by the way uh we're opening a show at the plaza and i am bringing my dad there the oldest living mob guy in america is going to be at the show 101 years old but um he's in new york now but uh so i go see dad in lebanon they said dad i'm not going to school if i don't help you out you're going to die in here and he was kind of upset we went back and forth a little bit and by the way i want to tell you this people my dad did a lot of bad things in his life i don't ever apologize or make excuses for what he was nor for what i was i mean i went to jail for a crime that i was guilty of i pled guilty did my time but that particular crime that my dad did all this time for he was innocent enough my dad was no bank robber he was framed i'll take that to the bank we spoke to every witness they recanted their testimony we gave him lie detective test proved they lied at the trial we could never get the conviction overturned so he did all that time for a crime he didn't commit but you know it's like i tell a lot of young people because i work with a lot of young people you put that bull's-eye on your back you put your hand in a fire long enough you're going to get burned system is not always fair but this is the way it is so um he said to me okay son but if you're going to be on the street i want you on the street the right way and in his mind the right way was to become a member of his life and he proposed me for membership in the family at that point now i'm sure you know this you can't just go up and say hey guys i'd like to join you know somebody has to propose you they have to vouch for you and so on and so forth so i was 22 years old i'm sure many of you remember uh joe columbo had been shot seriously wounded at the entire american civil rights league rally that we had back in 71 he eventually died from the wounds a new boss took over his name was tom debell and i sat with tom he said mike i got a message from your father he said you want to become a member of this life is that true i said yes he said well here's the deal from now on 24 hours a day seven days a week you're on call to serve this family the colombo family that means if your mother is sick and dying and you're at her bedside and we call you to service you leave your mother's side and you come and serve us from now on we're number one before anything in your life when and if we feel you deserve this privilege this honor to uh to become a member we'll let you know and you know the mob is not a business it's a way of life it's a whole subculture from everything else that exists we had our own rules our own policies we did business as part of that life but it's a way of life and i was 22 years old i was in kind of like a pledge period for about 18 months where i had to do anything and everything i was told to do to prove myself worthy and it could have been uh something very menial there's a lot of discipline in that life a lot of authority a lot of alleged respect you had a meeting at eight o'clock you weren't there at 7 30 you are late you can never be late in that life drive the boss to a meeting sit in the car for five hours waiting for him to come out god forbid you leave go get a newspaper go to the restroom he comes out you're in trouble i know i did that once and i paid the price but uh a lot of stuff like that and you know this question always comes up people and i try to be as honest as i possibly can i think you you'll understand this and give me a little grace but that life at times is very violent and if you're part of the life you're part of the violence and there's no escape if anybody tells you differently they either weren't a made member of that life or they're just not being honest with you and i think you know what i mean after about a year and a half i proved myself worthy it was halloween night 1975 when i walked into a room with five other gentlemen that night we all took an oath and became sworn made members of the colombo family now i took that all very seriously back then i take it very seriously tonight even though i don't consider myself a member of that life anymore you come into life you don't sign a contract there's no retirement age you know what they say they say when you leave that life either leaving a coffin or you join the government and enter a witness protection program obviously i've done neither it's a very solemn ceremony dimly lit room late at night they wanted you to understand the seriousness of what you were getting involved in we walked into the room individually the boss was seated at the head of like a horseshoe configuration on the boston console area to his left and right and all the captains were alongside of them we had about 15 top regimes or captains in our family at that time walked down the aisle stood in front of the boss held out my hand he took a knife right here cut my finger some blood dropped on the floor this is a blood off i cupped my hands you took a picture of a saint the catholic altar caught put it in my hands lit it aflame didn't hurt it burnt quickly it was merely symbolic and he said tonight michael francis you are born again into a new life until a cousin austria this thing of ours violate what you know about this life betray your brothers and you will die and burn in health like the saint is burning in your hands do you accept and i said yes i do the other five guys walked in and they all took the oath the same way and you come into the life you come in as a soldier and i was motivated to do two things at that point i wanted to get my dad out of prison i did get him out after 10 years on parole told you what happened after that and i wanted to make money and my dad said in this life you make money it translates to power not unlike the real world and i was fortunate and that i knew how to use that life to benefit me in business went on to make a significant amount of money and in 1980 the boss of my family carmine persico who's now doing life in prison he was indicted and convicted on the mob commission case by giuliani back in 86. he said mike you're doing a good job i'm going to make you a cop regime and that's it the boss says you're a captain that's it and from 1980 until 95 when i consider myself formally removed from that life i acted in that capacity so gus uh i can't follow that i'm sorry [Laughter] it's pretty it's pretty hard to follow that but um if you can talk that's a lot this actually i i just watch what you're saying now bro i'm watching this uh this kind of follows on that maybe uh meaning jimmy blue eyes halo maybe if you could explain about why you were who he is why you met him and how that went sure jimmy blue eyes anybody heard of jimmy blue eyes here a few yeah he was actually meyer lansky's partner lifelong partner he met meyer lansky ring a bell uh he he was quite the the boss and uh in this same project the same uh peter jennings project uh trying to nail down the whole thing with the kennedys and the mob i uh realized that jimmy blue eyes in the late 90s he was still alive of course meyer had passed away and jimmy was around 94 95 at the time and he'd never given an interview about his life with meyer lansky or what he might have known about the kennedys or anything like that and uh i called him up and he didn't want to say anything and i said i said well it's not about meyer it's about joe kennedy he said i'll talk about joe kennedy but i'm not going to talk about meyer and he said come on down so i flew down to uh fort lauderdale where he was living and picked him up at his uh hotel or i'm sorry his condominium and uh went to his favorite restaurant uh i think it was doria's pier five that was a pretty famous restaurant down there at the time and uh it was amazing crowded restaurant beautiful italian restaurant and i walk in with frail little jimmy 94 years old and when we walked in it was amazing again it gives you a sense of what that life is really like because the place just froze i mean every waiter turned it was it was much larger than this room and uh the bartender stopped and the cook the chef came out and the owner came out and they surrounded us you know and just bowed to jimmy blue eyes i said oh my god this is what it's like the owner came over and kissed his ring and uh so uh i said okay this is again another adventure so we sat down and uh and i talked to him and i said well i want to find out about joe kennedy and do you know anything about his relationship with uh meyer or with anybody and then with the 1960 election which was allegedly fixed and he said yeah i remember something he came down here to florida to talk to meyer and me and he said i want you guys to get behind my son jack and help us win this thing and he i said what did you say jimmy he said i told him i said who do you think we are we don't fix elections that's all fine who do you think we are it's then he said uh uh i'll tell you who might help you he said go to chicago talk to talk to sam giancana's people because he told that to joe kennedy he said go to chicago they'll help you and that's how joe kennedy ended up going to that other process i talked about but i just thought was kind of funny when when he you know said to joe kennedy who do you think we are we don't do that kind of stuff he tried to pay the bill oh yeah and then when it was all over i'm looking for the waiter to get the bill and uh i said excuse me we're ready to go and he said what do you want i said i want to pay he said you want to pay what i said i want to pay our meal he said that's jimmy blue eyes and you're his guest he he never gets charged are you kidding you know who he is he's like okay coming down here more often you know but uh it was like an understood thing you know it's jimmy blue eyes halo and uh you don't pay you're insulting us you know i said all right that was it that's excellent suzanne we're again it's nothing like that no no i'm sorry i was just thinking actually of michael's father and and then jimmy blue is live to a ripe age as well well i'll tell you what if you die of old age and you die free in that life you've really accomplished something no doubt and even though my dad did all those years in prison he's hopefully going to die if he stays out of trouble from his wheelchair by the way you wanna know this i'm trying to bring him out here now you gotta understand this no no he's the oldest they abolished parole in the federal system there is no more parole but there's only three guys left in on parole in all of america my dad is one of them so i got to bring him out here he's still on parole and i got to go talk to his parole officer to get permission to bring him out here so the parole officer says to me what is he going to do when he gets out there he's going to do the same thing he's doing here he's going to sit in his wheelchair and wait for me to bring him somewhere he's 101 years old what do you expect he's going to do cause i'm taking him to see his show he's going to rob a bank no no so then they say to me well if uh if they'll accept if the parole office will accept him in las vegas then we'll let him come out there i said yeah but there is no more parole offer you're the only pearl he's the only parolee in town there's only one here so you got to work i mean we'll get him here for sure um i don't know what we're gonna have to do but uh we'll get him here but that's the system that's it that's amazing suzanne maybe this sort of kid that's okay so maybe this opportunity for you to continue your story sort of pick up where you left off a little bit where did i leave off you're in mexico oh right mexico um so give me another question you know i mean so a little bit later in life you would start researching your father and you start learning more about who he is okay so at a certain point when i was in new york and i'm about 10 or 11 years old and i'm living with my mother and she is making she's got a blue blooded boyfriend there you know a lot of new york aristocracy kind of stuff and she's trying to break into a new life and she's got me in catholic school roy cohn actually got me into a catholic school and um wow she says i don't know how to tell you this but people are going to tell you your father's in in the mafia and it's not all together untrue and i'm like not altogether untrue okay i'll you know i'll go with that um and when i came back to vegas you know there was always a shadow world but at a certain point i started reading and it wasn't like i was looking for it but it would come my way and at one point i got this juice job at the stardust um and in the startus you know gift shop they had a magazine and i opened it up and sure enough it had some like piece of [ __ ] article about my dad being associated with murder incorporated and i'm like oh and so he on that day met me for lunch in the stardust um coffee shop and i i you know i just i i just wanted to go there so i i put the magazine in front of him and he says i see you've found a familiar name and i'm like uh yeah you know is it true you know the murder incorporated thing and he said ah nah you know that that couldn't happen you know you you kill you have a guy kill a guy and he'll just get caught and turn you in and i'm like that's your explanation um and then he said something that stuck with me he said you know i'm no angel um but i'm no mobster either i've liked to walk between the raindrops and i haven't always done the legal thing but i hope i've always done the best thing and i hope i've always done the right thing and he was telling me about his own internal morality and he was very um very serious about it you know he he he really walked a line and uh as his era his casino era ended and he started being a real estate developer tony spelatro frank colada and that whole chicago gang starts to move into the stardust his old hotel um and he didn't want me to go over to the stardust i'm like really you're kidding me and he was i think scared of them he had lost you know he had he had aged and his power base had really changed and there's this very lethal uh element that came into las vegas and he didn't like it one bit now he couldn't do much about it he had to let you know tony spelatro one point join the country club he menaced everybody at the country club debbie here they stole her parents jewelry you know at a certain point they stole they robbed oscar goodman's house so i mean there was this out of control thing that my father could not relate to it was not part of his deal las vegas was a safe place it was crime free and you know except for the skim you know but that was a different thing except for that where were we so we could we could end there that's a good that's a good spot um that's good we're going to move our way all the way through your life to the to the current day here by the end okay um michael uh you you tell a funny story this goes back to the gas thing a little bit but about uh being sent for by fat tony salerno oh yeah tony uh was the boss of the genovese family at the time and you know because i was in that business i got around quite a bit it turned out to be a very big enterprise in new york and when i first got involved i'll tell you i i went to my boss at the time persico he was out of prison and i sat down at him we called him junior and i said junior i'm gonna show you more money than you ever saw in your life and immediately so we don't do drugs i said no drugs you know i had but by the way we weren't allowed to get involved in drugs in our family we we dealt drugs we got killed um i said it's not drugs it's gas i said but here's what's going to happen as soon as everybody knows about this and they try to get involved we're gonna blow it too many people you gotta keep this with me you gotta keep it within the family you can't play politics every time we sit down with somebody i gotta win i says and i'll make you wealthy beyond your dreams and at one point in time i'm bringing him two million dollars a week now that buys a lot of loyalty back in that day in that life but um so i got around a little bit and uh fat tony called me one day and he had a club and social club in harlem so he's a boss you know i was a captain at the time but a boss calls you you go doesn't matter what family so i go see him and uh i don't know if you know fat tony but uh right out of central casting you know short fat guy smoked a cigar he had the fedora great guy though i loved him right and he sits down and he says hey mike what's going on with this gas business i hear you're making a lot of money i said yeah tony i'm doing pretty good he says uh i got a bunch of these palookas around me they can't earn five cents he says you give him a job i said yeah i'll put them all in a gas station i said i'll give him a gas station i said but tony don't let them rob me rob you i'll cut their hands off that's well you don't have to do that you know but just make sure they don't rob me because we had a lot of cash at the time so he says i really appreciate that he said how much you're going to give them so i'm thinking it's the boss i don't want to say the wrong thing i says tony how about i give him 1500 a week each he says 1500 give them 500 give me two thousand i say tony you got it you're the boss whatever but uh and that's what i did i told you that's what you do good deal the only problem with that he wanted to put everybody to work the whole crew we had like 300 stations at the time so we were putting a lot of people to work back then but he was a character he's one of the guys that i really missed uh a lot he was a good guy and um you know he was he was also convicted on the commission case and he ended up dying in prison they gave him they gave each guy 100 years so that's the kind of time they were given back then giuliani yeah yeah gus one thing the group might not not everybody here might be not be aware that gus is one of the foremost authorities in the country on the jfk assassination so he's done as much research i think as anybody to try to determine what exactly happened and we may uh may i don't know if we want to get into that right now but uh what gus can talk about is the research that he did along the way and i thought you might talk about uh uh bill frazier and the oliver stone uh connection there yeah this is such a funny story has anybody ever heard the name buell frazier in relation to the kennedy assassination nobody no no okay oh it's not important uh right now but anyway uh around 1990 i wrote a screenplay a fiction screenplay on the kennedy assassination and sent it out to oliver stone cold i didn't know him i just got his address and sent it to him a couple months later i get a call from his partner saying oliver really liked your screenplay and he wants to meet with you so i'm thinking you know my ship came in and i'm going to get a major movie with this guy and uh we met and he said i've already written a screenplay i don't want you i've already got a screenplay which i it turned out to be pretty goofy about jim garrison the new orleans d.a uh really i could go on for hours about how crazy it was but he said i want you to be around because you know a lot of people and maybe you could connect this up with people who uh we need to talk to for authenticity and so forth i said okay i'll stick around he was paying me i wanted to see how a major motion picture was made i could stand right next to his side and watch academy award winner film a 50 million dollar movie and all i had to do was call up people he wanted to interview so uh he wanted to meet this guy buhl frazier who you never heard of abuel frazier was a 19 year old when when kennedy was killed he was lee harvey oswald's only real friend in the book depository where it all happened and oliver was anxious to meet him to find out what lee was like in fact buhl gave lee the ride that day to work when he killed kennedy with the rifle in the back seat and he wanted to find out what lee was like because only buell really knew him and but buell didn't talk to anybody i mean he uh he never gave interviews he was really traumatized by his what happened and he did talk to me i was friends with him and oliver knew that and he said could you bring buell in to meet with me and i said well i'll ask him he's real shy and i'll see if he can come down as a favor to me buell said okay i'll come down and meet with him he didn't know oliver stone from a hole in the ground he's fuels are real salted the earth texan and you know cares very little about hollywood so we went down to the stoneleigh hotel in dallas to meet with oliver stone we're sitting in a place much like this small bar in the stoneleigh hotel there's me and buell frazier oliver stone and two of his co-producers and oliver was going to interview buell about lee harvey oswald and so they asked a few he asked a few you know decent questions about what he was like and what it was like that day and what the depository looked like on the sixth floor and it went well for about 15 or 20 minutes then oliver it seems like he needed his ego stroked a little bit and he said to buell who could care less about this stuff he wasn't into any of this hollywood stuff he said so beautiful what do you think of my movies and everybody just tightens up like oh my god oliver wants to you know get his ego taken care of and you'll say well sir i gotta say i riley i don't know if i know any of your movies now by this time oliver stone had won all kinds of academy awards platoon wall street born on fourth of july and and so and the producers are sitting with oliver just saying oh my god where is this going to go and and bill said what have you done sir and and he said well i just won academy award for born on fourth of july he said well i didn't see that mr stone but did you do rain man now that was a great movie and stone says no no i didn't do rain man and so now we're saying oh my god and so then then uh someone said well rain man you should've done rain man that was a great movie and so then oliver stone says uh i did wall street did you see wall street and he said i can't write let's say ever heard of that one now driving miss daisy did you do that one and it ain't working and oliver's starting to get really upset and and we're all like crap trying to hold back cracking up and this went on for about four or five movies every movie that uh oliver suggested buell would suggest another one and he you know it was just uh one of those moments where this wonderful guy who could care less wasn't gonna you know buy into it and oliver just couldn't believe this guy wasn't gonna drive and miss stage that was a good movie guys i'm curious how did your what how did your role play out with the movie jfk how did it play out well you know i hung around you know when they were filmed in dallas when they recreated the assassination and i was in new orleans for a while and i was uh in washington dc and watched them film it and it was just a mad house it was just crazy stone oliver stone as he would readily admit uh like to get inebriated uh high uh like all the time and he would just roll up to the set in the morning just with red eyeballs and and his cinematographer had everything planned out and ready to go you know and oliver would just go into his chair and uh but yeah i was around for a while but he would ask the most crazy things he would say to me uh gus we're doing jack ruby how did he part his hair you know he wanted that kind of detail but yet he had lyndon johnson and the joint chiefs of staff murdering kennedy he got that wrong but he wanted to know jack ruby's hair and he recreated the tiniest thing the lucky strike cigarette packages were exactly as they were in 63. he had every license plate in the motorcade the same numbers and letters they were like who would care who would know but yet he's got lbj you know killing kennedy um it was it was a mad house it was just crazy interesting suzanne we're back uh so this is actually this is leading somewhere and you know i'm curious to know you grow up and you're and when do you sort of rekindle your interest in in the story and start doing your own sort of coming back to las vegas and probing this story right so um mo dalits dies in 1989 in his penthouse at the regency towers and he's overlooking the city loved and helped to build and we have a big funeral it's like an affairs state the big man dies and steve wins mirage opens three months later and the new las vegas is launched and i um i'd had it with las vegas you know they had not been all you know roses in the last decade of my dad's life and i thought that the daylitzes should just go ahead and leave the stage to others and that's what i did and i went to california and raised kids and entered civilian life very far from this and very far from this story and i forgot my own story it became something so very deep down every once in a while oh yeah you know she's the mob daughter and it would be like they were talking about uh you know one of the girls in the godfather something like that got character from some myth but it was not my life and i had no identity with it i'm sitting in my kitchen in santa fe i moved to santa fe i have a husband a kid and i read an item in the newspaper that las vegas is building a mob museum and i'm like oh [ __ ] [Laughter] las vegas is calling its mob children home and that's exactly what happened because as oscar is rolling out this big civic project 50 million dollar museum and they've got the curators from the rock and roll hall of fame and this thing is rolling there's some other attraction down the strip in the basement of the tropicana that is also a mob theme park and it's got the giancanas and the seagulls and all these other mob children the real ones not the biggest variety i am um there so all of a sudden vegas is a watch in in mob families and memorabilia and i i it was just like you can't it's like a car wreck you can't turn away so i came and i started spending time here with the curators and going through finally all of my father's old archives i've been schlepping all this stuff his business papers and all of his jewelry and all this stuff around with me all these decades you know and by the time i opened it up for the mob museum to look at it the curators were like oh my god it's the mother lode so i i came back to las vegas that way really invited by the mob museum but it was something else i knew i was going to have to circle back on this story you know that thing where you can never go home again but you have to go home again or something's missing there is an answer or a question that hasn't been asked and it's something fundamental uh so i did and i uh i remember the day with jonathan is jonathan still here jonathan ullman um uh met me in the coffee shop with the bellagio and i have with me all of my father's jewelry and i'm turning it over to him and for my father you have to understand he would have just killed me he would have just killed me i mean this was like the ultimate betrayal in fact the whole arc of his story was all about not becoming someone in a mob museum and my bad you know but this these this is where the path led and i started writing and i started interacting with all of these other mob children and with all these old wise guy guys who are like floating around doing memoirs you know i mean they've all been through witness protection they want to talk to me oh moe you know he was this he was that and i'm hearing all these stories some of them awful and all of my father's generation of las vegas who had been studiously erasing the mob part of our story were horrified and i was blackballed by my whole former um cohort except for debbie debbie still loved me but it was it was really something so the only people talking to me were you know yeah i mean i mean this in a good way but they're just you know self-promoters and selling books and so i'm being on the one hand courted by history and on the other hand lied to by just all these scoundrels and i just started it was really unexpected i started having fun you know what i mean it was like it was i thought it was going to be some therapeutic slog and it and it and it wasn't um and i'm six years into my writer's block on my memoir i think i have you know enough material for three books here i am you know still not satisfied still asking still wondering yeah when that book is done that is going to be a good read um michael uh as much as much as you know uh i almost hate to bring it up but because he's but he's john gotti is such a huge figure uh in in this story in the in the mob story of america and you had uh a sit down with him um could you describe that yeah well first of all i was um i happen to like john you know we were i wouldn't say we were close but we had a lot of interaction because you know in that life when you're a uh an active guy like i was you meet a lot of people and john and i we clashed a couple of times socially he was great go out and place like this have a drink terrific guy business he was a nightmare nightmare because he didn't really understand it and john had the type of ego where he could not lose no matter what the deal was you sat down with him he had a win so if you had a sit down with him uh you had a note going in that basically you had to somehow make him think he won but you got what you wanted anyhow and these sit-downs are very technical it's it's a whole different procedure which we can get into later on but so there was a flea market uh believe it or not pretty big business in brooklyn and one of the owners was a uh an accountant and he ran to me because his partner was a drug dealer he found out and was dealing drugs in the market and doing all these things stealing from the market and so on and so it was a big market so he comes to me and uh he says mike you know i really hope you'd help me out so on and so forth so i get rid of this drug addict again just made him leave the market and um about a week later i get a call from john he said mike i need to see it so i go meet him in uh in manhattan and he says you know that flea market that guy you threw out of there he's with me i said well john how could he be with you he's a drug dealer he's dealing drugs he said no he used to deal drugs he don't deal drugs anymore i said john he's dealing drugs out of the market well he ain't going to do any more drugs from this point on he says so we're partners and i knew it could never work out so we had to sit down over it i went to my boss at the time i said junior this is never going to work i said i think the best bet is we let him buy us out of the market and we get out so i said but he'll never agree to that because he'll never give me what i want so i have to go in there and say john i'm buying you out of the market you're out and i knew at that point he would say no you don't buy me out i buy you out and bottom line we went back and forth back and forth and uh at the end of the day he bought me out i think he gave us 200 and some odd thousand at the time and took care of the accountant and three months later the market went belly up and went bust but i will tell you this about john um you know and this came up recently because uh well i don't want to bring this other thing it was a sidebar with with donald trump and i'm not going to get political but uh uh we were talking about comey somebody had interviewed me about him and we had some relationship with him because comey the fbi agent former fbi agent was involved with the sami govano case he helped turn sammy gravano and he asked me about him and i knew sammy well and my answer was on his worst day john gotti was a far better person than sammy the bull sammy admitted to 19 murders admitted to 19 murders and i don't care at least in my way of thinking you don't give a pass to somebody that admitted to 19 murders basically he was a serial killer and i'm not saying that you know i'm any better than him or whatever but nobody made a deal with me i went to jail did my time i didn't cooperate and do anything but you don't give a guy a deal to get a guy like gotti and the only reason they did that was because he was so high profile he thumbed his nose in everybody's face and he carried himself a certain way and i had kind of a respect for that because he never made any bones about who he was hey this is who i am i'm a mob guy i'm gonna die a mob guy i don't pretend to be anything else and yeah you know like all of us he had his good points and his bad points but um you know i'm very close with his family his his daughters and his his wife are wonderful people in my view i'm fairly close with uh with junior and um you know i think what happened to him at the end of the day was uh was just wrong because of the whole gravano thing what does gravano do and jerry my friend jerry over there he owned the uh key club in uh in sunset boulevard it was first uh billboard live then the key club well sammy uh after he got out of prison made the deal he goes out to arizona you could tell i don't really care for the guy he goes out to arizona brings his whole family there and it starts selling ecstasy to kids in nightclubs some of them jerry you may not know this but it was in the key club at that time i found out later on and ends up going back to they they charge him in arizona and they uh end up convicting him giving him 20 years he got his wife his daughter his son he got everybody in trouble you know he just got out i think about four or five months ago but i don't know what he's going to do at this point in time but um you know that's my i mean i had a lot of interaction with john along the way so it's kind of a you know i have kind of bitter sweet feelings about that because of the way it ended up sure while we're talking about sit downs you also had an encounter with paul castellano a little bit different oh gosh yeah well i had this uh and this was before i was a recruit i wasn't a maid guy yet but i had a uh a market like a farmer's market out in in california my dad you understand so my dad was in prison i used to go there and he used to send me all of these guys mike this is a good guy you're going to make a lot of money with him this is a good guy everybody he sent me was a disaster i remember one guy he sends me he's supposed to be he he's in the trucking business and he uh transports goods across the country and my dad said he's a great guy never forget his name and he says michael buy him a truck so i buy him this beautiful peterbilt truck right beautiful big chrome you know uh a bumper big by beautiful truck and he used to say to me i love your father so much he said i want to tell you something michael anybody ever bothers you i chop off the head i bring it down a silver platter that was his famous thing right i said great joey so he tells me all the things he's going to do he gets in the truck he drives off that was 40 years ago i never seen him again never seen him again that was the end of joey i used to tell my dad please don't swim anymore guys but uh so he sends me this uh this guy and we're going to this market together and we were selling chickens now paulie castellano was the chicken king back in new york he had it all wrapped up so we had to buy chickens from him it was a memorial day weekend some woman comes in she buys a load of chickens from me and she leaves i think the tuesday or wednesday afterwards she comes back in and she says michael these chickens they had maggots in them they were all destroyed every one of them i said i got it so let me give you your money back i bought a bunch right give her our money back and i get on the phone with paulie's uh nephew i believe and i said listen you gave me bad chickens i said you know you got to uh you got to reimburse me for him so i am reimbursing you for anything i just know you got to reimburse me we go back and forth he starts cussing me out i start cussing him out it's a whole big thing right i hang up on him about uh a day later i get a call from my captain at the time andrew russo and my boss and they say get into brooklyn we need to see it so i go into brooklyn he said did you have an argument with paulie's nephew on the phone i said yeah i told him what happened i said you know he called me out i called him out and they reamed me out do you know who that is who the heck are you to disrespect somebody i said what do you want he was calling me names i just responded you know he's well paulie wants to have a sit down now he told me this he said now listen to me you're sitting down with the boss you don't open your mouth you don't say a word unless we tell you and this is kind of the rules of the city i don't care what he calls you what he says you keep your mouth shut so i'm there and paulie's like abusing me who you to talk like that and so on and so forth my boss is kind of sticking up for me so on and so forth at the end of the day the way the sit-down was resolved uh they paid me for those chickens and i had to continue because i said i'll never buy another chicken from you again right but i had to continue buying from him so afterwards we get in the car and i'll never forget uh both my captain and my boss cracked up laugh and they said we never had a chicken issue before in our lives this was the first time and uh paulie never really cared for me after that but i'll never forget but um that was that was my chicken story that's funny yeah he was he was quite a guy gus you're doing research on on chicago mob and um you really landed a great source in gene humphreys yeah right and i thought you could sort of relate that experience of me you know explain who she was and explain and describe meeting her and interviewing her and learning about her experiences with among others johnny roselli oh yeah well in the hierarchy of the chicago outfit in reading through all the fbi files i learned that curly humphreys murray humphries was the real einstein behind the whole chicago outfit he was the genius who came up with all the uh great scams and plans and union uh takeovers just a brilliant man he passed away in the 60s and uh but he was the guy who really was the you know orchestrator of the whole thing behind the boss uh tony ricardo and uh in reading that i read read about his you look for their kids and their wives and all this stuff and i noticed in a footnote in the fbi file that his wife his second wife jeannie humphries was 25 years younger than him and i'm thinking she's still alive this is back in the 90s i'm doing this i tracked her down it wasn't easy she had changed her name four or five times she was living in roswell georgia in an efficiency apartment and she couldn't believe i found her but when i found her it was a gold mine because she saw everything and kept a journal she knew everybody uh it was astonishing and she was like a guy in those days she wasn't like the mob wife who stayed home and cooked pasta she was you know a real ballsy chick and she you know saw everything she witnessed the election fix she was there right in the middle of it in 1960 and so it was just incredible so one point we're talking about johnny roselli and you know johnny roselli uh who was uh here in vegas for a while he was uh also controlling the hollywood unions for all the studios and uh and so we're talking about roselli and she said oh roselle what a lunatic he was he got he got in so much trouble with the boys there was this time back in i think it was 62 she said we were down at he she had a place in key biscayne and she would often go over to the fountain blue hotel where the boys had their meetings in in the early 60s so at the time uh just a parallel to this during the kennedy years in 1962 there was this thing called operation mongoose which was the most secret operation of the time in the kennedy administration it was to launch raids against castro's regime and and to murder fidel castro and they were using the chicago outfit to try to do this and it was the biggest secret nobody knew about it until in the 70s when we later found out about it but it was it was the thing that had to be sacrosanct they would meet at the fountain blue hotel in florida i'm getting around to gene humphreys in a second bob mayhew yeah and bob mayhew local las vegas guy was the liaison between the kennedys the cia and all the chicago outfit so he would put them all down in the fountain blue hotel okay so she says one day i'm sitting by the pool at the fontainebleau and just minding my business and the boys are all up on the 17th floor talking about their business and who comes down with johnny johnny roselli and sits down next to me on the lounge chair and she says the background to this is you have to know at the time our house in key biscayne was being invaded by snakes in the neighborhood and i had heard a rumor in jamaica that they used to bring mongooses in imported to take care of the snakes so johnny sits down next to me and i said to him i said johnny what do you know about mongooses and they're upstairs on the 17th floor talking about operation mongoose and she's talking about something else entirely of course and johnny says how do you know about that and she says everybody knows about it the whole neighborhood knows about it this is the biggest secret oh my god you can't how did this get out and she's going oh come on johnny everybody knows we're all talking about it this goes on for three or four minutes he thinks she thought she's referring to operation mongoose she's talking about mongooses and snakes and so she says johnny what's the problem it's no big deal she says no he says no big deal murdering fidel castro is a big freaking deal she says what and he goes what were you talking about he said oh my god he said don't tell your husband i screwed the pooch i'll be killed so that was just the kind of craziness that went on with johnny roselli and there she had so many stories like that that were existing apartments she had all these like there's a story behind every nickname yeah it's a tiny apartment with little knick-knacks and things and and paintings and everything in there and she wouldn't brag about it i would point him out that's a nice little statue where'd you get that oh cardo gave me that and oh that yeah that over there sinatra gave me that i know what a jerk he was he was trying to get to me and and uh yeah that that was uh myerlansky gave me that everything in the apartment was a gift from some mob guy and what a colorful life gina had my god but she saw it all absolutely suzanne we've uh you we've sort of reached the present day with your story but i'm curious to know who some of the people you've talked to or maybe what's some that you've learned about your father from other people so well i did ask frank colada if he tried to kidnap me in the 70s because there had been this incident in which my father called me to my mother's house in dallas i was somewhere else and he said i'm bringing the camper and we are going on a trip and we did and he did not explain you know why why we were uh why were why we were taking a voyage across the entire desert southwest for several months um and it had remained a mystery because it one day it ended and he said we're never going to talk about this again and i had subsequently realized it was tony spelatro had threatened to kill me and i so when i met frank at this thing called mob con remember he was doing these like mob conventions and i'm like frank did you did you like take a run at me like did you like try to kidnap me and he said when are we talking i'm like well the 70s he's like no but i could have gotten a million bucks for you you know that's not nothing so and he meant that like as some like weird frank compliment um what was the question that's one of the things you learned as you know oh yes so one of the things i learned and i just want to say because i you know i feel like i've had the like the girl version of the mob story here on the panel that mo dalets we're we're in a speakeasy and it's it's it's kitchen it's cute and the stills are far out and this is like a great room and i'm i'm sitting here trying to imagine my father's world he was one of the most prolific bootleggers in the great lakes during his day he was the admirable admiral of what they call the little jewish navy and he loved boats anyway um but you know he he like had this way to paint them so that they looked higher in the water than they were because you know they really were laden with so he was doing like trump lawyers and he had all these strategies he was taking the alcohol down the detroit river and networks from there and he was proud of his bootlegging he thought that the laws of the united states prohibiting prohibiting alcohol and gambling and all the other lists of taboos were like the ultimate in hypocrisy and what i think we're looking at now at least what i'm looking at now is okay so it was a crime then it's not a crime now where is you know in this morally ambiguous world what am i supposed to think of my father's crimes really um i'm having a hard time getting all worked up about booze don't right um nobody else did it you know and then don't get me started on pot you know it's like we um we need to be very careful what we prohibit and i celebrate that pirate part of him and when he was dying he was he had kidney failure so it messed with his mind and he uh was medicated and you know he'd never talked to me about that part of his life and i regret that because it was a cool part of his life and um he like kind of lost it at one point i i came into his hospital room and he looked up at me and he said let's go take down some storefronts and he started talking to me like i was one of his crew and it was just like the most hysterical moving moment between us when a little bit of that of the truth of his early life came forward it's not like like you say it's not to ex excuse all of the other dark things that happened i'm not a pollyanna in that way i have to make room for the idea that the worst did happen ah but i didn't experience it personally the part of him i experienced personally was a man on the path to redemption not unlike the man sitting next to me and nick pileggi says in in the film upstairs he goes uh the you know the gangster is always the most interesting person in the story and i would say yeah but you know the gangster on the path to redemption is more interesting than that i think that's an incredibly complex man an incredibly complex moral and human phenomenon and i'm i'm proud to be related to it related to him and to have that's part of his story be part of mine if i may say something very interesting i have i have seven children i have five daughters and it's very interesting to me to hear you say that because my girls um they're kind of afraid to acknowledge what my former life was all about and they've been through stuff you know but it's very interesting to hear that because i never talk about it in the house you know my wife um never asked me about it never and um i wonder sometimes how they deal with it you know i really do and it was very interesting to hear that by the way you know i always get asked you know are the guys afraid when they come to see you you know when they i wouldn't want to be you know a boyfriend and uh i tell them straight out first here's what i do six months i don't talk to them i intentionally get their name wrong because they got to like work to get in my good graces i put on that whole thing and then finally when it's you know when we meet that time i said all right come here let me explain something here i'm not from l.a i'm from brooklyn let me tell you how you're going to treat my daughter and i scare the hell out of it right off the bat right and uh it really works but i will tell you this if uh if you're not italian you got teenage daughters put a vowel at the end of your name speak with a brooklyn accent it really works guys you guys think you're all mobbed up right it really works but um but i really appreciate hearing that i really do because it made me think about how my daughters you know could react to certain things because they don't confide in me about it you know my sons are different my my little guy wants to think she's a half a gangster but my junior but it's okay michael i i thought this would be an appropriate time you know we're we're going to start moving toward wrapping up and i think the way we tell these stories will help us do it uh how you uh managed to get out and to into why you're still alive yeah i get asked that all the time you know it's um there's no blueprint that tells you how to walk away from that life and obviously you can't do that and most people most of the guys that i know you know they're either dead or they enter a witness protection program and that's the end of that but the way this happened for me um very dear friend of mine jeff koutash you may know his name he was the creator and producer of splash very successful show for 20 some odd years in the riviera back in 1984 among many things i was doing i was making movies i had a production company in la and smokey robinson and leon kenny at the time brought me a screenplay for a breakdance movie and so we were filming it in south florida and we hired jeff at that time to be our choreographer he was very well known here got a great name in l.a rather and so we're filming in florida and we bring i think 30 or 40 professional dancers and jeff's crew to south florida and we brought a lot of the cast and crew and it was a sunday afternoon i had thrown a a barbecue we were getting ready to get into principal photography so i threw a a party at the hotel just wrapping everything up getting ready for the heavy work and um it was a beautiful day in florida you remember this jeff and i'm sitting by the pool minding my own business talking to a few guys you know just shooting a breeze and guys you'll appreciate this all of a sudden out of the water this gorgeous 20 year old girl comes out of the water i saw it was like a pepsi commercial everything went in slow motion right i said man who is this girl gorgeous and she had kind of a dancer's body so jeff was hanging out at the pool i said jeff come here that one of your dances she said yeah i said bring her over i want to meet her you know producers she'll want to meet me so he brings her over her name was camille i introduced myself to camille i'm your producer i want to get to know you better let me take you to lunch she said sure very sweet polite gorgeous all that so i set up this place on top of one of the uh the major hotels in miami i figured she'd come there i sweep her off her feet she's mine right that was my my uh attitude back then i'm up there 20 minutes a half an hour 45 minutes she stood me up stood up a mob guy imagine that she had no clue who i was believe me she would have probably never seen her again but anyway she stood me up five times each time she would say yes and she would never come now you know i tell my daughters you want to get some knucklehead guy play hard to get you know guys always wrong i'm old school in that way you know and they just thought dad you know you listen to frank sinatra you wear your hair too short you know it's for them i'm just dead fill up the car with gas take the trash out that's it they don't care they don't care about the mob stuff but um i make a long story short she was a young girl of faith and i felt very much in love with her and i met her mother she was from anaheim california she had no clue who i was and by the way there is no mob in los angeles we call them the mickey mouse mob they don't exist out there i know mickey calling back in the day but there's really no other thing there it's true you know whenever i went someplace in the country like if i would go to chicago or florida we had to check in with whoever the guy was back there just out of respect let him know we were there out in l.a they said do whatever you want we'll worry about it later on don't worry about it but um um i knew that she could never um really put up with my lifestyle because she was she was really uh honest about her faith and so was her mother my mother was the most godly woman i ever met in my life and i knew i had to make a change now by that time i had been indicted five times i had a federal racketeering case and four state cases and i beat every case i beat giuliani on a big case in 84 but they were coming after me on the gas case so i told my lawyer i said you know what i'm going to take a plea i said guys are going down like crazy a lot of informants on the street giuliani was really doing a job i said i had a plan i had leverage it's great to have leverage with the government because when i beat him on a giuliani case they were nervous they really wanted a conviction on me so i told my lawyer i'm going to take a plea i'll give him back some money i'll do a couple of years in prison i'll marry camille i'll move out to the west coast after i get out i'll have parole and probation i can use that as an excuse not to meet up with the guys maybe after 10 or 12 years they'll forget about me that was my plan and um it didn't work out that way i when i got into prison life magazine did a huge story on me 29 years earlier they had done the um the largest story ever done on anybody it was done on my dad it was 29 pages with pictures it was all about the murder case that he was involved in and this was kind of an anniversary edition they were doing one on me and um they really did a number on me when i told the guy he came into the prison he interviewed me and i said yeah you know there is no mob i said classic mob stuff i married this girl i love the west coast i like the warm weather when i get out you know i'm going to hang out out here well when he writes the article um about two weeks later the warden called me and i was in terminal island california and he says francis you got a death wish i said what are you talking about and he shows me the article it was a huge article big picture of me and across the top quitting the mafia and i'm in jail with like 10 or 12 other mob guys and he had me doing everything but testifying against guys in new york and so they locked me down and the feds came in the fbi and said francis you're a dead man words all over the street from our informants um you know you may as well cooperate with us we'll put you in a program we'll protect your life and that of your families now honestly people i didn't want to do that i wasn't looking to hurt anybody i just wanted out of life well they didn't take no for an answer they gave me a very very tough time in prison they put me on diesel therapy which if you don't know in the federal system they can ship you anywhere in the country you're in your cell they pick you up at three in the morning they throw you on some plane that the marshals confiscated for some drug dealer and they ship you to another prison you know where you're going and it's it's the worst part of doing time in the federal system bar none so um we get through that i had married my wife she was 21 years old and we get through that and when i get out on parole um i had a very tough time in l.a i was like a fish out of water i made all this money in new york but you know big shot mob guy back then i i couldn't get anything going in l.a i was like a fish out of water i couldn't put a house in my name no utilities people coming to look for me the fbi came to the house they scared my wife every time i walked out the door we didn't have cell phones we had beepers back then she would beat me to make sure that i'm okay which it was a very tough time for her but after 13 months i violated my parole it's another whole story and they threw me back in they gave me four years which was the maximum on the violation and i did 35 more months in 13 days but i did 29 months and seven days in the hole 24 7 6 by 8 cell and people i will tell you this that's not easy i don't care what anybody tells you i learned during that experience we weren't meant to be solo creatures we were meant to be social and i saw a lot of guys that not do well in that situation those lights go out at night you hear a lot of screams and it's very very tough but praise god we got through that and um you know listen i'm a guy of faith and i believe honestly bottom line is god had a different purpose for me in life and that's played out over the last 20 some odd years you know i do a lot of speaking and all over the world now but um you know there's also a practical side of that in that i knew that life extremely well you know i was at a high level i grew up basically what in my father and i spent 20 years in that life so i knew what the guys would do and i wouldn't knew what they wouldn't do now one of the horrors of that life and you probably are familiar with this is that we take an oath to abide by the rules and if we don't we're told straight out you could pay for it with your life you got to play by the rules and your best friend might be called upon to do that job and in turn you might be called upon because the life becomes first before anything and everything and um so and unfortunately i witnessed that in my life guys walks into a room they don't walk out again and it's really one of the horrors of that life and so i said hey they're not walking me into a room they're going to have to work to get me so i move out to the west coast i change my whole lifestyle i can tell you this since i got out of prison in 95 i've been into a club maybe four times and this is probably the fifth i know who hangs out in those places i'm pretty well known a guy makes a call back to new york he wants to be a hot shot i walk out to the parking lot boom i'm gone i don't do that in the beginning i wouldn't go to the same restaurant every tuesday night and eat i didn't create any patterns in my life i didn't walk my dog the same time every morning so if they were watching me they knew what i did no house in my name no utilities and what happened quite honestly i just outlasted everybody i mean everybody i know is either dead or in prison that that fortune magazine written in 86 you know is the 50 biggest most powerful ball huge huge article they sold a ton of magazines they had a chart with the 50 of us on there you probably remember that according to wealth and power and all of that i was the youngest guy on the list number 18 behind john who was number 13. he wasn't the boss at that time and people don't ask me how they make a list like that they didn't ask for our tax returns trust me that's all nonsense it sold a lot of magazines but here's what was is not nonsense about it out of that list of 50 46 and i think now 47 are dead two of them are doing life in prison without parole and i'm the only guy here to talk about it and believe me i don't take any credit for that because i didn't know how it was going to work out i'll tell you another thing the five guys that i walked into a room with and we got made on halloween night i'm the only one alive the other five were all murdered we had a big war in our family back in the early 90s they're all gone and um when i walked out of prison in 95 everybody predicted my death life magazine quote if he holds to what he has promised will mark the first time a high-ranking member of the mafia will publicly walk away from his past and live ed mcdonald was the head of the organized crime strike force he was henry hill's prosecutor he actually played himself in goodfellas if you see the prosecutor he was my pride he was he's the prosecutor that flipped henry hill well he was my prosecutor too he was the head of the strike force at that time ed mcdonald when i walked out of prison he went on national tv and said quote i wouldn't want to be in michael franzis's shoes i don't think his life expectancy is very substantial he was very diplomatic you know predicting my demise bernie welch was one of the agents followed him to the podium that day and said uh he will get whacked and i think you know what that means in street terms that was in 85. so um to say that i'm a fortunate guy is probably an understatement and if i may i have to plug something now it's it's part of the deal right you're going to let me do that that was my next question thank you um jeff came to me a couple of years ago and we've been maintained a relationship for many many years introduced me to my wife that i love you for and sometimes i'm really upset about it too he came to me and he said mike you know i had such success with with uh splash i want to do something again and he came up with this concept about doing a show in vegas the history of the mob in las vegas set to music and dance and i said jeff it sounds terrific he's done a ton of research he's brilliant in that regard and we are now bringing that show to the plaza hotel we opened july 11th it's called a mob story and i can tell you it's brilliant i'm telling you right now we got the best dance sequences in all of las vegas i can prove it to you i have them all on my phone but i can't show it now i won't do it jeff don't worry about it but uh he he tells the story extremely brilliantly and we're transforming the whole showroom at the plaza we do have a relationship here with the mob museum obviously we're going to be doing some things together but i'm actually going to be narrating the show i'll be on stage for about 18 minutes he's got me and he integrates a little bit of my story in there so we're really excited about it we hope that you people will support it i think it'll be an experience and you know you come to the mob museum spend a couple hours here brilliant right go to oscars i have to plug oscar dear friend of mine oscar is an ambassador to the show by the way he's very much involved with it he loves it we did it today did you watch channel 5 news this afternoon he and i did an interview was on there anyway but oscar you always get publicity but um uh and then you can come back here and come to the speakeasy after 7 30 come and see our show so you got a whole mob experience for that day so we hope you'll come by and uh and pay us a visit and uh the mob museum said they'll comp everybody if you come right i'm only i'm always yeah i'm only kidding but we'll buy you a drink at least that much i promise anyway thank you thank you michael and that is uh july 11th july 11th july 11th yes yep so why don't we throw it open to a couple questions um i want to see if we have uh a microphone that we're going to bring around for that we have the microphones we just need the persons to move them so first question right should you hear me there on the here i could i could speak up for my loud voice this is a question from mike and then i'll ask you some comments um when you talk about the the police and the law enforcement it sounds really hitting the mob very very hard and i'm wondering did uh how much did the mafia back in those days have police officers or other law enforcement on their payroll and how much do they try to drive their way out of this or do people ever try and use violence against the police to try and stop this or how come the police are so successful in hitting them so hard okay well let me explain a couple of things first of all realize this there is no mafia in america mafia is in italy in america it's called a cozunorstra means this thing of ours similar organizations but if you take the oath and you're a maid man in the mafia you're not automatically made here um and when people from the mafia would come over here we were respectful to them obviously uh but we didn't share our secrets with them but um in new york understand something we had five families and among all five families we had about 750 guys at the time that actually took the oath and then we had hundreds of associates and within that body of associates a lot of them were police officers we had family members that were law enforcement so on and so forth there was one precinct in brooklyn where at two o'clock in the morning i can go into the precinct and i can look at all the files and you know remove some and so on and so forth we had those relationships with law enforcement as far as gambling you know we used to pay the guys off and so on and so forth um and we had you know politicians that we're very close with meet esposito he's gone now i think i could talk about him he was very close with us very very close with us and a few other guys and but i will tell you this on a federal level back in the day i would have paid anything to get my father's conviction overturned and i had the money to do it and i couldn't do it i couldn't get to a judge i couldn't get to a prosecutor i couldn't get to an fbi agent and i think maybe you know my dad's case was so high profiling so hot at the time but second question violence we had a hands off we did not commit any kind of act of violence against law enforcement italy different italy quite honestly there's there's no uh boundaries there but here in america we didn't do that there was only two guys that we talked about that okay and one of them was my boss persico and that was giuliani we did talk about that because he did a lot of damage and uh the second wasn't law enforcement you may know him geraldo rivera now listen to this as the truth i was on hannity and i was promo one of my books came out i was on hattie i was on a panel with geraldo me and some other guy i forget who he was and you know when gerald's there nobody could talk he talks and talks and talks to talk so we get off the commercial break and hannity says to harlow would you let these other guys talk you know and i said so elder you know you're one lucky guy he said why i said i got to tell you this he said you know that we had a pause even though you lied about us a lot you know we had a policy we never heard law enforcement or anything like that there's only two guys we didn't like and we were really thinking about it one of them was giuliani he said well yeah i expected that he said who's the other one i turned around i said you he froze i mean he turned water i swear this guy turned white you got to see it that shut him up for the next segment he didn't talk at all right he was quiet and he said tomatoes i know how to keep you quiet we're going to put a hit on you but but uh but we never did that we did not you know we said hey you know what we understand what their job is but we didn't like the fact that they framed us and people they did i i no matter what anybody tells you they didn't play by the rules when it when it came to us guys and uh you know they they hear this exculpatory information so on and so forth but we kind of understood that was the game they were the good guys we were the bad guys and we're going to fight them as honestly as we possibly can and what happened i think you don't understand this prior to 1984 when the bail reform act came in they abolished parole the sentencing guidelines came in um it's a whole different ball game because years ago if you got a 10-year sentence 15-year sentence any one of us could do that you got 15 you know you dude 9 10. no big deal today with the rico statute you know you get one count you go down for 20 years and here's what they were saying to guys to say hey listen we got you on eight counts i had 29 counts i go down on one i got 20 years i go down on 29 i'm rip van winkle i'm down it's all over with because they're going to give you and they're going to back it up they're going to run them wild on you but what they told guys is this listen we got you on 20 counts okay you want to cooperate with us you know you you talk about this we're going to put him away for the rest of his life and we'll put you away we'll protect your family and so on and so forth guys didn't stand up for that and you know they're saying it was all the younger guys wasn't the younger guys there's a lot of older guys that just didn't want to do life in prison and joey messina who was the boss of the bonanno family very good friend of mine he got 300 years but when they went to him 300 years when they went to him and they said you know we'll cut you loose if you testify well he was he was uh they had a bug when he had guys visiting in prison he started cooperating guys don't stand up over that time and i want to tell you this i've been through five trials of my own four of my dads and countless numbers of friends of mine i know the system very well i have never seen to this day and oscar and i talk about this all the time i have never seen a mob informant get on the stand put his left hand on a bible right hand swear to tell the truth and lie through his teeth and i'm sorry but you know maybe i'm jaded in this way and guys say well i wanted to change my life they don't want to go to jail and that's the bottom line and these guys will say what they have to say and most of the time law enforcement if you're going along with what they want to hear they're going to let you go with it and that's the truth about how they deal with mob guys how they deal with other people i don't know and you know one time i was on on another show was actually on geraldo's show they had luke just locked up 103 uh gambino guys you remember that about maybe four years ago and so there was a young fbi agent he was probably 35 years old and he was oh we destroyed the mob we wrecked these guys we got 103 guys and so on and so forth and blah blah blah blah and alder said to me what do you think i said well let me tell you what's going to happen they got 103 guys 90 of them are going to go free some bs gambling charge or something like this maybe they'll get six months a year they're going to go free i said the other 10 guys maybe as a murderer or rico rat something like that i said they'll have a problem i said but i want to ask you something i said you came to us a lot of these guys at six o'clock in the morning with machine guns and flak jackets on and a whole bit i said when was the last time that one of us guys took a shot at you i said no no let me correct that when was the first time that one of us took a shot at you i said you call us up you say we're going to lock you up we get our attorney and we come and surrender i said that's we do we don't run from you guys this is how we played occasionally a guy will go on the land because whatever he's got a hundred years families will try to get some freedom but nobody's going after them with guns and you know this nobody shoots at these guys or anything else but we're easy targets now they don't do that with the mexican mob guys and they don't do that with the colombians uh i mean they have to go with floyd because they'll kill them that's the bottom line but we didn't do that stuff and um and i'm glad we didn't do it and i want you to understand something i am not anti-law enforcement you know i always tell people i have a wife and five daughters when they walk down the street i want them to be protected and i look at law enforcement that way and i happen to love my country believe it or not i'm patriotic but um but i don't like when the government doesn't play by the rules they have enough tools enough weapons to get guys the right way they got everything on this side it isn't an accident that there's a 96 percent conviction rate in the federal system and most across the board in the state systems too just get the guys the right way because if you're not going to abide by the law then you're just as bad as the criminals you're going after i mean that's how i see it now maybe you'll disagree i have every right to but that's how i believe it we must hold our law enforcement our government officials accountable that's my thing [Applause] let's take a question here we'll take one more question i just asked michael you think you would have been more successful if you were handsome and articulate that's spike maybe one more question seriously for all three um is there one or maybe a handful of people that really stand out as having a presence or a very um elite level that you ran into that really had an impact on you and maybe it's a relative that's already been mentioned um i'll pass for now gus um i have to think for a minute um boy in the mob world or in the kennedy world or anybody you've interacted with oh my goodness uh too many um come back to me on that i got to think about that for a minute it's been thousands of people yeah yeah you mean guys outside of the mom no you know well you know listen i um there was a lot of guys within that life that i had a lot of respect for honestly and i tried to emulate in their ways i i grew up idolizing my father idolize them because to me you know he's one of those guys that would die with his boots on he's never going to cooperate with the government uh he couldn't got himself out of prison my dad has never said one word to the press never he won't even do an interview i tell him dad your grandkids and your great-grandkids all they know about you they don't see you in jail all your life they don't know anything i got grandkids they don't know anything i said i need to get you on camera i said just talk about stuff so they see a different side you're 101 years old he says to me uh i let me consult my lawyer i said i said dad you don't have a lawyer i got you your lawyer and he's going to say yes he he's it's just in his head he won't do that and there's i really respect that in him i had a lot of respect for fat tony i had a lot of respect for the chin people ask me you know was he really crazy i said look if you can pretend to be crazy for 40 years you got to be a little crazy okay but uh he was crazy as a fox let me know but um you know look i i'm going to be honest with you i look up to oscar is one of the most interesting guys i've ever met he's one of the most witties guys i ever met i love being around him i love his stories we're doing this uh podcast together to promote our show the mobster in the mouthpiece and uh he came up with the name of course oscar right and um but i love being around him you know as as far as uh people i mean i look up to a lot of people for things that they accomplished in life you know but i can't say that i'm in awe of anybody but i have a lot of respect for people that do things the right way um you know and and accomplish things in their life because this is a tough life you know it really is and for people that exceed and and excel i wish that for my kids i mean i have a lot of respect for them so probably too many to name for me and i really mean that you know being a person of faith i meet a lot of really upstanding people that i admire you know everybody come to mind us well not really but i had a question for you if i could sure uh yeah well maybe well one of the things people don't understand about uh the mob world is if you're too successful and you make a lot of money it's difficult to spend it without being noticed right and this is where the idea of money laundering comes from because the irs or somebody will see that you just you just bought a mansion for 10 million dollars cash that gets a lot of attention so what i'm curious about in your heyday when you guys were really earning how did you clean the money so it looked like you had a legitimate source of income so you could spend it what was your main way of doing that well for me i really had to clean the money because a lot of my money smelled like gasoline i used to bring it into the bank and it smelled so we came up with a plan this works by the way but i i bought a refrigerator and i put baking soda in there and if you put the cash in there in about a day the smell goes out so okay just in case you get into the business but um it was um it was a very intricate operation that we had and um another story i have a guy in uh citibank in long island in sayasi he was an italian guy his name was rocco rita right so um there was a time there was a time when i don't know if you remember this but the tax on every gallon of gasoline was being collected at the gas station level all right and the way we had the scheme at the time i had about three hundred and some odd gas stations in in the northeast and at the time you got about 10 months before the uh not the irs the state tax and the irs would come down and want to you know close you down and we had a very intricate way of holding them off for 10 months to a year but what happened then the government says okay we're going to change all of this we're going to make everybody be a wholesaler and they're going to have to get licensed okay to become to collect the tax and then in turn pay us the problem is when they were doing that they advertised it in the paper and it gave us about two years to figure out how we can beat them well by the time they put it in place we had a better operation because now we didn't have to have the gas stations i used to sell to anybody that had a gas station was it was unbelievable you had to get licenses but i had a connection in albany i had 18 licenses at one time and for each license we would get about 10 months to 12 months and then we'd burn it out and get on the next license but um we had a very intricate operation so i got this guy at citibank and we were making the transition i knew that the money we were making was gonna it was going to be a hundred fold so i go to see him i said rocco come here i want to talk to you i said uh you got a basement in this bank he said yeah i said let's go downstairs i remember he said he said why i should go downstairs don't worry about it so we go downstairs and uh i said here's what i need you to do i said i'm gonna bring a construction crew in here and i'm gonna finish the basement i said i want you to make a counter i said i'm gonna buy some money machines i want you to hire a few tellers i says and i want this basement to be for me he says well you're nice well business is good we're gonna have a little bit more cash and i'm gonna we have an operation i want you to send it to different places so he says great so he says how much money you got so i wanted to impress him so so i have about 10 guys coming down the basement with boxes of cash right and i said you got to put a vault in here too now so he basically we finished that basement um he put money counters down there with some tellers and i had that operation down there for several years you know he would never take any money for me westbury music fair used to get him tickets for everybody that came bought him a car but he would never take any money and when i got indicted you'll appreciate this they hammered him in the grand jury he never said one word legitimate guy never gave me up just great guy but from there we would send it to various parts i had i had bank accounts in austria we had the cayman islands and i've been not saying anymore that that's about it some other places no i'll tell you what happened when when i originally turned informant against me there was a big war because giuliani had indicted me and when irasio flipped he wanted ayarizo to be a witness against me on the case but he didn't really know anything about that case in the eastern district you know there's always rivalries among districts and government the eastern district did not want to give him up because he was the main witness against me in the gas indictment that they were preparing but they have a big sit down in washington giuliani wins they put irisu on the stand he testifies against me and i'm acquitted we destroyed him on the stand right what happened they were ready to throw him out of the witness protection program because he couldn't get an acquittal so now prior to that we had 30 i think 38 million dollars in an account in austria there were numbered accounts he had half the number i had the other half a number and uh when he was becoming an informant i grabbed the whole of his son i said listen i understand what your father's going to do i'll fight him in court but don't give up the money that's our money i said don't give it up you know if we go to jail at least we got you know that money we split it up between us so during the first trial he didn't give it up but now when they were throwing them out of the witness protection program now he gave up every ready to say anything so he gives them half the number right they go to austria the fbi does and they go to austria and they say look this is mafia money mob money we got half the number we want you to release it austria said no way you want this money you bring us the account so they said we'll froze it but we won't bring it um so as part of my plea agreement since i knew i'd never get the money i had to give him that and we lost 38 million dollars of taxpayer money but uh but i'll tell you what happened i'll tell you how sneaky the government is there any agents or anybody in this room i want to insult anybody i like this is way back when um i had a 15 million dollar restitution aside that i had to pay but that 38 million it disappeared they never gave me credit for it they never talked about it gone wow i don't know where it went but i know i didn't get it oh wow did you want to say something no are you looking at me yeah i was wondering if you had any uh you know i i was like stuck on that question of you know for lack of a better word great men and um [Music] so this is what came up um the night kennedy died um my mother and i were in in acapulco and i was watching her get dressed for dinner and there was a little transistor radio and it was scratchy mexican radio and the message was coming over and over that the president had died and i watched my mom and her face turned totally white i mean i guess we all remember at a certain age where you were how you felt and i was watching her have that experience she sat down and i said mom is everything going to be okay and she said i hope your father is going to be okay it was where her head was at not that there was a direct relationship but we in our world everybody was some degree of separation from that event and it was a terrible association and a mysterious association yeah and i asked my dad about it what does this have to do with us and he said and this is later and he said i know you think he's a great man because i was you know when rfk was running for president i was walking around with a button and he was just horrified just horrified um and he said they are not the men you think you are you think they are and he's trying to tell me that there are no great men that everybody comes from shadow somewhere especially if you arrive at those kinds of places in this world where you are considered great and so i mean i guess that's my answer yeah you know on the one hand the voting rights act the civil rights act you know etc there's some things i value tremendously about that president and that presidency what i suspect is he he knew things that we didn't learn until later about kennedy oh yeah yeah he knew in real time because jfk used to come here and party in the late him out all the 50s girlfriends yeah i set him up and in fact i interviewed one of the guys in one of my projects and when some people thought the mob killed kennedy and i would talk to those guys about it they said are you kidding he was like one of us we loved him he used to come here to the sands and the steam bath and everything and he had his own robe that we gave him and his nickname was on and it was chicky baby that was jfk's nickname and we set him up with girls he shared girls with sam and uh so there was another side you know to the to the family for sure yeah yeah well i think we you know is two hours have elapsed and uh and some people in the back by the way have been standing this entire time we should give them a round of applause yeah really i want to um i want to add one more thing before we close and this is this is important to me because um i don't know if you know the work that i do now but i i am a speaker and i work with a lot of youth groups and i speak to gang bangers all the time i work with sheriff's departments and i don't want to give the wrong impression in that i tell these young kids this i said the mob life the gang life the street life it's an evil life now i want to be clear i'm not calling the guys evil i was one of them but the lifestyle is evil and the reason i say that is i don't know one member of any family including my own now not my wife and kids but you know my mother 33 years without a husband my dad 38 years in prison when my mom died at the end of their life i can only call the relationship between my mom and dad ugly because she blamed him for everything that went wrong what went wrong i had a sister that died of an overdose of drugs my brother was a drug addict 25 years my brother's now in the witness protection program he cooperated was a street kid got himself in trouble made a deal with the feds and cooperated against my father and got my father violet on parole son cooperating against the father and every family of every guy that i know has been in the same situation one way or the other and any lifestyle that does that to a family is an evil life and i want to be clear on that and i don't talk bad about the guys i never do really because i shouldn't i was one of them i just happen to be extremely blessed but i want to make that clear i don't want anybody to go out of here think that i'm glorifying that life we're certainly not going to do that in the show we're just going to tell the story i mean the history is what it is but we're going to tell the truth about it too but i just think it's clear because i i've spoken at a number of churches here central christian i don't know if anybody knows it but a lot of big churches in town and i don't want to give anybody the wrong impression uh i do reminisce about the life there are things that i do miss about it but it's not a lifestyle that anybody should look up to in any way or anybody should aspire to be you know these kids you know this gus when i speak to them you know we show a little video of some of the stuff i did and they're so enamored by it and they'll talk about good fellows because they mention me in goodfellas there's a character me in there and and they'll go man you had all the money you had all the power you had all the women i said yeah but did you not watch the end of the movie how come you only saw that you didn't see who got killed who went into the program who went to jail for life they don't see that part of it and that's the part that we have to educate them on and have to make them understand that this is not a life that you got to aspire to be because one way or the other you're going down i mean and that's it and i just want to you know make that very very clear that i'm not here to glorify the life in any way because it was devastating in my life and anybody who gets involved it's the same story you can repeat that over and over again very good so i i think we are going to wrap it up but i hope you enjoyed the program

Channel: The Mob Museum

Views: 310,385

Rating: 4.5131326 out of 5

Keywords: mob museum, downtown las vegas, true crime, michael frazese, gus russo

Id: 9XePocfjqYs

Length: 114min 8sec (6848 seconds)

Published: Wed May 16 2018