The Broker Who Made The Mafia Billions On Wall Street - Sal Romano

i get a call from barry gesser barry gesser's jordan belford's right-hand man this was my first direct association as you know a businessman with the mob and i got a call from my mother who told me that the fbi had just come to the house wanting to talk to me what kind of money were you making at the time i'm making probably 50 000 a month in 88 you're making 50. and i beat that car from beginning to end from from the sides to the windows to the mirrors i had an early nickname where i was the guff meaning i took no guff from nobody because i guess i was compensating for my size always trying to prove myself be good with my hands this is probably going to be a different angle of the mafia mob interview uh but you can appreciate this one because i'm sitting with a man who at one point in 2003 went away for a hundred million dollars stock scam but if you take him back when he was working with the gambino family back in the days the way he got started was with a firm called jd fd roberts securities which he used to compete with the name you may know jordan belfort from wolf of wall street and he went from there to working with the gambino family to working with mikey scars at a year where the senate subcommittee talked about the mob was getting somewhere around 10 billion dollars from the stock market from the stock market he hasn't done any interviews except for one from uk with trevor mcdonald this is his first long-form interview he's doing he's wanted to be low-key for a specific reason so with that being said sal romano thank you so much for being a guest somebody today my pleasure patrick so i read your wikipedia i read the articles no interviews except for trevor mcdonald the one you do with uh you know the mafia woman the wives and children all that stuff why have you not done an interview with anybody oh i mean that being said it's not something that i'm proud of nor do i really want to talk about it i still have family members but you know with me it's about controlling the narrative a little bit so i don't like the way i'm portrayed in some areas or some respects so it's probably a good time in my life now to possibly talk about it sounds good so you know why don't we go back just walk us through how you came up the streets and how you got connected with fd roberts and how you got into the securities industry tell us your story sure uh i was born in bensonhurst brooklyn i know most of the wise guys you talk to are and uh after that we moved to staten island which literally you know everybody goes from from brooklyn to staten island ultimately jersey and then they migrate to other areas so i was raised in staten island an area called new springville a lot of big mafia influence there you had sammy the bull gravano you had frankie de chico you had sonny saccone you had a lot of you know wise guys that came from brooklyn and moved to staten island so it was always in front of us it was always there it was always you know looking at the cars and the jewelry and the money and the power so it was always in front of us it was a way of life for us and did you see everybody like did you see sammy and did you see them yes i mean i was a little kid but yeah of course we saw them and they were a great influence on us plus the distance between staten island and brooklyn it's like 20 minutes so we were always in brooklyn my family remained in brooklyn so we were just always around it it was always in front of us what was the reputation like what reputation did the ma i mean we've obviously we've seen many different versions stories what was the reputation even as a kid who was sammy who was the chief who who were these guys in the streets it goes back long before sammy you know with my family it was carlo gambino and paul castellano what happened was my grandfather on my mother's side who's a legitimate business a legitimate butcher and he came to this country in the 30s and he was sponsored by carlo gambino and paul castellano so ultimately they end up bankrolling him in a few butcher shops in harlem when there was a strong mob influence and italian influence in harlem so he had butcher shops and he was a butcher and i don't remember him ever mentioning carlo to me but it was always big paul ben paul you've always met you got it so my mom was sicilian my dad was uh from nate uh his family was from naples so i was half knobbly down the half sicilian and growing up in brooklyn my father you know as a kid was always in a gang so he was very good with his hands he was a muscular guy oh yeah he was definitely a genuine tough guy but he was also very educated so he preached education to his children so he had the best of both worlds he was very smart he was an accountant and he was good with his hands so everything with him was making sure his children were educated and could handle ourselves physically and i was never the biggest or the strongest but i always thought of myself as being very tough i was always fast i never backed down to a fight i had an early nickname where i was the guff meaning i took no guff from nobody because i guess i was compensating for my size always trying to prove myself be good with my hands and we were always exposed to it so my dad had always done business with wise guys as their accountant he had card games he was always a [ __ ] a book maker so frankie dico was always in my home when i was a kid and he was a powerhouse so with us forget about queens and gotti and anything that was going on in jersey or the west side with the genovese it was always the gambino family and it was always in front of us so that being said my father got me a job at lehman brothers in 1985. and this is before it was shearson before it was american express this is when lehman brothers was the preeminent investment banking firm in the world you would make a cold call and tell a prospect you were calling from lehman brothers but with that being said i saw all the improprieties that were going on even there because at the time we didn't even have fax machines so there was no way to get news so what lehman brothers would do or any other brokerage firm for that matter is they'd sell a stock let's say ten dollars and they'd print fourteen they'd make four dollars a share on it so finra at the time was the nesd they then you know started implementing the five percent markup rule but back then there was no rule so you would sell a client wow what a time to be in it's the best time an asd that's right so you would sell a client today and tomorrow they wouldn't know where it was trading until they ultimately opened up the new york times and saw a quote in the newspaper so they don't they wouldn't even realize how overpaid they paid and you know that's when you know statements like if you can't net it forget it and churn them and burn them that was all lehman brothers in you know the seventies they didn't get away with it at that time though limited regulation got it so the regulation was extremely necessary obviously without a doubt okay without a doubt got it and that being said that was wayward lehman three years okay and that was my first exposure to this what a way to start though yeah but it just looked like the norm not the exception it looks like this is the way wall street business is done so that being said i left there after three years and i worked for a small firm in manhattan called steinberg and lyman which essentially was mostly healthcare venture capital and i got exposed to that and i studied and i learned as much as i could about the investment banking side because that's the side i always wanted to be in after i left there me and my group went looking for a firm we saw an advertisement the local newspaper for a firm out in new jersey and i went there they were promoting penny stocks i had never even heard of a penny stock but what impressed me was the money they were making for their clients they were showing like 200 percent returns on their recent ipos clients were making money had no idea the quality of the company i mean how good can a company be if it's trading at pennies a share so that being said i signed on to work with them jordan that you mentioned was already an employee there and you know everybody that worked there was absolutely clueless they were all young they were all uneducated they were none of them had the experience i had so it was so easy for me to rise in the ranks being from lehman brothers having the pedigree in the background and the training that i received was second to none got it so within 90 days i became assistant branch manager which i wanted because they gave me an extra 5 000 a month for and within five months i became the branch manager so that was the position that was coveted and three or four guys jockeyed for it and one of them was jordan had very little interaction with him but i thought he was a nice guy and this is before i think any of his vices or anything but he was a good salesman what impressed me and what stood out is that he was head and shoulders above everybody else there he was he was terrific in what way in what way the way he carried himself his professionalism his knowledge of the market and his salesmanship who was he with before you were with the lehman but who did he come from i have no idea okay i know nothing about his past up until that got it and so were you guys competing against each other or no you could say that in other words what the firm tried to say is in order to get the promotion they would go with who they felt was the most qualified but it really came down to production because the last thing upper management wanted to do was lose a rep that could take those positions to another firm and then ultimately sell those positions and drive the stock down so i had by far the greatest position in the firm and i was you know by far the most talented but the separator between me and everybody else was a nobody was gonna outwork me and nobody was gonna out study me including jordan yeah i mean jordan was far away this was northern new jersey and jordan i don't know if he lived in long island or westchester but he had a long commute so i don't think he was going to put in the hours that i was going to put it out she got a party together no no no nothing like that you guys were in the same office together we were yeah we were two feet from each other get out of here so you're hearing him on the calls as well yeah he was talented he was a good guy so script if you're calling me what was a conversation like with the client what do you what are you telling the client what was the script like patrick you and i had a conversation going back about a month ago i told you i would only contact you if we had something exceptional if you noticed in the recent newspaper our returns have been over 150 on our ipos although i don't have an ipo for you today i have something really exciting if you have a couple minutes i'd like to share with you sure and then you get it now the separator is i'm going to do that 400 times a day i'm going to get there at 7 45 in the morning and i'm not leaving until nine ten o'clock at night so i'm gonna out study you and i'm gonna outwork you if i don't know my product i'm the worst salesman in the world if i know my product there's nobody what kind of money were you making at the time i mean again it's 1988 and i'm making probably fifty thousand a month in eighty-eight you're making fifty i'm 21 years old it's a lot of money in it you're 21 years old what's life like are you have you started partying or not yet i'm still living at home i'm a kid the partying thing wasn't that important to me because me and my wife who's my wife now uh we've been together since i was 17. so i was already on my way to you know trying to get focused on getting engaged and having a family so partying wasn't important to me establishing the career was primary 37 years you've been together with your wife that's correct that's unbelievable four children that's incredible ranging in age from 26 to nine holy moly good so you're still working good for you hard working family so you're making 50 a month you're 21 you're not a party guy you're staying home you and your wife you've been together since 17 you know you become the branch manager five months later you're you're doing your thing jordan leaves he resides at that okay so go from there jordan leaves there's a mass exodus at that point now the mob influence that was there was a legendary gambino gangster by the name of joe butch correa who was working there no of course not he's a major gangster but the firm is on record with him okay so the way it went down is there are two principles of the firm their names were freddie gagliardo and johnny perfetti and the two of them the way they dressed the way they looked the way they carried themselves you could see gangster personification so this was my first direct association as you know a businessman with the mob although it's been an influence in me since i'm a baby now it's directly with me and i'm running the show here so what happens is the security regulators ban them from the industry so they get asked to leave this is fd roberts yes okay so after they stepped down a fella down here in florida by the name of lenny tucker legendary trader he steps in as chairman and he's the one that promotes me the branch office matters so fd roberts stays intact yeah except the people that were involved with the mob they step away they had to they were banned for the industry got it okay and i guess the prerequisite was the firm to remain open if those two fellows step away makes sense so joe butch carrajo's son vincent was an employee there the day i met him i said what do you do for a living big guy too he shows his business card he said assistant to the chairman of the board i said okay so i looked at this i said i'm gonna take this place over this is mine i'm italian nobody can work like i do nobody knows this industry like i do this was built for me i had one requisite and that's i want to open up in lower manhattan i want to be on wall street so ultimately we do open up on wall street we were there two months the feds raided the place the place was closed down and that was the end of that so the whole thing lasted maybe 14 15 months so the 50k my last 14 15 months at 21. did you do time or no no no i was not party to any any criminal liability because my time there we had done no initial public offerings no ipos at that time were you licensed are you serious i was like okay i got my license there you got your license at ft roberts okay so you go to lower manhattan you're you want your branch couple months later boom what happens next we're overlooking the hudson we had the most gorgeous office we were ready to rock and roll and then it ended when it did end i was skiing up in hunter mountain in upstate new york and i got a call from my mother who told me that the fbi had just come to the house wanting to talk to me telling her tell your son to get home immediately is going to be indicted this is for fd roberts i get an attorney i go to two gateway plaza in newark new jersey and i walk in there are three fbi agents two agents for the securities exchange commission two from the nasd two postal inspectors and two representatives from new jersey bureau securities so they get me in this room and they corner me asking me to wear a wire to testify against freddie gagliardo joe butch correao johnny perfetti and i said am i being charged today with anything and they said no i said conversation's over got up walked out never heard another word so it was a bluff i called him out on the bluff and i was fine so next after i leave fd roberts and this is where jordan and i are passed across again interesting enough if you if you looked at a breakdown of my securities license you'll see after fd roberts there were two other firms that i signed on for as i signed on both of them subsequently closed within days of me going there so i said okay i'm done with the small firms i'm going back to the big firms there was a major wall street firm been around 100 years called gruntal gruntal at the time was the third largest insurance company in the world insurance company yes but they had a broken dealer got it so i went to work in an office there i get a call from barry gesser barry gesser's jordan belford's right-hand man at oak at stratton or i didn't know at the time but i believe it was stratton security it's owned by a fellow by the name of jim taramina barry calls me cesaro what are you doing you're at gruntal are you crazy gruntle's like merrill lynch you can't own merrill lynch let me tell you what i'm doing you remember jordan so i said yeah he said okay i'm buying stratton securities jordan's buying a company called oakmon out in long island we're going to merge the companies we want you to own we want you to run the manhattan operation with the possibility of being national sales manager i said let me come meet you i drive into manhattan he's working at i'm sorry he's living at trump park which made an impression on me who's he jordan is barry gesser i never see jordan nor do i talk to him and i never did to this day so i drive to trump park barry's in his apartment i walk in and i said barry there's no way in the world you're getting me this early unless you pay me up front he says what do you want i said 35 000 cash up front he says done meet me at the office tomorrow we'll go over all the terms i went there i signed an agreement he gave me the check i said i'll start on monday i deposited the check in those days checks took forever to cash ultimately i start on monday on tuesday to check bounces i says barry you got to be kidding me man how do you let this check bounce i mean i'll leave in three seconds you got to make good on this ultimately he gives me another check or i redeposit it i don't remember it bounces again now he's with jordan in an office in long island i drive there like a raving lunatic and i'm banging on doors nobody will see me nobody will talk to me i take a bat i go under the building into the garage where his little red mercedes convertible is and i beat that car from beginning to end from from the sides to the windows to the mirrors and just destroyed the car left and never again heard from bearing yes i wrote jordan belford again as i was said and i had no dealings with jordan there only barry that's literally the story that is the truth okay 1989. so 89 at this point so the 35 000 check bounces twice you go destroy car they go on to merge stratton oakmont and then become stratton oakmont securities they've blown up yet has jordan blown up here i don't even to be honest with you i don't even know and i'm not bad mouthing anybody and i'm not starting any fights i i've never even heard of that i don't even know what they did it wasn't like you know the most popular firm on the street they were buried in long island doing their thing you know but the wolf of wall street i don't know anything you've seen a movie though yeah of course okay so you didn't know nothing about the stories of the parties any of that stuff no but that was the norm that was going on but you were not on the scene either so it's not like you were in the same party and because you were more a guy that was a married guy my office was okay i got you once i blew up and did my thing like we did the [ __ ] bowling that was you yeah but whether or not he did it too i can't tell you whether he did i remember a couple of my guys heard it on howard stern because howard stern had the [ __ ] polar so they they had a party one day in the office and they did it and i remember that the dwarfs with the helmets on they kept banging into the elevator so these guys were all crazy so i was around it i just didn't encourage it promoted it or participate emotionally but you guys did it all of them did it yeah we had a we got a what was it what would you you pay these men you pay them to do it like you how does that work it's like hey there was a 200 bucks to there was a service that provided this that's a business model what a stranger promoting it it was a strange business model okay so again not to say jordan wasn't real but yeah whether you want to say the book of the movie was you know i don't know there's footage of this guy partying like a madman and there's a lot of i'm sure they did yeah so so by the way i i watched the movie uh in sherman oaks at the arclight theater with my dad sitting all the way in the back my dad was cracking up for two and a half straight hours i said what'd you think about the movie great movie i'm like okay dad obviously the critics agreed because it was an academy award nominated i mean and obviously you have the lead guy if you're going to have anybody playing the lead it's it's not bad when you have the leo playing the level of course and scorsese yeah that's right little time i spent with him i i liked him a lot he was a very likable guy and there were no vices at the time you know sometimes that comes later you've got to be patient bites to show up what do i know about a guy that wants to do drugs and i know nothing about it sure i've never done a drug in my life so that's not your world you're not one dad no getting married early probably helped you out from not getting in too much trouble yeah i mean i i guess yeah one of the things that helped me is i had no vices none i like to gamble but i like to casino gamble and i never gambled over my head plus i had the money i never sports gambled never did drugs didn't you know do the women thing so it just wasn't in my you know universe which kept me clean makes sense okay so what happens next so this is going to have my own okay so now it's 1989 okay and i opened up one of the first franchise operations of a brokerage firm so with that being said it's like opening up a subway i didn't own the broker dealer but i owned the franchise they're 22 or 23 22. 22 years old you open up your own place how many that is called financial equity resources i hooked up with an investment banker in philadelphia by the name of howard appel who was absolutely brilliant and this was my foray into investment banking this is how i learned to do investment banking like today they call them spax special purpose acquisitions right corporations back then it was blind pools so we can raise money off a strong management team and then go look for the acquisition and then ultimately that became the reverse merger play and we were the kings of it but the blind pool did it have as bad of a reputation as spax do today or no it was too early to have any bad news nobody knew anything about it the first one we did is you may know the guy a fellow by the name of wayne allen root no okay he was like an early sports prognosticator a brilliant guy he's got you know he's got his blogs and his youtube thing going he's pretty famous now but at the time it was it was sports prognostication and that was the first blind pool we did got it so so 22 years old you start your own place you start doing uh blind pools you get the management team first you get the money and then you go find a business on what you guys want to do what happened we're doing a lot of reverse mergers but we're doing quality deals okay and i think that's what kept me underneath what were the deals how big were the deals you're doing no that was small deals you know the way you would normally work if you want me to give you a little lesson or for your viewers just understand what a reverse merger is the publicly traded company is there first and what that publicly traded company is is a company that's been stripped down it might have filed chapter 11 it might just be a depressed stock that's now trading at pennies a share so what we would do is we would let's say seek a company looking for financing so you come to me and you say sal i need 10 million dollars in cash we would tell you well we're not just going to give you 10 million dollars without having an already inherent exit strategy can we explain to you how to go public or that we could take you to work once you're buying in on that we'll use our own cash maybe give you a million bucks in cash just to hold you over and then we'll use that money or other money additional capital to buy that publicly traded company because it's trading at .001 cents a share and there's 50 million shares out there which cost us nothing so once we've bought and seized control of that publicly traded company we're now taking that first emerging the operating entity into it taking the company public hence the words reverse merger the public entity is there first now we have as much as twenty thirty forty percent of that stock that the ceo and his management team has whatever twenty thirty forty percent you have ten fifteen twenty percent of the already existing shareholders and you create that merger now the investment banking work comes in if the stock's trading at a penny you may want to do a reverse split make a trade at a dollar if it's trading at a dollar make it trade a 10 sure but now we have paper all of that is legal the illegality part is as the public is buying we're selling and in order to do that we have to let's say promote that stock which is still okay but it's the additional compensation given to a licensed stock broker in the form of a cash payment under the table where he no longer has his investors best interest at heart but lining his own pockets and that's the illegal part who else was doing that at the time everybody okay so even the bigger guys we're doing well i don't know about the bigger guys but there's always been additional compensation i'll give you an example and this is the way lehman qualified it they used to be soft dollar deals so the way lehman used to work is when they used to get a syndication and this indication is for let's say a company going public they're doing a hot ipo and everybody knows it's going to be a hot ipo so ultimately what they would do is they would get a syndication or a set amount based on their production so if patrick was one of the best brokers he's going to get a hundred thousand shares of this ipo now there are traders out there that covet that want that need your ipo now they can't compensate you so what they do is they give you an american express card and they say enjoy yourself take your wife on vacation go to the bars go to the strip joints whatever it is we got and there is the soft dollar deal as it's called got it so that form or let's say the practice has been around forever it's got different names and and maybe a different methodology but the practice itself has been around forever they're not doing it today anymore though right how do i know yeah i mean i never talk about things i don't know yeah finra's uh they did they have the gift limitation back in the days to clients or did they have a hundred dollar deal yeah yeah by the way we were talking about yesterday with a guy who's a doctor talking about opioids how these doctors are making all this money because these big pharma companies are giving uh uh you know whining and dying on these doctors i said if finra gave us a hundred dollar limit for client maybe the pharmaceutical industry needs to have a gift limit that they're giving their doctors but anyways that's a complete different conversation it's difficult to go after big pharma it is tough nowadays that's why you know they're doing what they're doing anyways going back to this so you're you're 20 to 23 you're you're running your shop you're doing these blinds it's a very small shop i got four or five guys okay i got two so walk me through what happens next you're doing these deals now this is where the plot thickens for me so now i'm making some money decent money more than more than fd yeah on certain occasions i am yeah but it's mostly with the undisclosed additional commissions 100 a month yeah some months even more okay it depends so you're making a mill a year yeah absolutely so now at this point somebody approaches me and wants me to finance their finance company it's it's like an advanced fee loan business so i look at it i do my due diligence it's 100 legitimate i agree to bankroll them when i do i throw my dad in there to watch my investment he's retired at this point so he's working there and i throw my sister in there to answer the phones so i have enough coverage in there or at least i take solace that they know what they're doing so ultimately this becomes a criminal operation in other words overzealous sales reps using their fake names charging advance fees upfront so i'm not a participant in it i don't contribute to it but at the end of the day i'm as guilty as they are the money's going to be sure so i'm i'm a participant in this so with that i think we receive something like 900 inquiries at the better business bureau in 1990 okay so that encourages and precipitates a postal service investigation into the firm i give an interview to the local paper they knew it was coming i explained to them nothing is more valuable to me than the integrity of my firm my integrity uh what they're accusing of is wrong so on and so forth ultimately i get indicted my dad gets indicted my sister gets indicted very clever on that part because my sister although she's just answering the phone is now a party to a conspiracy which means if i go to trial i'll beat this in three seconds but am i going to risk her and now now i have a problem so i ultimately have to plead guilty that guilty plea is going to give me a mandatory jail sentence one and number two it's going to ban me from ever working on wall street again so i agree i plead guilty sometime in 92 and in 1993 i started three-year sentence in morgantown west virginia this is the 30 months that you got correct okay got it so now when i get there i'm in morgantown west virginia my father's there with me and if i can be 100 honest i'm having the time of my life this was this was like almost an organized crime training camp for me because all the gangsters are there everybody's talking about their war stories they're talking about this and there were some big guys that it was the jackalone family from detroit and my buddy jackie is now the boss of the detroit partnership dead there guys from pittsburgh uh youngstown ohio steubenville ohio a couple of guys from new york so you know if you look at every crew let's see the colombians are three or four guys puerto ricans and three or four guys darian brotherhood of three or four guys we were like 40 strong having the time of our life so this is supposed to discourage me when i arrive back home i mean if if the fear is prison you could take that element out of my life and i'm the kid i'm the baby they all love me i'm carrying things for them i'm helping them yeah everybody called me the kid the kid that was pretty popular it was well liked and we had a ball so now i get released and i say to myself okay what's my next move so before my release i'm doing about six months worth of research trying to figure out what my next gig is and it looks like the head the hottest sector right now due to the breakup of the baby bells is long-distance phone service it looked like like you could make big money in commissions distance phone service are you talking like excel communication cards because the baby bells broke up yeah so the phone cards it's a big business and you're switching to long-distance service you use a t well i'm working for this company representing them we could save you 20 30 and i'm going to make a commission of up to 30 percent on your remember the company names jerry communications got it i remember quest was doing it too right that's what's going on first yeah there was a few lcp which became no i'm sorry uh i forgot what it was but that became a publicly traded new york stock exchange stock it was a hot sector so this is what i chose to participate in so when i get home i'm looking for bank i'm looking for you know somebody to stake me and a buddy of mine who was the nephew of a gangster by the name of john gamarano he approaches me saying look my uncle will put this up because he's a pretty popular guy a strong businessman strong wise guy well he's not a wise guy but he's not a maid guy but he's a gangster his name is joe watts and joe white is making a fortune in this my uncle wants to put you two together so i meet with john gamarano joe watts i go over this whole business model of what i'm looking to do joe watson's making a fortune with the phone cards so johnny gamarano agrees to stake me he does we open up the office i start doing well johnny had always assumed that one way or another i would go back to wall street in one capacity or another so now the most interesting part of this in the trajectory of my life is now when i return home less than three years later everybody's a stock broker all of bay ridge all the bensonhurst everybody's a broker and everybody is making a fortune off this new invention called the world wide web this is 92.99 94.95 so now it's the start or the advent of the internet guys are making a killing so this is when all of these firms popped out of the woodwork and everybody was making a fortune now i'm still relegated to doing the long distance service i got a nice business i'm starting to ramp up but the itch to get back to wall street was always there so then my original partner howard appel the guy from philadelphia tells me about this one stock that he's working it's called nal financial and it's backed by even wayne heisenga here in florida who at the time was the chairman and the founder of blockbuster video very wealthy guy so i think one of the reasons why i was able to stay under the radar for so long patrick is because we always did quality deals like investors always had a shot there were nobody there was no customer complaints and if nobody's complaining we're not on the radar so with that said we did this nal financial deal and this was a hot deal so my job was to find stock brokers to promote it and then additionally i can compensate them under the table in cash and we got off again so now it's may of 1995. i have a wedding to pay for that's when my wife and i were married i needed money i needed to jump back into this universe and now i'm noticing all this mob influence on wall street you had so many wise guys involved who had a piece of this what a piece it is what a piece of this any big names or no uh yeah you had uh like it's probably better for me if i don't get that specific if you don't mind what were they bosses involved the underbosses involved like the high that were involved in this the money was too good not to and let me just say something the mob has always been on wall street it may be different capacity i don't care if you know they they find a box of zero coupon bonds but the point is the mob has always had an influence on wall street not to this degree but the mob has always been there even today how can i vouch for what happens today right you know but the mob is my assumption is yes if there's money to be made on wall street particularly particularly you know when you can corrupt the broker or too you know makes sense okay so so now this is my first deal and we make big money right off the bat this is the nil n-e-l n-a-o and a-l so now a buddy of mine my best friend from my whole life who's working at gruntal okay grundle decides to make a market meaning they're going to support and trade nao financial that's how legit this stock was this is no penny stock so i grabbed joe i said listen your firm's already in this why don't you get out of there i'll stake it we'll open up a broken dealer under you and you know with these internet stocks and some of the deals that howard and i are working on we can make an absolute fortune after a lot of coaching and explaining he finally agrees so now i have my hands on a brokerage firm now there's a lot of heat there's a lot of pressures a lot of investigation so i don't want to put a bullseye on my forehead by owning a broken dealer so i decide to go the franchise route again the way i did earlier on by owning the franchise you take a lot of the the watchful eyes of the regulators and the scrutiny off yourself and it's more on corporate so we did a couple of deals it was a company called argent securities out of atlanta jp turner securities shamrock partners we were able to keep changing the name on the door to avoid any kind of you know heat or problems do quality deals not be the direct owners of the firm so the regulatory scrutiny goes to corporate and we were able to capture a run and the kind of deals we did were insane i remember this one deal it was called metro media china when i started on wall street in 1985 there were four billionaires in the world that's it just four billionaires number four on that list was a guy by the name of john kluge john kluge was the chairman of metro media now we owned a shell company that was already in china and john kluge's team was trying to get to china to build out the cable infrastructure there he couldn't get in there without buying something that was already that he could be more or less grandfathered in so now we're in bed with the fourth richest man in the world ultimately we put up like let's say a million bucks of cash raised 10 million from the public he put up a ton of money the deal ends up blowing up china throws all foreign ownership out of the country howard appel calls me one morning he says listen we're still getting [ __ ] we're just getting [ __ ] by better quality people that's the phone call we're still getting [ __ ] we're just getting [ __ ] by better quality people again the guy's the fourth richest billionaire in the world so we always did quality deals so even though that one didn't work out i mean you want to talk about a shot that we had there you talk about building out the cable infrastructure in the country so we always did quality deals and we were able to capture or run as a result but what made me really deadly and this was probably the separator from let's say me and a strategy is when you do this i mean this is a criminal enterprise you're never going to trust everybody or trust anybody a hundred percent but there has to be some sort of trust i'm paying you cash in a bag and charging you and going out and soliciting this stock so how do you get these co-conspirators patrick how do you develop these people well you have a lot of wise guys that have a lot of kids around them and they have a lot of wannabe gangsters and this was their way in by getting license or paying another individual to take the series seven for them which became very popular and now they're told to play ball with zao so now i have the mob recruiting the brokers for me because nobody was ever going to shake me down i wasn't going to pay protection money per se that wasn't me although i knew i needed protection you can't run this enterprise but i was too much of an ego too much of an egomaniac to say hey i need protection let me pay you scratch your ass produce something for me well recruit brokers and i'll give you a piece so if i'm paying the broker twenty percent i'm gonna pay the wise guys ten percent i'm gonna slowly move up the ranks i'm a guy that can keep his mouth shut i don't fear jail i can handle myself i have the brains i have the work ethic this is a perfect marriage this was the way it all began what kind of money did you start making at that time when you say start or finish i mean i'm just giving you the finish what were you at the end what was your biggest year was 99 i made 30 million you're net at 30 million and 99 it's always net it's green yeah that is the number that matters so you're making 30 and 99 and and what's i mean at that point is this when you're living in your 5 million home you got 2 million dollars of you're trying to figure out a place where to hide the cash and that's in other words knowing that there's no way in the world this was going to last my play and what was in my head is diversification diversification diversification so i spread it out all over the place five million dollar excuse me uh four million dollars in restaurants real estate all under other people's names so i was big with cash businesses and a lot of businesses i don't care if it was a beauty parlor or a piece of career every laundry everything so my point is i know ultimately this is going to end so you're going to bring 2000 a week to my wife you're going to bring 5 000 a month to my wife you're bring two thousand a day to my wife knowing that i had to spread around the plan was that if something happened to me she would be well provided for i paid cash for my home the home wasn't under me or the business so you know i did it i made enough moves where i was trying to at least be able to provide for them if something bad happened for me and then along the way you know we just started doing more and more deals and we started getting more and more popular and you know you mentioned the paul anka thing before and yeah i mean it was just a crazy what was it like what was uh are you partying hard are you having fun what are you guys doing i'm in my life of course we're partnering with some stories what were some of the things you guys were doing i mean you know i'm hearing the story about 50 60 000 of cash being thrown at strip clubs what were some of the things that were happening that was a stereotype for the broker during the time that was never my thing so what did you get how did you guys party well you know one of the things i felt responsible for and this probably an illustration of how crazy i am i got involved in the boxing promotion business and i wanted to be the biggest and best promoter in the world but i felt almost charged with the responsibility of bringing it back to the wise guys bringing it back to the italians which hasn't had a foothold on on boxing since probably the early 1960s so with that said i i invested in a promotion company and then i really worked it in other words we had some famous fighters we had eric harding who fought roy jones jr for the light heavyweight championship that was roy's last fight under his hbo agreement this is when roy was still roy i had james tony i had mitch blood green who fought tyson we had bernard hopkins but i i opted not to sign him so i mean this was my thing so this was a passion play and this is how i end up meeting paul anger because what happened was i signed an agreement with espn where i was their exclusive espn2 friday night fights that was my show so we would travel all over the country in these boxing matches so my casino host at the mirage was steve wynn's sister-in-law it was steve wynn's wife's sister her name was marianne she introduced me to paul anka paul paul and i struck up an immediate friendship and relationship and then paul brings me a deal that to this day i'm sick to my stomach that i passed on and i'll tell you that funny story he tells me he says now i own an entertainment company which we'll get to shortly but he says listen he says i got a kid i want to sign the kid he's got no money he needs quick cash so why don't you and i former production company so he comes up with the name ranca productions which is a derivative of romano and anchor so we formed that company with his attorney whose name was stuart silfen very famous entertainment attorney i have no attorney coverage in this deal at all and i'm looking at the agreement and it's this thick anyway the plan was and david foster was not famous the way he is today but david foster had an agreement with sony where they were gonna sign him to a two album deal and i could get my money back almost immediately so i said well how much we have to put into it and he said it's like 400 grand so i said let me hear the cd so he plays me this cd it's michael buble he plays me the cd so i said i don't know paul i mean you know big band music i mean he said so i'm telling you the guy's just like harry connick jr it's okay do we really need another harry connick junior ball listen to me if there's one thing i know paul's music this guy's got no shot he'll never make it make a long story that's a joke but i never said that make a long story show when i'm reviewing the contract it's me putting up 400 grand he doesn't have one quarter in this yeah so anyway i supported a pass on this deal he loses his mind hates my guts as a result that deal blows up and michael buble becomes what michael boy is today i was listening to michael buble last night putting my daughter down i was she wanted to listen to christmas song so i played a michael buble christmas song he's got the he's got a very unique voice how do you think we had a market for him paul sang the song right sounds sounds way he did something for like opening up one of your businesses i don't know what it was this was my get out deal and we had a launch party and we brought him in just to sing it so he changed the lyrics to uh knob sorry he changed yeah he changed the lyrics of my way he made it sal's way sal's way so so let's go back to the mob so you're doing stuff with you you get introduced through john uh johnny g gamorano and then from there something happens to john i think he goes away and then you get hooked up with mikey scars what happens to you walk me through this so cause mikey scars was a cowboy right he was accomplished yes there was some stories about him potentially he was lined up to be the next boss yeah that came a few years later after he and i were extremely close which we would not at this time but gamorano is my guy so basically as johnny's under indictment the entire time that i initially met him so i'm living in the halfway point when you guys met out the marriott and then he met him right okay they're very good by the way with your research the day i meet him he's under indictment in louisiana and i'm in a halfway house so i'm still in the bureau of prison's custody i'm living in bedfordstein brooklyn at a halfway house and he and i have our first meeting and he approached me like look i heard you're a big money maker you know what you're doing you're your kid to keep his mouth shut i checked you out even going to the guys in the midwest they have nothing but great things to say about you i want you to meet joe watson we'll get hooked up with this so ultimately we do but then when i'm doing the wall street gig now they're one problem after another that i got to keep bringing him into so now he's involved in pretty much everything i'm doing the problem that he makes his mistake is now he's going away and he doesn't tell anything about tell anybody about anything he's doing with me at all which is a cardinal mistake his contention was he invested his own money in this legitimate enterprise and he doesn't have to explain it or report to anybody god okay that was a cracker [ __ ] it might have been your own money but you can't have a more illegal enterprise that i'm running in fact robin morgenthau manhattan district attorney said if this firm did anything legitimate it was by accident so everything was that was his quote if this firm did anything legitimate was by accident wow now i would challenge the statement but it is what it is that was it so now mikey mikey scarce comes in no it's not that simple patrick back up so now john you're teasing us he's teasing us with mike well i'll get to it so john tell i said john what do i do with you going away i mean we've got peeps every day there's another problem here i mean look at the way we live our lives i mean this is not going to be kept quiet he says okay he says there's a guy in staten island which i don't want to mention his name he's still very active today you see him if there's any problem i said okay then he comes back to me says don't see him do you know who mikey scars is i said yes i do he said do you know him i said no he says maybe you see him then he comes back another day and he says you're not going to see him just see my nephew i said just see your nephew you know if he's not even a street guy how's that going to help me what does that mean anyway he leaves it like that with me so of course as predicted we have 20 problems the minute he leaves because everybody's around and everybody's ironing it everybody's doing something there's going to be a lot of beats as a result so now i have an issue what the nephew decides to do is rather than put it on reggie with our family the gambinos he goes to the bananas because he's got a friend there to try to represent this so now i'm like are you out of your mind it don't work that way you're gonna create problems for your uncle problems for me this is crazy but he stayed pretty steadfast with that okay so now i'm at a firm and that firm is doing an initial public offering okay there's an ipo coming and actually let me back up so now with that said i try to sever myself a little bit from that problem because i know this kid just made a major mistake you don't go to another family that was a mistake so at this point michael sends two guys to come see me two guys that i know very very well made men or no uh one to me guy one is a associate associate yeah big guy though so i meet them at a restaurant right next to my office they called me and when they called me i said who is this and they uh said it's heckle and jekyll or whatever stupid name they use so they said we're next door at the restaurant come see us so i go there and there's a vestibule there and in the vest of you we don't actually go in the restaurant and one of them says listen you guys are doing an ipo that ipo has got to come here it's got to beat us i said well the ipo is not going to you it's going to johnny he said you can't do that i said listen to me johnny's writing me letters he's calling my house he's telling me i got to be strong he's only as strong as his friends are on the street i can't give you this he said well this is going to be a problem so i said well i don't know what you want to do you want to roll around right here in the vestibule you're not getting it i don't know what you want to do but you're not getting it that night i go to a club in uh bay ridge brooklyn michael's at the bar and i went there specifically to see maybe he'd be around i was going to approach him but i knew he'd approach me so he sends one of the guys that i saw in a vestibule over to see me and he says michael won't stop you so i see michael at the bar this is 1996 and he says you're crazy man you go to see my two thugs like that my goons and you tell them what you told you don't need to see anybody else you're with me you just see me like you think this guy johnny could help let me know this is leonardo this is okay number one he's old number two he's not well liked number three's a drunk number four when he comes home he's moving to florida you know he can't do anything who's the time of moving to florida johnny toronto okay johnny yeah so now i got a skipper telling me i'm directly with him so i got to make a decision how much more loyalty can i continue to support johnny g with now that michael himself is telling me this so i'm going to guys that i respect their opinion wise guys what do i do everybody's saying you don't understand michael he's going to be a boss one day you're in great shape this guy's going to be a boss you're doing the right thing but now technically i'm betraying gamorano which i'm very uncomfortable about am i willing to die over it i don't maybe i mean i love the life i wanted to be part of his life this was made for me and i didn't want to answer to anybody so i had very lofty goals i didn't want to be a skip around to be boss i mean 100 italian doesn't matter for you you don't even have to be 100 italian your father has to be italian they changed it yeah it used to be the mother could pretty much be anything and your father has to be attacked at the time okay so you're okay so i thought it was 100 cecilia my point is i don't take orders very well but i'm going to be in this i want to run it were you really ambitious enough to one day want to be a boss or no if it was there for the taking yes i would have okay because i i think i understand the biggest mistake the mob ever made the biggest mistake ever besides the fact that there's no loyalty and there's just they made such a mess of it the problem is if they ever ever really implemented then this is supposed to be organized crime i mean look how organized it was with maya lansky and lucky luciano so you know everybody says when gotti came it's because paul was a businessman paul was a businessman he didn't know the street first of all of course paul knew the straight he was indicted and did time for hijacking so don't say he wasn't a straight guy maybe you know he forgot those roots and he became a businessman but that's exactly what was needed without a doubt a businessman not nobody was flipping at the time how do you explain that so what happened is now with the new regime nobody's providing for these families so if patrick is going to go away for sal that sal better do the right thing for patrick's family and with nobody doing that and nobody implementing that and instilling those values and you're left for the philistines why would you stay loyal why why would you so you understand merta was impossible in my world this and i'm going to use the word conformity a lot if are you familiar with joe valachi of course okay so joe village he lets he was the first rat sure but what joe valachi did is he gave mario puzo and francis ford coppola the platform to understand a world they never would have understood and because of all that information out there from velocity now puzzle's able to write a book so once francis ford coppola comes into this mix and he's such a family-oriented guy he brings the family element into organized crime in the mafia and what happens is everybody wants to be part of this so the the wise guys may have not acted yeah the way the way marlon brando acted now they wanted to act that way so you want to talk about art imitating life or life imitating heart there's the reason so now you have a whole new spectrum of what this is supposed to be about but everybody forgets this patrick so let me remind you of something there was no federal presence there was no fed investigation as early as 1960 you have j edgar hoover stating publicly there's no such thing as them so if you're relegated to local cops you keep them on the payroll you stay off the radar it was pretty easy then once rudy starts bringing in you know the ricoh act and now you have that he changed the game though before him bobby kennedy really did too because now all of a sudden there was an attack on the mob and the only reason in my world why bobby kennedy ever went after the mob was to keep it quiet about how his brother became president there's a lot of different speculations there there's a lot of different speculations there because of all situation would they they were worried about illinois with dewey they needed those seven thousand votes from dead people west virginia they really didn't need illinois by the way that was going to happen without it and then they hated the fact that there was that uh you always a favorite type of mentality and bobby had the bigger ego than john apparently uh but at the same time there's a little bit of link with the marilyn monroe and women and sonny there's a lot of different stories to it but but the point is once the attack on the mafia started now and it's publicity now and it's publicity nobody needed it and joe bonanno's book also didn't help by the way he wrote that book that joe colombo with his italian civil rights campaign and then of course john in 1985 so what shot did this have so if it's going to be an imminent prison sentence for everybody provide for the families do you think guys are flipping because they're afraid of jail these guys these are men interesting nobody's afraid of jail they're afraid of not providing for their family so if you and that was one of mikey scars concerns as well when he talked about in the interview with trevor mcdonald he says i called the guys i'm like wait a minute i need food for my wife for my wife and the boss said get her on uh welfare because she needs to get on so let me get her on welfare i can't get her on welfare and then that's when he flipped they showed that in good fellows too yeah so the concern is if you can't support your family the person is going to flip well that's just one you know part of it did you follow tommaso boshiro's story as well or no similar story there as well slightly different there because of uh you know the point is a wise guy takes an oath to put this okay cos an australia yeah ahead of god and their own family i mean only an imbecile would actually do that you may make that profession at your induction ceremony but do you think anybody really believes that do you want to put this thing because ahead of your child ahead of your god i mean what's that gonna get you so it's a fake statement to begin with but my point is if they ever implemented something to provide for the families and how would they have to be a formula you know based on your contributions earnings based on where you were still somebody still would have flipped them without a doubt yeah but my point is it would have been less i think it would have been contained no it would have been less okay so now you you get with mikey scars they tell you he's going to be the boss he's a couple at that time you're going in is this still 99 when you're netting 30 or would you resist with mikey starts 96 so now it's 97 and the fbi comes to my house knocks on the door six o'clock in the morning and has two agents there and they tell me i'm going to be assassinated they tell me there's a contract on my life and it's coming from the west side which is the genovese family so i said can you tell me why and they were like we don't know anything about you we just obligated to tell you this from informants there's contract on your life from the west side i said and you can't tell me anything he said supposedly some stock deal that went bad so i said well i'm not involved in stocks so i don't even know what you're talking about they said look we're just giving you the heads up so obviously i took this as a credible threat so in my mind i believe this is gamorano from prison got it plotting to kill me knowing he can't use the gambino family to kill me so he had to go to the west side that's what i believe now so now i have a choice do i sit inside like a hermit do i change my lifestyle i didn't even move into my new house yet and i only had i had two children they were babies and i'm still on parole i got a probation officer an answer to so now i call her and i tell her i guess i'm obligated to tell you this but the fbi just left here telling me i'm going to be killed she said well if you have any problems you know my number i'm licensed to carry a firearm great so now i'm left saying what do i do now so obviously i go to michael i explained to him what's going on and i said would you think i was crazy if i told you i think it was gamorano he says no i wouldn't think you're crazy i think you're very very smart you've come a long way in these last few years and we were left to believe that so yeah i guess this is when i started realizing you know i don't want to say how tough i am but yeah at the end of the day i wasn't going to change anything i made the decision that this is my life that i am in this i'll do what i can to protect myself i have my crew i'll do whatever i can but i'm not going to change anything and again i hadn't even moved into my home yet i hadn't even bought the new brokerage firm that i was going to buy and this was just really at the start so we got off we did deal after deal i did all of these other businesses things were going very very well and then pete gotti gets pinched in 2002 at some point and then at my restaurant we're having a birthday party for michael i want to say that was june 2002 after michael left his party he arrived home and i think at five o'clock in the morning that morning he got picked up and pinched so now he was arrested too so now ironically enough at the time where michael is now in jail camarado's now back on the street so where do you think that leaves me and this is where everybody betrays me i get bounced around from guy to guy nothing but issues nothing but problems 9 11 happened the internet bubble in march of 2000 happen things are no longer robust and good and now camarado's playing his games and now this is when everything goes bad and then ultimately in may of 2003 is when i agreed to flip okay so at this point a bunch of stuff is happening you're getting to a point where you're gonna have to cooperate because you know gamorano is coming out yeah you're worried what's going to happen if he comes out this is you said 0203 it's right after 9 11. it's o203 so but pre talking about what happens when you cooperate when you're making 30 a year i'm assuming you're probably partying with the best of the best i'm assuming you have some stories i'm assuming you're on celebrities i'm assuming you know you probably are being invited to some exclusive parties what was the life like at the time yeah well with the boxing company which was really my baby you know that's what i guess gave me you know a platform to do other things you know we were in negotiations for about six months with sugar ray leonard's company he had formed sugary leonard boxing and he was throwing his hat in the ring with promotion firm as well so we had a few meetings with him we hit it all very very well and then that became meeting with tommy hearns and and his management to try to acquire the cronk name out of detroit croc boxing we were negotiating with them simultaneously we had acquired the rights i signed the license agreement to gleason's gym in brooklyn and we had opened up an additional like a satellite operation of gleason's in long island where we had gleasons too so what we were utilizing this for was a stable of bringing up young upcoming fighters we could keep a pulse on them we could bankroll them finance them try to you know be instrumental in their careers so you know during that and you know doing a lot of traveling to vegas southern california uh the foxwoods in connecticut you know we were always hobnobbing with a lot of celebrities so joe montana had approached the associate of mine where he was doing a lifestyle magazine called joe montana's in the red zone which was a lifestyle sports magazine what year is this this was 97 i want to say is he still playing for the chiefs he's not no he's no longer what he's done yeah he's done so he came to me came to our office and we had acquired i want to say probably upwards of 50 of the rights to that magazine so the magazine had launched we had run you know two consecutive months it did pretty well and then essentially paul anka had introduced me to a guy by the name of bernie hewman bernie human only managed he was a manager he only managed two acts in his entire life muhammad ali and siegfried and roy wow and he's the one that landed sig freedom roy that big deal at the mirage paul anka's best friend is steve nguyen the owner of the murrah so when at the time when we did the montana magazine we wanted to approach ali we wanted to try to do something with ali now anka had had his own vision in mind what he wanted to do was because of the relationship with bernie human and the mirage as well as you know his intimate information on the rat pack and the special effects that they utilize for siegfried and roy paul anka wanted to do this entire show where he brings back the rat pack back to life to i guess with holograms to perform with him utilizing the special effects of siegfried and roy so bernie human agreed to me with me we met at the four seasons in manhattan and we and we were trying to get that show off the prerequisite that i gave and i said you got to give me ali everybody told me that ali was untouchable you could never get to ali that he'll never do anything with that said bernie was able to get me ali and we did the muhammad ali i think it was for his 50th birthday at the time the commemorative special magazine for his 50th birthday which was coming out simultaneously with the release of will smith's film ali so we had that deal in the pipeline today do these guys did montana did i ali did their camp i don't know that you're an associate with the gambino family i don't think initially but over time yes because paul agger absolutely did it's one of the reasons why i fell in love with me in other words anchor was a kid when i say kid he was in his mid-20s to early 30s during the time of the rat pack but they took him under his wing i mean he wrote songs for sammy davis he wrote my way for sinatra so anchor would be out there legend i mean he's so he saw us me and my crew in reverse in other words now he was sinatra and we were the young guys around him and that's what he loved so i traveled all over the country with him in other words we either promoting boxing matches or hanging with him he was going through a pretty ugly divorce at the time which nobody knew about so he was traveling with his girlfriend you know i mean he let me into that world and i became very very close but as a result i was forming a sports media entertainment company that i was ultimately going to take public and i made him you know like an advisory board member and then ultimately the ceo of the advisory board so he was able to bring me a lot of properties and ordinarily he wasn't a shareholder he was a warrant holder warren hold okay there's this he did not own stock but he don't want it's protected if it's warranted so it's it's slightly different than having shares so when i knew that the heat was on me and the pressure was coming what i decided to do was take all of these properties that i owned anything that could be deemed media entertainment leisure and even roll up the restaurants that i had into a publicly traded show i bought a company called jaguar investments i had 35 million shares jaguar was trading at six dollars a share and this was my get out deal so now this is after the internet bubble which hurt us greatly in march of 2000 we're entering 2001. i needed we had more properties we had a grease remake starring britney spears and justin timberlake in the year 2000 when nobody even knew who these kids were so they were they were they were get out of here they weren't popular yet but they were known so we had we had justin timberlake and britney spears signed to do a grease remake one we had a contract with nbc to do the first reality golf circuit tournament which at the time the only reality show out at the time was survivor so nbc loved this model we had the rights to john travolta's next three films we bought a small production company a guy by the name of jonathan crane and he had the rights to travel this next three films this is at a time where he had just released swordfish just to put a timeline to it so we had what we deemed you like swordfish that was all right i'm with you go ahead that would have been the first film we did so at this point you're worth about a quarter of a billion if you take thirty five times six that's 210. but that's without all the other assets remember i owned a brokerage firm that managed a half a billion dollars at your peak what was your net worth actually i don't know i don't know it's too fragmented yeah i mean if you go the value of the brokerage firm and all the paper that i own i mean at one point we had done four penny stocks literally pennies in in january of 2000 all four of them were trading north of 30 a share a penny stock to 30 yeah i mean because they were all technology driven and now i mean we bought the uh the yahoo ipo was up 100 points in one day this was a crazy time so it was so hard for me to qualify it or quantify the amount it really was it was very difficult makes sense why didn't you go legit though why why didn't you go i was planning to with this premiere deal but i waited till you know the heat got to the point where it was inevitable that i was do you think you think you would ever go legitimately you know how everybody says i was planning like you know the movie what's that one movie i love them with carlito's way where he gets i said i'm not doing that you know i'm not doing this and then he's taking his nephew the nephew gets shot up at this one bar and he's like well you know one day we're gonna go live i'm telling you we're gonna go live this place and then you know benny blanco from the bronx shows up at the end says hey remember me benny blanco from the bronx everybody says they're going to leave but are you really going to leave their life patrick here's the way i'll frame it to you okay in all honesty yeah because i'm probably the biggest hypocrite in the world in other words i believed i was somewhat legit i did quality companies people were making money there were no victims it's not like we were robbing pension funds and widows or bernie madoff with a ponzi scheme i wore a suit and die every day i got in earlier than anybody i stayed later and i worked and i tried to develop the crimes that were guilty of enterprise corruption racketeering money laundering bribery the furtherance of organized crime tax evasion all guilty as charged but i could always shave my own face in the mirror and sleep soundly at night because i never robbed people that wasn't my game we weren't doing fake companies and hurting the public there were no victims at the time the only time that victims developed and there was a manisterfation of it but the only time that manifested into victims was after the internet bubble in in march of 2000 because whenever they came crashing down as well as the heat so this enterprise this premier sports media and entertainment group that i tried to do tried to build would have been the get out deal but the mob was still a very very strong hold in my life if i was going to be in this i was going to try to be boss so to say legit now i never thought about going legit because the mob was always a big stronghold on me did you ever have any direct dealings with any of the bosses or no yeah louis they don't he was the boss of little casey acting boss of the lucasy family he was a very very dear friend when we did the full angle launch party he grabbed my mother pulled her aside he said your son mrs romano is a rose among thorns and i'll never forget him saying that wow and then he grabbed michael and he said michael when are you going to straighten this kid out if you don't make him i am so yeah i was very liked and and louie i did a lot of business well i did some business with i shouldn't say a lot mostly moving money around and i loved him to death he's doing life sentence now in louisburg i believe or allah would excuse me so 03 you decide to cooperate what happens next when you decide to cooperate no you're never forced i made a decision but i was greatly betrayed and that's what encouraged my thinking to cooperate michael had already flipped and i knew michael uh you know reluctantly would have to tell them everything about me i knew i had an investigation that was ramping up for the district attorney's office in manhattan so i knew i had state problems i knew i had fed problems and i knew the heat was closing in on me i would have done my time i never in a million years would have agreed to cooperate what really encouraged my my thought process on cooperating is the betrayal in other words i was doing business with a very famous producer who's also one of the largest real estate holders in the united states and he's about two blocks south of here so unfortunately i don't want to get into his name but he's a big guy and he was corrupt and we were doing a lot of things together and that being said he was in bed with another fella and i will mention that name a guy by the name of eli weinstein that name meant nothing to me had no idea who that is anyway i met with a skipper in the gambino family capo who pulled me in and said you're doing business with this norton herrick guy so i said yeah he just gave me a six million dollar mortgage on my house in other words i had paid cash for my house and when i knew the heat was coming in this was a good time to pull money out of it so i said yeah i'm doing a lot of business with him he's got like 10 million to cash up with me he just gave me six million from my house he said okay he says he's got something that this eli weinstein wants we need you to go to him and tell him to give eli weinstein back everything i said how do you even know who this guy is and how are you putting him with me what do you know i had another meeting and a guy had another wise guy and that guy had a post-it a little yellow posted and it said the name of this producer and he said sal i want to talk to you about this guy i said you're another one what do you guys have to do with my guy he's mine how does anybody even know this guy exists so does eli weinstein give it back tell him to give it back to him okay i go to this guy and i said look this is what i've been told you know who i am you got to give blah blah you got to give it back to him he says i'm not doing anything without me talking to my guy and my guy's in chicago i said well you're going to have to give me your name so we can make our people talk to him anyway to make a long story short i was then met with the same cabo and he said sal you know this guy that you're shaking down for all this money back the [ __ ] off him what the hell are you talking about now you're protecting him are you guys crazy what are you talking about now you fast forward to today today the last order of business that donald j trump did as president united states is he granted a presidential pardon to eli weinstein who received a 20-year sentence for embezzling 300 million dollars from the jewish community of people he saw every day so if trump wanted to commute a sentence you'll do that for somebody that's wrongfully accused you know harshly judged or a myriad of reasons that you could justify this guy embezzled 300 million dollars from his community and got a presidential pardon as a result he did six years on a 25 or 30 year sentence that when he was out on bond he committed a further crime and robbed 45 million dollars regarding an investment in facebook while he was out on bond trump excuse me he did not give him a pardon he commuted a sentence down to an immediate release and that was the last order of business that trump did as he was walking out the door who the hell is this guy no nothing all i know is that's that's what my research showed as early as a week ago that's insane what what a connection of the stories and by the way if you're saying the big producer real estate i mean you pretty much gave them away maybe it's the name but that's a whole different story i won't say the name i'll say the name go forward norton herrick okay you knew that if you're saying here local yeah so it's not going to be hard to figure that part out but anyway so i was doing a ton of business he was one of my largest investors i mean we had a lot of you know we had paul de jouria who's the owner of paul mitchell we had the bellsburg family up in canada the seagram's family i mean this is the kind of money that we were around so we always did legit deals and that's why i was able to stay under the watchful eye of the regulators for so long these are the type of deals we did but this norton herrick guy i mean there's a patrick it would take me three hours to explain that story he and i were joined at the hip he had a publicly treated company i was working it from time to time he asked me to drive the price down of his publicly traded company the reason for that is things were it was a tumultuous market he believed the banks would give him more favorable rates if they believe that he was imminently looking to file chapter so i mean this goes on and on and on and then i recorded tape conversations of him i was trying to extort him to get the deed to my home back he ran and the guys that were with me or i was with are now betraying me for him and it goes on and on like that everybody betrays everybody in that world it's a very uh the only guy that from uh i had a meeting with sunny francis i don't know if you know what you of course you know michael's father standing friends at a meeting with uh sonny three times we met because i was trying to do the interview and every time no last time i went out there we took a crew of five of us six of us camera and i took him to an italian restaurant i'm driving him to the town university it's 102 years old we're moving them with a wheelchair but the guy had the energy of a 20 year old he could talk so what do you think about such and such great guy what do you think about lucky he's your error you're from his era fantastic guy what do you think about ben siegel great guy how about meyer great family guy who is meyer billionaire i don't know what you're talking about so so he was so he did 55 years yep in jail 55 years just because he said this is the life i chose he stuck to it and allegedly he was innocent on that original church he was innocent yeah he was innocent on that well other things he was not but on that one charge they got him they wanted to kind of just violating yeah and then but that but you know on that one charge yes he he was innocent on that one charge so all three you cooperate you chose to at this point what happens to life from o3 to today did you stay low-key intentionally like listen i'm just going to what did you do for the opposite i you know i opened up a legitimate they relocated me to san diego california uh most of my partners were persian like yourself they almost got to the point where i could speak fluent farsi at this point i mean everybody was iranian so i did business with old persians 80 persian restaurants they staked me we were able to get lucky with a couple of companies and then you know again i'm the luckiest guy in the world i'm living in rancho santa fe california and at the time oil is skyrocketing right away i started investing in oil and gas deals and then my partner who went into the program with me unfortunately he gets the bad luck of being sent to des moines iowa well the great thing about des moines iowa is right now biodiesel and alternative energy is in favor and he's in the corn capital of the world so we were able to invest wisely in energy and then hedge wisely in alternative energy and we got off we did very very very well again no trouble since 03. yeah there's been trouble nothing i want to talk about this time but yes there's there's always trouble the government is constantly coming after me constantly so how do you make money today are you fine right right now you're low-key you're not really doing anything business-wise nothing that i would want to get into publicly okay got it so just more low-key today more so so so are we going to see more of sal romano out there is there going to be more stuff about you out there are you more or less trying to just keep it low-key and you did this interview just to do this interview no absolutely not i've been asked to do interviews for the last i don't know close to 20 years constantly everybody that ever heard my story says when are you going to write a book when are you going to write a book because i'm only giving you a certain amount of everything that i have in the arsenal and i think right now with the situation that i'm in it's about controlling the narrative i don't want stories being written about me or told without me at least having a say in how it's framed because i'll only frame the truth i'm a devoted devoted devoted catholic i love my faith i i pride myself on being somewhat of a novice theologian but i you know i my book is basically a correlation of my spirituality and my faith along with my past culmination to where i'm at today in life so yeah there's a story to tell and after many years of contemplation i believe now is the time to tell it and no better than uh to launch with you sir well it's it's great to have you on here i am sure this is going to steer the pot with a lot of different questions and comments and people are going to reach out and they're going to want to have you back on to address other questions and maybe we'll do a part two here since we only had about 90 minutes here together and i've really enjoyed talking to you a unique story different angle yeah it sounds like you were one decision away from having been a professional guy in the financial world for decades and you would have made a lot of money but that industry kind of kept pulling you in because it sounds like you had a little bit of aspirations of wanting to be a boss there was something very attractive and i'm not a hypocrite i wanted that life without a doubt i wanted that life because if i wanted to go legit i could have easily gone legit i had the talent the work ethic and the brains right you've done very brains yeah the brains three times you talked about being at the office at 7 45 and the way you explained you know blind pool the way you explained the reverse you know that's not something that everybody can explain which means you know having started in 1985 with lemons for three years you were with them it's not like you were there for three or six months cold calling for some other guy my first week on the job lee iacocca was there leaving ford trying to borrow to raise a billion dollars from the company in order to start a company called chrysler yeah this was my first week on the job so yes i've had the exposure of everything no i was a baby but i was on premise when he was there i mean he's a he's a legend did you watch ford versus foreign of course but you think about the story in there with what he did with negotiating with italy and enzo and all that smart yeah crazy stuff anyway sal thanks for coming out thanks for being here sunday tim and i really it my pleasure patrick take care of it anytime anytime completely different perspective of that life sal romano how he made his money and what happened to by the way if you enjoyed this interview give it a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel i got two other videos i want you to watch both podcasts that we recently had on one is with samuel garvano and the other one was michael francis you're going to enjoy both of them but click on one of these too if you enjoyed this topic i think you'll enjoy one of these two podcasts take care everybody bye-bye [Music] you

Channel: Valuetainment

Views: 664,953

Keywords: Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneur Motivation, Entrepreneur Advice, Startup Entrepreneurs, valuetainment, patrick bet david, Valuetainment Media, Patrick Bet-David Valuetainment, Mafia, Patrick Bet-David Larry Mazza, PBD Mafia, Murder, Mafia Murder, PBD Murder, Colombo Crime Family, Colombo PBD, Patrick Bet-David Colombo, Mafia Sit-Down, Sit-Down PBD, Patrick Bet-David Sit-Down, Gambino, Sal Romano, Pizza Guy, John Gotti, PBD Sal Romano, Sal, Romano

Id: UNOQwDMhnso

Length: 81min 1sec (4861 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 29 2021