Pod Insights PBD Podcast Mafia States of America | Episode 5 - "The Fall of the Mafia" About this episode In Episode 5 of Mafia States of America, the bosses dissect the fall. From the RICO Act to Joe Banano’s book that gave prosecutors their blueprint, Patrick Bet-David unpacks how Giuliani weaponized the law and crushed Cosa Nostra. Sammy and Michael face the truth of how greed, pride, and arrogance ended the life they once ruled.
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Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:04 Speaker 02 And all of a sudden, this book comes out. He had a chart. And the chart had all the commission members, their pictures. And he explains the commission in detail. So you see that chart right there? It goes up to 1963. If I can fill in the people up to 1983, I have a rego case.
2:12 Speaker 03 Omerta is more than a word. It's a way of life. It traces its roots back all the way to the Roman Empire. Omerta is handling your business like a man. Keeping your mouth shut and choosing death over dishonor. Staying true to Omerta wasn't hard when getting pinched meant a little stretch in the can. Three or four years, come on, they can do that standing on their head. But when the government started putting people away for centuries, guys not only started singing, they started composing.
2:54 Patrick Bet-David? What caused the fall of the mob? Was it Pesto? Was it Giuliani? Was it Valachi? Was it Tommaso Buscetta? Was it arrogance? Was it not staying low-key? Was it Joe Banano's book? What was it that caused the fall of the mob?
3:10 Speaker 03 For me, mid-eighties racketeering law. When the government changed or leveled the playing field to a degree that we just couldn't keep up with it, with the racketeering law, the bail reform act, you didn't get any bail. The sentencing reform act where all of a sudden they abolished parole. You're doing eighty-five percent of your time. The sentences went through the roof. The racketeering law until today, I believe it's unconstitutional. I had three racketeering indictments. A lot of things happened as a result of those laws and, you know, that's what put everybody away.
3:47 Patrick Bet-David? Was there something before that that brought up the recall? Well, like, I'm trying to go to the, like, to the, you know, the seed. What caused the ripple effect to get to the recall?
3:58 Speaker 03 You know, Patrick, years ago, before the racketeering laws, and I think Samuel will bear me out. Guy gets convicted, he gets ten years, fifteen years. He makes parole, he does seven, eight, nine. Anybody can do that kind of time. Everybody did that kind of time. When you change the playing field to where you bring in a law like the RICO Act, that's very hard to defend. To me, it's unconstitutional. To me, it's... They're able to use... You need two predicate acts in the RICO Act. One has to be within the five-year statute of limitations. The other act could be something that you did 30 years ago, that you got convicted of, that you did your time for, and everything else.
4:37 Speaker 02 RICO, basically, makes it a crime to have a crime business. So, I can go rob a bank, that's a crime. You and I could agree to go rob a bank, that's a conspiracy. We give an extra penalty for this. But suppose we agree that for the next 20 years, we're gonna rob five banks a year. Now, we've established a RICO enterprise. We've established... Basically, we've established an informal business to commit crime. Now, what does that allow you to do? It allows you to put them in prison for a lot longer. But the most important thing it allows you to do is to seize their property.
5:15 Speaker 02 And the biggest problem with the mafia now was, for a long time, Hoover ignored it. Then, they started prosecuting it. But all they were doing was helping the line of succession. They'd take number one out, they'd take number two out, there'd be a little gang war, and somebody else would take over the multi-billion-dollar business. Because nobody affected the numbers rackets, the fixing of boxing matches, the skim from Las Vegas, the drug trade. Nobody did anything about that.
5:47 Speaker 03 So, unconstitutional in that regard. But what happens? It was a very hard law to defend. It was very expensive to defend with the lawyers. And the amount of time that they gave out. You know, anybody could have done the amount of time that we did prior to the RICO Act. But after that, you know, you tell them, "Guys, hey, you're doing 20, 30, 40 years. You're never getting parole." That's it. You know, that was the end of it. A lot of guys cooperated as a result of that because they say, "I'm not gonna spend the rest of my life in jail." You know, it goes to this whole thing of love and fear, which is a more powerful emotion. They're both powerful, but I think in the end, I disagreed with Chaz Palminteri on this in the movie.
6:31 Speaker 03 I think what happened with the government is that the fear of the government overpowered the fear that we had on the street. And as a result, a lot of guys went the other way, and you just couldn't overcome it. You couldn't overcome it.
6:45 Speaker 05 Absolutely right. Absolutely right. And along with the Witness Protection Program, exactly. Changing people's names, moving them, giving them money, doing a whole host of different things. It gave them a way out. And all of those names that you had mentioned, Donnie Brasco, and all of these names, it started to deteriorate in a big way. So now when guys were getting pinched, going back to what Michael said, a lot of them are betrayed by people, so when you're being betrayed, it's easy to say, "Well, I'm not doing this." And now the government gave you an avenue to get out. Years ago, during the commission trial,
7:29 Speaker 05 Carmine Persico, who was a pretty fierce boss, said in the trial that we should admit there's a mafia. Because belonging to an organization as long as you put it forward, like the Ku Klux Klan and so many other different weird organizations, it's not illegal. It's your actions that are illegal within that group. So you can be, he said, "We could say that all of the old timers who are bosses," and say, "Admit, he's a boss, he's an underboss, he's this, but we don't do anything wrong." And we're good guys.
8:15 Speaker 05 Now you've got to prove that he did something personally. Not just this Rico law that they invented and everybody can get caught up in it. They have somebody can't take in the stand, this is the mafia. The boss has got a okay in his head. Even if he didn't, he sucked into it. And that was all successful. They used different equipment, bugs and tapes that were phenomenal.
8:42 Speaker 02 Here's what I need to do. I need to break into Fat Tony's house or the social club. I need to, I need to do the same thing with Persico. I've got about four or five little things here where I got it. A lot of this work is going to be breaking in. I knew that I couldn't get this all done with just the FBI. I, so I said to Bill Webster. Bill, you got it, you got to go pick for me 20 guys on the national security side. The guys who were busting in on the communists. Because I used to be in charge of them too, when I was associate at China. And I did the first FISA warrants, all basically for Russian communists. I said, those guys are better than burglars. I mean, we don't have burglars in New York, they're as good as never.
9:27 Speaker 02 They can get in any place. They go up sewers. He gave me 22 of them. He moved them over to the criminal side. And there was a lot of stuff to put that case together. But they were the key to it. And we got into Fat Tony's. We got into Fat Tony's social club for nine months. It was like a studio. It was like a recording studio. And consider, we're talking about 1983 technology. Imagine what we could do today.
9:51 Patrick Bet-David? What made that legal? Meaning prior to the Rico laws, what Blakey wrote in 70, would that have been legal to do prior to that?
9:58 Speaker 02 No, it was a period of time when it would have been done.
10:04 Speaker 02 Illegally. But it wasn't illegal. Got it. They just did it. So was it, was there a part of it? Then there was a period of time they realized, "Stop it. We can't do surveillance without warrants." So then they set up a law. If you want to get, want to put a bug in a house, if you want to put a camera in a house, the whole big wiretapping, bugging statute. That requires you to show probable cause, go to a judge, judge has to approve it, only lasts for one month. You gotta go back to the judge and show him that you're getting evidence and that you're using it appropriately, you're not just spying on the guy. It was a very, very disciplined statute. Which, which is what got me so angry with the Pfizer stuff that went on because
10:49 Speaker 02 it was like totally inconsistent with the thousands of hours we used to work on this. To make sure it was just perfect. Because if, if you made a mistake, they throw the whole thing out. There goes a four million dollar investment and all this boom because he had his wife on the phone too long.
11:03 Speaker 05 All of this stuff combined changed the whole thing. Now, the bosses didn't agree with Carmine Persico. Every single one of them said no.
11:13 Speaker 02 Why?
11:13 Speaker 05 "We will not admit," that's part of our oath, "that we will not admit that there's a mafia, no matter what."
11:20 Speaker 03 And I don't know that, it was such a bad strategy. Because every juror, I mean, you gotta, you gotta be living under a rock if you didn't have a preconceived notion of what the mafia was all about. You hear mafia, you hear Al Capone, you hear, you hear all bad names and you know it's a criminal organization. Just a normal guy. So they didn't understand that, okay, he just admitted that he was in the mafia. He must be a criminal.
11:46 Speaker 05 Right.
11:47 Speaker 03 That was, that had to be in their heads right off the bat. So it was a bad strategy.
11:51 Speaker 05 All those movies, Good, uh, Godfather, Goodfellas. Everybody knows there's a mafia. So when you went in, you, you half dead.
12:01 Speaker 03 But what I was told, Sammy, what I heard afterwards, that the tapes were so bad. That there was no way they could have got around saying that there was no mafia. They had to admit to the existence of the mafia. I think it was the first time in a trial, especially of that magnitude, that guys ever admitted, "There is a mafia." I mean, other than, you know, Velaci and people that could understand and said it, but defendants, I don't think it ever happened before. They admitted that there was mafia.
12:29 Speaker 05 What happened there is that women on the street, me, uh... Frankie Chico was alive, and we went to the Genovese family. Messages came out, "They want to admit." And all the messages went back and said, "No." Everybody said, "No." Now, what happened is Carmine Persico didn't take that "no." He got his lawyer, on a sneak, and told his lawyer to admit it in court. The lawyer admitted it on closing arguments, I think. It was... And they had a fit. He tried to blame the lawyer.
13:10 Speaker 05 They grabbed this lawyer on the street, put a couple of guns to his head, and he admitted that Carmine Persico told him to do it. Later on, Wild Bill, when the war was on, the Colombo War, he said, "Why are we fighting over him? He's a rat." He made the lawyer admit. Wild Bill got killed because of that.
13:40 Speaker 02 Like any other great organization, they were... From their point of view, they were fortunate to have Luciano and Lansky. One, a financial genius, the other one, kind of an organizational genius. Put together a structure that was better than anybody else. And if you followed their rules, they might still be. They had all remained.
14:02 Patrick Bet-David? Low-key.
14:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, like I'm running the olive oil business.
14:06 Patrick Bet-David? So what brought them down? Would you say Volacci, you know, Banano's book? Would you say Tommaso Buscetta? Would you say Sammy? Would you say Blakey, the professor from Cornell? The Rico laws? Would you say the arrogance of flamboyant? Me being out there for you to see kind of what I'm doing? Or would you say Rudy Giuliani brought them down? What brought these guys down? All. Is there one that's the first domino effect?
14:34 Speaker 02 All of that. I'm not even sure I know how to evaluate them in terms of what is most important. But I think the most important thing that brought them down, that brings down almost any group, was their loss of discipline.
14:50 Patrick Bet-David? Their loss of discipline.
14:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, like the end of the Roman Empire or possibly what's going on with America now. They had a good set of rules. The set of rules got them through thirty, forty years with minimum scrutiny and even legitimately fooling people. And then some of them just had, the egos just had to, had to play Colombo. Colombo did them great damage with that whole Italian American Civil Rights League. It was such a farce. And it was so obvious, it really just offended people that he would do something like that.
15:27 Patrick Bet-David? What's part of it? Can you unpack that a little bit?
15:29 Speaker 02 Joey Gallo got killed because he was sitting there talking about a Broadway play about him.
15:36 Speaker 02 How ridiculous is that? I mean, you do that, you're just challenging authority. I mean, Colombo, Colombo decided he'd put together something like the Anti-Defamation League for Italian-Americans. I mean, that only works if you have a legitimate source of prejudice. It becomes absurd if the people leading it are the people that are, the actual people that you shouldn't be prejudiced against, the people who are killing others. So I think Colombo really, really hurt. I think Joey Gallo really hurt. They were the early ones that got a lot of publicity. And then that challenges the FBI and the police to do something about it.
16:21 Speaker 02 They got a little bit too big. Like often happens.
16:26 Speaker 02 Organizations, they get arrogant.
16:34 Speaker 05 The collapse of the mafia was happening for all of these reasons put together.
16:41 Speaker 05 What they didn't realize is that maybe there was a truth to saying, "Maybe we should make this legitimate. We were talented in different ways. We could go legitimate and make money. We could stop killing one another." So, I think you asked me once, "Well, what would you do? How do you stop this? If you don't kill them, there's no penalty." There is a penalty. You're no longer a main guy by all the families and all the people. You're disgraced, you're out them, instead of killing them. Period. And then, when you're killing people, all the time, bodies all over the place,
17:25 Speaker 05 again, like as you said, you go into a jury room on a murder, they know that's what we're doing. They find the guy in the trunk, "Oh, that's the mafia." They find a guy a certain way, "Oh, that's the mafia." So you, how do you beat cases anymore? And then you're gonna do that kind of time. Now it becomes life without parole.
17:44 Speaker 03 And not only that, Patrick. If you would've listened to some of the tapes, you didn't even need informants at that point. The guys convicted themselves. I had a, my Giuliani case, I had one guy who was, we had 16 co-defendants. I had one guy who was in a union. Sammy, they mentioned his name in the opening argument. They never mentioned his name again for three months that I was on trial. Never mentioned it again. We're about to give closing arguments, last day of trial. We left, it was a bunch of us, guys you know there. And they put the casing on against this guy, and it's one tape. And in the tape, he was in a conference room, he was a union guy, he was in a conference room, and he was sitting around a bunch of guys. And he's making a speech, he said, "Listen.
18:29 Speaker 03 Everybody needs to know this, what we're doing here is a crime. If this office is bugged, we're all going to jail, this is criminal activity." That's what he said on the tape. He got convicted, he got seven years, that was the only thing they said about him, he convicted himself.
18:41 Speaker 05 Yeah, he did.
18:42 Speaker 03 And that happened time and time again, Tony Duckswood, Sally Abelino, and the tapes were horrible. Even the ones at Casas Store, that we are, with Jerry Lightfoot.
18:51 Speaker 05 The room to Paul's house was tremendously bad.
18:55 Speaker 03 Terrible.
18:55 Speaker 05 I mean, in a whole bunch of different ways, they were disgusting, some of them. But, and those came from John Gotti and Angelo Giurio's tapes, that's, it all started with that, and it all started with us.
19:09 Patrick Bet-David? So Rudy Giuliani, Joe Pistone, Joe Banano, who hurt you the most out of those three?
19:17 Speaker 03 For me, look, I, I spoke to Giuliani directly, had a conversation with him. And he kind of, you know, he confirmed what we believed at the time, and you've probably heard of it, that Joe Banano wrote that ridiculous book to try to compare our life like it was a family and like he was a father, and it was so ridiculous, it was so absurd.
19:42 Patrick Bet-David? Men of Honor, was it called, something like that, Men of Honor, Men of Honor, like, yeah.
19:46 Speaker 02 So I'm going out of one job, going to a new job, and I know that the FBI has all this material on organized crime. I don't know it in detail, I just know it from my supervisory role. So I asked them to read the files, so they sent me a lot of the files. And all of a sudden, this book comes out, an autobiography, I'm sure ghostwritten, about Joe Banano. So I said, gee, it might, it might be interesting to read this book. So I pull the book, get it, start reading it, I'm about, about one-third of the way through. And he had it organized into sections, like one section was his early life, second section was being made, third section was coming up, fourth section was the commission. It was four chapters.
20:31 Speaker 02 He had a chart. And the chart had all the commission members, their pictures, going back to that original, he was one of the original 1931 guys that Lucky put on. And he explains the commission in detail. So first of all, I mean, he definitely had pretension and grandeur. He would say, you know, we're really like heads of state. Myself and Corallo and Castellano, we're like heads of state. And the commission is like the United Nations for us. And it was a very good idea that Lucky had. I've always been in favor of as little killing as possible. Because it hurts business. So I'm reading a thing, and my wife is upstairs.
21:16 Speaker 02 And I say, Donna, come down here, I want to show you something. So you see that chart right there? It goes up to 1963. If I can fill in the people up to 1983, I have a rego case. Professor Blakely was the one who realized about 15 years earlier, only way we're going to stop this thing is by taking away their unusual peculiar infiltration of business. We've got to take those businesses away. And then they just become another organized crime.
21:46 Patrick Bet-David? What inspired him to do it? Because I'm curious, was he somebody that didn't like the mob? What was, because it was a 19 Cornell University professor, right? What motivated him?
21:55 Speaker 02 That's very, very, that's very interesting, Patrick. I knew Professor Blakely pretty well, but not intimately. But I did know the rationale of it, and I had talked to him many times about it. And then when I was going to do it, I called him and I said, I want you to look at the book and tell me, if I'm wrong, isn't this like what you passed it for? He just, he just handed me, because the first thing you've got to prove, you've got to prove the business. So we're not going to have Articles of Incorporation, and we're not going to have a charter. We're going to have an oral agreement. Well, he just laid it out for me. And I said, he's gonna be my chief witness. He's gonna take care of the number one part of the case, we'll show the organization. Then it's my job to take each one of those charts and make it current.
22:40 Speaker 02 Went over to the bureau, I started going through their files while I was still there. I realized they had a lot of stuff. I realized there were a couple of good investigations going on in the state. And by the time I got there, I had a lot of other things to do, but this was my project. And I did a chart. And the chart had all the Banano stuff, and then I put in the guys we had to get. Who we had to get to fill out the Genovese family. At that time, it was run by Fat Tony Salerno. So we had to get Fat Tony, Corallo, each one of them, Castellano, Persico.
23:22 Speaker 02 Each one of them, and then what did we have? So, we had already a wire on Castellano in his house. The state prosecutor of corruption had a wire on Ducks Corallo, on his Jaguar. Where his driver would pick him up. And why they were important was every time they'd have a commission meeting, they'd all go somewhere and talk it over with the boys. He would talk it over with, he'd walk out of a commission meeting, and then we'd hear the whole commission meeting. His version of it. Fat Tony, once again, Fat Tony won't murder anybody. I mean, I don't believe in a lot of murder, but we gotta spill blood sometimes, you know?
24:05 Speaker 02 Then you'd hear the same description by Fat Tony when he went to his social club in East Harlem. Fat Tony would say, "God, I don't know, I don't know, that guy would kill his mother." You'd get these great conversations. So I looked at it and I said, "Okay, let's make a deal with the state. They come in, we make a task force."
24:34 Speaker 03 Guys on the street during that time, I remember, I only heard Joe Banano's name with a curse word next to it.
24:40 Patrick Bet-David? Everybody.
24:41 Speaker 03 Everybody that I knew at that time. And what Giuliani said afterwards is that he was one of the original architects of the racketeering law with this guy, DeBakey, who was on the books for over 10 years. I think 1970 was when it was created. They didn't know how to use it. The FBI didn't know how to use it. The government didn't know how to use it.
24:59 Patrick Bet-David? This is the Cornell Law Professor.
25:00 Speaker 03 Correct. And DeBakey, I think his name was. All of a sudden Giuliani reads that book. He gets inspired. He leaves third position in the government to come down to be the US Attorney in Manhattan. Strong position, you know, very high profile because he had aspirations beyond that. And he reads that book and he says, "Banano gave me the whole case. He put the RICO indictment together. He put the racketeering law together for me so that I..." He admitted to the commission. He said, "He allowed me to construct that law or interpret that law in a way that I can go after the entire commission." And he was the guy that did it.
25:38 Patrick Bet-David? So Banano to you, then Rudy, then Piston. You don't think Piston had that much of an influence?
25:43 Speaker 03 Look, we disagree. Piston was an agent. He went in there, he did his job, he went undercover. Our guys did not check him out, and Sammy said earlier, they didn't check him out the way he should have, the way they should have. And he was smarter than we were.
25:59 Patrick Bet-David? Good guy. Would you say Joe's a good guy?
26:01 Speaker 03 Look, I know Joe now and I like him. I like him. I mean, look, back then I wouldn't have liked what he did. I'm glad I only met him one time. We joke about that. But I don't believe he framed anybody. And look, we always said this, I mean, I've had countless discussions with FBI agents. We said, "Look, you do your job. We understand the job you got to do. We may not like it, we may not want to be you, but if you do your job right and you don't frame us, that's your job. We get it. Just don't frame us."
26:29 Speaker 05 I agree with that. Here's where I change directions. You can put bugs and taps if we're stupid enough to talk on certain areas and certain places. We deserve what we get. When I got pinched, I didn't hate the agents as long as they did their job. In my case, and when I cooperated, they were clean. So I didn't really hate them. They were doing their job. But this guy here goes undercover and there's nothing wrong with that either, to an extent.
27:01 Speaker 05 But when he comes over your house, and he meets your wife, and your daughter, and your family, eats with them,
27:13 Speaker 05 and he's fucking wired to the guilt. And then he's putting words in your mouth. You know what we could do, Michael?
27:23 Speaker 05 Your wife is in the background talking.
27:27 Speaker 05 That turns my fucking stomach. I can't like it.
27:32 Patrick Bet-David? Even today, till today, Joe.
27:33 Speaker 05 I can't like him even till today. I will give him credit for this. First of all, there was no contract on him. I think that was all bullshit.
27:42 Speaker 03 Look, Sammy, let me ask you this. That's a good point. I always say this. When we got into that life, we were obligated to do certain things. If we were told to do something, they didn't say to us, hey, do this and we'll give you ten grand, or do this and we'll give you fifty grand. You were told to do something, you had to do it. I don't know of any time in my twenty-plus years in that life that anybody was paid to put a contract on somebody. I don't know of it. I'm not saying it didn't happen.
28:10 Speaker 05 No, it's not. It's not the point of being paid. From what I understand of this guy, and I don't know him, you know him, I don't really know him. But he went out. I didn't know agents who knew. He went way above what he was supposed to do.
28:26 Speaker 05 And that's what... Then he went out. He wasn't even supposed to write a book. He left the FBI. They were almost throwing him out because he was giving away his secrets and writing a book about what he did. So he had a little greed in his ass.
28:41 Speaker 03 I don't know if I believed it. Look, the government gave him a check for five hundred bucks when he went undercover for six years. And look, I say this to him.
28:49 Speaker 05 Why are we made of that? That's what he was supposed to do.
28:52 Speaker 03 No, no, but I would say this. Listen, the guy had balls. Cause
28:57 Speaker 05 I'll kill him, yeah.
28:58 Speaker 03 Any, any, Patrick, any day, a neighbor sees
29:02 Patrick Bet-David? Five and a half years.
29:03 Speaker 03 Anything could have happened.
29:04 Patrick Bet-David? It's a long time.
29:05 Speaker 03 Well, he could have walked in the club the next day and got a bullet in the head.
29:08 Speaker 05 Five and a half years.
29:09 Speaker 03 Yeah.
29:10 Speaker 05 And not only that, his family, he didn't see his family for four, five years. So I look at this guy and say, what kind of guy is this? What kind of an obsession?
29:18 Patrick Bet-David? His wife stayed with him till today.
29:20 Speaker 05 Yeah, almo- almost, almost left him.
29:23 Patrick Bet-David? Sure.
29:23 Speaker 05 But, what kind of guy is that? And what's the, what's the obs- obsession with it? And then like I say, once he comes in the house.
29:37 Speaker 05 I just can't see it. If I meet Michael's wife, she's, from what I understand, she's a beautiful woman, but she's a beautiful woman inside. I, I, it kills me to wanna hurt him.
29:53 Speaker 05 I may wanna hurt him legitimately, but once I meet the wife, the kids, I know the life, I know I'm destroying. When I destroy him, I'm destroying them.
30:03 Patrick Bet-David? What, what frustrates you most? What he did, what Rudy did, or what Joe Banano did? Cause they each hurt the family in a different way.
30:11 Speaker 03 I, I would say this, with Joe Pistone, he's indoctrinated into that life. The way we were indoctrinated into our life, he's indoctrinated into the FBI. Same thing. He was told that we're the bad guys. And whether he volunteered, probably volunteered to go on the club.
30:28 Speaker 05 He did volunteer, he just told me, he volunteered in doing these things way, way overboard. Going into the homes and doing certain things. No, it's going by a club, planting a bug, telling them about a meeting. I think he went way overboard.
30:44 Patrick Bet-David? He's doing his job, though.
30:45 Speaker 03 He's doing his job.
30:46 Speaker 05 Well, way, way overboard. How about if I come and kill you in your house, right in front of your fucking family and everything? I'm doing my job to kill you. What about if I do it right in front of your family? Because in Osho, I will never kill you in front of your family.
30:59 Patrick Bet-David? But his job is to
31:01 Speaker 05 Kill us in front of our families.
31:02 Patrick Bet-David? That's his job. His job is to manipulate you into thinking he's one of you.
31:07 Speaker 05 He's not. He can do that anywhere. He can do that in any club.
31:10 Speaker 03 See, I'm saying, see what you said, if he would have had the wife on tape or the kids on tape and tried to involve them or use the wife against the husband.
31:19 Speaker 05 They did. No, they didn't do that.
31:20 Speaker 03 They didn't do that.
31:21 Speaker 05 The government itself didn't do that. They didn't need it. They had so much on them. But they did have those tapes.
31:26 Patrick Bet-David? Does Rudy, what Rudy did, does that bother you at all, Rudy Giuliani?
31:29 Speaker 05 Yeah, of course. Of course it bothers me too.
31:32 Patrick Bet-David? Why Rudy?
31:33 Speaker 05 Well, Rudy was another guy, you know, these guys, again, you're a prosecutor, someone brings you a case, so be it. He takes the law and he invents ways to, like he says, it's unconstitutional, to corrupt the law, to hurt these people.
31:53 Speaker 02 The key to doing the commission case and getting that high up was in fact the FBI's. Number one, having Rico. Number two, having a great deal of intelligence that they were gathering, that they were really just gonna use it for the purpose of putting the guy in jail. And then my adding to it, every time we do one of these cases, we bring a civil case. And we take away the Fulton Fish Market. We declare it an illegal operation and the government takes over ownership of. We took over ownership of Umberto's Clown House. Because it was owned by organized crime. We actually ran it for a while.
32:34 Speaker 02 And I think one of the funny newspapers, the Daily News or the Post said, the worst thing about the federal government taking the food stinks. The food now stinks. But the big things we took over were the fish market, the garment industry. And how about the Teamsters? We removed the entire board of the Teamsters and brought in legitimate people that extricated them from Las Vegas. Then I was able to follow through on some of this when I became mayor. So when I became mayor of New York, I set up a system, much like Las Vegas with casinos. If you wanted a license for private carding, you had to get it from the city,
33:16 Speaker 02 and the city would do an organized crime background check on you. And we removed all the organized crime groups. And we made it possible for little people to come in and do it. And we also made it possible for the national companies to come in, because they were afraid to come into New York. And when I ran for reelection for mayor in ninety-seven, I gave out posters to all the merchants saying, Giuliani got the thirty percent mafia tax back for us. We love him.
33:47 Patrick Bet-David? Giuliani got the thirty percent mafia tax back for us.
33:51 Speaker 02 Because the...
33:52 Patrick Bet-David? Because it was a double tax. You're paying the government, and you're paying the mafia.
33:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. So, so let's say...
33:56 Patrick Bet-David? They were essentially a form of a government, and...
33:58 Speaker 02 Yeah. Let's say it would really cost a thousand dollars a month to take the carding from a pharmacy, which is a little expensive, because you gotta worry about medicine and stuff like that. They would make it thirty percent more, forty percent more, fifty percent more, and just keep it for themselves. It was like the biggest tax deduction they ever got. All of a sudden, a twelve-hundred-dollar bill is now a seven-hundred dollars.
34:21 Speaker 02 And, uh, and then the better companies came in, and that... They kind of really straightened that out.
34:28 Speaker 05 He's Italian. He's got the same roots and race that I have. Now, he'll say, "Well, you hurt the Italian people because of your name and things you did. I cleaned it up." No, you didn't. No, you didn't. You did it in a different way. And if you don't think you've killed certain people, then go to see Sonny Black's family. Sonny Black, as soon as he found out what happened, knew he was gonna get hit, left his ring, his watch when he was called. He knew he fucked up, and he walked in and got killed. And there was others who got killed with his actions.
35:12 Speaker 05 So how fucking proud are you? And don't tell me about people I killed when you killed fucking just as much. And don't tell me how many families I hurt when you hurt ten times more families.
35:23 Patrick Bet-David? Rudy.
35:23 Speaker 05 Rudy. And you're Italian. And then I can't stand when they fucking win like that, and they hit each other five. One thing I like about the Pistone story that supposedly said, and I don't know if this is true, that it hurt him when Lefty Guns was hurt and was gonna go to prison. And the only reason he didn't get killed is because...
35:46 Speaker 03 They intercepted him.
35:47 Speaker 05 They intercepted him, he was arrested, and he went away. Now, Lefty Guns, I knew him well. His granddaughter, Ramona, is my niece. When she used to hang out with my daughter, there were kids crawling in the house. She grew up like that. She's not my legitimate niece, she's my unadopted niece. I love her like I love my daughter. And they're like this till today. That's her grandfather that you destroyed.
36:20 Speaker 05 So, I look at that, and just like this, people must hate me for what I did. Why shouldn't I hate them?
36:27 Patrick Bet-David? Sammy, so you call out Pistone, you call out Giuliani, but you don't say anything about Banano, who wrote the book?
36:34 Speaker 05 I went to Paul's house one day, and he took me on a side and he said, "Mr. Banano wrote a book."
36:43 Speaker 05 I said, "I heard you, but I didn't read the book. I knew who he was, I knew he wasn't in New York anymore, that he was in Arizona."
36:52 Speaker 05 And Paul says, "I think I'm gonna send you down there," and he came, "like to do this."
37:01 Speaker 05 Me? Yeah.
37:05 Speaker 05 As a boss, another one? Okay. Not that I knew anything about him, not that I disliked him, I gave, I knew what...
37:40 Speaker 01 Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPact.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
38:10 Speaker 05 So I'm gonna do this. I wasn't too happy about it. I know nothing about Arizona. I really didn't know nothing about him. His son was with him, Salvatore Banano, who is his consigliere, and some guys who so well-liked made guys who left with him. So there's a crew of them down there. I'm not too happy about this. Paul and the day backed off and said to me, "It's the Banano people, it's their problem." Forget about what I told him, which is great. He wrote a book. He was chased, he wrote a book. I mean, he explained some things. I remember, I don't really remember the book, but I did read it. I remember, at the end of the book, he says,
38:55 Speaker 05 "This country doesn't need a president, it needs a father." Like he was the father of a family. I believed in that, but they used that book when they wanted him to testify that he came out on stretcher going to the hospital. He wouldn't testify. So the book did hurt them. They used it, I believe, in the commission case. That's Giuliani found a way to manipulate the whole thing, even though the guy was gone all them fucking years. But he used the book. Another thing I don't like about Giuliani. The guy was gone, it was all, he wrote a book. I know, we can smile all we want, but I don't dislike him all that much.
39:34 Patrick Bet-David? You're saying you don't dislike Giuliani?
39:36 Speaker 05 No. Banano. When I got out of prison the first time, and I went to Arizona myself, I cooperated, everything was behind me. I get a message that Joe Banano wants to meet with me.
39:54 Speaker 05 Okay. Now, I'm meeting with him. Now, he's sitting with his son and some other guy. The other guy is a confidential informant, and he's wired. So he tells his son, this Sammy DeBoer, I hear he's down in Arizona now. In Phoenix. And I want an appointment with him, I want to talk to him. So Salvatore Banano tells him, this is all I'll take.
40:21 Speaker 05 What do you want to talk with him for? Well, I want to make sure that there's no problems. Fuck him, he's a rat.
40:28 Speaker 05 He tells his son, he never understood the life.
40:33 Speaker 05 A rat? If he's here and he wants to take over, we're gonna, some of us are gonna be found in his trunk. That's this guy's style, that's how he'll take over.
40:42 Patrick Bet-David? He you?
40:43 Speaker 05 Me, me. So he says, I want to meet with him.
40:50 Speaker 05 So I get this message.
40:53 Speaker 05 And I ask, what's it about? And they tell me what's it about.
40:59 Speaker 05 I said, I have the utmost respect for him, he's an old timer. And I'll meet with him. But there's really no need. You could tell him, I have no intentions of taking over Arizona. I have no intentions of hurting him or his family. All I want is to be left the fuck alone. Me and my family.
41:21 Speaker 05 And that nobody bothers my family. That's the only way I will be a problem.
41:28 Speaker 05 So he goes back and he tells me.
41:31 Speaker 05 And he says, great. And he sends me a message. That'll never happen. If somebody gives you a problem, send me a message and I'll help you.
41:41 Speaker 05 The agent's got in touch with me. Sammy, you gonna meet with Joe Banano? Yeah, what?
41:50 Speaker 05 You're in for all, first of all. And then what are we gonna talk with him about? I said, nothing. He was a little concerned though, what I was gonna do. And I told him I wasn't gonna do nothing.
42:04 Speaker 05 And we never met.
42:07 Speaker 05 So I have a little bit of respect for him that he wrote a book, he left a life. When he left, I didn't hate him either. Mike. When he left the life, I, I, people talked. I never wanted to hurt him. That he's gonna become famous, he's gonna write a book, or whatever he's gonna do. He's gonna go into the entertainment business. It didn't bother me, he's gone, he's out of the life. Get over it. Now. This happened. Up until now, the mafia collapsed at a certain point, where you're talking about all of these laws and all of these things. I actually think it's a good thing.
42:46 Speaker 05 The mafia should collapse. We should get rid of it, we don't need it. We're tired of people. It only hurts us. There's a lot of guys in there who could think. Now, he's been pretty successful in what he does. He changed his life. I changed mine. And I'm doing pretty good myself. And they, there's a lot of guys in there who could think and use their head and go into legitimate business. We have a little bit of an edge. Because we look at business a different way. We use common sense. I don't think they teach that in school, college or nothing. We learned that in the street, common sense. We learn how to sit down in negotiations like we're doing right now. And it gives us a different kind of an edge.
43:30 Speaker 05 I don't have a Harvard degree, I got an eighth grade education. He's pretty good at business. I said he's a racketeer. He's a good racketeer. With a good head on his shoulders. And I think every mafioso could do that, in a way. Stop killing, stop all that bullshit. And go into business.
43:52 Speaker 06 Coming up, on Mafia States of America.
43:56 Speaker 03 When somebody tells you, you gotta go kill this guy. I don't even know this guy. What do I gotta... Well, you don't have to know what happened. Go kill him. What did he do? Never mind, just go kill him. Okay? That's not normal, Sam.
44:10 Speaker 05 It's not normal because you don't understand the beginning of Gozo No Shra, how this thing even started. And what it was.
44:18 Speaker 03 Sam, I don't care if it started a hundred years ago. I'm not smirking at you. I don't care if it started a hundred years ago or yesterday. It's not normal.
44:27 Speaker 05 To you, it's not normal?
44:28 Speaker 03 It's not.
44:29 Speaker 05 Good, then keep that in your mind, it's not normal. But yet, you break that "not normal" to defend and go kill somebody who fucked with your family.
44:39 Speaker 03 Are you sorry for the things that you did in that life?
44:49 Speaker 07 Oh beautiful For spacious skies For amber waves of gray
45:02 Speaker 07 For purple mottled majesties Above the flooded plain
45:17 Speaker 07 America's weep America's got shades Of deep For we cry like we We're better than From sea to shining sea, yeah Oh beautiful For heroes
45:51 Speaker 07 In liberated strife
45:57 Speaker 07 They mark that sand
46:02 Speaker 07 Country love Mercy more than life
46:18 Speaker 01 Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
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Previous “85 Unofficial Sharia Courts” - Piers Morgan On UK Migrant Crisis & Tommy Robinson | PBD Podcast 682 Next Trump's BBC Threat, CA Trans SHOWDOWN, TPUSA UC Berkeley Brawl + Gov't Shutdown Over? | PBD Podcast | Ep. 683 Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
