Last month, federal prosecutors indicted an NBA coach and current and former professional basketball players in an illegal sports betting scheme. How the FBI’s investigation into the gambling ring is shining a light on how the mob has evolved to survive.
Guests
Tony DeStefano, journalist and true crime author who has written ten books about the American Mafia, including bestsellers “Top Hoodlum” and “The Deadly Don.”
Michael Franzese, former mobster who was a caporegime (captain) in the Colombo crime family in New York City. Motivational speaker, author and popular YouTuber who discusses his experiences in organized crime.
Jim Walden, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York from 1992 to 2002. He mostly focused on organized crime and prosecuted members and associates of all five families of “La Cosa Nostra.”
The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:
Transcript
Part I
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Last month, Joseph Nocella, Jr., the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, stood in front of reporters and dropped a bombshell in the sports world. The FBI had arrested known NBA figures, including the Portland Trailblazers coach and Hall of Famer Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat Guard Terry Rozier. The men were among 34 people arrested following an investigation into illegal sports betting and rigged poker games.
JOSEPH NOCELLA, JR.: My message to the defendants who’ve been rounded up today is this, your winning streak has ended, your luck has run out. Violating the law is a losing proposition, and you can bet on that.
CHAKRABARTI: The details of the two indictments are straight out of a Hollywood script. Victims were lured into joining high stakes poker tables in cities like Las Vegas, Miami, and New York.
The NBA stars known as, quote, the face cards allegedly helped entice them to join.
NOCELLA, JR.: What the victims, the fish, didn’t know is that everybody else at the poker game from the dealer to the players, including the face cards were in on the scam. Once the game was underway, the defendants fleeced the victims out of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per game.
CHAKRABARTI: They allegedly had shuffling machines that had been altered to rig which players had the best hand at a given time, or offsite operators relaying strategies to co-conspirators sitting at the table.
NOCELLA, JR.: Defendants used other cheating technologies such as poker chip tray analyzers. Which is a poker chip tray that secretly reads cards using a hidden camera, special contact lenses or eyeglasses that could read pre-marked cards, and an x-ray table that could read cards face down on the table.
CHAKRABARTI: One victim lost $1.8 million in these rigged poker games. Nocella says defendants have been charged with crimes such as illegal gambling, extortion, and wire fraud conspiracy.
NOCELLA, JR.: The defendants laundered their proceeds, including through cash exchanges, the use of multiple shell companies, and through cryptocurrency transfers.
As part of the scheme, some of the defendants and their co-conspirators, conspirators also committed acts of violence, including the gunpoint robbery of a person in order to obtain a rigged shuffling machine and extortions that were perpetrated against victims in order to ensure that they repaid their gambling debts.
CHAKRABARTI: I’m pretty sure there’s a Hollywood script writer out there who’s already hard at work on a screenplay about this, but it happened in real life. Even though the nicknames themselves of some of the defendants do seem like they’re straight from a movie names such as the Wrestler, Spook and Albanian Bruce.
But there’s one more thing about the story that feels ready made for the big screen. The old school mob was running this entire operation. Again, here’s U.S. attorney Joseph Nocella.
NOCELLA, JR.: The mafia, specifically members and associates of the Bonanno, Gambino and Genovese. Organized crime families had preexisting control over non rigged illegal poker games around New York City.
As a result, they also became involved in the rigged poker games, helping to organize the games and taking a cut of the proceedings and working to enforce the collection of debts.
CHAKRABARTI: Gambino. Bonanno. Genovese. These are three of the five families in La Cosa Nostra. In The Godfather, Don Corleone brought together a fictionalized version of these families, and in the Sopranos they’re dinner table conversation.
(CLIP PLAYS)
CHAKRABARTI: La Cosa Nostra formed in the 1930s after a bloody power struggle for control of crime operations in the United States.
They controlled unions, industries such as waste management and neighborhoods, via loan sharking and shaking down businesses. But in the ’80s and ’90s, the tide began to turn on the mob. Prosecutors put high profile soldiers, capos, even bosses behind bars.
(NEWS MONTAGE)
BRIEF #1: Today, federal officials tried to start making the mob bosses do the paying. For the first time ever, the reputed heads of all five crime families in our town were hauled into court on one indictment.
BRIEF #2: Sal Lamberti, the alleged American contact man for Sicilian heroin importers, who is now out on $3.5 million bail spent his day trying to avoid returning to jail, extradition to Italy and reporters.
BRIEF #3: The jailhouse gates rumble down as a prison van carries John Gotti to a future behind bars. Prosecutors say bon voyage, goodbye to John Gotti. Who’s headed now for the prison yard.
CHAKRABARTI: High profile news from cases in the ’80s and ’90s, including the famous commission case Pizza Connection Trial, and the arrest of Teflon Don John Gotti. But by 2010, mob stories had pretty much dropped out of the headlines, and yet last month’s announcement shows La Cosa Nostra is still very much alive.
And very much active. So how in the world are these families still around and still committing crimes even though we all know who they are? A little bit later in this hour, we’re going to talk with a former member of the Mafia, and we’ll also speak with a prosecutor who went after organized crime families for years.
But first, let’s turn to Tony DeStefano. He is a bestselling journalist who’s been following the Mafia for decades. He’s written 10 books about the mob, including the bestsellers, “Top Hoodlum” and “The Deadly Don.”
Tony DeStefano. Welcome to On Point.
TONY DeSTEFANO: Thank you. Here we are.
CHAKRABARTI: So you must be one of the few people who wasn’t necessarily surprised to hear three of the five families’ names read out by the U.S. attorney in New York.
DeSTEFANO: This was a fairly lucrative scheme that we heard about and yeah, when you hear lucrative and the mafia, you figure the families are going to be involved. It’s easy. That’s an easy one.
CHAKRABARTI: Here’s the thing about La Cosa Nostra, is they are much more well known in the popular imagination because of things like The Godfather.
So let’s get some straight facts from you, Tony. Tell us a little bit about the families. Let’s start with the three that were actually named by the U.S. attorney. So the Gambino family, what’s their story?
DeSTEFANO: Their story, of course, they get the name from Carlo Gambino, who passed away back in 1976, I believe.
Very powerful, particularly in the garment industry, in trucking and also the docks. The Genovese family. Another powerful family at its time, taking its name from Vito Genovese back in the fifties. And powerful in many ways, and more sort of blue collar if I want to term it that way.
And then you have the Bonanno family, which I seem to know more about. Because I covered them extensively. They were the third of the legacy families, if you want to call ’em that, involved in this thing. They were into all sorts of stuff, gambling, hijacking. It was a lot of stuff that they were into. A lot of, again, blue collar stuff.
But those are the three that are involved in this case. There’s a fourth family, the Colombo family, which is lurking on the fringe of this case and certainly showed up. The early part of the investigation, although I don’t think we have anybody connected to that family in these round of indictments.
CHAKRABARTI: We will speak to someone who was formally connected to that family in a couple of minutes.
But Tony, since you know, it’s the Bonanno family that you know the best, right?
DeSTEFANO: Yeah, exactly.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So tell us a little bit more about them. Like how long has the family been around and what kind of things did you discover as you were following them for many years? I’m just eager for your mob stories.
DeSTEFANO: That’s fine. All of these families have a start, if you will, back in the 1930s when Lucky Luciano got everybody together in this commission style organization, and there’s a lineage to all of these families. I’m not gonna bore you with all of that, but suffice to say, the Bonanno family is named after Joe Bonanno.
Who by about the 1950s and perhaps a little earlier, was the namesake for the family. And that was a family which was fairly powerful. And eventually because of Bonanno’s, Joe Bonanno’s duplicity, if you want to call it that, he got thrown out of the leadership and the family went through a number of leaders on temporary status.
And so finally there was a power struggle in 1981, in which the three upstart captains in the family were murdered. And Phil Rastelli became the boss, although Rastelli was not a very effective boss because he kept going in and out of jail. And his main emissary on the street was a guy by the name of Joe Massino who took over when Rastelli died.
Massino I know a lot about because I covered his case, his federal racketeering case, and he was a guy who was very shrewd. Not very well educated, but had a head for math and numbers and he got his crews organized in such a way that they defeated surveillance and they defeated surveillance.
But on the one hand, they were penetrated by the FBI agent Joe Pistone. Which worked against them and for them. What do I mean by that? What happened was that when Pistone was revealed as the undercover, the rest of the mafia family said, okay, look, the Bonannos, they can have who they want as the boss, but they’re not gonna be part of our big rackets.
They froze them to the side, which actually worked to the advantage of the Bonannos because that family then didn’t get caught up in some of these big cases that were made against the other families. So the Bonannos were kind of cushioned. But that only lasted until about 19, sorry, 2002, when the FBI through some forensic accounting got the line on Massino.
Uncovered his schemes. There was a lot of, there was hijacking going on. There were murders and there was a lot of other stuff that happened. And they brought Massino to trial.
Part II
CHAKRABARTI: I’d like to turn to Michael Franzese. He is a former member of the Colombo crime family in New York.
He was a capo and he claims it at one point he was earning some $8 million a week for the family. But in 1986, Franzese was convicted of federal racketeering and tax conspiracy charges, and he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. While in jail, he converted to Christianity and left the mob and has since become a motivational speaker, author, and popular YouTuber.
Michael Franzese, welcome to On Point.
MICHAEL FRANZESE: Hi, Meghna. How are you?
CHAKRABARTI: I’m doing really well. First of all, tell us a little bit more about what your reaction was when you saw all these familiar names pop up in this major announcement last month.
FRANZESE: I certainly wasn’t surprised about the gambling situation with the NBA.
I was recruited way back when to speak to players about the dangers of gambling. Because I had a big operation on the street. Many athletes were gambling with us, so that didn’t surprise me.
What surprised me a little bit was the fact that they mentioned four out of the five families in New York that were involved in this. Normally, you don’t work in concert with each other, at least, you do at times, but not, it’s not very normal, very likely. So the fact that all four families were involved, and I believe they weren’t in concert with one another, is just that gambling is a major business of that life. So they might not have been working together.
It might have been individual cases where guys from each family were working and they lumped it all in at once, so that was a little bit surprising.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. We’ll talk about that more in just a second, Michael. But when you said you were recruited, you mean recruited by law enforcement to, no?
FRANZESE: No, I was recruited by the leagues themselves. I was finishing up my 10 year prison sentence. I was actually in solitary confinement. They kept me there for almost three years. And yeah, the FBI did tell the NBA and Major League Baseball heads of security that they believed that I would cooperate with them.
Because I had stated that I was walking away from that life, changing my life.
And so they came to the prison and they asked, they met with me and said, listen, you claim you changed your life around. We’re gonna give you an opportunity to do, we have a big problem with gambling. You at one time were one of the perpetrators.
Would you come and speak to our players? And when I was released from prison, I did that. I started that in 1996, and I’ve been doing it ever since. I’ve spoken to every major league baseball team, all the NBA, NFL. And then 1998 the NCAA jumped on board, and I’ve spoken to probably 300 universities, Division I and II.
Over the past 30 years.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Tony, I hope you don’t mind if I talk with Mr. Franzese a little bit because he is already making me wish we had two or three hours with him. But he’s gotta leave us in about 10 minutes.
DESTAFANO: That’s fine.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Thanks Tony. Thanks. Michael Franzese, the solitary confinement time is, just grabbed me. But, so let’s go back to what landed you in that 10 year sentence anyway. How old were you when you became part of the Colombo crime family?
FRANZESE: My dad was the underboss under Joe Colombo in that family. So basically, I grew up in the life. My dad was an extremely high profile figure.
He was the John Gotti of his day. So I grew up in the life, but I didn’t intend to be part of that life until my dad drew a 50-year prison sentence on a bank robbery case. I was 18 years old, and my dad went away for what would’ve been 50 years. And because of different circumstances, my dad thought that I can help him get outta prison by becoming part of his life.
So I was very close with Joe Colombo. When my dad went in, he took me under his wing, very active in the Italian American Civil Rights League that Joe put together at that time. And my dad proposed me for membership in that life. When we were in a visiting room, Leavenworth Penitentiary. I was 20 years old, 21 years old actually.
And for about three years I was in a recruit period until I proved myself to them. And in 1975, actually Halloween night, I took an oath and became a made member in that life. And I was a soldier for about five years. And then the 1990 excuse me, 1980, I was appointed at caporegime by my boss at that time. … And for the next 15 years or so, I was part of that life. I had about a 20-year run myself.
CHAKRABARTI: What is the oath? That you took.
FRANZESE: It’s basically, a lot of people think that when you take that oath, it’s an oath to lie, steal, murder, and do things like that. That’s not the oath. Obviously, that happens in that life.
I’m not going to sugarcoat anything, but the oath is really an oath of silence. It’s Omertà, you’re never supposed to even admit that the life exists. Obviously, you never betray your fellow associates in that life. But that’s really what the oath is all about.
And it’s a very solemn ceremony. Some blood falls out of your hand, and a picture of a saint is burnt in your hands. And it is very solemn, very serious. And I took that oath very seriously back then. I take it very seriously today, even though I don’t consider myself a member of the life anymore.
It’s a serious situation.
CHAKRABARTI: Do you remember what Saint it was? The picture?
FRANZESE: No. No. Meghna, I’ve been asked that so many times.
CHAKRABARTI: I’m sorry.
FRANZESE: That’s okay. I really don’t, but —
CHAKRABARTI: No, I’m just curious. So at one point, you were very successful once you took the oath. At one point, and this is what in the eighties? Must have been, or late seventies or early eighties, you were earning $8 million bucks a week for the family.
How? What were you doing?
FRANZESE: I had devised a scheme along with another fella to defraud the government outta tax on every gallon of gasoline, and we ran that operation. I had the Russian guys involved with me also. We ran that operation for almost eight years. At the height of our operation, I had over 300 gas stations, I either operated controlled or leased. I had 18 companies that were shell companies that were licensed to collect the tax.
We had to be wholesalers at that time, and we were selling a half a billion gallons of gas a month and taken down 20 to 40 cents a gallon, whatever the market would bear at that time.
So it was a very significant amount of money and that was eventually what I went down for. I had been to trial five times before that. Rudy Giuliani indicted me on a big case, but fortunately I was acquitted in that case. So after five times going to trial and beating the government, I decided to take a plea on the last one.
And I drew a 10-year prison sentence. I had a $15 million restitution. I had $5 million in forfeitures. I had my own jet plane, a helicopter at times. So I gave a lot of assets up to the government and went in and did my time.
CHAKRABARTI: One more question about your time in incarceration, Michael, if I may. I mentioned that you had a conversion experience in prison, and I wanna be sure I described it correctly. Because were you Catholic before that?
FRANZESE: I was, Meghna. I grew up a Catholic. To me, Catholicism was really, it was like a subject in school to me. It wasn’t really, I can’t say I was a person of faith during that time.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And so then what was your conversion experience while in prison?
FRANZESE: My wife, young girl that really, I walked away from the life because I met this young girl who I fell very much in love with. She’s now my wife of 40 years. And she was a Christian, and her mom was a very devout Christian, but that in itself didn’t really work for me.
But when I was in solitary, it was a tough time, being in solitary, especially for that amount of time. I was there almost three years. The government was very upset with me. They tried to get me to cooperate against certain people in that life, I wouldn’t do it. So they were pretty upset with me, and they kept me in lockdown.
And it was during that time a correctional officer handed me a bible, and I just really started my journey, my faith journey and just came out of there believing very solidly in Christianity. And it’s been that way ever since.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Michael, hang on for a second. Because Tony, I wanna go back to you and return to the case that we’re currently talking about. Because what Michael said was really interesting that the thing that he found remarkable was that these families were allegedly working in concert with each other. Can you talk about your thoughts on that?
Is that, how unusual is that?
DeSTEFANO: I think it is not the run of the mill everyday thing, but they do, when they get a good racket together, they will cooperate. We saw that historically in the Windows case back in the eighties and the concrete case, they cooperate.
This case was lucrative and I think there was going to be cooperation from the get-go when they saw, started to see how much money was coming in and how much money that was allegedly scamming off this. So there’s a history here. There is a history.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So then Michael Franzese, about the sort of high profile nature of these most recent indictments.
I think it took a lot of us a lot of Americans by surprise. Because as I mentioned in the top of the show. Following the eighties and the nineties when there was such intense focus on investigating and prosecuting the families after 9/11, it seemed as if, I don’t know if the families themselves were just significantly less powerful because of all their arrests or if federal agents just stopped paying less attention.
What was it?
FRANZESE: I’ve always said this, Meghna, the golden age of costa nostra in this country was really from the time Luciano really organized everything into the commission and the families. He was highly responsible for that. But the golden age was from that time, I would say early forties, right through the mid-eighties.
When the racketeering act really did tremendous damage in that life. A lot of people say it was John Gotti that brought the life down. It wasn’t John Gotti. It was absolutely the RICO Act. Because what happened is, a lot of that life people stayed in line because of fear. They were afraid, and I guess you can understand that, but what happened was when the RICO Act came in, the fear of the life was transferred to the fear of the government because now you’re going away forever. They’re taking all your assets, whatever you have, unless you cooperate. So many guys started to cooperate and become informants a lot, more than, I couldn’t believe it.
There’s guys in our family that were cooperating for quite some time and I couldn’t believe it when I found out. So it really put a lot of damage in that life. And what happened after that? You know what happens. The government runs in patterns, they run in patterns with this.
They’ll build really intense on the mob for 10, 11, 12, 13 years. Back when I was on the street, I believe there were 1,400 agents that were assigned to the families. We had about 750 made guys. Guys that actually took the oath. We had a lot of associates, but guys that actually took the oath, about 750. You had two agents for every made guy.
Now I believe that have less than a hundred guys. Because you’re right. What happens? Terrorism became the major focus and now the guys on the street, they start to build up a little bit again. This life is not going away in my lifetime; I can tell you that, these guys are very resourceful.
They got smarter. They know they can’t be the John Gotti and throw their chest out and be like that because the government will intensify again, when I was on the street, Meghna. There wasn’t a day that went by, or at least every other day that you didn’t read about us in The New York Times, the Daily News, The Post, the Long Island Press, the NewsDay, whatever.
Now you know, I read the New York Post every morning online and maybe every six months you read something. You know? The guys who’ve gotten smarter in that regard because they had to, there was no way they were going to survive if they didn’t. But it’s not going away. So this bust didn’t surprise me, and I still don’t believe that all these families got together and were working together.
You need to understand something. You know, what made the mob strong in this country was prohibition. The government made the mob strong. Before that, there were a bunch of guys trying to make a living, extorting people in the neighborhoods. But when Prohibition came about, they realized how much money they could make because they were going to make a product available that people wanted and couldn’t get anywhere else.
Do you know that there were 36,000 speakeasies in the state of New York alone? And most of them were mob run, so they made a tremendous amount of money. But that was an 11-year run. I made a lot of money in the gas business. We were bringing in 7, 8, 9, $10 million a week. But that was an eight year run and then that went away.
Gambling was from the beginning. It will be till the end. They know it the best. They love it. They operate it all the time. They’re independent. The families are operating independently in different card rooms and different ways to get to players all over the place. So I don’t believe this was a concerted effort among them.
It’s just what they do all the time.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So I’ve only got two minutes left with you, Michael. Two more questions. Sure. One is, you’re right to point out, these are gambling related charges. As far as I know, there’s no murder in these indictments. So in that case, are we more likely to see, from your experience, the government, or even the guys being willing to make deals instead of going to trial?
FRANZESE: Yeah, you remember what I’m telling you? You’re gonna say, I think 33 guys were indicted so far. Recently two more baseball players were indicted. I just, I did a video on that and now I just heard there was a bunch of college kids that got indicted also. This is going to continue, if they would’ve put an agency like they have with the SEC watching Wall Street.
If there’s a division of the FBI that sticks only with gambling in sports, you’re gonna see this happening all the time. These athletes love to gamble. They’re not very smart. They gamble out of emotion. They talk to their friends, they get online, they do text, they’re going to continue to get caught.
But here’s the deal. Tell me the question again. I got a little bit.
CHAKRABARTI: No, don’t worry. No worries. I was just asking if given the nature of the charges, how many of these are actually going to go to trial versus cutting deals?
FRANZESE: I’ll tell you what’s gonna happen. 33 guys got indicted. You’re going to see 25 of them making, taking plea.
This isn’t murder, it isn’t anything like that. Guys are gonna get some time, some guys are gonna walk away, other guys are gonna cooperate. It was big news and I understand that the government makes a big splash outta this thing, and it is important. I’m not downplaying it. We can’t have this in professional or college sports.
They have to, people can’t believe that the games are rigged. Becauseit’ll destroy the sports. I can tell you another thing, Meghna, and I know this for a fact. A lot of players are very resentful because now the leagues who have always preached the dangers of gambling are now partners with all the gambling sites.
They’re making money. And the players are saying, wait a second. You say we can’t gamble, but your partner’s making money on us. Because we’re the players, we’re doing all the work and you’re telling us we can’t gamble. There’s guys right now that are very resentful of that. I can tell you right now.
So the leagues, the more access you give people to gamble, the more problems you’re going to have. And that’s what we’re going to see.
Part III
CHAKRABARTI: Tony, before we bring in our former prosecutor here, I just wanted to ask you about what seems to be really sophisticated and technologically advanced operation that these families allegedly had going as announced by the U.S. attorney, like those x-ray machines or the glasses or the offsite strategizing that was happening.
It seems as if perhaps no one’s surprised that the mafia has kept up with what, how technology can help major operations cheat.
DeSTEFANO: Yeah. What’s happened is that they took these card shuffling machines, or if you wanna call ’em that, and modified them so that they could keep track of the hands that everybody was getting around the table.
And then you had the x-ray machines. The x-ray tables. The special glasses. This is amazing stuff. Now I say it’s amazing because back many years ago, back in the 1960s, there was a similar rudimentary scandal at the Friar’s Club in California, where people drilled holes in the ceiling of a card room and were able to look down through the pinholes to see what hands people had and relay them to their cohorts.
It was a cheating scandal, but nothing like this. But yeah, what’s happened is that the mob through people who know how to do this technology, is able to keep abreast of the changes and corrupt it for its own purposes.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Let’s bring in Jim Walden. Now he is a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of New York. He’s serving that position from 1992 to 2002, and during that time, focused mostly on organized crime. He also prosecuted members and associates of all five families in La Cosa Nostra. He’s still a prominent attorney in New York City, has his own law firm now. Jim Walden, welcome to On Point.
JIM WALDEN: Meghna, thanks for having me on. I’m glad to be here, especially with Tony, who I have a long history with.
DeSTEFANO: Very good.
CHAKRABARTI: Jim, I think part of what amazes people about the mafia and the law enforcement officers who went after them is really just not just the sheer dramatic aspect of how powerful and sophisticated the mob was, but also just the risks that people took in trying to bring them to justice.
Was that part of your experience when you were prosecuting members of La Cosa Nostra?
WALDEN: So when I was a prosecutor, especially in the young years, we had just gone through a circumstance where a Chinese organization sent essentially a shotgun bomb to a prosecutor. There were threats at, against various prosecutors, especially in the Gotti trial, the John Gotti trial.
I wasn’t terribly concerned about that. I had studied the mob enough to know that going after prosecutors was not an acceptable thing to do in the mob. It just brought more heat. So I wasn’t terribly worried about it. What I was worried about is the threats to the witnesses.
That happened consistently through the time that I was prosecuting cases. So much so that I literally went out with the agents and found one guy that was threatening an important cooperating witness’s family and basically told the guy that if he didn’t stop, the world was gonna come down around him.
So that was my main concern.
CHAKRABARTI: That must have been a fun meeting.
WALDEN: Yeah, it was, we pulled the guy’s car over and I literally pulled him outta the car, and it was not the smartest move, but these guys at the end of the day are bullies and you just needed to be tough.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So given your prosecutorial experience, tell us more about what it takes to investigate or let’s start from the beginning. How is it that law enforcement these days, with it sounds like so much reduced availability of agents for mob investigations, how do they first decide, Hey, there may be something going on with illegal sports betting. And then what do they do?
WALDEN: So oftentimes it’s an informant. It may be an informant that’s paid, it may be an informant that is working with law enforcement out of a sense of purpose. It may be that the person got jammed up in something and wants to get out from under.
But oftentimes these investigations start with an informant who is not expected to testify. It’s just a street informant, and then you build cases. And use electronic surveillance whenever you can. It was very difficult when I was a prosecutor to do anything other than phones. We tried bugs in clubs a number of times, but obviously as you’ve said in the earlier segment, the mafia has merged with Mission Impossible.
You think Ethan Hunt will be a mafia member next, given the sophistication of the scam that just came down. And the main thing that causes what you really need, which is cooperating witnesses to break the oath and testify, is Michael said it was RICO. And I agree with them that’s helpful, but it’s the mandatory minimums that often went with drug trafficking.
Because contrary to their rules, especially in the eighties and nineties, the drugs were super lucrative and there were mandatory minimum sentences that were long and the death penalty was introduced. So murders became much more costly. And to my mind, that’s what caused people to cooperate. And for a great prosecution, that’s really what you need is cooperating witnesses.
CHAKRABARTI: Are we seeing activity now with the families in things like drugs or even more violent crime, the way we did in the eighties and nineties?
WALDEN: No, I think that the mob has always been nimble. People say that it started in the thirties. The truth of the matter is, it started centuries ago in Italy and came here in the late 1890s when mafia members were killing people and putting them in barrels and leaving them on the street or mailing them.
It has a long, as Tony knows, a long history. But the mob got smart. They’re nimble. They’re almost like water running down a hill. You put an obstacle in front of them and they’re going to flow around it. So they flowed in the tax scams that have become even more sophisticated than the one that Michael was running.
They’ve gone into crypto, obviously. Michael’s right, gambling is, oh, as long as gambling remains illegal in the United States, that is always going to be a place for them, to have both schemes like cheating and also just profit from running games and running slot machines and joker poker machines and all the other things that the mob does.
CHAKRABARTI: They’ve gone into crypto.
WALDEN: That’s what I’m hearing. I’m hearing that they’ve got all kinds of schemes and scams going on.
CHAKRABARTI: Tony, I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on what Michael had told us earlier, that there’s so much money in sports now. It’s a multi-billion-dollar industry, and it’s not one, hopefully that violence has to be a part of executing whatever the scams are. Does that mean that it just becomes that much more lucrative for the mafia, and do you think we’re likely to actually over time see even more cases like this?
DeSTEFANO: It’s funny you bring that up, because I just was looking in the last few days, there were some ex-wrestlers out of a college in New Jersey who were charged in a scheme with a reputed Lucchese crime family associate. And so this stacks on top of the Major League Baseball revelations we had recently. In addition to the 31 or 33 people charged in the NBA case. And this has been going on, and I think what happens is that.
And Jim alluded to this, that the mob realizes that if you start committing murders, becoming very violent, you’re going to get the full force of the RICO law on you. Particularly with murders. I don’t think we’ve seen a mob murder maybe since 2004. So it behooves everybody to get involved to make money, and this is what it’s about.
The mafia, one witness told me is around, the job is to make money. And I think everybody wants to get involved in that. And in sports, billions of dollars is at risk in all sorts of ways through the value of franchises and whatever. And I think the players see the clubs and the leagues involved in gambling legitimately, and they say why can’t we do this?
Why not? Why not? But you take a risk. And the risk, as the current case shows can be basically ruination of your career. It’s crazy, that you spend all that time building up a career in sports and then you throw it away, for what? Several thousand dollars.
CHAKRABARTI: That makes me wonder, Jim, Michael was saying earlier that, and I know that both you and Tony agree with this, that there’s just fewer assets available from the federal government to monitor the mafia. Like there at one time, Jim, correct me on this, that in New York itself, the FBI used to have a squad, one squad for each, so five essentially, for each of the families.
WALDEN: And one for the New Jersey family, [DeCavalcante].
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. And then after 9/11, when, for understandable reasons, the focus was international terrorism, that was all collapsed into what, how many squads.
WALDEN: One.
CHAKRABARTI: One. Okay. Now, given what the sort of national security or let’s say domestic law enforcement priorities are in the United States now, which still includes obviously drug investigations and drug trafficking control.
We also have the threat of domestic terrorism, et cetera. Do you think that the mafia should be included once again in terms of, as a high-profile need for more FBI and law enforcement assets?
WALDEN: I do. It is, when you just take a step back and think about what the mafia is a nimble, durable, large group of people involved in a quote-unquote secret society for the purpose of corruption and crime. So whether or not you hear lots about them today, yesterday, a month ago, they’re there and they don’t really care about the values that we care about. They just care about making money and getting power.
So whether we’re seeing lots of enforcement activity or not, there is lots of crime going on and much of it undetected. And I always thought it was a mistake for the FBI to lose focus on them because all you’re doing, there’s so many of us that maybe didn’t cut the head off the snake. But came as close as possible to decapitating it.
It was really on the ropes and the time that it’s had to rebuild is just gonna be revealed in all the crime that will eventually come to the surface and the wars that will start again when there’s a need or a desire for more power.
CHAKRABARTI: But the thing I think that we keep being amazed by is that we have this, now almost a hundred-year experience with the activities of these families.
How many, what percentage would you say right now of the made members that law enforcement is actually aware of?
WALDEN: I don’t know. I don’t have the answer, but I would say that it’s at least if you think about each family having between 100 and 250 members, we’re talking something around 700 to 1,000 Mafia members in the New York City area.
It may not all be in New York City anymore, because many have moved out to New Jersey, Connecticut, et cetera. But I’m guessing if we were, we had a current FBI agent, it would be somewhere between 700 and 1,000.
CHAKRABARTI: But that, and those are known right?
WALDEN: Known or suspected. Or suspected. One of the things about La Cosa Nostra is you don’t always have perfect information.
We have a boss right now of one of the families that very, there’s very little known publicly about, yeah.
CHAKRABARTI: I guess the reason why I’m asking is that this isn’t, these aren’t new operations on the scene. And I’m not diminishing the complexity and effort that has to go into bringing things like RICO cases to trial.
It’s hard, but at the same time. It seems like it should be doable again, given that so many of these people actually may be known to law enforcement.
Am I oversimplifying that, Jim?
WALDEN: I don’t think you are simplifying it. One of the things about organized crime that’s different than other than other groups, although you’re seeing the same thing now in terms of the discussion about some of the cartels and international gangs, is you generally know and can verify the structure.
There are enough informants. There’s still surveillance. They still assemble at things like social clubs and the like. And so they’re a relatively known cohort, so that doesn’t mean it’s gonna be easy to investigate them, but it means you’re starting with an advantage.
CHAKRABARTI: Tony, do you have any thoughts on that?
DeSTEFANO: Yeah, I think Jim is right, the advantage today for law enforcement is that you have a history, institutional history of intelligence, cooperating witnesses who have been able to help put together a critical mass and are able to, I think, point you in the right direction if you’re gonna do an investigation.
Also, technology, I think is has helped. Today, we have if you wanna track somebody, say you have license plate readers you have more sophisticated technology. Gotti, when he assassinated Castellano, they ran through the streets of Manhattan, and we didn’t have that kind of technology back then.
So it took a while to really make a case. But things have progressed to the point where I think it can be done in terms of making cases. But it takes the effort and the work. Jim said, and he pointed out that there’s one squad now. Or the FBI in terms of La Cosa Nostra, but that’s probably too little. I think we’ve gotta expand that.
The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.