https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0q98Z4kv98Q
I was told straight out, you know, they said to me, do you want to become a member of this life? And I said, yes. And they said, well, here’s the deal. It was a new boss that I had taken over. His name was Tom DiBella. Tom has passed on now. And he said to me, here’s the deal. From now on, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you’re on call to serve this family, the Colombo family. That means if your mother is sick and she’s dying and you’re at her bedside and we call you to service, you leave your mother’s side. You come and serve us from now on. We’re number one in your life before anything and everything. And when and if we feel you deserve this privilege, this honor to become a member, we’ll let you know. So from that moment on, you have to do whatever you’re told to do to prove yourself worthy. And, you know, there was a lot of menial things. You know, there was times I had to drive the boss to a meeting. I sat in a car two, three, four hours, waited for him to come out. You know, God forbid you leave, you go to the restroom, go get a newspaper. He comes out. You’re not there. You’re in trouble, you know, stuff like that. I know I did that once and paid the price. I had a real tongue lashing. You know, just a lot of things like that. I mean, a lot of times you’re just really hanging out and observing and watching and listening. And, you know, I learned to be a very good listener at that point, Jordan. I just listened and observed and seen what it was I need to do and what was expected of me. And look, you know, again, to be honest, there are times when you’re called upon within that life to commit an act of violence. And if you’re told to do it, you need to do it. And before you had gone into medical school and then decided to take this turn in your life, had you been involved in anything that was violent as a child or a teenager? I never was involved myself. I mean, I had fights, you know. I mean, I had a fight, two or three neighborhood fights. I mean, my ribs were broken once. I got hit with a bat, you know, things like that, scuffles like that, but nothing major. But I witnessed things, you know. My dad was a fairly violent guy. I mean, I saw him hit people. So I witnessed that. I didn’t really enjoy seeing it, but I witnessed it at one time at a really young age, I think it was 10 or 11 years old, and he had, you know, trouble with somebody on the street. I was driving with him and he was pretty violent with the guy. How did you react to that when you were 11? It kind of scared me. You know, I didn’t see him like that with another guy. So I was a little concerned. I said, hey, you know, in my mind, I guess I was thinking, is this going to get out of hand? What’s going to happen? And two fellows that were with my dad walked over to me and said, I was in the car, and they said, Mike, don’t worry about it. You probably shouldn’t be seeing this, but everything is OK. But it made an impression on me. So, all right, so how far had you gone in medical school? Well, I was a pre-med student. It was my second year, I was a sophomore. Basically a biology major. And what happened with your father? What happened with your attempts to have his case adjudicated, re-adjudicated? Well, my dad actually did 40 years on that 50, and he was paroled. He made parole because he was under the old law where they still had parole in the federal system. Back then, today they don’t have it. You got to do 85 percent of your time. But he was under the old law. And after 10 years, I actually did get him out on parole, but he kept going back in and always for associating with other felons, somebody alleged to be an organized crime. So he was paroled five times, violated five times and went back in. And he ended up doing 40 on the 50. He was actually released in 2017. For the last time, he was 100 years old, the date of his release. He was actually the oldest member of that life in America, probably in the world. And he died at the age of 103, just two years ago. So what did it mean to be in that time? At that time, what did it mean to be part of the Cosa Nostra of five families in New York? And why five? And how were they? Were they bonded together or were they competing with one another? Well, they didn’t compete with one another, but there were rivalries at the time, but never rivalries that ended up in violence, because in that life, there’s a perception that families used to fight one another. That kind of activity stopped in the 40s. You know, when Lucky Luciano got together and created the commission and there was kind of a ruling body over the five families, the boss of each family was involved in it. They didn’t fight among one another. They settled disputes amicably. Whenever there was a war in that family, it was always a civil war. It was usually for power or leadership. But I always say this, Jordan, I believe the golden years, if you want to call them that, of mafia in New York and maybe probably throughout the United States was really from the 50s until the mid 80s. In the mid 80s, things started to fall apart when Rudy Giuliani started to really use the racketeering laws and put a lot of guys in prison, created a lot of informants. And that’s when the life kind of made a drastic turn, you know, I guess for the better for society, but for the worse for them. But it was a big deal, you know, back then. I mean, we had a lot of power and a lot of control in this country. Yeah, well, it said in your bio that you at the height of your activity, you were involved in criminal activity that was generating something between five and eight million dollars a week. And that would be in the 70s if I’ve got the timeline correct. Yes. So that’s an awful lot of money. What sort of so what sort of activities were you overseeing and what did that overseeing consist of? Well, you know, there’s you kind of you kind of find your own level in that life. And I like to explain it this way. There was kind of two types of people in that life. You were either a racketeer or a gangster. A racketeer was a guy that knew how to use that life to benefit him in business and went out and made money not only for himself, but for the family. And a gangster was someone that was just not capable of that. And they were kind of a I guess you can call it a thug. You know, they were the guys who did a lot of the street work. If you are a racketeer, you also had to be a gangster at certain times because you were you were you had to do that. You know, that was something you had to do. But normally they tried to keep the guys that were earning money, you know, earning money because no organization survives without money. So I was fortunate. I knew how to use that life to benefit me in business. And I went on to make a very significant amount of money. What did we do? Just about everybody in that life, you know, in that level is into gambling. Like I had a lot of bookmakers that were under my control because bookmakers weren’t really allowed to operate on the street unless they were some way affiliated with organized crime. We wouldn’t let them. You know, I put out money on the street at usurious rates. People couldn’t go to a bank, so they would come to me. We did that. And I was again, I was I was very aggressive on the street. I worked very hard and a lot of people would come to me with different schemes. You know, there’s a there’s a misconception that guys in that life sit in their social clubs and look at the next business that they’re going to attack or infiltrate or corrupt in some way. And that happens on occasion. But normally it’s someone from the business that would come to us and say, hey, we have a scheme to defraud our company or our business. Can you help us? And that happened to me quite often. And the biggest thing, you know, to answer your question that I got involved in was I was involved in a scheme to defraud the government out of tax on every gallon of gasoline. And somebody brought the germ of an idea for me. And we we created that into a huge, huge enterprise, I would say, where we were generating eight to ten million dollars a week. How was that implemented, that that that scam on on the gasoline tax front? Well, initially in New York and I think throughout the country, the tax on every gallon was collected at the gas station. The gas station operator was obligated to pay the tax. While that was happening, we had 350 or so gas stations that we either owned or operated and we installed people in all of them. And to make a long story short, you know, it would take the government about 10 months before they would come down on a company that wasn’t paying tax. And we had a way to manipulate them so that it took 10 months. And then they changed the law and they said that you had to be a licensed wholesaler in order to collect the tax and then you had to pay the government. Well, I had 18 companies that were licensed to collect tax on every gallon of gasoline. And the same deal. It took them about 10 or 11 months before they came down on us. And we had accountants working for us that were able to keep them at bay for that length of time. And then by the time they would come down on a company, we just closed the doors. That company would be over and we’d move to the next license. So we did that for I ran this operation for almost eight years. So how come the government didn’t clue in if they were losing the amount of money that you were siphoning off? You said you ran this repeatedly. So if I’ve got it right, you set up a company, you had about 11 month window before the government would come in and enforce its tax collection. So you could collect money for 10 months and then just kill the company and then start another one. Correct. And so and then you managed to do that for eight years. Yes. So why didn’t the government clue in? Well, they couldn’t, you know, they were investigating us. They were trying to clue in. They just couldn’t figure out how we were doing it or what we were doing. And, you know, it was a pretty sophisticated operation and we just tried to stay one step ahead of them, which we were able to do. And it lasted that long. I mean, I had an incident once where two FBI agents, I had also a couple of car agencies, I had a Mazda agency and a Chevrolet agency, and they visited me in my offices once and they brought me outside and they said, look, we have an idea what you’re doing. We know what you’re doing, but we can’t figure it out. Just tell us, help us and we’ll give you a pass on all of this. Now, obviously, I knew they weren’t going to give me a pass and I didn’t cooperate with them at the time, but they knew something was going down. They just couldn’t figure it out. We just stayed ahead of them. And so how did it finally fold up after eight years? Well, my partner, who developed the scheme along with me, he was actually the one that brought me the idea. He had a small operation out in Long Island and he got in trouble on an unrelated case, a tax issue, a personal tax issue that he had. And at the time we had a he was on trial and we had a compound in Panama. And the reason we had it there is because there was no extradition between Panama and the United States at that point in time. And so he was flying back and forth to Panama. And it was at some point in time when he thought he was going to be convicted on his case and he didn’t want to take the conviction. So he fled to Panama. And the FBI somehow they went and kidnapped him in the middle of the night. So they bypassed the extradition laws and they brought him into Florida. And at that point in time, he agreed to be a cooperating witness against me. And I was the target at that time. I had several investigations going on me at one time. And once he became an informant and started cooperating, he told them how the whole scheme was coming down and that’s when it fell apart.