https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=lKWycjEXl5g
When you look at the situation now, because you’re a changed man, and we’ll get into that, you talked about viewing law enforcement as an enemy and an enemy worth continually battling against, even at personal cost, and not blaming your father, and you said you loved your father and that he was a good father to you. When you look back on it now, I mean, obviously your father, and correct me at any point if I’ve got this wrong, but obviously your father was engaged in widespread criminal activity. Why was that not an issue when you were young? Why do you think that his guilt on that front was more or less invisible to you? And how do you view his participation in these activities and his hand in establishing his destiny, even if he was framed on those charges? How do you view that now? Well, totally different. One of the, I’ve had many defining moments in my life, but when I stepped away from that life and walked away, I had a lot of trouble, Jordan. I mean, there was a contract on my life because you can’t walk away from that life, and everybody thought the next step for me would be to be a cooperating witness because that’s what happens normally. People don’t just walk away. So I was in prison at the time, and we can get into that, how that happened, but the law enforcement, the FBI came into the prison and said, there’s a contract on your life. You’re a dead man anyway, cooperate with us. And they said, and your father went along with the contract. We got word from our informants. Now, I understood that. I understood that because sometimes in that life, if you propose somebody and that person becomes an informant, well, you could be held responsible. In my case, probably not with my dad because of his reputation there, but it was possible. So I understood what he was doing. It hurt a little bit, but it didn’t bother me that much because I understood the life well. And I said, well, these are some of the consequences I’m going to face. I don’t believe my father would ever put a gun to my head, but he might’ve kept quiet, you know, and just, well, hey, my son violated the rules. But it was really later on that I had a conversation with him, and this was many years later, after I walked away, it was probably maybe 10 or 12 years ago. And I said to him, I visit him in prison on his last violation. And I said, you know, dad, our family’s destroyed. I mean, my mother, 33 years without a husband, at the end of her life, she died in 2012, her relationship with my dad can only be described as ugly because she blamed him for everything that went wrong. What went wrong? I had a sister, 27 years old, died of an overdose of drugs. My brother, 25 years a drug addict, I can’t even begin to tell you what he put the family through and me personally, trying to keep him alive on the street. Another younger sister, you know, 41 years old, she died of cancer, but she was never mentally stable. And I said, you know, dad, you got to claim responsibility for what you destroyed our family. Because he was asking me, you know, you walked away, why did you do this? And I said, because I didn’t want to put my family through what we went through. And, you know, he looked at me and he said, well, none of this was my fault. I said, well, what do you mean by that? He said, well, I was framed on this case. And I said, dad, you weren’t framed because you were a doctor, a lawyer, or a priest. You were framed because of who we were. I said, you got to come to terms with that because eventually you were going to go down. He wouldn’t accept responsibility. So that’s interesting. So, okay, so let’s talk about that a little bit because that’s extremely interesting. Because you might think that given that he had lived an exceptional criminal life, that he would have been willing in some sense to accept the guilt that would be part and parcel of that. I mean, if you engage in criminal activities, then you’re doing criminal things. And obviously that’s wrong in some sense, or it wouldn’t be called criminal. And you’d think that that would be part of the price you’d pay for whatever success and respect you might generate as a consequence of doing that. Maybe whatever adventure you might have as a consequence of doing that. But the fact that he dwelt on the narrow fact of his innocence in that regard means to me in some sense that he was denying his, and I think this is what you’re telling me, is that he was denying his culpability. You know, when you often hear that, especially the high-level criminal types are without conscience, but that doesn’t seem to be an appropriate description of the situation with your father because if he was without conscience, he would have just said, well, of course I was guilty, and they frame me, the sons of bitches, but that’s exactly what you’d expect. But you know, I had it coming to me in some sense because of all the other things I did. But you said that he was clinging to his innocence and also unwilling to take responsibility for what he had done. And do you think that’s an exaggerated version of what you had to do when you stepped outside yourself, so to speak, to commit the sorts of acts that you didn’t regard as part and parcel of you? Yeah, I think it could be described that way, yes. You know, and I got upset with him during that meeting too because I said, you know, how could you not claim responsibility for any of this? I said, our family was destroyed. And he refused to do it. He was very, now again, I don’t know if he just couldn’t face me and say it. Maybe inwardly I can’t look into his heart and his mind, but he was very adamant about denying it. And maybe in some sense, I don’t know, maybe that had a carryover effect on me during my time in that life. Because my dad did teach me one thing. He said to me, or he taught me a lot of things that I thought were very helpful to me. But one of the things he said is never admit to anything. Never, no matter what. You don’t ever admit to anything. Let them prove it, let somebody else prove it. And I saw that as being wrong later on, but during my time in that life and growing up, that’s how I would never admit to anything. If you guys want to get me, you got to get me. I’m not going to help you. So that was my mentality back then. Right, right. And do you think that did carry, did that also carry over? Do you think, it’s hard to practice something without it becoming habit, let’s say. And so you might say, well, did that carry over to your attitude to yourself? Because I am very interested in that idea that you brought forward earlier about having to step outside yourself when you saw yourself doing things that you didn’t regard as essentially you. It’s a strange distinction, right? Because there’s the real you that’s doing the things that are good, and then there’s the sporadic you that are doing terrible things, but that’s not really you. There’s a line of denial there. And that’s not conscienceless in any sense. In some sense, it’s the denial of conscience. And you did say that your father seemed to manifest the same attitude on a very large scale. When you decided to get out of that criminal life, was that a consequence of willingness to preserve your family from the catastrophes that your birth family had been through, or to what degree was that also your willingness to look at those things that you’d done and to start seeing them as part of you instead of part of whatever it is that you were being when you weren’t being you? Well, there were a couple of things that led to that. Jordan, one of the horrors of that life is that you make a mistake, your best friend walks you into a room and you don’t walk out again. And there was a night when I had that experience. There was a lot of talk about me on the street. I had a very big crew at that time. We were making a lot of money. There was a publication, I think it was Newsday, that wrote a story that said I was getting powerful enough to break away from the Colombo family and start my own family. There was no truth to it. It was fictional story, but you know how the media is. And so guys on the streets start to get a little bit nervous about that, especially my boss at the time. So without going into all the details, unless you wanted me to, I always walked into a room one night and I didn’t think I was gonna walk out again. And it was one of the scariest times of my life. It was not heroic that I walked in. It was more robotic. I just said, hey, if this is it, I was such a product mentally. Well, I’d like to hear the details. Tell me what happened. So you were becoming very successful and a story was generated about you in the press, about your ambitions. And obviously that caused some concern. So yeah, tell me the details. Okay, well, my dad was on parole at the time and I was a captain in a family. They had elevated me to that position. That’s a powerful position, cap regime, captain. And my dad was also a captain. And I went to see him, he sent for me. I went to see him and we were in the driveway of his house in Long Island. And he said to me, the boss wants to see us tonight. And because my dad was on parole and I had no record at the time, I drove him everywhere. I tried to shield him from people because he kept getting violated. So wherever he would travel, he would go with me. I’d keep people away from him. So I said, okay, what time do you want me to pick you up? Because we knew it had to be a covert meeting because the boss was also on parole and we couldn’t all get together because there would have been a violation for the two of them. So he said, well, they want to do this differently. They want me to come in first and they want you to come in second. And I said, well, why do they want to do that? I said, no, we’re not going to do that. You know the talk on the street. I said, we’re not going to do that. Why would they separate us? I said, we’ll go together. Lowick story showed it was the first time I really had an argument with my dad ever in my life because I always respected him. Even if I disagreed with him, I did it nicely. But he was very adamant, very insistent. He said, we had an order. We got to do it that way. I said, okay. So another captain in the family called me and he said, meet me in Brooklyn on 18th Avenue. And so I drove in from Long Island. I met him, I parked my car and I got into his car. Now this is somebody I knew my whole life. He was another captain, equal rank with me. When I got in the car in the passenger seat, there was somebody sitting behind me who I recognized, but I didn’t know well. And I started to get a little like, what’s going on here? And it was about a 15 minute ride to the house where we were meeting the boss at that time. And we had to do it covert to make sure nobody was following us. It was a summer day in August. And when we parked the car, we get out of the car and it was about a 30 yard walk from the car down to the basement apartment where we had to go. And I get out of the car and I start to walk and I felt his name was Jimmy. Jimmy, I assumed got behind me and the other fella got out behind him. And this was a very bad setup, Jordan. I said, something is dramatically wrong here. I said, this is wrong. And you know, when I think of this, I’m telling you, every time I think of it, it was that intense for me. I can hear like the crickets chirping and I see these little lightning bugs that we had at the time in New York. And as I’m walking down there, I’m saying, this is bad. I may not walk out of this room. And I started to get very nervous, scared, started praying. I wasn’t a grateful guy at that time, but I started praying. And I knew the setup, you know, walking down those steps, that door opens and might be the last thing I ever see. I don’t know how I didn’t faint when the door opened. But anyway, we go in, I sit with the boss. My father wasn’t there. And we go back and forth, back and forth. And they were grilling me over money and all this stuff. And what happened, I started to get mad. I was getting angry. And I realized you don’t ever get angry with the boss. That’s a bad move. And I said, look, it looks like I’m walking out of here. Let me just keep my cool, which I did. And when it was over, you know, hey, let’s have a glass of wine and everything is good. And we’re hugging and you know, I just wanted to leave. So I told Jimmy, the fella driving, I said, Jimmy, drive me back to my car. I got to go to Long Island. It’s a long drive. So we get in the car and I was really just about to, I was very angry with him because this is somebody I knew all my life. And I wanted to tell him, why didn’t you prepare me for this, this was serious. And he looked at me and he said, before you go any further, Michael, he said, I want to tell you this. He said, this was very serious tonight. You held yourself well in there. Could have been a problem. When he said that to me, I got even more upset with him. I said, you’re my friend. You don’t let me know. You don’t prepare me, give me a hint. And he said, no. And I’m sitting there and he said something to me that really got to me. He said, if it was the other way around, would you have told me? And I thought about it for a minute and I honestly said, no, I wouldn’t have. He said, well, you know, this life is well better than anybody. You grew up in it. He said, this is the life we lead. And I was in silence for about 10 minutes. I was just thinking about all of this. And then when I went to get out of the car, he grabbed my arm and he said to me, I want to tell you something. You’re not going to like this, but you can take this to the bank. He said it just like that. He said, your father was in there earlier tonight. He didn’t help you one bit. He hurt you in there tonight. And I was pretty stunned. I mean, to the point where I couldn’t even ask him, what do you mean? But as I was walking back to my car, Jordan, knowing my father so well, I knew what he did. He didn’t help me. He said, look, if my son is stealing money or anything is going wrong, I have no idea. He handles everything. You know, I’m on parole. I don’t get involved in anything. He threw me under the bus. And I found out later on, that’s exactly what happened. So it made a real impression upon me. I said, man, if this life can separate father and son, you know, after the bond that we had, you know, both the blood oath that we took and father and son, I said, what do we really have here? And it was two years later that I met my current wife, which was really my motivation for walking away. But I still say to myself, I wonder, and I’m not sure. I’m saying, if that incident never happened, would I ever walked away? Because my dad had a very strong hold on me, as did the life. So I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know if I would have ever walked away.