https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_trfsFoyftA
You know, 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. You know, 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 a fictional story, you know how the media is. And so guys on the street start to get a little bit nervous of 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 going to 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, capo 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 it 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. Long story short, 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 the fellow’s name was Jimmy. Jimmy, I assume, got behind me. And the other fellow 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 playful 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 fellow 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? So 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. It could have been a problem. Big government continues to spend borrowed money. Inflation continues to swell, dragging down our economy. And the stock market has entered bear territory. So what’s your plan? Are your assets diversified? I’m Philip Patrick, precious metal specialist for the Birch Gold Group. For nearly 20 years, we’ve helped Americans diversify into gold. And we can help you too. Did you know you can own physical gold and silver in a tax sheltered account? We can help you transfer an IRA or 401k tied to stocks into an IRA in gold. If you’re skeptical about the trajectory of the economy in the US dollar, then text Jordan to 989898. Birch Gold Group will send you a free info kit on securing your savings with gold. With thousands of satisfied customers, five star reviews, and an A plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, we take precious metals seriously. Text Jordan to 989898 for your free info kit. 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, after the bond that we had, 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. Well, it sounds to me, given everything you’ve told me so far, is that the people who were involved in that life set up a morality of, it’s something like a morality of patriarchal loyalty that goes above all else, is that there are like military, that military obedience, military style obedience is required. And that all morality is therefore now a consequence of abiding by the rules of the game. And that would mean you sacrifice your personal happiness, you sacrifice the stability of your family, you might even sacrifice the relationship you have with your son. But the manner in which your moral is to abide by the code of the family. And that sounds like what’s inculcated. Does that seem accurate? Absolutely. Absolutely. Okay, so that would also mean that when you were viewing yourself, doing things that you didn’t think were, say, integrally part of the real you, one of the other justifications for that is, well, that’s the code that I’m bound to abide by because I’ve decided to enter this life and I’ve put my word on doing so. And so at the moment, in order to continue that and to abide by my word, I don’t really have any choice. That’s accurate. Yeah, one of the things that really disturbed me about my dad is that he wouldn’t take any responsibility for it, you know, none at all. And what I had said to him on a few of his violations, I said, Dad, the family is falling apart. You need to leave New York because you can’t make it in New York. You need to get away from everybody and preserve the family. And he wouldn’t do it because his legacy in that life meant more to him than anything else. He wanted to be known as the guy that would die with his boots on. He would never be an informant, no matter what. He stood up, you know, with a 50-year prison sentence. That’s what he wanted to take to his grave and that’s what he did. But in the meantime, the whole family was destroyed. Yeah, well, I think that part of the reason that the mafia life has such a grip on the popular imagination is because of that weird paradoxical relationship between the strict moral code, which is admirable, like being able to abide by a moral code is disciplined and admirable. And then that juxtaposed with the criminality and the chaos that goes along with that and the family price. If you’re just a run-of-the-mill idiot street shoplifting thug and spinning off your idiot criminal enterprises, which are likely to end in catastrophe in a chaotic manner, there’s nothing that interesting about your life. It’s just kind of pathetic. And it usually has a pretty pathetic outcome and generally isn’t very productive. But the thing about the organization that you’re describing is that there really is an iron shod ethos that goes along with it. Now, but what’s interesting about it, you know, so imagine that we look at your situation, we think you had decided to abide by an ethical order. And that was the order of the cosinostra of families. And you’re bound by that. And then you might say, well, that defines you. But it doesn’t exactly, because you said by your own testimony that despite the fact that you had identified with that ethic, when you saw yourself doing certain things, you didn’t feel that was the real you. And so then the question would be, well, who is the real you that that mafia ethic is transgressing against? You know, if it’s something you did by choice, which was the case, and it was something that you were disciplined to do, you might think, well, that’s you. But that isn’t the case. What you felt from what you’ve told me is that you felt you were violating the real you when you were doing terrible things to abide by this ethos. And so what do you think now you’re much older and you’ve gone through many transformations, what do you think the real you that was being violated was? And why wasn’t that the cosinostra you?