For a long time, the words ‘organized crime’ conjured up images of the American mafia, the Five Families of New York, with notorious figures such as Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano, Giuseppe ‘Joe the Boss’ Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano. These characters rose through the ranks of the mob to form the Commission, which ruled over organized crime in New York and beyond.

Louis Ferrante, a former associate of the Gambino crime family, lived ‘the life’ but also paid the price by being sent to prison for his criminal activities. In prison, he began reading 18 hours a day, every day. After serving his time, he left the mob but never turned against his former associates. In the first podcast episode of our series Underworlds with Mark Shaw, the GI-TOC’s director sat down with Ferrante to discuss his book, Borgata: The rise of Empire – A History of the American mafia.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mark Shaw: Louis, really a pleasure to have you on the show. And the book is amazing and a great read. It contains, honestly, some of the best one liners in the business. Do they just sort of come out of your mouth? Is that a mob thing? Or do you work on the text to shape them? I don’t want to give them away. I was going to read some out, but they’re just brilliant, I have to say. Where do you get them from?

Louis Ferrante: Thank you. When I’m writing, I try to be as natural as if I’m hanging out with you somewhere in a social club. Because I’m back in those days, when I’m writing. And we used to laugh a lot and we took everything very lightly. For example, one time we were playing cards around a table and somebody came in with the news that somebody had been killed. And somebody said, ‘Son of a ***! Son of a ***! SOB! I can’t believe it!’. And I said, ‘You knew him that well?’. And he said, ‘No, he owed me money though’.

It was all a joke. Even in prison, we made light of the situation. We always laughed. Is it Augustus Caesar? When he was checking out in his final moments, and he said, ‘I depart the comedy of life.’ And Italians also have an attitude that they look at life as a comedy. And the comic moments sort of lighten up the tragic moments. So, as I said, even in prison, we laughed. We were one time in a holdover in an underground, sort of like a holding pen, and we’re all chained up and it’s a miserable day. And my friend from the Colombo family, he looked around at all of us and we were all grim and tired and worn out, exhausted. We wanted to get back to the jail. And he says, ‘Well, we got them right where they want us’. It took a second to figure out what he said, but we all cracked up laughing, so we made light of the situation. I do the same thing when I’m writing. It might be somebody just got killed. And if I can find some humour in it to lighten up the scene and lighten up the moment for the reader, I do. If there’s something that comes to me, I write it. Why hold it back? I appreciate that you enjoyed that.

MS: You read through it, and then you read that line again, and it’s beautifully crafted. And it brings an argument together in some ways, or it’s just funny or it’s a bit irreverent. For me, that made the book, in many ways. Louis, you have really an interesting back story, which perhaps not everybody knows about. You’ve written volume one, which is the history of the American mafia. But what’s your back story? What qualifies you to write this?

LF: I got involved with stolen cars when I was a kid, as a teenager, and that led to chopping up the cars and selling them to auto body collision shops for parts. They would buy parts from me and my friends a lot cheaper than they would buy them from General Motors or Ford Motor Company. It was a good business. I was in an auto body collision shop one day where there were these giant toolboxes – Snap-on and Matco were the brand names – that stood as tall as I am. And they were loaded with tools, obviously, and they were for the mechanics and the bodywork guys. And I said, ‘Wow, look at the size of this’. And a friend of mine goes, ‘They go for about five or six grand apiece, and the truck comes every now and then. And the truck’s probably got, like, US$100 000 worth of tools on it’. And I said, ‘You want one?’ And he said, ‘Sure’. And I started hijacking trucks. That was the first time I got into truck hijacking, and I realized that of all the cars that I was stealing and piecing them out, parting them out, bringing them to the collision shops, I could hijack a truck and, within 10 minutes, make as much as I was making in a matter of months.

So obviously, the math wasn’t hard to figure out. This was something new. And I was young and stupid and ignorant. I wasn’t concerned with the consequences or the people I may have been victimizing, which was sad, but when we’re young, we don’t think as much as when we’re older, as much as we do. I saw a way. I didn’t consider the risks involved or the people I was hurting, and I saw a way to make more money, so I went with it. And one hijacking after another, I’m meeting more and more people on the street because you have to sell your merchandise now, and you need a fence. And then you meet guys in the mob, and you meet guys who are sort of associates of the mob rather than real mobsters. And before you know it, I’m involved with the highest, biggest mobsters in New York. And the reason being is because they are the underworld government. They’ve even been called, I think, by Senator Estes Kefauver as a government within a government. And I think Bobby Kennedy, as the attorney general, called them a private government.

And they are. They are indeed. So as a government within a government, they want to know who’s making money and who’s earning. And they look for you. They’ll find you. You don’t have to find them. If they see that you’re hijacking a lot of trucks and you’re making a lot of money and you start to get a name as a stand-up kid, you’re halfway there. And then the other half is if you want that route. And I did at the time, because it opened up a lot of new doors for me.

MS: When you were growing up, were you aware of mob figures in your neighbourhood? Or just, once you began your, let’s call it criminal career, they reached out to you? They saw you as successful and word got around that you were very good, you were running this business. You had to talk to different people to fence the goods, and they found out about you. When do you think they found out about you?

LF: I think it’s an entire subculture that you’re introduced to and you learn as you go. There were a lot of friends of mine that were involved in ‘the life’, which is la Cosa Nostra. The whole understanding of that subculture they had with them from early youth, if not birth. I remember one time I was at a funeral for somebody who died in ‘the life’. And there was a kid who was sitting next to me, and he was asking me questions, and he says, ‘Where are you from? What do you do for a living? What kind of car do you drive?’. And it was just a kid asking curious questions. And the father leaned over and he said, ‘What are you, a cop? Leave the man alone’. This is how the kid is taught from when he’s young. I said, ‘No, it’s okay’. I realized he’s just a kid. But the father admonished him, ‘Don’t ask so many questions’. It’s the life that they’re raised in, whereas I was learning as I went.

And there’s a sociologist who I read in prison, I can’t remember his name, but he wrote about how each subculture you get involved in, whether it’s drug cartels, the mafia, maybe the African Americans who sell drugs within the projects, those are all three separate, different subcultures that you have to learn. You can’t just walk in off the street and think you’re going to speak the lingo and understand how it works, and they’ll spot you in a minute unless you become part of them. It’s a world you become part of, you become absorbed into that world. And that’s what happened to me. Did I know mobsters beforehand? From the newspapers. Nothing really big. As I started to branch out and go to different neighbourhoods, there were neighbourhoods surrounding my own where you saw a guy on the street who had a tan in the winter because he’s always traveling to nice places. And he has three or four cars. He has a Mercedes-Benz, a BMW, a Cadillac. He has all this gold he’s wearing, and he doesn’t work. You start to realize, do I want to be like my parents who break their asses every day and they can’t even afford to pay the bills? Or do I want to be like this guy?

And for a young person, it’s an easy decision. As you get older, you realize that there’s long-term consequences to that man’s lifestyle. But you can’t see that when you’re young. When you’re young, all you see is what’s in front of you. And my country is very materialistic. You’re raised materialistically. People who are considered successful are people who have things, who have money, who have toys. In my neighbourhood, you’re not taught that maybe somebody could become an astrophysicist. ‘He’s a professor of such and such, he’s an icon that you should follow’. You’re not aware of those people. They’re not around you and they’re not accessible to you. Those people are something you see in a book or on the news. The people you do see are on the corner or in front of the social club. They’re the guys who are making money. Psychologically, they’re your go-to to achieve success. You want to be like them. You want to mimic them, and that’s what you do.

When I got involved with the mob, there was a lot I had to learn, but I was a quick learner and I was already making money. That’s the biggest thing, an earner. And the other thing, too, is you have to be willing to commit violence. And I was. Unfortunately, I was violent. When I was young, I had no problem fighting with people. If there was a fistfight, I wanted to fight, and then if somebody had a knife, then I was happy to pull a gun. If somebody had a gun, I was happy to pull a bigger gun on him. And then you learn to be what Machiavelli called virtù, which is nothing like virtue as we know it today. It’s more sort of like cunning. And you learn to become a cunning individual to outsmart other people, which is something that I wanted to decompress and get away from when I finally changed my life in prison. And to complete the question as to my background, eventually I knocked off some of the biggest heists probably in US history, as I’m told.

I was pulled in in California on the eve of knocking off an armoured car. Me and my crew flew to California. There are surveillance photos of me and my crew in California floating around on the internet now that the FBI took. We were down there to knock off an armoured car, and then I was accused of doing other things that big. We had an excellent crew. I was in my early twenties, and everybody in my crew was in their thirties, forties and fifties. And the fences that I regularly went to were in their sixties and seventies. Everyone was older than me. And the reason they took me seriously was that if I put a plan together, let’s say, for an armoured car, for example, we hatched the plan and then we were successful pulling it off. It gives you a lot of mojo in the underworld. That goes on your underworld resume, and you become somebody who’s extremely in demand.

And my crew that I put together, they were really the best at what they did. They were good guys. As close as what you’ll see on television, although what you see on television is complete drama. It’s all fake. Where guys are talking in little things before a heist, and they have a suit and tie on… there’s stuff I laugh at when I watch that. But we were a well-oiled machine. We did our homework. We did our research before we made a move. I didn’t even know what the word research was back then, but we were smart enough to case that place out, see what was happening, and then assign the right people to do the right job. I was successful pulling off all the heists at the time.

MS: It’s a fascinating story. This underworld reputation, which is built by doing stuff, doesn’t that also make you very vulnerable? If your name is in and around the underworld, the state in all its forms is talking to the underworld itself through informants and others. Isn’t that a point of vulnerability? You need that reputation in the underworld to bolster yourself, but that’s something that, in the end, can be pretty dangerous.

LF: It’s a great question that leads into the next stage of my life. I was unaware of the consequences. Let’s say we hijacked an 18-wheeler. (And it was before the age of tracking, they just started to do tracking when I went to prison. It was before the age of GPS devices and stuff on trucks. It was starting to happen, but not entirely.) Let’s say we took a truck, we unloaded it in a friend of mine’s warehouse and then we ditched the truck. Once I left, I thought that the crime was finished. I didn’t understand the law. I didn’t understand that the federal government will allow for an informant to go back several years and say we did something, and that’s considered evidence, just the hearsay even of an informant. I wasn’t aware that there were informants circulating around us. And those informants were regularly reporting activities to the government or to the state authorities. At some point or another, they dropped the hammer on me.

And that’s when I was indicted by the state. I was indicted by the federal government twice, the FBI and the secret service. So I found myself with three indictments. And, basically, authorities were saying, ‘We need this guy off the street’. ‘We need him off the streets one way or another, if we have to indict him 100 times, we will’. So I had three indictments, and I had a superseding indictment, which could be arguably considered a fourth indictment. And between those four indictments, I knew then, at that point, that I was going to be facing the rest of my life in prison. People that the FBI was interviewing would call me when the FBI left because they were still loyal to me. They were friends. And they would say, ‘Look, the FBI just left my house. And these are the questions they asked me’. Or ‘The FBI just left my house. And, boy, do they want you. Lou, watch out. Maybe you should just go to Europe or something, get the hell out. They’re looking for you.’

And then at some point, the FBI started to offer people the witness protection programme. And that’s when I knew I was doomed, it was the first real wake-up call. I said to myself, if the FBI is willing to pay somebody’s upkeep, to maintain somebody’s lifestyle for the rest of their life with so many thousands of dollars a month out of government resources to get me, I’m in trouble because I don’t have equal power to confront that. And I knew that I was doomed. And at some point, they came after me and they put me away. And I did face life. I hired the biggest attorneys you could buy at the time. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the radicals. He was considered a radical civil rights attorney, William Kunstler. He represented Malcolm X, he represented Martin Luther King. He did the Attica negotiations. He went into Attica prison. During Attica prison riots, he represented some big, big people. And I hired him, and he took on my case. I was referred to him by somebody in the Gotti family, and he said, ‘Any friend of the Gottis is a friend of mine, and I’ll take your case’. And he did.

MS: You hired the best lawyer. Would you mind saying where you got the money to hire the lawyer? Is this from the takings you had? I mean, how did you do it? Did you receive wider support?

LF: The money came from, obviously, illegal activity. I’m mentioned in a biography about William Kunstler, where the biographer said that Kunstler always said he never took money for a case, but yet here are six or seven mobsters that paid him. And I’m one of the persons on the list. It’s an excellent biography about Kunstler. It was to my surprise when somebody brought that to my attention that I was in the book. I paid him a lot of money, and I paid other lawyers a lot of money, too. I went through seven attorneys. I paid some of the biggest attorneys big money. And all of the attorneys, contrary to what they may say, they take cash. No criminal defence attorney will turn down US$100 000 because it’s cash. They may try to ask you to figure out how to pay them. You may have to get some help from friends to wash some money. But they took my money, and no one questioned anything.

A very big attorney who’s still alive, I can’t say his name – one of the biggest attorneys in the United States ¬¬– I handed him US$25 000 once, and he literally went like this in his office [looks around] and slipped it into a drawer. I saw that with my own eyes, I handed it to him. No one can tell me different. And he’s lauded as one of the great criminal defence attorneys in the United States. But I had a lot of money. I spent a lot of money to fight my cases, and I went broke doing it. I didn’t care if it cost me millions of dollars. What’s it worth if you don’t have your freedom? I realized that pretty quickly. And people do the same thing. If you’re in there, you’re with a lot of people. I don’t care if they’re the leader of a cartel, the Medellin Cartel. I don’t care if they’re the boss of the Bonanno family. I don’t care if they’re the boss of an international opium ring from Asia. They will spend everything they have to get out of there, because all of the money in the world isn’t worth it to stay there.

There’s no life. You’re just existing, you’re breathing. I’ve seen it time and again, and I’ve done it. I’ve lived it. So, after hiring and firing seven attorneys and becoming very frustrated with the system, I studied law, and I was able to reverse one of my own cases pro se with the Second Circuit court of Appeals on a technicality, not because I was innocent. But I found a technicality with the help of another friend of mine, who was my cellmate at the time. Brilliant guy who was doing a 35-year bid. And he became an absolute legal genius, better than any attorney I’ve ever been in contact with. Here’s a guy, half black, half white, from Connecticut, convicted of drug dealing, sentenced to 35 years. And I could tell you right now, out of the seven attorneys that I used, all seven of them combined didn’t have his intelligence and understanding of the law. And I think a lot of it comes from when you’re in there. You have definitely a different understanding of the law because you’re part of the law’s punishment. You’re not part of its oppression, you’re not pretending to be part of the defence against its punishment.

And what is the law? Obviously, philosophically, the law has been considered just public vengeance, right? So you’ve been on the receiving end of that vengeance, even if it’s deserved. In my case, it was deserved. I would call it well deserved vengeance from the public hammer. I deserved everything I got. But then again, it does give you these insights that you’re able to get. I don’t even believe that judges who sit on the bench can understand the law as well as I do. Not unless they were put in prison for a month or a week or a day. Sit there and understand it for 24 hours, and then tell me what your opinion of the law is. So anyway, [my cellmate] was an absolute genius. I was able to reverse one of my cases on a technicality, and I was able to cut down a much larger sentence, and I was able to get out after eight and a half years of prison. And I served time in some of the worst prisons. I was at Lewisburg penitentiary; the very first day in the general population, the Aryan Brotherhood hacked to death and gutted two black Muslim inmates. It was in the middle of a race war that I landed there for, which was horrible.

These are things I’ll never forget. Blood and guts all over the walls, all over the tier block. They show you pictures of the dead bodies and ask you if you know them. The next day you’re locked down for months. You have to carry a machete in defence of your own life. And then I would say to people, ‘But I’m not an Aryan and I’m not a black Muslim. Why should I have to carry a machete?’ ‘Well, you could be hated by both groups. And if you’re in the way, you’re dead. And if they have to get somebody to save face when they’re going back and forth with vengeance, they will kill you and say, well, we made a mistake’. It’s a dangerous place, and people were killed for a lot of different reasons.

MS: In the prison, it’s tough for you, but what comes through the book is that clearly something starts to happen to you in prison. You are unbelievably well read, right? This is clear from the book. You have read everything. When did you start? Were you reading as a young man before you were hijacking trucks? Were you reading while you were hijacking trucks? Or did you start reading in prison? Because there’s a depth of reading that comes through here, which is quite phenomenal. And I’m not talking about reading on organized crime. You’ve already mentioned you’ve read this book on sociology and other things. So you’re reading philosophy, history, sociology, the history of organized crime. Do you start this in prison?

LF: Yes. I had never read a book from cover to cover.

MS: So not before?

LF: No. I was literate, I was taught how to read and write, obviously, I went to school as a kid, but I’d never read a book in my life. In my family, no one ever went to college. My mother and father, they never went to college. They couldn’t afford to go to college. They didn’t come from a family that went to college. My grandparents didn’t go to college. The first book I wrote – my memoir, when I came home from prison – it was the absolute first book that my father ever read in his entire life. And he was in his mid-sixties, at the time. So just to give you an idea – if you don’t come from a home where education is sort of stressed and there are no books around the house… the only reading material around my house were magazines that my mother, on her way home from work, would lift out of the garbage from a dentist or a doctor’s office. She would see the magazines in the garbage, and she’d carry them on her way home from work, and she’d look through them. And that was the only reading material in my house. I never was up for Better Homes and Gardens, I never read those magazines. The first time I do read is in prison.

MS: Where do you get the depth of literature that you start to read? I mean, prison libraries don’t ordinarily have this sort of stuff, surely. Were you reading what was there first and then you started ordering in additional books?

LF: It’s a combination. I had a friend of mine who just passed away last year. His name was ‘Fat George’ DiBello. His nickname, his mob nickname, was Fat George. He was the caretaker of John Gotti Social Club in Queens. He had tattoos all over his body from head to toe, and he had biblical verses. In different parts of his body, he would have Matthew, Mark, Luke, John… And I said, well, he must have read. I’m in jail, and I wanted to read. I came out of ‘the hole’, and I was in ‘the hole’ for something that I didn’t do.

MS: And ‘the hole’ is solitary confinement, right?

LF: Solitary confinement, that’s correct. So, I’m in solitary confinement, and it makes you think. And I had words with somebody, the captain of the guards. And I reached through the food slot, and I went to grab his necktie, and I gave it a yank. I pulled it, and I cursed him, and the necktie pulled off his neck because it was a clip on. And I threw it back at him through the food slot. And I said, ‘You son of a bitch, it’s a clip on!’ And he said, ‘You think we’d wear real ties with you animals in here?’. And he says, ‘Look at yourself, you’re an animal in a cage. And as if the cage of this prison isn’t big enough for you, you have to be put in a smaller cage’, something to that extent. And I realized that I was an animal, that my mother didn’t raise an animal, that I’d been acting like an animal for many years in my life, that I did belong in prison.

That was a big realization. Everyone denies that they belong in prison. Everyone swears they’re innocent. I think it was a big step in my mind, in my mental evolution, to realize that I belonged there, to realize that I did do things wrong, that I had no right to do them. I have no right to put a gun to a man’s head and take merchandise, even if it doesn’t belong to him. I justified it by saying, ‘Well, it belongs to a big company. It’s not his. He just drives for the company’. Usually, we were as nice as we could be to the driver of a truck. We would say to him, ‘Look, you’ll be home with your wife by 5 o’clock, don’t worry about it. We’re not after your stuff. We’re after the…, you know, we don’t give an f about the company. We don’t want to hurt you, though’. And that, to me, justified our actions, but you’re still traumatizing someone. And when I was in prison, I realized that. And I realized that I had no right to do those things. And that was a big wake-up call. So, when I came out of ‘the hole’ that time, after the guard had called me an animal, I called up Fat George.

And I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, that was his nickname. I said, ‘Hey, can you call me? Can you send me in some books?’. ‘What are you looking for? Big boobs? Big butts? What are you into?,’ he said. He thought I wanted what we would call ‘short eyes’, pornographic material. And I said, ‘No, no, I want to read a book. I’ve never read a book before in my life. And I assumed you have, with your verses all over?’. He says, ‘Yeah, I’ve read the Bible. I’ve read a few other books. I’ll send books.’ He sent me Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, a biography about Napoleon Bonaparte by Vincent Cronin, which I probably still have somewhere in my bookshelf, and Julius Caesar’s The Gallic Wars. I called him on the phone and said ‘What the frig did you send me?’. I had no idea. And, you know, this is big reading. I was looking for probably something like [the Adventures of] Huckleberry Finn or something, the adolescent version of Mark Twain or something. Gulliver’s Travels, I don’t know. And even those are adult books, but something like maybe an adolescent version of those.

And he said, ‘I went to the store, I told the “broad” all about you. And she pulled those books off the shelf.’ So anyway, I pushed through those books. I understood nothing of what I was reading, but I did push through them and I bought a dictionary. And I would look up every vocabulary word each day. I would never pass a vocabulary word – I made that as a promise to myself – I’ll never pass the vocabulary word without studying it, knowing it before I move on. And then each night I would study my vocabulary words and I kept reading. And in the beginning, it doesn’t make sense to you. Who is Julius Caesar? Where does he fit in time? Who’s Napoleon Bonaparte? Did they know each other? Were they friends? No, they were 1 800 years apart. But you don’t understand that until you start reading the bigger part of history.

And so as I went, I kept learning and I started loving what I was reading. And then I realized that there was a bibliography in the back of each book and that would lead to other books. And then I would call home to family and friends and say, ‘Hey, can you do me a favour? I just read Napoleon Bonaparte, for example. Can you send me something about Robespierre? Can you send me something about the Reign of Terror? Can you send me something about maybe Jean-Jacques Rousseau who maybe wrote stuff that led to the French Revolution. Can you send me something about the French Bourbons who were thrown out by Napoleon? Can you send me something about Julius Caesar? Can you send me something about Hannibal who fought the Romans? Can you send me something about Scipio Africanus?’. One book would always lead to another. And then I was able to continue to read and put the pieces together.

And then I realized at that point that this most tragic event in my entire life, which was placing me in a prison cell almost for the rest of my life – and how that happens, just to take a short detour, is each time you commit an armed robbery, it’s a 10-year statute. Each time a gun was used in the commission of a crime, it took an additional five years. If you have 10 armed robberies, that’s 150 years. And I did face those 150 years. I know people who went to trial and gambled and lost and are still serving 100, 150, 200 years. They’re still there for armed robberies. So, getting back on track, I realized that this being the worst tragedy of my life turned into the biggest blessing in disguise. At some point or another, there was a tragedy in Churchill’s life where his daughter said, ‘It’s a blessing in disguise.’ And he said, ‘It’s absolutely brilliantly disguised.’ This was brilliantly disguised as well, because it’s very hard to see the penitentiary where people are killing each other as a blessing. But it was. Although it was brilliantly disguised, it was the biggest blessing in my life once I found books.

Because now I had 18 hours a day to read. And I read. I carried a book to the chow hall. I carried a book to the yard. I carried a book everywhere I went. I was never without a book. And then also, God put things in my way. One time, I had just finished reading War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, and I went to the bathroom, and there was a broken urinal in the penitentiary in the bathroom. And in that broken urinal – which wasn’t, you know, there was no urine in it for I don’t know how long, it had probably been broken for years – I washed off the book, but I literally took Anna Karenina out of the broken urinal and walked back to my cell and started reading Anna Karenina. What are the odds you found Anna Karenina after you finished War and Peace at a broken urinal in a penitentiary? These were things that got in my way, the things that were put in my way, that you have to wonder.

There was another guy. His name was Richard Messina, may he rest in peace. He was a corporate attorney. He was an absolute brilliant man who was well read. He was in there for something he shouldn’t have been in there for, but he was brilliant in literature. He knew everything about literature, and he helped me. So one day I walked up to him and I said, ‘I’m reading this book, The Red and the Black, it’s pretty cool.’ And he says, ‘Le Rouge et le Noir. What a beautiful book. What is Julien Sorel up to now?’. And I said, ‘Wow, you read that?’. He says, ‘Oh, I may read it again when you’re done. Send it to my cell’. And then I began paying him visits at his cell, and he would say, ‘Did you read this? Did you read that?’. And he was sort of like a guide to the Western canon. And I found all these things. And the more you searched, the more things came to you. And as I said, I was reading 18 hours a day. I fell in love with history. I read history, philosophy. I read religion. I read science.

A lot of people fall into the trap where – now and then I would ask somebody if they wanted to read something – if they were Spanish, they would want to read Spanish history. If they were Asian, they wanted to read Asian history. And I would turn them on to, you know, ‘Here’s a biography about Mao Zedong. Here’s a biography about Zhou Enlai. Here’s a biography about Sun Yat-sen.’ But I would also say ‘You should read about other places. Don’t just read about your own.’ Because I was never into just the United States or Italy. My heritage being Italian, I got around to, eventually, the history of Italy. I got around to the history of the United States. But I wanted to learn about the bigger world. So I would always push that on people. There might be a friend of mine who’s African American. I would first give him a book on Martin Luther King, his autobiography. A Long Walk to Freedom about Nelson Mandela. But I would also then push other books on that person and say, ‘Why don’t you read something about Italy? That’s my heritage. Maybe you’d be interested in it. I loved yours. You should read mine.’

I would try to get people to expand into other things and read other things. And I think that was a key to me understanding a big part of the world through just constantly grabbing other things from not just my own little world, my own little heritage. And I love science. I wrote a book about science, too, called The Three Pound Crystal Ball. It’s about a theory I have about the dreaming brain. It ties in physics through Einstein and psychology through Sigmund Freud. Freud, who’s been debunked for the most part, he’s sort of like a hostile witness in my theory because he believes the theory couldn’t have been. And I bring him in and I prove as sort of like, ‘Freud’s my witness, understand?’ And I proved that the theory should have been. And I debunk him in this sense. But he was also brilliant in other regards.

MS: Let’s turn to your book. It’s the first of three volumes, as we said earlier. And you’ve written the three, as I understood from the acknowledgments at the back. You’ve written 550 000 words. This is the first one out, the second one is coming later in the year. It’s a huge achievement. There’s lots of characters. Who are the key people that emerge from this? Name some of the key characters, if you wouldn’t mind, as you make your way through the story of the mafia.

LF: The way I view history is that it’s driven originally by men, and now men and women. History is driven by individuals. And there are always people who stand out in history. Let’s say we look at the history of the British Empire. We may find, during the Napoleonic times, the people who stand out. Maybe Pitt, maybe Nelson, maybe Wellington. There are people who always stand out. There are driving forces that push history forward. And it’s the same thing in the mafia. In the history of the mafia, I wanted to focus on individuals who made the most monumental impact on the mob, driving its history forward as it evolved. And in the first book, it happened to be Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, who were really an incredible pair. Luciano, being Italian, was able to get into the mob, into la Cosa Nostra, which was the strongest ethnic underworld group at the time. And Meyer Lansky, who was Jewish, would not necessarily have been allowed in the mob at that time. But he was so respected by Luciano and he was such a close friend to Luciano that he became his partner in so many things.

And the genius of Lansky, he became quickly accepted by all mafia dons because he knew how to put together something and make money for everyone. And that always holds weight in the mob. The mob, at its core, they don’t see colour, they don’t see religion, they don’t see ethnicity. Only in the sense that you have to be full-fledged Italian to become part of la Cosa Nostra, part of the family. That said, they will partner with anyone. We took over a club, me and my friends, in midtown Manhattan, many years ago, before I went to prison. And the guy who owned the club before us told us, ‘Look, your best night is gay night. Make sure you keep gay night. The gays are very big spenders. They don’t cause problems. They don’t get into those stupid fights you’re gonna have with men and women. Men want to fight other men over a woman at the bar. You’ll have a great night. Keep gay night.’ We looked at each other and said, ‘We keep gay night. We don’t care.’ The mob is portrayed now and then as ‘They don’t like gays.’ We really don’t care. You know, that’s not to say you could be gay and be in the mob. That was probably the dividing line.

MS: It’s about making money, Louis. The issue is if you make money, you’re good.

LF: Correct.

MS: It’s interesting because, as you may know, in different places, and including in South Africa, where I’m from, we are counting criminal assassinations. We are counting when organized crime kills somebody, whether they’re in organized crime or whether it’s a journalist or outsider or other. And I was very struck in the book, and there’s countless photos in here of bodies of members of the mafia who have been killed. Explain the level of violence to us, because you tell fascinating stories of people who knew they were going to die. There’s a decision by the commission that somebody must die. People are dispatched to kill somebody. Inevitably, the hitmen are themselves killed. It’s an incredibly violent story, brilliantly told. There’s an underpinning violence. What’s the purpose of the violence, in your view? Is it needed? It’s central to your story.

LF: It’s always about money and power. Plutarch obviously did the lives of Greeks and Romans, and what he did was he pointed out their vices and virtues, and he would point out what they did right or what they did wrong. And I wanted to use that as a template for this book – whether it be a mobster or a mob boss – what he did right, what he did wrong, how he let himself into a trap, how he got himself killed, or how he avoided that trap and how he was able to live. Lucky Luciano died in an airport of a heart attack. Why does he die in an airport of a heart attack? When Ben Siegel is gunned down and blown, his eye is blown out of his head and plastered against a wall in California, and he dies such a horrible, tragic death. What are the differences between these two people? And I wanted to make sure that throughout the book and throughout this history, I always point out to the reader the mistakes or, to their credit, what they did right, to either find themselves in that predicament or avoid it.

And I think that’s a big thing right there. And the other thing is, why are so many people killed, as you asked? And is it a common thread? Does it continue? It does. And whenever there’s money and power at stake, there’s murder. And we don’t like to admit that even as members of polite society. We live in democracies. But the government kills and the underworld government kills. Those are the only two entities that kill, really, in this world.

MS: In a way, in both cases, it’s a form of regulation, is that what you’re saying? The underworld acts against people who are moving outside of its bounds, who are a danger to it, who have broken its rules.

LF: Exactly. If you belong to an organization that kills, you know what the stakes are. You’re well aware of what the stakes are and now you have to live within the guidelines of that organization. I wasn’t aware until I was in prison. I was naive enough to believe before I went to prison that if you broke the rules, those are the people who died and disappeared. For example, let’s say, Mark, you’re my friend. Mark disappears. We hear about it the next day, and we say, ‘Gee, what happened to Mark?’. Well, you’re told, first of all, a story that’s probably propaganda, and you don’t realize that Mark died for a different reason. You’re told he died for something or you’re not told at all, or you don’t ask because you’re not supposed to ask. ‘Why are you asking? Are you informing? Are you reporting to an FBI agent? Why would you want to know?.’ You might only ask close friends that trust you enough, but you don’t go sit at a card game and go, ‘Hey, why did he die?’. Everybody at the table will look at you and say, ‘Is he out of his mind?’. You’re not supposed to ask those questions.

I thought people had died for reasons, because they did something against the Borgata, they did something against the family, they were either about to inform, or maybe they slept with someone’s wife. They broke a cardinal rule and they had to die. You believe that. Now I’m in prison, and once I learned the law and studied law, a lot of people came to me and asked my legal advice. And I would help other people file briefs, I would help other people try to get them out of jail. And in some cases, I was successful. But I had a lot of indictments laid bare for me, and as I understood it, a lot of people, now I realize, died for power or money.

Somebody might have mislabelled Mark a rat because he wanted Mark’s business, he wanted Mark’s rackets. And now he kills Mark, and then he gets everything that Mark had. And now maybe two people protest. ‘Gee, Mark was a good friend of mine. He was never a rat. He shouldn’t have had to die.’ ‘Well, maybe we have to kill those now, too. Those two just asked for it, too.’ You’ll see a lot of that in volume three when it becomes the Wild West. ‘But now we have to kill Mark’s two friends because they’re inquiring a little too much.’ So that’s where you learn to keep your mouth shut. You don’t want to be on the list, right? This is an underworld government. But volume two gets deep into the Kennedy assassination, and there were an inordinate amount of ‘suicides’. One guy shot himself five times in the chest. How many times can you shoot yourself in the chest committing suicide? You don’t go against the narrative, whether it’s a government or an underworld government. There are guidelines, and you have to learn them.

MS: I wonder if organized crime, at least as we’re considering it, has sort of broken those boundaries. One of the key figures [in the book] says, ‘Well, we never kill outside of the mob.’ I don’t know if you remember that sort of phrasing. Was that true? Would the mob have killed a journalist in New York at the time, similar to what is regularly conducted in Mexico? Are there rules that have now been shattered as organized crime has grown and the old ‘proper’ regulations have been broken? Or is that all nonsense and this is a very violent organization and will use violence against whoever opposes it?

LF: For the most part, it’s true. Siegel was the person. He asked this developer to build the Flamingo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, and the developer was leery. He said, ‘I’m not going to get myself involved with this wild gangster.’ And Siegel said, ‘Don’t worry about it. We only kill each other.’ And for the most part, that was true. And even in my own day, it was still, for the most part, true. We kill each other and we hope that the government then will leave us alone.

During the Gallo War, which I talk about in the second book, one of the judges was holding Joey Gallo, who was an integral part of the war that was taking place on the streets of Brooklyn, and said, ‘I don’t want to let this guy go, but I really don’t have a reason to hold him.’ And the prosecutor said, ‘Well just hold him because we know he’s part of the war. We don’t want to let him out. [The judge] says, ‘Look, these guys are going to handle their business their own way, no matter what, let them do it.’ And the judge was very pragmatic in the sense that he understood they’re going to kill each other. They’re not killing citizens.

If you accidentally did kill a citizen, you would be killed. There are instances where stray bullets hit people, and that guy goes in and he’s done. You got to get rid of him. You may see once in a while, like in Chicago, that a sheriff got killed or a judge got killed, but those people have wandered into our world. You don’t necessarily kill a judge because you’re in front of him.

MS: You would say that a journalist who was covering Lansky, Siegel and others would have been fair game in this era, would you think?

LF: No, no, most of them were never touched. However, there was an instance where Vito Genovese was in Italy, and he sent word to one of his guys in Greenwich Village, New York, Manhattan, and told him, look, you got to kill this journalist. He was doing it as a favour to Mussolini, but he did not seek out approval from who was in charge of the Borgata at the time, which was Frank Costello. Costello had taken over for Lucky Luciano when Luciano was deported. Now Costello is in charge of the Borgata. Vito Genovese is supposed to send word to Costello and say, ‘I’m looking to hit this guy’. Costello would have knocked it down, he would have never allowed it. Never. And I write that and the reasons why he wouldn’t have never allowed it. He knew that it would have caused too much heat for the mob, which it did. He would have knocked it down. But Genovese was in Italy, and he had to ingratiate himself to Mussolini, and that was the best way to do it. So, there are times when people say, ‘The hell with it, I’m doing it anyway’.

And it happens throughout. There’s a time in volume three where Carmine Persico is in prison and he orders a prosecutor to be hit. This is not supposed to happen. Overall, it’s against the rules. I also talk about somebody who killed an agent. Never supposed to happen, and that guy was killed in return. There was a mob guy, I was friendly with the family, I knew the family for many years. They’re a good family, they’re a beautiful family. However, the guy was a little bit of a wild man. He killed someone thinking the guy was an informant. He did not realize he was a DEA agent. And once he killed him, the mob were tossed about it. Some people stuck up for him and said he would have never done it intentionally, we should keep him alive. And then there were others who said, ‘Whether he did it intentionally or not, at the end of the day, he did it. And the only way we’re going to release the heat from us because the DEA and the FBI have not stopped with us now, is to kill him and leave the body somewhere’. Let them see that he’s dead, and we’ll call the heat off our organization.

And I talk about that in volume three as well. I get deep into it, and I knew the major players in real time. I was privy to a lot of stuff that happened, a lot of the conversations that took place. But as a rule, the mob knew that this isn’t Sicily where you could blow up judges, you could kill prosecutors. Over here, the public won’t stand for it. The American public did not want that. And I make that very clear in the beginning of Borgata volume one, where we talk about Chief Hennessy in New Orleans. Chief Hennessy involved in the mob? Yeah, he got involved with the mob. He weighed in for one side, and the other guy felt pushed up against the wall and he killed Chief Hennessy, as I understand it. A lot of innocent people were picked up for that murder. The entire Italian American community in New Orleans was absolutely put through the wringer for that murder. And the rule was you don’t kill the chief of police. And they felt, though, that he got involved in our world, so he’s fair game.

MS: This is fascinating. In the research community, we are studying organized crime. Of course, not the mob in the circumstances you have described, but in many different places where hits are very common, individuals are killed and they come in spates. Revenge, counter revenge. How do we read that? Is that instability in the underworld? When there are no hits, is that a period of control by somebody? You talk about the symbolism of violence. You leave the body or people are killed in certain ways, which clearly is meant to send a message.

How would you look at hits from a research perspective outside of the mob? Because it’s such a key part of your book and you write around it in such interesting ways. You’ve explained the rules and the regulations, but fundamentally it’s violence on top of all of that, although there are tram lines that control it, particularly in the US, perhaps not elsewhere. How would you read it in a research project on sets of violence around the criminal market?

LF: I would say if your researchers are seeing a lot of violence in a particular area or around a particular racket, that definitely is a sign of disorder. There’s something going on. There’s usually a power struggle behind the scenes. If one person is in power, then usually once in a blue moon, that person will exhibit his strength by killing someone even during the most peaceful times. Usually when a boss goes to jail, there’s always a hit or two on the shelf and they pull one off the shelf and they kill somebody. People are terrified when a boss is going to jail, people who are on thin ice, because they know the boss is sending a signal. ‘I still will have reach. Just don’t get out of line. I may be in a cell.’ So they will kill somebody. Usually, one or two hits happen when somebody big goes to jail.

MS: This is symbolic of reach? Person A may have done something wrong two years back. The boss kills them now. And the message is ‘Don’t cross me while I’m in’. Is that as simple as that?

LF: Correct. The boss knows that people are going to be starting to circle what they perceive as a carcass. The boss is going to be dead. He’s going to be pretty much removed from the scene. So, the people who want power are going to look for that. They’re going to say, ‘Well, here’s an opportunity.’ And Machiavellian intrigues are going to start to creep up behind the scenes. And the boss is aware of this. So, what he usually does is he sends a signal to the underworld before he goes to prison or right after he’s in a cell. And it always happens, always. A body will pop up.

In my time, not too long ago, I knew a man named ‘Wild Bill’ Cutolo, Billy Cutolo. And he was the underboss at some point of the Colombo family. But the boss knew that, if he goes away… he knew Billy’s personality, he knew Billy’s character. He knew Billy would make a move. And in the past, Billy did make a move. So, he knew that there was something that Billy was going to do. So, what happens? Billy’s invited somewhere, and Billy was killed. And not only is [the boss] getting rid of a threat, but he’s sending a signal. ‘Don’t anybody get smart while I’m away. I’m in charge.’

MS: And you recounted that some people know they’re going to die. ‘I’m a dead man walking’, as a couple of characters say. People know they’ve broken the rules. They know somehow that the system will act.

LF: There are some people who are out and out suicidal, and you have to wonder why. It’s a character trait that people have. Just to give you an idea, I was in solitary confinement at times for a fight or something I had done on the compound, and I’m put in ‘the hole’. And then you would hear a guy screaming and yelling non-stop. Then he would start to flood the toilet, and then the whole entire tier block was beginning to get flooded. And you’d say to the guy, ‘Hey, buddy, you know the goon squad’s gonna beat your brains in, right?’. And he continued to go. ‘Hey, buddy, they’re gonna be here any minute. They’re gonna beat your brains in!,’ and he continued to go. And you’d say, ‘This guy’s suicidal’, and then at some point or another, the goon squad comes out and you hear them go in the cell, or you could see it sometimes if it’s across from you, and they beat his brains out, I mean, they literally drag him out by his ankle. There’s nothing left of the guy. He’s basically clinging to life. And you say, ‘My gosh, he had to know. We’re telling him it’s coming.’

So that happens also in the mob where a guy just spits in the face of somebody, maybe goes with somebody who’s very powerful, hits on his wife, or goes with his daughter and mistreats and abuses her. That happened with Castellano in volume three, where the guy’s abusing the daughter, he puts his hands on her. You got to know, if you hit the Don’s daughter, if you punch her in the face, you’re going, buddy, you got to know that. And you can’t resist it. A lot of times, people are suicidal. I think it’s just their character, where they’re out of their minds. And a lot of times, people do think that they could get away with something, and they push the boundaries. I think that’s common as well, where they’re going ‘Maybe if I push the boundaries, I’ve always gotten away with it, so I’ll push a little more.’ Maybe someone steals and they steal money, and they figure, ‘I’ve stolen it plenty of times before. I’m not going to get caught.’ You’re going to get caught, eventually it’s going to come out. And when they catch you, it’s not going to be a misdemeanour or a felony. It’s going to be your life.

MS: I’m very interested in the targeted killings that take place throughout the book. What’s gone wrong elsewhere where organized crime becomes incredibly violent? Let’s take Mexico. Disappearances, women, children, people in the criminal environment. The mob is relatively regulated, organized. What’s gone wrong elsewhere? Is this normal? Have you thought about that, seeing the level of violence attributed to organized crime elsewhere? What are your thoughts on that?

LF: There are different parties contesting for power. I think that’s the start of it, when you see murders like that. You see 30 heads on the side of a road in Mexico, this cannot be tolerated. Who has the strength or power to stop that? Only the government. And if the government needs help from someone else, then maybe the government isn’t strong enough. They should call allies to help them or do their best to stop it, but they don’t. So, what’s going on there? It’s obvious that the government’s involved to some extent. It becomes quite apparent, if there are no consequences or they’re lame, the consequences. That’s your immediate understanding that somebody bigger is involved. And it might not be the government, meaning the people who are elected officials. They just got a new government in Mexico, a new president. She may not know the cartel people, but there are people behind the elected officials who are really the power, the donors, the people who are behind it, the money.

And those people may be working to some extent with people who get away with that. And then they’re fighting, maybe there are two different parties involved. Because don’t forget, what I establish throughout volume one of Borgata is that the mafia could have never gotten away with what they did without participation from the government. And how that was handed to them, to be quite frank, was during prohibition. The mafia before prohibition wasn’t thought of as anything sexy or romantic. And public officials didn’t want to do business with them. Once in a while, guys were being left on the curb in New Orleans and New York and Chicago, and it was disgusting, but it was Italians killing Italians. We wouldn’t really care about that, the American public. ‘Let them do it.’ At some point or another, when they made this error by prohibiting alcohol, most Americans thought that that was ridiculous and wanted to drink. The Irish, the Germans, the Italians, all these immigrants from different places thought that this was draconian. ‘How could you take alcohol away from us?’. So the bootleggers were the mob, and the mob now needed the politicians and the law enforcement characters to allow them to run these operations.

And they didn’t feel it was a big deal. The mayor, the governor, the congressman… he was like, ‘You know what? People want to drink. I’m drinking. I go home and open up the liquor cabin as soon as I get home.’ There’s even evidence that, I think Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice, said, ‘Everybody in Washington’s going home and opening up the liquor cabinet and having a drink at night. And they’re the ones who voted for this.’ She pointed out how hypocritical it was. So once the mafia established those contacts in government, in law enforcement, when prohibition was repealed, they had those contacts, just basically had their hand out going ‘What’s next? I’ve been getting US$50 000, US$60 000 a month for years now. Is there anything else we could do for you?’. ‘Sure. We want to open up casinos. We want to gamble. We want to do this, we want to do that.’ ‘Okay, sounds good to me.’ And we would continue, the mafia would continue then to buy those officials. Then we have, midway through the book, Frank Costello running the entirety of Tammany Hall, which was the politically corrupt machine in Manhattan, in New York, and putting judges on the bench.

So you have the biggest mobster in America appointing judges to the bench. And it’s proven. Frank Hogan, who was the prosecutor, thanked [Costello] when he tapped his line. Hogan heard this and he said, ‘Gee, thanks for getting me appointed to that bench.’ And he said, ‘Sure, we’re always friends.’ And then he goes to the Tammany Hall people and he says, ‘What’s going on with Frank Costello? He’s pointing people to the bench.’ And the head of Tammany says, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ Little did Hogan know that Costello put in the head of Tammany as well.

MS: Louis, you write brilliantly on prohibition. The story is very well told. With the characters coming through and the sort of business decisions they’ve made, as you’ve described now, and how that opened up space. Tell us about [Thomas] Dewey, because he’s pretty hardcore. He has a real impact on the mob. And I think you treat him very sympathetically, actually. And in our work, I read that as ‘Well, actually, a few good men can make a real difference to an illicit market, which is violent, out of control, corrupt and the like.’ What are your thoughts on that?

LF: Thomas Dewey is a central figure in book one. He was the first one to really launch a concentrated attack on organized crime. He was ruthless in his pursuit of them, and it was warranted, at the time. And Dewey, at some point or another, I think realized also, because he lightened up on them later as governor of New York. It was obvious that he was doing it as a means to higher office. No one knew that at the time, but he would target a central, big figure, a prominent mob figure – Lucky Luciano, Lepke Buchalter, Dutch Schultz – and he would take them down, and he would get all of the media that went with that, because Dewey had an eye on the White House. And at some point or another, Dewey gets into the governor’s mansion in New York, and then he starts to say, ‘Well, I’m good with the mob.’ And he deports Luciano. He’s a lot easier on the mob. People wonder, was he getting donations? Did they donate to his campaign as governor?

But Dewey was smart enough to know that they ran Tammany Hall. So even though they would allow for a prosecution of one prominent figure, he didn’t really dismantle the entire mob. They’re still in control. They’re still running Tammany Hall, and he still needs Tammany Hall to become governor of New York. So, he goes on to governor. He takes a shot at the White House. He doesn’t make it. But basically, Dewey was, as a prosecutor, the first guy who attacked them. But as a politician, he had a different view of them. And in volume two, we see that with Robert F. Kennedy. The Kennedys were in bed with the mob through the father. During the 1960 election, the father reached out to a lot of big mob figures through Frank Sinatra. And he said, look, ‘I need to carry Chicago. Who owns Chicago?’ The Chicago mob – Sam Giancana, at the time – controlled all of the major wards in Chicago, and he controlled Mayor Daley. At that time, if you needed Chicago, then you needed to make a compromise with the mob. They did that.

And the mob thought in return, they would sort of have a hands-off approach. Sure, Bobby Kennedy was horrible towards us during the McClellan rackets committee hearings. He embarrassed us. He did everything he could to put us in jail. But if the Kennedys got the administration that they wanted, they got into the White House, it was believed they would look to bigger problems in the United States, like civil rights. Civil rights were long overdue in the United States. We needed a president to address that. They would look towards nuclear proliferation. We were having this horrible nuclear race with the Russians. Somebody had to put the brakes on that. The mob thought that the Kennedys would move on. They were blindsided when Bobby did not move on. Bobby became attorney general, and he continued to go after the same mobsters who helped put John F. Kennedy in place. I’m laying the groundwork for volume two, where I get deep into that. But the mob’s experience with Dewey was, ‘once he gets what he wants, once he gets the publicity he wants, he moves on’.

Senator Estes Kefauver ran the Kefauver committee, which attacked the mob across the United States. But, by the way, he avoided his own state, his own home state. He didn’t go near his own home state, so there’s always a little politics involved. But when Estes Kefauver got his presidential nomination, he wanted to be the president. He won the democratic primary. He beat John F. Kennedy at that point, in 1956. And then he moved on. Kefauver no longer wanted to chase mobsters. He wrote his little book, he got his book deal, and he moved on. So the mob figured, ‘Okay, if they come after us for political reasons and they get what they want, they move on.’ And they believed the Kennedys would do the same thing. The unfortunate thing was that they didn’t. Part of the reason was that the father, who made a lot of the underworld deals with the mob, suffered a massive stroke, and he was incapacitated. And at some point or another, the Kennedy children, who always listened to the father, they didn’t have the patriarch telling them, ‘Hey, you owe some favours through me and back off.’ They no longer had that. I think that was a key part of their downfall.

MS: The story you’ve told now, these big historical sketches, is there enough written on the influence of the mob on politics, historically? You’re quite critical of scholars or people who have written on organized crime in the book with some quite funny and well-crafted side comments. Do we know the full story? Will we ever know the full story? Do we need to know the story? Is that your purpose in writing the three volumes?

LF: It’s not my purpose, but I can’t avoid it. There are relationships. The mafia today is a mere shell of what it once was. And the reason being is that they don’t have judges. They don’t have politicians in their pocket anymore. It’s very difficult to bribe a judge. When a judge makes a quarter of a million dollars a year with all kinds of benefits and he goes to galas and he’s the most respected man in the community, what is he going to get by taking US$50 000 from a mobster? He’s not going to throw a case anymore. You’re not going to get that. Do you have judges who are in bed with corporations? Maybe there are some judges who should have recused themselves from major corporate cases and they have stocks in the corporations. But no one wants dirty money from a mobster anymore.

As far as police, you have a policeman who maybe is a local policeman, and you used to be able to give him a couple hundred bucks here and there, and he was in your pocket. He’d turn away when he saw gambling, an illegal casino, he wouldn’t really care. He’d maybe even come in and gamble a little. And everybody knew him. Back in the day. Now the cop says, ‘I make US$70 000 a year with all kinds of benefits. I got an excellent pension. I’m not throwing it away.’ Things in society have gotten better in the United States, where it’s much more difficult to bribe somebody.

MS: What was the turning point? Because at the end of volume one – and I really look forward to reading volumes two and three – you sense the mob’s decline. It’s partly due to state action, but it’s also due to the mob killing each other. What’s the turning point? Does that come in volume two? What’s this big social change? When does this occur?

LF: The turning point is volume two, and that’s why it’s called Clash of Titans. It’s a clash between the biggest people internally in the mob, and also between the mob and the overworld. I feel like this is a microcosm of any empire. Empires rise and fall. And if you study the rise and fall of empires, whether it’s the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Carthaginians or the Romans, you’ll always see a period of growth and evolution. As Arnold Toynbee brilliantly pointed out, there are always crises that have to be met. And then a small group of people will usually meet those crises head on to continue the growth of that civilization. And that’s civilization, obviously, Toynbee is talking about, not empire. But there are parallels to be drawn. And then at some point or another, you reach a point where they’ve reached maturity. And what happens when you’ve reached maturity is then there’s conflict. More conflict than ever. Sure, there’s been conflict in the past, but now the conflict is internal.

And now, in the United States, look at us. We’ve been a great empire for a long time. We don’t like to admit we’re an empire, but we are an empire. We meet the definition of empire. And now we’re in conflict. We can’t get two parties to agree on anything. We’re at each other’s throats in the United States. I see it objectively because I see it as a historian. I try to view it without an ideological horse in the race. I see it as someone standing back, and I see it as the natural degeneracy of empire. We’ve reached a part where the dollar is printed, we’re printing dollars without anything backing it. The economy isn’t what it once was. A lot of people are suffering, and they wish that the government could do something about it to curtail it. But really, there isn’t anything either party could do about it. We’ve reached a point where we’re at each other’s throats now. That will happen in volume two in the mob. If we imagine the mob as an empire, they’ve had their growth and maturity. Now they’ve reached their peak. They’ve expanded as far as they could expand. And now what happens? They fight, they kill each other, and then it starts to contract.

I think it’s a period the United States is going through right now as we speak, believe it or not. I think the British Empire did it as best they could. When they retracted, it followed World War II when the Brits were told by Franklin D. Roosevelt, ‘You can’t be colonialists anymore. You got to stop this stuff’. You know, Churchill – who I love, by the way, I’m a fan of Churchill – but he was for colonialism to a certain extent. And they said they realized they had to retract from that, that idea of colonialism. They couldn’t continue, and they did it as peacefully and gracefully as possible, but usually it’s not that peaceful. In volume two and three, you’ll see everyone [at the mob] is at each other’s throats. Sir Arthur Helps, who wrote a brilliant four-volume history of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, wrote in one of his introductions something to the effect that ‘After the animals of the jungle have killed the carcass, what’s left is for them to fight with each other over the remains of the carcass.’

And that’s where we are in volume three. It’s the rancid carcass of empire that’s left, and they’re all killing each other over what’s left. And it so happens that that’s when I was part of the mob. I saw a lot of it first-hand. I was much lower in rank, but I was friendly with the people at the top. I was like a fly on the wall for some great conversations, and I saw things unfolding in front of me. And then when I went to prison, I was away with a lot of the people who talked openly about things that happened. I was put in a perfect place to not only write volume three as a historian, but someone who was there and saw it with my eyes and heard it with my ears. But I think it’s the natural life of empires. And it happens whether it’s in the geopolitical world or in the mafia, which has been called an empire by others. It’s not just me that I pulled that out of thin air, but it really could be considered an empire in America.

MS: Louis, thank you very much. We look forward to reading volumes two and three. Thank you very much for the discussion and the very candid views, both about your personal time and struggles, and then this rejuvenation through books, and then writing your own books.

LF: Thank you for having me, Mark, and thank you for the work that you and your organization do. Greatly appreciate it. Keep up the good work, I tip my hat to you guys.