Loyalty & Betrayal, The Story of the American Mob. Part 4. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. 25 Jul 1994.

Narrator: Everybody scores in Atlantic City. The players, the feds, the state, and epscially Uncle Nicky. The Mob’s got Vegas as his own backyard.

 

Newsreel: Atlantic City, June 1977. New Jersey Governor, Brendan Byrne, signed the Law paving the way for Casinos. Byrne told the Mob to stay away.

Pathetic voice: Keep your filthy hands out of Atlantic City. Keep the hell out of our State.

 

Newsreel: But organised Crime didn’t. State Police say the Mob is increasingly active in Atlantic City. The Police say the Mob is also involved in Businesses and provide the Casinos with parking, Food, Liquor, and vending machines.

 

Leonetti: We had connections with Local 54, which was waiters, waitresses, bartenders, distilleries, which was one of the largest Unions in the Area, the Atlantic City Area. We also had all the other Unions in Atlantic City. The Teamsters. Everybody was with us. We could have told every Union to strike, to stop delivering the trash, stop picking up the trash, no Deliveries, no Food, no nothing. We could have closed everybody down, but we don’t want to do that. We don’t want to cause no problems. Everything was working out smoothly. We’re making a lot of Money, my uncle. It worked out Good.

 

Narrator: It had been working out Good for a long Time. Since [1930’s], the Mob has used its muscles to get a piece of organised Labour. By the early [1960’s], the Mob has a piece of almost every Union in America. But it took a bitter feud between Robert Kennedy and Teamster boss, Jimmy Hoffa, to expose the Mob’s connexions inside the Unions. The Unions, with their millions of dues paying Members and billion dollar Pension Funds, were key source of Mob Money and Power.

 

Ragano: In the 20’s and the 30’s, the Managements would hire the goons to crash the picket lines and big nose fellows unmercifully. [omitted]  There came a time when Jimmy Hoffa realised that, without the help of the Mob, he could never be successful. [Steven Speilberg & George Lucas & Robert Zemeski & Martin Scorsese. Ridley Scott. Steven Soderbergh.] And that’s where he recruited the Mob, and the Mob was very happy to help, because it would give them an inside track to the Unions. And without them, he couldn’t manage. And he used them, and they used him.

His dream was to have a Pension Fund. And that’s how he would reward them for their assistance. And organising these Businesses and Practices and Plants and everything else, that they would have an access to the Pension Fund and be able to obtain Loans for themselves and their friends.

 

Salerno: If you took a Control of the Labour Union, you could see that you would be voted a generous Salary, a generous perks, an automobile, an expense account, and so on. Plus, you could make Money selling Labour-piece.

 

Beattie: Guys who were picketing the place was a friend of ours or somebody. We’d go down to straighten out somebody or move them out. We’d call them to the side, and we’d said, What are youse doing? He’d say, We were sent down by our Unions. We’d say, You’d like to leave here tonight and go home to your Families. Your alternatives are this or that. [omitted] And most of them did, most of them did. There’s always a couple of stubborn People you had to lock horns with, [Accurate.] so we locked horns with them. We didn’t kill anybody, but we broke a few heads.

 

Mazarano: We used to go to the Owners of these Businesses and say, Look, we’re going to try to organise your, excuse the word, Business. We’re going to take care of your hospitalisation for your People, we’re going to give them a little Benefits, and you’ve got to them them a bone. Instead of giving them $2.15 an hour, give them $3 an hour. No, no, no, I can’t do it. No, you don’t understand. You’re going to give them $3 an hour. Because we’re going to call dues from them. And if we call dues from them, you in turn are going to get a piece of the action, asshole. So lousy a quarter, fifty cents an hour you’re going to throw in their pockets, you’re going to get back. But they never got it back, of course. Once we take something, once we grab somebody’s throat, we never release the throat. [Bill Clinton & Hillary Clinton. Diane Feinstein & her husband. Barack Obama.]

 

Surveillancetape: Hey, Chuck, I’m going to tell you something. You have that $25,000 on my hands by tomorrow. You understand? You have it here by six o’clock tomorrow night, or believe me, believe me when I tell you this, I promise you this, I’m going to break every bone in your body before I go to Jail.

 

Le Vien Jr.: They have what Law enforcement doesn’t. They have the Fear of God and the Fear of that 22 behind your ear. And they can make that contract almost anywhere in the World by picking up the phone and say, Do we have anybody in Rome, in Germany, in Munich, in Paris to go see you. I want his kneecaps boiled, baked, or fried within 24 hours. They have the Power to do that.

 

Mazarano: We’re not animals. We do what we gotta do. We’re not the nicest People in the World, but that’s part of the Business, and it is Business. [Stephen Walt & John Mearsheimer. Flynt Leverett & that cunt of his. Ronald Reagan & George H. W. Bush. Allen Dulles & John Foster Dulles. John F. Kennedy & McGeorge Bundy. Robert McNamara.]

 

Miller: If you’re building a big Building and losing Money, is it easier to call a gangster and “straighten out a problem”? You bet it is.

 

Beattie: If you have Gambino Crime family, if you have organised Phillys coming at you, you’re powerless. What’s a man going to do?

 

Miller: You pick up the phone, you call some wiseguy who’s in the Union and say, Hey, these guys are breaking my chops over issue X. And that guy says, Leave me $20,000 in a brown paper bag, and I’ll take care of that tamara. And that means your project doesn’t lose $250,000 a day for the next 30 days while you haggle with the Union. Is it Wrong? Of course, it’s Wrong, because the Union is selling out the very [People] that pay their dues to be in it.

 

Beattie: I worked in Madison Square Garden. The only History they ever being closed down was due to us. They’ve never been closed down, the Madison Square Garden. How long have they been in existence now? I don’t know. A hundred years? I don’t know. [omitted] So we just severed all the Electric cables in the building, and nobody could work. We didn’t even want to close them down. Why? Because we wanted more Money. Not just more Money, we wanted more no-show Jobs. So we just closed them down until they gave it to us. I worked there for seven years, I think I showed up there for two and a half years. I got paid every week, all this Money. I got paid not to come there and create a problem. It got to that point.

 

Montiglio: I didn’t steal cars, and they didn’t steal cars. You paid People to steal, you paid kids. You paid them like 500 a car. They do 5-6 cars a night, they make 3,000 a night, they do that 5 nights a week, they make 15-20 grand a week. And the cars get tagged, change all the numbers, phony shipping documents, ship them out of the Country. Or they stayed here, they go to the chop shops, sold the parts. [omitted] Our crew took it to the multi-million dollar level. It was a multi-million dollar Operation.

 

Beattie: I used to lend out $1,000 for a $50 a week juice, which didn’t come off the top. You never touched the principal. Five years from now, you can pay me $50 a week for the next five years, and five years from now, you still owed me $1,000.

 

Mazarrano: Years ago, it used to be 1.5%. Now, it’s 5.5%, 6%, 7%. It varies, depending on the amount. It works out anywhere between 200-400% a year. [omitted] Not, no. That’s why they call it loansharks. Otherwise, they would call it businessmen.

 

Beattie: A lot of desperate People on the West Side. Most of them are trying to work hard for a living. They can’t afford it. They’d like to do a little betting, they’d like to take their wives out for dinner, or they have a misfortune with the children at home. We actually dwelled on our own People. We actually took advantage of our own People. They couldn’t outside of the Neig hbourhood. The ghinnies wouldn’t give them the Money. They didn’t know them. We gave it to them, and we made it sound like we were actually doing them a favour. And they believed what we were doing. We were actually destroying them.

Montiglio: It was a truckload of 15 shots Smith & Wesson 9mms. They were going to, I believe, the Police Department in Nebraska, and a couple of friends of mine hijacked the truck. And they didn’t have any place to put these guns. I said, Sure, you can leave them in my house as long as you get them out in the morning. My wife would walk into the living room, and all over the floor, there was just guns. And she said, What are you guys up to today? I said, Nothing, we’ll just keep these here overnight. They’ll be out in the morning. She got me in the kitchen, she said, Why are you doing this to me? She says, I don’t want to sleep with [them]. How many guns do you have? 400, 500 of them. She said, I don’t want to sleep with 400, 500 stolen guns in my house. And we kept them overnight. I kept my word. We had them out in the morning. And the big problem was Distribution. Nino came up with a Good idea, We start selling these all over the City, they’re going to get into the hands of, they’ll be getting used on us. So we had to be very selective about whom we were giving them to. So I’m trying to sell all these guns all around the City. So what I did is I went up to Harlem, and sold them to the black guys up there. I knew some big-time dope dealer up there. Mickey **’s crew. I figured, We’d never go to War with them. So I dumped like a hundre of them up there. [Ronald Reagan & George H. W. Bush.] Gene Greene, who was Mickey’s lieutenant. That’s basically how I got rid of them. I got rid of some of them to the Cubans. I don’t think we sold any of them to Italians except the ones who were in our Family, whom we could trust in our Family. And you really can’t trust them, either. That’s what gets you. Who’s going to set you up other than them? It’s a scary thought. What we did was everybody in our crrew got three or four to keep.

 

Narrator: It’s this guy, and thousands of bookies like him, who bring more dough than with less risk with all the stolen guns and hot cars and loansharking combined. The Mob’s cut for the illegal Gambling is only 10%. But it’s 10% of the $40 billion dollar Business. More than enough to keep bookies, lawyers and crooked cops fat and Happy. It’s the grease that keeps the organised Crime running. But organised Crime is about to become disorganised. The Drug Business is going to change everything.