S4E3: The Untold Story: Exploring the American Mafia

Transcript:

Jason Dressel 00:11

Today on the History Factory Podcast, Lewis Ferrante and a history of the American mafia.

 

Jason Dressel 00:24

I’m Jason Dressel. Welcome to the History Factory Podcast, the podcast at the intersection of business and history. In today’s pod, I’m going to talk to Lou Ferrante about the history of business through a different lens, the mafia in America.

 

Jason Dressel 00:40

And look, if you’re like me, you find mafia-themed content entertaining. And I’ll admit it, I was very interested in talking to Lou and we calculated that a lot of listeners out there might be too. And this discussion and Lou’s book, which I’ll get to in a second is both kind of what you’d expect if you know anything about the mafia. It’s also really different than a lot of other mafia books and documentaries and the kinds of things that we all are used to seeing. And to understand the context of the conversation, you need to know a little bit about Lou Ferrante. So Lou is a former mafia associate and heist expert who served eight years in prison after refusing to incriminate his fellow Gambino family members. He was an associate of John Gotti in the 1990s. But here’s the thing about Lou, it is more than fair to say that he is not your average person. And he certainly did not have the typical experience of a member of the mob during his time in prison or sense. What I mean by that is, that Lou is largely self-taught but intellectual. While he was in prison, he took the books in a major way and genuinely gave himself an education in the classics and liberal arts. He studied religion, science, law, and history, and after prison, he created a new life for himself as an author. He wrote a book called Mob Rules, which is an international bestseller translated into 20 languages. His Discovery Channel series Inside the Gangster’s Code earned him a Grierson Award nomination for presenter of the year. And now he has written the first of a three-volume series for gota, the history of the American mafia. And it’s an interesting read, because it reads in many ways, like what you might expect, and I think it’s fair to say that mafia-themed content immediately conjures some assumptions. But it’s also heavily influenced by the scholarly histories that Lou reads. And that’s a big part of the reason why it’s a different kind of history. The other consideration, of course, is that this is a world a culture that Lou literally grew up in and understands innately. And to that point, one thing that Lou is clear about is that most of the content that you read or watch about the mafia is inaccurate, distorted, and romanticized. So as you’re about to hear, I intentionally didn’t spend much time talking to Lou about his past and personal background. But I understand listeners may be curious about him. I intentionally really wanted to respect his work and focus the conversation on that. But if you’re interested in learning more about Lou’s personal experiences, there are other podcasts and media coverage that delve deeper into that. And it’s well worth it. He’s a fascinating guy. And there’s a lot to unpack if you’re interested in learning more about Lewis Ferrante. He’s on Wikipedia, and he has a website, Lewis ferrante.com.

 

Jason Dressel 03:53

But for our purposes, I wanted to stay focused on the content of the book in the context that the mafia has been present in American business and politics in our culture for a long time. And how did the mafia come about and how has it evolved? Like Lou’s book, we avoided romanticizing what is a violent and illegal enterprise. So definitely a really interesting conversation. I hope you enjoy it. Here I am talking with Lou Ferrante.

 

Jason Dressel 04:29

Lou Ferrante, welcome to the History Factory podcast. Thanks so much for joining us today. 

 

Lou Ferrante 4:32

Thank you for inviting me.

 

Jason Dressel 04:37

Well, Luke, first of all, congratulations on your book. Congratulations on the birthing for volume one of the trilogy.

 

Jason Dressel 04:47

You know, it was a really fun read. And, you know, one of the things I just wanted to start right out with is, you know, I think one of the kind of themes of this category and certainly one of the

 

Jason Dressel 05:00

Sort of themes of your, of your work is that you point out that, you know, the history of the mafia is generally portrayed more like historical fiction than really a serious field of study. And it’s often romanticized. And I’m just curious, first of all, what kind of your take on why is and what are the general discrepancies between how the mafia is stereotypically portrayed? And what, what, and what’s reality? 

 

Lou Ferrante 5:32

Yeah, so I’ll start with the latter part of the question first, first, which is the stereotypes, very, you have the Godfather, which romanticizes the mob, to the trillion degree. I mean, that’s like, totally not real. Maybe at one time, it was closer to reality. But in my own time, which would be the 1990s, late 80s, early 1990s, before I went to prison, those days were very much more like the movie Goodfellas, which is, you know, a little more reckless, the people were a little more violent, less, less given to a code.

 

Lou Ferrante 06:04

There was a code, but more people broke it than not. So it was a different sort of time so the movies do get it wrong. In a sense, I thought that the sopranos were done well. When I was in prison. The guys used to go into the television room every week to watch The Sopranos, the mob guys I was with and I would say what do you watch in that crap for you know what, that’s what got us into this. You know, they told me to come to the TV room with my brother. Keep my nose in history books so I can move on after this. So I never went to watch it and then at some point or another, I was I was in touch with Lorraine Bracco who played Dr. Melfi on The Sopranos. She purchased the movie rights to my first book, my memoir unlocked and I said oh shit. I never watched the show. I better get started watching these things. And I have to tell you, I got sucked in. I thought it was done well. It was more it was more Gridley it was more human. I thought they captured the family life very well. Tony Soprano’s family life, the relationship between him and his wife, and him and his kids. I can’t tell you how many top mob guys’ houses I’ve been in, in my life. So you know, I mean, I remember vividly conversations at the table between husbands and wives and children, etc. And I thought that they did a phenomenal job with what the sopranos did, and they also didn’t hide anything. You know, Sopranos. Tony Soprano was a family man. But he’s not. It’s not beneath him to cut somebody’s head off, you know, at six o’clock at night before he goes home to dinner, and kisses his wife, you know, hello at the table. So this is sort of what he did. I think there was one scene where he did indeed cut to him and Chris cuts somebody’s company’s head off in a bathtub. So they sort of got that stuff, right? They didn’t sort of glorify it. But the movies that do romanticize it, are just phony. You know, the real thing is, it’s a lot of blood and guts, it’s a lot of intrigues. Your life is always on the line. If you don’t know how to operate in that world, you will find yourself in a jam. And if you get out with your life, you’re lucky. So you know, you need to know how to maneuver and how to navigate that world. It is a specific world just to learn it which I did. You know, my family wasn’t mafia, my family. On my mother’s side, we’re not around guys. I’m 100% Italian. My father’s family was from Bari. My mother’s mother was from Sicily, and her father was from Naples. And you know, her side of the family. They were a little crooked than I believe Don’s and Sicilians but they weren’t mob. So that was sort of new for me. And I was groomed by old timers, and even young guys who grew up in the life, who taught me everything, I understood it, I was a quick learner. And I took to it and you know, the reality is that you want to aspire to something like The Godfather, but you end up like something like Goodfellas.

 

Jason Dressel 08:55

Yeah, you know, one of the things that was cool about the book is it. It does sort of blend being a highly entertaining read, and you write it from the first person in some places where you’re able to kind of hear your voice and your experiences.

 

Jason Dressel 09:13

But it is a serious piece of history. And you did your homework and spent a significant amount of time. And we’re going to talk about that I want to hear more about the sort of the research process.

 

But readers or listeners might be surprised to hear that the history begins in Sicily in the Middle Ages. And then it works up to the early origins of the mafia there in Sicily in the 1860s. Why did you make that choice? What’s the kind of through line in terms of the events that shaped the unique characteristics of Sicilian culture that then kind of as you write, sort of in sort of, you know, plant the seeds for the mafia? 

 

Lou Ferrante 9:55

Yeah, there are a couple of reasons why I began in Sicily. One was, the book was hatched in Sicily

 

Lou Ferrante 10:00

When I was invited to speak for the German conglomerate, Axel Springer, they were having a retreat for editors in Sicily. And I was seated next to, unbeknownst to me. When I arrived there, they had seating arrangements pre-planned and they sat me next to an English-speaking

 

Lou Ferrante 10:17

Person who was at the event his name was George. And at the end of the night, he said, I’d like to publish your next book. And it was it ended up being Lord George Weidenfeld one of the biggest publishers of the 20th century. So here we are in Sicily, the next day we met overlooking the ruins of Agrigento. And, I said, What kind of book would you like? And he said I’d love for you to write the history of the American mafia. And it began in Sicily. So that’s sort of where I began, you know, where my mind my train of thought began. I was in Sicily. And I should credit Lloyd George’s lovely wife, Lady Annabelle, with a lot of input. She was an avid reader when she was young. And she had, she added tremendously to the conversation we had convincing me that I was the person to write it. The next thing was, when I read a lot of Mafia histories when I started to do my research, everyone sort of, you know, they skipped over the real origins, they’d say, Well came from Sicily. Well, it was about family. Well, I was, you know, I was the way the Sicilians Wha, well, kind of maybe stem from feudalism, but nobody ever went deep into it. So I said, Well, where did it come from? So I dug deep and with the lead, and they usually just jump into the blood and guts, which is what a lot of people just want to read about. And I have that throughout Borgata, there’s a lot of blood and guts. I go deep into the intrigues. I enjoy that stuff, the intrigues and the politics involved and how people were thinking. But I wanted to make sure that the reader understood where it all came from. And I went deep into feudal society. And I’m the first one ever to make those strong connections between feudal society, feudalism, and a modern-day mafia family. 

 

Lou Ferrante 11:54

There are literally exact things that they did, during feudalism that they do now in a mafia family, whether or not the relationship between the Lord and his vassals is identical to the relationship between a mafia don and his soldiers slash capos. So all of that played a huge part. And I said, once I want to draw the connection, so the reader sees that this isn’t just, I’m telling you, it came from feudalism, like everyone else, let me show you. You know, that’s what I felt like always, when I learned how to win, I taught myself how to write. I always read over and over again, when I read the great authors, show me Don’t Tell Me so I wanted to show the reader how this came about. The other thing was, that there were a lot of secret societies in Europe, around the same time the mafia came about in the 1850s 1860s 1870s. It starts picking up speed. And why is that? Well, the ancients, ancient regimes throughout Europe, were being overthrown by a lot of secret societies. Most of us are familiar with the Jacobins in France, overthrowing, you know, causing the French Revolution. But there were a lot of other Yeah, a lot of other secret societies throughout Europe that wanted to get rid of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Ottomans, etc.

 

Lou Ferrante 13:12

So, these secret societies when they eventually achieved success, by unifying Italy, and rejecting the Austrians out of northern Italy, and the French out of Southern Italy, slash Sicily, they the French bonds, they eventually then said, Well, you know what, we don’t need these secret societies anymore, and the mafia took a lot of what they left behind, and that was available at the time and you could see and why they needed it was the mafia in Sicily, the people who would become the mafia in Sicily, were originally just people who resisted this new Italian unification. They weren’t happy with it. They were conned by Garibaldi and others. I don’t know if Garibaldi knew he was conning them. But they were told that they would have independence once these overlords were thrown out of Italy and Italy was unified. And then they were told suddenly that they were part of this whole attack experiment. And then the new government is in the original terrain, but eventually Rome. And they’re like, What are you talking about? You know, we listen to ourselves. We don’t want to listen to Rome. What the hell’s wrong? What are the what people in Rome know about us in the foothills of Western Sicily, in Palermo, in Castellammare, del Golfo, in Agrigento, what do they know about us in Villa Bombay, etc, etc? So they were very, very unhappy with it. Around that time, they started to sort of the new government in Italy and started to crush these resistance movements in Sicily. And that is when the mafia came about. They came about originally sort of as like protect his I feel for the people. And then they morphed into something very different. They were criminalized. They were told they were criminals by logic, government, and Rome. Originally, as I said, Turin, and they’re told, Well, you know, you guys are criminals. Everything you do is criminal. You can’t have an old man in the Piazza. settling judicial disputes. This is ridiculous.

 

Lou Ferrante 15:00

We do that by a court of law, you can’t have him telling you who’s going to be the mayor. We do that by ballot box and the ballot box can’t be tampered with. And these guys didn’t want to hear that and Sicily. So, you know, they resisted this. And once they were labeled criminals, at some point, I think they didn’t care how much more criminal conduct they engaged in because they were already labeled criminals. And that’s why I make the argument very, very clearly in the book, I use quotes, I use references I use geopolitics, social politics, etc, to show the reader how it all came about. And there were a lot of moving parts, a lot of components to this. And I did my best to make it as clear as possible and as intelligible as possible. So by the time you’ve finished those early chapters in the mafia just suddenly appears, you know exactly how they formed inside the Sicilian womb.

 

Jason Dressel 15:46

Yeah, and the other thing that was cool about that was how you’re able to really

provide context for why Sicily and Sicilian culture are really distinct. In Italy.

 

Jason Dressel 16:02

One question I was going to ask you is Sicily the Texas of Italy?

 

Lou Ferrante 16:07

Yeah, the Lone Star State. Yes. But yeah, don’t mess with Sicily. Yeah, don’t mess with us. Exactly. Yeah, yep. And the Alamo was the Italian unification. You know, that was sort of like, you know, when the resistance movement and you know, while the Alamo was quite different, but you understand, it’s a famous, it’s a famous event in Texas history. And the unification of Italy was a famous event in Mafia history in Sicily, they did not want to be, though so how we then jumped to America is at the same time, Italy becomes unified, you know, you have these movements, you know, 1860s 1870s, Italy is now one nation. You know, the Germans went through this during the time of Bismarck when they unified Germany so Italy then went through it.

 

Lou Ferrante 16:55

Now you have the people in Sicily were very unhappy. At the same time, America abolished the institution of slavery, the United States does, and they’re in desperate need now of cheap labor, labor, very cheap labor to replace slave labor. And the doors were swung open here in the United States. For immigrant labor, we need immigrants quick to fill up there to work these worst of the worst jobs the cane fields, the cotton fields, the tobacco fields, etc. And this huge southern Italian immigrant wave which included met you know, southern Italians went through a lot of hell.

 

Lou Ferrante 17:34

When after the unification, Southern Italy was very distinct from northern Italy. I make that argument in the book and show you this is well known to Italians, obviously, for people outside of Italy are familiar with it, as familiar with it as Italians are. But Sicily also was part of that southern Italian immigrant wave. And they migrated across the country in search of work. And with these huge waves of migrants came the mafia. A lot of fugitives left Sicily and said, well, the new world is opening up, I’ll go there. And then with the Italian workforce, taking oval places like the waterfront, along the eastern seaboard, taking over unions and stuff by sheer hard work ethics, not having to do with any criminal, the hard-working Italians. For example, the hard-working Italians, let’s say took over the waterfront because so many of them were hired in New Orleans, that the mafia found it easy then to just organize them. We speak the same language, they’re from the same place we are, and they organize them. And then it becomes sort of like a criminal element to it that, you know, once you have an organized and organized union, then you have political power, you have political clout, you could control the docks. If there are citrus fruits coming in, at the docks, it’s perishable, within a couple of hours, they rot. So if you stop the conveyance of citrus fruits to the French market, and that’s drought, the United States French market, we’re being in New Orleans, and then the rest of the United States. If we shut down the docks, we control the market, we could destroy this market overnight. So they eventually now they started to gain power, using the Italian work ethic these mobsters did to sort of like gain a foothold in different places. And I eventually did point that out as well. The Italians became very close with the Jews. And when the Jews were in, for example, New York, a lot of Jewish people came with fled pogroms in eastern pogroms in Eastern Europe. They worked as seamstresses. They worked as my grandmother worked in a sweatshop and she worked alongside all the times and Jewish ladies. And so they work the hardest jobs in the garment industry. And then through their hard work the Italian and Jewish hard work, the Italian and Jewish gangsters. Were able to organize these workers into a workforce and then eventually slowly infiltrate those unions. So you know, the mafia capitalized on its own people, being hard-working ambitious people who just wanted a better life for themselves, and the mafia time and again, was able to sort of ride in on that wave.

 

Lou Ferrante 20:00

Attach themselves like parasites, you know, in many cases to these, you know, big large groups of people who just wanted to work hard. And, they would sort of dominate an industry through that hard work ethic. And then the mob would dominate that same industry, by mobilizing the people into something that they could control.

 

Jason Dressel 20:20

Yeah, that was really interesting

 

Jason Dressel 20:23

Dimension to this as well, I go to New Orleans a lot. And I’m always struck by the influence of Italian culture there. And, and I’ve never quite understood it. And it was really interesting to read, you know, sort of those origins of, of the amount of immigration of Italians to Louisiana for the reasons that you shared. And that, you know, I think, I think conventional wisdom, when people think about sort of the origins of the American mafia, they think New York, but you really point out that a lot of that formation actually was taking place in New Orleans because of that sort of combination of the labor work that was available there. The climate was very appealing to Italians, and the Sicilians in particular. 

 

Jason Dressel 21:21

And just the fact that surprise, New Orleans was pretty lawless back then.

 

Lou Ferrante 21:25

Exactly. And those were all the main elements that went into the mafia becoming so strong in New Orleans, which surprised me when I began my research. I always assume New Yorker, New York is sort of like the Rome of the Roman Empire, everything that is, you know, everything else is secondary. You know, you have Alexandria, you have, you know, Egypt and Tunisia, etc. Those rural outposts, Spain, those were outposts of the Roman Empire, where Rome is where it won’t happen. So I always assumed New York was, was the center of power and everything else, because I was from New York, and there were five major families there. But the more I did my research, the more I realized it all began in Louisiana, in New Orleans, specifically, even before it sprung up in New York. And the reason being, as you said, the Mediterranean climate was closer to the New Orleans climate, you know, you got people leaving the Mediterranean for the first time in generations, in 1000s of years. The last thing they want is to deal with nine feet of snow in New York, you know, in a bad winter, you know, these people aren’t built for that, you know, it’s like right now, just you know, picking up somebody is born and raised in Florida their whole lives and telling them you have to go live in an igloo, tomorrow in Alaska. You know, it’s not, it’s not the climate they’re looking for. So a lot of southern Italians migrated to Louisiana, where not only the climate was what they understood in light, and you know, what we’re used to, but also law, it was well, that’s what the mafia went there because it was lawless, but also because there was a lot of work there. And also you know, they were depleted of slave labor. And they had to fill in for these, you know, what are we going to do without African Americans now? Now, where are we going with this, we need people quickly. So they responded to that. And then the mafia found it the most lawless place in the United States. And by far it was, I found books, after books written about how lawless Louisiana is, specifically New Orleans was at that time, it had always been known as that, whether it be smugglers and pirates, even before organized crime. I mean, this was you read books, where people lay dead in the street for days before the cops even took notice. You know, I mean, this is like complete lawlessness, and all the cops are on the tape, and the politicians are on the take. And then the Sicilian mafiosos land there. And they’re like, You got to be kidding me. I feel like I went around the circle and got off the boat and Sicily, again, this is great. You know, it’s like home, we can take over everything here. And they did. And they basically mobilized the criminal element there. And they took over. And so they played a huge role in the very beginning of volume, one of the Borgata trilogy, which just came out, but they come back, we see the resurgence of the New Orleans mafia at the beginning of volume two, so people who are interested in the New Orleans experience with the mafia with regard to the mafia, we’ll find it in the early chapters of volume one, and once again, we come back to it and volume two. 

 

Jason Dressel 23:21

Awesome, well, I’m coming back for that.

 

Jason Dressel 24:23

So we’ll talk about that. But so some of the things you spoke to also really addressed, you know, again, I think the conventional kind of wisdom of, of how we think about the mob or the way I think about it, just because of watching the movies that you referenced, is that you know sort of the rise of the American mafia is really fueled by prohibition.

 

Jason Dressel 24:48

You know, they then you know, after, after, alcohol is legalized again, they then kind of go into sort of gambling and casinos and the rise of Las Vegas and then later they can

 

Jason Dressel 25:00

, into drugs. And, you know, that’s kind of very much the sort of the kind of narrative arc of Goodfellas, as you mentioned it.

 

Jason Dressel 25:10

What you’re pointing out is that you know, pre-prohibition, there was this really whole movement of how the mafia was involved with kind of a lot of the inner workings of sort of the Industrial Revolution and supply chain and markets and, and human labor. And, you know, and kind of working through a lot of that, what are some other kind of elements of sort of the mob, but they’re kind of misunderstood in terms of kind of the, the roles that they were playing. Like, for instance, during the Great Depression.

 

Lou Ferrante 25:44

The Great Depression was a great event for them for the mob. And they’re coming off, you know, off the heels of prohibition. And prohibition was the first time as, as you mentioned, it’s the first time you know, these guys are, they’re violent, they’re criminals. And they’re seen as that. So anytime mafiosos appear in the newspaper, you know, that they’re very discriminatory to references to them. These evil-looking Sicilians, these, the suave, the Italians, these, you know, these are the references you find time and again in these newspaper clippings from early on, and the mafia wasn’t thought of as anything sexy or romantic at that time. And then prohibition comes around and the mob, you know, and actually I make a strong argument that it all began with Donald Rothstein, who was he was sort of a mentor. 

 

Lou Ferrante 26:37

Jewish guy came from a very different, very different background sort of like, Lower East Side Jews who gravitated toward the mafia who had nothing to lose by going that route. Rothstein came from a good family, but he taught the mob and this this this direct testimony from mobster after mobster Italian mobsters saying I attribute this towards you know, attribute that the ROTC and he taught me this, he taught me that he invested in me, he gave me this, he gave me that one time and again. So Rothstein becomes sort of like Aristotle for this early school of mobsters. You know, the Lyceum of the early school of my mom’s desirous Rothstein is, and at some point or another, these two other Jews approach Rothstein and they said, look, we got an entry point around the Great Lakes fulica During Prohibition, coming in from Canada, we need a $250,000 investment from you. And that’ll give us the money to put together the fleet of boats, cargo vessels, and trucks. And with that, we can distribute it throughout the country with our own connections. And so Ross needs to let me think about it. And he goes back and he comes back to them and he says, hey, look, I’ll tell you what, I’m going to invest in this. We’ll do it through the Great Lakes. But eventually, the Canadians are going to squeeze us and squeeze us and squeeze us now and we only have them to rely on. So it’s obvious supply and demand. They know if they’re the supplier, the main supply, the only supplier, we’re in trouble. I’m going to try to open up another port of entry from this from Scotland. So he ends up making a connection with a distillery overseas in the United Kingdom. He then brings in, he’s bringing in 12-year-old Scotch from the Scottish Highlands, Rothstein, and then because his protege Maya Lansky was best friends with Lucky Luciano names most of your listeners have heard of these two guys so young at the time and Rothstein says I’m going to give you sort of like managerial positions in this little this little operation we have over here with big operation actually, with this alcohol. And Luciano then because he’s got aged whiskey that’s a top-notch top shelf that every speakeasy in the country wants. He just supplants all of the Italians who were making, you know, rock got bathtub gin, and all of this other stuff from these makeshift distilleries that’s pretty much just crap. You know, people are going blind people are dropping dead. Here’s Luciano coming out with stuff that you know, we would crave today if we went to a restaurant, so new channel then elevated himself inside the Italian Mafia, thanks to Rothstein. So prohibition then gives the mafia because Luciano then opens it up to the Italians. Rothstein eventually exits the business but the Italians partner with the Jews across the country, and at some point or another, they come out of prohibition and the great depression comes the stock market crashed during the Great Depression, and the banks are tightening up credit for everybody. The remaining banks most of them went under, and the few remaining banks were so tough to get a loan from that the mob now is flush with cash from bootlegging. And they start saying, Okay, you need 100,000 I’ll give it to you, but I want a piece of your company. You need 250,000 I’ll give it to you. But I want some shares of your company. And they start to embed themselves in industries that they had never previously been involved in. And that was a big, big time. A big moment for the mob. You know

 

Lou Ferrante 30:00

They literally just came off of pocketing all that cash during bootlegging prohibition. And now, everyone’s short on cash, and who has it, the banks don’t want to give it up. And the mobs are the only ones who’ve got it and want to give it up. So a lot of small business owners are going, it’s better I partner with this guy called Joey nine fingers or Frankie to foot as opposed to going under, and I can’t feed my wife and children. So a lot of times they then embedded themselves in industries like the waste removal industry, the ice industry at the time, they used to have, you know, deliver ice.

 

Lou Ferrante 30:34

A million other industries that eventually would take over construction, etc. And they got once they had a foothold in them, once they dug the islands, into this hit these industries, they never let go, they never let go. 

 

Jason Dressel 30:47

That is so critical to understand, I think, Luke because that really kind of explains the origins of how the mafia has seemingly for decades been sort of integrated with these legal industries and entities. And there’s this kind of shade of gray sort of area, that it seems like they’ve, they’ve been able to play in that space, and how they managed to be able to kind of sustain those kinds of arrangements for so long.

 

Lou Ferrante 31:20

Well, a big part of it was this savvy businessman. And I wrote before this book, I published a book called Mob Rules, what the mafia can teach the legitimate businessman. And the book ended up becoming an international bestseller. It’s been translated into 20 languages. And it’s been tremendously successful. It’s in maybe 13, or 14 printing in Spain, it’s a runaway bestseller in Vietnam. So every every sort of place on Earth, it’s been, it’s done extremely well. And what the book is, is, if you strip away the violence, if you take away the violence, and the mob is violent, I make no excuses for their violence.

 

Lou Ferrante 32:00

 I don’t try to in any way do I ever make my apologies or make excuses, they are violent, the mob is violent. But if you take away all the violence, there is still an extremely

 

Lou Ferrante 32:12

Astute, savvy business savvy that they exhibit every day. They know how to do business, I grew up in a neighborhood where the local supermarket, you know, once in a while, you’d see this old man in a trench coat and a fedora. And, you know, he came in, he was in the manager’s office for a little while he counted a few dollars, you went over a few things. And he laughed, and I was a kid. I didn’t know till I was in the Gambino crime family, that he was a capo in my family. And he still ran his supermarket chain very seriously. He just happened to be a capo in the mob, but he still had to put the right stuff on the shelves, he still had to produce, you know, sauce, the best veggies, etc. And chicken and you name it, he had to do it. So these are conscious guys, a smart businessman. That doesn’t mean he won’t kill you if he had to. But if I put in my book, I stripped away the violence. So a part of it is they were very good businessmen when they took over the garbage industry. They organized the garbage industry, which would have been chaotic without them. Now, I’m not making excuses. I’m not telling you, it’s better that they control the garbage industry. I don’t want any of your listeners to have to get me wrong over here. But however, if you look back at the garbage industry, they put together a cartel where they said these are your territories, everybody, you don’t infringe on anyone else’s territory. These are the prices you don’t undercut people and try to steal customers. And because of that, they allowed everybody at all the mom-and-pop garbage companies to operate under their umbrella. But you had to listen to them. Now at some point or another when Rudolph Giuliani was a prosecutor and eventually the mayor of New York, he ousted he got rid of all the mobsters out of the garbage industry, one of them being a friend of mine who controlled all the garbage on Long Island. So what happened and after that, that’s I’m not going to say what he did was wrong. You need to clean up the mob. Okay, I get it as an illegitimate citizen today. I understand that. But let’s look at what happened today. Now. Now you have one giant monolithic company that controls all the garbage in New York and Long Island, and all the small guys can operate. They suck them up. So they will be put out of business. So if you had a wife with four kids, and used to operate a nice little four or five truck company under the mob, you just listened to their rules you put up with the price guidelines, you didn’t go outside your territory, but you took home 6080 120,000 A year, whatever. Now the big company that took over a big company that trades on the Wall Street stock market, everything else, they squashed you like a bug. And they told you you can’t even survive, you know, you gotta go look for something else to do. So there’s an argument that could be made that there was a benefit to what the mob did. As I pointed out in my book at one point, George Friedrich Hegel said that selfish men

 

Lou Ferrante 35:00

Also contribute to history’s trajectory in a good way, even though we’re in the midst of all this selfishness, a good example might be Rockefeller. Rockefeller put so many people out of business when he was controlling the oil industry in America. The original rock John D. Rockefeller, excellent book Titan. 

 

Lou Ferrante 35:22

I remember I recommend the buy turnout. I think it was Ron Chernow, the excellent book you put everybody squashed everybody. But in a sense he helped the oil machine you know, the machine of industry go to an extent that it would have never gotten to had he not done all that. So in all his selfishness, he contributed to the American project the American economy to the American experience in so many other ways. Same thing with the mob, you know, they may control the waterfront, they may control different unions, they may control the garbage at those times. But they organized it when no one else was. And they contributed in so many other ways. To you not waking up in the morning and going when the hell are these people going to pick up my trash? The trash was picked up on time, they didn’t want anybody calling the police going when trash come in, or the city, they wanted to make sure they did a damn good job. So nobody complained. So you know, there are good and bad and I point that out, again, I make no excuses for criminal conduct. I’m not excusing them. You know, I just want to make that ultra clear. But there were some benefits to what they did during those times. And that’s why they were successful at it. And they also bought off a lot of politicians with the money they made. That helped.

 

Lou Ferrante 36:32

Entrenched Yeah.

 

Lou Ferrante 36:34

System in America. Yeah.

 

Jason Dressel 36:38

That was one of the things I wanted to ask you about was a lot of the things that you cover in your other book, which I haven’t read, which is, you know, what are some of the other kinds of best practices that legitimate business leaders can learn from the mob?

 

Lou Ferrante 36:53

I gave, I outlined 88 lessons in that book, Mob Rules. And there are so many lessons, I’m you know, it’s hard to just pick one time. Again, there are so many different lessons in the way I structured the book, this will help understand how the book if anybody would like to read it, I structured the book in a way where I would use a mafia story that I was either familiar with or knew about, you know, the firsthand experience or knew about it. 

 

Lou Ferrante 37:25

And, then I would use also sometimes a historical vignette to further bolster the theory that I’m putting forth, this is how you do business, for example, I would, this is how the mob handled this particular situation. This is also to when this certain situation pops up, either in business or in real-world politics. This is how it was handled in the overworld. So then, sometimes I’ll supply a vignette as well. And this is how you should do it. And, you know, once again, it’s stripping away all the violence. You know, and the mob knows how to do that, you know, these guys, good businessmen, you know, so I urge people to anybody interested in just, it’s just business lessons. Some people who are really good at business already might say, well, I know all this stuff already. That’s fine. Maybe the book isn’t for you. But a lot of people who like entertaining stories and to learn a lesson through the story, that’s basically who it’s for. And there are a lot of good stories out there. A lot of people starting out in business, who don’t have someone to school them or help them have emailed me from all over the world saying, you know, I read this religiously, once a year, I keep it on my bed shelf. I read this all the time, before I go to bed, I read another chapter, I’ve been doing it for years, I read it five times, I read it six times, and I have these people that email me from all over the world telling me it’s become their Bible, you know, in a sense, their economic Bible, their financial, that their business Bible, rather. So you know, it’s been successful, because it’s true. And when it was first, the idea for it came from a friend of mine, and he goes, you know, you tell me all these stories, put it together in a book and just get at it. Yeah, nobody’s gonna read that crap. And you know, and then he kind of like kept pushing me. And eventually, I saw myself put together some I put it, sent it over to my agent. And she loved it. And you know, she had me, Penguin picked it up penguin portfolio picked it up in no time. And it turned out to be an international bestseller, one country after another scooped up the Translation rights. And it surprised me, but it shouldn’t have, but it did.

 

Jason Dressel 39:19

You mentioned earlier,

 

Jason Dressel 39:22

The code.

 

Jason Dressel 39:25

What is the code? What’s the ethos of the mafia? And has that? Has that remained consistent? Or? Or has it changed over time? 

 

Lou Ferrante 39:37

It has extremely degenerated.

 

Lou Ferrante 39:41

So it has not remained consistent, and it’s changed over time as well. So the original code would be based on something called Oh Martha. And oh, Martha, in the original sense of the word as taken from Sicily in the late 19th century, would be the second half of the 19th century would mean that

 

Lou Ferrante 40:00

Being a man in every way. And what is it to be a man? Well, if you’re a man, you raise your family, you grin and bear, you don’t complain to your wife, you don’t complain to your friends, you do what you have to do. If somebody confronts you, you don’t go to the police or the law, you take care of it yourself. These were the things that they did in Sicily. 

 

Lou Ferrante 40:21

Somebody says, you know, whatever the case is, it’s always about being a quote-unquote, man, in every sense of the word. And the man I traced to the Italian sense of the word man was doing your duty. And that’s interesting. Duty was very big. And what is your duty, you know, most American men, most men in the world, they go out, they break their backs every day for a day’s pay. And even if they’re white-collar jobs, they break, you know, even if they’re sitting on their essence, they work hard. Most people carry the strain and stress of the week with them wherever they go. And they and they grant it and Dad, and those men believe it or not, in every industry in America legitimate, all exhibiting what the Sicilians originally believed was omerta and doing your duty. You know, that’s what you do. There was one instance where I point out in the book where a Sicilian Petitto or rat snitch, was ratting on a big mafia down in Sicily. And he says, You kill this guy, you killed that guy, you kill this guy, you kill that guy. His only rebuttal was the Sicilian Mafia, Don, who they used to allow, and I’m not sure if Italian law has changed, but they used to allow you to confront your snitches. And he says, Yeah, who were you to talk? You never even took care of your wife.

 

Lou Ferrante 41:37

So when this guy’s mind killing people was okay, that was being a man, he was doing his duty if somebody got in his way he killed them, but not taking care of your wife. Ah, that’s something where, you know, that’s pre-chemo Mirta you’re not being dutiful, you know, and obviously, a jury with any Saturday would say, This guy’s a lunatic. You can’t kill, you know, I rather I rather you neglect your wife a little and don’t kill 50 people. You know, I mean, that’s like the American view of it. Right? Okay. Most wives are neglected anyway, in a sense, you know, this is the way it goes. You know, they deal with it, too. But, you know, I mean, this was how they thought so that all marked up now has changed to just mean basically, the way Americans think of it American mafia is the code of silence you keep your mouth shut. If your questions. You know, Louis, you know about this guy, Lou, you know about that guy? I don’t know anything. I didn’t see anything. I didn’t hear anything. That’s what Martha that’s how we think of it. But really, it was a bigger thing. It was a bigger deal. And it was like you take your lumps. When I went to jail, I was faced with three different cases, two federal cases and a state case. I had all the pressure in the world on top of my shoulders. I had every reason to snitch and get out of it. I remember my stepmother said to me, you know, the smart thing to do would be to talk right? I said, yeah, it would be the smart thing to do. But it’s not what I could do. It was an enemy. So what was I doing, I was exhibiting in a sense that the Sicilians would have believed was murder. And being a man in every way, I made my bed, I made my decisions, nobody twisted my arm, nobody forced me into it, and I’m now suffering because of it. And I have to now man up and just suffer.

 

Jason Dressel 43:14

You know, shifting gears a little bit, one of them, I want to talk a little bit about just the, the kind of process of, of writing the book itself. And one of the things that struck me was your a really obvious point, which is that it’s really hard to,

 

Jason Dressel 43:34

Produce a comprehensive history of a topic of a group that, fundamentally,

intentionally don’t write anything down.

 

Jason Dressel 43:49

Or say anything in a way that is, that is, on the surface explicit. There’s a whole code of communication that takes place in this culture, both in terms of the written record, and making sure that there isn’t one, and even and even, you know, conversations and how those take place. So I’m curious, you know, how you were able to sort of overcome that obstacle.

 

Lou Ferrante 44:17

I did it by using the bell in my head that goes off if something alerts me that something is off. So this bell rings in my head, and for example, I’ll give you a good example. When I was in prison and began to read and fell in love with books I used to read 18 hours a day. And I knew that I needed to catch up with a world that I had fallen so far behind in. So I read physics, I read history, I was in every branch of science, I read history, I read the law, I read philosophy, beginning with the ancient Greeks up until the present day. I read the Masters of 19th-century fiction. I used to love fiction. That’s how I taught myself how to write in many ways by reading Flowerbad posts the ASCII Tolstoy

 

Lou Ferrante 45:01

And time and again.

 

Lou Ferrante 45:04

I would hear guys reading on my tear block. And most criminals gravitate if they do read most don’t. But if they do read, they gravitate toward true crime. They want to read what they like and what they know. And I would hear a lot of people who read my books back then, fellow mobsters of mine in jail, blurting out a lot of bullshit. No way. Never happened. Who wrote this crap? And you’d hear it all day long. And you know, then the lady talked to go. Would you read this sob said, this has never happened. Will we? Come on? I go, Yeah, I don’t know where the guy got that one from, you know, but I didn’t want to read the true crime book. So now here I am. I’m tasked with writing a history of the American mafia. So I got to go through all these books I didn’t read, which is a good thing that I didn’t have to go through twice. So it’s better. I didn’t do it back then. But now

 

Lou Ferrante 45:56

I’m going through them for the first time. And I’m seeing for myself what they were saying. And I knew right away if something didn’t ring true, there were no recorded records. There were no you know, there were no these conversations. There are no minutes. There’s no stenographer taking minutes when the mob has a sit-down. You know, these are things you know, you got to you got to, you know, yourself so I know if I read, for example, Albert Anastasia wanted to get the movements of Thomas Dewey Thomas Dewey Albert Anastasia being a top mobster Thomas Dewey, being a prosecutor was prosecuting the mob. They were thinking about killing them. So he was going to push the baby caught and he ended up pushing the baby caught back and forth, up a Manhattan street trying to figure out how can Anastasia be a boss. Do you really think he’s gonna push a baby caught? He’d have some kid do it. Like when I was 18. He told me, Louie, go get a baby caught. Tell me what he’s doing. Okay, I’ll talk to you a little bit. You know, that’s how those guys operate. So you know, somebody’s got this wrong. And then timing again, I would find this they would say, chin, chin Chaganti shot Frank Costello in the head. And he put on 50 pounds before he shot him because he didn’t want anybody to notice them at the scene. I didn’t commit a million crimes. You don’t put on weight before you go to a heist, you think you’re gonna get caught? At the most, you put on a mask and didn’t even bother to put on a mask. He’s not gonna put on a mask, but he’s gonna lose 50 pounds or gain 50 pounds. Because some people said he lost the 50 After some people said he gained it before. I said you go as you go. So then what’s the reason though? Why was he 50 pounds lighter when he finally went to trial six months later, or whatever it was? The reason was he botched the hit. He didn’t know if they were gonna kill him or not if you botched the hit you died. So you know, he was like, probably shitting his pants and not eating. No one was gonna knock at the door to kill them or you know, just greet them and bring them more macaroni. So you know, so the guy Wiens down to nothing, he finally goes to court. So you know, it’s these things are obvious to me. You know, but if you don’t know the mob, and you know if you, you know, you went, you got 25 years of college, but you never really held a gun, you never, you know, you never pulled a stiletto, you never want you never had handcuffs on your wrist. You don’t understand it. You know, you never had your life was never on the line, you never had a sit down where you might not make it out of the room. You know, they might roll you up in a rug. And that’s the end of the day, you get thrown in a pickup truck. You know, if you’ve never experienced that you don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong. So, you know, it’s like me waking up tomorrow and going, Yeah, I follow politics. You know, I think I’m gonna write a history of the Oval Office. What the hell do I know about the Oval Office? I have never even been in it. You know, I don’t know what the President does and who he phones and who he calls and who he intercoms, and I What the hell do I know how he deals with, you know, other than what I read, but usually you want that history from someone who’s been in the oval office who’s operated with one or two or three or four presidents. You know who understands that world so it’s the same thing with me, but I’m the first guy who ever came from that world and understood it and that was why Lord George Weidenfeld wanted to be righted. He says nobody gets it like Do you have to be the guy who writes it? You know, nobody. Nick Pileggi, wrote Casino Goodfellas Wiseguy, which became Goodfellas the movie. Nick Pileggi is a friend of mine, a great guy, an amazing guy, always there when I needed him. Tremendous man, the epitome of oh Martha in so many other ways are, you know, legitimate ways. But he said to me, I’ve never met anybody like you, somebody who came from that world. And you can walk away with the insights and experiences you have and the ability to write them down. You know, it’s not something that I’m obviously free of false modesty but when I make these statements I’m happy to report that that was Nick Pileggi Take on me.

 

Jason Dressel 49:46

Sort of wrap it up in the book. Volume One is in the 1960s you mentioned and Volume Two will start in the early 1960s. And we’ll be back in New Orleans. What was kind of the thinking behind

 

Jason Dressel 50:00

Is this sort of structure? And when did you start out expecting and planning this to be a multi-volume work? Or did you? Or did you start to realize that brevity was perhaps not your strength?

 

Jason Dressel 50:17

And you were gonna have to extend it out. But what was the kind of sort of rationale logic? And what can we expect to see in Volume Two and Volume Three? 

 

Lou Ferrante 50:28

So it’s a great question. And yes, brevity is not my strength, obviously, just from hearing me talk, right?

 

Jason Dressel 50:35

I share that. 

 

Lou Ferrante 50:37

Yeah, that’s great. That’s great. We find each other in the world too, right?

 

Lou Ferrante 50:42

So basically, it’s a great question. Basically, when Lord George Biden felt, contracted the book he asked for it was supposed to be a one-volume history of the mafia. I began writing and I realized that this thing wasn’t fitting into one volume. I just kept going. So I figured you know what, when you’re done, you’re done. Keep going. And it’s I would have hoped my other books took me a year to write and I thought that this would take me a year I didn’t know that it took me Yeah, I a year, I basically was still getting through the Middle Ages and feudalism and stuff.

 

Lou Ferrante 51:16

This was going on a long time and you know, at the time, too, it’s you know, they don’t dish out millions and millions of dollars for you when in advance. I’m not Stephen King. So you know, you have to live in the meantime you have to figure out how to survive and stuff. So, I’m, I’m struggling to get through the initial stuff. And I realized this is going to be a long book. And at some point or another, after seven years, it took me, I got 550,000 words, and I handed it to a publisher. She goes to the woman in charge of the publishing company now based out of London, Simon and Schuster bought the American rights. So Simon and Schuster slash Pegasus, is putting out the book here in America, but Orion is the publisher in England. And then she said to me, I can’t do this. And I said, why? Warren pieces? 550,000 words, she goes.

 

Lou Ferrante 52:06

She goes, No one’s gonna buy it. So you know, you know, there’s a few of us who want to read War and Peace. I’m one of them. But I was locked in a prison cell, you know, my hat’s off. In the in, you know, in the real world. But, so, you know, I said, okay, so she goes, cut it down, and break it up. So I broke it up into a trilogy, I cut it down to roughly 330,000 words about 110,000 Each volume, which is what should be and the reason why I go from 1866, Sicily to 1960. America, it was a nice cut-off, I found a perfect milestone. And by the grace of God, it just worked out this way. I didn’t have to do any really forceful, you know, pushing squares into circular holes. You know, it was a nice break that I found that I said, Wow, this is perfect. The 1960s was About 100 years, but also to be is a major change. Nobody is attacking the mob, with the exception of Estes Kefauver Senator Estes Kefauver who had the Kefauver Committee and went after the mob. But he never really followed through on it, with the exception of Thomas Dewey, who targeted a few monsters so he could then run for Governor of New York and then run for the Republican nomination for president. And then he lost the Truman, you know, that famous newspaper, you know, where Truman holds up the paper, it says do we win? So with the exception of those people, there was never really a concentrated attack on the mafia as a whole. Volume Two goes up until it starts around 1960 and goes up to 1985, which is when John Gotti took over the Gambino crime family. And that sort of was the beginning of my own time. And then volume three picks up with my own contemporary times. In volume three, it’s very interesting because I not only was there but I was also firsthand privy to some of the things that happened, I was also able to contact people who were involved in the thick of things who would talk to me only because they never ratted. You know, a lot of people talk to me off the record and said, Louis, you know, never to put my name in print. Right? Of course. Okay, I’ll tell you what happened. You know, that’s it. So I got a lot of the inside scoops and volume three, straight from the horse’s mouth. So that’s sort of 1985 to 2005 is volume three, it’s a 20-year period, where the mob is in freefall. And that sort of you know, that their last? It’s the autumn of empire. It’s almost done, you know, the epilogue will then wrap it up. But, yeah,

 

Jason Dressel 54:35

What was the biggest surprise for you? During the course of developing the book? 

 

Lou Ferrante 54:40

There were quite a few surprises. I was surprised to learn how many people and how many nations invaded Sicily. On Part Sicilian, my father’s family is from Bari, which is in southern Italy on the Adriatic coast. My mother’s father was from Naples and her mother was from Sicily. So

 

Lou Ferrante 54:58

So I am Sicilian.

 

Lou Ferrante 55:00

You know, my grandmother, my maternal grandmother is to say, and I realized that there was a strong Arab influence in western Sicily. And they had a lot to do with the origins of the mafia, which readers will find interesting. I believe a lot of people have told me that already. And this was fascinating for me to learn how much Arab influence there was in Sicily. There were still churches that looked like mosques in Sicily. Yeah, the Arab influence is very apparent there. But also as far as you know, I traced the merit of the Mafia’s Founding Fathers to the Arab Berbice of Western Sicily. That was interesting to me. And then there were along the way. There were a lot of things I found fascinating myself, you know, when you’re in the mob, John Gotti for example, I had mentioned I’d mentioned John Gotti John Gotti was one of the biggest mob bosses in the 20th century next to Al Capone as far as notoriety fame, etc. The most known face of the mob well John Gotti doesn’t know mafia history he doesn’t know what Charles Luckey who channel said to my olanski He knows how to make a buck on the street right now. He knows Cosa Nostra as we know it today. You know, we didn’t have history lessons. We won’t go Okay. Show up at the bargain Hunt and Fish Fish Club on Monday morning. We’re having a one-hour tutorial on the history of our origins. He didn’t know you, nobody told you these things. Tell you know, you know, I didn’t know these things, even when I was in jail. So you know, you know what, you know, around you, you hear old stories, you know, there’s like this Homeric, this Homeric epic, to the whole thing, where there’s this oral tales that you hear about, you know, so and so had a beef with so and so. And this is how it was straightened out. This is how it went. You know, that’s how mafia caselaw sort of comes about. So new sit-downs can be decided, based on the decisions of old sit-downs and stuff like that. So you know, sort of like the immediate past, but you don’t know the deep history. So that was something I found fascinating myself as I studied it.

 

Jason Dressel 56:55

Very cool. Well, congratulations. Really enjoyed the conversation. And we’ll look forward to seeing Volume Two when it comes out. Same here. Thank you, Jason, and appreciate you reading the book. And I’m so glad you enjoyed it. And I hope to come back for volume two. Sounds great. Thanks again. Cool. Thanks, buddy.

 

Jason Dressel 57:19

So there you go. wind him up and watch him go. Lou Ferrante. If you’re interested in learning more, go to Lewis ferrante.com. The link is in the show notes. Volume One of the Borgata trilogy. Rise of Empire is out now. Thanks to Luke Bryan Day, a fun conversation. Thanks for listening to the History Factory Podcast. I’m Jason Dressel.

 

 

 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai