How the US Government Quietly Worked with the Mob for Years

The speaker shares his experiences and insights about the influence of the Mafia in the government. He suggests that politicians and businessmen who used the Mafia often fared better than the Mafia itself. He also questions why these same politicians would then prosecute the Mafia, concluding that they did so because they could. The speaker also discusses the ethical implications of the government or a president turning to organized crime for their benefit.
During World War II, President Roosevelt sought help from the Mafia to protect American ports from Nazi sabotage, particularly in New York. Key figures like Meyer Lansky, an immigrant who was passionate about American history and had personal reasons to oppose the Nazis, played a significant role. The collaboration was not only about getting mob boss Lucky Luciano out of jail, but also about securing the largest port in the world, through which most military equipment, clothing, and food passed. Despite the success of this unusual alliance, the government denied its existence for 40 years, leading to frustration among those involved.
The text discusses how the government and mafia cooperated to prevent terrorism in New York, with the mafia helping to catch Nazis planning to blow up various facilities. It also touches on the mafia’s role in protecting neighborhoods and their involvement in solving civil rights workers’ disappearances. The text further explores the dynamics within the mafia, the Kennedys, and the government, highlighting the complexities of these relationships.
Joe Kennedy, father of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, had connections with mobsters and used their help for political gains, such as winning elections. However, Robert Kennedy was against these ties and often clashed with his father and brother over it. Despite the mob’s assistance, the Kennedys often betrayed them, leading to tension. The only president who didn’t betray the mob was Harry Truman, who was heavily supported by a mafia-controlled organization in Kansas City.
The text discusses the historical relationship between politics and the mob, highlighting instances where politicians may have benefited from mob influence. It mentions Joe Biden’s 1972 Senate campaign, where the Teamsters union allegedly helped him by preventing the distribution of newspapers carrying negative ads about him. The text also discusses how Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan reportedly gained union support through dealings with mob-connected figures. However, it emphasizes that these interactions were often mutual and not necessarily coercive, with politicians also seeking out mob support for votes and funding.
The text discusses Donald Trump’s interactions with the mob during his real estate development days in New York. It clarifies that while Trump had dealings with the mob due to their influence in the construction industry, he was not part of it. The text also explores the growth of the Mafia in America, attributing it to Prohibition and the public demand for liquor. It concludes by mentioning the mob’s involvement in clean casinos to attract high-profile individuals.
The text discusses the influence of the mob in American history, debunking myths about its power and wealth. It emphasizes that while the mob had significant influence, it did not control everything. The text also discusses the shift in influence from the mob to political donations, suggesting that today, power is gained more openly through financial contributions.
The author expresses concern about the government’s focus on money and power, and fears that foreign entities are funding U.S. universities to influence the next generation. He also mentions rumors about foreign exchange students being spies, and discusses the effectiveness of foreign propaganda. He hopes for more transparency and sanity in these matters.

She says to me, you’re from Cherry Hill, New Jersey, right? And I said, yeah. And she said, that’s Mafia, right? I wasn’t thrilled. And I said, well, yeah, there’s a lot of it. I mean, I wanted to be Mr. Young Washington. And she said, boy, the Mafia, you know, they run the country. And then just then Reagan walks out and I’m totally struck. I mean, he was much bigger than after she said the Mafia runs the country. I looked at her and I went, they do. The benefit of being the one who makes the laws is you get to beat up on the people who break them.

And one of the things that I concluded here is in the end, the politicians and the businessmen who used the Mafia actually did better most of the time than the Mafia. And so you say to yourself, well, why did the same presidents who used the Mafia turn around and prosecute them? And the answer is, because they could. I have to tell you this, Eric, you have corroborated my experience and everything that I’ve been told over the past 50 years by people, very prominent people in my former life about, you know, our relationship with, with the presidents and with government.

And I absolutely love the title of your book, what Wise Guys in the White House. I mean, it’s terrific and it says it all. You’ve corroborated everything that I’ve experienced and I’ve been told over the past several years about the influence that organized crime has had in government. Well, I think that as you know, in your line of work there’s so much mythology and a lot of. I started out with this. I was a young 22 year old white House aide working with Reagan. And my boss, it was the first time I walked, was walking with her and I was going to see the President close up.

And I’m a starstruck nobody, I’m a kid there. And she says to me, you’re from Cherry Hill, New Jersey, right? And I said, yeah. And she said, that’s Mafia, right? And I said, well, I wasn’t thrilled. And I said, well, yeah, there’s a lot of it. I mean, I wanted to be Mr. Young Washington. And she said, boy, the Mafia, you know, they run the country. And then just then Reagan walks out. And I’m totally struck. I mean, he was much bigger than I expected. He looked way younger than I expected. And his hair was not black.

It was sort of a brown color like JFK’s with a lot of gray in it. And I always thought he had this black hair. And she said, after she said, The Mafia runs the country. I looked at her and I went, they do. And the net net is I don’t believe the Mafia runs the country, but I do believe that there were times where there was extraordinary influen. And what I tried to do in the book is not get hysterical about it, but try to figure out what we know and what’s a lot of fun but may not be true.

Well, you know, I love what I’m going to read, the Kirkus review, at least a little part of it. I took a lot of notes on this because I have a lot of questions to ask you. But I love what Kirkus said about this. He said that sometimes the mob figures come off as more entertaining and better than the presidents do and the government people do. Well, I think a lot of what happens is the benefit of being the one who makes the laws is you get to beat up on the people who break them. And one of the things that I concluded here is in the end, the politicians and the businessmen who used the Mafia actually did better most of the time than the Mafia.

And so you say to yourself, well, why did the same presidents who used the Mafia turn around and prosecute them? The answer is because they could. And it’s better in the end if you have the choice between making the laws or breaking them, to make them. I mean, I use a quote from Lucky Luciano that he said, depressed in his exile in Italy, which was, boy, if I had my time to do it over again, you need a license to steal from the public. I would have gotten that license first. And a lot of what Meyer Lansky said in his private records is he was muscled out of the industry he created, not by mobsters, but by corporations and politicians who were able to raise money and kick money to each other and hire FBI agents as security.

And how much money could he raise in New York, Chicago, and how much money could you raise from an ipo? But in the end, you know, one of the things Sam Giancana said is, you know, they’re going to stab you in the back, and there’s not a lot we can do about it. Yeah. And let me ask you this, Eric. After all the research you’ve done on this, what do you think ethically, what do you think it’s about when the government or a president can turn to organized crime for something that would benefit the country or something that would benefit the people? I mean, do you think that’s ethically wrong, or do you think that, hey, whatever you have to do, because we know the CIA will work with just about anybody to accomplish their goals.

They don’t care who it is. I had a long conversation, a great conversation, with Mike Benz, who was very much into this and taught me a lot about what the CIA would do, more than I already knew. And what do you think the ethics of that are? Well, I live in a very hardball world. Not just that I’ve written about mobsters and spies, but how I made my living in the crisis management world. I see the underbelly of America, and so I don’t have prim and proper notions of how things need to get done. In fact, one of the reasons I got some of the fil that I used to write this book is after 9 11, the CIA was more willing to share things than they were before.

Because after 9 11, one of the things we were asking ourselves as a country is what are we willing to do to deal with these guys? How nice are we going to be? If we look at my chapter on World War II, which is a big one, we see what the world. What we were willing to do to deal with gangsters. And in a conversation I had with a CIA friend of mine who has since passed away, he used the mob to pay off someone overseas for reasons that are immaterial right now. And this mob guy took his money.

And I said, my God, these are tough guys. What did you do? And he said, eric, they are tough guys, but my guys won two world wars, print their own money, and have nuclear weapons. And so, you know, he played tough, too. And a lot of what was interesting to me is, my friends, I know something about having power, whether it’s on the streets or in the media. It’s all about who controls the narrative. And right now, the mainstream media is trying to control yours, whether you realize it or not. I’ve been using this platform called ground news, and it’s completely changed how I look at the news.

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You know, with everything that’s happening in our country right now, so much going on, you need to see the full picture, not just what they want you to see. So don’t wait on this. Take control of your information today. You want to be in the know the right way. Get to Ground News. It’s an offer that you shouldn’t refuse. Leading up to World War II, we think of FDR as this liberal president saving the world. And he was a liberal in many ways, but he was also a badass. He was not screwing around with the Nazis.

I mean, Roosevelt was almost killed by an anarchist bomb around the time of World War I. The Germans during World War I blew up a munition storage area right off coast of Manhattan that was felt as far away as Maryland and Pennsylvania. So by the time when the cruise ship Normandy, a few weeks after Pearl harbor blew up at Pier 88 in Manhattan, Roosevelt lost it. He didn’t want to find out for sure whether it was the Nazis or whether it wasn’t. He had been governor of New York. He knew who ran the ports. And the effort to get mob guys to cooperate was very interesting and not very straightforward.

I mean, for example, they initially, the Navy went down to the ports and looked for cooperation. But there was a problem. A lot of the guys who worked the ports, Irish and Italian, first of all, they weren’t the kind of guys who were excited to talk to somebody in a uniform. Second, Italian Americans had been declared enemy aliens by proclamation. How excited do you think Italian Americans working on the dock were to be declared enemy aliens and cooperate with the US Government? Furthermore, Meyer Lansky, who we’ll get to this was a guy who was an immigrant who had personally seen standing with his grandfather, a rabbi, drawn and quartered, I mean, ripped apart.

And he said to himself, with Nazis running around New York, which is hard to believe today, I’m not waiting the federal government to protect me. This is personal. I’m going to get these guys because they’re going to kill me. Second This, I don’t know whether you can see this. It doesn’t matter if you can see the details. This is Meyer Lansky’s certificate of naturalization. Interesting. And when the government tried to figure out how they were going to get the Mafia to cooperate, they looked into who they could go to. And a lot of the prosecutors in New York were Jewish.

And they said, you know, you’re having trouble with the Italians. But one way to get to Lucky Luciano, who was in prison doing 30 to 50, he was up on the Canadian border. You need to appeal to people who have a patriotic impulse. And they started looking into Meyer, and they found that he had attempted to enlist in the army, but was rejected because of his age. He was 40 in 1942. He was too short. He was 5 foot 4. But he also. Not only did he make the effort to become naturalized as an American, which Luciano didn’t.

Big mistake. But he personally hired tutors to teach him American history. And it was very important to him, not only to get the Nazi sympathizers, but second, to show that he was an American. And third, there were some selfish interests. He figured, if I can get Luciano’s cooperation, maybe we can get him out of jail and maybe the authorities will look the other way with some of the other stuff we have going on. So there were multiple, multiple interests. And there’s a lot of fantasy. On one hand, you have people who will tell you, oh, this whole Mob World War II thing was BS.

They didn’t do anything. That’s all history. That’s all mythology. Then you have the other people, like Albert Anastasia later said, Lucky Luciano stormed the shores of Sicily, and in the countryside, he waved the American flag. And no, that never happened either. What really did happen is much more basic. Help from the Mafia was sought in order to make the American ports safe from Nazi sabotage. To help the Nazis it to become inhospitable for Nazi sympathizers to work around New York. And a lot of what we try to do in war is, if I think you’re my enemy, I’m just going to try to make your life hard.

And they did a really good job of it. And after the security of the docs happened. And by the way, what does this have to do with Roosevelt? Who did he appoint to be in charge of the New York intelligence operations? His best friend, Vincent Astor. Where were the meetings held between the Navy and Meyer and mob guys at the Hotel Astor, who was Roosevelt’s top propaganda advisor? Walter Winchell, who most young people today don’t know who that is, but there’s nobody like Walter Winchell today. He was the reporter in the country. He was advising Roosevelt.

Guess who his next door neighbor was at the Majestic House Apartments in New York? Meyer Lansky. And he used to tip off Meyer to where the Nazi rallies were being held. And Meyer and Ben Siegel would send guys to kick the crap out of them. And one of my favorite stories that Meyer wrote about in his journal is Winchell gave him a bum steer. He didn’t do it on purpose. And he ran into Meyer in the lobby of the Majestic. And Meyer said, walter, you gave me a bad address this time. And Winchell was scared. You’re dealing with Meyer Lansky.

And what does Meyer say? He said, well, Winchell starts going, my God, Meyer, I’m so sorry. I thought the address was good. And Meyer says, calm down, Walter. We got him. And so here there’s this pipeline to the President of the United States, which is really unbelievable. I don’t think Roosevelt had any hesitation about doing this anymore. That when his son was asked later in life, did you ever get a sense from your father that he would have felt badly to use a super big weapon? I mean, they didn’t call it the atomic bomb yet. And James Roosevelt said he would not have hesitated to use anything he had.

And the phrase do what you got to do is what runs across this whole story. Right. And by the way, Italian. Oh, I’m sorry. Go ahead. No, no, I was telling you, just verify. I never knew the personal part of Meyer Lanci’s interest in, you know, protecting the docs like that. I was always told that it was an effort to get Luciano, you know, out of jail and that it would be reciprocated if he was to help with the docs. Well, I think. I think you said it in greater detail. Well, no, I think. I think that your assessment is correct.

It’s just that people love the idea. Oh, it was a scam to get Luciano out of jail. Well, it was, but it was also something else. It was an effort to. This is the biggest port in the world. All of our. Our military equipment went through and clothing and food went through the Port of New York. Most of it. Also, you have the self interest part that, look, these guys were gangsters. They hoped that the government would look the other way. And one of the things that was interesting as a creature of Washington is, to me, it wasn’t just the role of Luciano and Lansky.

And by the way, Luciano, his sentence was commuted, but he was deported. But if you look at the fate of the Navy man, his name was Hoffenden, who ran the program. It’s a classic Washington scam. Here you had this guy who used the Mafia to help guard New York and to help plan the invasion of Sicily, where Italian Americans played a huge role. I mean, the guys who did the intelligence work for the Sicilian invasion were guys named Marzullo, Alfieri, Corvo. And so the idea that Italian Americans were loyal to Mussolini, I mean, you might have had somebody, but by and large, overwhelmingly patriotic.

But what happened to Hoffenden? The only thing worse than failing at his mission is what happens if you succeed. If you succeed, you’re working with the Mafia, and people started going, hoffenden. Why, goodness gracious, I’ve never met him. Mafia. I’ve never heard such a thing. And it’s a perfect Washington story, because here he went on this mission and he was destroyed by it. Nobody wanted to ever hear from him. The government denied this happened for 40 years. And one of the reasons I was able to get a lot of information from members of Meyer’s family and his circle, including his business partner many years, who I’m sure you knew of, Jimmy Alo, Jimmy Blue Eyes, is.

Meyer wanted this story told because he felt what I do all this, and the government, I’m a gangster. In fact, the first time he was ever referred to as a gangster was in the Jewish press by a Jewish newspaper who were like, oh, well, these people who are beating up Nazis, they’re gangsters. So even Jewish people start disapproving of their gangsters because, well, that’s a little too violent for me. And you see this type of thing happening today with what’s going on on campuses. You have people openly threatening Jews, and you have Jewish Americans saying, what? We’re supposed to sit and do nothing? And other Jewish Americans saying, well, we don’t want to play rough, you know, Eric.

So the collaboration between the mob and the government at that time, you’d have to say, was successful. I mean, it was successful in Italy, and it was successful here in New York at the docks. I mean, we did what we were supposed to do. There was not a single other incident of terrorism in New York, even though the Normandy probably was not terrorism. And a lot of what you’re trying to do, I mean, you live in the world. There’s no perfect guarantees. But a lot of the reason. I mean, why does somebody want to work with someone like you in your prior life? Because they get a certain amount of, well, no One’s going to put their hands on me.

Why did the government go to the Mafia? Well, these guys are going to make it really hard for the Nazis in New York. And there were four Nazis who came ashore on Long island with plans to blow up munitions plants, chemical factories, stores, the docks, and they were caught. One of the guys turned himself into Hoover. But some of Lansky’s guys and Luciano’s guys in lower Manhattan and said to call the government and said there’s some German guys showing up at these hotels. Well, who controlled the unions? You know the answer to that. And some of these waiter, waiters and servers, you know, called it in.

Can we prove, you know, look, a lot, you had a lot of people taking credit. What did J. Edgar Hoover do? He said, we cracked the case and we single handedly. No, they walked into Hoover and turned themselves in. Meyer, what did he claim? His guys caught them in lower Manhattan? I think it’s a mixture. I think some of these guys got caught because they screwed up. Some of the guys walked in to Hoover’s office because, you know, it’s easy to be a tough guy from 3,000 miles away when you’re there to blow up docks and plants.

It’s a whole other hard thing. But mob guys made life hard for them. You know, Eric, I wonder if people in this country would really be that upset if they knew that the Mafia was helping. Because I can’t even begin to tell you how often people come to me, oh, we wish the mob was protecting our neighborhoods again. We wouldn’t have these MS.13 people around because we always kept our neighborhood safe. I hear it all the time about Vegas. Oh, when you guys ran Vegas, it was so much better than it is today. The corporate America has ruined Vegas and it’s different.

And I don’t know if people would have been that upset if they knew as long as it was benefiting the country, you know, but who knows? Well, no, you’re raising a really good question. Because I think that a lot of it wasn’t how the public would respond, it’s how a lot of the bureaucrats in Washington would respond. I mean, J. Edgar Hoover, he was all about getting credit. That’s what he was afraid of. And we’ll get to something close to the Colombos in a second. But I don’t think the public would have been that upset. But I think that the bureaucrats, the Navy, the State Department, the Defense Department.

What, the Mafia worked these guys over? No, we went in with our red blooded American troops and we saved the Day with strategy. It was a little dirtier than that. And similarly, and I don’t want to skip too far ahead, but in the case of after the Civil Rights act was passed in 1964, you know, a few weeks later, civil rights workers started going missing in 1964, 65, 66. And LBJ, he was on tape. And I quoted in the book, saying to Hoover, hey, do what you got to do. You know, how you screw with these communists, I don’t care what you have to do.

And Hoover wasn’t the kind of guy who cared about civil rights. But here he has the President of the United States, a personal friend also. I mean, Johnson’s dog, was he named J. Edgar? And Hoover. Hoover can’t sit there and say, we don’t have any assets in the kkk, so they sent one of your old family members, I assume you don’t mind me saying that, Greg Scarpa down and, you know, again, some mythology surrounding that. And I was able to get people in the federal government to say some of the stuff that you heard here is bs, but I like the way one of the guys worded it to me.

We have come to accept that some of these things with Scarpa actually happened. And Greg Scarpa, of course, went down to Mississippi and roughed up, to say the least. KKK guys and their sympathizers to give up some of the murderers of the civil rights workers. Well, listen, Greg told me that personally. I mean, he related, you know, I don’t know if he embellished it a little bit or not. I don’t think so. Because knowing Greg, you know, he was that type of guy for sure. So I knew that for a fact, you know, and I’ve, I’ve said that many times that Greg was instrumental in helping during that time.

So again, you probably got into it even in a little more detail than what I knew. Well, I did. And you know what’s all. What was interesting to me, I was actually thinking of you when I was writing the chapter, and I thought, how does a guy, you know, one of the things you always hear about mob guys is, oh, if they had chosen to go into the corporate world, they would have been just successful, by and large. I don’t think that’s true. I do think it’s true with you. I mean, not that you’re my best friend or anything.

I don’t look at a guy like Greg Scarpa and see him navigating in the political world and the corporate world. And to picture someone like you sitting down and talking to someone like him. I’ve never been able to quite put it together, because I just think there is either something genetically in you or something about your life experience that makes you different. And I’m not saying that Scarpa was a stupid guy, but, my God, the stuff this man was capable of was absolutely terrifying. And by the way, there’s no reason to believe that LBJ personally knew.

I think Hoover lied to him. I think that what he said was, we cracked the case. We sent our best forensics team down, and they looked at the way the soil was, and they figured this would be the soil where they could bury bodies. No, they didn’t. They sent Scarpa down. Exactly. No, I agree with that. I’m sure Hoover, you know, placed it a little bit differently to lbj. But I will say this. You know, in response to what you said, there were guys in that life that you just weren’t happy to be around. He wasn’t one of those guys that you wanted to go out to dinner with, you wanted to associate with.

As a matter of fact, Eric, when we heard that he was actually working as an informant for over 20 years, that’s what we found out afterwards. I personally was nervous because, you know, we were captains together. I sat with Greg many, many times. You talked about many things, and I was. I was personally worried. But, you know, he didn’t. He didn’t say anything ever to hurt me. But, yeah, he wasn’t a pleasant guy to be around. Even if you’re, you know, associated with him daily, you didn’t want to be around him. But, you know, there are some guys, you know, I could say this, that.

That would have been successful in another life if they were able to clean up their language and their diction a little bit. They were pretty intelligent, and they might have done well in the. In the corporate world. Well, one of the things that. That even though this doesn’t relate to the presidency so much, but one of the things that are the reasons why Meyer Lansky and Jimmy Aylo moved to Florida. Everybody said that it was to open up Florida and open up Cuba. And yes, that was true. But they couldn’t stand the likes of Dutch Schultz and Vito genovese.

They did notI’m not saying they were sweethearts, but if you talk to some of the people who were close to them at that time, they didn’t want to go around killing everybody. They wanted to make money. And here they’re dealing with people who, if you looked at them the wrong way, you end up dead. And that is not where they want to be. I mean, I looked sat among Meyer Lansky’s bookshelves, and if you see he hired tutors in economics. This was not a guy who was excited to do in his 40s, 50s, 80s, what he did in his 20s, basically because he had to.

But a lot of what was interesting to me in putting this book together is, is how brazen and unhesitant these political people were about knocking on the door of mob guys when they needed them. And at the same time, if things got too close, who I mean, Bobby Kennedy was, the Kennedy brothers and Joe Kennedy. The dynamics there were fascinating because I think people lumped the Kennedys together. They think they were all one unit. And you had these three very different personalities. I mean, Joe Kennedy, despite the legends that I debunk, which infuriates people about bootlegging, he was much more clever than that.

But there’s no question that Joe Kennedy dealt with mob guys in Nevada, with investments in racetracks, casinos, and he owned the merchandise Martin in Chicago. And he needed the help of mob guys. Those were his mob ties. Bobby was absolutely furious to find out that his father had tapped some of these guys to help with labor. They first went in the 1960 election. They first went to Jimmy Aylo. And Jimmy said words fresh off Cuba, word licking our wounds. Meyers is being operated on for heart disease. We don’t want to be around it. And so the whole idea that they were all in it together, it really wasn’t true.

Some of the guys were into it, some of them weren’t. And they ended up going to the guys, famously in Chicago. Bobby Kennedy lost it. And later, after the Kennedys were in office and they inherited the program to kill Castro, where they were actively raging to have Castro killed. Well, Bobby finds out that Johnny Roselli and Santo Trafficante had been recruited. He loses it, and there is this big fight with the CIA, who basically say to him, and I acknowledge I’m oversimplifying. So, Bobby, let me get this straight. You want this guy dead, but you only want us to use the nicest people to do it.

So, you know. Well, let me tell you what I heard, all I heard exactly, exactly what you were saying, that it was Joe Kennedy. Let’s, let’s go back to the election with Nixon. First it was Joe Kennedy that approached us guys at that time and said, listen, we need the state of Illinois. It’s a razor thin election at this point right in time. The votes are very close. And if you deliver to us we will back off you, basically. And Robert Kennedy was upset with that, didn’t want that to happen. John Kennedy was kind of, from what we heard, he was neutral.

He didn’t really care. Whatever his father said at that point, he was going to do. But it was really Robert Kennedy that said no way. He didn’t care what his father said, what his brother said. You know, he just hated anything you do. Goes back to days with Hoffa to do with the mob. And he was going to go after it. And that’s why people in our life were very upset, Very upset. And, you know, we get to the whole Kennedy assassination thing. Listen, you know, I wasn’t personally involved in that, obviously, but I can only tell you what I’ve heard consistently from everybody.

And, you know, Eric, people in that life, the substantial people in that life, don’t brag about things. Guys like my father and guys like, you know, Persico and guys, they didn’t brag about things. When they told me something and it involved somebody’s death or something like that, they were telling me, because they were telling me. Not that they were bragging about it, but I always heard that we were absolutely involved, you know, in the case. I know that that’s your. Yeah, it was all because they didn’t keep their end of the deal. Well, you know, I have a.

I have a different angle on it, and I promise I’m not going to. You know, my general ground rule when the Kennedy assassination comes up is it a fight never goes anywhere good. And so all I do in the book is I make it very clear that I. And I don’t believe there was mob involvement, but I understand why people do. I think that what I argue in the book is that Joe Kennedy did not tell Jack and Bobby. I mean, you have to remember, these are rich kids. Why is it great to be a rich kid? Because somebody else does the throat slitting.

These guys never had to. They never carried a wallet. And one time one of JFK’s aides said to him, if you had any idea what your father did for you and jfk, I want to hear about it. And so I don’t believe that. I think that the Kennedy brothers knew their father was doing something, but JFK was the kind of guy. I don’t want to hear about it. Bobby and his father had issues. There was a fight at Hyannis Port because what. I don’t think the words were ever said by Joe Kennedy. Hey, Sam Giancana, if you help us here, I’m going to get my guys to back off.

There are certain conversations that you don’t need to have. Just. I mean, there’s that famous scene in the Sopranos when Ralphie says he’s decided not to kill Jackie Jr. And Tony says, I back you up completely. I’m totally with you as long as whatever’s done happens in a timely way. And I think that what happened was Giancana said to himself, I’m having so much trouble with this guy, it’s worth a shot. And I think that he did help out. Do I believe the mob put Kennedy in office? No. But just like I said with the World War II story, I do believe they helped.

And a lot of what you’re looking at has help. And it wasn’t just in Illinois. It was in West Virginia. It was in New Jersey. It was in some of the Midwestern states. And the reason labor is so important is in politics, it’s hard to go door to door. But if you’ve got the Teamsters or one of the garment unions, you’ve got millions of people. And that’s why labor is so important. You get all with one fell swoop. So I can’t make the argument that the mob won the war. Didn’t won the war, the election, rather.

I’m sorry, but there’s no question help was sought. And, you know, Giancana was heavily wiretapped around that time, and he did say that, my God, these guys are going to stab you in the back. What I argue in the book is, while it was reasonable to think the mobile would do that, the wiretaps showed nothing. In fact, they showed a number of mob bosses terrified they were going to be blamed. And one of the things that, when I ever do interviews about this that mob aficionados don’t like, they don’t like it. Whenever anybody ever says that the mob is afraid of something or worried about something, when I’ve said that Tony Accardo said, do not hurt this reporter who’s bothering us.

People don’t like that. They want to hear that, that Accardo said, kill him. But right around, right before the Kennedy period, There were the McClellan hearings, which were kicked off because somebody threw acid in a labor reporter’s face. So I really am skeptical of mob involvement in that. And also, there’s the legend that Bobby Kennedy threw Carlos Marcelo out of the country. No, it was somebody else who did it. And Marcelo was interviewed and said, I can’t stand Bobby Kennedy. But that wasn’t him that did it. It was somebody who tried to impress Him. But look, the fact is the mob had reason to be pissed off.

They were tapped, they did help. And you had situations where the Kennedys stabbed them in the back. Nixon sought their help and then passed Rico Reagan. His career was boosted by Lou Wasserman who built MCA on the back of the muscle of the Chicago mob. And the one president who didn’t knife the mob in the back was the one who would not have been president, period, end of story. Without the mob. And that was Harry Truman. Because you can read great biographies of Harry Truman and there isn’t a word about the mafia. There’s just word about the Kansas City machine.

What people don’t understand, this was a Mafia controlled machine. The John Lazia family controlled the Pendergast machine. And when Lazia, the mob boss was killed, he was shot. And what he said is, please, please tell Jim Pendergrass or Tom Pendergrass I love him. And it was so corrupt that they helped pick Harry Truman because they couldn’t find anybody else to run for Senate, which ultimately led to his presidential career. And Truman openly wrote in his private records, I had to let gangsters steal. But look, I wanted to advance. I never took money from them, which I believe.

But he needed them to do his dirty work. How did he reward them? He rewarded them by firing the people who prosecuted Tom Pendergast and Kansas City mobsters. He rewarded them by getting. After the Chicago guys were put in prison over the shakedown, over Hollywood, Hollywood unions, they got Paul Rica and others moved to prisons closer to Chicago. I mean, you know the drill better than I do. They’re far away from home and they don’t want to pardon them. So they’re going to go, hey, can you just let us get a little closer? And then, hey, can you get us a little closer? Harry Truman did that.

There’s no reason to believe he took a bribe. But more than any other president, Harry Truman would not have been president without the backing of a Cosa Nostra controlled organization in Kansas City. Well, I got to tell I, I’ve never really talked about that. But I sat in the visiting room 11 Worth Penitentiary with a guy of real substance in my former life from Kansas City and he talked to me all about this. Me and my dad were with him for maybe two hours and it was eye opening. I never repeated it. But I’m glad that you said it because again you just verified everything that.

Excuse me, that I was told, you know, at that time. But it’s amazing, really. And you know, one thing I want to get to this I never knew was about Joe Biden and Frank Shearhan. I never knew there was any kind of relationship there whatsoever. I thought Joe Biden would have been the last guy that I would have thought had any kind of relationship with my former associate. Well, you know, growing up in Southern New Jersey, I mean, I could see the Philadelphia skyline from my house. People think New Jersey is New York, but, but Philly and South Jersey, I mean, few miles away.

And so Joe Biden was a local figure throughout much of my childhood. I mean, he was elected, sent to the Senate in 72. And one of the beauties of, of getting into this book is it’s a nonpartisan book. I mean, most people, people will try to, you know, Democrats don’t like that I said something bad about a Democrat. A Republican gets mad that I talk about Trump and mob ties, but it’s really nonpartisan. And the story that I love about Frank Sheeran is Joe Biden was running for Senate in 1972. He wasn’t doing well. He was running against an incumbent, and the incumbent wanted to finish him off with political ads in Wilmington newspapers.

I mean, back then it was mostly newspaper ads, not the TV ads that were we see today. And even though there’s no evidence that Joe Biden gave the order or knew, the Teamsters, of course, were backing the Democrat who was running for Senate and they wanted him to get in and they wanted to knock off the Republican guy named Boggs who had been there forever. And so they came up with this scheme, which is brilliant in its simplicity. And Frank Sheeran, he was a Delaware based guy, even though he was national in some ways and he was very close to my hometown family, the Bruno family.

And Frank Sheeran arranged for the Teamsters to not pick up and distribute the newspapers that would have attacked Biden on the eve of the election. And he won. Now, can we say this was the factor? I don’t know, but can we say it helped? Sure. And that’s the point. Like with everything else I’ve said, it helped. And I just think it’s a hilarious story that kind of a guy like Joe Biden, who was not associated with the mob in any big way, he had serious help with that one simple little scheme. Yeah, you know, you know, Eric, to what you’re, to further what you were saying, I don’t think we have to go the distance and say the mob absolutely put this guy in office and the mob helped us win World War II and all that.

I think it’s enough just to Say, hey, we played a role in that. We were helpful. The government did come to us, and we did do our part. I think that’s enough. And I think that’s how you. You’re putting it. It’s not. Doesn’t have to be said to the extreme. And I know guys on the street, if it wasn’t for us, Kennedy would never have been in office. I’ve heard that a million times. But I think it’s enough to say, hey, we did play a part in that. Oh, look, I. That’s where I net out. Because one of the challenges in writing a book like this is there’s the conclusion you reach and there’s the conclusion people want you to reach.

Yeah, my boss was being hyperbolic when she said, oh, the mob runs the country. The mob doesn’t run the country. But a lot of the point in the book is the sheer volume of interactions between presidential level politicians and the mob is astonishing. And do I take it so far to say is that mobsters are sneaking into the Oval Office at midnight? No, I don’t believe that. But. But a lot of what happened is, whereas the mob and the drug cartels were super powerful in Italy and Colombia and Mexico in terms of controlling the federal government, where the mob had the power was locally.

And the effort to seek national power by getting help locally was really where they had their influence. And I think with. With what was so interesting about Nixon is he was able to flip like Reagan did later, the unions from the Democrats to the Republicans. Well, how did he do this? Well, he made the deal with getting Jimmy Hoffa’s prison sentence commuted. This accomplished two things. One is it said to Teamsters, hey, Nixon’s our kind of guy. He’s getting Jimmy out. The second thing it did is the mob guys, as we famously actually know, were sick of Jimmy Hoffa because he was making a lot of noise.

They were very happy to have his successor, Frank Fitzsimmons, in office because that gave them access to the pensions. And so the mob got a lot out of the deal, and Nixon got the backing, took the Teamsters from the Democrats and embraced them to the Republicans. And Reagan did the same thing. I mean, even though I wasn’t involved with it, my old bosses, people who I talked to told me that one of the things that Reagan realized is, you know, these Teamsters guys don’t like Jimmy Carter. They just don’t like him. And they may not think Reagan’s policies are best, but all of a sudden they started noticing guys with western boots and carrying sidearms were going to Reagan rallies and going, you know, they like our guy.

And so through Jackie Presser and the Teamsters in Ohio, they brought them over. Now, I think some of them later regretted it, but the labor unions have been furious at the betrayal by Republicans for why did we back these guys? And I understand their position, but it was very, very clever politics, and it involved the mob. Yeah. You know, and I, I have to say this, too. You know, a lot of people think that we had to put the arm on politicians, like, we had to go after them. I can tell you this. We had so many politicians that were attracted to us because I always said this.

Politicians want two things. They want money and they want votes. And when we control the unions, we can give them money and votes. And listen, I, I, There was a very powerful Democratic leader in, in New York that we were very close to. Helped me get my licenses when I was in the gasoline business. He is, you know, he was very helpful in that regard. We donated money to his campaign. We participated in a lot of his fundraisers, and he wanted to be around us. We didn’t have to chase him, but neither did we put the arm on him, you know, And a lot of times, it was a different level of people in that life, Eric.

Exactly right. You know, the smarter guys would say, listen, you know, we’re helping you. If we need help at some point in time, hopefully you’ll help us. It’s not that they were putting, we were putting the arm on them to do anything dramatic or drastic that might put them in trouble. We didn’t do that. But the relationships were absolutely there. Well, I think that, you know, you hit something. A friend of mine, who was much higher up than I was, who played a role in getting the Teamsters to support Reagan, said to me, you know, there was never a, a crossword or a tough guy conversation.

Presser was happy to help. We figured, geez, if he’s happy to help, we’re happy to take it. Maybe we’ll do something for them on the flip side. And there were, there was legislation passed that Reagan did some compromising he didn’t want to do. There was never a backroom deal where, if you do this, I’ll do that. And similarly, when the Navy approached Meyer Lansky with, by the way, the New York District Attorney, nobody ever said, hey, you help us out or there’s going to be trouble. It was a very warm conversation with Meyer appealing to him as an American.

And he stood up after the meeting and he said, this this is patriotism. I’ll do it. There was no tough guy talk. And I just think that I remember when the whole Trump Russia collusion. And I’m going to make an analytical point, not a political bias point. A lot of my more liberal friends in the writing world said he’s got some deal with Putin. Putin gave him this, and they returned. Got that. And I said, guys, I’m not defending Trump or trying to get you to like him, but I think you think the world works in a different way.

Did it ever occur to you that Putin said to himself, hey, I’m going to release some of these emails I have of Hillary Trump, it might be something he likes and maybe he’ll be nice to us if he gets elected. And you might think that that’s corrupt, but this is not the same thing as a deal in an alley. And where the media went wrong with that story is they were looking for a briefcase being passed with cash. That never happened, as opposed to an intuitive notion that, hey, I’ll help this guy and see what I get back.

You don’t have to like it, but it’s not the same thing as bribery. Exactly. No, you said it just so right. You know, and getting to Trump also, you know, I’ve many, many times. Oh, come on. Trump was involved with the mob. He was in New York. He was in construction. Roy Cohen was his attorney. And I’ve said this many times, look, Donald Trump and his organization, like Helmsley or Gutterman or any of the big developers, they had to deal with us. They had to. It doesn’t mean that he was part of our life or that we controlled him or that he was paying us off, you know, and people don’t get that.

You know, they don’t get that. No. So we had a big influence in that industry in New York. So you had to deal with us if you wanted to get your development projects done without any headaches. You know, I met Donald Trump once. He probably wouldn’t even remember that I had to go see Roy Cohen, who was going to represent me on a case. And I went to a private club in Manhattan and Donald was there. And for two minutes I said hello to him and then walked away with Roy. But he wasn’t involved with the mob.

And I keep telling people that, you know, did it. Did his organization deal with us? Yeah, like everybody else, but there was no involvement there. So you can’t say he was, you know, a member of the mob in some way. Well, I get to this in, in great detail in the book. And I went into it not knowing what I would find. And what’s interesting is in my world of writer friends who, who, who hate Trump, they love the Trump mobbed up. And a lot of what I talk about is, number one, Trump has been on national television saying he dealt with the mob for years.

And so from a damage control perspective, where do you go when someone is on television saying, I dealt with them. Did you deal with them? I just said I did. But of course, only as Donald Trump can do. Sometimes he’s asked if you dealt with them. He goes, no, but that’s Donald Trump. But how he dealt with them is interesting. What he did was very simple with Trump Tower. If you picture most buildings being built, you picture steel girders going up. He built Trump Tower out of concrete. Steel is an international industry. Nobody controls it. Who controls.

Controlled the concrete industry industry and two companies in New York, Trump simply paid them well. There is no law that says you can’t pay them well. Well, a prosecutor friend said, me, yes, but if he got something in return, that’s racketeering. And I said, it’s been 45 years. No one’s proven it. And so here what Trump did, some of the people, the mob guys who worked on the construction with Trump went to prison. Trump has never been charged. And one of my uncles, a colorful guy in the Atlantic City, told me, I asked many years ago, before I even knew I was going to do this book, I said, what’s the deal with Trump and the mob in Atlantic City? And he said, it’s very, very simple.

If he needs help with something, he pays well for a piece of property. An uncle of mine who was involved with that world was telling me that Salvi Testa, who was the son of Phil the Chicken Man Testa, owned a piece of property worth $195,000. Trump paid 1.1 million and used it to build a casino parking lot. Well, you might say, aha. Well, no one has shown that there is a law against paying somebody well. And when Donald Trump, who nobody has ever accused me of being, being a fan of, says the way I did things just makes me smart.

He may actually be right. And I’m not asking for people to applaud it, but you have to make the clinical point that there’s a difference between something you don’t like and something being boorish and something being a crime, well, I think you explained that extremely well. And, you know, look, Donald Trump is not the type of guy that’s going to be controlled by Anybody, it’s his. You can see that he’ll work with somebody. He might try to get something done, you know, in the way that you describe. But he’s not going to be controlled by anybody.

And I’ve told people that, and I think his personality says it all. You could see that. You know, I have to ask you something, because I think you go into this in the book. What I have said consistently is that, you know, it was the United States government that made the Mafia, Cosa Nostra, my former organization, strong in America. And that was through Prohibition. Before that, we were just a number of gangsters running around trying to, you know, shake down people in our own neighborhoods and do things like that. When Prohibition came in, we knew how to take advantage of it.

That’s when the big money flowed, and that’s when we started to become organized. You agree with that? I violently agree with it. Because so much of the ability to grow something has to do with whether or not but it is sanctioned. I mean, one of the things that Meyer Lansky wrote in his private records and in private letters was the casino gambling industry will be the fastest growing business in America once they throw out the Italians and Jews. And that is exactly what happened. And what he talked about was, whenever there is the whiff of legitimacy or public demand, that is what grows a business.

And the thing about pro business Prohibition is you had these elite high society people and feminists, by the way, it was a very big feminist issue who didn’t like the idea of Irish, Jewish, Italian immigrants coming in and getting drunk and dirtying up the country. And this was a way at them. And so here you had something that the public was demanding. The public wasn’t demanding extortion or arson. They were demanding liquor. And I saw this with old timers in my own background. They’re going, well, let’s make something that people want. And the authorities are really not that interested in arresting us.

I mean, I grew up near the Pine Barrens. That’s where a lot of the stills were. And I had people in my background who were in the pharmaceutical drugstore where it was legal to buy alcohol for medicinal purposes and have it. That’s a lot of what Joe Kennedy did that people want to turn into bootlegging. And there wasn’t an appetite for law enforcement to get it. And furthermore, by the time Roosevelt got in office, he really didn’t like Prohibition. And in fact, one of the things that Joe Kennedy, he did that was so brilliant was he, during Prohibition, bought foreign liquor companies and kept it held them until Prohibition was lifted and then flooded the US Market.

One of his partners was none other than Jimmy Roosevelt, the President’s son, who provided insurance. And a lot of what did he get in return? Kennedy was all about being seen as classy, not as an Irish liquor man. The President’s son is one of his other partners, guy named Winston Churchill. And so anything that has the sanction of the classy people. And Capone talked about this as hospitality. When I do it, it’s bootlegging. That’s what gave the mob their start. And the next thing, of course, was gambling, because that was not viewed as dirty. In fact, a lot of people don’t realize that the reason that the mob got involved with Cuba was not that they went down and took over Cuba.

Meyer Lansky was brought in to clean up corrupt casinos because he knew that dirty casinos are not going to attract the best people, because the best people, A, don’t want to be scammed, and B, are going to alert the authorities. And so by making the casinos clean, Batista in Cuba said, I like this guy. I want more of this. And then the mob came in to run what were, by most accounts, I can’t account for every single casino, very clean casinos. Because how else are you going to get Richard Nixon and Rockefellers and Kennedys to come to the casinos? Absolutely.

No, you said it right. I want to ask you this, Eric, because, you know, over the years since I’ve been on social media, you know, and I talk a lot about. I mean, I built the channel initially talking about, you know, my former life and my experiences, and people have come out and said, oh, come on, Michael. You’re glorifying the life and you’re talking a lot about it. And I say, no, you need to understand something. You know, we were part of the. In the last hundred years especially, we were part of the history of this country, and we had an influence.

I’m not saying we control the country. I’m not saying not. I’m not saying any of that. But we did have an influence, you know, high up in political offices. And I think you’ve just corroborated all of that by this book and what you’ve said here. We didn’t control it. We’re not saying that. But we absolutely played a part in certain things that happened of significance in this country. Well, that’s my argument, because it’s funny, the angriest anybody has ever gotten with me for something I’ve said is there’s two things that I’ve said That drive people nuts? Well, three, but I won’t get into them.

One was, I did an interview once, and somebody said. Called in and said Tony Accardo was more powerful than the President of the United States. And I said, no, he wasn’t. He was very powerful. And it was like I came out and endorsed child abuse. They needed to believe that Tony Accardo was more powerful than the president. And I don’t believe that. I believe the mob had a lot of influence. And the second thing that drives people nuts is when I debunked the idea that Meyer died with. Meyer Lansky died with what was then a $300 million fortune.

No, he didn’t. The reality is he was massively wealthy in the 1950s, but he lost his money, a vast majority of it in Havana, because that’s where he wanted to go straight. He failed because Havana fell. Guys like Mo Dalitz who put their names on their certificates ended up being legitimately rich. But this need to believe in that the Mafia is controlling everything is the part that glamorizes it. And I think a lot of what I’m doing is debunking the fact that it’s glamorizing it. I’m not saying that these guys were criminals, weren’t criminals. I am saying that.

That they played a big role in the history of this country. But stop making them out to be magicians for a long time. One of the things that drives me absolutely nuts is whenever somebody, a reporter, doesn’t want to do their homework, they call it a Lansky operation. He was a big guy in his time. He wasn’t running everything. And if you think for a minute that the Italians. There was a headline in this book called Lansky, and the subhead was, the Mob runs America and Lansky runs the Mob. Come on. This little Jewish guy is running America.

No, he’s not. And I think it’s upsetting to people because a lot of the mob aficionados, they go too far. The mob would never touch drugs. They were against that. Well, you know, and I know there were some guys who were, and there were some guys who weren’t. I mean, the Cherry Hill Gambinos, I mean, these were neighbors. They were in the heroin business. Carlo Gambino was well aware of it. I also think that there were people like Chin Gigante who were in it in the late 50s and then were burned and legitimately said, no, no more.

I tend to believe it. You would know better than I would. But I took it as face values. I just don’t think these guys are gods, that’s all. No, you’re right. Well, as far as the Cherry Hill Gambinos, I did two years time. He was my cellmate with Rosario Gambino. Oh, Sal. Yeah, they were definitely, definitely. Yeah, they were definitely into drugs, you know, and you said it just right. There were some guys that were doing it and some guys that didn’t want to do it. And during my era, I’ve said this so many times that I get so much pushback from it.

During my era, we were told straight out, you deal with drugs, you die. You weren’t allowed to deal with drugs. Now with some guys doing it, you know, on the side, yeah, they were doing it, but not to any degree like the cartels in Mexico or the heroin dealers that we have in Italy that were pushing that stuff, you know, big time. We weren’t doing that here. During my time, Genovese was a guy that was dealing with drugs, guys like that. But we weren’t allowed to do it because we knew it wasn’t. It wasn’t something smart for us.

But you know what, Eric, I got to say this. You have. You are so credible to me. Everything that you’ve said just. You’ve nailed everything. Just. Just the way it is, the way it was, I would say, and I really mean that. Well, I’m grateful for your time. I’ve read all your books and I watch as many of the podcasts as I can when I’m on the treadmill. I don’t think I’ve missed many. And I think that it’s important to bring some sobriety to this. Because, look, I grew up believing the myths because I wanted to believe them.

I believed in Camelot too, that if Kennedy had lived, we would not have gone to Vietnam. That I wanted to believe. When the Godfather came out and Al Martino lived a few doors down, oh, well, this means I’m involved. This is part of my world. I was deluded. I was a kid who wanted to think that this all was cool. And I found out that I was really wrong about a lot. And a lot of what I tried to do with this book was re examine what I thought was true and what wasn’t. My grandfather was in legitimate business with a man who, in the book, I call him Uncle Vince because I didn’t want to use his real name.

He was one of the Philly bosses, and he was in the car with Vito Genovese at Appalachian when they were taken in. And the story, one of the stories that really stuck with me is I finally had the nerve to ask my father, what did you hear? And the legends, of course, which, you know, or that these guys came walking out of the house and saying, hey, you know, you can’t touch me. The truth is, apparently Genovese and Uncle Vince, we’ll call him, were absolutely mortified. They. They thought, shit, this is the beginning of the end.

We look like jackasses. And I think it’s really to understand that these guys are human beings. Not because I want people to think that they’re great guys, but when you turn them into these Greek gods or Italian gods, you lose sight of the fact that a lot of what brought these guys down was stupid decisions, like holding the meeting at Apalachin. And Genovese knew he was going to be disrespected because of it, and it was the beginning of the end for him. And I just thought it was interesting that as much as I was so far removed from it, just to hear that these guys were, oh, my God, this is going to look terrible.

We’re known in our communities as businessmen that are a little mysterious, but now people are going to think we’re terrible. And it’s important to know that there’s a humanity there. And a lot of that’s what interested me. And that’s what interested me about how the government recruited Meyer Lansky because he wanted to be an American. And that was the hook. Well, you know, very, very interesting. And I always said this, you know, the golden age of Cosa Nostra in this country was really from the time Luciano formed the Commission, I would say around the 40s, right through the mid-80s when the RICO act came in and started just to devastate everybody.

You know, we were our own worst enemies at that point. We just didn’t keep up with what the government was doing, you know, and they were really, really out to get us during that time. A lot of people like to say it was John Gotti that destroyed the mob, and he was so out there. Well, there were a lot of guys that were out there. You know, Joe Colombo was out there. I mean, he had a big presence. There were a lot of guys. John didn’t help things. You know, he did bring some heat. But it was really the RICO act that destroyed that life as we know it.

And I don’t think it’ll ever come back to where it was, and I don’t think it’ ever have the prominence that we once had in this country. Well, Mike, you know, it’s funny. The big question I Get when I do a book talk is what has replaced the mob in terms of influencing the presidency. And the answer is very simple. You write a check. This is true with both parties. If you want to influence, you openly write a big check, whether it’s hiring somebody’s son, investing in somebody’s relatives, hedge fund. You sit in front of the camera and you write the check.

And that’s how you get influence. It’s all happening, Democrat and Republican, right before our very eyes. And that is what’s replaced the mob. There’s no tiptoeing around back alleys. I don’t want to say there’s none. But this is what you deal with in Mafia democracy. And the things that we have to watch are the things that. Hello. Happening right here. No, there’s no question. That’s why, you know, the funny thing I wrote that, I started to write that book, like, seven years ago. I. I owed my publisher another book, and then I stopped writing it because I said, you know what? I’m gonna.

People are gonna get mad at me over this, and I don’t have any trouble now, and I don’t need the heat. But then, you know, three years ago, I said, I have a responsibility to write this book because the government is acting exactly like the mob. I mean, this is what they’re doing. It’s all about money and staying in power and control, controlling people. And I’m seeing it. And, you know, I just hope that, you know, maybe with this new administration, I don’t know if things are going to change. I don’t know, because I think the, you know, without getting too political, the four years we had prior to this was just disastrous, in my opinion.

And, Eric, look, you know, it’s not about me being a Republican or a Democrat or anything else. I try to look at what I think is best for the country, and I try to make an assessment as far as that’s concerned. And I just think the four years prior were just terrible. And I hope Trump does the right thing and continues. I think that there is an examination of all of this stuff, and one of the things that I watch very closely, that I don’t think the public has really caught on to is the fact that a lot of this stuff you’re seeing on college campuses is being quietly funded by Iran, Islamists, Qatar, and these tents that are popping up in these protests, these are financed.

And to me, what is interesting is following the money and seeing what is being funded, whether it’s going to a Democrat or a Republican. But I Think that the real scary thing is the billions and billions that are going into US universities in order to breed a generation of people, people who have absolutely no idea what they’re supporting. And so I think that to the extent there’s still secrecy going on, I think people would be stunned to find out what foreign governments are funding that are polluting the minds, not so much on the political level, but on the education level.

And it would be good to see sunlight thrown on that. No, I agree. I heard something today. I don’t know how true it is, but I heard that 1 out of every 10 Chinese foreign exchange students was born and bred to be a spy. One out of every 10 that are going into our, our universities. I don’t know how true it is, but that’s what came out just today. Well, I, I don’t know either. What I do know, having written about the spy world, you know, with a co author, is the foreign governments are Russians and Chinese and the Islamists are way better at propaganda than we are and they spend.

I talked to a former KGB agent who said to me, eric, you know the theory that CIA killed President in Kennedy? And I said, sure, I know the theory. He says, you know where this come from? And I said, no. And he said, he boped me on the head and he said, what do you think I do? 60s, 70s, we pay left wing professors to say this. And I said, well, who do you think did it? And he goes, we knew right away. Effing idiot Oswald, but no money in this. The point he was making is they spent a fortune on propaganda and subversion, but it didn’t pay off for a long, long time.

Just like it didn’t pay off with the Islamic fundamentalists. What did the Americans do? The Americans hire a PR firm in the first Gulf War for $400,000, nickels and dimes, and it’s all the New York Times can talk about. There’s no way we can do what the Russians can do, what the Soviets did, what the Chinese do, what Qatar and Iran do, because they’re closed systems. And I think that that’s where a lot of the disinformation is coming from, because nobody’s watching. Yeah, well, I think you nailed it, Eric. I got to tell you, this was a fascinating conversation.

Well, thanks for doing it. No, I really enjoyed it and I hope to have you on again. There’s some other things I want to get into. Always happy to do it and I’m a big fan. I’ve been following you for a long, long time. I’m glad you’re bringing, bringing some maturity and, and, and, and, and wisdom to this area, because there needs to be some sanity to it. And I’m grateful for your time. And if you need anything else, I’m not hard to find. I hope to sit down. I appreciate it. And, you know, Will, I know you probably don’t need any help with the book, but we’ll be plugging it because I totally believe in it.

Extremely credible. And you’ve. You’ve just corroborated so many things that I’ve said and even in greater detail, and I really appreciate that. I appreciate you having it. I know people won’t agree with everything, but I did my best based on what I really knew. You did a great job, Saint.
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