Elie Honig:

Before we start, just a heads up. As you might expect there some violence and adult language in here, so if you’ve got kids around, you may want to throw on some headphones first. Thanks. From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, I’m Elie Honig, and this is Up Against the Mob. It was about nine o’clock AM, and already the cooperating witnesses mother in law was in the kitchen frying up the eggplant. It was a Saturday morning and I had driven out to a safe house to spend the day along with an FBI special agent meeting with one of our key cooperating witnesses prepping him for a trial that started the next week. I won’t say the cooperators name here or his family members names or the location of the safe house. I’ll just say that it was in one of New York City’s outer boroughs. Anyway, back to the eggplant. I don’t remember what happened first, if I smelled it first, or heard it sizzling, but immediately when the cooperator greeted us at the front door and let us in, I knew it was going to be good.

Elie Honig:

“She was excited to have company,” he said nodding towards his mother in law. She looked out from her work at the stove and announced to us with a broad smile, “I’m making you a special lunch.” Fine with me. The cooperator the FBI agent and I then went down to the basement of the safe house. It looked and felt like pretty much any suburban basement, sparse furnishings just the couch, a few chairs, a low coffee table. There was a bar not stocked with anything at the time. And there was a TV mounted on the wall, nothing fancy. We spent the next three or so hours doing standard trial prep, running through the cooperators direct exam contemplating what questions he’d be asked on cross. And finally, right around noon, we got the call. Lunch was ready. In an odd way it made me feel like a kid again getting called up from the basement for lunch.

Elie Honig:

We walked upstairs and into a small feast, bread, salads and peppers, Italian meats, and the star of the show the much anticipated eggplant parm, and believe me when I tell you that eggplant parm lived up to the hype and the expectation, and then some, best I ever had. And I make it pretty well myself. The lunch went on, got to be one o’clock, 1:30, a little wine might have even come out at a certain point, it would have been rude not to have just one small glass. And before we knew it, it was the middle of the afternoon and we were all stuffed and a little tired, let’s say. We went back down the basement and tried to continue with our prep. I remember we decided to turn on the TV and put a college football game on. In a token nod to our trying to do some work, we agreed to keep the game on mute. But it was basically over by that point.

Elie Honig:

We’d had a productive enough morning, but the afternoon was less productive. Here’s the point. The relationship between law enforcement, FBI agents and prosecutors and cooperating witnesses is supposed to be dry, robotic, mechanical, and often it is. You usually meet in a conference room in an office building. There’s a lot of straightforward question and answer going over documents, maybe listening to tapes. It’s a professional relationship first and foremost. But over time, especially as I deal with mob cooperators, guys who testified for me many times over the years, a personal element emerge too. How could it not? You spend hours together. Days. Yes, business comes first. But inevitably, you’re going to chat as people do. How’s the family? How’s your son doing in high school? Did you see the game last night? Can you believe the Yankees blew it? And importantly, what are we eating?

Elie Honig:

But there’s a real dissonance to it sometimes. I just be casually chatting with this guy like he’s any ordinary person, but then I remember he was a made guy once, a real world gangster he did really bad things. In some instances, killed people. But we’re all human. Maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome or some strange variant. But inevitably there’s a human connection to be made. Perhaps no cooperator made as big an impact on mafia history as Sammy the Bull Gravano. When he flipped back in 1991, it hit the mafia like a bomb. Nobody seemed less likely to flip than Sammy the Bull. The born and bred gangster, the remorseless killer, the underboss to the legendary boss, John Gotti. Sammy posed a major threat to Gotti he and two other mafia powerhouses. He was positioned to send a lot of powerful people to prison for a long time. And if anyone in the mob had a shot at Sammy, they’d have killed him in two seconds flat and been a hero for it. So the FBI knew they had to protect Sammy at all costs.

Elie Honig:

He was the highest value most endangered cooperator in many years and maybe ever. Sammy held the keys to the palace, the keys to bringing down John Gotti finally, and they could not let anything go wrong. And that’s when James Gagliano got the call. Not a call so much as a tap on the shoulder. Jimmy G, as he’s known was a rookie FBI agent in 1991, just months out of the academy in Quantico, Virginia. He’d go on to have a legendary FBI career, including some remarkable work as an undercover agent. Jimmy G was and still is a big guy, tough, smart, no BS, but he was also raw back then as a rookie in 1991. So like every FBI agent, every fed, he was stunned to learn that Sammy the Bull had flipped, and he was even more shocked to learn that he had drawn the assignment. Jimmy G had to protect Sammy the Bull at all costs to make sure he stayed alive and stayed safe and stayed sane. And in the process as you’ll see, Jimmy developed a human relationship and had some surreal moments with a one time mob killer turned cooperating witness.

Elie Honig:

This is the story of how James Gagliano got the call to protect the most valuable asset the FBI had ever gained against the mafia. This is the story of babysitting Sammy the Bull. So just give us a sense stepping back for a minute, how big was this case against John Gotti, Sammy Gravano and Frank Locascio, and tell us sort of who were these guys within the Gambino family?

James Gagliano:

It’s impossible to understate the larger than life figures these folks were. Look, since then, we’ve had shows from the 1990s like the Sopranos with Tony Soprano, and people have kind of gotten a perspective of what a character John Gotti was.

Speaker 3:

Did you ever meet John Gotti?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, I know John.

James Gagliano:

Not only that, not only was he a flamboyant, kind of cut against the grain for a mafia boss because most of them were small, stooped over old men that wear cardigan sweaters and Fedora hats and didn’t want to be noticed. John Gotti was a new era of gangster, he flouted it, he literally loved to go out in his $2,000 suits and his expensive alligator skin loafers and his perfectly quaffed hair and his straight blade razor shave every single day. He wanted to look the part, not only that he had an almost bulletproof aura about him. And I don’t mean bulletproof in the sense that he couldn’t be killed, I mean bulletproof in the sense that he couldn’t seem to be convicted. There were several federal and state cases that looked like they were open and shut cases that we came to learn later on because John Gotti’s folks got to a juror where John Gotti’s, his just larger than life persona made him a sympathetic figure to juries, we had not been able to convict him on a number of startling crimes.

Elie Honig:

And just so we’re clear here, this is John Gotti the father. Later on, there’s John Gotti, the son, who I ended up prosecuting, not ultimately successfully, but just so we have the correct perspective here. And they’re very different people as we can talk about. So, take us to that day when you’re in your office and you get this bombshell news about a major, major development on the case of United States versus John Gotti and Sammy Gravano at all.

James Gagliano:

You mean November of 1991, where it started out as a normal day would for me. I lived upstate New York at the time, and I would take planes, trains and automobiles to get to the office because we didn’t have the resources to assign every agent, especially a rookie, a bureau car an FBI take home car. So I got into the office early that morning after about a two and a half hour, almost three hour commute. And our boss at the time who’s a legendary FBI supervisory special agent by the name of J. Bruce Mouw and you say Jay, well, it’s J. because back in those days, he came on in the late 60s, everyone wanted to mirror what J. Edgar Hoover did. So you took your first name and made it an initial and used your middle name.

James Gagliano:

So, J. Bruce Mouw who literally was the man behind the successful prosecution of John Gotti from the FBI side, along with Special Agent George Gabriel, who was the case agent, called the entire squad into his office that morning and revealed the news that Salvatore Sammy the Bull Gravano, who was again incarcerated, housed at the Metropolitan Correctional Center down in lower Manhattan, had elected to turn state’s evidence and was joining as we say in the business Elie, you’ll be familiar with this. He was joining team America.

Elie Honig:

Team USA.

James Gagliano:

Yeah.

Elie Honig:

Always want to be on that team. So, tell us what does that mean sort of generally, when someone turn state’s evidence, flips, cooperates, and how big was it that Sammy Gravano was now coming on board?

James Gagliano:

So you’ve worked with a few cooperators in your day, just a couple.

Elie Honig:

A couple.

James Gagliano:

Right?

Elie Honig:

Yeah.

James Gagliano:

So we’re familiar with the motivations and motivations vary. Some people do it, some people provide information to the government. We can’t make cases without people on the street are people that are connected to some of these illegal enterprises or bad people without people giving us information. Some of those are just John Q Public. They’re just John Q citizen people that want to do the right things. Others are motivated by financial considerations. They get paid for information. And others are trying to work a sentence off, meaning they did something wrong, they got indicted, they got prosecuted, they got convicted, and now they’re trying to work off some sentencing. And others do it for revenge and retaliation. I think in Sammy’s case, our understanding the case was that he had gotten some discovery. And for the listener discovery is things that government is required to turn over related to a case to the defense so that they can properly prepare for their defense of what the allegations are.

James Gagliano:

So, there had been some tapes that the government, some wiretapping the government had done and some of the transcripts made their way to Sammy’s lawyer at the time, who was Gerald Shargel, John Gotti was represented the time by Bruce Cutler, a famous mob attorney. And Sammy had gotten wind that on one of the tapes, John Gotti basically expressed his dissatisfaction with Sammy and was probably considering taking away his businesses, removing him from his exalted position of underboss and possibly even killed. And Sammy said, “Guess what? I’m not going to stick around for that.” He made overtures to the government and the next day we moved in, plucked him out of the MCC, and the rest is history.

Elie Honig:

So there’s that element of betrayal, right? Sammy Gravano the loyal underboss, side by side with John Gotti for years. Now, we learn that he’s on the outs. And in my experience, there’s two reasons guys flip. One of them… But I would say number two is betrayal. But number one is the one you hit on, which is saving your own hide, right? And Sammy Gravano at this point is charged with multiple murders, looking at life behind bars. So, you know Sammy, not me, that had to be a factor too.

James Gagliano:

Well, so you’re counselor, you’re speaking about the pragmatic aspect of how these folks look at it.

Elie Honig:

Yes. Self interest.

James Gagliano:

Save your own skin. 100%. So, in this perspective, remember, the government back in the late 60s came up with a tool would you use very successfully in your job at the Department of Justice, called RICO, Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, I think it was ratified in 1970. And we began using it… I mean we, the government of the United States very successfully, especially in the late 70s, early 80s. Because you got to remember that from the United States perspective, a lot of people didn’t believe there was a mafia here until 1963 when Joseph Falacci first testified in front of Congress.

Joseph Falacci:

This is my doom. This is the promise I’m breaking that even if I talked I should never talk about this and I’m doing so.

James Gagliano:

And said, “Yeah, I’m a made member. Yes. I was involved in this ritual. Yes, it’s this thing of ours La Cosa Nostra.” So you fast forward now to the 80s, you fast forward to the time of John Gotti and Frankie Locascio and Sammy the Bull Gravano. Sammy looked at the situation and said, “This is crazy.” Now, no one up to that point at that level in the mafia had ever cooperated or turned state’s evidence. Sammy was at that point in time, the highest ranking member to say, “This doesn’t look good for me, I know they got me dead to rights on a number of murders and being part of an enterprise, a criminal enterprise, and they’ve got a number of predicates that they can charge me with, I’m looking at 25 years to life. If they convict me on the murders and on RICO, I’m going away for life. I’m going to help myself.” And that’s when he reached out to us.

Elie Honig:

So take us back to this day. All right, you’re a few months in FBI, Bruce Mouw, legendary agent calls you all into the room, tells you all Sammy Gravano has flipped. First of all, what is the reaction like in this room full of FBI agents specializing in organized crime when you got that news?

James Gagliano:

Well, let me paint a picture for you. Because the location of the FBI at that time, the office has now since moved to Kew Gardens a number of years ago, but at the time was located at 95-25 Queens Boulevard in Rego Park 11374. I still remembered it was the first business card I ever had. So, you got to remember it’s a tiny cramped office and back in those days, Elie, if you’ll recall, in government facilities, you could still smoke and… No, way man.

Elie Honig:

That’s a different.

James Gagliano:

Legal things. So, Bruce Mouw was just an aficionado of pipe smoking. So you walked into his office, there’s all these agents who was probably about nine or 10 of us crowded into his office sitting on a couple of couches and a loveseat and a couple of folding chairs and we’re all sitting there wondering why he’s calling a squad meeting outside of the one we had monthly there which was a regular deal. So you’re sitting there, you’re cutting through all the haze of the smoke and Bruce was a very stoic man, you know him, so I think you know what I’m talking about kind of impassive in his countenance and look, and he kind of he’s chewing on the stem of his pipe and he says, “I have some news.” And so everyone’s sitting there and I’m like, “Okay, well maybe there’s been a reassignment people have got to focus on this or he wants somebody to work on this and what could possibly this be?” And he goes, “We have a new member of Team America.”

James Gagliano:

And there were a couple people in the room, the senior agents that knew about this because they’d been responsible the night before under the cover of darkness from going to the Metropolitan Correctional Center and spiriting Sammy away out of the Department of Corrections who had him at the time. And he says, “Sammy the Bull Gravano is now going to be working with us on the prosecution of John Gotti and Frankie Locascio.” And of course, there were some smiles and some high fives and some just… People just could not believe it. This was an underboss of the largest crime family syndicate, the biggest, most powerful of five families in New York that now decided he was going to come work on Team America.

Elie Honig:

So you have this meeting, you hear this stunning news, and then you, Jim Gagliano got one more piece of information about what you would be doing.

James Gagliano:

So, Bruce then looks in everybody scurries out of the room, they all have their different assignments, things that they were working on, whether it was continuing to transcribe the tapes, we had volumes and volumes and hours and hours of consensual monitorings that had to be transcribed. Some of it was in Italian that we had an Italian speaking agent on the squad that was handling. There were just a number of things need to be done. And he asked me and another agent whose name just also happened to end in a vowel. I don’t think this was purposeful, but his name was John Acaveli, and asked us to stick behind. And he said, “Your assignment is going to be to go down to a safe house where we have moved Sammy to and you guys are going to be housed with him and basically stay with him as his ‘handling agent,’ while we’re going to be flying in prosecutors and flying in agents.

James Gagliano:

So we’re going to need to start… We used the FD302, which is a testimonial document in the FBI where they’re starting to transcribe all of Sammy’s cooperation, because remember, he still had deplete what he had done. So why we were excited and happy, there were still some things that had to be done, but my role is going to be to launch immediately down to the safe house and spend the next three or four months living with him.

Elie Honig:

So you’re a brand new rookie, the most important, potential cooperator in many years maybe ever has now flipped. You’ve got John Gotti senior in the cross hairs now. You think this could be it. Why would they go with a rookie? Why the new kid?

James Gagliano:

Well, again, I’d love to-

Elie Honig:

I know you were part of a team, why the rookie?

James Gagliano:

I’d love to believe it has to do with the fact that Bruce Mouw was just such an incredible Judge of talent. But I think that the more appropriate review of his decision making was I literally was the newest guy in the squad and had the least amount of responsibility. He was like, “Hey, kid, here’s your job, don’t screw it up. Another one of those things, keep your mouth shut, keep your eyes and ears open. But this will be a great tutorial for you on learning not just about the Gambino family, but also about the mob in total.”

Elie Honig:

So what is this safe house… And I know there’re safe houses all around the country, which we can’t give the specific addresses of. But tell us about this safe house where you watched, babysat, supervised Sammy Gravano.

James Gagliano:

So the generic description or definition of a safe house is, as you’re well familiar with having visited a few in your career, is any place that the FBI or law enforcement can provide security for somebody whose life may be threatened because of the fact that they’re going to be cooperating in a federal prosecution. So it could be everything from a hotel room, to a rented house, to a undisclosed location in wherever you could possibly fathom it, where it would be nondescript and where people would not think to look for somebody that is wanted. And again, when you cooperate against the mob, you have signed your death warrant. So Sammy Gravano knew that by doing this, there were going to be people that are going to want to come after him. The one that we used was a little unique, and I can speak about it now because obviously at the time it was kept under wraps, but it’s been talked about a number of stories in different places. But there was a location down at the FBI Academy that I just recently graduated from at the end of May in 1991.

James Gagliano:

And this is only a few months later in November, there was a location at the FBI Academy house called the defectors suite. And a defector back in those days, you got to remember this is right after the Cold War had just ended, right? East Germany and West Germany have just reunited and the Soviet Union was crumbling. This is right after the Cold War had basically come to an end, the United States was victorious. But we had a suite down there were Russian defectors, KGB men, double agents, things like that had been placed for their safekeeping while they were debriefed and that was the location that they chose to keep Sammy safe.

Elie Honig:

The defectors suite.

James Gagliano:

The defectors suite.

Elie Honig:

That’s interesting because defectors is sort of another way to talk about cooperators. But tell us a little bit about that because an important part of mob culture is this idea of you don’t talk, you don’t… I hate to use this word, but they do. You don’t rat, you don’t snitch. And a lot of the cases I was involved in murder cases that I involved in prosecuting involved killing someone because they were or were suspected of cooperating. So, how much danger exactly would Sammy Gravano have been in at that moment?

James Gagliano:

Well, it’s funny that you’re careful to use the term honor among thieves, because really, where is the honor? But the mob and one of the reasons why it was so super successful and well, to certain extent it remained successful, is that it did have a certain sense of criminal enterprise rules and regulations. And one of them was, you don’t cooperate. It’s the code of omerta in Italian which means you don’t talk about this anywhere else. La Cosa Nostra this term for the mob, which means this thing of ours, not this thing of yours, or this thing of other people’s, but this thing of ours, you keep it sacred, you never ever, ever rat on friends and associates within this criminal organization. You don’t ever turn state’s evidence. In fact, you will betray friends who are not in the mob, and your own family members before you would ever not follow an order that was issued to you by a superior or do anything to betray the mob, you would always pick them up first.

James Gagliano:

This was huge. Now, there was a concern on a number of levels because Sammy had a wife and two kids that lived out on Staten Island where he lived. And the concern was, would anything happen to them? Sammy was pretty convinced that no, he was going to separate himself from his family, he was not speaking to his wife anymore, or his kids. And the mob while there was still some type of… And I use the term honor in quotation marks would not go after his family, but would look for him. So concern on his part for him, not a concern for his family.

Elie Honig:

Right. So, he’s essentially dead man walking if he’s seen. But he still believes in and it played out nobody’s going to go after the family. Right? In my experience, that’s a mob rule. And yes, these are all criminals, but they do have certain rules that held in this case for Sammy.

James Gagliano:

They did hold. And I think that was a big ace in our pocket.

Elie Honig:

So let’s go down to the defectors suite down in Quantico on FBI property. Who gets there first? You and John, the other agent, or Sammy? Is he there when you get there, or are you there first?

James Gagliano:

Yes. So he had gotten there first because they had flown him in. So the FBI’s hostage rescue team, which is our super elite paramilitary organization. It’s like the SWAT team of all SWAT teams. It’s the civilian version of SEAL Team Six, or the Army Rangers or Marine Force Recon, that kind of stuff. They actually flew in, picked up Sammy, and then brought him back down their house, their compound is at Quantico at the FBI Academy, which is again, housed on Marine Corps property. And they brought him down there and then secured him in the suite. And then the other agent and myself, we drove down together anticipating that we were going to be there for the next few months.

Elie Honig:

The other agent, John Acaveli.

James Gagliano:

Yes.

Elie Honig:

Is he given you the sort of, “Here’s the rules of the road.” Right? He’s a veteran agent, you’re the rookie. What did he tell you before you went in to meet with Sammy Gravano to watch Sammy Gravano about how this is going to work. What were the ground rules?

James Gagliano:

Well, it was… Again, it was another fortuitous turn of events because I genuinely liked John. John was my training agent. And when you come into the FBI, you spend a year or two on what we call probation, which means you’ve got to learn a number of different things, you’ve got to fulfill a number of different tasks. You’ve got to get your boy scout merit badges, you’ve got to check this box, this box and this box. John was the person responsible for making sure that I muster and did all those things. So, I was really close to John. And I think john from his experience, he was a Bronx kid. Obviously he was much more knowledgeable about the mob and about… He’d been working it longer. He was there in New York working the mob when the spree of mob hits was paralyzing the city and there were different wars that were going on where mob families, either internecine or different mob families were killing each other.

James Gagliano:

John just told me, “Don’t do anything stupid, keep your wits about you, recognize that this guy is a stone cold killer. He’s done it. Now look, you work with a cooperator like this, you have to establish a certain level of trust. You grow to like people in those circumstances because you realize they’re doing something that’s dangerous to them, and that’s helping you get the bigger fish. But at the same token, don’t drop your guard.” And he reiterated Bruce Mouw’s very sage advice, keep your mouth shut and use your eyes and ears much more than you use your mouth.

Elie Honig:

Take us now to your first time actually physically meeting Sammy Gravano.

James Gagliano:

Well, I had seen the arrest photos from the December of 1990 arrest, and obviously I’d become such a student of La Cosa Nostra and the mob. I felt like I was living a dream life that here’s a kid of Sicilian descent who didn’t really live in New York or spending time in New York until he gets to this point in his professional career where if he Could have selected where to go he ended up going exactly where he wanted to go to the squad that he wanted to go to. And then it’s just unbelievable opportunity to sit there eat dinner with, converse with, and learn from an underboss of the biggest crime syndicate in the country. And it was a blessing. Now, when I walked in and saw him, I expected him to be like Travis Tritt says, 10 feet tall and bulletproof.

James Gagliano:

And I was kind of surprised that his stature he was a very short guy. I’m six three, almost six four. So when I walked in, I was kind of taken aback by how short he was. But no doubt you looked at him and he was built like the proverbial, the spark plug of the fire hydrant. Just compact, muscular, just turned 40 I believe and at that time, Elie as a 26 year old 40 was ancient, that’s my father’s age.

Elie Honig:

Oh, boy.

James Gagliano:

Right? And now 40 is in the rear view mirror for me. So looking at him I was taken aback by how tough he looked, how short he was, and how serious he was. He looked very serious when I first met him under the circumstances you understood why.

Elie Honig:

Sure. So tell us about if you remember your first exchange with Sammy. What did you say to him? What did he say to you? How are you sort of setting the boundaries here?

James Gagliano:

Well, I think, he knew John Acaveli, because Sammy’s actual handling agents, the guys that actually worked the Gambino mob from the Staten Island perspective, the Staten Island the borough where Sammy was located, were two guys again two more Italians. I don’t know how we had so many Italians in the squad, but that’s the way it worked out. Frankie Spiro and Maddie Trikorako. And these were two literal Hoover era agents. I mean, when we did surveillances and we were taught in the 90s in the late 80s to dress down to blend in, these were guys that still wore… You’d almost think of Fedora but coat and tie, tie never loosened, jacket never off, not even in the office, just the consummate gee man that you would expect.

James Gagliano:

Well, John through them had also met Sammy before. And John was also part of the team that basically spirited him out of the MCC. So, Sammy knew him. So when he saw me, it’s just like, “Well, who’s this lunkhead right here? Who’s with you, John?” And John explained who I was, and Sammy just shook his head and said, “Another Italian coming after me. Look at this.”

Elie Honig:

It took him that long to realize you’re Italian, one glace?

James Gagliano:

Exactly. Well, and hearing my last name, I think too. When you’re that last name you’re like, “Yeah, he’s probably not an Irish guy.”

Elie Honig:

Right? So, he comes right out of the gate, sort of throwing [crosstalk 00:27:27] attitude at you.

James Gagliano:

Comes right out of the gate swinging, and that was one of the things, the guy had a rapier like wit, he was really sharp with equip, he could turn a phrase. And again, you’re talking about somebody that didn’t even finish high school, and yet to rise to the level that he did the underboss, the number two in like I said, the largest crime syndicate of the five families in New York City, a very powerful, powerful criminal enterprise. And you go he’s not stupid. There’s a lot to be said for street smarts. And there’s a lot to be said for he didn’t have a formal education. But the streets taught him well.

Elie Honig:

Yeah. I used to have certain cooperators or even mob defendants and sometimes I would look at them and think, that guy would have been successful in banking in the law and anything else. And others I think that guy would have failed out of anything else.

James Gagliano:

100%. You look at guys like that, and I’ve thought about this many times over the years and you say, “Gosh, if you were to just put that energy, that effort, that passion that were with all those street smarts into something legitimate, you’d have been Bill Gates.”

Elie Honig:

Yeah, yeah. Bill Gates. Thinking of Sammy in charge of a software company-

James Gagliano:

Microsoft. Right.

Elie Honig:

So how long did you spend with Sammy Gravano? And tell us a little bit about just the physical living arrangements. Were you living there, were you coming at nine and leaving at five? How did this work?

James Gagliano:

No, this was a 24/7 job. So there was no time off on weekends was like being in a combat zone. And I don’t mean to say that lightly having spent time in a combat zone I know that there are no days off. There’s no… You don’t take Sundays off to read the newspaper and go to church services. You’re in a heightened state of awareness all the time and their jobs and responsibilities was the same thing here. So, 24/7 job, it was my tenure down there, we approached probably close to four months I came back on a couple of weekends they rotated me out just to give me a break so I could get home and see my little one and take care of some things like paying the bills because you didn’t have bill pay online back in those days, Elie as you know, everything had to be snail mail and a stamp on it to make sure that they didn’t cut the electricity off of my house.

James Gagliano:

But I remember walking in and looking at the place, it was a typical FBI conference room is extended. There was a circular table in the middle with a lot of chairs where we spent hours upon hours upon hours debriefing him. And then there were two bedrooms on either side. And then everything was surrounded by a hallway where the hostage rescue team, the armed guys. Because remember in this instance, I was not allowed to be armed. So I couldn’t go in there and where there was no taser on my belt, there was no set of handcuffs, there was no sidearm. All that stuff had to be checked in at the FBI Academy, nothing like that could be inside the space. So large conference room, large rectangle conference room, one bedroom on one end, one bedroom the other. My bedroom was on one end, Sammy’s was on the other. Sammy’s could be locked from the outside, mine could be locked from the inside.

Elie Honig:

Big difference.

James Gagliano:

Big difference.

Elie Honig:

So, I’m basically picturing a government issued version of sort of like the Raddison Suites or something like that.

James Gagliano:

That is a perfect description, maybe a Holiday Inn Express, if you will, that you got that extra extended suite, nothing fancy. There was a color TV there, there was a bookshelf there, there was a couple of comfortable chairs, but everything there was on a government budget. So, this was not high end, it was standard equipment, government issue stuff.

Elie Honig:

And you said you were not armed.

James Gagliano:

Not armed.

Elie Honig:

Why is that.

James Gagliano:

Once I got to Quantico, I had to check in my sidearm. And there was a reason for that. It’s the same thing where if you’re a corrections officer on Rikers Island, or you’re with the Bureau of Prisons on the federal side, you never are armed in and amongst the inmates. And why is that? Well, first of all, they’ll outnumber you. There’s 200 of them for every five of us. They outnumber you. And second of all, God forbid you lose control of that sidearm, you’ve now armed somebody that has nothing to lose. So, the issue was, why would you be armed in a position where God forbid it was taken off of you, or God forbid, you didn’t secure it properly, you’ve now put a weapon in the hands of somebody that shouldn’t have it.

Elie Honig:

And let’s remember Sammy was at the time charged with multiple murders later confessed to a total of?

James Gagliano:

19.

Elie Honig:

19 murders. So you have a guy who is, as they say in the streets, a capable guy.

James Gagliano:

I think that’s a perfect description.

Elie Honig:

You have a lot of time here with Sammy. You’re roommates, babysitting whichever term you want to use for four months with this guy. How did you pass the time? And how did you build rapport with him?

James Gagliano:

Well, and this is sometimes I get into arguments with some of my students at St. John’s when I teach an organizational leadership class in the past and you talk about leadership and we think of leaders we think of good people, right? That’s a leader. And when you think of a good person, they’re selfless, they’ve got character, they’ve got competence. They’ve got charisma, the three Cs. Okay? Well, you take out the character piece of that, and you look at the competence and the charisma and that was Sammy to a tee. Look, Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, awful people, but knew how to mobilize the masses. Sammy, did incalculably grotesquely wrong things, right? Killed people including being involved in his brother in law’s death, his brother in law’s death.

James Gagliano:

So when you think about that, his wife’s brother, so what more can you say about that? But at the same time, he was feared, he was respected and he was liked. Now, you take out the fear and the respect part initially early on, I could understand why he was considered likable. Sitting across the table you realize-

Elie Honig:

And why is that?

James Gagliano:

You and I know each other long time, we’re easy, it’s comfortable having a conversation. Very quickly with Sammy with the quips, with the just a memory, like just a picture perfect memory that can recall details of this and the other. And Sammy was a classic needler. He’d find the thing about you and make fun of it and-

Elie Honig:

Okay. So… Well how did he go at you?

James Gagliano:

I was the kid and he knew I’d been in the army and I was in the Army Ranger and I had a goal when I came to the bureau I desperately wanted to come at some point I’m a member of the FBI hostage rescue team. Well, they were the ones it was a good cop bad cop routine. Those of us closest to Sammy could play the good cop. We’re the case squad, we’re here to make your life comfortable, we’re going to ask but we don’t know if hire is going to allow that wink wink, that’s the bad cops out there, they’re the tough guys that strip search you, they’re the tough guys that toss your room every day to make sure that you’re not holding on to contraband. They’re the ones whose job is to be pure professionals, our job is to build rapport and relationship with you. So, it was different.

James Gagliano:

So, that’s what I’m talking about when I say we became… He looked at me kind of as… He’s like, “Oh, well, you want to be a tough guy and everything, you want to go do that, why would you want to do that? Those guys are jerks. Why would you want to be that? You’re becoming a robot or a robocop or whatever. Don’t do that. This is where you should stay.”

Elie Honig:

So it’s interesting to me that Sammy Gravano, this savvy street operator, almost a prodigy, he rose up through the mob so fast. Meets you, and pretty quickly identifies where’s that vulnerability? Where’s that thing he wants? Where’s that thing I can needle him on?

James Gagliano:

Well, remember… Again, it goes back to the thing about leaders, even bad leaders, they have traits about them that make them able to assemble power, and that’s really what it’s about. And what is one of those things? It’s knowing the person that you’re negotiating with or dealing with. And that Sammy’s thing. So you had to keep that into pieces. I had to keep in perspective that he’s not like me and you. We’re not going to have that type of collegial, friendly, loyal bond forever. However, this is a utilitarian relationship. We need something from you, you’re looking for something from us, we’re not promising you it, but we’re looking to help you at the end if you can help us. And as long as those boundaries and ground rules are laid out, let’s make the time we’re spending together enjoyable.

Elie Honig:

Ah, so speaking of that, you got 24 hours a day in this defector suite with Sammy, and there’s only so much time you can be sort of debriefing as we say, meaning interviewing and that kind of thing. What on Earth do you do? What do you do to keep from going nuts? What do you do to pass the time with you and Sammy, and John?

James Gagliano:

Well, you know as being a writer, we both do a lot of writing, that you can only stay so sharp throughout so much of the day. And so, really the duty day for debriefings was between the hours of eight and five. Okay? That was, prosecutors would fly in, remember this case was prosecuted in the Eastern District of New York in Brooklyn. So, prosecutors from Eastern District would come in, prosecutors from the Southern District of New York that had parallel cases or tangential cases would come in to debrief. And then we had an agent like at first it was John as we discussed earlier, and then it became other agents from my squad that would travel down to be involved in the transcription of the FT302s from the debriefings.

James Gagliano:

So Sammy’s job was basically to tell the truth, tell us what you did. All right? If you’re going to make a global play here, it’s going to be you’re going to tell us what you did in the seventh grade when Mrs. McGill Cuddy wasn’t looking and you took that pack of gum from Bobby Brown, we’re going to find out about that today you’re going to tell us everything. So that was between eight and five. Early in the morning now, Sammy was a huge fitness buff at that time. We didn’t have CrossFit in those days, there was no workout of the day. What’s the WOD? Let me go online and find it. There was none of that. So, every morning we would get up and HRT would put us into a vehicle, Sammy would not be… Would be blindfold would not be able to see where we were driving to, we would go to some location in around Quantico where there was safety on a tank trail.

James Gagliano:

And there was security on it different points there and then a trail vehicle and a lead vehicle, and then a couple of us usually the agents that were down there with him and maybe one or two guys on HRT that would be out on foot with us, we would run four, or five miles every morning.

Elie Honig:

At what time?

James Gagliano:

4:30 because the whole premise behind this was it all had to happen before the sun came up and before there was anybody else out there. So we’d get back to the room around 5:30 we’d shower, we’d make some breakfast in the kitchen, we’d sit down, we’d put on the news. This is back in the days when cable was still a relatively a wonderfully 21st century in our mind convenience. Turn on your ABC, your CBS, or NBC and watch the news that morning, eat our breakfast and then await the first wave of folks who are going to come in for the debriefs.

Elie Honig:

Okay, so I just want to set the scene here. So 4:30 in the morning, you’re getting up, you’re running four or five miles with security in front of you, security behind you, FBI agents all out, sounds like a real nice relaxing, cleansing little run in the morning.

James Gagliano:

Well, again, it was part of that… Anybody that’s done this as you have, it was part of that establishing a rapport and breaking down of barriers. And working out with him was something to him that was important. First of all, you’re tough enough to keep up with me. And then second of all, you’re doing chitchat along the run. We weren’t running five, 30 miles at the time, but we were jogging and being able to have a conversation while we were on that tank trail. And it did form a type of bond and we’d come back and shower, whatever. Again, the purpose behind this was the people closest to him from the case squad were to break down those barriers with him and establish rapport. HRT was the bad guys, they were supposed to be the, “Hey guy, here are the rules, you’re going to comport with those rules, or there’ll be severe consequences.” So it worked out nicely in that arrangement.

Elie Honig:

So you’re the good cop?

James Gagliano:

Well, I’d like to believe that we were the ones that he looked more fondly on than he did on team that I joined later on on the HRT guys who he was not fond of.

Elie Honig:

So you guys would… You and Sammy would run together on the path. And I understand you’d also throw a couple of punches with him here and there.

James Gagliano:

Well then it started again like I said, I don’t want to say that I invented CrossFit, but if think about it now, the two of us would just come up with different games. One of the games we did was I had a deck of cards, and sometimes we’d play cards. He loved spades and spades is a game that I learned in the military. So I played spades, it’s the only card game I know. I’m not even get a 21 because it requires math and that was never something I was good at. But I had a deck of cards and we would play deck of cards push ups, which means TV’s on in the background, we could have a movie on, the VCR was humming or the Betamax. Whatever the outdated technology we used was to watch movies. And then we would just both get down with on a push up position turnover card and do that many amount of push ups and do it through the entire deck.

James Gagliano:

So again, it was another bonding thing. Sammy was… He was the proverbial real deal in the sense of he wasn’t the puffed up tough guy. Sammy worked out at Gleason’s Gym again as a boxer, he was 40 years old at the time. There was no… He wasn’t using drugs at that time or anything steroids. He just was a workout fanatic. So, the two of us would push ups, pull ups, sit ups, anything we could do in that Raddison Suite that you just described.

Elie Honig:

So tell us about these, and I don’t know if I’ll call them heavyweight bouts. But tell us about these bouts. They were not available on pay per view, but it was Gagliano V Gravano.

James Gagliano:

Well, so this was one of those kind of things we’re sitting around one night having dinner and that was another thing. I had to go out and do all the shopping. Now I was on a budget, your tax dollars were hard at work and I would have to go out and I would have to find the items that he wanted to cook whether it was marinara or whether it was… Whatever it was. Broccoli rob… Look, I wasn’t good at making things like [bajoor 00:40:49], or chicken pecan or things like that, but I would go out and try to find the ingredients and then we would cook together. And generally John was a really good cook. John the other handling agent that was down with me was really a good cook and he could make an Italian spread and we’re talking about and Sammy says, “The one thing I miss other than my freedom…” And he stopped and had that pause right there waiting for a couple of chuckles. “The one thing I really miss is the opportunity to box. I like to throw my hands and I don’t get a chance to.”

James Gagliano:

And I was sitting there and saying, “You know it’s a shame because just spitting distance from here is the FBI Academy gym that shoot six months ago, you have to go through boxing and you have to go through defensive tactics. It’s part of the FBI Academy, physical training protocol.” And I said, “They’ve got sparring gloves down there.” And he goes, “Do you think there’d be any way…” I said, “First of all, you’re never… They’re never going to allow you to leave this room while you’re here other than to go run. So, the chance of you going to the gym is zilch, nada. Not happening. However, I could go get a couple of those gloves, a couple pairs of them.

James Gagliano:

There’s a PX here the Marine Corps PX where I could go buy a couple of mouthpieces, which we could just boil on the stove and fit them for ourselves. And then we’ll move the conference table over push all this overstuffed chairs aside, and we got a little ring in here.” And he goes, “I love it. Boo, I love it.” I’m like, “boo, who’s boo?” Well, boo is the term that he used for us, those of us close to him. He would call us boos. It was kind of a term of endearment.

Elie Honig:

That’s a Brooklyn term right?

James Gagliano:

I guess it has to be. I grew up in Decatur Georgia, I’ve never heard it.

Elie Honig:

But I had guys used that phrase.

James Gagliano:

You do?

Elie Honig:

I said, “What is this boo?” [inaudible 00:42:20].

James Gagliano:

I’m not your boo. But then when you came to understand that it wasn’t a pejorative, it was a term of endearment. That’s what he’d use.

Elie Honig:

So you and Sammy boxed?

James Gagliano:

Yeah.

Elie Honig:

Headgear, gloves.

James Gagliano:

Everything.

Elie Honig:

Once a bunch of times?

James Gagliano:

So a number of times we moved all the furniture out, the two of us would get going. I had my watch which was a Timex I’d set it on the side and we’d say, “Okay, we’ll go three rounds.” Now here’s what happens when you have two testosterone laden guys and you throw them into a ring like this where I’m thinking to myself, “Okay, Sammy, how do you want to do this?” He goes, “Well, nothing to the face.” Okay, we won’t do to the face. We’ll just do body shots. How hard you want to go? Well, let’s just go 50%. We did that for a couple minutes and we’re like, let’s go 60%. How do you make that differentiation between 50? Let’s go 75. You know what, let’s go 50% to the face. The first time you get hit on your button and I got an Italian nose, so my proboscis is kind of formidable. When you get hit on the button, 50% goes right out the window.

Elie Honig:

A couple other details and I don’t want to get into big picture stuff here. So, you mentioned the VCR the Betamax. So you’d sit there with Sammy the Bull and just pop in a movie?

James Gagliano:

Yeah, so this is… You got to remember this is the age of when blockbuster was king. Have you seen a blockbuster lately?

Elie Honig:

No, they’re gone.

James Gagliano:

Exactly.

Elie Honig:

It’s a shame.

James Gagliano:

So, Hollywood videos?

Elie Honig:

No.

James Gagliano:

They don’t exist anymore.

Elie Honig:

It’s a shame.

James Gagliano:

So this was back in the air when on every street corner, if there wasn’t a blockbuster, there was a mom and pop video tape store. So, we had a VCR. And in the evenings to pass the time again, you didn’t have 600 network channels. There was no Dish TV back then. So, some of the interesting things we watched, we watched the Godfather. We watched the Godfather part two.

Elie Honig:

You sat there with Sammy Gravano and watched-

James Gagliano:

Absolutely.

Elie Honig:

Was he giving you running commentary on it?

James Gagliano:

He knew as many quotes from it as I did. He could quote it better than I could.

Speaker 6:

State your name please.

Franklin Pentangeli:

Franklin Pentangeli.

Speaker 6:

And where were you born?

Franklin Pentangeli:

Partinico, outside of Palermo.

Speaker 6:

And where do you live now?

Franklin Pentangeli:

I live in an army barracks with the FBI guys.

Elie Honig:

But did he ever say, “No, no, that part’s not. That’s not accurate. It would never go down that way.”

James Gagliano:

No, I think that they were… Because I think on some of the tapes, some of the wiretapped conversations, they talked about the Godfather, they were Gotti, Gravano, Locascio, they were all enamored with this glamorous portrayal of the mob. Remember, the Godfather is set back in the 50s in the 60s, so the first Godfather. So they were enamored with it, but I would go pick up current movies. One of the ones that comes to my mind was Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze in Point Break. Yes. And watching that with him, with one of them being an FBI agent and how weird the juxtaposition of sitting there with the current underboss of the Gambino crime family and watching this story about an FBI agent who was infiltrating a –

Elie Honig:

A rookie FBI agent.

James Gagliano:

A rookie.

Elie Honig:

Just like you.

Speaker 8:

I am an FBI agent.

Speaker 9:

I know man, in the wild.

Elie Honig:

Another thing that’s very important to me, very important to mobsters, is the food. Who was the chef? What kind of things would you all dine on?

James Gagliano:

So really, to give credit where credit is due, John Acaveli, who again was my training agent and kind of my guide through this whole process because John was older than me and just knew the business, the mob business better, knew New York. And John was a heck of a cook back in those days. Sammy did pitch in on some of those weekend meals in making the meatballs, I have vivid memories of sitting there. I’m sitting up on the counter. John’s stirring the sauce and Sammy’s taking the bread crumbs and the meat and rolling it into balls and just thinking, “How freaking surreal is this? I’m a couple months out of the Academy, I just read Donnie Brasco, and here I am now sitting with an underboss of the Gambino family.” Utterly surreal.

Elie Honig:

And that brings me to my big picture question because I think we both know having spent a lot of time with cooperating witnesses, former mobsters killers, in a lot of instances, that there’s a fine line between building rapport, building relationship, building trust, on the one hand, and as I used to instruct our newer prosecutors, when I taught on this, I said, “Here’s a commandment, you may not fall in love with your cooperator.” And I don’t mean that in the romantic way, but there’s a fine line between we’re building trust on the one hand, but this is we’re not friends. Ultimately, on the other hand. We can’t become friends. This is business, not personal. So how would you sort of negotiate that in your mind in your relationship with Sammy Gravano?

James Gagliano:

The number one way that you can get in trouble in law enforcement is to fall in love or have a relationship with a cooperating witness or an informant. And as an undercover agent too. Same thing with a target of your investigation to fall in love or to have some type of improper relationship, you have to understand what the relationship is built on. First of all, the undercover side is built on a lie, you’re pretending to be somebody, and on the working with a cooperator like Sammy, you have to keep in perspective what your job is. And you have to keep in perspective what his job is. His job, as you pointed out, the top of this is to cut the best deal possible.

James Gagliano:

Your job is to make sure that he’s comfortable, that he’s taken care of and safe, his family’s comfortable taken care of and safe. At the same token, the job one in this whole thing was to finally take John Gotti down, a man who had gotten away with so many things and had done it successfully. And this was the way to do it.

Elie Honig:

Yeah. So let’s jump to that. Ultimately, big picture goal here is you are building the foundation to get Sammy Gravano ready to walk into federal court under the brightest possible media glare. And under what will be intense cross examination from very skilled defense lawyers for John Gotti, and give testimony aimed at the head, the most powerful gangster really this city has seen in many decades and probably ever. So take us ahead to that trial. Right? Sammy ends up testifying. And tell us how that trial went down and sort of how that hit the world. The mob world and the larger world in general, when Sammy took the standard testified against John Gotti at that trial.

James Gagliano:

Well, again to set the scene and now you’re going back and this is almost 30 years ago, almost three decades ago. And things didn’t go viral in those days. But things spread by word of mouth, they spread by reading the newspapers, the New York tabloids whether it was the Post or Long Island Newsday or the Daily News, The New York Times covered these things. There was a fascination with it because John Gotti was ubiquitous. That’s the only way to describe him. He was known everywhere. And in this instance, when this trial was ramping up because he had successfully beaten the government at the state and federal level a number of times-

Elie Honig:

Teflon Don. Right?

James Gagliano:

Teflon Don, it was must see TV, if you will.

Speaker 10:

Once again, John Gotti faces the prospect of life in prison with prior felony convictions for attempted manslaughter and truck hijacking. He could face a stiff prison term as a persistent felon if convicted a third time.

James Gagliano:

So how did we feel about Sammy? Did I have any concern? No. I knew that Sammy was looking forward to the showdown as much as he would have been a boxing match or a real street brawl. He was looking forward to matching wits with some of the best attorneys that money could buy.

Elie Honig:

Yeah. And so the ultimate outcome was, finally they got the big one, right? John Gotti was convicted and Sammy was the star trial witness. And John Gotti never walked the free man again.

Speaker 9:

This time the charges stick and the Teflon Don may now spend the rest of his life in prison. John Gotti, guilty on all counts.

James Gagliano:

Would John Gotti have beaten the case without Sammy;s testimony, it’s hard to say I doubt it. Elie only because this was a wire case as you’re familiar with. So, in his own words on the tapes, it’s John Gotti directing hits to happen and talking about ill gotten gains. But did Sammy insure it? Absolutely. And so John Gotti gets convicted. Obviously Sammy pleads later to the 19 murders, Frankie Locascio gets convicted, they both get convicted of murder and racketeering and tax evasion and all those things. John Gotti goes to jail on a federal pen in Marion, Illinois, where he languishes until 2002 when he passes away, I think due to throat cancer.

Elie Honig:

Right. Right. And so Sammy Gravano was a very large part of that. Now, you mentioned the 19 murders. And ultimately, when Sammy got sentenced, he got five years. And now of course, he’s getting a lot of credit for the not just extensive, but the historic cooperation that he’s given the government. He testified in many trials after they got a trial, and he led to convictions of a lot of different gangsters. Let me just ask you to sort of take off your FBI hat for a second here and look at this as a civilian. Because there are folks out there who say that’s not justice. 19 murders five years, I know he helped I know he cooperated. I know he put himself at risk. But that is simply not just. What do you think about that?

James Gagliano:

I understand that argument. I certainly do. And I can understand how somebody could look at that and say, “Boy, you’re making a deal with the devil and you are basically condoning what he did.” Sammy had spent four years in jail, up to the point of his plea. So after he got convicted, he only had to do an additional year in jail. I think it’s important on a couple of levels. And the first thing is, the Gotti case wasn’t… That might have been his opus, if you will. But that wasn’t the only trial that Sammy was involved. And Sammy testified for a number of years as part of his plea agreement where the government when he was in jail, would fly him in to testify in Colombo case, or Banano case, or Luke Hazy case, or a Genovese case, or another Gambino case, or other cases involving corrupted jurors, or politicians or whatever.

James Gagliano:

So, the government got their pound of flesh out of him from that perspective, even when he was released and went into witness protection initially early on, they continue to bring him back to testify and trials. Now, what does that mean? That means that he was responsible, not the only piece, but he was responsible for what we talked about in organized crime realm, disrupting and dismantling criminal enterprises. So were live saved, because? Yes. Now, this is the last thing I’ll say in this, and I don’t want this to be taken the wrong way. Because when you talk about murders, as a former prosecutor, you can be convicted of murder when you’re not the person pulling the trigger, or swing the battle ax.

Elie Honig:

Sure.

James Gagliano:

You can lure somebody to a location when you know they’re going to be killed. You can dispose of a body, you can do a lot of things that you can order the hit, which is what happened with Gotti. Sammy was involved, I believe in one or two actual pull the trigger, the rest were he’s involved in the conspiracy. It doesn’t lessen the impact, it doesn’t make it any less murder. But the government did a cost benefit analysis they looked at it and said, “Would this case have been successful? Would we have been able to make all the other cases if we didn’t give him this type of deal?” And they did that analysis and determined this was the best way forward.

Elie Honig:

It’s an interesting question, and it’s a tough one. And I know that years later when I was trying mob cases, defense lawyers would use the Gravano sentence to cross examine later cooperators. They would say, “You Michael DiLeonardo …” To use an example of a later Gambino guy who flipped. Michael DiLeonardo you are hoping to get the sweetheart sentence of the century.” And he would say, “I hope to get this at the lowest sentence possible.” And they would go, “And you know about Sammy the Bull, you know that he did 19 murders and got five years?” And they would use that to argue to the jury that cooperators like you are going to get sweetheart deals and that could be effective. I think it doesn’t sit right with some people that you get that much of a break. But as you said, Jim, there’s a cost benefit here. Thank you for coming in talking with me today and helping our listeners understand what it’s really like to live this kind of life as an FBI agent.

James Gagliano:

Elie, this was fun. Let’s do it again.

Elie Honig:

Anytime. Thank you, Jim.

James Gagliano:

You got it. Thanks, man.

Elie Honig:

Talking to Jimmy, I keep trying to put myself in his shoes back in 1990. Brand new to the FBI, supervisor pulls him into the room and says basically, so we’ve got something for you. Here, you’re going to be making sure nothing bad happens to the most endangered guy we’ve ever flipped. You’re in charge of Sammy the Bull. And talking to Jimmy about that really got me thinking about my own very first days as a prosecutor. And I remember that every single thing I did, every first, my first court appearance, first guilty plea, first sentencing was at once terrifying and thrilling. I had this sense of I can’t believe somebody is trusting me to do this combined with a sense of this is what I do now. And that’s exactly what makes the job as a prosecutor or as an FBI agent, so challenging, and so rewarding.

Elie Honig:

On the next episode of Up Against the Mob, we’ll talk with journalist, author and psychologist Maria Konnikova. She’ll help us unpack why we’re so fascinated by the mafia, and its anti heroes, and why films like the Godfather and Goodfellas have permeated our culture. That’s it for this episode of Up Against the Mob. Thanks again to my guest, James Gagliano. If you like what you heard, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners to find the show. And as always, please send us your thoughts or questions to letters@cafe.com. Up Against the Mob is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I’m your host Elie Honig. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The senior producer is Adam Waller. The technical director is David Tatasciore. Music is by Nat Wiener. The CAFE team is Matt Billy, David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. Special thanks to Nate White for his help with research. I’m Elie Honig, and this is Up Against the Mob.