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[Related story]
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/queens/workers_at_jfk_face_heat_in_heist_tYAWbpwdG3iZWRn2sK4DvJ
This article about a theft at JFK Airport, mentions the earlier JFK robbery in which friends of Polisi participated.
Feds believe $1.2M heist from Swiss air shipment may be inside job
By PHILIP MESSING
New York Post
Last Updated: 9:53 AM, June 26, 2013
Posted: 12:59 AM, June 26, 2013
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You can see three videos of Sal Polisi at this link
http://enoughroomvideo.blogspot.com/2013/06/sal-polisi-talks-about-sinatra-club.html
The Sinatra Club
My Life Inside The New York Mafia
Sal Polisi and
Steve Dougherty
Gallery Books
New York 2012
Sal Polisi
Sal Polisi survived an exciting life in New York City working as an associate of ranking members of the five crime families. Published in 2012 it is a recent account of events in the 1970s through the 1990s. He tells about his upbringing in Brooklyn as a child of divorced parents. His father remarried. His sister, who he loved dearly, died young, as well as a step brother.
This book is well written. It is one of those books that when you are reading it you do not want it to end. He tells a familiar tale about corruption in local governments, a lesson never learned, except by criminals. Polisi reports, "The only fees the Mob paid on all of is profit came in the form of payoffs [. . .] It took some hefty sums to grease all the politicians and government officials, judges, lawyers, prosecutors, police brass, investigators, detectives, and cops on the job[.]"
He adds, "thanks to the greed and corruption of the same people taxpayers paid to serve and protect them, the Mafia's enormous gang of criminals were able to commit the most brazen acts of thievery and violence imaginable--from back-alley serial killings to public executions, including the most blatant whacking of all time, the assassination of a president--and get rich in the process. The so-called good guys gave us the greatest gift any small-time hoodlum or Mafia don could ask for: They let us get away with it."
"Prohibition was the golden goose that made the Mob. Narcotics was the poison that killed it." He reveals that in 1948, "Lucky Luciano established the Turkey-to-Sicily-to-Marseilles-to-New York smuggling [of heroin] operation known as the French Connection."
Charles "Lucky" Luciano
This exposed the myth portrayed in the film and book, The Godfather. "[T]he real French Connection was a joint venture between the Sicilian Mob and the American Mob. [T]he Sicilians got the poppies in Turkey, refined them into junk in Sicily, and exported it to New York from Marseilles."
"[T]here was a whole new kind of French Connection. There were guys in Marseilles who got their stuff from the Arabs direct and refined it themselves; their product was better, purer than the Sicilians'[.] The french guys bypassed the Sicilians and shipped their product to the United States. Their main customers were black gangs up in Harlem and in the Bronx."
Polisi explained the meeting of crime leaders in Apalachin, New York in 1957, which was called to discuss new drug sentencing laws. They agreed that any made man caught selling drugs would be killed.
On the intimacy of the FBI with crime families he says, "J. Edgar Hoover was the best friend the Mafia ever had. Hoover's ties to the Mob went back decades, and that was the main reason the Families prospered that way they did for so long without the feds [stopping them.] The nation's top cop was closely associated with [. . .] Frank Costello, who used his knowledge of Hoover's secret gambling addiction and his closeted life as a homosexual to intimidate and control him; and Roy Cohn, the infamous Mob lawyer who helped Hoover wage war on Communists and the Left[.]"
J. Edgar Hoover, FBI Director
"When the Kennedy brothers got into office [. . .] the FBI finally turned up the heat. [on the crime families that did not support Kennedy] And when J. Edgar led the Warren Commission investigation into the Kennedy assassination, he suppressed all evidence that pointed to the true culprits behind the plot."
Robert F. Kennedy (left), and John F. Kennedy
He says, what he loved most about working with crime families, "was the action, the excitement. [. . .] it was the danger, the thrills that made the life of crime something special. [. . .] That was the best part, the actual hijacking, when you stick a gun in the driver's face and steal his truck."
He admits he was arrested dozens of times but he "never did any real jail time for any of it; the charges were always dropped or forgotten. The reason for that is that I was connected."
"[I]f there was trouble with any witnesses [. . .] we had a guy in a Queens [NY] detective squad who could trace their license plate numbers for us."
"Everything we did flowed from gambling, [. . .] If guys couldn't meet their nut [debt payments] every week, they'd become tipsters, paying their debt by offering information and assistance instead of cash. They tipped us off to high-value shipments coming into JFK [airport,] maybe they'd forget to lock up at closing time [. . .] or they'd tell us when a competitor's payroll was delivered. They'd tell us about diamond and gold deliveries in Manhattan's famous Diamond District[.] It was the choice of either that or getting their legs broken."
"The real problem [with selling drugs] and the key to our success if we solved it, was how to hide the money. [. . .] We could start a restaurant, but we might as well call it the Money Laundry 'cause that's why wiseguys get in the restaurant business in the first place."
Frank Costello
"Frank Costello had a fleet of bulletproof speedboats that he used to bring in the booze from Canada. Joe Kennedy, JFK's father, was Costello's partner."
Joseph Kennedy
Polisi's uncle told him "Costello was the most powerful godfather in the country in the 1940s and '50s and had every politician in New York in his pocket, including Paul O'Dwyer, who was mayor when [Polisi] was born." His uncle said, "The politicians were all Irish [. . .] but the Italians owned them." His uncle "said it was common knowledge in the Mob that Hoover was a degenerate gambler who was into the Mob for big money. [Walter] Winchell was friends with both Costello and Hoover[.]"
Walter Winchell
One USPS Carrier had a son who was "on the Queens [NY] vice squad. Like every other cop in town, [the son] was on the take. [He brought along] another cop [. . .] who had access to the DMV records[.] When Serpico [the film] came out, you'd have thought it was tavern owners and the guy at the corner store paying off the cops. [. . .] It was the Mob greasing everyone's palms. I can't speak for every borough, but in Queens we owned the police department. [. . .] Jimmy Burke used to say he loved living in Queens because it was the best place in the world to commit crimes. That's because Jimmy almost single-handedly turned the blue-collar Queens police force into middle-class suburbanites. [. . .] Jimmy must have had one of the largest payrolls in Queens County. Besides half the cops in the borough, he had tipsters in most of the trucking companies and cargo warehouses at JFK Airport on retainer."
Frank Serpico
The night before the film "The Godfather premiered in New York, in the middle of March 1972, [Carlo Gambino sent out word that n]o made guys, no connected guys, nobody in this Life goes" to see that movie.
Carlo Gambino
During a war between Joe Colombo and the Gallo brothers, "the Westies, the Irish gang from Hell's Kitchen, were doing contract work for both sides in the new Gallo War. They were carrying out hits and they were also using the war to promote their side business, which was kidnapping connected guys. Normally they would just hold them for ransom and whack them if nobody paid up. With the war, they could grab a guy and sell him to the highest bidder--either let him go for a ransom or, if the enemy Family offered more, whack him."
Joseph Colombo
"When the police broke the famous 1960 French Connection case that the movie was based on, they confiscated a shipment of [drugs] worth something like $30 million. The junk was stored in the NYPD's property clerk's office [. . .] Altogether the NYPD's stash was worth about $73 million. Because of all the publicity [. . .] somebody thought it might be interesting to find out whatever happened to all the drugs. The cops opened up the storage bin. [. . .] which now contained a couple hundred pounds of cornstarch and flour. The entire property clerk's drug stash was gone. [Polisi] was living in a world where wiseguys were selling smack that they stole from the cops who took it from other wiseguys.
Polisi testified the Gambino Bergin crew "had the entire Queens courthouse in their pockets, from the DAs to the top judges; how hard it was to find a cop or a detective who wasn't on the take."
Diane Giacalone
During the trial Polisi noticed that the jurors were being driven in limos "to wherever they were being sequestered." When he got the opportunity he mentioned this to the prosecutor, Diane Giacalone. "I told her they were crazy to drive the jury around in those limos. What was stopping the crew from following them and finding out where they were staying? She said I was paranoid. I said she was nuts if she didn't think they'd try to fix the jury. She laughed at me and said it was impossible; there was no way that could be done. I told her she didn't know how these guys worked. [. . .] I kept after Giacalone about it, but she never listened." He added, "She was real smart and well organized, but she was naive."
James "Jimmy The Gent" Burke
"Jimmy [Burke] went to prison for fixing Boston College basketball games[.]"
When Polisi drove in Mexico near El Paso, he saw extreme poverty for the first time. He watched "young mothers with babies begging in the streets. [. . .] I thought about all the greed that fed the machines the gangs of New York ran on, the greed that made the dollar the almighty so it didn't matter how you got it. Money was everybody's god, not just us guys in the Mob. That's why the cops let us get away with murder. And the feds? They let us get away with assassinating the president of the United States. All because J. Edgar Hoover's greed and fear of being outed as a degenerate gambler and a closeted homosexual who blackmailed others for their own sexual preferences had to protect his friends in the Mob at all costs."
In Boston MA James Bulger is on trial for 19 homicides allegedly committed while he worked as an FBI informant. His handler, John Connolly, is in prison for homicide in Florida. One other FBI special agent in Boston died in prison awaiting trial for homicide. In New York City Roy Lindley Devecchio was tried in state court and acquitted for helping Greg Scarpa in his war for control of the Colombo crime family. There were reportedly up to 50 homicides during that period when Scarpa was an FBI informant. There is no end to the list of corrupt agents, police officers, judges, and politicians. Yet there is silence across the nation regarding these extreme abuses by public officials. Education dominates the economy in Massachusetts. Harvard University dominates education. Are the President and Fellows of Harvard College responsible for the wholesale corruption of the local and state governments? Silence in Cambridge MA, host city of Harvard University, MIT and Lesley University. Silence from the MA Attorney General who focuses on high school bullies and same sex marriage. Silence from the five laws schools in Boston; silence from the government schools and the political science departments of the many colleges in the Boston area. Will we all be safe if high school bullies are stopped? If all people are allowed to marry whoever they want? Will that end the corruption of the public officials who abuse their power to steal taxpayer money?
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