In this last interview with our good friend and contributor, Camillus “Cam” Robinson, Gary and Cam discuss the infamous government informant Vincent “Vinnie” Teresa. Cam died recently and I will feel this loss for a long time. His gentle nature and prodigious work effort was always a great benfit to the podcast and to everybody around him. Rest in Peace to my friend and collaborator in this crazy world of mafia history. Camillus was a great historian and an excellent writer. Check out his book by clicking on the title, Chicago Swan Song: A Mob Wife’s Story. Lisa Swan became the wife of Frank Calabrese, Jr., a collector for his father, the notorious and brutal Frank “Frankie the Breeze” Calabrese, a high-ranking member of the infamous Chinatown Crew. It’s all here. The money, the violence, the drugs, the greed, and the murders that surrounded her, as well as her deep passion to break free from a lifestyle that could change with the flash of a single bullet. Swan’s firsthand, intimate look inside the insular and secretive Chicago Outfit details her life inside the Calabrese Clan, one of the First Families of the Chicago Mob. She describes, with clarity and occasional humor, her discovery of the dark side of the Mafia and her battle to save herself, her children, and eventually her husband from the gritty realities of the Mob.

In this episode, we learn that Vinnie Teresa was an early mobster in the FBI’s vaunted Top Echelon Informant program. In the end, Vinne Teresa was caught in an act of perjury when he tried to implicate Meyer Lansky in a criminal conspiracy.

 

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Transcript

[0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers, good to be back here in the studio, Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Detective and now podcaster, documentary filmmaker. And I am here with my good friend and periodic co-host, if you will, Amulus, Camillus Robinson. Cam, thanks a lot for coming on the show. Gary, I always have a blast. I mean, you and I, you got me started in this and anytime I can come on, we just love to. We have a good time getting together, don’t we? Yeah, we do. So oh you know a little aside i was just researching some old stuff on chicago or newspaper clip and i saw there was a grand jury about gambling in gary indiana see cam used to live up by gary indiana and we did a show about the gary indiana family that’s right.

[0:49] Ran by chicago of course hell chicago ran everything some people even say they ran kansas city they didn’t really but they had a lot of influence down here kansas city next savella did not do much if he thought iupa wouldn’t approve he wouldn’t do it he he got iupa’s approval on any major things outside of kansas city for sure they had a swung a big stick didn’t they absolutely savella wasn’t the kind of guy who answered to people but i think he was smart enough to know who were the big fish in the pond yeah he was smart anyhow we’re going to talk about Vinnie Teresa. Vinnie Teresa is one of the earliest mob books I ever read. I’ll never forget, Kim. I was in a library in the junior college. I must have been taking a class and I was just poking around. I found this book about the mafia. I wasn’t into organized crime at the time. I started reading this book about this Vinnie Teresa and all the stuff that he talked about, which is pretty controversial. That first one was My Life in the Mafia in 1973, which he wrote with another guy. Do you remember that book? I know you’ve referred to his testimony in his books.

[1:56] Absolutely. I learned a lot about what you can pick up from a lot of what Vinnie Teresa is just the inner workings and the day-to-day sort of scumbaggery that these guys, the scams and the cons and the, and ripping people off and how they lean on people. It really, it being so early, people didn’t have a friend reference except the Godfather. And yeah, that book really, really opened my eyes to a lot of things.

[2:21] Interesting. You know, his, his second book, he documents his life during his time in witness protection. And that was in 1975. Then later on, 1978, he wrote actually a fictional novel called wise guys. And I don’t, I don’t, I’ve never read it. I’ve never heard anybody talk about it. So I don’t know what that’s about. Um, My mother told me when his stuff first came out, people didn’t believe it could possibly be true. It was like we just said, it being so early, people just didn’t have a frame of reference on what the mob was and certainly nobody coming in from the cold. And she said, I remember people talking, oh, he can’t, none of that can be true, can it? Can that be really how these guys operate? Now, he was, his grandfather came from Sicily, who was a mafia member in Sicily and bootlegger during Prohibition. So he comes by it, honestly, being in the mob, shall we say.

[3:18] I gave him a lot of gravitas with some of the old foot in the door. You know, every one of these guys we’ve ever done anything about their whole life, that would start out, you know, they get caught by burglar doing burglaries and robbing stuff as teenagers. And he got expelled from school for violence against the teachers and all that kind of stuff. He was in, according to what I read, he was an inveterate gambler, he was a degenerate gambler. Total degenerate. Early age. He goes in the Navy for, everybody had to go in the service back then. I’m talking like right after World War II, if you were of a certain age, even all the way up till, I don’t know, 1970s till the end of Vietnam. Everybody did two years. If you didn’t go to college and get married and have a kid, you went in. And he went in the Navy, but that didn’t last very long. Bad conduct discharge. So. Roly poly fellow too. So I can’t imagine him doing his PT too effectively. I don’t imagine he was real gung ho on doing those pull-ups and running the obstacle course. Let alone all this just runs. Yeah.

[4:31] So of course he gets married and as they all do and start getting jobs and he gets caught stealing from his employers i mean it’s a usual deal but you know he’s got mob connections so with the patriarchy family so now he you know guy a good thief like this what’s he gonna do they’re gonna see him and they’re gonna pick him up and he’ll start getting involved with them Remember much about his early days with Patriarcha family? You know, I know that, you know, as I said, because of his family connections that entered him in with a Patriarcha, the guy, one of the guys who predated Patriarcha, Joe Lombardo was sort of like the old man, sort of like the, some of the older guys who would be around Kansas City that, that Civella would go and, and, and pay his respects to and seek their counsel. Joe Lombardo was that kind of guy in Rhode Island that patriarch would always go and seek his counsel and sit with him as an equal in a way. And because Teresa had those, he worked for Joe Lombardo in some limited capacities early on as a youth, sort of cartage theft and trucks and different things. But he really, because he had that pedigree, that was what really gave him, he got to skip a couple of steps when it came to getting in with the big names. And he was a sharp guy, really was a good earner, just like you said, he just degenerate gambler.

[5:55] Yeah, it’s an interesting life. These guys, they’ve got this history and this background. They take a man, he starts making connections with him. He was kind of a white collar crime guy from early on because he was a big gambler. Gamblers are always going to be white collar crime guys. One of his early things he did was insurance jobs, getting a business building, doing an insurance gig. From then on, he starts making money for people and it’s a no brainer from then on. And he even gets involved with taking gambling junkets to Las Vegas. Back in those days, you had to go to Las Vegas. And so they’d come up with junkets. We had one in Kansas City. That’s what they use as a cover to bring the skim money back out of the Tropicana. The gambling junket by a guy named Carl Caruso. Well, he started running gambling junkets from the New England area to go to Las Vegas. And even I also went to England down the Caribbean where they’d gamble at casinos.

[6:48] Teresa went to Haiti and he, per his account, had some stuff. Ties to Duvalier and the leadership of Haiti. I think the idea of Junkets is kind of not known today what exactly that was and what kind of, it was basically like a mafia travel agent, you know, and you would book a tour and the hotels would give kickbacks and they would give a percentage and the money lost. And there were different ways to make money, but you’d get a bunch of guys together and fly them out into the Caribbean or fly them to Cuba or flying to Haiti or flying to Las Vegas. And it was just a gambler series of gamblers seeking the mob as a travel agent and then get it knowing that they would then have a good time because they’re going out there with the mob who run Vegas anyway. And there was a minimum you had to.

[7:34] Gamble with so much money. I don’t know the exact details of it, but you had to gamble. I think here it was, man, this is back in the middle seventies. It was like $2,500. I think at the minimum, you had to be gambling with $2,500. And you know, most guys will end up losing a couple of grand, 20, maybe lose the whole thing. It’ll be one that’ll win of course, but most of them will lose most of their money. And you know, if you were high enough better back in the old days, people kind of long for those old days of the casino business where you would get comp rooms and free meals you didn’t pay for anything you know if you were a good enough customer you didn’t even have to pay for the junket the newer guys would pay for the junket pay for the airfare and everything and so it’s you know it was just a constant every week this guy would in kansas would advertise in the paper and he probably did there too and he’d fill out a plane about every week and go out to Vegas for about three days and then come back. And I bet he was doing exactly the same thing there.

[8:37] He was earning a lot of money for him with the gambling and he was doing some loan sharking. Some people, you know, they claim that he even became one of the more powerful members of the patriarchal family and earned millions and millions of dollars for him back in the day and selling stolen securities, which a big deal back then. And you don’t ever hear that anymore, but they had these barrier bonds and he would be a guy that could make connections with bankers and maybe up into canada or over in switzerland because he was going international and would take these stolen securities and sell them to somebody else or get big loans on them and then they didn’t care because they weren’t going to pay the loan back and he was a true thinking man’s criminal he really wasn’t he hit per his account because this was free.

[9:22] You know, whatever went into the witness protection. Vinny Teresa says that he never committed a murder and he wouldn’t have committed, he wouldn’t have copped one because he wasn’t charged with one. And I think that things were still getting balanced out as far as how immunity worked out. If you look at some of the wiretaps, there is a conversation between Patriarca and one of his other bosses. I can’t remember if it was Henry Tolomeo or Jerry in Boston.

[9:47] But they say, And Jerry Angelo. Angelo, yeah. Angelo, yeah. Thank you, sir. Thank you. And everybody knows I struggle with these vows, even though it’s my own people. So he gave him, they say, give that job to big. And then the FBI transcribed it as Big Benny.

[10:02] Well, there’s no Big Benny that I could ever find in the Rhode Island or Boston family. But what it looks to me, I’ve always suspected in my paranoid thinking mind that the FBI, By knowing that they had this guy and that he probably had committed murders, they sort of altered the transcripts a bit to read from give that job to Big Vinny to give that job to Big Benny. And then so when people would review, they’re like, oh, look, nobody ever gave a murder to Vinny Teresa. They never talked about it. But there is talk of a guy named Big Benny committing a murder on behalf of Raymond Patriarcha. I always found that little tidbit kind of interesting. you know did they alter the record so they could say they didn’t help a murderer or was there some big benny that nobody’s aware of except for uh patriarch himself that is interesting i could see that happening because if he’s going to testify for you if he’s a murderer then you got to take a look at that murder and he also has to admit to it and he obviously didn’t admit to it when they brought him in and they do not want to attribute it to him because it’s going to decrease his credibility that’s the thing with frank culotta when they all that chicago outfit they just worked like hell to to try to take away any credibility that frank culotta ever had in order to keep to keep him from being a credible witness so that’s a yeah that’s an interesting uh uh thought process sir cam you may have something.

[11:26] Well, if you look behind the curtain a little bit, you’ll pick up things that maybe it’s something, maybe it’s not. But you’ve seen plenty of little details like that throughout your years doing this, Gary. And it’s like, is that what really happened or is this what was in the record and sort of to a little slight of hand trick? You know, the FBI records are replete with things like that. And it’s interesting to try and draw comparisons with what went on and what the FBI was trying to put out.

[11:50] Yeah, I like the ones. I’ve seen two of them here recently. uh, Jimmy ice pick in Donino and in Chicago and, uh, John Curley, Montana, the one in Cleveland, they, they listed them as informants and documents, but they never really were informants. There’s nothing else to back it up. A guy goes out and talks to him a couple of times, comes back in and said, Hey, you know, I got him. I got him. So they put him in as an informant, maybe even give him a number and you never talk to him again, or he’ll never talk to you again. But that agent can say yeah yeah i got i got that guy man we we flipped him give me the gold star another thing i noticed and looking at benny the fat man he was in lewisburg for a while for this yeah transporting conspiracy and stuff stolen securities and transporting stolen securities and and of course he was on mafia row he would have gotten to know gaudy and hoffa and carmine galante there’s a lot of big time guys there and that is 1969.

[12:56] A lot of guys make those connections with other cities where you can get somebody you can call, you can trust out of the penitentiary because they, you know, they get grouped together, get housed together in the same general area. And so then when you get back out, you’re looking for somebody, a connection to do something in, you know, in Kansas City, you know, you were in prison with Tuffy Luna and Jimmy Duarte. And so you get hold of them, say, hey, here’s what I got going. And, you know, who can you, can you direct me or help me here with this? So that’s.

[13:28] He talks about being in prison with Lilo Galante and he talks about connections he made, certainly not in prison, but just in Miami and just going down to Miami where all the gangsters lived with playing dice with a cardo and the cruel pranks they would play on the hotel staff who then couldn’t fight back because it was the mob. But he talks about gambling with Ricardo and laughing and throwing $100 on the table and saying, you go ahead and roll, Joe. One of the interesting things to me is that he was absolutely Lewis Berg and he got to know Nego Galante and talked about how powerful a guy he was and he could take it all over. He also got in really tight with Velocci. That’s later. We’ll get into that in a second, but he got very close with Joe Velocci. He was in that special Velocci unit. And he talked about he and his wife and cooking dinner for Veloci and Veloci cooking with them and the whole sort of a merry scene of these ex-killers and gangsters and drug dealers and just the two of them getting so close. And Veloci is just a fragile old man at this time and very frail. And I believe he said that he shed a few tears when Veloci died.

[14:36] Interesting. Well, that is really interesting. I didn’t know they ever took them together like that. And my research showed me that he probably began cooperating with the government as early as maybe 1958 or 59. And they gave him a CI number in 1961 or 62. So he was talking to him for quite a while.

[15:04] As we’ve said, a lot of the smarter guys at that time really did have, whether it was Chicago or whether it was in Cleveland or Kansas City, anywhere, a lot of the sharper guys would shark their competition by giving just trickling a little bit of information about what their competition was doing and protecting their own rackets. That was kind of Danny Green’s deal. We know that Bulger didn’t participate to the extent that he’s been credited by John Connolly in later years. We know that he did help out a little bit with Jerry Angelo in taking out the competition. And that was a tool that the FBI made themselves available to me. They sort of offered these guys inadvertently that we will slim your competition and increase your earning power. Just give us a little bit of information.

[15:50] And when you look at the sort of the veil of dishonesty these guys operate behind, that’s just not a tool in their belt to talk to law enforcement and say, well, this guy over here, you might want to show up at the corner of 7th and Grace. And see what’s going on there i just found out his number was assigned in 1962 and that was around the time that that wiretap or bug was put in patrick’s office that i there’s a whole bunch of transcripts out there i i don’t remember how you find them i’ve seen them and i haven’t looked for a while yeah the fbi the patriarchy papers patriarchy papers he and his name is his number is mentioned in her BS, a 12 CTE, which means TE is top echelon and BS is Boston. So, you know, he was flipped around that time and probably helped out with explaining a lot of that.

[16:44] And maybe where to plant the mic in the coin-o-matic there on Atwell Avenue in order to best record Patriarca. You know, it’s a strange coincidence that Vinnie Teresa gets a CI number in 62. Later on in 62, they plant that mic in the coin-o-matic there in Atwell Avenue and start recording what was going on with Raymond Patriarca. It just, you kind of got to wonder, as close as he says in the book and as high a rank as he achieved for not being a made man per Teresa, the timing of that microphone and Teresa’s participation are very suspect.

[17:21] Yeah and velacci was testifying by that time one thing i read said it was probably quite likely the fbi was grooming fat benny to come on behind joe velacci once they’d used him up they knew eventually you know they’d be able to have him and he was a good storyteller and he would be pretty photogenic for the you know congress or whoever they wanted to trot him out in front of to to start telling great stories about the mob so yeah, and i think a lot of ways teresa would have been a much better than valachi who was kind of a street guttural guy and he was mostly muscle and he would repeat the things that they would sort of tell him but teresa as you just commented on was a charismatic guy and a good storyteller that book came out in 73 and you read that book and he seems like a guy you’d kind of want to laugh around with. And, you know, he’s awful. But the way he laughs about the stories and the cons that he ran, there is… I hate to say it. There’s kind of an endearing quality about it. I think he would have been a much better long-term witness than Vlatchi was capable.

[18:33] Yeah. One of the stories I dug up was what might’ve been what brought him in, or he was maybe kind of doing it. He was part of a pistol whipping of an owner of what they called the state spa in Somerville, Massachusetts. and two other guys were arrested and robbed a guy of $2,800.

[18:52] And the third guy was probably Vinnie Teresa, but he was never even charged. So this is 1958. And, you know, the Bureau back then would have covered up crimes. It’s really, you got to be really careful today. I know that even up until the 70s and 80s when I started getting involved, you got to be really careful. But back then they would have covered up a crime in a second. He offers a lot of good insights. Speaking of FBI and crimes, and I know that there are different takes on Paul, the FBI agent who was charged with rigging evidence. I know you did a really good show on that with a few alternate takes on it. But the Willie Marfio murder and the guy’s name was Red, who testified against Patriarcha and said that he wanted killings and he’s really just a low street level guy. But Teresa offers a good timeline of what happened when Talameo and Patrick went into prison and what all led up. And then later on, Peter Lamone and a lot of the circumstances with Joe the Animal and what led up to Patrick’s imprisonment, what was going on in the street when he was in, how Patrick was continuing to run things, and how Barbarossa kind of flipped everything on his head. And a lot of the interactions with Joe the Animal Barbarossa and what he wanted and where he was and who he was afraid of, even though he was the chief psychopath.

[20:16] There’s a lot of insight into that whole drama and how Etriarch was kind of set up to take a fall for a murder from a guy who he never would have even known who he was. He testified against him. But there’s a lot of insight into the intrigues of what happens when the boss goes to jail in that book.

[20:36] And Benny, talking about being a storyteller, I guess at one time he even told the FBI that Patriarca had been approached by the CIA trying to kill Castro. Now, somehow he heard about that other story going on, and he spun that into making him have this high-level information about Patriarca and this crazy stuff like that. Well, all the time he was out being involved with these stolen securities behind the Bureau’s back in the late 60s. He was involved in millions of dollars in stolen securities. He describes himself in the book as being the number three guy in the patriarchal family behind patriarching Tana Leo. And that would have put him ahead of Jerry Angelo. And he and Jerry Angelo hated each other. He said Angelo was out to get him, and he just was minding his own business and didn’t know what accepted. A lot of guys didn’t like Jerry Angelo because he made his money gambling, and he sort of bought his way in when Patriarch came after him. But as we know, Angelo was a sharp guy. He just, you know, he was a moneymaker. He would have come to the mob one way or the other, but there was a little bit of animosity between Teresa and Angelo. And Angelo is sort of downplayed, even though the wiretaps from that time show us that Patriarcha held Angelo in pretty high regard.

[22:00] So it is interesting. If you want to know, besides just seeing the day-to-day cons that a guy puts out, a lot of the drama and the intrigue and the day-to-day happenings of the Patriarcha family are pretty well documented in that book in a way that they haven’t been elsewhere. Yeah.

[22:18] Interesting. I read something where the quote is, he could blend truth with fiction in a way that just was, I didn’t remember those guys. They were storytellers and they could throw a little bit of truth in there and then go off into some fiction. It’ll leave your head spinning. And he was one of those guys. Great con man, beautiful con man. And you and I have experienced these guys through the years. You get a good con man who really knows the deal and knows how to tell the stories to get the money. And there is an art to it.

[22:58] I’m just reading about his. When he went in, witness protection. Government spent over $10,000 to relocate his wife and her kids. He was up at Lewisburg at the time. He got his sentence reduced from 20 years to five. With immediate parole, as long as he testifies, wife is getting $700 a month. So he was somebody asking about his girlfriend. If she was also in witness protection, if she got money and he said, nah, she’s got to go to work now. The poor kid. If I recall correctly, he talks about going on vacation. He’s got his wife at one end of the street and his girlfriend down at the other. And he’s gotten forth and back and forth. And you’ve seen him. He looks like a kickball of a big kickball of a man. And he seemed to have no problem with the ladies. And I guess that speaks to the life, you know? Well, there’s no accounting for taste sometimes, I guess. Yeah, he did seem to love the ladies. No, she’ll have to get a job, poor kid. Yeah. In that world, you know, it’s a little different world what we live in.

[24:18] I guess he talked about beating cases because he was paying off judges. So he gave up judges during those years. When he first came in, he talked about the Lamontina brothers been trafficking heroin in Boston for a long time. But he didn’t really give up enough to do anything about him. it might’ve been bogus. Yeah. It was incredible. The control that Patriarcha had of things in that, in his little fiefdom up there between Boston and especially Rhode Island, it doesn’t get as much notification. You just don’t hear about it as much because that’s a smaller family. And I’ve talked to guys who specifically follow that family and just the insights they can offer into just how much control of the municipal, I mean, you know, Patriarcha getting a pardon by the governor when he was, you know, just a young kid, I think Teresa did give up a couple of judges. I mean, it was really, they just had that place locked down. Yeah.

[25:19] And they claim he or he claimed he don’t earned as much as six million dollars in stolen security stocks, bonds and credit cards and loans and different white collar scams. And he was just, you know, he was like gold for the FBI is extremely successful Bobster that now was talking for them. But he did stuff like he testified that a guy caught in his name, he called Butchie McCulley, who I don’t know if it’s a real guy or not. Supposedly this guy had a mob hit squad and worked for carlo gambino and was kind of like the mafia police would go around and do enforcement actions at different places and he did know a guy named bushy and they were involved in stolen bonds together so i tell you the other one i thought was really interesting he’s really creative is he claims that he once gave a cadillac car to a guy named Papa Doc Duvalier, who was the boss, the prime minister, the dictator, whatever, and I guess it was to expand gambling down into Haiti. I’m not sure, but that’s, that’s, that’s exactly right. He was, you know, he went straight to the top. He tried to make those connections in Haiti because there was such a, and he’s been so torn apart by world politics and that, but that was a place they wanted to replace Cuba with you know and it just was what they weren’t able to really dig in as much as they wanted to but you know.

[26:49] For a guy who was making – and I have no doubt Teresa was making a ton of money. When you look at the kinds of scams he was running, he was ahead of his time in a way as far as the white-collar stuff like you said. He’d never had two nickels to rub together. He just – that gambling, he just – that’s one thing he talks about in his book is he can never put together any cash. He had local community people, and what he would do is he would say, hey, I’m a loan shark. If you want to give me some of your money, I’ll put it out on the street, and we’ll put a number on it, and I’ll give you a percentage. She was like playing stock market with loan sharking and people would give him the money and they’d come back to him and say, Hey, what, and doctors and lawyers. And, and he’d say, what money? What are you talking about? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Get the hell away from me. They just rip them off. Yep. That’s what you get when you go into business with the mob and they play by their rule. Forget about it. They’re nothing but take your money. I’ve had guys say, oh, you ought to make a deal with Michael D and Mikey Scars or Sammy the bull. I said, you know, I’m not going into business with those guys. They got their own rules. I played by society.

[27:53] I’m going into business with them. I know better than that. You’ve spent your career learning better than that. I mean, but going into business with somebody like Fat Vinny, you know, and I’ve seen that. I’ve seen it happen. You know, they play on your greed. He’s a con man. You know, that’s how a con man does. Yeah. He spreads out this feast that, oh, if you just like put up a little money, you’re going I’ll be able to participate in this feast on down the road. And, you know, they say, Ooh, wow. I can make a lot of money for, you know, no effort, just give him some money and he’ll take care of everything else. And, you know, then they come back to get their proceeds, their money back. And it ain’t there. That’s right. That’s what you’re going to do.

[28:35] He turned me in, you know, it just wasn’t done. That’s right. It’s like Joe Lombardo told Morris Shanker when he was threatening to kill him. He said, you know, what are you going to do? You’re going to put one guy in jail, me, you know, one guy, you know, there’s others out there. So, you know, they do not want to do business with the Bob. Let’s just take that as a warning guys out there. Don’t do business with the mob. I think y’all know that except for those mobsters who are out there listed too. There’s a few of them. So gangland wire, public service announcement. There you go. Now that’s one of these last cases. I think the Bureau, they really, they really overstepped their bounds on this last one with Lansky. You know, that story about the Lansky case where he said he could testify that would put $150,000 in Lansky’s hand. And that way they could get him for income tax evasion. And this was during those years when he was brought back from Israel. He tried to immigrate to Israel using the return law. And the Bureau burned him over there and they kicked him back out and they brought him back and then arrested him, indicted him on this income tax charge based on Fat Benny’s word that he had once given him $150,000, which you wouldn’t be able to explain.

[30:04] And then Lansky, they think maybe Lansky will cop a plea or something, and he won’t. And I know the prosecutor, I read something about the prosecutor. Prosecutor was really surprised. He said, you know, this guy wasn’t like a mobster at all. He was, you know, very articulate and charming. You’d think he was an executive of a big American corporation. And as he said, you know, we’re bigger than U.S. Steel. Bigger than U.S. Steel. And that was understating. Yeah, really. Significantly larger. But yeah, that famous quote. But yeah, trying to go after Lansky never really worked out for them in the end of that world. It just couldn’t prove it. Lansky had a good memory. He kept records, and he knew what he had done and where he was when he’d done it. Well, Benny Teresa had committed to a time when he put this money in his hand and a place. So Lansky doesn’t get on the stand to deny anything. He put his wife on the stand. Her name was Teddy. He called her Teddy. And she had receipts from a hotel that shown that they had been in Boston at exactly the same time when Vinny had testified that he had given him money in Miami. And as we all know, if a witness gets caught in a lie, everything else is just gone. No matter what else you got, everything is suspect after that. So he gets acquitted.

[31:31] Yeah, that was a big, you kind of got to wonder if that was when Lansky was at the end of his life and shortly after he was trying to repatriate Israel, how much of that was Teresa coming up with the money and how much was that him just MBSing and the FBI’s that are here, we want you to, and specifically bringing him out and say, so what do you know about Meyer Lansky? You really want to get Meyer Lansky. You got to know some about Meyer Lansky, right? And sort of having conversations like that, it stirred Teresa to say, oh yeah, I know Meyer Lansky. I think he loved the spotlight so much. He would have said and done anything to stay in the spotlight. I don’t think he really cared anything about law enforcement. He didn’t really have to do anything probably by then, but he had to be in there. I like being in that spotlight. I think you’re exactly right. And he loves telling tales. The feds moved him. I don’t know where he was during those years, but in 1978, they moved him to Tacoma, Washington.

[32:28] And he’d been importing exotic birds without a permit and not taking the proper precautions and everything. He had a bunch of birds die and somebody started working a case on that. They found out about it, started making the headlines. He got exposed in Tacoma because of this bird deal. And they wanted to move to Omaha and he refused. I think maybe Henry Hill spent a little time in Omaha and hated it, but he refused to go to Omaha. Now, he claims that the Bureau then put more pressure on Custom to make a case on him, which they eventually will on these birds. It was odd, these guys, Henry Hill and Vinnie Teresa and all, who just couldn’t keep their nose clean. They didn’t know, you know, witnesses. They’re just, they’re going to, criminals are going to criminal. And they go into the witness and the FBI paying them. And they’re still just coming up with these scams and they get exposed from town to town to town.

[33:25] We’ve had three that I know of right here in Kansas City. When they get here, they immediately, one of them just muscled a guy out of a business he had. And the other guy was out selling dope and trying to assert himself as a new mobster in town. And when all that came, he was just selling smaller amounts of marijuana. And that came out. We were trying to make a case on him. He just left town. They hit him. And the other guy, that really never came out. That victim, I just found out about him and it never came out. He just walked away from the business. And the other guy got in with a corrupt sheriff’s department over in the Kansas side and started a gambling game. And so, you know, they don’t, you know, Tiger don’t change his stripes. Come on.

[34:09] It’s like they have divining rods and sort of back and forth. And instead of looking for water, it’s like, oh, scam, you know, con, you know, they can just zero right in. I couldn’t find a corrupt sheriff’s department if I tried. I wouldn’t know where to look. I don’t know how to muscle some guy out of his business. But these guys, it’s just they’re in town for two days. And it’s like in my blue heaven. That’s how it worked. And that’s exactly like this deal with his Wyandotte County deputy sheriff that they are actually his dad was a sheriff. He wasn’t actually a sheriff. Everybody thought he was. And this Joey Cantaloupe moved to town. And next thing you know, he’s running a big, like a casino with long before casinos were legal, running a whole casino at a county park with using uniformed deputies to guard him.

[34:57] Crazy. Might as well go big. He’s relocated witnesses. And this guy, he was stealing hand over fist. His son was dealing in cocaine. And his son actually killed somebody during this time. He claimed he was just trying to earn money for his legal fees, but he got somebody to threaten the prosecutors on his son’s case. He did some insurance fraud. He and his other son stole some office furniture and equipment from a dentist who then filed a much bigger than normal claim for loss, $250,000 claim for loss. He was involved in this drug smuggling, this cocaine smuggling from Bolivia at the time, too. The dentist turned state’s evidence on him, so making a case on him on that. 10 years, again, at an elderly age for the mail fraud and some cocaine trafficking.

[35:50] There’s something so brazen about some of these guys that a lot of the listeners, thankfully, just get a kick out of this sort of total disregard and this antisocial part, just to the nth degree, just the ludicrous situations these guys end up getting into. Yeah and by the way after he goes to jail on that they end up putting together this whole case on smuggling endangered birds from asia and selling them to somebody back in pennsylvania with and all the rest of his sons the daughters and daughter-in-law and sons and a guy from indonesia were indicted for conspiring to smuggle a million dollars worth of rare birds and animals in the united states crazy how in the hell do you how do you get into smuggling rare birds how the hell does that get set up on your plate i don’t know and he did all that in witness protection so i don’t know well i’m glad they do that it gives us an endless fodder for the gristmill of mob entertainment. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.

[37:10] All right. Well, he’ll die of natural causes shortly after that. The end of Benny Teresa, one of the early stars of the FBI top echelon witness protection program. And wit sec, as they call it.

[37:33] It was the early days, and that program has certainly done some mixed results through the years. It is funny hearing about some of the early hits and misses of it back in the day, guys like Cantalupo and Vinnie Teresa. Henry Hill. A guy, the guy that was here was Peter Savino, who was a white-collar crime guy. He was the one that really put the Windows case, the famous Windows case, really for the five families. Everybody shared on that. He worked for Galate, you know, the Chin. He worked for the gigante gigante peter peter sabino i’m pretty sure that was his name i ended up talking to one of his daughters here recently but it’s uh you know it’s a different life and they’re all over the united states today i don’t know it would be a great book, to put together of all these different crimes as they’ve committed and witness protection but it’d be so hard to find the information because it’s so secret even they’re protected yeah.

[38:36] That’s right you have to get a hell of a foyer yeah and even then you probably have to end up suing them to get records because i know how they are about that stuff they’ll just take a guy and wipe him clean you won’t be able to find anything about him and be like he almost like he never existed except for when he tells if he testified and they even like you’re not gonna find much on that either i think they get that kept out of the court files that are accessible.

[39:06] All right, Cam. So I think we’re probably pretty well done, Benny Teresa. It’s one that people should really look up if you want to see how the history of mob literature kind of came to be. You know, every guy and their brother writes a book nowadays, but Benny Teresa was the first. He was still sort of during the heyday of the mob just after Appalachian. And, you know, it’s a hell of a glimpse into what was going on, especially if you’re into the patriarchal family. We have a lot of insights that that book offers some true, some a little less than, but it offers a lot of great information. I got my copy on eBay years ago. They pop up. It’s definitely worth finding.

[39:45] I’ll have to get one one of these days. I’ll look that up. There may be, I don’t know how big of printing they had. Some of these books that they quit printing, went out of print a long time ago and to find them on eBay, they want a lot of money for them. Oh, well, you tell them, you know, I buy all those old books and all the Saturday evening posts. Articles and stuff and i’ve done some that’s right life magazine you know i’ve definitely paid a pretty penny for some of them newspapers and life magazine in particular and the post too they really used to cover the mob and cover all those cases and then yes some really good information out there oh beautiful beautiful coverage the chicago tribune is great too, oh yeah how often i’ve gotten whole stories out of a chicago tribune article that uh that kid up in chicago the chicago outfit news and comments or something like that i can’t remember the exact name of his facebook but i’ve gotten whole stories out of some of those articles that he’s printed or posts on his facebook page and they’re good those guys and those are reporters in chicago really covered the outfit up there.

[40:54] All right, Cam, so tell us about your book. I’ve got Chicago Swan Song with a mob wife story of Lisa Swan, the ex-wife of Frank Calabrese Jr. We talk about what it was like for the family, and she sort of protected her children in that world. How when they split up, the community turned on her. She grew up in Gale Wood, an Italian enclave in Chicago, and things that she observed growing up. She wasn’t in the know, but she sort of experienced what it was like if you’re a father or you’re a grandfather or somebody who’s a mobster. This really takes you behind the table at Thanksgiving dinner, and you see what it was like. And then the realizations have come when the family secrets trial came out, the things that she realized that a man she had stood up to through the years was actually Frank Calabrese Sr. who had killed 19 people, including a woman. So I think that it was important for me to tell a family and to tell a woman’s story from within. And I really, it turned out well, we’ve had a lot a positive perception of it. And I highly recommend it. It’s just different perspectives than what you get on typical mob stories.

[41:57] Yeah. And Cam, all guys, I’ll have a link to that book or you can get that on Amazon in the show notes. You know, I did my own book recently. You can see back over my shoulder here, the Windy City Mafia Chicago outfit. And that’s just a series of short stories. None of them are related that I’ve done stories on. So I just go back and look at my notes and transcript of my shows and for that particular story, and then rewrite it into a real easy to read short series of Chicago outfit stories. It’s ones I thought were interesting and weren’t real well known sometimes. And I’m going to do one on New York and I’ll do one on the Midwest families. I’ll probably keep doing this over the next year or two, just to keep having something coming out. I think it’s fun. I find it interesting to do. I think that’s a great idea. It sounds like something And it’s just kind of an easy sort of quick read. Nobody’s got the facts like you do, Gary. So I think that’s a great opportunity for somebody to really delve deep into some of the lesser known stories. Quick read. I think you could read it in one night. Certainly, if you’re a good reader, you could read it in two settings. And then go on. As I get a few out there, then you go on to the next one. The next one, you know. Some of us are attention spans aren’t as long as they used to be because of this damn internet. That’s right.

[43:14] I think a lot of guys out there will nod their heads and heads in agreement right now. Yeah. I don’t want attention span. I want to sit there and scroll YouTube shorts and believe me, I’m guilty. I’ve done it myself. That’s right. That’s right.

[43:37] All right, camp. Thanks a lot for helping me with this story. And don’t forget guys. I like to ride motorcycles. So watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there on the street. And if you have a problem, another public service announcement, if you’ve got a problem with gambling, there’s one 800 bets off. We got a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, go to the VA website. Got a problem with drugs or alcohol at the Gambino, Anthony Ruggiano of the Gambino family. I mentioned he was a member, but he wasn’t supposedly he was, he was a prospect. I think the motorcycle gang is called a prospect. I think it was a proposed member. His dad was a member. He’s a legacy member. He would have got in if he had lasted long enough. That’s right. Anyhow, he’s got a hotline on his YouTube channel and used to do drug and alcohol counseling. He may not have to work for a living anymore. He may just be an entertainer. That’s what I’m trying to do. I just want to be an entertainer instead of working for a living. I’ll have links to my movies and my documentary films that I’ve done. And the two books that I’ve done, one’s about Las Vegas and the Kansas City connection, getting the skim. And that was about Chicago. So thanks a lot, Cam, for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. All right. Great.