[10:29] That’s interesting, Mike, how you start in a murder investigation, and I’ve seen this happen here. You start in a murder investigation, and all of a sudden, you know, somebody, something else comes in that may have something to do with it and may not, but then you get sidetracked onto that, then it looks good. And you stay on that for a while and then you have to come back. When you go to Boston, you have very little leads. You’ve got this car and this composites and a bunch of other dead ends that weren’t that. Did you have anything at that point in time that led you to believe that this reached outside of Oklahoma City or in that area? No, we had nothing. I mean, we had just a few phone calls. Other people knew more about our case and how it hooked to Boston than we did. There was no way to research it.

[11:26] What about Roger Wheeler? What about Roger Wheeler? Did you know about his connection to the High Lie down in Florida at that point in time? He was a big businessman, but he had invested in this world highlight business in Florida.

[11:41] When we started looking at this thing, of course, the brass was making decisions. Of course, that never helps out when you’re a detective trying to find the truth and the brass stick who knows in it. But the brass sat down with the FBI. They said, hey, this Dixie Mafia lead looks pretty good. And we’re going to follow that lead. We know about Wheeler and this parimutuel gambling business.

[12:21] Highline, which if people don’t know what that is, if they ever watched the first of Miami Vice, there was a spot in the trailer on that. And it was filmed at World Highlight down in Miami, and these guys have these big baskets hooked to their arms, and they’re on a court with a granite wall, and they catch this ball with this basket, and then with the weight or force of their entire body, they hurl this very hard ball called a palata up against this wall. And they’re basically playing handball and you know the crowd sits behind the screen there’s huge amounts of money bet on that too.

[13:15] Yes, there was a lot of money. Roger Wheeler had taken some of his money that he’d made in these other businesses and bought this whole High Lie organization, World High Lie, which ran the games. And then also, were they involved in the parimutuel betting on that and the gambling on that? Yes. World High Lie had five, they call them frontons. They’re about the size of a pretty good-sized indoor arena. And there are four of them in Florida, and there was one in Hartford, Connecticut. We stuck our nose into it and started looking at it. And the brass says, hey, we made a deal with the FBI. The FBI is going to handle all the potential organized crime leads. And you guys stick on this stuff local. Or nearly local. Didn’t like it at all. You know, I was a 25-year-old kid. Yeah, what are you going to do? Now, you had a call from the Massachusetts Highway Patrol. I interrupted you back then. And this is going to start leading you outside of Tulsa back to Florida and to Boston. So what was that about?

[14:34] Yeah, we went up there, and they told us about this Irish mob. It’s a loose-knit organized crime group. They said, here’s some guys to take a look at. Because I was coordinating a deal where we were…

[14:56] Going through boxes and boxes of paper records from every hotel in Tulsa, looking for something that stood out, maybe a tag number or an out-of-state reference to where somebody came from that we would follow up on those leads. They gave us some names for us to look for also, like somebody used their true name, checking into a hotel where they’re doing a mob hit. But I did what I was told. I was buried in boxes of paper when I wasn’t down in Oklahoma City chasing these drug dealers. You know, this Pat Earley, he worked for a guy that bought bad debt markers from, oh, I think it was Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. And he’d go out and break legs and stuff.

[16:05] Here we had two different angles, or actually even more than that, because Mr. Wheeler was a complicated man and was involved in a lot of businesses. There was a lot of stuff going on. I was like a kid in a toy store with all these things. You know, here I’m chasing the drug smuggler. Here I’m chasing the guy. And let me tell this about Pat Early and this Dixie Mafia. And the Dixie Mafia were responsible for shooting up Buford Pusser and killing Buford Pusser’s wife.

[16:43] Buford Pusser was the McNary County, Tennessee sheriff that they made a movie of. Called walking tall yeah and so they shot him up killed his wife i mean there was just so many crimes that that we were coming across that uh i can speak for myself we lacked focus because there’s so much stuff going on uh i still wanted uh i was still a little bit upset about the fbi was going to handle the highlight angle, but checking for airplanes. This guy that Pat Earley worked for, he owned a company that specialized in outfitting airplanes for international drug smuggling. And, I mean, you couldn’t spit without hitting some other motive.

[17:41] You know how that goes. You just get in the crowd. How did you get your focus back, and how did you end up on this highlight connection? Was that because of the FBI or because of the Boston-Massachusetts Highway Patrol? How did you get back to that? Well, we got involved with the state police in Boston a little bit. We didn’t know how we could do this. Boston was, you know, they said, well, we’ll check and see. And if anything comes up, we’ll tell you. Well, then we got hooked up with the Connecticut State Police.

[18:20] Who were overseeing the investigations on Highline in Connecticut, where Wheeler owned a facility. So I was still just on the fringes of Highline. And then in the fall, I believe it was, of 81, Dick and I are sitting at our desk one evening. Somebody barges into the detective vision, told the receptionist that, hey, I want to see the detective who’s working my dad’s murder case. My name’s David Wheeler. They called me back there and said, this irate guy wants to talk to you. So I did that. I brought him back to the bullpen. We sat down. I’ve been waiting for you to come talk to me, but all that’s been coming out of the woodwork is FBI agents. I said, well, we were told that the FBI would handle you as their source of information. They haven’t really said very much about it. We have meetings with them, but nothing really comes out. I think World High got my dad killed, and I think a retired FBI agent was involved in it. And I’ve told the FBI that.

[19:39] And they won’t listen to me. So here I am. My psychiatrist told me to come talk to you. Now this Wheeler, his son, he helped you write that book. He had some input

[19:52] into that book, correct? Oh, he had a lot of input into this book. So in that book, you’re going to have the personal side. You’re going to have the law enforcement side of the murder of Roger Wheeler. Yes. Okay. We found, as we started dealing with him, that Mr. Wheeler was just a busy millionaire businessman, self-made businessman. You know, he might have had his flaws, but he wasn’t a crook. He had legitimate businesses. He just had made so much money on a pipeline business that he had a big, big amount of money that he could invest. And so he had gone to somebody that he had dealt with before, the Bank of Boston, and said, Hey, find me something to invest in that I’d make money and just bring me whatever it is. And I’ll take a look at it. They offered him a casino. They offered Hi-Li. So he started looking at this, and he had sent his son, David.

[21:07] Down to look at these businesses and put together some sort of computer program. David did, and it came back that Highline had the most potential to make money, and the tax incentives were there in that business. So his dad said, I’m going to buy this one. That was in the late 70s. What had happened, the business was run by a guy from Boston, a CPA. It turned out that he hired several retired FBI agents, one of them was a fellow by the name of Paul Rico, to allegedly keep the business clean from organized crime. Paul Rico was a legendary FBI agent that had developed many mob informants while they were trying to stamp out the Italian mob. And so as he was nearing retirement, he had moved to Florida for his last year or two, was hired by World High Line before Mr. Wheeler owned it. and that was something that attracted Mr. Wheeler. He felt safe with these FBI agents working there. And then immediately it started not.

[22:35] Making the money that they thought it should make. It was a real, real problem. Then it turns out that a runner, a world highlight, a guy named John Callahan, a Connecticut State Police figured out that he was hooked up with the Winter Hill game in Boston. He had to resign, and he was replaced by his business partner, a guy named Dick Donovan, another CPA.

[23:04] Wheeler was stuck with this guy because as a part of the Bank of Boston and proving that loan, they said, we want Donovan to stay on as president. By early 1981, things were just not looking good in the business. He was arguing a lot with Donovan. David Wheeler had planned to fire Donovan and Paul Rico, and that was just relayed from Wheeler to his son just a couple weeks before the murder.

[23:39] Now, Mike, this Paul Rico, I was looking up a little bit about him. By the time he retired or maybe shortly after, it came out that he was involved with an informant named Joe the Animal of Barboza who had done a murder of a guy named Teddy Deegan.

[23:57] But Rico wanted a guy named Peter Lamone and three other members of the Italian La Cosa Nostra mob to go to jail for this Teddy Deegan, and Rico stood back and allowed Barboza to perjure himself and let these guys go down. Now, in the end, they’ll end up getting released from prison when it all comes out several years later and get like a, I don’t know, a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the FBI and the Department of Justice because of that case. So he was, you know, he had a history and plus Boston FBI, you know, that’s the place where John Connolly, the FBI agent who came along after RICO.

[24:41] Uh, uh, was, was there, we say Rico like Rico law, but H Paul Rico and John Conley was a kind of a junior agent that then moved in and had all these informants and the Irish mob continued going after, going after the Italian mob. And then he ends up going to prison behind all that. So that was, uh, I tell you that Boston FBI was a, uh, was a snake’s nest. Uh, it was not good at all. And so Rico is now working in the Winter Hill Gang, who he’s been protecting and using his informants over the years to get the Italian mob. They’re they’re siphoning money out of that. They’re what are they embezzling money out of the High Line, World High Line? For the sake of the charge, we proved that they were just trying to take control.

[25:32] World High Life, so they could really get the money. We just hadn’t figured out how the money was coming out at that time. That was a big hang-up on filing charges. I mean, this thing, we’re fast-forwarding ahead close to 20 years until we get to this point. But, you know, we suspected Rico was involved. May of 1982, a couple of guys get gunned down in Boston. One of them’s named Brian Halloran. The other was Michael Donahue, who was just giving Halloran a ride. And Donahue’s dad was sergeant on the Boston Police Department.

[26:12] We didn’t hear about it. Nobody told us about this.

[26:16] Until finally, a reporter called the police department and said, hey, you guys need to know this. That’s how we learned about it. And that’s how we dove into the Boston angle at this time. Wait a minute. Remind me, how did that murder in Boston connect to the Hi-Li and Roger Wheeler? Right. Well, I found out after a couple months, Brian Halloran had gone to the FBI and said, hey, I got offered this hit out in Tulsa. I got thinking about it, and I decided I didn’t want to do it. It was a hit for Paul Rico. He wanted Wheeler dead. John Callahan, the former president of World High Line, wanted Wheeler dead. He declined the hit. They gave him $20,000, said get your mouth shut. And he got jammed up in another murder in January of 1982 in Boston. And that was his ticket was the Wheeler murder. An FBI agent might have been the guy behind it. So the FBI never told us that. By this time, we had figured out, of course, the FBI was screwing us over every day. And, you know, we learned that from David Wheeler back in the fall of 81.

[27:44] And the police department told me, he said, get to know this guy, figure out if he’s crazy or what, because he had a passion. His dad was dead, murdered, and the FBI wouldn’t listen to him. And so he turned to us, and the police department turned to me, and I was the rookie detective closer to David Wheeler’s age. Dick Bishop was older and had no patience, as we all get.

[28:18] But I’ve got to say, Dick was a great guy. We came back after meeting with Wheeler for days, and we met with the brass, the chief, and everybody else said, hey, the FBI’s screwing us. We got to get into this ourselves because the FBI is hiding this stuff from us. Within a couple months, Halloran got over. We went to Boston. You know, we met with all these state police and stuff up there, and they were doing their best to help us as much as they could. But this was a rat’s nest of corruption and disputes between agencies. The FBI hated everybody. Everybody else hated the FBI. Nobody could trust anybody. They were trying to do wiretaps. They were getting burned on wiretaps, you know, against these Winter Hill monsters. So they said, I don’t know how you’re going to solve this. So I said, well, let’s just go to what they called a strike force prosecutor that handled his section, handled all the organized crime prosecutions, federal prosecutions in New England. They said, well, he’s got to be involved in this deal with Howard.

[29:39] He’d be the guy. I said, well, let’s go. Let’s go talk to him. And little did I know that in Boston, you could drink a couple beers sometimes. A shift and get by with it they didn’t have that problem so we had a couple beers at lunchtime.

[29:55] And we went over to the federal courthouse and said hey we’re here to to meet with a fellow by the name of jeremiah o’sullivan who was the strike force the head uh strike force prosecutor department of justice so it went in there we were getting stonewalled by him taking notes like crazy, throwing stuff at him, saying we had information that the corruption had infiltrated into the FBI in Boston. John Conley, like he said, this guy was around during Rico’s time. He said, well, Rico was connected with the Winnerville game. Well, we know what that means when you’re a cop. You know, if somebody says they’re connected to something else, That means they’re part of them. And he said, you know, Rico liked to carouse and gamble and play cards to these mobsters when he was on the job. So I’m hearing this. I mean, I’m a young kid. At this point in time, I didn’t know how to, even that people fix tickets occasionally.

[31:02] And I’m hearing them talk about carousing with mobsters and stuff. And I said, well, I just want to know who made the decision to cut Brian Howard loose and not tell us about it. He said, well, that was my decision. By this time, I was just getting pissed. I said, well, that was a bad decision. He’s dead. It’s our case. Who gave you the right to make a decision about our case? It just went downhill from there. Myself and a couple other detectives, wonderful reports, which quoted him verbatim. Which later came back to bite him as we both were testifying before Congress. My reports caught him in a lie. He both got charged with lying to Congress. He tried to turn the tables on me, and a good police report’s the only thing that saved me. So for the young cops out there, making a good police report is paramount to what you do when you’re trying to prove a murder. So I told him, I said, well, we’re up here and we’re going to find John Callahan, the former president of World Highline. I said, we’re going to make him snitch. I have no idea why I said it that way.

[32:19] And everybody else was looking at me like, what the hell are you saying? I can imagine. I mean, I had no business to open my mouth in that meeting as a young guy. So we were looking for Callahan up in Boston. Went everywhere. Had a drink. About every bar we went to, we had a drink for about three days, which I’m sorry I’m saying that. You know, I just followed the crowd. We stayed there for a week or so. We headed back to Tulsa. So I walked in my door and I am walking in my door with my suitcase in my hand and the phone was ringing. So I answered him and somebody said, hey, is this Detective Mycuff? Yes, sir. He said, are you looking for John Callahan? I said, I just came in the door from looking and we’ve been up in Boston looking for him for about a week. And he goes, well, I’ve got him. I said, well, great. Where are you? He said, I’m at the Miami International Airport. He had introduced himself as a detective from the Metro, dead police, John Parmenter. And he said, I’m at the airport.

[33:35] I got him in the trunk of his car, and he’s got a dime on his chest. And he was all shot up, and he’s dead. Oh, wow. The first thing that came to my mind is, you know, I just told the head of the strike force, this high-level Department of Justice prosecutor, that we were going to make him a snitch. And less than a week later, he’s dead in the trunk of a car in Miami. I mean, I just, it just about knocked me over. I felt like I was potentially responsible for his death. I didn’t like the feeling at all. And as a 25-year-old kid, 26, this was just too much for me to process. So I immediately went down to the station, met with the chief and all the brass. Dick Bishop, obviously.

[34:27] He’d come from home, too, because we’d just got home. So I said, hey, we got a problem. They said, it sounds like you need to be in Miami. So we started putting together a trip to Miami, met the detective that was down there. When I got that phone call, I believe on August 3, 1982, when they said Callahan was dead, I said, well, let me talk to the detective that’s going to work the case. They said, well, he’s on his way to Boston. Can you get a message to him? I was thinking, get a hold of him at a hotel or whatever. They said, well, he’s not going to be at a hotel. He’s made arrangements to stay at an FBI agent’s house that’s working on his case up there in Boston. I said, oh, my God, he cannot stay at an FBI agent’s house. They’re in this up to their eyeballs. Turned out, made a handwritten note, laid it on his desk, knowing he’s probably not going to be back for a week. And that’s where that note stayed until he had spent a week with the FBI up there you know he was a great guy Shelton Merritt we called him Grits.

[35:37] So I met him down in Miami and, He’s just shaking his head, and I’m shaking my head. Everybody’s shaking their head. We’re not, we have no clue what we’re going to do. At this point in time, the brass of all these agencies had just pretty much given us carte blanche and said, go do what you need to do. And Dick, being a lot wiser than I was, said, well, they just set us up for failure, and And so we’re going to wind up getting screwed on this deal because they’re not going to take any blame for anything that goes wrong. And without a doubt, something’s going to go wrong. And boy, was that true. We dug into this. We got everybody to come out to Tulsa and have a meeting. We arranged an informal task force amongst Miami, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the Connecticut State Police, and the Massachusetts State Police. We were just shaking our heads trying to figure out what to do.

[36:42] Spending taxpayers’ money like it was going out of style. Everybody’s flying around here and there. We kind of put the logistics together, who was going to investigate what, who we were going to target, try to get some information out of. Within a couple months after that, the FBI gave us a call, and they’re dealing with David Wheeler and saying, oh, this isn’t going to be connected to the FBI. We’re going to drop this case. And then the next thing you know, we would do something, and they would come back into the case because they were trying to figure out what we were doing.

[37:21] And so they decided they wanted to bring all the detectives together from all these states to Oklahoma. They said they wanted to have an information-sharing meeting. They put us up in Nice’s Hotel, put everybody else up in Nice’s Hotel in Tulsa. I mean, the food and the liquor slowed for about three days. We were just trying to avoid the FBI, talk with all these guys in this little informal task force. And so finally, on the last day of this meeting, which was held at the federal courthouse here in Tulsa, a guy from FBI headquarters, and he was a very high-level guy named Sean McLean, stood up and said, we have to know everything incriminating that you have on Paul Rico. By this time, if we’d had rocks or bottles or something, they would have been thrown at him. And we said, we got nothing to tell you because we can’t trust you. He said, well, here’s the deal. Paul Rico…

[38:37] Came out of retirement, and did a favor for the FBI. He went undercover to a corrupt federal judge by the name of L.C. Hastings, and we’re going to arrest him, L.C. Hastings. We have to turn everything that you have over in discovery.

[39:01] To whoever Hastings’ lawyer is going to be. So, I mean, that disbanded that meeting as quick as it could. Well, I said, we’ve got nothing to say to you. People left. I mean, people were going to a phone trying to get their airline reservations changed, go get a suitcase. I mean, it was just, it looked like a bunch of guys running from a stolen car after a pursuit.

[39:31] I mean, these guys just ran out of there. great analogy it turns out that he did arrest alcee hastings and he was acquitted he later became a u.s senator in florida yeah so i mean uh the the high level stuff that that we were dealing with it just put a stain on what’s going on i mean there was no way i mean i was i was looking at all this stuff and i said there is no way that i am smart enough even being this room, I probably need to go back to patrol. Mike, at this point in time, I mean, you’re almost like stymied. That was ingenious on their part. Now, if I see a conspiracy theory here, I could see that Rico knew people were after him and he wanted to know what you knew and you weren’t speaking to the FBI so he could volunteer to go work a case on a corrupt judge and then have to know everything you got on him for discovery i mean that’s they could potentially had got court orders from a judge in that criminal trial to say you know bring it to tulsa and all the other different.

[40:45] Jurisdictions and say you have to give us that and you had to give us then he would have known so it’s uh i don’t know that’s a conspiracy theory that maybe it’s a leap too far it’s pretty sophisticated, but I think it’s possible, don’t you? Oh, yes, sir, Gary.

[41:03] My head was spinning. I can imagine. I went to my dad March 14th, 1983. I went to my dad and I said, I think I got to step back, maybe volunteer to go back to a police car because I’m in way over my head. My dad said, no, there’s no way you can step back because you are in way over your head and you can’t run from this. You know, he said, you’re right in the middle of a cesspool of corruption. You can’t.

[41:36] You can’t do this. You can’t walk away from it. Well, that was the last time I talked to my dad because the next afternoon he was taking a nap and he got a heart attack in his sleep. That is something I detail in this book, along with many other things. But, you know, when we were writing the book, I talked about that story. And not until then did I really soak in that my dad’s funeral was on St. Patrick’s Day and I was right in the middle of all this Irish corruption, Irish mob. A friend of mine just said, hey, that was a sign you were just too stupid to realize it. You know, I believe he’s right. From that point on, I never thought about leaving this case. Of course, a few years later, this case caused me a little bit of a divorce.

[42:37] And I needed to make a little bit more money, so I promoted to sergeant, but I had made a deal with the brass. When I made sergeant that I’d have to go back to patrol for a little bit to learn how to be a sergeant, They’d bring them back in to run the homicide squad when it all worked out. Can’t give away everything that’s in the book. I know there’s a lot more that’s going to happen to get to Paul Rico, and you end up getting to him. And so, guys, you’ve got to get this book. Now, I have one last question here about this George Monterano, who eventually will admit to this murder. And eventually it comes out that this murder does tie back to the Winter Hill gang, And the guy that did it admitted to it and is out there today running around free. Yeah, it’s John Mariano. Boy, there are so many stories, just like you said, Jerry, so many stories in this book.

[43:38] It’s just so hard to share this trivia that comes through here. In 1995, I had learned that some young state policemen who started working a loan sharking case came up with enough to charge Whitey Bulger with some racketeering. So I heard about that, and I said, well, I’m going to make it. I took 60 pounds of reports. I mean, I made, I just stood in front of a copy machine for a couple days. And I had reports that were Boston Intel guys from back in the 70s that they had to purge. And so they were no longer in, but I didn’t have to purge them. I didn’t know them.

[44:38] So I took all these reports up there. I had a suitcase with a roller attachment to it. I rolled in these reports to the U.S. Attorney’s Office to a guy named Fred Wyshack. I’m from Tulsa, and I’m working this case, and I just want you to know that you’re getting ready to step into knee-deep corruption. So I got these reports that I’d like to share with you because you’re going to come across my case in it. So it turns out that, you know, we started working with them a little bit back in the late 80s. I had a call from some TV people. And they said, hey, we’re from a TV show. Joe, we’d like to put you on our pilot show, our very first one, and it’s called Unsolved Mysteries. We’d like to feature your case. You know, that was a time when there were just, you know, three major networks.

[45:47] There wasn’t a reality show. There weren’t all these crime shows, podcasts, anything. We went up and down the ladder on that. Roger Wheeler’s widow tried to block us from doing that. chief made a good decision and said, we’re going to do it. So in that, I learned of John Margarano. It even went back to some information back when our first trip to Boston in 1981.

[46:14] So Margarano had a felony warrant out for a horse race fixing conspiracy that they had worked up on him in the late 70s. So, um, I showed his picture on this Unsolved Mysteries and, uh.

[46:37] That was probably 86 or 87. Years later, in 1995.

[46:44] After this thing started unraveling up in Boston, somebody’s watching a rerun of Unsolved Mysteries, a fellow down in South Florida. And he sees me show this picture of Marano. And he said, hey, he don’t go by that name, but that guy is a loan shark. And I’ve paid some money to him. That’s how Marano’s arrest came about, off of that guy calling in and saying that. I wish he had called me, but he had called the state police. That’s how Marano got arrested. Once he gets arrested, I go visit him down in Latuna, Texas. He was staying in what they called the Veloce Suites. It was a suite of rooms where Joe Vellacci lived out his life when he became a witness against the mob. I guess they used this suite for the most important witnesses that they have need protection for and whatever. But, I mean, Margarano had his own small little kitchen. He had access to a toll-free phone, and he had private access to the rooftop exercise area. It was something. It was better than the first apartment I lived in.

[48:09] So, you know, me and Marno kind of hit it off. He told me, he said, you know, Unsolved Mysteries came out in the late 80s. He said, I was in Hawaii on vacation watching TV and I saw you come on holding up my picture.

[48:26] And he said, I knew right then and there, he said, I’ve been worried about this murder, but I knew right then and there we were going to meet someday. You know, it was interesting.

[48:38] Marano, I mean, I talked to him, you know, multiple times, but the first time I talked to him, I spent three days with him. He had a story that went for decades, you know, his involvement in organized crime, how he got involved in organized crime. As we were working through this, we brought him out to Tulsa, but yes, Marshall’s dead.

[49:02] And we had a small army put together. Me and him were in the car. I said, you know, this is 20 years almost after this happened. And I said, tell me what you can remember. He said, well, let’s go out there to that country club. As we’re going, you know, he’s saying, turn left here up at this light. And it’s right up here on the right. And as you pull in, there’s a garden shack that nobody was at the day it happened. And here’s where we parked. I mean, and what I did was I just went through, and every sentence or word that he said that would prove that this guy was the guy, every bit of corroboration, I totaled him up. There were 167 points of corroboration that only the killer would know. So, you know, then we went past the Wheeler’s house and he goes, yeah, I didn’t like this one right here because their circle drive kind of comes out onto a busier street. I didn’t want to get jammed up, you know, sitting there waiting to get out in traffic. And, oh, here was this parking space at Telex. It had its name on it.

[50:28] And sure enough, it did at the time. and he goes, oh, and there’s a Catholic school across the street and I didn’t like this one because I’m Catholic and I didn’t want to do it right in front of a Catholic school. I mean, just stuff like that. Yeah. That really showed me, I mean, by this time I’m kind of a decent investigator. So I’m seeing the level of a report that I was doing And comparing it to a level of a report that, say, the FBI or some other agency was doing, they were just pounding square pegs into round holes on their cases, and we were intricate with facts and details. I mean, that was…

[51:17] Something I really recognized at the time. Did Monterano, did he then give up Rico? Yes, he did give up Rico. And he gave up Stevie, the rifleman, Flemmie. He told us that Joe McDonald was the driver. And I tell you, if you ever watch that movie, Bullet, Joe McDonald became close to a movie maker. And the movie maker was making a mob movie. And so he wanted somebody to tell him what it was like to be in the mob, so McDonald told him. Eventually, that guy made a movie called Bullet. And in that big chase scene in Bullet, Joe McDonald was the passenger in the car being chased by Steve McQueen in the movie. He was the actor. The car getting chased, he was the guy with the shotgun. That was Joe McDonald. I’ll be darned. So what happened to him? Did he go down behind him? Well, he died in 1982. Okay.

[52:19] He, uh, he got caught coming back from, uh, Florida on, uh, Amtrak. Uh, he got caught, somebody snitched him off on the way, but he got caught in New York and he had a machine gun in a suitcase. Case, me and Dick Bishop, we had our bags packed and getting ready to head out the door to the airport. And I got a call from the cops up in New York City, and they said, you can stay at home because he ain’t talking to anybody.

[52:52] And we asked him if he would talk to you guys, and he said, I’m especially not going to talk to those guys.

[52:58] So he was a getaway driver on the Wheeler case. So Margot Long gave up Rico, gave up Flemmie. Finally, we got Flemmie to talk. Crob-ranked the Rico story.

[53:14] And we decided we had enough to arrest Rico. It took me forever to get the DA in Tulsa to file a charge. A little side issue that’s in the book, I had, over the years, had heard that there was a guy in Boston that actually put the guns on a bus. And Marano and McDonald picked up the guns at a bus station in downtown Tulsa to use. So I tried for several years to get that guy to talk to me. And he had a lawyer, and I talked to a lawyer every couple months and me the same answer. So finally, the last time that I tried, I said, hey, tell that guy. And this guy was a very huge Irish supporter. He had been arrested for smuggling guns to the IRA in Ireland.

[54:19] And he’s something. And there’s a bit about him in the book. I said, hey, tell Pat that my great-great-granddad came from Ireland through Boston and made his way out this way to Kansas before he slipped down into Indian territory. Just tell him that my great-great-granddad’s buried in the Indian cemetery about 20 miles from my house. And he came over from Dublin. and within an hour.

[54:54] Literally he said hey as soon as you can get out here he’ll talk to you what we did it’s myself and my partner at that time we got the chief to make a phone call we got sworn in as u.s marshals so we headed out to that that was the final piece that we needed to get the da to file a charge we had a deal with da that he was going to keep this under wraps nobody was going to know about it until we got there and got in place to arrest Paul Rico. We went out there, got with the Marshal’s Task Force out. We all went to Rico’s Miami Beach condominium about six in the morning. We just confirmed that the warrant was active, which is all good. So I beat on the door. And over the years, I had kind of gone toe-to-toe with Rico at least half a dozen times. So I’m beating on his door at 6 in the morning. He said, who is it? I said, hey, it’s Sergeant Mike Uffman Toss Place. I heard his wife say, what do you need? We’ve talked to you enough times.

[56:06] And I said, well, you need to open the door. So I opened the door. I got a warrant for first-degree murder. He got under arrest for the murder of Roger Wheeler. And he kind of stumbled back to the chair, fell down. and he was in his boxer shorts and stuff. I said, you need to go in your bedroom. We’ll take you in there and put some clothes on because you’re going to jail. I told his wife, I said, does he have some medicine he needs to take with him? He goes, yeah, he’s diabetic. And so she got a handful of pill bottles, put them in a sack. I said, well, if he’s diabetic, he might need to eat something for breakfast because you might not get some at the jail. And his wife said, hey, put your World Highlight cashmere sweater on. They’ll get a kick out of that. And I said, well, we’re going to get a kick out of it. But this is no joke. This is a big deal that’s happening here. You need to realize that.

[57:09] So we took him to Dade County jail. We go in there, and that smells like a third-world country in there. I mean, you know, it’s a big city jail. Yeah. We’re standing in line waiting to get booked in. There is some sort of foreigner standing right in front of us, and he had a goiter on his neck about the size of a cantaloupe, and it was leaking pus. Oh, my gosh. And he smelled terrible, like he hadn’t had a bath for weeks.

[57:41] Rico turned around and looked at him. I mean, he said, are you really doing this to me? And I said, well, you kind of did it to yourself. As soon as we get you up to the front of the line, we’ll be through with you. And I’ll see you back in Tulsa. Kind of ends up sad for H. Paul Rico. He will eventually die while in custody, I guess, after he got to – he had bad health problems at the time, and he’ll eventually die in custody when he gets down to Tulsa, if I read this right. But I’m filling out the booking sheet in a room at Dade County Homicide Squad on Rico. I’m just asking questions, high weight, all that kind of stuff, and he kind of sneers at me. How old are your kids? And it stopped me in with tracks. And I looked up at him and I said, what the F did you say? And he said, how old are your effing kids? And I said, look, old man, I don’t have a problem.

[58:47] Hitting you or choking you out because you’re not going to threaten my kids. So that was the end of the band.

[58:55] Interesting. Interesting comment by him. I tell you what, I just talked about this in a show not too long ago, those kind of a veiled threats that mob guys do that you can’t really say it’s a threat by the words alone. Yes, sir. You would have to know the context, the relationship between the two people talking. and you have to know a whole lot more than the threat in that. How old are your kids? You know, we had a guy here in Kansas City that just read off the names and ages of a guy’s kids.

[59:26] You know, he can say, well, that’s all I’m doing, just reading off the guy’s, you know, names of his kids and their ages. You know, I didn’t mean anything by it. I mean, that is so mob. That is the epitome of the veiled mob threat, their skillful mob threat. Interesting. All right. Well, I guess I got it across to Rico that I wasn’t happy with him because he wound up crapping in his pants in that interview room. Yeah, it’s a sad end for him and his family, but you play, you got to pay is what I find. run an all-volunteer co-gaze task force for sheriff’s office. And I tell you, when you walk up to somebody 20 years after they did something and you’re able to arrest them, it’s better than having a foot chase running down a serial killer. I mean, it’s for something they thought they got away with decades before.

[1:00:26] You know, and those families, they sure appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah. And guys, let me tell you something. There’s, I didn’t think there’s anything better than getting into foot chase and catching the guy and putting the cuffs on him, but that’s probably is better.

[1:00:43] Yes, sir. It’s fun. All right. Mike Huff, former Tulsa PD. And what’s the name of the book, Mike? Remind me again.

[1:00:51] Killing My Father. And it’s the inside story of the biggest FBI corruption scandal in history. And it’s by the son, Mike Wheeler, the son of the man who was killed. Yeah, David Wheeler Me and a guy A published author by the name of Larry Yadin He has written about 14 books We met him as he got in touch with us While he was writing a dual biography On Mr. Wheeler and Whitey Bulger Who both grew up in Boston On different sides of town At the same time I didn’t know that, yes that’s a good book too it’s called One Murder Too Many because out of all the murders that Bulger did, and all the crimes this was the one that brought him down it was one murder too many for him.

[1:01:57] Mike Huff, Mike thanks so much for coming on the show, I really appreciate it, well thank you for having me well guys that’s been quite a story hadn’t it I tell you what, there’s nothing like hearing the real nuts and bolts, the background of a good long homicide investigation. There are so many little bits and pieces that have to come together. And a guy, the detective has to have this great memory in order to when you get somebody that’s confessing or you think might have done it. They start giving you details about that crime scene that nobody else could know. That’s when you know you got the right guy. So so this has been a great show and a really great guest. So check that book out. And don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. So watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there on the streets, driving your big F-150s and your vans and all those kinds of things.

[1:02:47] If you have a problem with PTSD and you were in the service, be sure and go to the VA website. They’ve got a hotline number. And if you haven’t been in the service and you’ve got any problems with drugs or alcohol or PTSD, get hold of help with Anthony Ruggiano. You know, he’s a former Gambino guy in recovery now. He’s a drug and alcohol counselor. And on his website, he’s got a YouTube channel. He’s got a hotline number too. Maybe you can go into treatment with Anthony Ruggiano. That would be cool.

[1:03:16] Uh, you know, I’ve always got things to sell. Uh, you know, we’ve been selling Mike’s book for a while. You know, I’ve got my book, uh, leaving Vegas, how FBI wiretaps in and mom domination of Las Vegas casinos. I’ve got my books that are from my podcast shows, uh, windy city mafia, the Chicago outfit and big apple mafia stories from the five families. I’ve got a whole bunch of stories from my old podcast shows and those books. And, and, uh, you know, you can rent my DVDs on Amazon. So just go to Amazon and, and run my name, Gary Jenkins and mafia. And you’ll find all the stuff I got to sale. So, so thanks a lot, guys. I really appreciate y’all tuning in and be sure and, uh, like, and subscribe and, and tell your friends about us, you know, make, uh, uh, share this on your social media. A lot of people like this podcast, I know. And, and, uh, give us more listeners that we like more listeners. Thanks guys.