Gary and Mike also explore the uneasy dance between lawmen and mobsters—a world where unexpected moments of mutual respect could coexist with threats of violence. Mike shares stories of face-to-face encounters with figures like Rusty Rastelli of the Bonanno Family, offering rare insights into how respect, fear, and human decency sometimes blurred the lines between hunter and hunted.
The episode dives even deeper into the chase for Alphonse “Allie Boy” Persico of the Colombo Family. Mike ...
Gary and Mike also explore the uneasy dance between lawmen and mobsters—a world where unexpected moments of mutual respect could coexist with threats of violence. Mike shares stories of face-to-face encounters with figures like Rusty Rastelli of the Bonanno Family, offering rare insights into how respect, fear, and human decency sometimes blurred the lines between hunter and hunted.
The episode dives even deeper into the chase for Alphonse “Allie Boy” Persico of the Colombo Family. Mike recounts the painstaking hours of investigation, the calculated street-level work, and the tension that came with tracking a fugitive deeply embedded in a culture of secrecy and retribution. His personal stories illuminate how local knowledge and personal relationships can make or break a case.
This conversation crosses borders, too. Mike recalls his work in Sicily, where American and Italian law enforcement collaborated to disrupt crime syndicates that spanned the Atlantic. From tense raids to split-second tactical decisions, these stories reveal the global scope of the mob and the relentless pursuit of those who hunt them.
Throughout the episode, Mike doesn’t shy away from the psychological cost of the job, navigating threats from criminal networks while maintaining unbreakable bonds with fellow officers. He reflects on these life-changing experiences in his book, Adapt and Overcome, which he describes as part memoir, part raw look at the human side of life on the front lines of America’s war against organized crime.
For true crime fans, mob history buffs, or anyone fascinated by the delicate balance of law enforcement in high-risk territory, this episode is packed with vivid stories and personal reflections that remind us what it truly takes to track—and confront—the mob.
🎧 Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app.
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[0:00] Well, hey, welcome all you wiretappers out there. It’s good to be back here
[0:02] in the studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective. And we’re going to, you know, we talk about the mafia a lot, and we’re going to learn a lot more about the mob, especially the New York City mob with a retired U.S. Marshal, Mike Pizzi. And I know I butchered that a lot, Mike, but come on. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Well, Mike, I’m going to read you a little review I read on your book. A truly outstanding book not only gives the reader an understanding of what the U.S. Marshal Service does, it also takes you on a journey through its recent history that turned into what it is today. You come away from reading it with a true appreciation of the men and women
[0:47] who serve in it. And I’ll wholeheartedly agree with that, Mike. And you’ve got a lot of great stories about mob guys that you had something to do with. So let’s start talking about kind of your early, you were raised around the mob. So tell us about that.
[1:03] Yep. I was born in Brooklyn and raised in Brooklyn and lived there most of my life. And the house I was born in was one house off the corner of an infamous area known as 13th Avenue. And Sammy the Bull talks about it a lot because he was in a gang that was a little further down the street. But my bedroom window was the back of the Grim Reapers Mafia Club. And that’s Gregory Scarpa. And so I grew up basically around those people, knew many of them, didn’t like a lot of them. And I particularly never liked this fellow, Greg Scarpa, as some of the guys I grew up with started to be attracted in his direction. I didn’t like it. So when I was, I was about 17 years old and I joined the Marines and I left the neighborhood for four years.
[2:07] One of my assignments in the Marines was actually the Marine barracks at Naples, Italy. Oh, really? Where now you’re going to be shocked at this. And I have the proof. Everything I say could prove. Where Lucky Luciano had an art studio on the same street where I was living. Because we didn’t live on a base. We lived in a barracks. And the name of the street was Via Michelangelo di Caravaggio. So it was in the area called Manzoni in Naples, and I got to know him. Oh, really? Yeah. He ran a couple of clubs downtown, the El Sombrero and another club. And we’d make our way every other weekend when we had off. We never went out in uniform. We weren’t allowed to. And I think the guy really loved Americans. And he would come to a local bar near our building where we were living in Manzoni and, he’d talk to us, you know, he’d come in with some of his bodyguards and some young girls, some foolish young Marines would go over and ask the girls, the dads without asking his permission. That was a big mistake.
[3:21] So later on, I had a friend at another Marines house after we were wall out of the Marine Corps and he talked me into becoming a deputy marshal. I was driving trucks at the time where it was such a rough job that the guys never spoke. They only grunted. And I actually started to understand the grunts.
[3:46] I think I worked a job or two like that in my late teens. Before that, I was a cement laborer. So, you know, just anyway, it was kind of a very good introduction to being around a lot of rough people. Yeah. But they worked hard. Eventually, I ended up in the marshal service and my partner, it was kind of like almost a place where the Democratic and Republican clubs would send people to retire. You know, a lot of the guys, some of the guys really worked hard, but a lot of them weren’t. They weren’t interested in working hard. So me and my partner, who I think was, his name is Jack Brophy, was the smartest guy I ever met.
[4:35] And we started to do things that nobody else would do. We would take warrants and work in the morning and go out and work at night. And we hooked up with a group of Federal Bureau Narcotic Agents. Now I’m going to take you back a little bit. They were part of the Treasury Department at the time. And if you look at some of the people that were in that group, You had former OSS people, and maybe the OSS had then evolved into being the CIA. Later on, it was learned that some of these people had dual roles in the government. So we would go out with them after hours and look for people and do things and work and learned a lot. They were really very good investigators. And so we did a lot of fugitive work and in conjunction with them as well. You know, Mike, that Federal Bureau of Narcotics was…
[5:30] The only agency at the time that gathered information on organized crime, on the mob, when the FBI was out chasing communists down and wearing suits and ties and interviewing people, the FBN, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, had been for years, been chasing down the mob people and putting the connections together. So you fell in with a good group of guys there. They’re really a pre-mobile law enforcement agency. And I’m going to tell you that I got all of my organized crime photographs and charts from the old Federal Bureau Narcotics.
[6:06] That was part of my study that I was doing. So they really, as you said, they were the number one group that was involved in this organized crime and they were putting it together. And so, ironically, at this time, if you remember the name of Joe Bonanno. Oh, yeah. He claimed that he was taken, kidnapped, and he disappeared. I remember that. And I’m in the Southern District of New York, which covers Manhattan, the Bronx, and 11 counties upstate.
[6:37] And I’m looking at Joe Bonanno. He’s sitting in the courtroom with an attorney by the name of Al Krieger. And I said to this other deputy, I said, that’s Joe Bonanno. He’s wanted. So we walked over and we arrested him. And we brought him down into our detention area. And the next thing you know, a whole bunch of FBI agents converged on our detention area, all bent out of shape.
[7:02] And we said, listen, we know he’s wanted. We arrested him. Do what you want with him. And I remember distinctly, he spoke with a very heavy accent. It was almost like he hadn’t been speaking English for a while. And I could remember when I searched him, he had a lot of $50 bills in his pocket. I never saw that many $50 bills ever in my life. I think as a truck driver, I was making like $8,000 a year. And as a deputy marshal, I was making like $6,000 a year.
[7:35] Working 24 hours a day, seven days a week. No overtime. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, it was a great experience and a good introduction.
[7:46] And so later on, I transferred over to the Brooklyn office. Now that’s Eastern district of New York. It was everything that I was doing at night. We would work in early morning, late night. Everything was taking me away from home. So going to Brooklyn was where I lived, and I was hoping someday to move to Long Island with my family. And so I took the transfer over to Brooklyn, and I started working with a great investigator, deputy marshal. Now, the Eastern District covers Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and all of Long Island. At the time, I think it was about 12 million people, and we had maybe 25 deputies.
[8:31] But there was a really good supervisor who had the Medal of Honor from the corrections department, a city in New York, big scar on his face where he was cut. His name was Bill Gallinero. And I say these names because if you say somebody’s name, they never die. Yeah, interesting. I know he’s, I’m pretty sure he’s not around anymore, but he’s got family. I know that. And he was a really good investigator. And he, he was really keyed on doing some of the organized crime cases. And so I took up with him. And then later on, I think after about five years, I became a supervisor and I had the investigation squad, which he now gave up and he moved on to the Senate committee for government operations.
[9:19] And see, the marshals did a lot of things that people didn’t know about. And so it was my idea that maybe we should get credit for some of the things we’re doing and let the public at least know, or let our superiors know. We didn’t have a director at the time, and later we got a director. So starting, going back to work in organized crime cases. So in the middle of one of my tours of duty.
[9:49] Alphonse Alleyboy Persigo was in court and he was, he just was about to plead guilty to a crime and a Rico case. You know, those, those called for a lot of time. And these guys really, in my opinion, had never run away. I mean, you let them out on bond, they always came in. So they wanted him to spend the weekend going through a bunch of files while he was in my custody that were in the storage room before he took, or after he takes the plea, because it had to go and have something to do with his sentence. And I said, what the hell are we doing? We’re working over the weekend,
[10:33] watching this guy go through files. Why don’t you let him out on bond? They never run away. Well, he ran away.
[10:41] And I’m like, sorry about that, chief. To make amends, we started working the case. Now, here’s the odd part. Because he already pled guilty, that warrant came under our jurisdiction because we have Memorandum of Understanding. They call it an MOU. With the FBI, post-conviction, fugitives were ours. And now, if you understand what the marshal’s obligations really are in the Justice Department, It’s in support of the U.S. District courts. So everything related to court actions comes through the marshal. We were responsible for parole and probation. We were responsible for failure to appear. And any agency that didn’t have arrest authority, we would do their arrests for them, like at the time early on, the postal inspectors and then ATF. None of those agencies really had arrest authority. How do we used to do all of that? And so, but we were never getting any credit. Okay. So it was, it was one of my goals to make sure that we did get the credit for the things we were doing. So I assigned the case to a couple of really good deputies and they started investigating everything we could investigate about Ali Persego.
[12:06] Personally, every time I was in his company and he was in my custody, he was a perfect gentleman. He was not a wise guy, tough talking wise guy. And so he was respectful. We were respectful back to him. And with any prisoner, you know, a prisoner who acted up, we treated him a little differently. So anyway, he, the information was always that he was in one place or another. And we sent the task force up to Connecticut at one time, and they didn’t find them. They said, no, not here. We sent a couple of aid deputies to Texas. We sent them out to Florida and tracked all the leads that we could possibly track down. Nothing. Then the rumor, after almost six years, was that they always seemed to be a step ahead of us. Now, I took that as a real slam against me. If they’re a step ahead of us, is there a leak? And who lived in the neighborhood? Who knows them? And so I said, you know what? I sent the case to Washington with the deputy that was in charge who was promoted and had an assignment in Washington. They called me and asked me to take the case back. And I take the case back under one condition. Okay.
[13:33] That I’m not going to keep you up to date as I am. You’re going to get reports or you’re going to get them late. And I don’t want any interference from headquarters.
[13:43] Because like we’re in all departments, headquarters doesn’t know this case. We know it. The people in the street and the field that work in the case. And they gave me a consent to that. It was a boss by the name of Chuck Kupfer. He’s gone now, but he was a good boss. And so I took the case back And we decided, With the help of Washington headquarters That we would have A task force It would be under my supervision Now I’m a chief deputy So I got a lot of other responsibilities, And so I’m Working the task force In conjunction with all my other authority And responsibilities, And we come up with the idea That we’ve got to arrest somebody that was in the case with him who may be a weaker link. Okay. So I’m not going to get too deep into that, but we actually do. And we picked this guy up in Miami and myself and now my lead investigator, a guy by the name of, deputy by the name of Vic Oboiski, great investigator. We go to Miami and we learn that maybe Alley Boy had a, got a license to drive a car in Connecticut.
[15:05] So we come back out of that and I sit down and I say, look, I want to try something. I want to get a deputy from Connecticut to be on this assignment because if we make this arrest in Connecticut, it will be a slap in the face to that marshal. I didn’t want that to happen, even though the marshal was pretty tight in letting one guy go. But he did let a deputy by the name of Roderick go. And I sat down and I said, here’s what I want to do. I can think like they think, okay? Not many people could do that. But having grown up there and having been around all these people, I said, well, here’s what he’s going to do. He’s going to get a license that his name is going to end in a vow. He’s got a tattoo between his thumb and his forefinger on his left or right hand. I forget which it is now. And it says Al. So his first name is going to begin with the letter A.
[16:05] He’s going to be five inches taller or five inches shorter. He’s going to be five years younger, five years older. So let’s do a run, but not tell the DMV in Connecticut what we’re looking for. Because they supposedly had a guy that worked with the mob. Okay. So we do that and we get 7,000 names. Oh my God. And I said, well, it’s retirement central. People leave New York to go to Connecticut. So I said, okay, let’s knock it down. And we had a computer working simultaneously. No computers at this time with cell phones, you know. Yeah. Let’s knock it down. And let’s knock it down to anybody that had no credit rating five years before. Yeah. And so we got it down to about 700 names.
[17:03] And I’m walking behind one of the guys working a computer, and he’s looking at a bunch of names that ended in Y. So I said, what are you doing? He said, oh, by the way, this guy later became a chief, so I’m not going to send him this power. But he was highly educated. Yeah. So he instructed me that a vowel is A-E-I-O-U and sometimes Y. Sometimes Y. I said, you know any Italians whose names ends in Y? Oh, you’re getting on my last nerve. Vinny Perkowski. Goloski. Yeah, Vinny Perkowski. Forget about that school that you went to. The street now. So now we’re down to about 70 names. Okay. We eliminated a bunch and we come up with the name Anthony Perry. P-E-R-R-I.
[17:57] And I said, don’t stop. Keep going. and we come up with the name Al Longo.
[18:05] And Albert Lungo matches Alley Boy’s date of birth. So I got him. Now we start doing the background and we take the actual, you’re going to laugh at this. I mean, you’ll be in a detective. They take the actual application for the driver’s license. And I told him, I know it’s been handled, but you don’t handle it. Put it in a sealed envelope and send it to me. And Dave O’Flaherty, who was one of my supervisors of the Warren squad, got over to the NYPD and they used the fuming, you know, with the superglue. And they fumed the paper, okay? And, of course, we went to the high school where we said he went and there was no such person. And after all night looking through my eyepiece, I matched his right index finger on the back. Wow.
[19:04] This is no joke now. Wow. I don’t know if you remember the name Howard Safer. No, I don’t. He was with the FM Bureau Narcotics back in the day. Became a DEA boss, then got transferred over to the Marshal Service and later became the police commissioner for New York City. So he and I were pretty tight. And I called Howard and I told him, Howard, we ID’d him. This is no joke. This is real. This is real evidence. Yeah. And he’s like, wow.
[19:36] So while we’re doing this task force, Howard calls me about a week later and he says, we identified him as being in the Exuma Keys. And I said, you did what? He said, we know he was in the Exuma Keys a month ago. I said, no, he wasn’t. He said, well, how do you know? He said, how do you know he was in the Exuma Keys? He said, I sent one of my guys down. Your guy doesn’t know the difference. He’s got his nephew by the name of Alphonse Persigal. I could tell you the tail number on the plane he was on. Yeah. We’ve been watching them. We know them. Okay. He’s looking at the wrong Alphonse Persigal. Oh, my God. He says, you know what, Mike? After this, everything comes to you. Thank God you finally understood this. You got to send the information into the field. And so slowly but surely we started to zero in on him and i i had to go to philadelphia, and in philadelphia there was a forensic anthropologist who could recreate faces and make heads and lead deputy at the time had one head made but i didn’t like what it looked like, It didn’t look right to me. It was too clean.
[20:58] So his nose was too small. It was a lot of things wrong with it. So I know I might have got him angry, but I told him he had to make another head because this was his belly with the water. Why now? You know? And so he made the other head, and man, this one was right on target.
[21:16] So now me and Roderick, the deputy from Connecticut, we go up to the last known address of Anthony Perry, which was a big complex where there’s a lot of rentals in Connecticut. And we get to the office and we kind of feel good about the person we’re talking to. And they say, well, yeah, we did have Anthony Perry here, but he’s no longer here. Well, who moved into his apartment after him? Albert Longo. That’s the other name That’s the other name Is he here? No, he left too Leave any forwarding? No Okay So we know He used this apartment.
[21:59] So, and he later found out that one of the people involved, I’m not going to say his name, was later killed.
[22:07] I think the wise guys may have thought that he gave us information, which he did not. He gave it up. Now, explain to me, the Harry guy and then Longo guy, was that the same person that he just left under that name and then re-rented under his next name? So to keep the smoke cloud going out there, that is amazing. He had two phony IDs, and we picked them both off. Oh, were they both the same date of birth? Did they use the same date of birth? No, no. Okay. This long ago had the actual date of birth, and Perry did not. Okay. All right. Wow. You know, a guy could get confused, so I figured he was somewhere.
[22:52] And so we picked off both of the names that he was using. And now we’re confused because we get close and we talk to a person that lived nearby an address and they say, well, yeah, he lived here, but he sometimes had his wife a visit. His wife? Yeah. What did she look like? Well, she’s a blonde lady with an English accent. That’s not his wife. Yeah. An English accent. And they had a daughter. Well, Ali had a daughter. So we’re confused But we get through the confusion And we realize that this is a woman That he must be having some kind of good relations with Yeah And so we kind of zeroed in on her.
[23:41] And the best thing that we could do, and the most current thing that we could figure was, because she didn’t leave too much information behind, the phone. And the phone came back to an address, and we checked out the address, and he was there. And now they’re calling me, asking me what to do. What should we do? I said, what do you want me to do? Get in a helicopter and fly up there? You’re on the scene. Make the call. I’m backing you up. If we miss him, we miss him. Make the call. And you have my total support. And they said, we’re damned if we want to do any more surveillance. And boom, they went in, and he was there. Of course, a joke was made because he was making tomato sauce. And one of the newspapers said, Ali Boy a la court.
[24:32] With Cosmo a la court.
[24:35] And like I said, he was always a gentleman. And we did our job. He did his. We did our job and it was unfortunate for him and his family that he did die in prison. And so a few years later. Yeah. But like I said, we did what we had to do. And, you know, there was some, some veiled threats that came out of this, which we immediately faced, went face to face with some of these people and told them, don’t think you’re going to go to war with us because you can not win.
[25:06] Yeah, because he was, that was a Colombo family and they had Scarpa working under them. So Scarpa, Scarpa was a bad dude because he was, he was thinking out to the FBI at the same time. So, but he was bad. By the way, I helped that agent get over on his case. They tried him actually in front of a judge in the state court for conspiracy to commit murder. Oh yeah. I remember that. DeVecchio was that agent’s name. There was a woman who was very close to Alley Boy, a young woman. She was a really beautiful girl. And there was a rumble that she was an informant. Now, I personally went and tried to talk to her. She wouldn’t talk to anybody. She was no informant, but they killed her, you know. And it was too bad. I feel bad for her and her family, but it had nothing to
[25:54] do with it. Was that that Mary Berry? Was that that Mary Berry? Yeah, Mary Berry. Mary Berry, yeah. Scarpa is one of the key. Actually, the son. I read that story his son told about his son like held her or something and his dad killed her. I mean, let’s talk about a father and son murder team. Wow. Oh, the son was a strange. Matter of fact, he’s got a podcast. He’s out of prison. Yeah, I saw that. I saw that. Almost 40 years.
[26:17] And I remember him, like I said, it was my bedroom window. And I remember I didn’t like him either. and and one of the guys who I grew up with was a young guy by the name of Joe Brewster he was a couple of years younger than me and Scarpa Joe Brewster actually named one of his kids Greg he was very close and Scarpa Jr. Killed him shot him dead they believed that they were going to some party and turns around in the car and shoots him dead in the back of the car and so you know, I felt really bad for Joe. I thought Joey was a decent guy. I know he was a member of the criminal organization, as was his good friend. And my good friend that I grew up with was Robert Zambotti. They called him Bobby Zam. He died in prison after 23 years. Dealing with Scarpa. Dealing with Scarpa. Who was giving them up. They were doing bank burglaries and he’s sending the cops there. You know, crazy, crazy world. But I didn’t like any of those people. And like I said, my friends that I grew up with, I got fond memories, but it’s a shame.
[27:30] Anyway, in the middle of doing all of this, one of the FBI agents, a supervisor who was really a good guy and interested in solving cases, his name is Lou Shalero, contacted me and said, we got information that there might be some people coming to meet with Ollie Boy.
[27:51] Do you want to put some guys in with us? We’ll run a role in surveillance on him. He’s going to be around for a couple of days. I said, well, who is it that you’re going to be looking at? He said, we’re going to be looking at a guy by the name of Johnny Irish Matera. Well, I know Johnny Irish Matera. He had been a prisoner when I was in Southern District, And I used to walk him from this federal courthouse in Manhattan over to the state court where we were facing charges for an armed robbery.
[28:21] And so he knew me well. I spent days on end with him. Yeah. I said, I can’t be there, but I’ll send you, I’ll give you a couple of teams. So we sent a couple of teams of our guys and we knew that Johnny Irish was very close with Sonny Francis. And so, but he was staying in a place that was close to Sonny’s house, but he never went to see Sonny. And that was odd, you know, because Sonny was, you know, a very well-known guy in those circles. I actually arrested Sonny on a parole. Oh, did you? Personally. You know, and he was a gentleman. Yeah. You know. And so, and I know, you know the tough guys. The guys that don’t, that talk softly, you know they got real power. Okay. That’s what I’m saying. Sometimes some of these guys working in the government really don’t know the culture, you know. Yeah. Like, I wouldn’t know the culture in your town. You know, I’ll probably get beat up the first day I show them.
[29:21] So we do this surveillance, and believe me, they got great surveillance teams. And they’re following them down this highway that goes right kind of near where I lived, and they lose them. With all the cars that they got going, they’re being so sophisticated, they lose them. So they lose them around an area called Bay Parkway. We’ll say that’s, if you’re using numbers, that’d be 22nd Avenue. And I tell my guys, get off at 14th Avenue and get up onto 12th Avenue and ride along 12th Avenue between 86th and 75th streets because a lot of wise guys live there. And so they do that and they spot them. They’re on them. They duck back. They call in the surveillance team, and the surveillance team comes around and circles the area, wide circle.
[30:21] And eventually it got dark. I was at the headquarters with the U.S. Attorney at the time, Raymond Deary, who became a federal judge. And we’re doing a search warrant request. We’re going to go to a judge and get a search warrant for that house because it’s a third-party residence. Just in the case that Alley Boy’s in there. And so before we can get that warrant signed, one of the FBI agents says, I saw him go in. I’m pretty sure that’s Alley Boy. And they go in on what they call exigent circumstances. And Alley Boy’s not there, but his brother’s there, Carmine, who’s the boss of the family. So is a whole bunch of other mafia guys. And by the way, we got to get something straight about the mafia. The mafia is in Sicily. In the United States, there’s the Cosa Nostra. Okay. There are no mafia guys in the Cosa Nostra. There’s only one guy that I know who was in both the Sicilian mob and the American mob, but there’s no crime families of the mafia in America. It’s Cosa Nostra. They would be at war if they tried to come here.
[31:36] I even had an Interpol case on Giovanni Gambino, who’s the only person ever mentioned that he had.
[31:44] A soul been a soldier in the mafia in sicily and he was a member of the gambino crime family, but when he’s in america he’s working as an gambino crime family okay they asked me you think he could put up to do a locate and i said yeah i see him every day he’s on 18th avenue standing right out there so they said don’t do anything else that was in the pool okay don’t do anything else so yeah and we even worked interpol cases the marshals now what you mentioned there is somewhere i read that you had escorted that tomaso so yeah okay so now let me let me put this interesting guy where the raid goes oh yeah we’ll go back to the persico house snake they’re going to lock up everybody but they take down any of the information persico is on.
[32:40] Parole, Carmine’s on parole, and he’s going to be violated. And a few days later, he surrendered to me. And if you’re going to take a second, I got a letter here from my director. Can I read it to you? Yeah, yeah, go ahead. So he said, this is to me. I’d like to take this opportunity to express my appreciation and commend you for your outstanding work leading to the arrest of Carmine Persego, reputed head of the Colombo organized crime family for a violation of parole. After continuous surveillance, Deputy U.S. Marshals of the Eastern District of New York were able to infiltrate a meeting of the most important organized crime bosses in the New York City area, resulting in the revocation of Carmine Persego’s parole for consorting with known criminals.
[33:24] Blah, blah, blah. And I went on to, you know, the impact of this investigation cannot be overstated. The efforts of you and your colleagues have placed a tremendous pressure on organized crime families in and around New York. Other crime bosses present at the meeting are now under federal investigation of this arrest, coupled with intensive efforts to locate and apprehend his brother. So that happened while we were still looking for alley boy. Right. I was thinking at the time when you said you interrupted this meeting, do you remember anything else about who else was there? Was this like a commission meeting? Yeah, it was part of the Cavalcanti family from New Jersey. Okay. And a couple of old-time bosses. I don’t remember all the names, but there were quite a few. And it was a pretty heavy meeting. Yeah. One of the people, as John Matera showed up, I think he said to somebody that he thought he saw cops and supposedly Carmine said to him, if you thought you saw cops, why did you come in?
[34:36] He later disappears, never to be seen again. Ah, he paid for that. Johnny Irish material. Disappears, never to be seen again. He was out of Florida. Like I said, I couldn’t be on a surveillance. He would have spotted me in a car. It would have been over. Yeah. Like I said, I knew him quite well. And so that caused the boss of that family. Later on, with Ollie Boy away and that case now closed, a warrant comes over my desk for Rusty Rustelli, the head of the Bonanno crime family. Now, you know how some of these guys, 15, 20 guys to arrest somebody. I take a young deputy by the name of Mike Hollander. He died very young, natural causes. And I forget the undercover Cadillac we have that we got from a DEA seizure. And I said, let’s go and sit out by Rusty’s girlfriend’s house and see if he’s there. Just me and him. And so sure enough, after a while, Rusty comes out. I tell him, I tell Holland to stay in the car. I get out and I go on and my sunglasses on and I walk up behind Rusty and I tell him.
[35:52] Rusty get in the effing car and his lips started quivering i said u.s marshall you’re under arrest, and it’s like what are you making a joke out of this he said he said don’t you feel better now you didn’t know it was me at first i thought you did a different kind of ride yeah he did he did And he thought, oh, it’s all over. You’re cold, man. You are cold. I couldn’t resist it. It was so hard. I understand. And he and I, believe it or not, he was another gentleman. He actually had a feinting spell while he was in the detention area. And the deputy marshal that was behind him actually gave him a resuscitation and kept them alive. And then we actually had a doctor in the building that day, and the doctor came down and gave him an injection. Anyway, he wanted to thank me and all of that, and I was going to play a joke on him. But when he came into the office, it was quite nice. And I was joking a little bit with him, and he said, you know, he says, you think everything’s funny. I said, I do, because I’m out here. You’re in there. You’re in there, yeah. So later on, when a DEA agent was killed…
[37:14] Every, there was a full court press. Oh, I remember that case. Yeah.
[37:19] Yeah. Yeah. It was a full court press on catching the guy that did it. They know who it was. His name was Farachi. And I actually got messages to a lot of people, including Rusty Rustelli, who was the boss of the Bonanno Crime family that Farachi was associated with. And he ended up getting shot 10 blocks from my house and killed.
[37:40] So I responded to the scene. I was close by, and one of the young guys that was shot, whose name I’m not going to say, I went to the hospital, and I offered him protection. He had a couple of bullets in him, and I don’t need any protection. Yeah. Really? You didn’t hear a shot. You don’t need any protection? Nope. And his father told me the same thing. So I guess it was a mistake shooting him, whoever fired the shots. Yeah, he might have set the guy up, too, and, you know, a straight bullet caught him. A couple of wild shots. But anyway, for whatever’s worth, that’s how, in other words, you see how everything is related? Oh, yeah. And it’s all neighborhood stuff, you know. And you don’t know the neighborhood, and you don’t know the players and the people, you know. Yeah. One of the guys that was killed was the son of a cop. But he was a bad guy, you know. So I think a lot of these things happened and our association in dealing with all these people, including people that are arrested by other agencies, they kind of know who you are. They know how we treat them, make sure that they get fed the right stuff and make sure that they’re comfortable. You know, we had to get extra ventilators into the cell block area because we were getting a lot of foreigners coming in under arrest for crimes and that they were here illegally.
[39:07] And, but we started to show traces that we were exposed to TB.
[39:11] Yeah. And then was always the policy to have the agents stay with the prisoner. And I started getting them out of there and getting them to a safer area. As long as we had a BDA, we didn’t need to have them exposed as well.
[39:26] Everybody’s interest was at our interest, you know. Yeah, right. That’s one of the little known hazards of anybody that deals with people that are incarcerated or a street policeman, too, where you’re like up close and personal, you’re wrestling around with people is disease. I mean, that’s a huge deal. Yeah. Anyway, there came a time when, of course, I’m now a chief deputy, a senior chief deputy. Then I was the only guy that was told could handle this particular case.
[39:56] And I said, it’s around Christmas time. And so what are we doing? Well, you got to, there’s a guy in Sicily we got to get.
[40:06] So I get a team together and we make our way into Italy. And it’s Tommaso Buschetta, who was the head of one of the crime families on the outskirts of Palermo. And at war with Toto Reina, who was the other Sicilian boss of the biggest Bugata crime family there. And this was vicious. They killed almost everybody in this guy’s family. His two sons were strangled. Adult sons were strangled. His father-in-law was shot. His brother was killed. I mean, everybody was getting killed. So Tommaso Boucher gave himself up, And it was my job to get them back to the United States safely.
[40:51] And the first time I told you I had been assigned to the Marine barracks. And one of the assignments that the Marine barracks had was a field in Italy, in Naples, called Capodacchino. Capodacchino field was their big airport, but within that airport was a naval air station. And Marines would do the protection on the Naval Air Station. And me being a Lance Corporal at the time, I had the post on the gate. So you came in and you left with going through a military guy.
[41:27] And so having known my way around this airport, we now get there and there’s no Marines there. There’s a security guard hired by just the Department of Defense. Oh, boy. This area. You got to come out some bruschetta. I’ll say the name of this. This area is known as Secundigliano.
[41:50] Secundigliano is such a mafia-controlled area. Yeah. I’ll say it again. Mafia is Sicil. In Naples, in southern Italy, it’s Camorra. It’s not mafia. They’re Camorra. But the Comoristas run this whole area, and even the Carbonari, who’s a military police and local police, can’t get in there sometimes. So this is a dangerous area. We used to patrol the field where the planes were parked with riot guns. That was opposed to ours. So this is a dangerous area. So now I look, and there’s a security guy. And I said, well, we got time. We’re here early. Let’s go into the, to the, what they call the slop shoot where you get a coffee or something. And there’s an Italian guy working in there. He’s got one of them white caps on. And he goes, oh, you guys are here for Bouchetta? This is supposed to be a secret assignment. Oh, my God. The guy behind the counter. Oh, man. Bouchetta. So I said, well, what do you know about it? He said, well, the plane’s out there. And I’m like, where? He goes, see the plane there with those soldiers? I said, yeah, that’s your plane. And it was like a C-129.
[43:11] The counter guy knew that, too. Jesus. Wait a minute. The soldiers were Italian paratroopers, also known as Basiliati, and they were so close to the plane. I said, well, how do we know? The guy’s making like $10 a month. How do we know we’re going to get a bomb on this plane? So now I got to go there. I got to push them away from the plane. I got to search the plane all over again. And we say, okay, we think we’re in good shape. We got the pilot and his crew. And here we got now Buschetta and we put Buschetta on the plane. With us comes a DEA agent and an FBI agent and four Italian cops. And then there’s four or five of us and we get on the plane. There were no seats. You know, when I was in the Marines and we got on those planes, they gave us parachutes. This is a flying plane. It’s 129. So the plane takes off and it’s like, I’m doing it with my arms. It’s like this and rumbling and cold. And anyway, we go to Mendenhall, England. He’s already puked in every puke bed that’s on the plane. We get off of the plane. We, we pick up a one 41, a C one 41, much bigger, a couple of engines in the middle, still sitting on slant things. We find the Maguire.
[44:35] We get on a DEA aircraft and now we’re going to fly into LaGuardia where there’s a judge waiting for us to parole him into the country.
[44:46] So, so as, as the plane is now circling LaGuardia, Bouchette is sick as a dog. He says to me, Mike, please, please stay with me. I said, I can’t stay with you. I got a, I got a different command. Please stay with me because I could speak and I knew the dialect.
[45:06] So I tell him, I can’t do it, but I’ll tell you what I can do. I say, I’m getting this pilot. Will you land this plane and stop circling? What are you waiting for? Ground security? We’ll shoot it out with them. Let’s get on the ground. And we finally get him on the ground. And, you know, we part company, but he kept requesting my presence. But another guy I knew that grew up in Brooklyn took the job and he spoke the language as well. and they kept them in a place somewhere in New Jersey. And then he lived out his life in Miami. I read that. He had a son that wanted to join the military. Yeah. There’s a movie about that called Our Godfather. Yeah.
[45:47] And there’s a documentary about that too. It has all kinds of video of him down there in Miami and his family and everything. So much for the long arm of the mafia. He forgave the guy that strangled his two kids because he said he had a choice. Yeah. I mean, so yeah, that’s the story of Buschetta. One bigger guy than him and probably more dangerous was Michele Sindona. Michele Sindona was the financial advisor to the Vatican. I don’t know if you saw the movie Godfather III. Oh yeah, I did. It’s been a while, but yeah, there was some Vatican connections there. That’s based basically on this guy Sindona, who’s Sicilian. He took the Franklin National Bank, broke in the United States. Yeah. All over drug deals. Okay. And he’s telling me on our way, we’re going into Milan with him, on our way there that they’re going to kill him. And I said, well, they’re not going to kill you away with me.
[46:46] And the Italians have something, their answer to Alka-Seltz, it’s called Briozki. Okay. And if you have indigestion, you take some Briozki. And he had Brioski with him, but I wouldn’t give it to him. I didn’t know if somebody poisoned it or what.
[47:02] After we got him there, and we made our turnaround, and we’re making our way back, sometime later on, not that day, but later on, maybe months or even a year, he’s in the mess pool in the jail, stands up, said, I’ve been poisoned, and falls over there. He’s killed him. Yeah. While he’s in their custody. So those are a couple. Really? All right.
[47:28] Mike Pizzi. Those are some great stories. And guys, you got to get this book. It’s Adapt and Overcome. And Mike, you got that from your time in the Marine Corps, right? Adapt and Overcome. Yeah. I think I forgot to mention that at the start, but I’ll have images of the book. And guys, there’ll be a link to get this book down below in the show notes. So I really highly recommend you get that book. It’s got many more stories. They’re just as good as these stories here. These have been great, Mike. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing those stories with us. Just wonderful, wonderful stories. Don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. So when you’re out on the streets there and you’re a big F-150, watch out for those little motorcycles when you’re out. If you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, be sure and go to the VA website. They’ll help with your drugs and alcohol problem if you’ve got that problem or gambling. If not, you can go to Anthony Ruggiano. He’s a counselor down in Florida. He’s got a hotline on his website. If you’ve got a problem with gambling, most states will have, if you have gambling, most states will have a hotline number to call. Just have to search around for it. You know, I’ve always got stuff to sell. I got my books. I got my movies. They’re all on Amazon. Just go. And I got links down below in the show notes and just go to my Amazon sales page and you can figure out what to do. I really appreciate y’all tuning in and we’ll keep coming back and doing this. Thanks, guys.
