In this episode, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence detective, Gary Jenkins, interviews Gary Clemente, who offers profound insights drawn from his father’s legacy as a pioneering FBI agent in the fight against organized crime. Gary recounts his father’s pivotal role during the 1957 Appalachian mob conclave, detailing his unique rapport with notorious figures like Carlo Gambino and the psychological dynamics of engaging with mobsters such as Tommy Greco. We explore the complexities of mob fam...
In this episode, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence detective, Gary Jenkins, interviews Gary Clemente, who offers profound insights drawn from his father’s legacy as a pioneering FBI agent in the fight against organized crime. Gary recounts his father’s pivotal role during the 1957 Appalachian mob conclave, detailing his unique rapport with notorious figures like Carlo Gambino and the psychological dynamics of engaging with mobsters such as Tommy Greco. We explore the complexities of mob family structures across the U.S. and how Peter Clemente’s fluency in Sicilian and understanding of criminal culture enriched FBI operations. Gary shares stories from his father’s extensive writings, promising future revelations about their historical battle against organized crime and the impact of these narratives on American history.
0:07 Introduction to Gary Clemente
2:45 Peter Clemente’s Unique FBI Career
8:32 Encounter with Tommy Greco
12:50 The Threats of the Mafia
17:04 Respect Among Mobsters
24:00 The Mafia’s Structure and Connections
29:48 Stolen Goods and Local Crime
32:47 Nicola Gentile’s Memoirs
35:13 Hoover and the FBI’s Golden Era
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Transcript
[0:00]Well, hey, all you wiretappers, good to be back here in the studio of Gangland
[0:07]Introduction to Gary Clemente
[0:02]Wire. I have a guest who has been on before, Gary Clemente. Now, Gary Clemente’s dad was Peter Clemente, and he was one of the first members of the Top Hoodlum Squad in New York City and the first Sicilian FBI agent, I believe, that was assigned to the FBI anyhow. So, Gary, welcome. Thank you for having me back, Gary. Appreciate it. Long time no see. Yeah, really. Now, we talked about his investigation of Carlo Gambino before, and he was all over Carlo Gambino, and the Gambino squad even went down to Florida and ran some wires on him or hidden microphone down in Florida. Done. It was a pretty interesting story. So tell the guys a little bit, remind us a little bit about your father and what he was so unusual in that way. He was from Sicily, I believe, and spoke Sicilian, but was also attached to the Top Hoodlum Squad. So tell us about him. Exactly. Well, again, thanks for having me on, Gary. It’s an honor to be on your program. You You’ve got a lot of great information. You’ve got a lot of mob guys on there. You’re killing it on this program. No pun intended. Thank you. We like to kill it.
[1:24]Kill it, but not really kill it. Yeah, really. I can’t do the crime. I can’t do the time. You know what Beretta said. If you can’t do the crime, don’t do the time. Well, I can’t do the time, so I don’t really physically kill it. But anyhow, thank you. Well, my pop was Peter C. Clemente, and he was a special agent with the FBI from 1950 to 1976. And in the early part of his career, he was doing security background checks to see if people were trying to get positions in the federal government that were very sensitive and whether they were members of the Communist Party USA and the Socialist Workers Party. So then 1957 comes around and they have the Appalachian mob conclave with all the top mobsters that were there that got together. Many of the big shots were there. Gambino was there, Genovese, Profaci, all the big shots were there. There were about 60 or so of them. And when that happened, when that got revealed, my father heard about it. The FBI started to put together a top hoodlum program. And every city would have its own top hoodlum squad. My father was in the New York office at that time. He wanted to be part of the New York.
[2:45]Peter Clemente’s Unique FBI Career
[2:46]Top hoodlum squad so he put him for transfer into that squad because he said look i speak sicilian i wasn’t born in sicily my parents were born there my grandparents were born there but i speak the language and i could deal with these people well i was very attractive to the bureau at that time because they did not have that many sicilian speaking yeah fbi agents so he became a part of the top of the squad, and proceeded to investigate all of these mobsters. Some of the first things he did was he did the first ever summary reports about people like Carlo Gambino and even Meyer Lansky. Meyer Lansky was not a part of the mafia, technically speaking, but he was a big associate. He helped to make a lot of money for them. So he did the first government summaries for them. Eventually, my father became the first one ever to do a face-to-face interview with Carlo Gambino on the streets of Brooklyn, New York.
[3:49]Spoke with him face-to-face because he wanted to hear his voice, wanted to get the tenor and spirit of his voice. If they ever wiretapped him, my father would be able to identify his voice as the culprit, the one behind the crimes possibly being committed. After that in 1957 in 1962 my father became part of a wiretapping event that was the first ever time that carlo gambino had ever been wiretapped and this was a pretty monumental at the golden gate hotel slash motel in miami beach florida now picture this on one side of the room is Carlo Gambino in his suite, along with his wife Kate.
[4:35]And people like Tommy Palmer, who was really known as Tommy Greco, and Jimmy Palmisano. Two of his lieutenants that used to come and visit him in that suite. For six weeks, he was there. Now, on the other side of that wall, that suite was none other than somebody with a white reel-to-reel a tape recorder along with a partner listening in on the conversations and, of Gambino through the wiretap that they put in the A block. And Gambino’s man happened to be my father along with his partner, listening to his conversations and recording all of that.
[5:18]And as I mentioned, Tommy Greco, a.k.a. Tommy Palmer, was one of the trusted lieutenants that Gambino used to consort with at that suite at that time. and my father used to listen in on those conversations.
[5:37]Yeah, this Tommy Greco or Tommy Palmer, your father, he must have been a guy that was on the streets. He got out of his car, as we say. We used to have guys, some of them just stayed in their car. Some guys would get out in their cars and get on the streets and talk to these people and get close to them. And your dad must have been one of those guys because he had a little run-in with Tommy Greco.
[6:00]Tommy Greco became the only mobster that ever threatened uh peter clemente to his face and so you want to talk about that a little bit you got a whole chapter in your book here uh untold mafia tales from the fbi top hoodlum squad you got a whole chapter on old tommy palmer and this situation tommy palmer guys you may or may not know him he’s not exactly a household name and in the mob business but he was a he had been under lucky Luciano prior to ended up working under, uh, Carlo Gambino. And he was, uh, he was an old school guy that went way back to the Lonzas. He, he operated out of the Lonza restaurant, may have heard of Sox Lonza. He was in that family. Sox Lonza was a guy that ran the Fulton street fish market for the mob. And he was also the guy that, uh, the, uh, Navy went to when Lucky Luciano said he’d get people to help the Navy during World War II. These Lonzas, they were real instrumental in giving information about any possible saboteurs or Nazi spies during World War II.
[7:10]Tommy Palmer, Tommy Greco, he is a guy that was a witness to a lot of history back in those days. Tell us about Tommy Palmer and your father. Well, Tommy was a trusted lieutenant, as I said, with Gambino, and he was one of the individuals that visited a lot. With Gambino when he was at the Golden Gate Motel and the wiretaps were on. I don’t believe my father ever told Tommy that he was on the other side of the wall wiretapping him and was privy to his conversation with Gambino. I don’t believe that my father ever said that to him. He never told me whether he did or not. I don’t think that he did.
[7:54]But years later, after my father was transferred from the New York FBI office down to the Miami office. He was still investigating organized crime as part of the Six Squad, they called it. And my father used to drive by Tommy’s place at the Taramina Cooperative Apartments in the Hallandale, Hollywood area to visit in on him to see what he’s up to, to see if he’s dead or alive. Yeah.
[8:32]Encounter with Tommy Greco
[8:27]Because you didn’t know half the time. Somebody could just think he’s up and disappear. And if he’s one of your subjects, you need to keep up on all of this. So every once in a while, he would visit Tommy, but not in a very social way. Tommy never liked it. He was always bothered by it, very annoyed by it. When my father would come by and see me, you probably know that too, Gary. You investigated the people. You would visit them, keep up on them. They didn’t want to see you. They weren’t very happy about it.
[8:57]So one day my father went to see him knocks on his door Tommy opens it up Tommy’s upset about this and he winds up pointing a finger, You know, my father like this. And he was really, and then he shook his head. And he said, these are the words he said that my father wrote down. He said, Clemente, if I’m the bad guy they say I am, did you ever stop to think I might get so pissed off at you that I might do to you what I’m supposed to have done to others? I’m older than you, and I’m sick, and I could croak any day now. I have less to lose.
[9:43]Well, that is not a very nice thing to say to somebody. They’re very socially. My father knew that that was a veiled threat. My father studied his face to see how serious he was. He said he didn’t blink. He didn’t turn away his eyes at all. He was serious. My father knew that he had to come back at him. He says, he told Tommy, he says, Tommy, the thought came to my mind that you and some of your Amici friends might be so foolish. Because I know Carlo Gambino told his guys that it was slow season on FBI agents. Anyone who hits an agent would get whacked. Carlo even said it would start a war with the FBI that Costa Nostra was sure to lose. Yeah. So my father told him, he said, look, Tommy, you’ve got to remember that.
[10:45]During the war, while you guys were stealing meat and gas ration coupons, people my age and the other agents that eventually became agents, we were overseas killing enemy soldiers wholesale while you were doing this selfishly on your own. And you think that you’ve got me reined in by the laws? You can’t rely on getting people by hitting agents because I don’t fit the FBI mold 100%. I’m Sicilian, Tommy, like you on both sides. Oh, man. And my mother, he said, my mother told me when she learned I was investigating USOBs, If anything happened to me, she wouldn’t stop with the guy who did it, but would kill the products of his seed. All of them. Old school, man. That’s the Sicilian in her talking. That’s my grandmother talking. And she’s an original gangster. That’s what you call the original OG. OG, yes. Yeah, that’s not bad. That is a vendetta of vendettas there when your grandma says that.
[12:04]My grandmother, my grandmother, my father’s mother, was not part of the mafia in any way. They were honest, God-fearing people. They were subject to the crimes of the so-called men of dishonor. They call themselves men of honor, but they were really men of dishonor. So my father’s family, they were honest people. So my father told him, he says, look, I’m not counting on my mother to do what I can do myself, but I’ve got to take what you’re saying and… As a veiled threat. And I have to think about taking a preemptive strike at you first. My motto is shoot first and ask questions later. Wow.
[12:50]The Threats of the Mafia
[12:50]So Gary, you want to know what he said after that?
[12:55]Tommy says, if you have any intention of killing me, you had better do it here and now. Because if I leave here convinced that you mean to have me killed, I will look for the soonest opportunity to put your lights out.
[13:12]Now, why did he say that? He said that because the FBI, Hoover, the Bureau taught their agents that you must, if you get yourself into a situation like this, you must dominate the situation. You must get a handle on it. You must not think that you’re weaker than they are. Because if they believe that, they will smother you. And I think you understand that, Gary. You even get to get a lot of people like that yourself. That’s the streets, man. That is the streets. Whether you’re a uniformed policeman out there or a detective or whatever, that’s the streets. And once they sense any kind of weakness, sometimes they’ll take kindness for weakness. And once they sense any kind of weakness, they will not stop. They will not stop until they dominate and they push you clear aside so you got to come back even if it’s pure bluff even if you’re getting you know you’re in the middle of a crowd or something and you’re going to get hurt bad before any help gets there you cannot back down you’ve got to keep it up and keep it going so that’s the only thing I respect is power, Exactly, exactly. Now, these mafia guys of that era.
[14:28]Gary, you know that all these guys, in order to get made as a mobster for the FBI, you had to kill somebody after orders. That was part of the if you want to call it an initiation yeah you had to that’s that’s really the way morally speaking that you bring somebody down to your your immoral level so that you’re all in the same cesspool together and you can’t really can’t really say well you i’m better than you are because i did not kill anybody well you did so tommy was one of these people and and many Many of these people have killed more than one individual. They’ve killed many. I don’t know how many of the Tommy killed, but he certainly made his bones by killing someone to become a part of the mafia. And my father understood that.
[15:19]So the other thing about my dad that was really great, he was a tough agent, but he was fair. And he would talk to these guys by giving them respect, not talking down to them. Because Italians, in general, we understand respect. If you show me respect, I’ll show you respect. Even whether it’s mobsters or people in the mafia. Give me respect, I’ll show you respect. That’s what my father did. Now, there were other agents that were not of Sicilian descent who were Anglicized, but they didn’t quite understand this. And they felt that they needed to talk down to these people in order to assert themselves. But my father completely understood that. So that’s why he was able to speak with Gambino the way they did on the street for a while. Now, I will tell you that after my father said all that.
[16:23]This is what Tommy said in return to after what my father said to him, I will come after you. So Tommy said, look, your mother sounds like my mother. God rest her soul. She used similar words when I was having a problem with a guy, a partner of mine. I didn’t say I was going to do anything to you. I said, suppose. Suppose is pure speculation. Hey, look, I like you, Clement. Even though you’re a pest and you cramped my style around here, it was no different with you in New York when I knew you back then. No, I take that back. You were worse.
[17:04]Respect Among Mobsters
[17:05]But do you think you you think i like you coming around on me and seeing all my neighbors talk you know talk having me talk to you look i’m not a young punk anymore you know i’m just i’m just a gambler i’m not here to bother anybody just look let’s both back off the call of truce okay.
[17:29]Yeah he backed him down but he let him save face too he backed him down but he let him save face, which is important it’s really important he gave he gave him respect yeah he gave him respect now no why did he why so my father says look i will i was i will stand down i would tell my troops to stand out but we’re not going to stack our guns now you have to you have to understand.
[17:59]Another reason why my father came down so hard on him is because you don’t know individually what these people are thinking sure gambino may have told all of them if you whack an fbi agent you’re going to get whacked yourself yeah that may be but a lot of these people these are psychopaths killers and thieves okay they’re not exactly normal individuals they could have a screw noose or two and you say something to them or you visit them at the wrong time and they they snap and they put out a contract on you yeah or they they may take out a weapon themselves but more likely they’ll put a put a put a contract out on you and campino even in his later years he was subject to doing that. He had a nephew of his that had been kidnapped and murdered, And he found the individual that did that, put out a contract on this particular person and have them whacked. Oh, yeah. I remember that deal. That was Gotti took. That’s how Gotti made his bones. That’s where Gotti made his was a guy named McBratney. I think John McBratney was an Irish guy that was kidnapping these Italian gangsters and holding them for ransom. and they killed Gambino’s nephew and Gotti’s the one that did that, him and that Angelo Ruggiano.
[19:27]That’s true. That’s very true. Now, there’s another reason, Garrett, why Greco, Tommy Palmer, had done this. My father said, well, maybe he’s getting older now. He’s sick. He says, I told him. He says, look, you need to take care of your sugar diabetes, get your blood pressure in there and your blood worked up. You know, don’t, I don’t want you to, you know, we may not like each other, but that doesn’t mean I wish death on you. So we told him to take care of himself. And he figured the reason why maybe he spouted off like he did, because my father had visited him many times before then. This wasn’t the first time. Maybe it’s because he’s getting old, he’s getting depressed, and this is his last shootout, so to speak.
[20:18]Yeah, really, it could be. It’s interesting. You know, those mob. You can tell the other guys, yeah, this agent came by and I popped off him. I can’t get the hell out of here. I’m going to do something. I’m going to pop him, you know, and he ran off. You know, that’d be a nice story for him. You know, these mob threats are really interesting. I learned this back when I was a young policeman.
[20:39]I overheard a mob guy talking to another guy. And, and he was, it was just kind of like normal conversation.
[20:48]So, you know, I kind of remember as much of it, as much of it as I could. I knew that he, the Bob guy wanted something out of this guy and, and he was, he was not a mob. The other guy was not a mob guy. He was a peckerwood as they call us here in Kansas City. He makes not Italian as a peckerwood. So I go back and I, and I talked to kind of the career main FBI agent. And I tell him, I relate this conversation. And he said, well, now tell me exactly what he said. He said, because these guys, they won’t give you, they won’t do a direct threat. It’s all in how they say things many times rather than what they say. And so I had to repeat it exactly and try to give him some impression of how it was said, because that’s what they’ll do. They’ll, uh, there’s a, yeah, I got a wiretap. That way you can’t come back with their exact words on them. It’s this indirect stuff. I got a wiretap where this guy, uh, Joey Lombardo was talking to this Morris Schenker who’s a lawyer from St. Louis, but he was, he was Hoffa’s lawyer and, and he owed, they felt like he owed a guy named Alan Dorfman up in Chicago, who was Chicago’s mob guy in the teamsters owed him a kickback on a casino loan. And he, He won’t pay it. And Lombardo gets on the phone, and he says something to the effect of, well, he said, you say you’re 72.
[22:16]You know, he said, you know, you want to see 73, don’t you? And then he later said, you know, he said, what are you going to do? You could put one guy in jail. You know, me, you could put me in jail. You could put one guy, but I’m just one guy. And then just dropped it at that, you know. And, you know, what he was saying was, you know, if you don’t pay this loan, you ain’t living to 73. and if you want to, you know, you can go complain about it, but maybe you can put me in jail, but there’s a whole lot more guys behind me. But he didn’t have to say all that. He just had to say, you know, I’m one guy. You can put me in jail. Go ahead and just stop there. It’s just, it’s amazing how they couch these things where you can’t say directly that they’re threatening to kill you, but you know what they mean.
[23:00]Exactly. Well, that’s why they have all these buffers, you know, Gambino and the rest of the Profaci, all these bosses, they had all these buffers. And everything had to be approved. You could just go out willy-nilly and kill somebody just because you felt like it. If you were a street soldate, a soldier, you couldn’t just kill somebody. You had to get permission. And if you didn’t get permission and you killed somebody, they would kill you. Because, look, back then they wanted to keep things quiet as much as they could. They didn’t want a lot of press. They didn’t want a lot of publicity. And Gotti was the antithesis of all of that. He was the one who ruined everything for them because he was too out in the open. He wasn’t like Gambino who died peacefully in his bed at the age of 76 without creating a lot of ruckus. So that’s an important part of how the mafia operated.
[24:00]The Mafia’s Structure and Connections
[24:01]They dealt, as you know, Gary, you know, the mafia would not have been as successful as they were if they did not have the cooperation from a lot of local groups.
[24:12]Uh, police forces. Yeah. And I’m sure you, uh, you, you understand that full, full well too, but listen, I’ve got to ask you a question. You know, every, um, uh, the, the, the mob will call themselves in code. They’ll call themselves the organization or they’ll call themselves the outfit or they’ll call themselves Alex King. And it depends on the area. In Kansas City, what did the mob call themselves? Did they call themselves the outfit or the organization? What did they call themselves? You know, it’s kind of a little known thing. They called themselves the clique.
[24:47]And people that were close around them called them the clique. And I learned this. I was talking to an old guy who was an associate, long-time associate. And he was talking about how he, he, he wanted to start the first Taco Bell franchise in Kansas City. He said, man, he said, if I’d have got the money for that, he said, I would have made a fortune, but I couldn’t get it. I couldn’t get anybody to loan me any money. And he said, I even went to the click and they wouldn’t loan me any money. And I said, the click, he said, you know, you know, the guys, you know, you know what I mean? I said, oh, okay. So since then, I’ve seen that in an old, uh, I think it was an old, uh, it was a transcript of an old hidden microphone. One of those ones that the bureau used to put in without any kind of, uh, of, uh, court orders or anything, you know, like they did back in the fifties and sixties. And they were talking about the click. So, but it never really gained any traction outside the mob, but within the mob, they were the click and they sometimes, uh, the FBI started calling the outfit here. So I heard that a lot. And I think it’s because they were so close to Chicago, but within themselves, it was a click. Really? Interesting. Now, I do not recall how many.
[26:03]How many guys you had in the in the kansas city family how many did they have there never was a lot probably uh you know let’s go on up into the 60s and 70s there was probably 10 to 15.
[26:18]Probably 12 i’m talking of the 12 mate actual maid guys and they were older guys that came out of the 30 40s and 50s that were still alive and and so that that was all there was they had a lot associates they had a lot of crews out there working you know like one guy willie camisano he had he had several crews out there working of professional thieves that if they needed something done and they brought everything to his fences and he and he and he had several fences around you like had one guy did nothing but uh record albums had had one guy that did nothing but uh like stuff you would steal out of a store like a pharmacy or a grocery store or something that you know, the small items that were high dollar razor blades and film and all that kind of stuff. And there’s another guy that dealt in clothes only. And so that’s kind of how it was broken down. Right. Right. Well, it’s not surprising that you have maybe, uh, maybe less than a couple of dozen, because when you, when you think about it, Carlo Gambino was the most powerful mob boss, not just in the United States, but in the entire world.
[27:24]And he had over 200 individuals. And you said, you said, well, 200, that doesn’t sound like a lot. But if you add up, my father estimated himself that if you added up all of the families in the United States that existed, Chicago, New York, Detroit, Kansas City, Buffalo, New Orleans, all of these families, Philadelphia, if you added up all of them, the maid members, if you added up all of the associates, all of the associates that they dealt with, and the people that the associates dealt with directly, you probably had, he estimated, 88,000 individuals across the entire country that were thieving and stealing billions and billions of dollars in the United States at that time when the mafia existed from its golden years of the 50s all the way to the end of the 80s. Yeah. So that was a lot of people.
[28:31]Another thing that people don’t realize is, of course, you compare Kansas City to New York. Like we have twelve hundred policemen and they have forty thousand policemen in New York City. So that’s you kind of see the difference in what’s going on between these two cities. But they also had so many other. Connections, you know, that you wouldn’t call them associates. They were not even criminals for the most part. They were just people that everybody knew out in the community that liked them. You know, everybody likes to have something that fell off a truck. Everybody likes to gamble. Everybody likes to drink and things like that. And especially the gambling area and the buying stolen property. And you had all these people out here that then if they could get hold of them, they needed something, you know, they could get something done. I talked about having connections all over the United States as a podcaster here with all you guys that write mob books and everything and other mobsters and policemen. Well, these guys have these spiderwebs of connections of hundreds and hundreds of people that they can be friendly to them and they can get something from or can get some kind of help. So it’s a fascinating, fascinating topic.
[29:48]Stolen Goods and Local Crime
[29:48]Exactly, exactly. Exactly. Everybody’s touching that pie a little bit. They want a little piece of the edge.
[29:57]A shipment of truckload of razor blades. I can go buy some razor blades for about half the price that it cost me down at CBS. I mean, why not? I mean, why would I? Here’s a good story. I was a sergeant over the general assignment unit, they called it. So we had check forgeries and frauds and credit card fraud. And one was a shoplifting squad. We had like a couple of detectives assigned to handle follow-ups on shoplifts. Or if you get a professional shoplift in a shoplifter in that on their second, third conviction, you then file felony charges on them, even if it didn’t rise to the level of money that the property is worth, you can still file felonies on it. So these guys would handle that. One time, this young guy came in, he’s kind of a new detective. He came back into the unit and he said, Sarge, he said, man, he said, there’s this place down the city market and they’ve got perfume, they’ve got razor blades, they’ve got toothpaste, They’ve got all that stuff. It’s half the price I have to pay at the drugstore. And there’s another old-time detective sitting there. We look at each other. And the guy’s name was Cosgrove. Joe Cosgrove said, Vince, do you know anything about that place down there? Well, no, but it’s cheap.
[31:20]I said, Vince, don’t go down there anymore. That stuff’s all stolen. It’s all stolen by boosters. and then that guy buys it from them and then sells it. Oh, I never thought about that. I was like, come on, dude. What do you think? It’s one of those places you go down and you want to buy, but you don’t want to know where it came from. Exactly.
[31:41]It wasn’t made in China. Yes. That is why it’s so cheap. Hey, Gary, I have to ask you, you know, you’re there in Kansas City. You worked in Kansas City. You’re part of the law enforcement department. Uh background of kansas city were you aware of of the uh one of the one of the original gangsters of the mafia nicola gentile were you aware of him i i’ve read about him yeah well he did he did head up the kansas city uh uh mafia family yeah for a while i believe it was back in the might have been the 20s could have been the 30s but he also they also had him head up uh interim uh the cleveland and detroit families as well too if memory serves me but i know it was definitely kansas city and he talked about that and my father was
[32:47]Nicola Gentile’s Memoirs
[32:38]the first one ever to do the translation of Nicola Gentile’s memoirs. Ah, interesting. And this was a fascinating story. There’s something else we could talk about for another hour. Yeah. But his memoirs, you don’t write these things down if you’re in the mafia. Yeah, really.
[33:02]And he wrote it down. I saw the papers, and my father brought the papers and tape recordings. Yeah. of him to my to his mother to my grandparents who spoke very fluent Sicilian and they helped my father translate the wording of Nicola Gentile exposing the mafia and what they were doing now he was he was the Joe Vellacci of his time before Joe Vellacci ever happened yeah and he did head up the Kansas City, outfit at one time. I guess I didn’t realize that. Did that end up becoming a book or getting printed or anything? Or is that just like in the FBI archives or something? It was released in the news.
[33:58]It did get out to the news. I have to look some of that up. You will find a couple of news stories about it and the FBI knowing about all of this. But my dad was the one who translated his memoirs. And I have his, I’m looking around, I’ve got those memoirs with me. My father left those papers behind for me. Oh, interesting. It’s fascinating. He was a guy, if I remember right, this local FBI agent used to work with a lot, Bill Owsey, wrote a book called Open City, and he really deals with, he goes into that in depth. And I remember Gentile, he was a kind of a guy that seemed like they sent around to help organize different families in the early days, and he moved on after the family got organized and he would move on because he didn’t stay in Kansas City. It sounded like he organized Cleveland and that other one. Right, right. You might say he was like the original doge.
[35:05]Coming in and getting things organized and run more efficiently.
[35:13]Hoover and the FBI’s Golden Era
[35:10]Got everything organized, cut the fat in the waste, and then he moved down to a different city. Yeah he was uh and uh after writing these memoirs you think he would get clipped he would get killed he did he did not get killed he wound up uh escaping escaping if you want to call it that leaving for sicily yeah and uh they they uh they never laid a finger on him so that’s that’s very very extraordinary yeah that is that is that’s a heck of a heck of a story there we’ll have to maybe do a show on that i have to i have to look up a little more about him let’s let’s talk about that and we’ll do that in the future the ages of the fbi my father included.
[35:52]Had a love-hate relationship with J. Edgar Hoover. He was an amazing individual. He was the general patent of his era. You know, the Blackjack Pershing. People would be these outgoing, off-the-wall personalities, and Hoover was like that. But I’ve got some inside stories about Hoover that people have not heard before that I will be sharing. Okay, good. So stay tuned. All right. Gary Clemente, I look forward to your next book. And guys, you got this book here, Untold Mafia Tales from the FBI Top Hoodlum Squad.
[36:43]Peter C. Clemente was one of the first members and the first definitely Sicilian member of the Top Hoodlum Squad. His son, Gary Clemente, we’ve got Gary with us here, wrote this book, and he’s got several more things coming from his father’s writings. And almost like he didn’t really leave a memoir exactly, but he left a memoir in a lot of different writings is what I hear you say. And you’re utilizing that to tell the stories. I’ve got a stack of papers, you know, that high. Oh, by the way, the book is available on Amazon.
[37:19]Okay. Guys, I’ll have links to the book down in the show notes, whether you’re on YouTube or the other or not. All right, Gary, thanks a lot for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. You’re welcome. Thank you for having me, Gary. Don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles, so when you’re out on the streets there in your 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 going. 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.
