Fear City: New York vs The Mafia

People once called New York "Fun City."

Now the police and firemen's unions in New York are calling it "Fear City."

There was a dispute over here, and he gets shot in the head.

- -

- ...take that cocksucker out. -

This is a story about New York.

There's been a lot of muggings,

killings.

Seven people have been murdered, their throats cut with a foot-long knife.

It's a story about horrible acts of violence.

It seems organized crime may have turned an abandoned railroad tunnel

into a graveyard for as many as 60 people.

Twenty-seven people have been eliminated.

And then it's a story about greed for money and power and dominance.

Federal officials say the Mob's income

could total 60 to 100 billion dollars a year.

Ninety-seven-04.

New York was held in the grip of the Mafia.

...as I've tried to tell the president, the vice president, to Congress,

what's going on here, they're not listening. This is a war.

The director of the FBI said, "What are we going to do about this?"

This was billed as the biggest organized crime investigation ever.

We were gonna bug the Mafia.

- Is Jimmy there? - He left about five minutes ago.

We were gonna hear them on the tapes, with our very own ears.

["Hard Times" by Baby Huey and the Baby Sitters plays]

In the '70s, the city of New York was owned by the Mob.

I had seen what Italian organized crime

had done in the neighborhood I grew up in in Brooklyn.

A few summers, I worked for my uncle, Jimmy Schiavone, in a butcher shop.

My uncle, he owed money to the Mob.

The poor guy worked six days a week to pay it back.

Meantime, I'd see these wiseguys come in from the Bonanno crime family...

bulls.

And my... my uncle was in the back.

And he would be schvitzing.

He would be sweating, because they'd be threatening him.

They'd threaten his son, Joey, Jr.

They'd threaten my aunt, Aunt Lucy.

And actually they'd look at me and say, "Who's the kid, right?"

And he'd say, "No, no he's just the delivery boy."

But, man, that was frightening days.

You knew when you borrowed money from them.

They-- If you didn't pay on time,

they'd bend your leg and stuff it in your pocket.

My boxing trainer, my baseball coach,

my barber were all involved with the Mob.

And I started getting an education,

really understanding the street by the time I'm 14, 15.

By the time I'm the time I'm 17, 18,

I'm already collecting money.

And I'm told when to talk, when not to talk,

or when to just hurt somebody.

You wanna motivate 'em.

"Better have that money this fucking week.

If you don't have that money, I'm gonna come see you in a different way.

Have that fucking money." Now, when a guy comes to see me

and he insults me with $1,000, yeah, I hurt him.

After I hurt him, I tell him to go get me the rest of my fucking money.

Now there's no patience.

He doesn't have the money a week before then, I baseball bat him.

I liked lending money out to people. It was good business.

If somebody couldn't pay,

then the idea is we become their partner.

I acquired a Chevrolet agency that way.

Then I started making a lot of money

and started to use that life to benefit me.

The gasoline scheme was the biggest thing

that certainly I ever had.

There was a guy that had a small gas operation out in Long Island.

He comes to me, and he says, "Mike, I have a germ of an idea,

where we might be able to defraud the government

out of tax on a gallon of gasoline."

So he got my attention. I didn't like the government.

Puts the box on the table. Opens it up.

He said, "This is the first week's take in the gas business: $320,000."

From that point on,

I grew that operation to between eight and ten million dollars a week.

We were selling gas to branded, unbranded stations, everybody,

'cause we were undercutting everybody. We weren't paying the tax.

The FBI couldn't figure it out.

I'll never forget one day:

I was at my office at my automobile dealership.

Two FBI agents come in.

They said, "Look, we know you got something going on with this gas.

Just tell us how you're doing it.

You tell us how you're doing it. We'll give you a pass."

I said, "I dunno what you're talking about.

You wanna buy a car? I'll give you a break.

I like you guys. Don't worry about it."

But that's how frustrated they were with us.

They knew we were doing it, but they could never figure it out.

It was the golden era of the Mob.

The FBI couldn't keep up with us. There was no way.

- -

Our relationship with the Mafia... it was a cat and mouse game.

A very serious game, to be sure.

I can't tell you how many times a wiseguy would say to me,

"You do what you gotta do. I do what I gotta do."

I used to tell them, "Hey, you do your job. We'll do ours.

You catch us the right way, no complaints."

Their job is to lock you up. Our job is to get away with it.

You see them in a van,

you smile and you wave, because you're being cocky with them.

They'd either walk away or tell me fuck off.

If you didn't get told that in Brooklyn, you'd done something wrong.

There was organized crime investigations being conducted

in three separate FBI offices,

but each of them had their own idea about how to approach the problem.

So, there was organized crime, but very unorganized investigations.

We had no strategy. We had no plan.

When we would come across somebody we didn't know,

the only thing we could do was take a photograph of them.

Then we could go out to our informants and say, "Do you know this guy?"

They'd say, "Yeah, I know that guy." "What's he do?

What's his criminal activity? Who's he connected with?"

And then we'd put them on a board.

We had a very, very good idea of who was who

and how the Mafia was structured in New York.

The five Italian organized crime families were

Gambino, Genovese, Lucchese, Colombo, and Bonanno.

The families were very structured.

It started at the top with the boss,

then you had the underboss, who was really the second in command,

and then you had your caporegimes, captains,

and then you had the soldiers under them.

The way the families were structured gave us a very powerful position.

The biggest problem was that you could never get to an underboss

or the boss himself.

They were too well-insulated from whatever criminal activity was done.

They had no connection with it whatsoever.

The lower-level guys were out there committing the criminal acts

and kicking the money up to the higher-ups.

The average wiseguy, we knew what he was doing.

We put him in jail for a year,

but it didn't solve the problem.

Whatever their money making scheme was went right on,

virtually without interruption,

'cause there's a lot of guys waiting in the wings to take his place.

You know how I would spot the wiseguys?

-Well, particularly in the disco era... -Mm-hmm.

...they had the polyester waffle-weave bell bottoms.

They had the open neck, you know? They had to have the hair.

Then they'd have their toilette water on, you know, like that Old Spice, Hai Karate.

-Lilac water. -Ah.

Man, you light a match, you'd all be blown to kingdom come.

In the '70s, when we started moving heroin and cocaine, it was huge.

We were making a million a month.

We partied constantly.

All the gangsters used.

They'll tell you they never did, but they did.

Say nobody cheated on their wives, but everybody cheated on their wives.

Nobody drank champagne. We drank champagne day and night.

The wiseguys were collecting the moola-shmoola.

In the mean time, the city of New York was total anarchy.

The Bronx was burning like every night.

Buildings were being either torched by the landlord for the insurance

or torched by gangs.

There is a war in progress on the streets of New York

to see who's gonna control portions of the illegal drug market.

New York was lawless.

One hundred eighty-seven banks were robbed in this town this month,

and there's still another day left.

Bank robberies, hijackings, drugs, murder, extortion,

loan sharking, gambling, you name it.

Organized crime controlled virtually everything you can think of.

No matter how much manpower we put out there,

the Mafia ran virtually unfettered in New York.

The Guardian Angels

is a group of youths who have taken it upon themselves to fight subway crime.

We had to take the law into our own hands.

As Guardian Angels, trying to maintain law and order...

The cops didn't like it, but we said, "Tough noogies, too bad,

because you guys turned the city over to organized crime."

Look, I had a jet plane. I had a Lear 25.

I had a helicopter at that time.

I had a house in Florida, a house in New York.

I built a 7,000-square-foot house with a racquetball court.

We were untouchable.

Who's gonna stop us?

You felt like you had the power to do anything you want.

I didn't have any power to do anything.

We were lucky if we put one or two guys in jail every year.

I didn't feel New York was mine for the taking.

I thought we already took it.

New York was held in the grip of the Mafia.

The government was not controlling much of anything.

That was the worst part about it. People didn't believe that law enforcement

could do anything about the Mafia.

It was gonna be here forever.

We had a meeting in Washington, D.C.,

the Department of Justice.

The director of the FBI said, "What are we going to do about this?"