Christian Cipollini
speaker
28 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Christian Cipollini’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Hi, Anoushka. Thanks for having me.
It was a big enough issue in the 20th century that by the 1950s, the United States Senate decided to have some hearings into related racketeering, antitrust kind of things. The problem was you had law enforcement agencies like the predecessor to the DEA
The Bureau of Narcotics was aware of organized crime, Italian, Jewish, etc., whereas the FBI, led by J. Edgar Hoover, was sort of in denial until the late 1950s, 1960s. When you have this disjointed kind of federal legal issue dealing with something that most people knew was the elephant in the room, the mob does exist. But what the mob did in the United States, particularly from –
1920s through the 1960s is they ran everything that was illegitimate and a lot of legitimate businesses so yes you have gambling prostitution narcotics but then they also had up until you know really the 1980s early 90s control of legitimate businesses like garbage disposal was a big one construction businesses And where was the epicenter of this large network?
New York City, where the five families, as they were dubbed, the five main mafia families. But the mob was so big and extensive. You had the groups that ran the show, and then you had associates spread all over the place. Everybody knew there was a mobster on every other corner, if you wanted to call them that, and they had influence economically and socially.
It's become almost Americana, a little bit of the fabric of the United States. So the federal government looked at this as an issue because they were making money and there were bad things happening to make that money.
This is fact. You cannot operate on a multi-million dollar level, talking about, you know, decades ago, and that would be billions if they were doing it. You cannot successfully operate at that level unless you have people in your pocket that are in politics or high up in business organizations on the legitimate end. So yes, it's not a conspiracy.
I mean, it is conspiracy, but not conspiracy theory. You cannot operate on that level unless you have that. Gangsters are opportunists. An opportunity arises. Take a prohibition in the United States. They took away alcohol. They swooped in, and it was the same with narcotics. There's some denial that the mafia didn't deal drugs in the United States. I can assure you, yes, they did.
It followed right in the footsteps of alcohol prohibition. They fell around the same time. But yes, prostitution, gambling, extortion, loan sharking, basically charging high interest to give a loan to somebody that can't get it from the bank. So what happens though when you become an organization large that conducts most of its business in the shadows?
You can't call the police if something happens. You have to police yourself. So what does that create? Murder and mayhem. Hence the dark, bloody side of the mob in America. How do you police your own organization? By violence, essentially.
That's a great way you pointed that out, because the federal government wasn't inept. They understood, at least certain departments were well aware that some people are in charge and some are the minions. But the problem is insulation. Setting up any kind of an organization, you insulate your CEOs, your CFO from potential lawsuits in legitimate business.
from danger that's what the mob did when you made it through the ranks in the hierarchy you were afforded certain protections other people were going to take the fall for you it's almost like if you signed up for this job you were a street level soldier and to your point the government was having a very difficult time getting the guys they knew were calling the shots down the hierarchy
Sure. The Sicilians, you know, two centuries ago really came up with this kind of existential concept of omerta. It can be – people have different definitions of it, but basically it means you take care of things yourself or within your group. You don't speak to law enforcement. You don't snitch on somebody, rat them out. That stuck with almost every organized crime group in the United States.
It didn't matter what ethnicity or if you were part of the mob, the rule was you get caught. You take that.
The five family structure was born in 1931 when the young Turks, as they were called, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, guys like that, Al Capone in Chicago, they all came up together and they thought, why do all these Sicilians and Southern Italians fight with each other and rob each other? Why don't we...
take that idea of not one giant boss but a bosses in sections and geographic areas and we work together that was essentially the birth of the five families which ultimately sort of called the shots for the entire country although every major city had their own families from philadelphia to los angeles san francisco
But a lot of them would still answer back or at least seek the influence and approval of New York. So, yeah, even though they're all supposed to get along and they sit on a board of directors throughout the 70s, 80s, there was a lot of backstabbing. The federal government was aware and thus jumped to 1970.
Okay, the mafia exists, the mob's a real thing, we've got some turncoats that showed us what it works like. How do we get the guy who committed the crime, the guy in the middle, and the guy who made the call? That was it.
Sure, when Recode was instated, it in and of itself is a super complex kind of law. Not everybody understood it. I'm not sure the government knew exactly how to use Ricoh. Until early mid-1980s, they tried again. And it really was about getting the mob. So everybody knows. The reason they even started this is to go after the mob and any groups sort of like that. In theory.
Well, somebody probably everybody's heard of by this point was Rudolph Giuliani was the one when he stepped into the role of state attorney in New York in the early 1980s. He decided to wage a war against organized crime. He had money. He had a presence and a voice and he used it to apply Rico to go after the five families, the bosses and everybody underneath that they could.
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