Patrick Girondi recounts his journey from Chicago's South Side to Italy, where he established San Rocco Therapeutics to treat his son's thalassemia and Wilms tumor using lentiviral vectors. He accuses Bluebird Bio of sabotaging his cure with a mutant gene, engaging in insider trading worth over $100 million, and prioritizing profit over patient safety while facing FBI investigations and IRS audits. After a 2021 settlement allowed him to regain his product, Girondi continues fighting FDA approval, arguing that corporate greed and political division undermine true medical innovation and social justice. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
Time
Text
Growing Up In An Italian Enclave00:14:28
Thank you.
Explain your book, Flight of the Rondoni, or maybe before that, just explain a little bit about who you are and what your background is.
Okay.
I'm originally from the south side of Chicago.
I grew up in an Italian enclave, basically, you know, 5,000 miles away from Italy.
And I have 13 brothers and sisters, basically with half-brothers, stepbrothers, et cetera.
But for me, they were always all my brothers and sisters.
Live the American dream.
First I was in trouble.
Judge Clarence Bryant sent me to the military when I was 16.
I couldn't go into any military but the Air Force because they were the only ones who had what was called the late enlistment program.
So my mother signed and I went into the Air Force when I turned 17.
I got out when I was like 19 because my mother needed help at home.
So I got a hardship discharge, which is an honorable discharge.
And I started working on the docks in Chicago.
A friend of mine needed someone to take a job as a runner at the Chicago Board Options Exchange.
It ended up being me.
A couple years later, I was a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show as a ragster richest story.
Later, I was a guest on her show again as a famous American chauvinist.
I was in Playgirl magazine with Sylvester Stallone and Magic Johnson as one of America's most eligible bachelors in 89, I believe it was.
And I got married.
My oldest son was diagnosed with a very rare blood disease.
In 92 October and I dropped everything and threw my life into trying to cure sickle cell disease and thalassemia, which is the disease that my son has, and the reason I say both of those diseases, because they're both defects on the beta-globin gene.
So you cure one, you cure them both.
And there's a hundred thousand sickle cell disease patients US.
There's only 2500 thalassemic patients.
Our mutual friend of ours, Art Williams, the counterfeiter, put us in touch.
How did you meet Art?
Yeah, Art's for my neighborhood as well.
My brother Georgie, God rest his soul, hung around with art, you know, and our kids.
And art's a typical neighborhood guy, just like I tend to believe I'm a typical neighborhood guy.
You know, it's a blue-collar enclave, Italian mostly and Irish predominantly, back then especially.
And, you know, he said, hey, I got this nice guy, Danny.
I want to put him in touch.
He's got this good show, and I think you're made for it.
And, of course, my book, Flight of the Rondone, you know, just hit.
the stores three or four days ago.
You can get it on Amazon and BAM, and here it is.
Flight of the Rondoni.
And of course, if nobody reads the book, it doesn't do anybody any good.
What started you on this journey from, like, what was your early life like?
Like, you were born where?
Yeah, so I was born on the south side of Chicago to an Irish father, an Italian mother, but I grew up in an Italian neighborhood because my father was never around.
Then I don't remember how old I was.
He said he wasn't my father.
I mean, I really don't.
care about all that nonsense.
But I do have my mother's maiden name.
I lived a wonderful life.
You know, I love it how people, you know, everybody wants to whine and complain and cry today, you know, woe is me, whether it's a special interest group called Me Too or Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ, you know, it's all about, oh, woe is me, woe is me, we're discriminated against and all of that.
Well, all of us, every single one of us has hardship, heartbreak, et cetera.
And I'm one of the believers that the hardship and heartbreak is what make us who we are.
And I'm very lucky and fortunate and happy that on the south side of Chicago, I had a lot of experiences stealing cars and, you know, stores and whatever I did to, you know, make ends meet.
And I'm happy about it.
I'm happy who I am.
I'm glad there was nothing hard about it.
I got beat up a bunch of times, shot at.
You know, I was, you know, part of an FBI and three FBI investigations, you know, I mean, but in the end, it's not woe is me.
I mean, lucky me that I went through all these great experiences and I am who I am.
My life has just been wonderful and continues to be wonderful.
And I'm saying that, you know, the father of a child who in 1992, they said wouldn't make it to be 14 years of age.
He would die and he would live a horrible existence.
And, you know, I can say that it was a wonderful life and it is a wonderful life.
And luckily my son, because of experimental medicine and other advances, today is 32.
He owns a restaurant.
He's a great, great young man.
Yeah, I mean, adversity.
I mean, you know, I get crazy.
Yesterday I was reading an article where schools are going to start, you know, giving grades to kids that they consider darker skin than the others.
They're going to give them extra points on their grades to try to make up for discriminations of the past.
I mean, it's just insanity.
I have no idea where these people come from.
If I had a tougher background growing up, I've actually got the advantage, not the disadvantage.
So I come from a family.
There wasn't a lot of cake.
You know, a lot of fighting, shooting, 10% of my neighbor was in jail for crying out loud.
Well, are we all whining at the same pool, woe is me?
No.
We were lucky that we grew up like that.
You know, we had a lot of different experiences that other people weren't as lucky to get those experiences.
So everybody, you know, I say they play the woe is me card.
For me, it's the opposite.
I was lucky.
You know, I mean, and this idea of now balancing the act out because we mistreated, you know, homos or we mistreated dark-skinned people or we mistreated the handicap, whatever it is.
I mean, I think it's kind of these social experiments.
Experiments are kind of great for the big corporations and all that, but I think they're, you know, they're great for corporations and politicians, yeah I mean, but it's just ripping the country apart.
It's just.
I've never seen anything so ridiculous.
I mean, if I went back to Italy and told the Italians that they were white, they'd look at me like I was nuts, like what are you talking about?
And especially in Italy, where you know you go into Calabria Sicily Puglia, you know a lot of our people are darker skinned than the northern Africans.
And then if you go up to Trieste in northern Italy and you have bluer eyes than the Germans, I mean Like, what is all of this nonsense?
And then, you know, I read the other day, I mean, Bill Cosby's going back to court for something supposedly he did in 1975.
I mean, how do you defend yourself?
He's free, isn't he?
Well, he's free, but now they're going after him again because a woman said she's 62 years old.
That's exactly right.
She's 62.
It's a civil case this time, but it's all about money, of course.
But, you know, she's 62 and claims that Bill Cosby in 1975 took her to his hotel or his home and put his hand in her pants and made her touch him and she's going after money and Bill Cosby is going to be back in court.
He doesn't have to show up, but of course, you know, he'll have to pay the money if he's condemned.
But what are they nuts?
I mean, how does a man or a woman defend themselves about something that happened more than two or three years ago, let alone 47 years ago?
I mean, is this getting even, you know, for all of these poor women who at one time or another were abused?
And don't get me wrong.
Women are abused.
Men are abused.
Dogs are abused.
Cats are abused.
Everybody's abused.
But I mean, What does this do, putting people in jail and making them give up their money?
I mean, it's just, it's insanity.
Yeah, it's a weird, it's a weird thing, especially when there's like high level celebrities like Bill Cosby or John Cena.
Well, because he's got money.
They're not going to go after, you know, I mean, you could have a guy living on the street.
He's homeless and maybe he molested 400 women in his days, but they're not going to go after him because he ain't got no money.
Right, right.
Or Johnny Depp.
Did you watch the whole Johnny Depp debacle?
You know, I didn't watch it all.
I mean, it's all kind of, I mean, again, I live in Italy for the most part.
I am a proud American.
I served in the American military.
I have a.
A honorable discharge and all of that, and I'll die a proud American, Catholic, by the way.
Um, but you know, I have my three sons, they live in Italy, I live in Italy most of the year.
Oh, they all live in Italy, yeah, they all live in Italy, and um, you know, because my son's disease, I mean, we ended up there because he was supposed to do uh experimental medicine, and here he had to be hospitalized, and it cost me like 70 grand for 40 days.
Um, so I ended up opening up a medical center in a town 20 miles from my grandparents' town, and uh.
We ended up there because of that, because he could do the medicine at home.
And because instead of like $70,000 for 40 days, I mean, it cost me like $3,000, you know.
What is the difference in the medical system there versus here?
Well, this brief interruption is brought to you by Versus Game.
And this week's Versus Game question of the week is Will Steph Curry score more than 30 points in game six of the NBA Finals?
Go vote yes or no.
Versus Game, one word, no spaces.
Or click the link below or search for concrete.
On the Versus Game app.
Go do it now and win some money back to the show.
You know, I mean it's oh this, this could go way over, you know, and uh.
So at one time the health care in the United States was a service and today it's an industry.
You know, at one time when I was a kid, my mother would take me and my brothers and sisters we go see dr Farrell.
If she had 20, she gave him a 20.
If she had 10, she gave him a 10.
Every year to go into Catholic schools, you had to be checked out.
So you'd go to her and you'd get done.
And Dr. Farrell, whatever my mother had, you know, he spent his 15 minutes, filled out the papers.
We went to school.
Everybody was happy.
Because medicine was a vocation about taking care of sick people.
Today, as we know, the corrupt orations own a great part of the health care and they've infiltrated our not-for-profits.
I mean, you have places like Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York, which, don't get me wrong, It's a great place.
The CEO makes $6.7 million salary a year.
And then when a kid dies of cancer, you know, they ask the grandparents if they can donate $50 for the Easter egg hut.
I mean, are they out of their minds?
But this is where health care has gone.
It's basically, you know, we watch on television.
I think it was 1997 when the FDA finally allowed us to advertise on television.
We're the only ones, by the way, that do that.
So now they not only advertise, you know, all of these drugs for if you've got your legs move at night or the other day I saw one for bulging eyes.
I mean, and then they tell you about the defects, which are worse than the problem that you have.
And this is the corrupt durations that took over the country.
I heard somewhere that we are one of two countries on earth that actually allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise.
Yes, New Zealand.
But New Zealand don't allow it the way that we allow it.
I mean, we have it direct.
We have, you know, the Cancer Firm of America, you know, it saved my life.
And, you know, they told me that I was going to die when I went over to the XYZ cancer farm, and I went over here, and then they told me I was going to live, and here I am.
I'm dancing.
I mean, it's just insanity.
But they own the country.
I mean, look at this LGBTQ stuff.
I mean, do people realize why the transgender thing is becoming so big?
Well, it's because it's $12,000 a month to do the hormonal treatment.
So of course you've got these corporations pushing kids to become transgenders.
It's about money.
It's about the innovations.
You know, I mean, I read the other day that, you know, these testosterone and estrogen, et cetera, went from being products that 20 years ago were selling, you know, $20 million worth to selling $2 or $3 billion worth.
It's not that our kids want to become girls or boys anymore.
It's just that they're being pushed into those things by big pharma, and it's criminal.
I mean, they're child molesters or child abusers.
I mean, it's just insanity.
Insanity.
Wow.
I did not know that, that that was the cost of this, the sort of therapy for children.
Oh, yeah.
And as you talk about these operations, you know, they're mutilating their bodies.
Men are cutting off their penises.
Women are taking skin from their.
their arms and making, and they're never penises, by the way.
And a man is always a man.
He's got X, Y chromosomes, and he's a man.
I mean, they could say whatever they want, but a giraffe, even if it wants to be a turtle, it's still a giraffe.
And it's just insanity that, you know, and don't get me wrong, I don't care what people do in their bedroom.
They want to, you know, puck, you know, they want to pack fudge.
They want to, I don't really care what they do.
It's none of my business.
I love them anyway, by the way.
But, you know, this whole idea that we're taking kids and giving them all of these horrible drugs that are doing nothing good for them.
and trying to say that this is right, we're saving their lives, which is really insane, because how many suicides are created?
And then you have them doing the de-transgendering.
You know, they're going back after that, like 14%.
I mean, it is 14% of them go back.
They claim up to 7 to 14, but there's not a lot of good statistics for all of this stuff, because it's all brand new.
But the other day, I was reading, and they call them, and I apologize that I forgot exactly, but it's called, they, What do they call it when you go from one way to the other?
They call it transgendering, not transgendering.
Transitioning?
Transitioning.
Then they have detransitioning.
Right.
I made a mistake.
You know, 14 years ago, I thought I wanted to be a man.
Now I really want to be a woman.
And it's crazy.
Guess what?
You're born a man.
That's what you are.
I'm sorry, but you got to play with the cards that you're dealt.
And I'm not saying you can do whatever you want.
I mean, you know, when I was a kid, you know, I mean, I was freaking 15, 14 years old.
I was with a 25-year-old waitress for like a year and a half.
I mean, okay.
The Truth About Transitioning And Detransitioning00:15:11
You know who cares?
You know it was one of the best year and a half of my life I learned more from that woman than I learned from 10 or 20 women You know today they'd want to put her in jail.
I think you ought to give her a medal I Think they ought to give you a medal Believe me there are some people that would like to do that, but probably in the form of a bullet, but and that's okay, too, but in the form of a bullet.
Well, you know look it Why would they want to do that?
Big pharma You know, I mean, I mean, I fought you know a company they were a 12 billion dollar company and 2018.
Their CEO was voted the CEO of the year in 2014.
He made $24 million alone in 2018.
In 2020, he was voted the worst CEO in the United States.
And the company today has a market cap of around $300 million.
What company was this?
Bluebird Bio.
Bluebird Bio.
And I started my lawsuit in 2015, not knowing anything, by the way, but just wanted to get my product back rolling.
And I just didn't understand what the hell was going on.
And Had they known that I was eventually going to last that long, they'd have killed me like they kill so many people.
You know, we have the couple, for example, that owned Apotec in Canada.
They killed them about three years ago.
I forget their exact names.
Nobody ever figured out a company in Canada called Apotech.
Yeah, and the owners were, you know, they were killed.
I mean, at one time, it was, I think, 2019, I was at home, and I get this weird call, and it says, watch Michael Clancy.
I'm like, what the fuck is this?
I don't even know what Michael Clancy is, you know.
And then I go, and I look at the movie.
It was a movie, and it's about a guy who's going against the corruptorations, and, you know, they hold him down, and they give him phosphate in between the toes, so he gets a heart attack, you know.
And I actually, in my book, it's in my book.
I wrote letters right then to my children.
I said, look, if I get killed by the mafia or run over by a car or have a heart attack, that's not what happened.
You know, I'm pissing a lot of people off.
And most of these people are these huge corrupt orations, I call them.
And I call the CEOs, the modern CEOs, crazed, egotistical opportunists.
And that's just what they are.
And they're destroying the country.
How old was your son when he got diagnosed with sickle cell?
So he was diagnosed with thalassemia, which is a cousin disease of sickle cells.
So Arabs and orientals get thalassemia basically and southern italy is arab for the most part you know genetically speaking and um he was two and a half years old in 1992 october and they told me that he would die by the time he was 14.
he'd have to do transfusions every month or a couple of months and it would be a horrible existence i was lucky enough to do experimental medicine with a wonderful professor from the university of san francisco she today is at bu boston university named susan perrine and um in order to avoid transfusions because back in the early 90s there was no antibodies recognized yet for hepatitis C and AIDS.
So anybody who did a transfusion, you know, it was like Russian roulette.
So I didn't want to transfuse him.
So we did experimental medicine and thank God for about five, six years he was on that.
And it maintained his hemoglobin from where he would have been at six, six and a half, seven to nine, ten.
And so he was able to avoid a hundred different transfusions at a time where you really needed to avoid them.
What were the signs?
What were you seeing?
What was going on with him?
Like what made you question something's up?
So when we're in our mother's womb and up to about a year and a half, we have what's called gamma globin gene.
And it's the fetal hemoglobin.
The hemoglobin transports oxygen all over our bodies.
And then when we get to be about a year and a half, that turns off and the adult hemoglobin turns on.
And that's the beta globin gene.
The problem with sickle cell disease and thalassemic patients is that they have a defective beta-globin gene or human adult hemoglobin gene.
So as a consequence, I mean, these poor sickle cell disease patients, which is slightly different because they also have a problem that their blood cells sickle in shape and they get these horrible strokes and the pain.
And by the way, it's mostly ignored in the United States.
And a lot of the reason it's ignored is because there's so much money in treating the 100,000 patients that are out there.
You know, they estimate that there's, you know, It costs $150,000 a year for all of these hemoglobin or all of these sickle cell disease and thalassemic patients.
So there isn't always a big push to get a cure.
The same thing in cancer.
And I'm certainly not trying to say, you know, yeah, you know, they've got a cure to everything.
And that's not the case.
But as was said about me back in the 2000s by one of the top CEOs back then, I believe it was CellGene.
And he said, Girondi, he can't be that intelligent.
He's trying to cure a disease.
The money's in treating him.
You said that you took him to a special hospital in San Francisco and they started treating your son.
Yeah.
What happened next?
Sure.
So I, at the time, was in Germany, you know, because the markets were going, excuse me, were going electronic.
I traded on the floor of the New York or the Chicago Board of Trade, Chicago Board Option Exchange.
I had memberships in the New York Stock Exchange, et cetera.
But at that time, things were going electronic.
I realized that I was in Germany for a deal.
And I got a call from my son's mother, and she said, look at Rocco's not moving.
You know, he's like, he's tired, and he's very pale, you know, pale.
And I said, well, take him in, you know, take him to his pediatrician, see what's going on.
And he said, he's, got thalassemia.
And so I looked it up and miles of facts came in because back then the internet wasn't so easy to get all of the articles about hematology.
And in fact, he had thalassemia.
We were told that he would die by the time he was 14 and that he needed to transfuse immediately.
I didn't want to do that, so we ended up in San Francisco and he did experimental medicine.
Then because we didn't want to do it, we didn't want to be hospitalized and we couldn't afford to keep him doing the experimental medicine in California, we moved to Italy forever, basically.
and opened up a medical center and he did it there.
Slowly but surely, there were other disease, other what made you want to move to Italy?
What told you that, you know, what influenced that decision?
Well, first of all, you know, I was growing up in Italian.
I mean, I grew up in an Italian neighborhood.
You know, Italian was the second language and when I made money, I went to Italy, visited my grandparents' people and my mother's people and I loved it and it was just, you know, a great place to be.
And then when my son was doing the experimental medicine in the hospital in San Francisco, I decided he couldn't live like that.
I mean, I wanted to avoid the transfusions, but I couldn't afford, you know, whatever it was, $70,000 for 40 days, and I didn't want him hospitalized.
So we decided, and Italy has a more liberal kind of attitude about medicine in a lot of ways, and he didn't need to be hospitalized to do it there.
So we moved 20 miles from my grandparents' house.
I opened up a medical center.
And we started treating a lot of patients, 38 patients at one time we had on, in 1997, 1998, on arginine butyrate and isobutyramide.
That seems like a crazy thing.
I just opened a medical center.
That seems like a big undertaking.
Like, how did that, what made you want to do that?
Yeah, well, I mean, like any other parent, you're going to do whatever you can do for your child.
There are some exceptions, don't get me wrong.
I mean, I guess they're not all our great parents.
But like any normal parent, I don't consider myself any different.
I want to do the best I could.
And I was lucky.
Like I told you, I was on Oprah Winfrey for Rags to Riches.
So I had cake, you know, and I could afford to do it.
And I didn't want my son hospitalized.
So I said, what's my alternative?
I'll bring him to Italy where he doesn't need to be hospitalized.
He can live a more normal life.
And I wanted to help others.
And I wanted to push ahead to research.
So I started a company in 1993.
From 1995 to 2004, I was partners with John Walton of Walmart.
I mean, John, great guy.
He died in 2005, I believe.
But John and his wife had a son, Lucas, who thank God today is 34.
He had a horrible disease called Wilms tumor.
They wanted to cut off half of his lungs.
But we had in Argin Butyrate an application for Wilms tumor.
So the Walton family invested like $20 million with me.
You know, they invested $20 million and took over our project.
And we were partners from 1995 to 2004 in Beacon Pharmaceuticals.
And then John said, look, his son actually went to Mexico and, you know, ate herbs and did all of these kind of holistic things that never took out his lung and is a healthy man today.
And John called me up one day.
I was on the trading floor in Chicago and he said, Pat, you know what?
My son is doing fine and I want you to go help little Rocco.
I'm going to give you a beacon.
Just like that.
20 million.
All of the patents we had in there.
He gave it to me.
Just like that.
Just handed you the whole entire company.
Just that.
And I was negotiating with Memorial Sloan Kettering because I knew that gene therapy would cure my son and sickle cell disease.
That will see me as my son's disease.
I knew it.
When you say gene therapy, what exactly do you mean?
So when we talk about gene therapy for Ross, we basically take the HIV virus.
and we disarm it.
So now it's an empty school bus.
And we put the gene that we want to get into the patient, the defective gene, in our case the beta-globin gene.
And we make a bunch of school buses with a bunch of beta-globin genes in them.
Then we take stem cells from the patients and we incubate them with the beta-globin gene which is in the school bus.
This is called a lentiviral vector, the HIV vector.
It gets into the stem cells and we give them back to the patient.
He or she is asymptomatic.
They're cured.
And there's been almost 100 people now cured that way.
Cured with no recurrences of anything?
Yes.
No symptoms or anything?
For four, five, six years.
We actually treated three patients from 2012 to 2015 with Memorial Sloan Kettering using our product.
And two out of three of those patients, after nine years, have reductions in transfusions of 43%.
Now, having said that, that product was made in 2009.
Today, if we make that product, which we're making it now at the University of Tennessee and Southern Illinois University with doctors Andy Wilbur and Frank Park, Christopher Ballas, these are our people, we're going to cure our patients.
Wow, that's fascinating.
And so what currently are you doing with your medical center in Italy?
My medical center in Italy is my son's restaurant.
Oh, now it's a restaurant.
Yeah, we closed the medical center when he no longer could do the experimental medicine.
When he couldn't be hooked up to this pump with all of these copious amounts of water going into him for 16 hours a day or whatever it was.
And they discovered the antibodies for AIDS and hepatitis C.
So our blood is infinitely more secure today.
So my son still transfuses every 20 days.
He does iron chelation.
And we closed the medical center because it wasn't needed any longer for that.
And today he has a restaurant inside of it.
So he does a blood transfusion every how many days?
20 days.
20 days.
What is that like?
Well, it's uh, wow.
I mean there's no expression or no words that can give you a real feeling of what it's like sitting there and watching the kind of blood come out of this little plastic sack and going into your son's body.
But it's a lifesaver and um, there are a lot of people that have it a hell of a lot worse.
Yeah, I can't imagine what that must be like to have to do that every 20 days.
Think of the sickle cell disease patients who, luckily, my son doesn't go through the horrible, horrible strokes.
And I mean, kids even, five, six, seven years old, just excruciating pain because their red blood cells are sickling and blocking up their veins and their capillaries.
And just unimaginable pain.
And there's no way to know when they're going to come.
And I mean, it's just incredible.
And let's hope, we're hoping, we believe that the lentiviral vectors like ours need to have an insulator.
Now, Bluebird Bio.
The company that sabotaged my product, actually, is trying to get approved.
And the FDA will let them know shortly if they will or not be approved.
They're asking $2.1 million per patient, which is ridiculous, by the way.
Just ridiculous.
And, you know, they say, well, you know, sickle cell costs $150,000 a year to treat a patient.
So, you know, in 15 years, we got our money back.
That's not right.
You know, then they'll try to say, well, it costs so much to make medicine.
No, it doesn't.
It costs so much to give the corrupt.
CEOs and the minions, all of the money and all of the funds that are dishing all of the money out to get their money back and to do their pyramid schemes with the stock market.
Yeah, that costs millions and billions, maybe, but it's not that the research costs that kind of money.
Yeah, and that's another thing.
A lot of these big pharmaceutical corporations, especially when you talk about companies like Pfizer or whatever, they have people working for them that are ex FDA or former or people that are like.
Wearing two half, they work for the FDA and they work for the pharmaceutical company.
Yeah, I mean, isn't that a huge problem?
Well, it's a conflict of interest.
I was on a show the other night and the guy was trying to rebut me a little bit and he said, uh well, wasn't it just a big conflict of interest?
And I said yeah, it was a conflict of interest.
Bluebird BIO wanted to make more, wanted to make money more than they wanted to cure people, and that was the conflict.
Um, but in the end, if we go back and look in our recent history vioxxx, Right.
Merck.
When Profit Overrides Patient Care00:05:02
Right.
They knew that people on Vioxx had a multiple time more chance, I believe it was six, to get heart attacks than the people who didn't take Vioxx.
And they let it go.
They ended up being fined $950 million because they were caught red-handed.
Then we go to Paxil.
2012, they were fined $3 billion.
That was GSK.
And GSK knew that Paxil was creating suicidal thoughts in adolescents.
And they hit it.
We had at least 100,000 kids commit suicide that came off of Paxil.
And then we got the best one of them all, OxyContin, the Sackler family, Purdue.
And what is our government doing?
They're letting them go.
Why?
Isn't there something recent in the news with them?
Didn't they just have to?
$4 billion.
They're going to end up doing a deal because they basically told the government, if you go after us personally, we're going to bank up Purdue.
You're never going to get us anyway.
But we'll give you $4 billion.
So they're worth $14 billion.
So they give $4 billion up.
And they have the art institutes with their names on it and all of them.
They don't spend one day in jail.
I mean, what's the pain of one parent, of one brother, sister, who lost a kid to OxyContin?
They were making drug addicts out of these kids purposely.
You know, we talk about the United States, which is a bit peculiar when we talk about the world because we have all these mass shootings.
Well, 70% of them are created by people under 21.
Well, why are they doing that?
Because they're on Paxil, because they were on Ritalin, because we're drugging our kids, and then when they're coming out of drugs.
You know, they don't know.
I mean, they're just screwed up in the head.
And our truck companies are doing that to make all this money.
And then what do they do?
They get machine guns.
They buy guns, whatever it is.
I mean, I'm not a big NRI guy, but it is true that guns don't kill people, do.
I mean, I lived in Switzerland for a while.
Every family must own a rifle because World War I, they made the law.
It's a law.
You have to own a rifle.
They have to own a rifle.
Really?
Sure.
Still?
Still.
Wow.
I didn't know that.
Yeah.
And every person has to go to the military because it's a tiny country surrounded by Russia and Germany and Italy and France and all of that.
They're not killing anybody.
You know, what's going on?
We're turning all of our kids, and by the way, our adults.
I mean, I think, you know, the average 60-year-olds on seven different drugs.
I mean, we're turning everybody into drug addicts.
And what are the pharma companies doing in the last 10 years?
They siphoned $20 billion to our politicians who let them get away with it.
And in the end, I say, you know, we've got to make all of our congressmen and our senators, when they're on television and when they're in Congress and at the Senate, they've got to wear NASCAR outfits so we can see who's writing the checks.
You know, I want to see, oh, why did they vote that way?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Look at Pfizer gave them $100,000 last year.
You know, and I mean, the United States is a great place filled with wonderful, wonderful people.
Is that George Carlin who said that?
It might have been whoever said it, but it was a great thing.
That was great.
Yeah.
But I mean, you know, come on with all of this.
I mean, you know, we're a great country.
How do we let, you know, these corrupt durations?
And by the way, now they're hand in hand with Black Lives Matter, Me Too, and LGBTQ.
They're all just one happy family raping and pillaging the country.
I mean, it's nuts.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A huge problem, too.
Not just like the opiates are a huge problem, obviously, but another thing is the.
The Ritalin and the Adderall are fucking insane.
I don't know.
I could count on one hand the people I know that aren't on that.
Yeah, they're finding it in the water supplies.
It's everywhere.
I mean, it's nuts.
And these people aren't going to jail.
They're going to the country club.
This stuff is so fucking bad for you.
It's unbelievable how bad that shit is for you.
That is not how you're supposed to.
It drains the fucking dopamine out of your brain to where if you don't have it, you're just a fucking blob of nothing.
And then all you can think about is getting more.
It's so fucking addictive.
and so bad.
I think there's not much difference from Adderall than actual meth, like pure meth.
Yeah, it's crazy.
I mean, you know, look, there's a great book I read one time.
It was called Sykes, and he said that the downfall of the United States of America came in 1959 when they opened Disney World.
He said, because we came from a country that we knew we had to work hard, we had to get married, have children, suffer, sacrifice, and die to a country that doesn't want to have children, doesn't want to sacrifice, will spend the last money not to die.
Life's all about having a good time.
And I say, for example, that the worst song ever made, now I'm a singer-songwriter.
I've done a lot of good songs and bad songs.
I'm not sure you'd like them all.
But I always say the worst song ever made was done by Whitney Houston.
When she's saying that the greatest love of all is happening to me, learn to love yourself.
It's the greatest love of all.
There's never been such a horrible song written.
The Downfall Of American Greed00:15:06
That's not what it's about.
It's about loving other people.
Not loving yourself.
And then they started saying, well, if you don't love yourself, you can't love others.
And all of these corporations are trying to sell you an iPhone and trying to sell you makeup and trying to sell you gym shoes.
Love yourself.
You're okay.
You can get fat.
That's right.
We're going to make mannequins that look fat now.
And don't worry about it.
You put on 30 pounds, get a tattoo.
You put on 60, get two tattoos.
I mean, it's just incredible.
It's nuts.
You were dealt this hand.
You're a man or you're a woman, you're a boy or you're a girl, you're bald or you've got freckles or you're dark-skinned or you're light-skinned or you were born with defective fingers or whatever.
You're not a goddamn victim.
You're a human being.
And you end up having to play the best hand you can with the cards you were dealt.
Stop all this nonsense.
Oh, now I'm a woman or now I'm a man.
No, you're not.
You mutilated yourself and you're nuts.
Right.
Going back, how did you get in trouble with the FBI?
Okay, so the first time in 1989, which is another reason why I ended up in Italy, Cargill I think it was Cargill, went to the, no, Archer McDaniels maybe, went to the FBI and they said, you know, we're getting ripped off.
Who's Archer McDaniels?
They're this huge company that owns more farmland probably than anyone in the world.
More than Bill Gates?
Just maybe not.
Anyway, there were some complaints that at the Chicago Board of Trade, they were being ripped off.
And the government decided to go infiltrate the Board of Trade and the Mercantile Exchange with FBI agents who bought memberships, lied about their names, and it's hilarious.
They actually bought memberships, and it's great because When you signed to buy a membership, it said that anything that you say must be the truth.
And if not, you're breaking the law.
So the FBI did that, and they infiltrated the exchange floors, and they started getting people, trapping people, entrapment, to break the rules.
And luckily for me, I got a call, and it was from a higher-up guy, not in the FBI, but in the administration at the Board of Trade in the Mercantile Exchange.
And he said, Pat, come to my office.
I said, yeah.
My firm, Bridgeport Securities, we were like the largest soybean traders in the soybean option pit at the time.
He said, the FBI's on the floor.
And we had heard rumors about it, but the president of the Board of Trade in the Merck denied that they were there.
And so nobody kind of thought it was just rumors.
I left the next day for Italy.
And in fact, they took one of the guys that worked for us.
He actually didn't work for us.
He was on our pay.
He was.
On our company insurance and he filled paper in the soybean pit.
They went into, went to his house at three o'clock at night, scared him, scared his kids.
Said, if you don't flip, you're going to go to jail, you'll lose your wife, she'll divorce you, you'll never see your kids.
Um, and his name is Tom, I won't give his last name.
He ended up going and doing five years in jail.
His wife divorced him while he was in jail.
Of course he didn't see his kids um, and they got him for what was called bucket trading.
Bucket trading yeah, it's a joke.
So at the end of the trading day, at 1, 15 brokers would end up having uh orders to buy and sell.
And if they were time stamped before 1.14.30, that broker had to fill that order.
So it was a big risk for him.
So he would walk around the pit and say, hey, Pat, I got to buy six.
And we'd say, I sold you six.
We'd use the price of the clothes, but it was a way of transferring risk from the floor broker, who for the most part didn't make a lot of money on these commissions.
And we transferred the risk to traders, trader groups like my own.
He ended up doing five years for it.
It was just a joke.
And that was the first time I went to Italy.
So my son was born in 90.
And then my second son in 91.
The FBI made a bunch of phone calls to my office.
They didn't try to extradite me.
Back then, I think it would have been more difficult.
And I was, like I said, I was on Oprah.
I was in Playgirl magazine in 89.
You know, they wanted a guy like me, a big fish.
What was Oprah talking to you about?
Rags Rich's story.
And it was great.
I didn't graduate from high school.
I ended up one of the bigger traders, you know, in Chicago history.
And it was great.
And, you know, I remember she said, when did you know, you know, did you know growing up that you do something big in life?
And I said, well, yeah, I thought I might do something big.
I didn't know if it'd be legal.
And, you know, she laughed and that was cute and all of that.
And then a couple years later, I was back on there for famous American chauvinist because I think it was Janet Davies from ABC or somebody after I was in Playgirl said, you know, you want to get married.
And I said, yeah.
And they said, well, tell us what kind of a girl will you marry?
And I said, well, I'd like her to be a virgin.
Oh my God, the hate mail I got.
Why would you want to marry a virgin?
Yes, I did.
Really?
Because what do you want to marry a porn star?
I mean, you want to marry a hooker?
I mean, it's not one or the other.
There's an in between there.
Well, yeah.
But wouldn't you like a woman who has only ever been with you?
Wouldn't a woman like a man who has only ever been with them?
I would say no.
Okay, but again.
I would say you'd want somebody who had some experience, who knew what they were doing.
Well, you know what?
I think differently.
I would have liked to have a woman who had only been with me.
Okay.
And maybe that was an old-fashioned idea.
You know, a lot of times I use it.
Maybe it died with the virgin bride.
But, you know, I'm talking about me.
Right.
Because I said that, it ended up, it got me invited to Oprah Winfrey the second time as a famous American chauvinist.
Oh, wow.
That's what got you invited.
Yeah, yes, definitely.
That's what got me invited because, like I said, I was on Janet Davies' show, ABC, I can't remember what it was, for, you know, famous American bachelors.
And that's what got me on.
Hmm.
Wow.
And you've been, and how long, and then when you moved there to Italy in 90, you said?
Yeah, yes.
In 89, I left for a couple years, and then we moved back.
My son did experimental medicine, but because of that, we moved back to Italy.
So Wolfram?
So Wolfram?
So Wolfram cemented us there.
So when you moved to Italy, you basically retired?
No.
I mean, I'm the, you know, I'm the founder of the pharmaceutical company, San Rocco Therapeutics, which is like my full-time thing, but I'm also a singer-songwriter.
But that started after when you're, after your, Son was born.
So what was your plan when you moved to Italy?
Yeah, so I went to Italy because I knew the markets were going electronic.
So Europe had the first electronic markets.
So we were trading on the SOFIX, which was the Swiss Options Futures Exchange, and the Eurex, which first was the Deutsche Termin Börse, and then the Eurex.
So we were already invading Europe because we thought that it would all go electronic.
So we had American traders in Europe and going back and forth.
And then when I found out in 89, so we already had operations there.
But then in 89, when we found out the FBI was entrapping people on the Chicago Board of Trade, I left because I knew they wanted a guy just like me.
And there's nothing good you can do for anyone when the FBI questions you.
You're not going to help anyone because they don't want to help you.
They don't want the truth.
They just want to put people in jail so they can get promotions or they can, you know, whatever it is.
So, and then when my son, my two oldest two sons were born there, and then eventually the third was born there as well.
But then we were doing experimental medicine in the United States and decided we had to stay in Italy so that my son could do the experimental medicine.
And so then there we were.
And then the second FBI investigation happened in around 98.
I think it was called Operation Ghost Payroll or something, if I'm not mistaken, or Grey Lord, whatever it was.
But I had an Italian American who I helped fund to become a senator, state senator, and committeeman in the southwest side of Chicago.
And he eventually got investigated.
And I was the money behind him, supposedly.
It was a great story, by the way.
It was an all Polish ward.
He was Italian.
You know, like I'll never forget, I went to the committeeman at the time, who was Polish, of course, but living full-time in Florida, and telling him, yeah, we want to get Bobby.
Bobby is going to become, you know, the committeeman.
And he was like 83, so he didn't care.
And, you know, he said, we'll have a party for you.
You'll make at least $100,000 at your political party.
We'll hire your daughter.
And he still thought it was a joke that we'd never get an Italian elected in an all-Polish ward.
And then on the deadline, of the election, the genius behind it all named Greg got seven people.
So the guy we went against, I can't remember his name, I'm going to say it was Kowalsak.
So the day that you had to have your name in the election, we had seven other people join.
And their name was Kowalski, Kowalska, Kowski.
So it ended up being one Italian name against seven Polish names.
The seven Polish got less than, you know, 10 or 12 percent each, and the Italian got elected.
Well, for some other reasons, there ended up being a big investigation into corruption at City Hall in Chicago.
Surprise, surprise.
And I decided to leave again.
What was the reason for the investigation?
They claimed that people weren't working.
Who claimed?
The government claimed that people were being paid but not working.
So I'm pretty sure it was called ghost payroll.
Project or ghost payroll.
And actually, one of my close friends went away for about five and a half years because a Polish woman said that he sold her a liquor license, actually.
So that was part of the investigation.
Could have been.
You know, when the FBI gets involved, they throw everything out there.
It's anything they can throw at you, they do.
But that was the second time that I was involved.
So you evaded them successfully.
Yeah.
I mean, you know what?
I wasn't the, what do you call it? the target.
They were targeting mostly politicians, and I went to Italy.
But the crazy thing was that when my friend Greg, I was in Altamura, my town, he was going to court.
The Polish woman shows up that he supposedly sold a liquor license to.
They ask her to get up and put her hand on his shoulder.
She puts her hand on his attorney's shoulder.
And we're figuring we're all done.
But instead, unfortunately, one of the Chicago politicians, Alderman, who had a heart condition, ended up collaborating with the FBI and signed a lot of documents saying that Greg did this, Greg did this, Greg did this, Greg did this.
Greg gets convicted anyway.
And then he needed to straighten things out with his family.
He had his three children living with him.
They were 14 years old, 10 to 14 years old.
I send a check for $25,000.
to make sure that he can stay outside between the time he was convicted and the time that they give him the sentencing.
You know, where he's going to go and how much time.
And the FBI stands up in court and says, I'm a mobster hiding in Italy.
Greg is going to fly to Italy.
I mean, Greg was Polish.
I mean, he doesn't speak Italian.
I have no idea what he's going to do in Italy.
But the FBI objected to me putting up the money for him to have that time to get his family in order.
How would they say you're a mobster?
Did you ever have any kind of connections to the mob or the mafia?
You know what?
I grew up in Bridgeport.
If you watched the film Casino, you got the two guys that got killed at the end the Spalacho brothers.
I think they called them Santoro brothers.
My ex wife went to school with their daughter, one of their daughters.
And the neighborhood was all those guys that, you know, supposedly ran, you know, Las Vegas back at the time, which they did, by the way.
And, you know, then the government decided to give it to the corrupt durations, so they knocked them out of there.
But, yeah, I mean, you know, people could say anything.
I, you know, I was in the military.
I tried to be a good guy.
All of my money was made legally.
I have my, you know, I file my taxes every year, but people could say anything.
So, you never actually got popped or did any time for anything at all?
No, I've been arrested for a bunch of stuff, but mostly kids' stuff.
What gave you the confidence that you could come back to the U.S. and not have any heat on you?
I waited the time, you know.
So, I would wait a couple of years and then come back.
One time it was hilarious.
Joe Farrell, my attorney, I was, every time I would come back after I bailed Greg out, the judge eventually, by the way, said that the FBI, okay, you know, I have to listen to the FBI.
So, Mr. Jeronde, you have to get to me.
you know, five letters of recommendation and your last three years of your tax returns.
I need to know where that money is coming from that you're going to bail Mr. Swan out with.
And I eventually wrote a letter to the judge myself, and I said, Dear Your Honor, you know, I'm an American citizen, proud to be an American citizen.
I served in the military.
And when I was growing up, we were taught that you don't turn your back on your friends.
And Mr. Swan needs to put, sorry, I said his name, Greg needs to put his house in order.
And I was told that if I put the money up, I would have trouble with the IRS and possibly the FBI.
But I'm a true American, and I'm not turning my back on my friend.
And I kind of think that that was the letter that the judge said, yeah, that sold it and got it home.
And in fact, I was audited seven out of the nine in the next years.
Every time I came to the United States, they stopped me at the border, and they made me miss my flights.
And it was one of the times I was in one of these little glass rooms, and on the thing it says, if you feel that your rights are being abused, call.
1-800, whatever.
And I copied the number down.
I called one of my attorneys, Joey Farrell.
I said, Joe, do me a favor.
Call these morons.
I mean, what are they doing?
I was on my way to Miami.
They made me miss my flight again.
You know, every time they're messing with me, you know.
So about a week later, Joe calls me.
He says, Pat, I talked to the FBI.
Fighting Corruption At Every Border00:04:46
I said, okay.
They're going to stop messing with me?
He said, well, I don't think so.
Well, What do they say?
Well, they said that they know what they're doing and that if I'm representing a piece of shit like you, that I must be a piece of shit as well.
And that I have two kids and a law practice.
And basically told me that if I didn't stop representing you, that I would also have trouble.
And I said, Joey, I love you.
You're a great guy.
Forget about it.
And that's it.
I forgot about it.
Didn't call him anymore.
But that's exactly what happened.
And in 2001, one of my best friends committed suicide.
He worked for me.
Terry.
Great guy.
Grew up together.
He committed suicide.
And at the time, his mother had just passed away.
He wasn't married.
And we were going through a, getting a banking license in Switzerland.
He was under a lot of pressure.
And he did what he did.
And in 2003, that was when Joey Farrell, two years after Terry was dead, by the way, that was when Joey Farrell went to the FBI, the government, and said, look, I've got to fill out this form because you're messing with my client.
Well, when they do that, the FBI has 10 years to come back and let you know.
what happened in the investigation so i was in uh on vacation in florida 2013.
my brother georgie just passed away i was a little bit down and i got a call from a friend of mine he goes you know i got a book at my house that came in your name and i said oh yeah ship it to me i'm in miami i get it i open it up it's not a book it's a pamphlet it's an fbi pamphlet So it was 2013.
They had to, by law, 10 years later, let me know that I was the subject of an investigation.
When my close friend, Terry, committed suicide, I was in Italy.
The FBI investigated me for murder.
They followed me around 2002 and 2001 and 2003.
They had almost every single thing was blacked out, but you could get little glimpses of here and there, and they had to send it to me.
Who knows how much money they spent on doing something so stupid?
What did you have to do to get this?
What was it like an FBI report or something?
Right.
So when Joe filed and said, I think that my clients' rights are being infringed upon, right, or being abused, he filled out the paperwork before he started dancing with them.
And so they have 10 years and they must let you know the results within 10 years.
And so they send it on the 10th year all the time.
Right.
And so I got it in 2013.
I mean, it brought tears to me.
And they redacted parts of it?
Oh, the whole thing is redacted.
I mean, I never even read the whole thing.
I got it sitting in my home in Italy, actually.
I never sat down and said, I'm going to concentrate on this.
It was just so absurd.
I mean, forget about the waste of taxpayers' money.
Oh, my God.
But, you know, this is coming because in 89, maybe they wanted me, and I went to Italy.
And they called me, and I said, I'll be there next week.
I'll be there next week.
I'll be there next week.
And maybe they thought I was, you know, pulling their leg.
Then in 97, 98, whenever it was, they wanted me again.
And I said, oh, I'll beat her next week.
I'll beat her next month.
Whatever.
So then, okay, this happens.
Well, oh, yeah, but didn't that guy work for Gerandi?
Well, okay, you know who Gerandi is.
One thing leads to another.
And the morons are investigating for murdering one of my best friends.
They were trying to pin it on him.
Right, exactly.
I mean, it's just absurd.
And don't get me wrong.
I know a couple FBI agents that are great guys, by the way.
Phil is a close friend of mine.
I love him, you know, and he's a retired FBI guy.
There's a lot of great guys and there's a lot of great congressmen and a lot of great congresswomen and a lot of great politicians, etc.
It's just unfortunate that greed ends up being one of the strongest characteristics in humans.
And so what happens?
Who goes to the top?
The greediest politicians.
Who goes to the top?
The greediest FBI guys.
Who goes to the top?
The greediest executives.
Why Fascism Is Born From Greed00:16:02
And the result is, you know, I always say that the modern father of the United States of America is benito Mussolini!
Why?
Well, because he invented fascism.
Because Benito thought, he was a country guy, he wasn't a greedy guy, but he thought if I get industry together with the politicians, it'll be the best country in the world.
We'll be efficient and we'll protect the workers from industry with politicians.
So the politicians will make sure that industry won't take over.
And abuse the workers, and that's fascism.
And in the United States, that's what we have the industry owns the politicians today, but the politicians don't protect the people because they sell them out to the industry.
So, in the end, Benito Mussolini is, uh, you know, the father of modern day America that kind of permeates through every big industry.
They just are constantly trying to create products to make more money, and it kind of is the same thing with big pharma, where they're not necessarily trying to.
innovate or make things better for people or better humanity.
They're just trying to make more money and make more profit.
Yeah.
I mean, unfortunately, that's the exact truth.
I mean, I drive when I'm in Florida, I bought a 2009 Sebring convertible.
I paid $6,500.
In Italy, I drive a 1996 Fiat.
Now, don't get me wrong.
I got a nice house in Italy, et cetera.
But, you know, I'm Catholic.
And I was taught that we're all brothers and sisters.
And a lot of our patients are Muslim, a lot of our patients are Hindus, a lot of our patients are Africans, etc.
And, you know, for me, being Catholic is the easiest thing in the world because, you know, I was taught from the time I was a little kid that, you know, we're all brothers and sisters, man, and you have to take care of your brother and your sister.
So, but you just don't have a lot of that going on.
Instead, what you have is, unfortunately, Amazon, who's paying their drivers $20 an hour, you know, and I mean, I'd like to see Bezos come and try to load one of those trucks.
I mean, You know, what kind of crazy world did we ever get into where we've got people that have, you know, billions of dollars and then we have people that can't afford health care in the same country?
I mean, that's like wacko.
I mean, at least in Europe, Italy in particular, you know, we have social medicine.
Thank God.
You break your leg, they don't care what your name is.
You go in and you get it fixed.
I mean, how can we be one of the greatest countries in the world?
We don't have social medicine.
And what is all this craziness about, you know, people taking out loans to go to school?
I mean, that's stupid.
What is that?
And then you're making them pay 8% juice on going to school?
I mean, You know, my kid Chicho, he's an architect today.
You know, he's in Italy, born and raised in Italy.
He was not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
You know, first he wanted to be an economist, and then he decided not to be an economist after two years.
Then he decided to be an architect.
It's free.
He went seven years.
One year he went to Portugal.
One year he went to Germany.
They paid him to go to school in Portugal and Germany.
Didn't cost me a nickel.
Wow.
And at the same time, I mean, here we are in the United States of America.
These poor people, I've got one of my nieces, they're nurses.
They're still paying back student loans.
And we say, We're the most powerful, strong, best nation in the world.
Well, we may not have good college or free college.
It may cost a fortune to go to college.
It may cost a fortune to get decent medical care, but at least we have the strongest military in the world, the most nukes.
Right?
Isn't that crazy?
There's a silver lining to all of this, Patrick.
You know what?
I had that argument with a woman at one time.
I was in a.
At least we could kill everybody.
That's right.
She told me we could kill everybody 30 times.
And she was very proud of that, by the way.
I just wanted to let you know that.
And don't get me wrong.
There's no perfect place.
You know, not China, not Japan, not Italy, not no, no place.
Everybody has their whole problems.
And that's because guess what?
We're all human.
And even though we'd like to put, I was reading an article about this 30-year-old teacher, a woman who got caught making out with a 17-year-old student.
And instead of giving her an award, you know, they talk about teaching sex education at school.
I mean, maybe she taught them how to kiss better.
She's going to jail.
I mean, out of your, out of your, are you, Out of your freaking mind.
I mean, I don't, I get it.
You don't, you want to fire her because maybe teachers shouldn't be doing that.
But what good do you get out of throwing her in jail for something so crazy?
Isn't Italy doing some wacky shit with, with, uh, COVID?
Yes.
And my good friend is the head of the health department in Italy named Franco Locatelli.
And I love him.
He's the head of the health department?
Yes.
He is the highest ranking doctor in the health department.
Really?
And he's from Bergamasco, from Bergamo.
And he talks like this even when he's.
speaks in English or Italian and everyone makes fun of him, but he's a great guy.
I love him.
And he's just really well intentioned and believed that, you know, he hook, line, and sinker that you've got to wear masks.
You've got to do a vaccine.
And, you know, one of the worst problems I had in Italy in the beginning, I don't know if you know this.
So we were one of the first countries to get back.
And we were putting people on ventilators.
Well, guess what?
When you put an 85-year-old man or woman on a ventilator, they're not coming off.
Now we don't use ventilators anymore, by the way.
But in the beginning, we had the most deaths out of anyone.
But in the end, was it really COVID?
Yeah, it was COVID, I guess.
But it kind of was because we were putting all these people on ventilators.
So almost the health care system was too good because we were able to treat all these people on ventilators where a lot of places, they don't have that many ventilators.
So Italy did some wacky stuff, in my opinion.
And I could be wrong, by the way.
And I love Franco.
Forgive me, Franco, because I know that you've got hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people that listen to your podcast.
Oh, he's got a podcast.
No, your podcast.
Oh, my podcast.
I thought he said Franco had one.
Yeah, and I don't know if Franco will do it, but a lot of good-intentioned people.
And I've got a guy, Johnny Tisdale, loving with all my heart, works at the NIH.
He worked for years with Fauci or has experience with him, et cetera.
And Johnny almost screamed a yell at me when I kind of said, well, Johnny, I'm not sure that the vaccine helped.
What do you mean they don't help?
They do help, and everybody should wear a mask.
And you know what?
Maybe he's right.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe the people that think the masks don't work are wrong.
And maybe the people that think the masks work are right.
And maybe the people that think you should get vaccinated are right.
I don't know.
But I just think we should all make the best decisions we can and leave the dollar bills out of it.
Best decisions for ourselves, not for other people necessarily.
Yeah, I mean, oh, God.
That's a hard one, too.
Oh, my God.
What is the rules?
Is there a rule?
You have to be vaccinated to go to Italy?
Yes.
You do.
I think they just the other day cut it out, but up until the other day, and it might still be going on.
Can you find out, Austin?
This kid travels to more countries than anybody ever fucking known.
He's never available to run the podcast because he's always in some fucking European country or some African island or something.
Nice, Austin.
So, Austin, you should know this.
Weren't you just in Italy?
No, Spain.
Oh, Spain.
Don't care, but I think they.
Are you vaccinated?
Yeah.
Oh, you got to be.
Okay.
No, without a doubt.
You have to be vaccinated.
I got a European vaccine card in France.
You even got your own European vaccine card?
Yeah, look.
Do you have one of these?
Yes, of course.
I got one of these.
Yes, I have one as well.
Yeah.
So, you need that to basically get around Europe?
In Chicago, or in Italy.
So I had a friend coming from Croatia and a kid I grew up with, by the way, that moved from Chicago to Croatia.
Anyway, and by the way, you want to hear that story.
He got diagnosed with prostate cancer.
Three medical centers in Chicago, Northwestern, University of Chicago, and Loyola.
And he came to me and he says, Pat, I got problems.
I go, what's the problem?
This is six years ago.
I got prostate cancer.
Well, how did you know that?
Why did you go get tested?
Well, because they say you should get tested every year.
I'm 53 or 54.
So I got tested.
So wait a minute, stop.
You out of the blue went and got tested for prostate cancer.
Well, that's what you do in America, Pat.
Okay, got it.
I got it.
Okay.
And they told you you have it.
Yeah, three centers told me.
What are your systems, Carl?
What are your symptoms?
I don't have any.
Carl, I think you should go to Europe and get a test there.
So guess what?
That's what he did.
He went to Croatia and they said, you don't have cancer.
Really?
You have an enlarged prostate.
In the United States, that's what they're doing.
They're treating all, and they've treated tens of thousands of men over the last 20 years.
for prostate cancer.
They made it a part of the protocol because you make a lot of money.
Was this during a routine checkup they told him this?
No, he went to get it checked.
Okay.
Prostate.
But that's a routine thing.
The PSA number, which, by the way, if you talk to the guy that invented the PSA number, which Carl did, he said, I never invented it to have anything to do with prostate cancer.
But because of the corruption in the medical industry, we've treated tens of thousands.
I mean, 10 years ago, they'd say, if you live long enough, you're going to die from prostate cancer.
Every man got it.
I mean, it was all bullshit.
Just like they did with the caesareans, you know, in the 90s.
You know, one out of four births in the United States were pop caesareans.
So if you get diagnosed with prostate cancer, what is the go-to treatment for that and who profits off that the most?
This might be a dumb question, but I don't know.
I mean, prostate cancer, you know, is there like a certain medication that, I mean, it's just chemotherapy and radiation.
Radiation and then years of who knows what.
I mean, you'll be incontinent a lot of the times.
I mean, it just, you turn into this cash register, basically, for so many parts of the, you know, American medical society.
I mean, I'm not kidding you.
I mean, I would almost tell anyone who ends up being diagnosed with prostate cancer to take a trip somewhere else and, you know, get it checked as well, maybe Canada, maybe Mexico or whatever.
Again, you might have prostate cancer, and I don't want to, you know, sugarcoat it.
A lot of people die from real prostate cancer, but a lot of people are being diagnosed with prostate cancer when they have an enlarged prostate.
and not prostate cancer.
But because the protocol says that the doctor will be sued if he doesn't basically tell the patient, look, you should get chemo, we should do this, let's be safe, all that kind of stuff, he can get sued and lose his license, et cetera, for not following protocol.
And since the pharma companies now are basically writing the protocols, you're getting treated for prostate cancer, whether you have enlarged prostate or your prostate cancer.
Yeah, there's a weird thing about being diagnosed with.
Things too, especially like cancer.
When you're told that you have something, it's kind of like there's a thing that happens, like a self fulfilling prophecy, where if you believe that you have a disease, even if you don't have it, you can end up suffering from that very disease.
Right.
You have it.
Yeah.
What do you believe?
If you believe you have it, guess what?
So many do have it.
Right.
If you believe you have it, you do have it.
The mind is such a powerful fucking thing that, you know, if you get it, it There's so many different variables from like depression that sets in that just it speeds up the not only if you don't already have it, right?
It's going to speed up the process of death and you believe you're going to die.
Like if somebody tells you you have six months to live, a lot of times that will happen.
Sure, sure.
And I mean, look at the numbers.
You know, we spend 20% of the American budget, right, is for health care.
But wait a minute.
The government's spending 20%.
And yet we have all these people spending.
I mean, I know I have friends spending $3,000 a month on their insurance.
So not only are you paying out of your pocket for your health insurance, the government's spending 20%.
Italy spends 9.7%.
And we all have health care.
Now, don't get me wrong.
It's not perfect.
There's some bad doctors, there's some bad hospitals, etc.
But the average Italians live in 82.7, the average American 78, 78.9.
What are you talking about?
82.7, that's the you know mortality.
So the average Italian lives almost four years longer than the average American.
Yet the Italians are spending 9.7 percent of their budget on health care, the Americans are spending 20, and then who knows how many more trillions of dollars that the private person is spending on it.
And we're living almost four years less.
This was up until the COVID.
The COVID probably knocked things out of whack.
But up until COVID, so 2019, the average Italian was 82.7, the average American 78.9.
So almost four years longer.
5% of your life, if you lived in Italy, you live longer.
And yet we're spending probably five, six, seven times more on health care in the United States than we are in Italy.
What the fuck?
Was that Austin?
The thing happened.
It happened again.
It's still happening.
What'd you do?
I didn't do anything.
Just change the audio on the audio output.
I hope we're not getting somebody pissed off.
It's kind of like, in a couple minutes, it'll get louder and then maybe the whole place will explode.
No, no, no.
Maybe it's the FBI listening in.
Yeah, whatever.
And by the way, I mean, I don't.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not one of these conspiracy guys, all that shit.
I don't.
But you know what?
Unfortunately, Each of us, if we have a sick child, sick father, whatever it is, you know, you got to think about the words that I'm saying and you can never be too careful.
And, you know, when I have a problem in Italy, I go to my coffee shop, right?
And, hey, Miguel, porta me un cafe.
And then I watch for my doctor whose office is right in front of my coffee shop and I go, hey, Rafael, vienito, vien, vien.
And I say, Rafael, what the fuck is going on right up here?
Look at above my belly button.
What the fuck is that?
Oh, Patrizio.
Sempre que hay un hernia.
You have a hernia.
What the fuck?
Well, it was going to hurt me?
I mean, what are you?
Eh, Patricio.
You know, you should probably get it taken out.
I mean, let me push.
You know, push.
Hop in my van.
Yeah, you know.
He says, you want a cafe, Rafael?
Yeah.
Miguel, get a cafe, per doctor, right?
Okay, no.
Did it hurt like this?
No.
Hurt like this?
No.
Like this?
Yes, that hurts.
Okay, listen, Patricio.
You know, it's July.
You don't want to get an operation in July, August, right?
You know, come on.
He says, Are you going to America anytime soon?
Yeah, I'm going to leave.
When are you leaving?
September.
When are you coming back?
November.
Call me when you come back.
Okay.
And I go on.
I get paid.
Now, Rafael probably makes $50,000, $60,000 a year.
As a doctor or a surgeon?
As a doctor.
Okay.
As surgeons, doctors, they make mostly the same thing, you know.
But their kids get free health care.
Their kids get free universities.
So, I mean, you know, I don't know.
What are they really making if you compare to an American person?
They don't pay any real estate tax on their house, by the way.
Really?
Yes.
But that's all Italian citizens.
You don't pay no real estate tax on your first resident.
Your second one, they stick it in your ass.
But your first one, you pay no.
But my point is What is the tax on the second one?
Whatever.
We have kind of luxury taxes.
It's kind of with cars.
If you can afford to buy a $10,000 car, you pay $10,000.
If you can afford to buy a $50,000 car, you pay $70,000.
If you can afford to buy a Lamborghini, you're paying a million, even though it costs $500,000.
You know, we call it luxury tax.
Comparing Taxes And Healthcare Systems00:07:08
But in the United States, we had a reasonable system up until Ronald Reagan.
You know, people loved Reagan.
Oh, he's great and he's handsome.
And I don't want to break any of you guys' hearts.
And I actually was a delegate to the 1982 convention or 80 convention.
I was a Democratic delegate, you know.
And I wore a button, Democrats for Reagan, you know, because I thought he was going to be great as well.
But I look back at the history of the United States, and I think that Ronald Reagan did two of the worst things that any president ever did.
And that was he lowered the taxes from 70%.
So he basically took the money that the rich people were paying, and he put it on the middle class.
And then the other nasty thing he did was he went after the air traffic control union, which was open game on the unions.
Today, the unions are, you know, we went from a country in 1980 that we had 34% of all of our employees were covered by unions.
And the other 66% were treated very fairly by their bosses.
Guess why?
They didn't want unions.
Exactly.
The threat of it.
To today, less than 9% have unions and they're all impotent.
So when I look at the downfall of the middle class in the United States of America, and by the way, it is really shot.
Yeah.
It's Ronald Reagan.
lowering the taxes of 70%.
And I know I'm going to get a lot, even my buddies, you know, because my buddies are, hey, man, you know, that was the greatest time in the 90s.
I made so much money, man.
And you're out of your mind and you're a liberal.
And, you know, what are you talking about, Ronald Reagan and John Wayne?
And, you know, I'm like, well, okay, you know, don't get me wrong.
I got nothing against either of them.
But it was a real bad thing if we look at our country, you know, when we took the burden of the taxes off of the wealthy.
You know, and gave it to the poor.
And they say, well, what are you, one of those socialist communists?
And I'm like, yeah, like Christ.
He was a socialist and a communist, by the way.
But let's think about it this way.
Really?
Yes, he was.
Of course he was.
He was a communist?
Of course he was.
He lived in a commune, man.
He lived with 12 unemployed guys and an ex hooker.
And they went from town to town.
They lived a communal life and they begged for food and they say, hey, you know, yes, he was.
I need to read the Bible so I don't sound like such an idiot on this podcast.
No, but I mean, yes.
I mean, of course he was, you know.
And he said, if you got two shirts, give one away.
You know, but, you know, I talked to all my friends about it.
I always thought he was a capitalist.
Maybe we, maybe we, but you know what?
In the end, I always say that capitalism is great, fantastic.
I'm a capitalist, but it's got to have a socialist heart.
You know, you got guys like Warren Buffett, and who knows, good, bad.
I'm not saying he's good or bad.
He's saying, yeah, I pay more taxes than my, what do you call it, my waitress, or what do you call the people in the house, my servants, my maids.
Maids.
I mean, yeah, they give them good names, but they're basically servants or whatever, housekeeper.
You know, I pay more taxes than her.
And I'm telling you, we've got to go back to the old system.
And all you guys want to debate me, okay, I say, yes, we should all pay the same amount of taxes.
All right.
So up until $50,000, nobody pays any taxes.
Nobody.
Between $50,000 and $150,000, we all pay 15%.
Between $150,000 and $400,000, we pay 25%.
between $500,000 or $400,000 to $7,000, we pay 50%.
And between $10 million and up, you pay 90%.
And they say, well, that's socialism.
No, no, no, no.
I'm saying we all pay the same amount of taxes.
We just don't all make $10 million a year.
But if a guy paid 90% and made $10 million, he'd make a million dollars cash a year.
So what?
What's so bad about that?
What's so hard about that?
Yeah.
Well, there's so many creative loopholes.
Unless there is.
But that's why I'm saying make it that way.
And then guess what?
When every American citizen has health care, When every American citizen has the universities and all that, you know what?
We can think about changing our tax system.
But until then, we should be very embarrassed that the greatest nation, and in a lot of ways we are the greatest nation, right?
You know, I mean, you got the Statue of Liberty, man.
Bring me your trudged and bring me your criminals and bring me your downtrodden and whatever it says on that, you know?
We got more people locked up, I think, than any country, right?
Yeah, we got 3% of the population basically either locked up or on parole.
Yeah.
That's crazy, man.
That's something to be proud of.
But come on, Danny.
Okay.
I agree.
And it's crazy.
And it's even crazy because a lot of these jails are now for profit.
That's how you had back in Philadelphia about 15 years ago two judges who were getting $10,000 for every kid they thought they threw into, you know, whatever.
But it is a great country, Danny.
It is a wonderful country filled with like 90% of the people are like bread and butter, like salt of the earth, great people.
It's just that you got these right now, by the way, you've got.
You know, Me Too, LGBTQ, XYZ, you know, and BLM.
And they're like, you know, running the country.
And they got the corporate corrupt relations, which are giving them tens of millions of dollars and 20s of millions of dollars.
And they're ripping the whole nation apart, by the way.
And it's not a free place.
But the problem is that the average guy and woman who are working very hard to put their kids through school, they don't have time to, like, get out on the streets and protest.
And they don't, you know, they just want to raise their kids.
And I get that.
And the politicians have sold out to the special interest groups.
And those special interest groups are terrorist organizations, in my opinion.
Yeah, well, it's all the left wing party uses those sort of like cultural, you know, LGBTQ, BLM, those sort of like social justice causes to they kind of weaponize those causes for themselves to fight the right, you know, because the right is sort of like they're ingrained in, you know, business.
and finance and sort of like the big money stuff.
It's about money.
And the left really had nothing.
I mean, that sort of like happened.
When did that happen in the 60s, right?
When the left sort of took art and culture and sort of.
That's what Malcolm X's famous speech was about.
How he talks about the white liberal versus the white conservative.
How the difference between the white liberal and the white conservative, the only difference between them is that the white liberal.
Is more deceitful because they weaponize art and they weaponize culture and music and they sexuality, sexuality, all that stuff to try to, you know, fight the conservatives.
Yeah, it's just all a political game.
Using Race As A Political Pawn00:04:06
And they use the he said they use the black man as a pawn in their game to fight the other party.
Oh, yeah.
And, you know, I've got, you know, I mean, I'll tell you a little story.
When I was 15, I worked in a hospital kitchen, it was Northwestern University Hospital in Chicago.
And I, You know, went into the hospital kitchen.
I was the only light skinned guy that worked in the hospital.
Everybody else was dark skinned.
And I had this guy, Kevin, and I definitely won't say his last name.
I said, I had Kevin.
He was like three years older than me, tall, lanky guy, hated my guts and tried to beat me up.
And I had this big, dark-skinned woman on the bread line or the food line.
You know, they put on jello and they put on fish and they put on corn and they put on green beans and all of that.
And they all wore these smocks.
You know, you could hardly see their faces and all of these big white dresses and all of that.
And she protected me from this guy.
And she was just incredible.
And I was at the hospital.
I worked there for about a year, year and a half.
And luckily for this woman, you know, she saved me and I was less terrorized.
And years later, there's this, I had a priest named Father Frawley.
He told me about this black kid, wanted to become a priest.
I helped the black kid.
I paid for four years of his high school education.
He lives in Tampa now.
He's one of my closest friends.
His name is Derek.
And just a great guy.
And Derek called me in maybe 2013 or 14.
He says, where are you at?
And I says, hey, little brother, I'm in Chicago.
He says, oh, good, you got to come to my.
My mother's funeral, she died.
I said, Oh, geez.
And I had met his mother a couple of times.
I said, Derek, geez, you know, I'm really sorry.
Where's it at?
50th in state.
I'll come to 50th in state at the church.
So I go to the church and I see my old boss from the hospital kitchen.
Ross, his name was.
And I said, Ross, what's going on?
You know, what's, you know, Pat, we were so proud of you.
We saw you on Oprah Winfrey's show.
And, you know, and I said, Yeah, I'm really sorry.
I never came back to say hi to you, but, you know, a lot of years had passed and all that.
And I said, But you know what?
This is finally time for me to make amends.
To big Mama, because that's what everybody called her, the woman who saved my ass from Kevin so many times.
I said, do you think she'll show up at the funeral today or can you give me her address?
And he looked at me funny.
He said Pat, this is big Mama's funeral.
I never knew that the kid I paid for his high school education.
I helped him through college.
I never knew that when I was 15, it was his mother who saved my ass really, and all of this craziness About, you know, outside of Chicago, they got a couple of suburbs I read today that are going to start getting, based on your skin color, they're going to give you a different grading system because they're going to try to make up from whatever happened.
And it's insanity.
You're ruining these children.
You are using these children.
You are abusing these children.
Where did you hear this?
It's two suburbs in Chicago.
I think one is River Forest and the other one is Oak Park.
But they're doing it in different states where they're going to start using.
The grading system using different grading system based on the color of your skin.
Wow.
Kind of affirmative action.
Have you, do you hear about the school in Colorado that had designated playtime for children of color?
It's, it's, there's a podcast called I'm Doing Great Podcast that the girl who's the host of it, she was talking about this thing called Horseshoe Theory.
She says, Horseshoe Theory, the concept of it is what are the KKK?
And, um, or I'm sorry, what do the uh, the Baptist and the bootlegger have in common?
They both want alcohol to be illegal.
The bootlegger wants it to be illegal because he makes more money, the Baptist wants it to be legal because out of morals, right?
So, complete opposite ends of the spectrum as far as ideology, and they want the same result.
The KKK and woke leftists, they both want segregation.
They're getting it, by the way.
I mean, I've never seen the country more.
Understanding The Horseshoe Theory00:15:12
More divided.
And I have so many friends, whatever they could be.
I thought that was hilarious.
Oh, yeah.
It is.
It's crazy.
I mean, it's like my new favorite comedian, who is David Chappelle, by the way.
I think his name is it?
Chappelle?
Dave Chappelle.
Oh, yeah.
My new guy.
I don't care what anybody.
He is my guy.
But, you know, it's just incredible what they're doing.
And I have so many friends, and they could be light brown, dark brown.
I'm tan.
They could be, you know, light black.
I call them chocolate, whatever.
They could have this different color of skin, but they're 100% against affirmative action.
They say, Pat, I got to be honest with you.
I've always been against it because I've had different clients who have questioned my integrity or my quality as an attorney because they're thinking that maybe I got to where I am because of affirmative action.
I mean, it's asinine.
You have to stop it.
It's just crazy.
And you know what?
I mean, you know, it's like they always said, you know, we're all created equal.
No, we're not.
No two men are created equal.
Everyone's different.
That's the most asinine thing I've ever had, heard.
You know, we're all created equal.
Bullshit.
It's not true.
I'm a dumb guy.
Don't get me wrong.
99% of the people on the planet are smarter than me.
I am not created equal.
But at the end of the day, we have, we are dealt cards.
That's our hand.
And guess what?
That's what we got to play with.
And that's what I do.
So.
How did this lawsuit come about?
Okay, so that's a great question.
So in 2010, Patrick Rondi and San Roquo Therapeutics delivered to the world the first commercial batch.
That's your company?
Yes.
Okay.
San Roquo Therapeutics delivered the world's first batch of gene therapy for sickle cell disease and thalassemia known to man.
Because up until then, it took a million dollars per patient to make.
And you could only make it one batch at a time.
For $1.3 million.
It took a million dollars per patient to make what?
The vector.
The vector.
The gene therapy vector.
The AH, yes, gene therapy vector.
So we were able for $1.3 million to make enough for 10 people.
So we brought it down from a million to $130,000 a person, which was incredible.
Okay.
And then a company called Bluebird Bio wanted to buy us.
And they were basically owned by Third Rock Ventures.
Which, you know, is one of these funds that had billions and billions of dollars.
Sorry to interrupt your story, but I'm curious, how did you do that?
How did you go about finding a way to make it so much more economical to do that?
Okay, so the real hero in all of this is a French researcher named Michel Settelin and his wife, Isabelle Riviere.
They basically, between the two of them, invented the beta-globin gene and then were able to package it to be able to get it into a human cell.
They started with mice.
Those are the heroes.
How did you find them?
I read about it in 2000 in Nature magazine.
Wow.
So I met them in 2000.
Met their kids in time.
They know my kids, all of that.
And I began funding them.
And then in 2005, I bought their product.
I licensed it to go forward to commercialize it.
Nobody cared about it.
I tried to get other drug companies to do it, but nobody wanted it.
Did you try it, test it on your son?
No.
No.
Um we, up until now, we've only done it on three people.
Bluebird done it on up to 46 people or 50 people.
Even so, in 2010, i'm with my president, Sam Salmon.
We drive to go see Bluebird Bio's new ceo, Nick Leshley.
And we go see Neal Exeter and we go see these, you know, multi gazillionaires that own Third ROCK Ventures and they want to do a deal with us.
So in 2005, nobody believed in gene therapy.
I tried to talk to Shire, I talked to Elon, I talked to Merck, I talked Elon.
E L A N.
It's an Irish company.
I thought he said Elon.
Yeah, no, Elon.
So I talked to all these companies about doing gene therapy, and they thought I was nuts.
Gene therapy is never going to work, you know.
And so in 2010, all of a sudden, Third Rock Ventures buys Bluebird Bayou, which was a French company, by the way.
And the difference between my French researcher and theirs was that my French researcher was first.
So we have the wild-type beta-globin gene in our product.
Instead, they have a mutant gene in their product, okay?
Well, they paid $35 million for the bum dope for the shit product.
What do you mean mutant gene?
So you change the gene.
So I have the beta-globin gene that you have in your body is what we put into our patient's body.
Okay.
But to get around the patent, basically, the other researcher had to change it.
And you could change it just, you know, small, making the plasmid a little smaller, introducing another plasmid, changing the chronological order or whatever.
Okay.
So it's still the beta-globin gene, but it's a mutant gene.
Just modified a little bit.
Modified.
Perfect.
So they had bought this modified gene, and I'm like, what the fuck's wrong with these guys?
They paid $35 million for this fucking this modified gene.
I mean, like, are they nuts, you know?
But they're all Harvard, Yale, all this bullshit, you know, banksters.
So I go there and, you know, I get there and they blow smoke up my ass, you know.
How do you always do?
Oh, Pat, you're the best fodder in the world and all you did for your kid and all of this, you know?
But by the way, we are banksters and we got more money than God.
And so you should do a deal with us.
And I said, okay, I'll do a deal with you.
You know Fester, but you bought bum dope.
You bought.
So what you got to do with Patrandi because I don't give a about the money necessarily, but I do have shareholders who've invested money, so we got to take care of them but the most important thing you got to do is promise that you use my medicine, because i'm using the real beta globin gene, not a mutant gene.
So they listen to me and they say okay.
And then I said, and by the way, You've spent $35 million for that shit.
Mine's got to be worth $350.
And I'm not telling you I want $350.
But, you know, we got the real thing.
I got shareholders.
We got to take care of them, you know, because it's the right thing to do.
I'm an American.
I'm a capitalist.
I got the right thing.
You didn't.
We got to do things the right way.
We got to be honorable men and women.
They went behind my back and they sabotaged the product.
We've got all the emails.
They were saying crazy shit at board meetings.
Danny, they were saying, we got to shoot Girondi down.
What do you mean they sabotaged your product?
Right.
So first they admit that my product is three to five times better than theirs.
Okay.
We've got it.
Read it in the book.
Don't listen to me.
Read it in the book.
It all came out in Discovery.
Girondi's product is three to five times better than ours.
It'll add $200 million to our company if we can sabotage it and shelve it and get it.
They go behind my back.
They go to the people where I license the product from.
And I have a non-disparagement, so I have to be careful about this.
Not against Bluebird, who, by the way, it cost a million dollars when I wouldn't sign the non-disparagement against Bluebird.
Anyway, so they go behind my back.
You mean they try to pay you a million dollars to sign a non-disparagement and you didn't take it?
Yeah, the other side.
So there was two people that had to settle up with me at the end.
And when I said, I won't talk bad about this not-for-profit any longer because they're a great institution.
Yeah.
And I don't like the executives and maybe they did a lot of bad things that they should not have, but I'm not going to talk about it because they are a good institution.
But Bluebird Bio, as soon as I walk out of the room, I'm going to tell the world what they did.
Right.
Well, that great institution basically had to give a million dollars to Bluer Bio because I wouldn't sign the non disparagement.
Oh, wow.
True story.
Wow.
So basically, they go behind my shoulder.
Okay.
And they went right to the company you were licensing it from.
Right.
And they basically say, you know, Geronti's nuts.
You know, he makes videos.
He's a rock star in Italy.
I mean, have you ever listened to his stuff?
I think he's crazy.
You know, and he, oh, he's off the reservation.
And when analysts, analysts, stock analysts were calling the CEO, And say, hey, Nick, what's going on with that Son Ruck with Therapeutics?
Is your product better than yours?
Yeah, Son Ruck with Therapeutics.
We got them all locked up.
Don't worry about it.
So that's called insider trading.
In the meanwhile, Nick Gleshley makes over $100 million selling his stock, which goes up to $230 in 2018.
Selling it, they raised $1.1 billion alone at $185 and $165 in 2018, selling it to unsuspecting investors.
All the while, they knew they had bummed dope.
That's insider trading.
Nick Leshley makes over $100 million.
I told you he was the best CEO in 2014 in bioscience, and he was the worst in 2020.
They go behind my back.
They make a deal.
I don't know what they're doing, but I make a deal with the company I licensed it from with a not-for-profit.
And I say, okay, guys, you're not happy with me for whatever reason.
I get it.
Not a problem.
I'll give you back the project, but run like hell with it.
And I figured because they had 4% and 6% royalties.
I figured if I give them 50% royalties, basically, they're going to go run like hell with it, which is basically what I did.
I kept 50% of the project for my investors and they got 50%, but they ran the project from then on.
In 2015, I went to them and I said, Bluebird Bio has treated 30 patients.
We've treated three.
What the hell is going on?
I got an attorney.
I found out that the CEO of Memorial Sloan Kettering had other issues.
And through newspaper articles, New York Times, by the way, 2012, found out that the same guys that bought my competitor had funded Memorial Sloan Kettering's CEO, his publicly traded company, and he was sued for a billion dollars in 2012 because of that.
Of course, it all ends up settling out of court.
Hold on a second.
You hear that?
Is that Rafal?
Is he here?
Can you ask him to turn that down real quick?
Just knock on the door right there.
Just crack it open real quick.
Say, yo, we're wrapping up the podcast.
Sorry.
Sorry, that's coming like through the microphone.
I can hear it pretty loud in the headphones.
He did?
All right, cool.
Sorry.
So basically in 2015, I'm looking back and all of that, and I find out that the CEO of Memorial Sloan Kettering got like $110 million from the owners of my competitor.
So now I'm getting a little bit nervous.
From the owners of who?
I told you that there was two French companies, basically, or two French researchers who invented one, the beta-globin gene, and the other, the mutant beta-globin gene.
Right, right.
The mutant beta-globin gene gets bought by Bluebird Bios.
Okay.
Bluebird Bio was owned by Third Rock Ventures.
Third Rock Ventures had given, had funded the CEO of Memorial Sloan Kettering's company, Adjo's Pharma, for $110 million between 2007 and 2011.
It's all in the book.
And again, I'm not disparaging Memorial Sloan Kettering.
Great.
I love them.
They do a lot of great, great things for people and all of that.
The executives, you know, whatever.
They come and they go.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I go to my ex-partner and I say, hey, man, you've got to give him my product back because, you know, you're fumbling the ball here.
And they say, no, no, we're not going to give it back to you.
So I said, okay, I'll sue you for breach of contract.
So I sue him for breach of contract.
And we begin discovery.
By 2017, Christmas time, it was December 28th, I get to read the second amended complaint.
You know, I think the worst thing in life, worse than cancer, worse than getting beat up, worse than discrimination, is disappointment.
For me, anyway.
So, you know, it.
It's like, son, the teacher said you cheated on your exam.
That's horrible.
But it's real horrible when you find out that he really did do it.
It's disappointing.
So I had suspicion that things weren't on the up and up, but there was no way in the world I thought anybody could ever put money in front of patients.
I mean, it just didn't work.
I'm stupid.
I admit that I didn't graduate from high school.
I'm stupid.
And like I say, I'm one of those.
Catholic guys who believes we're all brothers and wants to help everybody.
But in December 28, 2017, Judge O'Strauger was our judge.
He said, I'm going to blow this case wide open.
And our case was in the New York Times front page.
Front page, New York Times.
We had 40 articles.
Bloomberg, you name it, did articles on us.
And he said, I'm going to blow this case wide open.
I'm going to let the world see the amended complaint.
And what Girondi and San Rocco Therapeutics is accusing Blue Bird Bayou and Third Rock Ventures of doing.
I was laying in my bed in Italy.
It was like 51 degrees in my house because going through the trial, I didn't have any liquidity.
I was borrowing money from my partner, Joey Feldman.
He had borrowed the company $3.5 million that he'd never get back if we lost the case.
My attorney, Ken Sussman, Jew from New York, I love him like a brother.
He took out a second mortgage on his house because he was on contingency.
So there was no way I was going to ask anybody for money.
So my house, I didn't turn on the heat.
Lying In Italy During The Trial00:02:56
And that was it.
It was 51 degrees.
It was 51 degrees.
And I was in my bed when I got a call from my attorney, Ken.
He says, I just sent you the amended complaint.
The judge said you can read it all.
Up until then, it was protected under secrecy.
I couldn't read it.
It was attorney's eyes only, secrecy.
I don't know what happened, but like I said, I wasn't crying like, but I was disappointed.
I suspected that maybe they could have done what they did, but nothing hit me like when I read that they did do it.
They really put money in front of patients' lives.
And I laid in bed on my phone, and I just read it.
And I read all the charges, and the charges were the result of discovery that I couldn't see, but my attorneys could.
And all of a sudden, I'm reading the dates, the words, the documents that they used to fuck my son.
He'd have been cured three or four years ago.
And to fuck every one of his brothers and sisters who have sickle cell disease and thalassemia.
They fucked every one of them.
And I felt like the biggest piece of shit because I let them fuck them.
Because I wasn't smart enough.
When we started dancing in 2010, when they were blowing smoke up my ass about how I was the greatest father in the world, I didn't realize that those fucking fruit faggots from Harvard University and Yale were fucking me up my ass and at the same time fucking my patients.
And in 2000, December 28, 2017, I was able to read it all.
And there was nowhere in my house for me to hide.
I felt like the biggest idiot.
Just, I let, because by then, every sickle cell disease patient is my son or my daughter or my brother or my sister.
Every thalassemic patient.
And I had let them do that.
And, um, After that, the judge said to them, you know, this isn't a frivolous case.
By then, they had spent $30, $40, $50 million fighting us.
Up until then, it was me and my Jew attorney from New York, Ken Sussman.
Me and him.
Us two.
And Joey Feldman, my partner.
The Nightmare Of Unaffordable Justice00:04:19
Banking us, paying for experts, paying for the court.
The discovery.
I mean, it's just a nightmare and that's why, in the United States unfortunately, most people can't afford justice.
And uh, the judge finally, like in 2018, he told him.
He says, you know you're treating this as a frivolous case.
It is not a frivolous case, but Covet came.
So what happened?
Our court case delayed delayed delayed, and we didn't get in front of the judge until october 29th of 2020.
And the way he did it, he gave us four days.
And because of COVID, you had to do it by Zoom.
So we sent in all our affidavits.
They sent in all their affidavits.
The judge read all the affidavits.
And then for the first two days, they got to kind of find holes in our armor and make us look like fools or make it look like we were lying.
And I was the first guy on the stand.
And we were in Boston because it in 2021, we hired Greenberg Trow, rigged three guys from Massachusetts, and they had a bigger office than Ken's office in New York.
So we went to Massachusetts for the case.
And good guys, by the way.
So I was the first guy up, you know.
And I was on the stand for an hour and a half.
It was easy for me, Danny.
All I had to do was tell the truth.
Right.
I mean, I didn't have to remember a goddamn thing.
I just told the truth.
And I got done.
And then our president was on Sam Salmon.
He never took a paycheck.
I never took a paycheck.
Sam Salmon didn't even have a sick kid.
I hired him in 2009.
From 2009 to 2020, never took a paycheck.
I never took it.
I took my first paycheck when we settled the agreement.
When we settled the case in 2021, I took my first paycheck, you know, and I'm taking a salary of $150,000.
And when I saw that there was $19,000 on my credit card to shoot him in charge, I wrote a check back to the company.
That's the kind of capitalist that we are or we were in the United States of America.
The first guy to sacrifice is the boss.
He's not the CEO making $34 million like Fold when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt with all those poor people's pensions and he got a golden parachute.
Capitalism, that's not capitalism.
That's criminalism.
So anyway, I was the first up.
Sammy was the second up.
Greg Lapointe was the third guy up.
He was the CEO of Sigma Tau.
Great guy.
And boy, they couldn't even ding us.
Couldn't ding us.
There was thousands of people watching the webcast.
It kept getting interrupted.
And the guy on the webcast was saying, Your Honor, we can't technically support the thing anymore.
I mean, so many people are watching.
It was incredible.
And then we went the next day.
With our experts damage experts, etc. etc.
It was Friday The judge okay Monday and Tuesday You guys are up at bat now my attorneys got to find the chinks in their armor and the judge ended the day and he said I Don't know where you're going with this bluebird Third rock ventures This could be very painful for you And then he looked at me.
And it was weird because he didn't really know he was looking at me because it was a podcast.
But he was looking in me.
And he was looking into my heart.
He said, in the state of New York, damages are a slippery slope.
And that was a message to me.
So I went to my Aunt Gloria, 91 years old.
She died right after the trial.
Went to see her over the weekend and went to church and went to mass and talked to my mother and talked to my friends and Joey.
Damages Are A Slippery Slope00:07:02
Sunday night, I get a call from Mark Berthune.
Pat!
Gotta get on the phone!
Why, Mark?
It's fucking 10 o'clock.
They want to settle!
That's all.
They want to settle.
They can talk to me tomorrow morning.
I'm going to bed.
Yeah, but come on.
I mean, this is what we're waiting for.
Mark, I'll talk to you in the morning.
I went there.
They shuffled papers in front of me.
I said, Drandy.
Because, of course, I'm the bad guy the whole time.
I'm an idiot.
I'm the high school dropout who was playing over his head.
You know, street guy.
Father, good intentioned father, all that bullshit.
Rockstar in Italy and all this.
Anyway.
Gerandi, what will it take to end this?
He said, well, what do you mean?
Well, what do you need to make this stop?
I said, well, I want my product back.
And I want enough money to pay my attorneys, to pay my debt, and to have enough money to move forward and treat patients.
That's what I want.
How much will that be?
I'm bound by secrecy, so I can't give you the number.
It was in the millions, obviously.
More than that, I can't say.
My attorneys, if they're watching, and maybe they're not, maybe they are, they'll be cringing right now.
They're probably getting ready to bawl me out after the podcast, but I don't really care.
I'm going to die soon anyway.
I mean, how long do we live, you know?
I mean, I'm just doing what I'm supposed to do, you know?
So I said, it's X amount of dollars and give me my product back.
And they said, done.
If I'd have asked for double what I asked for, they just said done.
But I didn't need double.
I said, just give me enough to get back on the road.
And so that's what we're doing now.
So at the University of Kentucky, University of Southern Illinois, Chris Ballas, Desh Govinder, Professor Andrew Wilbur, Professor Frank Park, we're putting an insulator on our product because.
Michelle Settelin at Sloan Kettering discovered that these lentiviral vectors, these gene therapy, need an insulator because there's been cases of leukemia and stuff for patients treated without an insulator.
What's an insulator?
An insulator is, so when the gene goes into your chromosome lines, it could fall next to an oncogene, like a cancer gene, and trigger it.
Oh, shit.
So we want to put an insulator in between our gene that we're inserting, our vector that we're inserting, and the other gene, so it won't trigger them.
Yeah.
So we're doing that now.
We're doing that now.
Okay.
But Bluebird Bio might be approved by then.
Who don't know?
They're going to be on June 8th and June 9th.
There's going to be a public hearing that the FDA is calling for Bluebird Bio.
We already sent in a, it's called a citizen's petition.
And we said to the FDA, FDA, we don't think they should be approved because one, they have a mutant gene.
Two, they've had problems with patients.
Three, they don't have an insulator.
Four, they butted in line and acted with treachery to get where they are.
And the fifth thing is something called organs.
Drug exclusivity, because if they get orphan drug exclusivity they won't have competition for seven years in the United States.
So we said, FDA, we don't think you should allow them to be approved.
But they might get approved, and that's not the fault of the ex FDA, because it's not the FDA's.
You know thing to be looking at court cases, by the way.
So, and they might get approved, and and and and that's it, but that's how the court case ended, basically.
And we find out that Bloomberg BIO is infringing on our product.
So now we're ensuing them for infringement.
So maybe economically it might be the best thing in the world that they get approved, because then why They're going to have to pay me because they're infringing on my product.
But we think that we need an insulator on our product, and they need one as well, we believe.
And I was just at the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy in Washington, D.C. for a week, talking to all of the people at the FDA, all of the researchers, all of the whatever.
I gave out about 30 of my books.
It was kind of neat and wonderful.
But there's a lot of great people at the NIH, which is the National Institute of Health, National Cancer Institute.
FDA, SEC, FBI, politicians, you name it, we've got some of the best in the world, doctors, CEOs, even.
We've got some great, wonderful CEOs.
Emil Kakas, John Ballantine, Michael Chambers, CEO of Aldebaran.
And I'm talking about companies that are worth hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars.
And they're great guys, by the way.
Is this gene therapy going to be able to make it possible to where people with these blood diseases won't have to get transfusions?
Yes.
They'll be cured, they'll be asymptomatic.
So you'll get the gene cell therapy essentially once, and then it's done.
That's it.
Done.
Really?
Done, man.
When do you hope for this to happen?
We're putting an insulator on now, and we're making sure, I mean, I'll be getting a call by the end of the week probably, that the insulator is not hurting the efficacy of the drug.
Okay.
And show my book again.
That's exciting.
Hold it up for us.
Tell people listening and watching right at their own door.
And I don't give a shit about it.
Come up higher by your face.
I don't give a shit about the money.
I mean, the money's going to research anyway.
But you know what?
If you don't read it, you're not going to understand that this is true to what I'm saying.
And it'll be great for you guys if you want to go to the stock market because it tells how I got in the stock market.
It'll be great for you people if you got a sick father, a sick son, a sick daughter, a sick cousin because it tells all about that.
And it'll be great for you people if you're like out of the box, not cookie cutter kind of people and you're wondering, geez, how could that guy get on Oprah Winfrey show?
Twice!
How is that guy one of America's most eligible bachelors?
How do you end up doing what it?
Read about it.
It's a great story.
It's a feel-good story.
And it's none of this bullshit.
Woe is me.
My daddy beat me up.
And oh my uncle he he molested me.
Oh my god.
I could never ever see another hot dog in my life because Every time I saw a hot dog I thought of my uncle.
I mean come out with all that bullshit.
Will you I mean come out You we got to go back real quick before we end this thing.
You're you're in play girl.
You didn't have a spread in play girl magazine, did you play girl magazine?
I had all my clothes on.
Okay, good.
You can go and find it.
God.
Okay, and I was in there with if you were in there Sylvester Stallone I want to I wanted to have the signed copy to put on the bookshelf.
Rejecting The Woe Is Me Narrative00:03:26
I got it.
But you know what?
I'll send you a copy.
But I was in there with Sylvester Stallone and Magic Johnson.
By the way, Larry Johnson, Magic's brother, who I've collaborated with on sickle cell disease, by the way.
Good people.
So, I mean, it was kind of helpful.
At least when I called, I said, hey, we're in the same magazine together.
You know what I'm saying?
That's awesome.
No, it is awesome.
And again, you know, again, I am an idiot, okay?
And I'm a high school dropout.
And I'm not the sharpest guy in the drawer.
Um, but I try to be a good guy and a good American and a good capitalist, by the way and, and as a good capitalist and a good American with a socialist heart, with a socialist heart, I believe that the first guy to sacrifice should be the boss.
You know, that's very well that's uh, that's the truth.
I agree with that.
Yeah, you know.
I mean, you know Bezzos, you gotta lead by example.
Yeah, forget about okay, how much is worth a trillion that?
Come on with all that.
Give bonuses to all those freaking truck drivers.
Take yeah, take 90 all your money and give it away to your employees.
Yeah, let them get their health care, let them get everything.
I mean, You know, that's what capitalism in America is about.
It's not about dying with, you know, 20 zeros after your name.
What good is that going to do you?
I agree.
Pat, thank you for doing this.
I very much appreciate it.
Tell people where they can buy the book.
So, Flight of the Rondone.
Oh, by the way, stop.
I got to tell one more thing.
Yeah.
Why is it called Flight of the Rondone?
What is that?
That's a bird.
What is that bird called?
Well, in English, you'd probably call it a swift.
In Italian, you call it a rondone.
Now, the rondone flies from Africa at about 140 up to 140 miles an hour.
It gets into our town and it lays eggs in our cathedral ceilings or roofs.
And it flies around and around.
But the thing about the Rondone is kind of like me.
It's short.
And it doesn't have a big nose like me, but it's short.
But it's got like real long wings.
So it can't land on the ground.
Because if it lands on the ground, it can't take off again because the wings hit the ground when it tries to take off.
So it's always got to land two to three stories high.
Okay, and when they go in our piazza from like March to August September and they're flying around flying around flying around flying every now and then they collide because they go so fast.
Okay When they collide guess what happens they fall to the ground well when they get to the ground We know what to do we take them in our hands as gently as we can We cup them and we throw them as high as we can into the air so that they can begin flapping their wings and take off Well, when I was a kid Big Mama, that wonderful dark-skinned woman from Northwestern Hospital.
Clarence Bryant, that wonderful judge who told me to go to the military instead of jail.
That wonderful dark-skinned man.
Joey Gornick, that Croatian boss that I had when I loaded the trucks.
My mother, my attorney, that Jew, Ken Sussman, who I love with all my heart.
I kind of collided a lot.
It wasn't too bright.
Honoring Those Who Helped Along The Way00:01:53
I was at Rondoni.
And they picked me up and threw me in the air so I could fly again.
It's beautiful.
And I'm going to die soon.
You know, we all are.
You're not going to die soon.
Well, I mean, you look like a young health man.
Yeah, but what soon?
I mean, I don't know, 50 years?
It's pretty soon.
I mean, we've been on the planet 5 million years.
So all I want to do is I'll raise some more money for my company.
We're going to go after other therapies.
We're working on a therapy, CD47 now, which is a great invention.
I want to try to do a little good.
We're not going to make the company a big company so we could, you know, give everybody a hundred million or whatever.
No, no, no.
We're going to try to do good research.
And in the United States, we can do good research, and it doesn't have to cost a trillion dollars because we're not going to let the executives steal all the money.
It's a good plan.
I hope I wish you all the success under the sun.
And it's exciting to see what you're doing, especially for people, for the patients that are suffering from sickle cell and those other blood diseases.
It's exciting shit, man.
Yes.
And remember, again, I don't care.
I offended you at it.
I mean, it's almost like tough shit.
You know, I didn't mean to, but I did.
But you know what?
There's only one race, the human race.
And the United States, the first thing I do as a president, stop taking the goddamn census.
Who cares how many of dark-skinned is, light-skinned?
This is all idiocracy.
We're all Americans.
We just love each other.
We got a great country.
We've got to get health care better.
We've got to get our universities better, and we've got to help each other.
That's it.
Stop at all this division politics and all this bullshit.