March 26, 2018 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:32:01
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Okay Boom and we're live with Joey Diaz and TJ English Joey turned me on to you a long time ago, Mr. English. | ||
| He gave me a copy of The Westies. | ||
| Right? | ||
| What year was that? | ||
| 98, 99. A long time ago he gave me that book. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's fantastic. | ||
| Really fascinating stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| First book I published. | ||
| Was it really? | ||
| The Westies. | ||
| Yeah, 1990. How'd you guys find out of each other? | ||
| He wrote a book. | ||
| A friend of mine turned me on to a book named Havana Nocturne. | ||
| That was a small book, a fascinating read, and I was just blown away by it. | ||
| And I went to a party one night, and there was a literary agent there, and I go, do you fucking guys read A Van Nocturne? | ||
| They go, we optioned it. | ||
| And I was like, that's fucking it. | ||
| That's going to be a great book. | ||
| It broke down how Fidel took over it from three different cities, how it was going down in three different categories. | ||
| And then I heard that he was writing a book about West New York and Union City Cubans where I grew up. | ||
| And I emailed him and I told him who I was, that my mother had a bar and I grew up in that shit. | ||
| And he hit me back and we became friends. | ||
| He came to a show and... | ||
| Yeah, Joey reached out to me, you know, unfortunately, when I was just about finishing this book. | ||
| So I had done most of the work and it was down on paper. | ||
| But it was a trip. | ||
| It was like he was like a character who walked out of the book. | ||
| And I wished I'd met him earlier, because I hadn't met too many characters like him. | ||
| Union City's an amazing place. | ||
| I don't think people realize it. | ||
| It's one of those little enclaves. | ||
| Happens to be Cuban. | ||
| It's like a mafia neighborhood, but it was Cubans, not Italians. | ||
| Or it was like Hell's Kitchen, which I wrote about in the Westies, which was an Irish neighborhood. | ||
| Very intense neighborhood. | ||
| High premium on loyalty. | ||
| Young males running loyalty games on each other all the time from the age of six. | ||
|
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Am I right? | |
| How so? | ||
|
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What do you mean? | |
| How far will you go for me? | ||
| What are you willing to do for me? | ||
| In the case of Hell's Kitchen in the Westies, it was cut up bodies. | ||
| It was not only would you kill somebody for me, but will you make the body disappear? | ||
| And they tested each other with the cutting up of the bodies. | ||
| In Union City, a lot of it was political. | ||
| Some of it was political. | ||
| How anti-Fidel are you? | ||
| How badly do you want to kill, you know, Fidel and help us reclaim our lost homeland? | ||
| That was kind of behind a lot of things. | ||
| It wasn't spoken about a lot, but it was sort of a hidden motivation. | ||
| Westies was a really fantastic book. | ||
| Like, you went deep into that whole sort of sub-scene. | ||
| You know, it's a very interesting crime-infested area. | ||
| Well, what I try to do with these books is to tell the macro story, the larger historical, sociopolitical story, and then get intimate and tell the interpersonal stories between the characters that actually live the story. | ||
| That's a challenge. | ||
| You've got to find people who are willing to talk to you and share information with you that they've kept quiet probably most of their lives. | ||
| And then you get at the interpersonal stuff, because these stories really are just human beings caught up in something that's bigger than them. | ||
| And how long, when you're writing a book like The Corporation, which is your new book, or Westies, or any of your books, how much time do you spend doing the research, and how much time do you spend actually writing the book? | ||
| It takes about three years to do these books on average, and two of those years is research, probably. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| So do you bring this to the book company, the publisher, and you say, hey, this is what I want to write a book about? | ||
| You do a proposal, and I do very, very detailed proposals. | ||
| For the corporation, I did a proposal that was 125 pages long, and it's a chapter-by-chapter breakdown. | ||
| It's almost like a condensed version of the book. | ||
| And you get more money from a publisher that way as an advance because you're showing them the whole thing practically. | ||
| They can see the finished product almost. | ||
| And also, you know, the movie interest. | ||
| There was movie interest in this one, the corporation, based on that proposal. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Yeah, it was optioned based on that proposal before I even started writing the book. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what is the corporation about? | ||
| The corporation is the story of a Cuban-American organized crime organization that began in the mid-1960s and existed all the way to the end of the century. | ||
| And it was led by this mobster named Jose Miguel Battle, who was kind of a legendary figure in Cuban-American circles because he was a hero from the Bay of Pigs invasion. | ||
| The attempt to reclaim Cuba, take back Cuba, the invasion, 1961, which was a disaster for everyone involved. | ||
| Battle wound up in prison along with the rest of the brigade. | ||
| And when he got out and came back to the U.S., he was determined to get Castro and take back Cuba. | ||
| So he set up this criminal thing and it was based on one racket primarily, bolita, the number, the lottery, the illegal lottery. | ||
| Before the lottery was legal, it was illegal and it was controlled by organized crime and it was a huge money maker. | ||
| Big money maker for the mob going back to the 1920s. | ||
| Everyone bets the number. | ||
| Little old ladies bet the number, priests, Cops, you know, you can bet a nickel, you can bet a dime, you can bet $10,000. | ||
| Hugely profitable for whoever controls and organizes it. | ||
| Well, the Cubans controlled and organized it on the eastern coast of the United States, from New Jersey and New York all the way down to Miami. | ||
| And the guy who controlled it was battle, and he became legendary based on that. | ||
| They controlled the whole number system? | ||
| Because I know there was a lot of Italians that were involved in that as well, right? | ||
| Well, they went to the mafia. | ||
| One of the first things Battle did... | ||
| Battle had been a cop, a vice cop in Havana in the 1950s. | ||
| Before the turnover. | ||
| Yeah, during the era when the mob... | ||
| Joey was talking about Havana Nocturne. | ||
| That's what that book was about. | ||
| The era of the mob in Havana in the 50s. | ||
| Meyer Lansky, Santo Trafficante, and how they controlled that until Castro came along and spoiled the party and the revolution happened and they got chased out of there. | ||
| Battle had been a vice cop in Havana during those years and he knew all those high-ranking mobsters and in fact he was a bag man who delivered money from the skim at the casinos in Havana to the presidential palace. | ||
| So So Battle knew how the world went round and he made those connections and when he finally gets to the US and wants to start his own thing, first thing he does is go to Santo Trafficante and says, can you make the proper introductions for me? | ||
| Proficante introduces him to Fat Tony Salerno in New York City, who controls the numbers racket for all five families. | ||
| And Battle says, look, things are changing in Cuba. | ||
| Over the next couple of decades, you're going to have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Cubans coming to live in the United States. | ||
| They all bet the number. | ||
| That's a huge market. | ||
| If you let me take over this thing and organize it, you will get your piece of everything. | ||
| And the Mafia said yes. | ||
| And so the Cubans took over. | ||
| And they controlled everything. | ||
| I mean, in New York City in the 70s and 80s, there were probably 200 to 300 bolita spots where you could go bet the number. | ||
| The Cubans called it bolita, a little ball. | ||
| And so they controlled it and they took care of the mafia and everybody got fat and happy for a while until it turned bad and they started killing each other. | ||
| Now, Joey, when you heard about this book, this is something that you were very intimately involved in when you were a kid. | ||
| Very, you know, I come on your show and I tell you, there's a hundred stories I can tell you, and there's a thousand I can't. | ||
| And when he told, when I read the thesis for this book, I just knew. | ||
| I just fucking knew. | ||
| You know, I grew up in numbers. | ||
| When I went to Catholic school on Saturdays, when I came home on Fridays, On Saturdays at the age of 8, I was sent to different locations in the city, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and I would make $50 going to run errands, running numbers, go tell this guy the first number of the day is two. | ||
| So I grew up in it. | ||
| I grew up in a house where the bookie would call my mother by 3 o'clock and go, what's the numbers for the day? | ||
| And my mother would give him a fucking laundry list. | ||
| And it's very interesting. | ||
| In this book, he also covers... | ||
| The mysticism of the number. | ||
| So if I'm at your house and your daughter walks in with a hockey shirt and her number's 13, I'll look at you and go, Joe, give me a number from zero to nine, five. | ||
| And I pick up the phone and I bet 513. If I look out my window and the cop car is 506, I put $5 on 506. If I have a dream about an eagle, When I go down to the Bolita spot, there's books that they sell, books of dreams. | ||
| And I take that book and I look up Eagle, and if Eagle's number eight, I pay $8.13. | ||
| You were mentioning a couple months ago that your grandmother took numbers. | ||
| Your grandmother was Sicilian. | ||
| Sicilian people have the same, every day they live, today's the day. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Today's the day, Joe Rogan. | ||
|
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Yep. | |
| Today's the day I'm hitting the number. | ||
| I'm not getting... | ||
| That's all she talked about. | ||
| That dream. | ||
| That dream. | ||
| Again, we're going back to an immigrant mentality. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| That those three numbers today, if God wants, if God is real, what he says is true, my number's going to come out today. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When is my ship going to come in? | ||
|
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Right, right, right. | |
| You work a plain Jane dream. | ||
| You're a blue-collar person. | ||
| And on the way home every day by 3.30, you put the number in. | ||
|
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That's it. | |
| That's what you do. | ||
| Something to believe in. | ||
| That's something to believe in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Numerology. | ||
| And with Cubans, it was very mystical. | ||
| It was tied into dreams and belief. | ||
| The idea was you bet the number and you try to make your dreams come true. | ||
| That's literally what you're doing. | ||
| You're trying to make your dreams come true. | ||
| And the Bolita guys, the Boliteros, the ones who control it, They're the dream makers. | ||
| They're the guys who are making it possible for your dreams to come true. | ||
| So they had tremendous stature in the community. | ||
| In the community. | ||
| They're a dream solver. | ||
| So you work TJ's Jose Battle and you're an independent bookie. | ||
| Your job is to sit at At Brindy Lounge in West New York from 10 to 3, drinking, and all day long people come in and go, Joe, give me $517, $3. | ||
| Give me $3031. | ||
| At 3 o'clock, 3.30, a number comes out. | ||
| If that number wins, if I give you $500, you get $3,000 from battle. | ||
| You give me $2,500. | ||
| So you make $500 off the top, and then I tip you. | ||
| The thing that Battle did was he didn't take 10 points. | ||
| He let you run your independent action unless you called it into him. | ||
| You know, it's very... | ||
| You ever watch the movie... | ||
| What's the movie with Mickey Rourke and the Chinese people? | ||
| You're the dragon. | ||
| Yeah, great fucking movie. | ||
| Great movie when he says, you know, for years the Chinese were bringing in the heroin and they were selling it to the Italians. | ||
| You know, a $50,000 investment could make you $500,000. | ||
| Chinese weren't seeing that. | ||
| Like they weren't seeing that. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because they couldn't bring it out. | ||
| They couldn't sell it. | ||
| Black people and Spanish people bitch slapped them to death. | ||
| So the same thing happened with Bolita. | ||
| Fat Tony Salerno knew that he had a big thing coming with the Cubans, but Cubans want to put a bet in with Cubans. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you understand me? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Italians, they want to put a bet in with Italians. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Puerto Ricans, they want to put a bet in with a Puerto Rican. | ||
| Isn't that a big thing that was with the numbers? | ||
| It was that it was a community thing. | ||
| It's a community thing. | ||
| Everybody would talk about the numbers. | ||
| It wouldn't be like the lottery is some sort of a government-funded thing, and it seems... | ||
| Like, it's got a lot of red tape and official, and there's no wiggle room. | ||
| The numbers seem to be closer to, like, the community. | ||
| Especially with Latinos. | ||
| Especially with Latinos. | ||
| Yeah, it was, in some ways, the core of the community. | ||
| The number of spots where everybody would hang out. | ||
| You'd go to hear the neighborhood La Bole and La Calle. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| The gossip in the streets. | ||
| You'd go there to hear the neighborhood gossip. | ||
| Yeah, and it was never meant to be violent. | ||
| Back in Cuba, Bolita was not violent. | ||
| It was illegal, but it wasn't violent. | ||
| And it turned very violent in the United States. | ||
| The corporation became so profitable. | ||
| I mean, we're talking about millions of dollars on a monthly basis. | ||
| Billions of dollars over the course of the life of this organization. | ||
| Billions of dollars. | ||
| More than they could. | ||
| The hardest thing they had was what to do with the money. | ||
| I mean, they would literally strap money to people as money couriers to try to get it out of the country to get it into offshore bank accounts and launder them. | ||
| They had more money than they knew. | ||
| It was a license to print money. | ||
| It was hugely profitable. | ||
| That's what made it violent. | ||
| Then you started having gangsters vying for territory, territorial disputes, greed. | ||
| Greed took over and it got very ugly. | ||
| Now, is this between Cubans? | ||
| Between Cubans, between the Cubans and the Italians. | ||
| See, this guy, Battle, was a very charismatic leader. | ||
| With some great leadership qualities, he'd been a hero in the Bay of Pigs invasion. | ||
| He saved some guys' lives. | ||
| When I first heard that story, I said, I gotta verify that. | ||
| Maybe this is just a story a guy told about himself to burnish his legend. | ||
| So I found the guys that he saved. | ||
| And I found the guy's two brothers who went with him to save the guys that he saved. | ||
| And I went to Cuba, to the Bay of Pigs, to the exact location where he saved these guys, to verify this story. | ||
| And it was absolutely true. | ||
| In an act of incredible heroism, he saved the life of a number of his platoon members. | ||
| And so that was his reputation from then on. | ||
| He was revered in the community. | ||
| He was a hero. | ||
| And people defended him. | ||
| Even when it turned ugly and he became a ruthless boss who was killing people left and right, he had his defenders because of his legend as a hero in the community. | ||
| And so the power that he had. | ||
| But he also had this... | ||
| Joey and I were talking about this. | ||
| Cubans have this. | ||
| Latinos have this. | ||
| Everybody has it, but Cubans have it. | ||
| Desire for revenge. | ||
| This guy, you know, the Bay of Pigs invasion was an attempt at revenge, to get revenge against Castro, and they were humiliated by that process. | ||
| And a lot of the guys from that generation had an unfinished agenda for revenge. | ||
| So if you wronged this guy battle in any way, he was going to get you, even if it took years and years of calculation. | ||
| I mean, there are stories in the book about this one guy who killed his brother named Polulu. | ||
| It took 9 years and 12 attempts before they finally killed this guy, Palula. | ||
| They shot him in his hospital. | ||
| He was in the hospital. | ||
| They shot him. | ||
| Had an assassin dress up as a male nurse and go into the hospital and shoot him between the eyes. | ||
| Because there had been so many failed attempts. | ||
| They weren't going to fail this time. | ||
| And that's in battle. | ||
| Took 12 years. | ||
| I mean, took 9 years. | ||
| Did they catch the assassin? | ||
| No, never caught him. | ||
| No way. | ||
| Disappeared in the lane. | ||
| I believe the assassin got killed later because he was talking about it having done it and so bad it'll had him killed. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the revenge motive kind of drove battle off the deep end. | ||
| And somewhere along the line, he broke bad, so to speak. | ||
| I mean, I don't know if he was ever good and had to break bad. | ||
| But he started doing internal killings that really had nothing to do about business. | ||
| They were all about revenge. | ||
| Well, this is a theme that happens a lot with organized crime people, right? | ||
| It's like they just get a taste of killing people and it becomes easier and easier. | ||
| That was the thing about Murder Machine, right? | ||
| About Roy DeMeo? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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He just was killing people or anything after a while. | |
| That's another book you gave me. | ||
|
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Yeah, Murder Machine. | |
| I was reading all those books on the road. | ||
| Because I was auditioning for so many Italian roles and I never really knew the history of it. | ||
| So I was just trying to read all those books just so when I went in, I had an idea of what these characters and who they were. | ||
| I saw them growing up. | ||
| I saw these guys, you know, growing up. | ||
| I just didn't. | ||
| The interesting thing about this book was, talking to the Bay of Pigs, is that they knew that they were coming. | ||
| Like Fidel knew he was coming. | ||
| He put barbed wire or something in his coral that the soldiers all slashed their feet. | ||
| As they were landing, there was four battalions, I think, in 250. Well, you know what happened when they landed? | ||
| What happened? | ||
| There were Klieg lights set up on the beach. | ||
| Yeah, they knew they were coming. | ||
| When they landed, they flipped the lights on and lit it up like a movie set right when these guys landed. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| They got slaughtered. | ||
| They got slaughtered, and they felt they'd been betrayed by Kennedy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, there was supposed to be air cover, and the air cover never came. | ||
| Why was that? | ||
| Because Kennedy always had... | ||
| This operation was started by the Eisenhower administration and the CIA. It was a CIA operation. | ||
| Kennedy inherited it, and he never really... | ||
| He always had mixed feelings about it. | ||
| I mean, it was illegal. | ||
| It was an illegal, secret, covert operation, an attempt to overthrow a government... | ||
| It would have been seen as an illegal act in the eyes of the world to do it. | ||
| So Kennedy was trying to do it so it could be done in such a way that it could never blow back on his administration. | ||
| And so he withheld air cover at a crucial point in that war. | ||
| It lasted three days. | ||
| And they got slaughtered. | ||
| And they got imprisoned. | ||
| And they had a lot of resentment towards Kennedy. | ||
| I mean, I go into the book a little bit about the Kennedy assassination and the belief that a handful of those Cubans may have been involved in the Kennedy assassination along with the Italians, with the mob, because they were working hand-in-hand with the CIA. Yeah, that was one of the leading conspiracies outside of the CIA killing him. | ||
| And even the CIA killing him was a part of the Bay of Pigs conspiracy. | ||
| And also the idea that he wanted to disband the CIA. There was a really interesting article recently that was dismissing almost every single conspiracy theory about the Kennedy assassination. | ||
| They said, except the CIA one. | ||
| There's legitimate possibilities that the CIA... Well, you can bet your ass that if the CIA was involved, then Cubans were involved. | ||
| Now, let me ask you something. | ||
| In the book, you speak about Fidel's mistress. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That he got disenchanted with her at this particular one. | ||
| Marita. | ||
| She had gone to New Orleans or to Dallas. | ||
| Marita Loren. | ||
| This is very interesting. | ||
| Notorious figure. | ||
| She had a child with him and had an abortion and didn't have the child. | ||
| She got pregnant with Fidel. | ||
| In fact, Castro admitted as much. | ||
| She got pregnant with Castro. | ||
| She had an abortion. | ||
| And then the CIA Used her to try to assassinate Castro. | ||
| She was supposed to slip him a pill and she put it in her face cream and the pill dissolved in her face cream and that was the pill she was going to try to slip to Castro. | ||
| Her case agent was a guy named Frank Sturgis who wound up being one of the Watergate burglars. | ||
| See, the thing about Bay of Pigs and the Cubans The Bay of Pigs invasion is the key to understanding the whole latter part of the 20th century politics in the United States, the Cold War, because the alliance between the CIA and the Cubans Rears its head constantly throughout the latter part of the 20th century, the Watergate burglary. | ||
| Five out of seven of the burglars were Cubans, Bay of Pigs veterans. | ||
| They had been recruited by a guy named E. Howard Hunt, CIA agent who was one of the orchestrators of the Bay of Pigs invasion. | ||
| He was also one of the people that on his deathbed said that he was involved in the assassination of Kennedy. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So the CIA would come to these Cuban exiles, the militant exiles, and they'd say, go do this operation, go do this burglary at the Watergate, and then we go get Fidel. | ||
| Go do this assassination, and then we go get Fidel. | ||
| And the Cubans were always ready and willing. | ||
| Because it was all leading back to getting Fidel. | ||
| It was all leading back to getting Fidel. | ||
| Did you ever see the images of what they said was E. Howard Hunt? | ||
| He was one of the people that was arrested. | ||
| There was a bunch of guys that were arrested that were on trains. | ||
| They were calling them hobos, but they were all very well dressed. | ||
| That were near where the grassy knoll was. | ||
| The men on the grassy knoll, yeah. | ||
| Oh, there's lots of rumors about that, that E. Howard Hunt was one of those men. | ||
| There was even a reference that Jose Miguel Battle was one of those men, but that couldn't have been the case because he was in the Army at the time, the U.S. Army. | ||
| No, so it's like a subterranean narrative that runs through the latter part of the 20th century, the CIA and right-wing elements in American politics, using the Cuban-Americans to do all kinds of dirty, covert deeds. | ||
| And we're talking about terrorist activity, assassination of an ambassador from Chile right in Washington, D.C., blew up his car because he was sympathetic to Castro. | ||
| A bomb planted on a Cuban jetliner flying from Panama City to Atlanta. | ||
| Seventy-three people killed. | ||
| Innocent people, including the fencing team from Cuba, young people. | ||
| A dirty war! | ||
| A dirty war was waged. | ||
| By the anti-Castro underground in combination, in partnership with the CIA. We know about it now because a lot of it has been declassified and it's come out. | ||
| We didn't know about it at the time it was taking place. | ||
| Why did they blow up the plane? | ||
| It's just an act of terrorism against Cuba to show them that it could be done, to instill fear and paranoia in the Cuba. | ||
| The concept was to destabilize the Cuban government so they'd be vulnerable and then you could take them over. | ||
| So any act against Cuba... | ||
| I mean, asking why blown out the plane is asking, like, why fly planes into the World Trade Center? | ||
| You know, it was just a destructive act. | ||
| It's pretty amazing how resilient Castro was. | ||
| I mean, unbelievable. | ||
| The guy's 90 miles away from Miami and just ran shit through the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, into the 2000s. | ||
| They say there was something like 632 known plots over the course of four or five decades to kill Castro. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| 632. Don't you have a movie, 101 Ways to Kill Fidel? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he got on a train in New York, and they're like, are you fucking crazy? | ||
| And they checked to see that he had a bulletproof vest on, and he's like, no. | ||
| He took the train to the U.N., Wow. | ||
| Like, he's fucking nuts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was fucking nuts. | ||
| So, what makes this gangster story of the corporation so interesting and different is this political context, the framework that all this shit was taking place against the backdrop of this desire to kill Castro and take back the homeland. | ||
| And anyone who was involved in that was seen as a hero within the community. | ||
| Joey can tell you about that. | ||
| Union City, New Jersey, and Miami were the hotbeds of the anti-Castro movement. | ||
| There was an organization in Union City called Omega 7. There was one in Miami called Alpha 66. These were terror organizations, secret organizations that existed to plant bombs. | ||
| They would plant bombs at embassies in New York City. | ||
| They would put bombs at Lincoln Center when an orchestra from Cuba was making an appearance. | ||
| They were trying to shut down any relationship Between the U.S. and Cuba and governments that were sympathetic to Cuba. | ||
| They would do actions against them. | ||
| And this went on for like 40 years, man. | ||
| That's unbelievable. | ||
| You couldn't mention Fidel in the 70s in Union City. | ||
| Like a joke. | ||
| Like it's not a joke. | ||
| Don't even bring him up, dog. | ||
| Because you will get smacked. | ||
| Now, was there any pro-Fidel support amongst Cubans? | ||
| There was. | ||
| And bad things would happen to them. | ||
| In the United States. | ||
| In Cuba, though. | ||
| What about in Cuba? | ||
| Pro-Castro in Cuba? | ||
| Oh yeah, sure. | ||
| Was it real or was it out of fear? | ||
| No, it's real. | ||
| I mean, I've been there numerous times. | ||
| You know, the Cuban people made a choice. | ||
| And the revolution, I believe, would have happened with or without Fidel Castro. | ||
| The guy who was in power, Batista, had taken over the government in a coup d'etat. | ||
| He wasn't elected, so he was kind of a fraudulent president. | ||
| And ever since he got in, people knew he was a fraudulent president, and there were attempts to try to ouster him. | ||
| And that's why he was such a dictator. | ||
| He knew they wanted to ouster him, so he used the military to repress Any kind of movement against him. | ||
| And it was ugly, and the people rose up against it. | ||
| That's what happened. | ||
| So, in my belief, the revolution in Cuba happened for a very legitimate reason. | ||
| After it happened, in power, it was revealed that Castro and Che Guevara were communists. | ||
| He...Castor was very cagey about that during the revolution. | ||
| They never talked about Marxism and being communist or any of that. | ||
| And, in fact, Fidel came to Union City, came to the United States to raise money for the revolution while it was going on. | ||
| Got arrested in Union City. | ||
| Yes, he did. | ||
| My friend's mom, the Ascalises, She still remembers taking the bus in the morning in Union City. | ||
| And Fidel's talking to her the way I'm talking to you. | ||
| How you doing, Susan? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| He got in a barroom argument in Union City and he got arrested. | ||
| Over what? | ||
| Probably politics. | ||
| I'm sure it was a political discussion. | ||
| So then the revolution happened and, you know, Cuba becomes a repressive, communist, Stalinist dictatorship. | ||
| But a lot of Cubans, the way they saw it is, that was a choice they made to go with Fidel. | ||
| He did have, I think, the popularity of the people, following of the people. | ||
| Some people are quite proud of Castro standing up to the United States. | ||
| Cubans are very proud people, and they take a lot of pride in the fact that even though there's so much hardship there, That it's a choice they made to go in this direction. | ||
| At least they have their self-pride, which can be said in some ways about Puerto Rico and Jamaica and Dominican Republic, all these other countries in that region that are just as poor as... | ||
| Cuba. | ||
| So he has his supporters. | ||
| He always had his support. | ||
| Obviously, he also had his detractors, even within Cuba. | ||
| Most of those people are the ones who got on rafts and tried to leave the island at great risk to themselves to do anything to get out of there. | ||
| Because they realized Fidel was so popular, from within the country you were never going to be able to take him down. | ||
| So they made the decision to go out in the ocean and try to brave the risks of either swimming or sailing across the Florida Straits. | ||
| What the fuck happened with Che Guevara? | ||
| How did Che Guevara all of a sudden emerge as this, like, leftist political icon, but in this really weird, sort of clueless way? | ||
| Like, they really didn't understand his background, really didn't understand who he was and what he had done, and the atrocities that he had committed. | ||
| But these fucking t-shirts that all these dopey liberal kids... | ||
| I wouldn't put those fucking things on. | ||
| It's fucking crazy! | ||
| If you find out who that guy is, you're wearing a mass murderer's t-shirt. | ||
| Like, he was a fucking ruthless cunt. | ||
| And these people were wearing this shirt as if he symbolizes, like, liberty or freedom from an oppressive government or something like that. | ||
| But it was a long period of time where you didn't have any Che Guevara. | ||
| There was no discussion of it. | ||
| And it seemed like somewhere in the 2000s it picked up. | ||
| Am I right about that? | ||
| Something like that, yeah. | ||
| Let me tell you something. | ||
| It was so personal for a while. | ||
| Like, I have Argentinian friends. | ||
| But in the 70s, there was a rift between Argentinians and Cubans. | ||
| Like, that's how personal the Cubans took. | ||
| Che is Argentinian. | ||
| Che is Argentinian. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, there was a rift. | ||
| Because of him? | ||
| Because of him. | ||
| Cubans, the fuck out of here. | ||
| Really? | ||
| The fuck out of here. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Castellano, they talk. | ||
| How do they talk? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They do it with a list. | |
| Like a beast. | ||
| Like Spain. | ||
| Cubans would go. | ||
| Off in Union City if you were Argentinian. | ||
| Really? | ||
| That's how deep the hatred ran. | ||
| Cuban, Spanish. | ||
| How did the Lisp thing, where'd that come from? | ||
| It's from Spain. | ||
| It's from Spain. | ||
| Why? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's just a regional thing. | ||
| And they're the number ones on the top. | ||
| If a Cuban walk, look, Cuba is considered that we're the Jews of the Caribbean. | ||
| But Spain has one over on us. | ||
| My father's family was from Spain. | ||
| And I went there one time and never went back. | ||
| Really? | ||
| One time to meet my grandmother and never went back. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because she was talking shit. | ||
| At five, you ain't gonna talk to me that shit about my mother. | ||
| See, Spain is the colonial power. | ||
| It's the colonial power. | ||
| And often Spaniards look down on the Cubans. | ||
| And Mexicans, I'm sure, as well, right? | ||
| So I went over there one time. | ||
| My mom took me to meet my grandmother. | ||
| And like ten minutes in, I go, call my mother, you fucking cunt. | ||
| And my mother came over and goes, what happened? | ||
| Like, this fucking bitch is talking about you and shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And you were five? | |
| I was about five. | ||
| My mother cursed her out. | ||
| Oh, that's hilarious. | ||
| And that was the end of my relationship. | ||
| She was like, your father's going to be a debt... | ||
| Because she was from Kamaway. | ||
| So that shit didn't stink. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| And my mom was a peasant from Havana. | ||
| So she was like, my son had big dreams until he met that animal. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And I'm like, fuck you, you fucking hag. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like... | |
| She made my mother move in with him in Cuba and learn how to cook the dishes for my father. | ||
| See, Spaniards would be offended just by the way Cubans speak Spanish. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Like a lot of people tortured me when I did the Y'all thing. | ||
| I don't speak Cuban Spanish. | ||
| I speak... | ||
| I said, I speak the Spanish of the streets. | ||
| That Spanish I picked up in Union City, that's street Spanish. | ||
| Well, let me stop right here. | ||
| Anybody that gave you a hard time about translating, this is what I always tell people. | ||
| I'll talk in English, repeat what I said. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| In English. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's fucking hard. | ||
| It's hard to remember what someone said, especially, Yoel was speaking in these long sentences and you were translating. | ||
| You did a great job. | ||
| So fuck all those people. | ||
| No, I don't, uh... | ||
| But my Spanish is, instead of giving me five dollars, I'm una monja. | ||
| A monja means a nun. | ||
| We don't say numbers in my world. | ||
| A tenth spot is, I forget what it is. | ||
| There's a name for it? | ||
| Yeah, for everything. | ||
| I learned how to speak Spanish in code. | ||
| Oye, pon to la pila. | ||
| That means keep your eyes open and put your batteries in. | ||
| When I say to you, that means you gotta put your batteries in. | ||
| So I learned that streets... | ||
| Is this a Bergen County street thing? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| This is Hudson County. | ||
| It's the Cubans. | ||
| I said it as a word from Abacoa. | ||
| Yeah, but it's... | ||
| Monina. | ||
| Are we talking Cubans in the U.S.? Or... | ||
| Like, when I talk to a Cuban person, when I talk to my sister on the phone, I have no idea what she said. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Like, when she gives me an address and shit, the R's and all that. | ||
| I took Italian in high school. | ||
| I didn't take basic Spanish. | ||
| I learned how to read Spanish in the house by reading little different things. | ||
| But I learned how to speak Spanish. | ||
| Like, I remember going to a Cuban person's house once in Union City when I was about 12. And they told their son, don't bring this kid over here no more. | ||
| He's a street fucking speck. | ||
| You know, I was a street speck. | ||
| I learned... | ||
| I didn't learn that traditional Spanish. | ||
| My Spanish is a lot of hand signals. | ||
| That means watch him. | ||
| Watch him and don't fucking not watch him. | ||
| It's a lot of street shit. | ||
| I was never allowed to walk home the same way. | ||
| You had to walk on different directions? | ||
| Different directions. | ||
| Keep my eyes open around the car. | ||
| Don't pattern. | ||
| Because of my mother's operation, I could never just walk home on Burger Line. | ||
| I had to walk to New York Avenue and walk down just to see if I saw a suspicious car. | ||
| Now, that's smart. | ||
| Do you remember we were in San Francisco about 15 years ago and we had the crew? | ||
| Tate, Eddie, you, me, Ari, Duncan, and Redman were walking down the street in San Francisco. | ||
| As we approached, I saw a drug dealer go down. | ||
| I hit Ari. | ||
| I go, Ari, look at that drug deal. | ||
| You guys were looking at the whole thing. | ||
| Not one of you saw it. | ||
| Ari goes, how the fuck did you see that? | ||
| Because I was raised like that. | ||
| I was raised to go out and look for cars. | ||
| I was never allowed to walk home the same way twice because of the bolita business. | ||
| Now let me ask you about that because is this an instinct you learned on your own or were you actually trained? | ||
| When I became a numbers runner as a child When I was a kid and I came from Cuba, my mother put a big gold chain on me. | ||
| You know why? | ||
| Because she dared you to take it off. | ||
| My mother wanted you to take that chain because I would have to fight. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I remember one time Mr. Softy came and he looked at my gold thing and my mother yelled from the window, don't let him touch your fucking chain. | ||
| Yesterday I went to Glendale, and my daughter was throwing hoops, a red hoop. | ||
| And she was chasing them, all four of them, by herself. | ||
| She's an only child. | ||
| So there was other kids there. | ||
| And the red hoop fell through the thing, and some six-year-old took it from her. | ||
| And my daughter went to put her head down. | ||
| I go, oh, yeah. | ||
| Go take it back. | ||
| Go take it back. | ||
| And she just looked at me. | ||
| And the parent was like, that's an effective way of parenting. | ||
| She got it back from your daughter. | ||
| Don't ever stay here in my fucking house. | ||
| Wait a minute, the mom or the kid that took it was giving you shit? | ||
| Oh yeah, because this is today's America. | ||
| My America, we don't come home here. | ||
| What did the mom want you to do? | ||
| The mom and the dad. | ||
| Two Glendale fucking Gentiles. | ||
| The dad said, that's an effective way of whatever, but you ain't saying nothing, bitch. | ||
| Your daughter, a couple weeks ago, a little girl took the swing from my daughter. | ||
| Take the swing back. | ||
| Take it back! | ||
| My wife's like, what are you doing? | ||
| That's how Cubans raise their kids. | ||
| I was raised to always have my eyes open because I knew what they did. | ||
| I was at a young age, if I hung out with Joe Rogan and Joe Rogan's dad sold coke, I knew Joe Rogan's dad sold coke. | ||
| Joe didn't, but I would never tell you. | ||
| I came from a house where it was... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But you know, here's the thing. | ||
| If they wanted to get at your mother, they'd come after the kid. | ||
| Yeah, they'd come after the kid. | ||
| I mean, it was very common to kidnap the kid. | ||
| That's how you... | ||
| That's how you got to somebody. | ||
| Well, that's how you get to everybody. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, this Trump thing with Stormy Daniels, do you see one of the things that she said, one of the reasons why she came out about this? | ||
| Why? | ||
| Somebody came up to her in a parking lot when she was holding her infant daughter. | ||
| I don't know if this is true. | ||
| This is what she says. | ||
| Someone came up to her and said, you have a beautiful daughter. | ||
| It'd be a shame if anything happened to her mother. | ||
| You know, stop talking about President Trump. | ||
| Well, it wasn't President Trump at the time. | ||
| Stop talking about Mr. Trump. | ||
| And she was like, oh, fuck you. | ||
| Well, fuck this. | ||
| And then, you know, then she really geared up her animosity towards him. | ||
| Imagine that shit. | ||
| Hey, in the narco world, there's cases of what they would do is they would do a videotape. | ||
| If there was somebody they wanted to intimidate, they'd videotape their kid being taken to school every morning, being dropped off for school, picked up after school. | ||
| They'd videotape the daily routine of the child, and then they'd send the videotape to that person. | ||
| And I'd say, I know where your kid is every minute of the day. | ||
| Do what we tell you to do. | ||
| They didn't fuck with me, though. | ||
| I was never fucked with. | ||
| I was never really... | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I was never fucked with. | ||
| I was just raised to understand what they were doing. | ||
| That there's consequences. | ||
| And I was not allowed to repeat it. | ||
| So when I would come to you and you would be talking about whatever, even if I knew you were wrong, I would never correct you. | ||
| So that's how I was raised. | ||
| I would never correct you, even if I knew you were talking shit, because how do you know? | ||
| How do I know? | ||
| I was just at the fucking bar and they were talking about it. | ||
| That's how the fuck I know. | ||
| My mom didn't hide nothing from me growing up. | ||
| That's good and bad. | ||
| That had good things for me, but a lot of bad things for me. | ||
| You know, one of the things that he touched upon in this book was not only about Jose Battle, but the political corruption that came with it. | ||
| In my 20 years, have I ever talked to you about politics? | ||
| I wouldn't listen to politics if you paid me because it's all bullshit. | ||
| I saw it in a micro level. | ||
| You know, when you're a president, who do you get donations from? | ||
| Big farm, guns, whatever. | ||
| When you're a small mayor, who do you get your donations from? | ||
| The pharmacy? | ||
| The pizza place? | ||
| The numbers? | ||
| So I came from a society where those numbers were controlling everything in North Bergen, Union City, and West New York. | ||
| Remember, that shit's a felony in Jersey when it's a misdemeanor in New York. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Numbers? | ||
| It used to be. | ||
| Misdemeanor. | ||
| As a matter of fact, they would call you and they would go, Joe, Lieutenant. | ||
| He wouldn't say that because the phones were taped. | ||
| He would just call you and go, oh, you're getting a visit today. | ||
| That means if you got $5,000 in your pocket, give it to Jamie. | ||
| Clean out the house. | ||
| Leave some paperwork. | ||
| At 2 o'clock, I come. | ||
| I handcuff you. | ||
| I take your money. | ||
| I write you a summons. | ||
| I bring you down to the station. | ||
| We giggle. | ||
| And then after I let you out, I meet you around the corner. | ||
| If you had $2,500 on you, I give you $1,250. | ||
| And that's a cost of doing business. | ||
| There's a funny line in Goodfellas when he goes, how can I go to school with all that goody-goody bullshit and saluting the flag? | ||
| I was the same way. | ||
| I saw what happened. | ||
| I saw the political system. | ||
| I saw two cops coming in, one detective once a week and one Beat guy, my mom would give him a drink and an envelope. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know what my grandmother did, how she was involved, but I told you she went to jail. | ||
| She went to jail for running the numbers. | ||
| She went to jail because she wouldn't give anybody up. | ||
| They wanted her to give up whoever the fuck was at the other end of the organization. | ||
| And so for like six months, we were always trying to, like, where the fuck is grandma? | ||
| Oh, she's visiting her sister. | ||
| She's visiting Aunt Josie. | ||
| They give you a year for bookmaking in Jersey, you do six, five months, and they put you on house arrest and you're done. | ||
| She would knit sweaters and shit for the fucking guards in jail. | ||
| Well, a lot of times battle would own the judges, so you wouldn't do any time at all. | ||
| You might get a summons, you go before a magistrate judge and they let you go. | ||
| What's fascinating to me about this is also fascinating about the mob itself, is that a lot of it is basically dissolved. | ||
| That all this came from immigration and that this melting pot of the United States and they all came from all these other places and all this organized crime sort of like was running the cities in the East Coast, but most of it is kind of gone the wayside. | ||
| I would dispute that a little bit. | ||
| I think traditional organized crime as we knew it in the 20th century is gone by the wayside. | ||
| Italian, Irish, Jewish, that sort of assimilated into the system and has dissipated. | ||
| But there's new generations of immigrants that are playing this out. | ||
| Jamaicans, Dominicans, Chinese, Russians, Mexicans. | ||
| It's happening. | ||
| And I'd further make the argument that the corruption that was created during Prohibition in the 1920s, that's where this system was created, during Prohibition in the 1920s. | ||
| The alliance between the underworld and the upper world. | ||
| The connection between the political apparatus, law enforcement, and the criminal rackets. | ||
| That template was laid down during Prohibition and it was in effect for the next 100 years. | ||
| I think that template still exists. | ||
| You pick up a newspaper in any US city, large or mid-sized city, and what are you going to see on the first couple pages? | ||
| Some local representative who just got indicted for taking money from some criminal element to see that they got a law passed or that they got some municipal contract. | ||
| That hasn't gone away. | ||
| That still exists everywhere. | ||
| What happens is there's an ebb and flow, certain rackets come and go, it was legal booze, then it was labor racketeering, now it's narcotics. | ||
| It was bolita at one time. | ||
| There's always something. | ||
| As long as there's commerce being done on a large scale, there's always room for corruption. | ||
| As long as there's things that are illegal where there's a market for it, like marijuana. | ||
| Narcotics, yeah. | ||
| The big argument about marijuana laws in the United States is if they made it legal, it would severely limit the power that the cartel in Mexico has and cut all that violence out. | ||
| Basically the same shit that was going on with Al Capone and everything during the liquor crisis. | ||
| The time with liquor was illegal. | ||
| Yeah, because the criminal rackets feed the system. | ||
| Human beings are, you know, flawed human beings at every level of the system. | ||
| Dirty cops, cops on the take. | ||
| Is it more difficult now for them to pull something like this off? | ||
| It's less systemic, you know what I mean? | ||
| I mean, back in the day, you know, you'd have corruption that was all the way through the chain of command, you know, and everyone was sort of in on it. | ||
| Did you see the 7-5? | ||
| Yes, I did. | ||
| I also saw your interview with Michael Dowd. | ||
| Yeah, fascinating. | ||
| Yeah, that was fascinating. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, and that was 20 years after the Knapp Commission, which revealed that level of corruption. | ||
| Yeah, no, you have social systems... | ||
| and you will have corruption. | ||
| You have a money-making system like capitalism, you will have corruption. | ||
| That doesn't go away. | ||
| Organized crime has... | ||
| The face of organized crime has changed quite a bit. | ||
| But the core of that corrupt relationship between the underworld and the upper world still exists. | ||
| So is it the most disenfranchised sort of members of the community, the most recent immigrants... | ||
| Like, what is it that... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've written about this a lot, you know, through different books and through journalism. | ||
| I've come to believe that it's the American story. | ||
| This process of going through organized crime and gangsterism before you become accepted as a full-blown American. | ||
| Almost every ethnic group has gone through some version of it in the U.S. and is still going through it. | ||
| It's part of the American process. | ||
| You get here as a group, you're cut out of access, immediate access anyway, to power, and so you create your own path. | ||
| And initially, in these organizations, it's usually those ethnic groups preying on their own, preying on each other. | ||
| That's usually the first stage of this. | ||
| And then it becomes creating a system to try to deal with a larger system of corruption. | ||
| I mean, Jose Miguel Battle, what he did was so brilliant by creating the corporation, is he created a path for himself within American organized crime, which was controlled primarily by the mafia. | ||
| And he created an alliance with the mafia that made it possible for the Cubans to have their thing and fly below the radar. | ||
| I mean, while the Italians were getting busted left and right, the Cubans, this corporation existed for 40 years because they didn't really get messed with much. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Like, what was it the way the Italians, like, they were so flashy, like, particularly when you got to Gatti. | ||
| He was the most ridiculous of them, right? | ||
| Well, the Cubans were pretty damn flashy, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Some of them. | |
| Till this day, I detest nice cars. | ||
| I detest show. | ||
| Calling attention to yourself. | ||
| Because I saw too tight. | ||
| Like right now, I would love to talk to the producers of this film. | ||
| Because they're going to miss a lot of authentic stuff. | ||
| I'm sure they will. | ||
| In fact, I have a present for you. | ||
| I ordered you the same shirt Bruce Lee wore in Fist of Fury. | ||
| They're called Camisetas Chinas. | ||
| Cubans, when you're a success. | ||
| Remember when Tony goes in to see his mother? | ||
| Mama, I'm a success. | ||
| I run an anti-Castro. | ||
| When you become a success in Union City, The Chinese t-shirt is your first sign of success because it has three buttons here. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you cut the buttons off and then, what's your middle name? | ||
| James. | ||
| So it's Joseph James Rogan. | ||
| In diamond initials you put JJR and that's when you've reached success, okay? | ||
| And they need that. | ||
| There's so many little things that Cubans did. | ||
| But take a guy like Juan, for example. | ||
| My stepfather, brilliant. | ||
| Brilliant. | ||
| You know, Paulie didn't talk on the phone. | ||
| Paulie didn't move for anybody. | ||
| Paulie had his messages delivered to him. | ||
| In 1970, I'm looking at both of you gentlemen, and I'm telling you that Juan would not even have a conversation if there was a phone in the room and it was hung up. | ||
| Because in his mind, that phone was fucking tapped. | ||
| He was a genius. | ||
| If he had to meet Joe Rogan for a meeting at 9, at 5.30 in the morning, he'd come and put a gun under a car, just in case there was a problem with Joe Rogan. | ||
| He would hug you and you'd search him. | ||
| He would hug you and tap your back for a wire and tell you you were losing weight and rub your belt. | ||
| You're losing weight! | ||
| They hug you, but they're feeling you for a piece. | ||
| Juan, when my mother died, he still had the same car that he had when... | ||
| And he died with five million cash, and he lived in a four-story walk-up. | ||
| When he died, one of his friends said, what a miserable life to make money and have to hide it like that. | ||
| Juan would walk around with jeans and t-shirts, the same shit every day, and a wad of hundreds like this. | ||
| The hidden one. | ||
| The other one was single, so you thought he was broke. | ||
| If he talked to you, he talked to you in English. | ||
| Once the cops came, me no piggy. | ||
| And you know who was the interpreter for all the attorney meetings with all those high-level guys? | ||
| Me. | ||
| Really? | ||
| So I'd be at school, I'd be at home, and my mom would go, tomorrow you have to go with Chell to DeLuca's office, Sam DeLuca. | ||
| And Sam DeLuca would basically look at you and go, how you doing, Joe? | ||
| Great to see you today. | ||
| You'd have to bring him a suit. | ||
| He loves suits, Sam DeLuca. | ||
| So the more suits you brought him, the better. | ||
| He was like the other guy, the guy that had the thing. | ||
| But Sam would treat you just like this. | ||
| Joe Rogan, como esta hoy? | ||
| Bien, okay. | ||
| You're going to interpret? | ||
| This was how fast the conversation was. | ||
| You got busted for conspiracy of bookmaking, that's two years. | ||
| Listen, this judge, he's a motherfucker. | ||
| But thank God, I know the prosecutor. | ||
| So I'll tell you what I'm going to do. | ||
| For $300,000, we lose the evidence. | ||
| For $200,000... | ||
| He gets a year. | ||
| For $100,000, you get probation, and you do a year in a halfway house, and for $50,000, he'd just give you a menu. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| When you decide what you want to do, get back to me. | ||
| Always a pleasure to see you. | ||
| And you had a week to decide what you were going to do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So you gave him that amount. | ||
| He knew his way through the court system. | ||
| You didn't do no time. | ||
| There's no time. | ||
| There's no time. | ||
| I know for a fact that if you get caught with a gun in New York, you get the, what's the law? | ||
| Yeah, there was a name. | ||
| Two years. | ||
| Two years. | ||
| Mandatory. | ||
| There's no stop and go. | ||
| There's no trial. | ||
| They take you right to... | ||
| My stepfather, Wong, got caught with a gun. | ||
| He was out the next day. | ||
| DeLuca, don't play games. | ||
| DeLuca, don't play games. | ||
| Now, Joe, in answer to your question about the Cubans and why they existed for so long and didn't get busted, you know, the rumor was that they had a certain mystique because of this CIA pedigree and that they were untouchable. | ||
| And in fact, I mention it in the book, there's a case where the FBI is thinking about making a case against battle. | ||
| This is way back in the 60s. | ||
| They contact the U.S. Treasury Department because they figure he's not paying taxes and they can make some kind of case against him on a tax violation. | ||
| They get a letter from the Treasury Department saying, we're not going to go after this guy because he's anti-Castro and he's a veteran of the Bay of Pigs invasion. | ||
| It's right there in a letter from the Treasury Department to the FBI. Wow. | ||
| So there were elements within the government that were protecting these guys, particularly Bay of Pigs veterans. | ||
| We will not prosecute them. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| And so he had that kind of protection. | ||
| What a name, too, huh? | ||
| Jose Battle? | ||
| Yeah, his name in Spanish was Batlle, B-A-T-L-L-E, and he changed it to Battle. | ||
| It's a good one, right? | ||
| If you're a writer and a novelist and you're trying to think up a good name for the character, you can't do any better than that. | ||
| I grew up with a kid named Major Battle. | ||
| Guy I did Taekwondo with. | ||
| His name was Major Battle. | ||
| He's a bad motherfucker too. | ||
| Bad motherfucker named Major Battle. | ||
| What was his middle name? | ||
| Bad motherfucker? | ||
| Major Bad Motherfucker Battle. | ||
| But he was. | ||
| He was a black belt state champion. | ||
| And the only reason why they existed, they were very careful. | ||
| They had a systemized, Union City ran, Union City becomes Jersey City in Hoboken. | ||
| Union City ran 7th Street to 88th Street to White Castle, but the Cubans really controlled 7th to 48th Street, Bergen Line. | ||
| And then when you went to New York Avenue, They control from 50th up to about 60th Street. | ||
| And they kept to themselves. | ||
| And they didn't have social clubs. | ||
| And they didn't play cards outside. | ||
| And if you went into the bar, they were all dressed very moderately, but four of them were bookies. | ||
| And they only stayed there till 3 o'clock, because that's when the number goes in. | ||
| So you have from 9 in the morning to 3 to play that number. | ||
| But there's also a thing called a singular number, which the odds are a little less. | ||
| That starts at about 12. | ||
| So I'll see you at 12 and go, ¿Qué fue el número? | ||
| El 3 me cago en el madre, motherfucker. | ||
| I'll never listen to that fucking kid of mine again. | ||
| Now I gotta go back to the bookie and bet the second number. | ||
| Pulida, they call that, right? | ||
| Pulida. | ||
| It's one number at a time. | ||
| Can you imagine putting down $100,000 on the number five? | ||
| What are the potential numbers? | ||
| Are we talking single digits only? | ||
| No, it's normally a three-digit. | ||
| You bet three digits. | ||
| So why would it be a single number? | ||
| Well, that was just a way to improve your odds. | ||
| That's a different one. | ||
| There were different systems for betting. | ||
| Different systems. | ||
| Sort of ways you could do it. | ||
| But let's explain this, where the number comes from. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| The total mutual handle at the racetrack is published in the newspaper every evening and again in the morning. | ||
| How much money was bet total at the racetrack that day? | ||
| The last three numbers, that's the daily number. | ||
| So everyone, you know, it's the same number for everybody. | ||
| You know what it is as soon as it comes out in the newspaper. | ||
| And that's how it's determined. | ||
| So you have the individual numbers? | ||
| And then you have the early number, which is called, what come out of Brooklyn? | ||
| Casaglio in Brooklyn. | ||
| And then you have the late number. | ||
| What's the New York number? | ||
| The Brooklyn number and the New York number. | ||
| How did they all decide what it would be based on? | ||
| That was decided probably a hundred years ago by some, you know, Guinea who ran it for the Italians. | ||
| And maybe it came from Sicily, whatever the origins of it are. | ||
| You couldn't fix that though. | ||
| How could you not fix it? | ||
| You can't fix it. | ||
| Why's that? | ||
| Because I don't know what the track is going to make. | ||
| How do you fix the last three numbers? | ||
| Now, check this out. | ||
| Certain organizations, like the corporation, part of the reason people wanted to bet with them and like to bet with them is they would have somebody at the racetrack so the minute that number was posted, they'd know the number. | ||
| So you didn't have to wait around for the newspaper. | ||
| You didn't have to wait for the newspaper. | ||
| Or call sports. | ||
| You had to call sports. | ||
| Nobody remembers that. | ||
| You remember that, TJ. How you doing? | ||
| Welcome. | ||
| This is Joe Rogan. | ||
| You just called Sportsline. | ||
| You got to sit by a pay phone and put 35 cents in. | ||
| And they would run. | ||
| All right, NHL. And at the track. | ||
| They'd give the scores. | ||
| And they'd give you the score. | ||
| But whatever you bet was the last fucking thing. | ||
|
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Always. | |
| So you had to sit there and take that whole ear beat. | ||
| You motherfucker gave it to me. | ||
| And then when it came to them saying the number, the subway would go by and you wouldn't hear it. | ||
| And you wouldn't hear it. | ||
| And now you just lost another 35 cents. | ||
| But the whole numbers system, like my mother was a degenerate numbers. | ||
| And then she killed her with the Yankees and the Red Sox later on. | ||
| But her game was the numbers, the three numbers, the New York track, and now let's get greedy. | ||
| Why don't we go to OTB? Yeah, now see, this is where... | ||
| Why don't we just go to OTB to really complete your fucking day, you degenerate fuck? | ||
| Part of the brilliance of Battle and his organization was he didn't do sports betting. | ||
| In fact, his arrangement with the Italians, with the mafia, was you get bolita, you get numbers, but you don't get sports betting and you don't get these other things. | ||
| And so there's an example in this book of a member of the corporation who starts against Battle's Wishes, starts... | ||
| Playing, doing sports betting, that guy wound up dead. | ||
| Battle killed him himself. | ||
| Because he was going against the agreement? | ||
| He was going against the rules that could turn the mafia against him and bring the whole thing down. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Wow, that's amazing. | ||
| Now, in answer to your question about how they came up with that number, you've got to remember, it's all gambling. | ||
| This is the culture of gambling. | ||
| You know, you're at the racetrack, you're betting, card games, you're betting, betting the number. | ||
| So it's logical that somewhere in that universe would be how the number was determined. | ||
| So it came from the racetrack. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And then you also have... | ||
| The Puerto Rican lottery. | ||
| And that comes in paperwork. | ||
| It's different? | ||
| That's completely different. | ||
| Paperwork. | ||
| Paperwork. | ||
| So you buy paperwork. | ||
| That comes lottery tickets. | ||
| My mother would buy the whole fucking sheet. | ||
| It's like $10 a thing, but you could just buy the sheet. | ||
| And what is it? | ||
| It's a Puerto Rican number. | ||
| Now, you know that the corporation used the Puerto Rican lottery to launder their profits. | ||
| To launder their profits. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| So you hit the number. | ||
| You're my friend. | ||
| What are you going to win? | ||
| $20,000? | ||
| By the time they give it to you, let me just give you $18,000. | ||
| You know, that's how Whitey Bulger laundered money. | ||
| That's how Sammy the Bull bought lottery tickets, too. | ||
| Yeah, so Whitey Bulger won the lottery twice. | ||
| Twice, that's what you do. | ||
| Because people in the neighborhood won the lottery. | ||
| And he bought the ticket from him. | ||
| He took the ticket from him, gave him money, or whatever the fuck he gave him. | ||
| Check this one out. | ||
| Today's paper. | ||
| Front page of USA Today. | ||
| Confessions of a lottery scammer. | ||
| I brought this along. | ||
| I thought it'd be interesting. | ||
| A lottery scammer? | ||
| This is a guy, big fat guy, 300 pounds, sitting on his ass in Iowa or somewhere, who was on his device, who figured out a way to intrude on some algorithm, and he started scamming different states. | ||
| He scammed the state of Colorado out of $4.8 million. | ||
| There he is. | ||
| A total of $16.5 million. | ||
| Now I'm thinking, if this guy had scammed the corporation led by Jose McGill Battle, he'd be dead. | ||
| He'd be on the obituary section. | ||
| Look what he says here. | ||
| It was never my intent to start a full-out ticket scam. | ||
| He's sentenced up to 25 years in prison. | ||
| You could not scam organized crime in this way. | ||
| Well, how do you scam lottery? | ||
| You figure out how the number is determined, and then you're able to play with it. | ||
| You're able to play with it. | ||
| See, in organized crime, you couldn't do that. | ||
| Well, I don't understand that. | ||
| How could he? | ||
| Like, isn't there just a random system, a computer program or something that runs it? | ||
| He found some way to tap into that computer system. | ||
| To tap into it? | ||
| You mean to hack into it? | ||
| To hack into it and alter the number. | ||
| Oh! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Wow, that is crazy. | ||
| What is fascinating to me is that this, what you were talking about earlier, what we were talking about, about, like, that this was, it gave them an opportunity for hope, and that it was a part of the community. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| We're missing that in the West Coast. | ||
| The West Coast, like, off-track betting, there's no fucking off-track betting here. | ||
| There's a few weirdos that go to the Hollywood Park, but that's gone now. | ||
| You know, I mean, there's nothing here. | ||
| Well, the West Coast never had this. | ||
| There's nothing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's nothing, like, Seeing that, like I saw that and I saw what goes with it and it may sound ooky spooky to most people but it's not ooky spooky to people who are really really Sicilian And people who are very Cuban. | ||
| When you're Sicilian in that culture, there's women that you go to and they tell you things. | ||
| They're witches. | ||
| They're Sicilian witches. | ||
| Whatever the fuck you want to... | ||
| In Sleepers. | ||
| Remember, he goes, bring the eyeballs to this lady. | ||
| What's Sleepers? | ||
| Sleepers is a movie about four Irish kids. | ||
| That later was bullshit, but kind of... | ||
| I'm trying to remember that movie. | ||
| It's about the four kids. | ||
| De Niro plays a priest. | ||
| Priest met Brad Pitt, Jackie Gleason's grandson. | ||
| Okay, there it is. | ||
| Barry Levinson movie. | ||
| And then they got the guy on Letterman and he started backtracking like Steven Seagal about his CIA involvement. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Lorenzo Carcatella. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He later on became... | ||
| He said it was a true story and it was not a true story. | ||
| It was... | ||
| But, if you look at it, weren't two or four of those two kids supposed to grow up to be Westies? | ||
| Yeah, but it wasn't. | ||
| It's bullshit. | ||
| It's bullshit. | ||
| Like, they're two out of the four of those guys. | ||
| What were we talking about? | ||
|
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We were talking about witches. | |
| In the Cuban world, it's the same thing. | ||
| I want my kid to go to Catholic school. | ||
| If I play this fucking number today, this is going to save me. | ||
| When you're a comic, you have that hope. | ||
| Tonight I'm going to go to the improv. | ||
| Jess Hussman's going to be there. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| But it's an ethnic hope that comes back from your country. | ||
| It's hard to describe. | ||
| You understand it because your grandmother was a fucking bookie. | ||
| But if you talk to her on a daily basis about it and why she would play that particular number. | ||
| Like my mom played 517. Those were the last three numbers on my dad's gravestone. | ||
| You know, 604 was some other fucking hallucinogenic she had. | ||
| If I go like this, if I go like this and I go, you know what? | ||
| You're looking good today. | ||
| Here, go take a yardstick. | ||
| Most Cubans look at it and go, give me $5 on 253 because it's the last three numbers of the 20 you fucking gave me. | ||
| Now, is this still going on? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| The numbers are still going on? | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| Not as a 10-man office. | ||
| When I was a kid, it was a ten-man office. | ||
| You were downstairs. | ||
| You had a bodega. | ||
| Me and you ran the bodega. | ||
| There's two U's and yesterday's paper. | ||
| All was selling a book of dreams. | ||
| And then you come in, and you give me 604-517. | ||
| It comes on three sheets of paper with copy paper. | ||
| So right away, I rip the top one, I give it to you, I keep the other one, and the other one goes upstairs to the department where now there's a big wall with zero to nine on the wall, and I park it there. | ||
| So Joe just came up and played 219. There's two, and all of a sudden there's a list that goes down. | ||
| I'm a board guy. | ||
| I just worked the board. | ||
| I got six guys with phones yelling numbers on me. | ||
| Oh, yeah! | ||
| Rogan fucking just put $100 on that number. | ||
| That motherfucker killed me last week! | ||
| Fuck that! | ||
| Send $50 of that to Miami, because I could unload it to create the utopia. | ||
| You know, when I take a sports bet, I'm taking $500 on Pittsburgh. | ||
| Pittsburgh's playing New England. | ||
| I can't take 10,000 on Pittsburgh and 5,000 on New England. | ||
| That's not called a utopia. | ||
| I'm going to make money on the VIG, the 10 points from you losing. | ||
| So if you bet 10,000 on somebody and you bet 5, I unload 5 to another bank somewhere across town. | ||
| So this is how... | ||
| I mean, when I was a kid, my mother had a bank in the Bronx. | ||
| And the guy that cooked was Black Mike. | ||
| He was a Vietnam vet. | ||
| And I was 5, and he would give me 10 bucks to go get him blackberry brandy. | ||
| Black Mike cooked Italian food that was so fucking good. | ||
| It was 1970. Even if you hated black people, you ate his spaghetti. | ||
| Even Italians came to eat his spaghetti. | ||
| On Wednesdays, he cooked corned beef. | ||
| On Wednesdays, he made Cuban food. | ||
| They have an office. | ||
| And every phone has a little tape recorder with a wire connected to the phone so you can't call me and say you played 2-18. | ||
| Yeah, it's recorded. | ||
| I'll fucking bust your fucking head. | ||
| Yeah, it's recorded. | ||
| I'll play the tape for you. | ||
| So every hour the tapes come around and I pick up the tapes. | ||
|
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And those get destroyed. | |
| And those get destroyed the week after or that night after the thing. | ||
| Everything's settled. | ||
| But to see those offices in action when you're a kid and I'm going to get cigarettes and they give me a 10 to go get a $3 pack of cigarettes so I keep seven. | ||
| Now, did you ever see the money? | ||
| What do you mean the money? | ||
| Well, the money that was gathered. | ||
| I saw how the money would be taken upstairs. | ||
| Because that would be a separate location. | ||
| That would be a separate location. | ||
| Counting room. | ||
| Now, there's also, they move locations every week. | ||
| You also have to stay ahead of the cops. | ||
| So every week, you got a guy like Joe Rogan that just rents apartments for me. | ||
| So every week we move locations, so nobody ever gets comfortable with three months at one place, then with three months at another place, then with three months at another place, because not only do you have to worry about cops, you gotta worry about Jamie getting a little fucking cocky. | ||
| Jamie found out from Joe Diaz that they make $40,000 a day. | ||
| Jamie's gonna go get two guns. | ||
| Go get the two guns and try to go up there and see what happens, because they got two guys on the third floor that just got two guns, waiting for idiots like you to come upstairs to the fourth floor. | ||
| It was surreal. | ||
| It was surreal. | ||
| So in the mornings, my mom would go, you want to go to school tonight? | ||
| Or you want to go with mama to the Mets and go, yeah, that's important. | ||
| I'm going with you. | ||
| Because these bookies would all give me 20, 40 bucks. | ||
| It's part of that good look. | ||
| Now check this out. | ||
| At the end of the day, every day that this is going on, because betting is going on every day, seven days a week, this system that Joey's talking about. | ||
| So money's coming in. | ||
| A lot of money's coming in. | ||
| It goes to the counting rooms. | ||
| So at the end of the day, you got a lot of money at like two, three hundred different locations all around the New York area. | ||
| What they would do is they have people whose responsibility it was to come around, collect the money, that money would go into a van, And that van would have a police escort as it left New York City, went through the tunnel, and in New Jersey it was met by New Jersey police who picked it up and escorted it from there into the apartments or the houses in Union City where the money was kept. | ||
|
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|
Wow! | |
| So the cops got paid. | ||
| So how can I tell you this at the age of 10? | ||
| I knew this, but I could never tell you, because you wouldn't believe me. | ||
| So I had to keep it to myself. | ||
| Well, most of the kids wouldn't be able to shut the fuck up either, because they didn't grow up in that culture. | ||
| No, I wasn't allowed to talk about nothing in my world. | ||
| In my world, I didn't... | ||
| When were you Saturday? | ||
| We played handball all day. | ||
| I had to go to a play with my uncle. | ||
| I was in the Bronx. | ||
| You worked for a sports betting place, too. | ||
| Later on, as I got older. | ||
| But when I got out of high school, I was such a loser. | ||
| Then I went to 118th Street, and the guy's name was Cheo, Jose Torres and his son. | ||
| I went to them like a man. | ||
| They were around the block to this guy named Raleigh and Miguel, and they ran a complete different operation from the corporation. | ||
| Raleigh's still around. | ||
| If I had any balls left, I'd go put a bullet in Raleigh's head because Raleigh was tight with my mother. | ||
| My mother helped get Raleigh started on 118th Street. | ||
| When my mother died, he got tight with my stepfather. | ||
| When my stepfather died, he took that money and gave it to my stepfather's sister. | ||
| That money belonged to me. | ||
| So today, I'm still pissed off at Raleigh because when I was a kid, I saw Raleigh every fucking day. | ||
| He'd give me 50 bucks. | ||
| Every time I went over there, those guys lived their life on a karma-based life. | ||
| So whenever they see Joe Rogan, come here, come here. | ||
| You know how many things I did with your father? | ||
| Come here. | ||
| Here's $100. | ||
| Go get your dick sucked. | ||
| My mother would drive her crazy. | ||
| Like, how much money did you get today? | ||
| $200. | ||
| Give me $100 of that. | ||
| Because I used to buy knives and fucking stars to throw at people. | ||
|
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You know. | |
| But that's there where they're very generous, Joe Rogan. | ||
| You know, you can't do that. | ||
| When you come over to my house with your daughters, I can't. | ||
| First thing as they do is put a 50 in everybody's hands. | ||
| So now the girls know whenever they come over Uncle Joey's, they get a 50. Right. | ||
| So even after you're not around, they'll come over. | ||
| When they're 14 and they're going to go to Hollywood, they'll come over by Uncle Joey. | ||
| Where are you girls going? | ||
| You girls got money. | ||
| Here's 50, so I had people giving me money. | ||
| Because it's a karma-based business. | ||
| My mother would hit the number for 10,000, she'd give away eight. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, because that's the generosity part of it. | ||
| It's part of the community. | ||
| It's part of the whole thing. | ||
| Yeah, that's the thing you were talking about, the communal part of it. | ||
| And I think that was even more pronounced with the Cubans because of the history of Bolita and the cultural significance of Bolita going back to Cuba. | ||
| That's something they brought with them to the United States. | ||
| And it was just... | ||
| You know, like I said, it wasn't seen as a criminal thing. | ||
| It wasn't seen as a violent criminal thing. | ||
| Now, what happens with Jose Miguel Battle is at a certain point, 1985, he moves from Union City to Miami. | ||
| And he moves the hierarchy of the organization to Miami. | ||
| But the money's still being made in New York City. | ||
| The organization is as strong as ever, and the money's being made in the five boroughs of New York. | ||
| And it's being shipped down to Miami, where this guy now lives like a... | ||
| A gentleman farmer on an estate. | ||
| He surrounds himself with mamay trees. | ||
| Mamay is a fruit from Cuba. | ||
| He's had the shake. | ||
| Oh yeah, it's wonderful fruit, beautiful fruit. | ||
| So he associated with his childhood. | ||
| So the first thing he does is he surrounds his estate down in Miami with this fruit from his childhood. | ||
| And he lives down there, now far removed from New York. | ||
| Meanwhile, back in New York, A war breaks out between the Italians and the Cubans over this thing called the two-block rule. | ||
| When the Cubans and the Italians formed their alliance, they established a rule that nobody could open up a bolita spot closer than two blocks to a pre-existing bolita spot. | ||
| Somebody violated that rule. | ||
| I don't even know, after investigating it, who violated that rule. | ||
| But that rule got violated. | ||
| And it turned into a nasty war, an arson war. | ||
| They started firebombing each other's spots, and a lot of innocent people got killed, man, incinerated. | ||
| A four-year-old girl got killed. | ||
| It became horrific. | ||
| It lasted for about eight or nine months. | ||
| There was something like 70 murders, maybe 25 firebombings at different Bolita spots. | ||
| It got so ugly, it brought down the heat of the feds. | ||
| Nobody could ignore this corporation thing anymore. | ||
| So it brought a lot of unwanted attention to it. | ||
| Do they know who initially started it off? | ||
| Who violated it? | ||
| Yeah, he became a snitch and told the whole story. | ||
| So the guy who violated it? | ||
| Oh, not the guy who violated it, but the guy who became the number one arsonist and set up the whole campaign of arson. | ||
| He became a snitch and told the whole thing chapter and verse. | ||
| So it was basically just one cocky person just decided, fuck this two-block rule. | ||
| Well, he was probably authorized by his bosses to do it. | ||
| Yeah, go over and burn that spot. | ||
| We'll show them. | ||
| And then that happened, and then the response was, well, we'll show them. | ||
| Go burn his spot. | ||
| But burning the spot came out of someone violating the original deal. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, that was the reason the first burning happened. | ||
| Do they know who the guy was that started the first two-block violation? | ||
| They had a sit-down about it. | ||
| Here's how failed it was. | ||
| The Italians and the Cubans had a major sit-down about it to discuss it, to try to resolve it, to keep it from exploding into a war. | ||
| At that sit-down, they didn't resolve anything, and after they came out of the restaurant where the sit-down took place, a drive-by shooting occurred, and one of the Cubans got shot at the restaurant coming out of the sit-down. | ||
| And then the war was on, man. | ||
| It was on. | ||
| Like Battle said, we're at war with the Italians. | ||
| That's what he said with his people. | ||
| And Battle was ready for it, man. | ||
| He was good to go. | ||
| I mean, he was ready for that war. | ||
| He seemed to want it. | ||
| He seemed to cherish the idea that they were going to go to war with the Italians. | ||
| And so they were ordering all these horrific, and you know how they did the arsons? | ||
| They'd get these mamalukes to fill up a pail with gasoline. | ||
| Not even a can, not even a closed can, an open pail. | ||
| And, you know, they could spill, and they took that pail of gas, and they'd walk into a bodega, a bolita spot, and they'd dump it on the floor and light it on fire. | ||
| And whoever happened to be in there, too bad for them. | ||
| And people would die a horrible death. | ||
| They got incinerated. | ||
| I have some pictures in the book that are almost too horrific. | ||
| I had others that were so bad I didn't want to use them in the book. | ||
| You put something in that book that really blew my mind. | ||
| You said that in 1975 and 76 in Hudson County, where I'm from, there was 40 car bombings. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 40 car bombings. | ||
| I remember one. | ||
| Bombings. | ||
| Not all car bombings. | ||
| Bombings. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In Hudson County, from 7th Street to 88th Street there, where you have Bayonne, Hoboken, that stuff. | ||
| There was 41 car bombings. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| There was a time in the 70s in the U.S. where bombings, homemade bombs, were like the preferred... | ||
| Weapon of organized crime. | ||
| There was a bombing war in Cleveland over this Irish gangster in the 70s. | ||
| It was pretty common. | ||
| In Philly, too, they made a bomb with the nails. | ||
| The Sicilians were good with bombs. | ||
| They did make a movie about Danny Green. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| What was that movie called? | ||
| Kill the Irishman. | ||
| And now they're doing it again. | ||
| Well, they're doing the Irishman. | ||
| Different movie. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's fascinating stuff, man. | ||
| Now, did anything surprise you when you were... | ||
| I mean, obviously you're well-versed in organized crime and well-versed in these kind of communities. | ||
| I think the dominant feeling people will have when they're reading this book is the dominant feeling I had when I was researching it, which was, why don't I know this shit? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, this is like really... | ||
| This is not only a great story, really interesting, but it's a really important history. | ||
| All this political connection to anti-Castro movement and the role the U.S. government might have played in it, and the idea that this criminal conspiracy organization was allowed to go on for 40 years because... | ||
| Certain elements in the U.S. government didn't want to go after them because they were afraid it would open the lid on the Cuban relations with the anti-Castro relations with the CIA, the politics of it. | ||
| That's not only interesting history, it's important history to understand a certain social-political relationship between the U.S. and Cuba. | ||
| The Bay of Pigs, the residue of the Revolution, the way that shaped the Cold War, shaped U.S. politics over a period of about 50 years. | ||
| So I was like, why don't I know this? | ||
| This is amazing. | ||
| This is almost like a hidden history. | ||
| I mean, I knew what got reported in the newspapers. | ||
| But, you know, you lift up the rug and you look underneath the rug and you start to get into the details of it. | ||
| It just makes me so aware that What we're receiving as information on a daily basis from the mainstream media and everything is a version of what's happening. | ||
| There's a whole other version of what's happening that we don't see. | ||
| And you usually only find out about it 30 years later, 30 years after the fact. | ||
| And that's a good thing to know. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it sounds to me like this is... | ||
| I mean, I haven't heard a peep about this. | ||
| I mean, when you brought this up to me, Joey, and I was like, what? | ||
| The Cuban organized crime? | ||
| The corporation? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| What is this? | ||
| Like, this is not discussed. | ||
| It's just not discussed. | ||
| Well, hopefully this will change. | ||
| I grew up in it, and I never talked about it because, like I said, I have a hundred stories where you goof around. | ||
| I ain't Lucy Snorby's pussy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| There's a lot of shit I see in that. | ||
| I don't say it because, number one, you're not going to believe me. | ||
| And number two, it's not my position. | ||
| I was raised as nothing for me to say. | ||
| Do you know what I'm saying? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But I saw that as a child. | ||
| And then what made it worse for me was moving to North Bergen. | ||
| Once I moved to North Bergen, I saw... | ||
| What they were doing in Union City in a bigger way, which is all political. | ||
| I saw things that'll make your tongue drop. | ||
| That's why I don't give a fuck about politics. | ||
| When I see people talking about politics, I want to go up to them and go, if you knew what you were talking about, you wouldn't say a word because you have no idea what real politics means, how it works. | ||
| If it works like that in a micro system, I can't imagine in a real. | ||
| So I don't want to pay attention to it. | ||
| Now, Joey, let me ask you a question. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Because Joey and I connected when I had more or less written this book already. | ||
| If I had come to you way back at the beginning of this, out of the blue, all of a sudden this guy T.J. English, I don't know, I guess you knew the West. | ||
| So you knew who I was. | ||
| You knew I was legit. | ||
| If I had contacted you and said, will you talk to me about this history, would you have done that? | ||
| With everything. | ||
| It would take us a week to debrief me. | ||
| So you would have been ready and willing. | ||
| I would have told you. | ||
| Now you see what's interesting about that. | ||
| Everything I would have known because somebody has to hear this fucking story. | ||
| He opened up the door for me. | ||
| I have a responsibility now that I have another story to add to this. | ||
| Yes, he does. | ||
| I have the nuts and bolts of how this worked. | ||
| Have you thought about an addition to this? | ||
| I think there's going to be a number of spinoff books from this. | ||
| This is really... | ||
| The book that comes from this... | ||
| People will tell their personal stories. | ||
| I will get shot. | ||
| I will end up dead. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I will end up dead. | ||
| Not because of what I'm exposing. | ||
| But we know who did it. | ||
| I grew up, when I was growing up, the power in that Hudson County was the waterfront, gee. | ||
| That picture in New York City that people see, thousands of people died for that waterfront. | ||
| That waterfront was controlled by Weehawken, but everybody wanted a piece of it. | ||
| And North Bergen wanted a piece of it. | ||
| So my eighth grade teacher was the Weehawken mayor. | ||
| You ever have a teacher that was a mayor? | ||
| Why would your teacher be a mayor of a town? | ||
| Why, why, why? | ||
| Who's ever had a teacher tweet that was the mayor of a fucking town at the same time? | ||
| I did. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| At the end of my 8th grade year, I saw ATF come in and pull him out of there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| He did 11 years. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| What was he doing? | ||
| He was selling the waterfront. | ||
| They knew that was money. | ||
| There's a particular family that I will not mention because I won't even make it to the 405. And they were buying that property up in the 60s. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| They were buying that property up in the 60s. | ||
| They were posing as politicians. | ||
| They chop up $30 million a month now between four of them. | ||
| And then sell it. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| This is from all the property they own in Hudson County. | ||
| They bought everything. | ||
| Jersey City, Hoboken. | ||
| But they make their profit selling it, no? | ||
| No, they make their profit renting it. | ||
| Oh, renting it. | ||
| So the four of them, the four brothers chop up $30 million. | ||
| They go their own ways. | ||
| Every month they chop up $30 million. | ||
| So I saw it from North Bergen. | ||
| When I tell you a story, it was about Carmine Balzano. | ||
| He was a cop. | ||
| He was a cop that I... I got invited. | ||
| He opened up his home to me. | ||
| Then his son died. | ||
| The one that was my age, so I became his pseudo-son. | ||
| So here I am running with the Cubans during the week. | ||
| They're talking about numbers and drugs and everything, and I'm growing up in a cop's house. | ||
| That's also the driver for the mayor. | ||
| And he would do whatever. | ||
| Like, I saw him handcuff dudes and throw beatings on him. | ||
| And they called him Vinnie the Torch. | ||
| They called him Carmine the Torch Balzano because his job was to burn your building down. | ||
| The last one he burned down, kids were like, Mr. Mr., there's smoke. | ||
| And he's like, here's $10. | ||
| Go get ice cream. | ||
| I'll call the fire department. | ||
| He never called. | ||
| He faked a heart attack. | ||
| So you don't have to talk to reporters. | ||
| First thing you do is you fake a heart attack because you don't have to talk to reporters. | ||
| That gives you two days to get your story straight with the attorney. | ||
| You have no idea what I know. | ||
| Now, the reason I asked Joey the question about whether he would have been willing to talk is a lot of people reached out to me. | ||
| Early in this book process, the movie rights were optioned before I even wrote the book based on the book proposal. | ||
| And that got a lot of media attention. | ||
| And I started getting emails from nieces and nephews of sons and daughters of key characters in this story. | ||
| And these were people, like Joey, who had kept his personal family histories bottled up for 30 years. | ||
| Bottled up, Joey kept. | ||
| Hadn't talked to anybody about it. | ||
| And now they saw I was doing this book and they needed to get it off their chest. | ||
| They needed to talk about it. | ||
| I met these two girls who were daughters of one of the guys who became a snitch, testified against the corporation, the family went into the witness protection program. | ||
| These girls had never talked to anybody. | ||
| When I went to meet with them in a bar, they weren't even sure they were going to talk to me. | ||
| We were just meeting to talk about whether they were going to talk to me. | ||
| I got to meet them. | ||
| They talked nonstop for three hours. | ||
| Once they thought they could trust me, they just couldn't stop talking about it. | ||
| They had all this stuff they needed to get off their chest. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| We were raised not to say who gots. | ||
| Oh, gosh. | ||
| The first raid I saw on my mother, I was five. | ||
| They sat me on the couch and raided. | ||
| My mother had already thrown the coke off the balcony to the lady downstairs. | ||
| The landlord had already called her and said the cops are on the way out the door. | ||
| We lived on the west side terrace facing... | ||
| New Jersey. | ||
| And the lady downstairs, she would pay her rent and tell her, hold this bag. | ||
| My mother threw it. | ||
| They came up, sat us down. | ||
| They asked us to leave. | ||
| We went to 88th Street. | ||
| 88th Street, we never got raided. | ||
| When I moved to North Bergen, I would get raided. | ||
| Before I got raided, the phone would ring. | ||
| It'd be Carmine Balzano, tell your mom to clean the house. | ||
| I'd wake my mom up, tell her to clean the house, and come over here. | ||
| I don't want you to see what's gonna happen. | ||
| Cops would come and arrest my mother. | ||
| I would walk to Carmine's house with my basketball. | ||
| Right past the cops. | ||
| And it was that easy. | ||
| It was that easy. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Do you wish you had rented to Joey before you started writing this? | ||
| It would have been a different book. | ||
| Why I enjoyed this book so much is because no matter how much history this motherfucker dropped on you, He let you know who Jose Battle was. | ||
| He kept you reminded who Jose Battle was. | ||
| That's big for an author. | ||
| He never got away from Jose Battle. | ||
| And when you read the book, no matter what type of person you are, you kind of get mad at Jose Battle But there's something about Jose Battle you like, because you want that guy in your corner. | ||
| If you knew Jose Battle, and you knew that he got in the truck and said, I'm going out there for my men, that's the guy I want with me all the time. | ||
| Why am I going to hang out with this fucking idiot? | ||
| He gets scared if an ambulance goes by. | ||
| This guy actually went out and saved eight guys. | ||
| So he had that Cuban loyalty. | ||
| That anti-Castro-Cuban shit, that's big. | ||
| So growing up, there were so many things I wasn't allowed to say. | ||
| I wasn't even allowed to talk about. | ||
| Now here's how ruthless this guy was. | ||
| Let me let you answer the question though. | ||
| Do you wish that you would run into Joey? | ||
| Yes, I do. | ||
| But the thing that fears me, there was so much research to do in this book. | ||
| If I would have met Joey, I would have gone down a rabbit hole. | ||
| With Joey's stories. | ||
| And that might have taken me off the specific research I was doing. | ||
| So I almost... | ||
| Joey's thing is like a separate thing. | ||
| It's almost like a sequel to or the son of the corporation. | ||
| Sort of a spin-off of it. | ||
| And there's a lot of people probably who have their version of it like Joey does that they could tell. | ||
| So, yeah, but let me say about battle, because Joey's saying a very interesting thing, how charismatic he was and how you partly liked him and admired him, which is the case of any good leader, right? | ||
| That's what you want from a leader. | ||
| But here's how ruthless this guy was. | ||
| He had a guy in his organization, Ernesto Torres, Ernestico. | ||
| Who he met in Spain. | ||
| Battle was on the run in Madrid for a brief period of time when he'd been indicted on gambling charges. | ||
| And there were a bunch of Cubans living over there. | ||
| And they all hung out together. | ||
| And he discovered this 19-year-old kid named Ernesto Torres, who was sort of an orphan. | ||
| And one day he tells the kid, he's going to mentor the kid, one day he tells the kid, I've got a guy coming over this afternoon to the apartment. | ||
| I want you to watch. | ||
| He owes me $10,000. | ||
| I'm going to scare the shit out of this guy. | ||
| I want you to see what you do, how you treat somebody who owes you money, show them that they can't play around with you. | ||
| So he's waiting for the guy to come over, battle, and he's sitting in his apartment. | ||
| He hears a pop, pop from out in the street. | ||
| He goes down, he goes out. | ||
| Ernestico, a 19-year-old, is there with a gun in his hand. | ||
| He's shot the guy in the backseat of the cab arriving to meet with Battle and killing him. | ||
| And he says, Padrino, Godfather, he says, you'll never have a problem with this guy again. | ||
| I took care of it. | ||
| And Battle's looking at it going, you just cost me $10,000. | ||
| I didn't want the guy dead. | ||
| But then again, he looks at Ernestico and he thinks, I can use this guy. | ||
| I can use this guy. | ||
| So Ernestico becomes what he calls his prodigal son. | ||
| And he grooms this guy to maybe be the next godfather when they come back to New Jersey, they come back to Union City. | ||
| He sends this guy, Ernestico, out there. | ||
| And no one else in the corporation can understand Battle's affection for this guy. | ||
| They think Ernestico's a thug. | ||
| He's a killer. | ||
| He's a street thug. | ||
| Yeah, the organization can use guys like that, but you don't put him in positions of authority. | ||
| Battle seemed to have a soft spot for this guy. | ||
| He makes Ernestico a banker. | ||
| He makes the other bankers bankroll, put up $10,000 each so that Ernestico can be a banker. | ||
| They don't like it. | ||
| Most of them don't like it, but they go along with it. | ||
| A couple of them don't go along with it. | ||
| Ernestico doesn't have the brains to be a banker. | ||
| He fails miserably as a banker. | ||
| He's humiliated by that, and so what he does is he starts kidnapping bankers from the organization and holding them for money. | ||
| Very self-destructive thing to do. | ||
| He turns against the organization. | ||
| He goes rogue. | ||
| One of them, he shoots. | ||
| A banker, he kidnaps and shoots. | ||
| Happens to be Battle's brother-in-law. | ||
| The bankers come to Jose Miguel Battle and they say, you created this fucking monster. | ||
| You brought this kid in. | ||
| You created him. | ||
| You gotta take care of it. | ||
| Battle, being the man he is, realizes that's true. | ||
| It's his responsibility. | ||
| He hires a few assassins to try to take Ernestico out. | ||
| They bomb his car. | ||
| In Union City, they try to kill him. | ||
| They can't get the job done. | ||
| Battle decides he's got to do the thing himself. | ||
| By this time, Ernestico has fled to Miami. | ||
| He's hiding out with his girlfriend in Opalaca. | ||
| Battle gets together his brother, one of his brothers, and another assassin, Chino Acuna. | ||
| And they go down to Miami, and in the middle of the afternoon, they burst in this guy. | ||
| They find out where he is. | ||
| They burst in his apartment. | ||
| They engage in a wild shootout with Ernestico, and they shoot him in the closet of his bedroom, and Battle goes in, grabs him by the hair, and shoots him right, puts a bullet right between his eyes. | ||
| Now that's a boss. | ||
| I mean, aside from the horrible nature of the act, that's a leader. | ||
| That's a guy who takes matters into his own hands. | ||
| He wants something done. | ||
| He goes and does it himself and uses that as an example for the organization. | ||
| He comes back to the bosses, the bankers in New York. | ||
| He says, you're not going to have a problem with Ernestico anymore. | ||
| He says, you know what? | ||
| He died like a lion. | ||
| He fought to the death. | ||
| He fought until he'd emptied his gun, and then we shot him in the closet. | ||
| So he's telling all the other bankers, I still admire the kid. | ||
| He fought like a lion, but I took care of it. | ||
| It's done. | ||
| And, you know, the other Bolita bankers were in awe of this guy because he had a certain ability to do that that they didn't have. | ||
| Is this in the book? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Yeah, there's pictures of it in the book. | ||
| What was the logic to take this thug and turn him into a banker in the first place? | ||
| He had a soft spot for him. | ||
| Battle was a sentimentalist. | ||
| He took in stray dogs. | ||
| He'd drive around and he'd see a dog on the street and he'd open the door and he'd say, come. | ||
| And if the dog come, he took the dog in. | ||
| And in his home in Miami, his estate in Miami, he had like 25 stray dogs. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And they said Ernest Tico was like a stray dog. | ||
| He had a soft spot for the kid. | ||
| Before I piss real quick, you know, in Cuba, the dog is a big symbol. | ||
| Remember when I told you St. Lazaro? | ||
| Big symbol. | ||
| When Michael Vick got convicted, there was a lot of jails he couldn't be sent to because they had an Amacqua population, and they don't play when it comes to dog because their devotion is to St. Lazaro. | ||
| St. Lazarus, he's the one with the crutches that got his... | ||
| Licks. | ||
| And Ernestico was a lot like you, bro. | ||
| When people would say to you, why do you bring Ari and Joe Diaz on the road? | ||
| Because I love these motherfuckers. | ||
| And fuck you if you've got a problem. | ||
| Fuck you! | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| That's what he was. | ||
| He was very loyal. | ||
| Until you turned on. | ||
| Until you turned on. | ||
| But, you know, they almost canceled The Sopranos. | ||
| HBO got really pissed at The Sopranos in Episode 7. When he drives his daughter to the school and he kills the guy personally. | ||
| Because HBO felt that bosses should never do hits. | ||
| He did that all the time. | ||
| HBO felt. | ||
| HBO felt. | ||
| They went at chase. | ||
| Fuck does Ross Greenberg know about hits? | ||
| They went at chase and said, we don't think in real life a boss. | ||
| Remember he went and he picked up the guy by his neck when he drove Willow to college? | ||
| HBO threatened The Sopranos, not to air that episode, to cut that, to make somebody else kill the guy. | ||
| That wasn't the only guy. | ||
| Was that because they wanted Tony Soprano, they still wanted him to be some sort of a hero? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| That he wanted him to keep his hands clean. | ||
| Isn't that ridiculous? | ||
| Because that was one of the more appealing things about that show. | ||
| He was a murderer, but you still liked him. | ||
| Did he kill Palulu too? | ||
| He tried to. | ||
| He tried to. | ||
| Bro, they cut his leg off. | ||
| They lit him on fire. | ||
| Let me go pee real quick. | ||
| Yeah, the Palulu story. | ||
| Palulu killed Battle's brother, his youngest brother, in a dispute. | ||
| Shot him in a bar in Washington Heights. | ||
| Very public murder. | ||
| I mean, an insult to the Battle family. | ||
| So now, Jose Miguel Battle is fucking livid. | ||
| And at the funeral in Union City, he gathers his men together and he says, you know, I want this guy's I want this guy's head on the wall. | ||
| I want to be able to mount this guy's head on my wall. | ||
| And he puts out a hit on this guy for $100,000. | ||
| And this is in the 70s. | ||
| That's probably a million today. | ||
| It's probably a million dollars. | ||
| Ernest Tico and another assassin are the ones that take on that contract. | ||
| And they go out trying to get Polulu. | ||
| I mentioned before, there's something like 9 attempts or 12 attempts on Palulu's life. | ||
| They had a shootout in Central Park with machine guns in the middle of the afternoon. | ||
| Holy shit! | ||
| Guys with machine guns shooting with, you know, mothers with baby carriages and stuff. | ||
| Palulu got shot up so bad he loses his leg. | ||
| He winds up having to have a prosthetic leg. | ||
| They still go after Palulu. | ||
| When Palulu goes to prison, they hire a killer to stab him in the prison yard twice, two separate times, and he survives that. | ||
| He keeps surviving. | ||
| He survives so many of these assassination attempts, they think he's not human. | ||
| They come to believe that he's got some Santeria spirit who's protecting him. | ||
| So when you think someone has, I wish Joey was here for this, when you have someone you think has a Santeria spirit protecting them, you have to counter that with a Santeria spirit of your own. | ||
| You have to have what's called a Bembe, where you create a kind of voodoo energy to kill this guy. | ||
| So they continue to go after Pelulu. | ||
| Finally, Battle, as he did with Ernestico, says, I'm going to take matters into my own hands. | ||
| I'm going to be there on this one. | ||
| They find out where Palulu is in the Bronx, and they go on one night, and they trap him. | ||
| Cars come from all sides. | ||
| They trap him. | ||
| He gets out of his car. | ||
| They shoot him in the street. | ||
| They shoot him full of 11 bullets. | ||
| He falls in the street, bleeding, loaded with gunshots. | ||
| The last thing he sees is Jose Miguel's battle standing over him, laughing at him. | ||
| And then he goes unconscious in the street. | ||
| They think, great, he's dead. | ||
| They're almost ready to celebrate. | ||
| The following morning they find out, nah, Palulu was rushed to the hospital. | ||
| He's not dead. | ||
| He's recovering. | ||
| Now they're beside themselves. | ||
| They've tried everything. | ||
| They say, you know what? | ||
| We're not going to give up. | ||
| They hire an assassin, dress him up as a male nurse. | ||
| He goes into the hospital, shoots Palulu in his hospital bed right between the eyes. | ||
| They got the job done. | ||
| He was talking when you were gone about how if you felt like a guy had a Santeria spirit protecting him, you had to have your own Santeria spirit to combat it. | ||
| Santeria became a scam. | ||
| After all, like I was raised in Santeria from the age of five. | ||
| I had little disturbances when my dad died. | ||
| I was weak. | ||
| They didn't put me into Santeria to be a witch doctor. | ||
| Explain Santeria to people who don't know what the fuck that is. | ||
| It's a religion that originated in Africa, Nigeria, and then the slaves brought it over to Cuba. | ||
| They hid it from the plantation owners through Catholicism. | ||
| So that's why there's a lot of cross... | ||
| It's kind of a mixture of African and Catholic religion. | ||
| When I was five, I was brought up to 148th Street, and this lady had a collie, a dog, and I loved the collie. | ||
| I loved dogs, and I was allergic to them. | ||
| So while I was playing with the dog, she would talk to me, and I fell in love with this woman. | ||
| I fell in love with her. | ||
| She was like my mother. | ||
| And then as I got older, one day they asked me, do you want this, do you want that? | ||
| Do you want to get Elegoire, which is the first one you get? | ||
| Elegoire and Ogun, Yo Romero, those are the first things you get and you put them by your door and they guarantee, you know, your safety. | ||
| For me, it was health. | ||
| That big black woman is my godmother, okay? | ||
| And then after that, when I was six, they finally said they were going to initiate me and my mother because My spirit took my father. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So they wanted my godmother, they wanted me and my mother to be twins in the Santeria. | ||
| So I made Saint on 148th Street and Broadway. | ||
| But for me it wasn't to be a killer or to be anything like that. | ||
| I can't carry guns. | ||
| I can't go in cars with strange people. | ||
| I can't do business with three people. | ||
| I can't say I hope Jamie fucking gets hit by a car. | ||
| I'm not allowed to say all those things. | ||
| I don't use it. | ||
| The way in the late 70s... | ||
| Why can't you do business with three people? | ||
| Because two of them will sidle up against you. | ||
| And that's the same thing that happened to me on my kidnapping. | ||
| I robbed somebody with three people. | ||
| I can't stay in anything. | ||
| Look at my life now. | ||
| Look at my life when I was snorting white powder. | ||
| My saint in my head is controlled. | ||
| That's why I always wear a white t-shirt on Mondays. | ||
| It's the day of the spirit. | ||
| What? | ||
| You always wear a white t-shirt on Monday? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Look at my shoes. | ||
| They're white on white. | ||
| Always? | ||
| When I step out of the shower, I walk onto a white shower mat every day. | ||
| Every day. | ||
| Every day. | ||
| I'm still very Santeria in my head. | ||
| I wasn't when I was doing the coke because I knew I wasn't allowed to. | ||
| What happened in the mid-70s with Santeria was... | ||
| I would pay you to tell me what you wanted to hear. | ||
| Listen, I got a big cargo coming in from Columbia with 200 kilos. | ||
| What would the saints say I'd do? | ||
| It's fucking religion! | ||
| They don't fucking transport blow! | ||
|
unidentified
|
But these people got enamored with it. | |
| So it was like, you know, I want to kill Joe Rogan. | ||
| Let me put a spell. | ||
| So you're supposed to write your name on a thing and then take a tongue and put it in a cow's tongue. | ||
| Like, there was a big story when I was a kid, Fatati. | ||
| One of Tati's stories, he's in the book, he's Omega-7. | ||
| I didn't know this growing up. | ||
| He went to court one time and his godmother made a powder. | ||
| And before the judge went to make a verdict, she splayed the power in the thing. | ||
| And the judge fucking couldn't remember what the fuck he was about to say, so they had dismissed the case. | ||
| And she became astonished. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Every fucking criminal wanted to give her thousands of dollars. | |
| What was the powder? | ||
| Like a thing they made. | ||
| There's a movie they called years ago. | ||
| It was The Devil's Advocate with Keanu Reeves and Pacino. | ||
| And there's one scene where he has to go protect the guy. | ||
| The guy's a Santeria guy. | ||
| New York is prosecuting him because he's killing animals without a license. | ||
| And he goes, watch this. | ||
| He takes the tongue out. | ||
| He puts the tongue down. | ||
| He blasts the tongue like a thing. | ||
| And then he asked the guy, what's the judge's name? | ||
| And the judge gave him his name. | ||
| And he took the tongue and they rolled it with nails. | ||
| And they put it away and they go, don't worry about tomorrow. | ||
| The next day at court, the judge starts to fucking talk. | ||
| And he goes into a coughing spree. | ||
| You can't fucking talk. | ||
| Now that person looks like a hero. | ||
| These were all subtle coincidences that these fucking spics were fueled by now. | ||
| So now I gotta have a big week, Joe Rogan. | ||
| What does the saint say? | ||
| And you get four pieces of coconut... | ||
| You throw him on the floor and the saints say, this is going to be your week. | ||
| Let me give you $20,000. | ||
| So now drug dealers started doing it when Noriega got busted. | ||
| He had Santeria in his closet. | ||
| Fidel was well known for Santeria in his closet. | ||
| All these dudes. | ||
| Well, you have a special room. | ||
| You have an altar. | ||
| I made a promise when I lived in that apartment that if Batala got me a house, he'd have his own room. | ||
| Go to my house. | ||
| My saint is in my office. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Right behind me. | ||
| I have an altar. | ||
| I'm not Cuban. | ||
| I have an altar. | ||
| And I also have a... | ||
| If you get into the Cuban thing, it will get you. | ||
| It will get you. | ||
| It will get you at some point. | ||
| So you, from reading this book, created an altar? | ||
| I have an Orisha. | ||
| You have to have... | ||
| Eligua is my Orisha. | ||
| It's Orisha. | ||
| He's the little boy. | ||
| Why did you do this? | ||
| It's a belief system. | ||
| Why did you do this? | ||
| Because you can't really understand the culture unless you embrace it on some level. | ||
| You understand it and live it. | ||
| But you continue it even after the book. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| I've had people talk to me when I've thrown cards about you. | ||
| Throwing cards about me? | ||
| When people have done my readings, they have mentioned you in my readings. | ||
| Really? | ||
| That you're Obatala's son all the way to the end. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Obatala is an old wise saint. | ||
| He has 24 different passages. | ||
| He goes, my passages are Yaguna. | ||
| That's the one you don't want around. | ||
| Because they were supposed to put Chang'o in my head. | ||
| But to time me down, I was like, Chang'o, son. | ||
| Chang'o means thunder. | ||
| Whenever you see thunder and shit, that's Chang'o. | ||
| The drum. | ||
| Chang'o is a man and a woman. | ||
| You can't kill mice around him. | ||
| They beheaded him. | ||
| Because a mouse woke him up, and he woke up. | ||
| Oh, it's fucked. | ||
| Look, you have no idea. | ||
| Shango is the drum, the conga drum, which is the thunder, you know, summoning the thunder. | ||
| Yeah, so they put a bottle in my head to calm me down. | ||
| I'm not supposed to carry weapons. | ||
| I can't have knives on me. | ||
| I can't get into arguments. | ||
| My mother in the same is Ochoong. | ||
| She's just a whore. | ||
| She's just, Ochung is the whore of the saints. | ||
| She gave her kids to the Amaya to raise. | ||
| If you have problems with your stomach or you want to have a kid, you have to pray to Ochung. | ||
| You know, but the women saints are worse than the male saints. | ||
| You don't fuck around with the women saints, because they will fuck your world up. | ||
| Well, Choon is probably Mary Magdalene, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And Yemaya sent a message to my mother. | ||
| My mother didn't do it. | ||
| My mother died. | ||
| You know, he says that there's another side to the story. | ||
| And, you know, like I told him at dinner last night, my mother hid me for years. | ||
| They sent me to Sacred Heart School for Boys. | ||
| Yeah, she sent me there to get a good education. | ||
| But she sent me there because there was a lot of shit she didn't want me to see at that time. | ||
| And when I got out of Catholic school, I was introduced to it. | ||
| And one of the things I got introduced in one night was the end of Union City. | ||
| The end of that political era where everything was running smooth came to an end like in 76. That's when the allegations started to come up because there was two cops that would shake my mother down. | ||
| Very decent people. | ||
| They would come in. | ||
| One guy came well-dressed, would have a drink, talk to my mother in Spanish. | ||
| My mother would feed him. | ||
| It was a price of doing business, Joe Rogan. | ||
| Now here's how I knew Joey was legit, because when we first started communicating, he mentioned the name of one of these cops, and that name is in the book. | ||
| Frank Mona. | ||
| Yeah, a well-known cop in Union City at the time, so I knew right away Joey was tied in. | ||
| So if Frank Mona came to your house and you had 200,000, only 100,000 would make it to the police station. | ||
| So my stepfather Juan wanted to kill him. | ||
| He confiscated Juan's Electra 225. That was like, you know like when Tony Montana picks up Michelle Phyfe and he goes, what? | ||
| It's a Cadillac! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Let me tell you something. | ||
| You could put a Porsche The best Porsche in the world and a 1975 Cadillac next to a Cuban. | ||
| And he's gonna take the Cadillac. | ||
| Because that's a scheme. | ||
| That's American. | ||
| That's what it is to be fucking American. | ||
| When Mona took that Cadillac from Juan, he didn't shut up about that for 10 years. | ||
| He wanted to shoot that fucking cop. | ||
| But that cop was a clean cop, that was a dirty cop, and he always busted my mother's balls. | ||
| But he wouldn't come in for the shakedowns. | ||
| There was two other guys. | ||
| Then about 76 this guy started coming in. | ||
| That kind of looked like Jim Morrison. | ||
| Cuban good-looking dude with another white partner. | ||
| And they would come in and they would yell at my mother. | ||
| And my mom had the bar, the pool table in the back, and then she had a main office. | ||
| If she had to take a number, or somebody wanted to play a number, she rented an apartment. | ||
| She owned the building. | ||
| So she rented the apartment upstairs that had a line to the back. | ||
| So you couldn't, you follow what I'm saying to you? | ||
| So she could go in the back office. | ||
| I was in that back office one day and I heard yelling. | ||
| And I came outside and this cop was pressuring my mother saying, fuck you. | ||
| We know what the fuck you're doing. | ||
| We want our money. | ||
| Now at that time Union City ran from 7th to 48th Street and there was a bunch of bars. | ||
| These were all well-known Cuban bookie spots, and this guy started torturing Cubans. | ||
| And the Cubans were like, what the fuck is going on? | ||
| We pay, and all of a sudden this guy, but what pissed the Cubans off the most was that this guy was Cuban. | ||
| His name was Nicky Girardo. | ||
| And he was, you know, whatever, and this kept on. | ||
| And one day, I remember I used to go to McKinley School, and I would walk up to my mother's bar. | ||
| And one day, I walked up there, and every one of those Cuban owners were in there drinking, fucking yelling, anti-Castro shit. | ||
| There was one way before The Sopranos. | ||
| His name was Boyotrite. | ||
| That means sad pussy. | ||
| He owned the club on 35th Street. | ||
| Now, in Union City, you also gotta remember there's a bar called The Bottom of the Barrel. | ||
| And if you read any Mafia books, The Bottom of the Barrel's in every Mafia book. | ||
| It's where Henry Hill hung out, Dominic Monteglio, and Nino Gaggi. | ||
| It's right there on Bergoline Avenue. | ||
| So all this was going on in Union City. | ||
| Union City's the real fucking deal. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| It's the real fucking deal. | ||
| Now, before we get off Santeria, I told you the story about Ernestico, right? | ||
| After Ernestico got murdered, and they searched his apartment, they found a bunch of tapes. | ||
| He'd been taping phone conversations. | ||
| With all the people around him, and he taped some conversations with his mother back in Kewa. | ||
| Ernest Digo knew he was a hunted man. | ||
| There had been attempts. | ||
| He was hiding out. | ||
| In a phone conversation with his mother, like three days before they got him, He's talking with his mother and she says, I know, I'm worried. | ||
| I know they're trying to get you. | ||
| I'm worried. | ||
| I'm going to do a Bembe to try to protect you. | ||
| And he says, yeah, I need it. | ||
| You know, he says, I'm caught in the middle of a war of the saints. | ||
| I'm caught in the middle of a war of the saints. | ||
| And she says, I need some names for my Bembe. | ||
| And he names the people... | ||
| What's a bembe? | ||
| A ceremony. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You know, a ceremonial summoning of the spirits for one purpose or another. | ||
| And she was a babalao, a priestess. | ||
| So he gives her... | ||
| The very people who are after him. | ||
| Jose Miguel Battle, he says. | ||
| Chino Acuna. | ||
| He names all the people who are trying to kill him so his mother can use those names in her ceremony. | ||
| So when the cops find this Obviously, the Bembe didn't work because they got to Ernestico and killed him. | ||
| But on the other hand, when the cops found this tape, it was like Ernestico speaking from the dead and fingering the people who killed him. | ||
| And they were able to use that as evidence. | ||
| They knew exactly who killed him because of that tape. | ||
| Conversation with his Baba Lau. | ||
| So how the fuck do I fit into Santa Rita? | ||
| A couple years ago I had a read and some guy told me that you have a couple strong about a lot of people in your life and that's definitely you. | ||
| You're an older, wiser guy. | ||
| You're not violent. | ||
| You're very controlled. | ||
| You're a lot more controlled than I am, which is more of a... | ||
| I lean towards the chango phase. | ||
| Volatile. | ||
| My main thing is Ayaguna. | ||
| Ayaguna was the young Obatala. | ||
| He's the one that took a sword and wiped it on his chest with red... | ||
| And they asked him, why did he like to kill him? | ||
| He said, because blood makes change. | ||
| Something stupid he has. | ||
| But I don't practice that. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| My bottle is very calm. | ||
| But one guy goes see. | ||
| He's a badass motherfucker here. | ||
| Mentioned. | ||
| Didn't mention your name. | ||
| Didn't need to. | ||
| They don't need to mention names to me. | ||
| Once they tell me, I already know what they're talking about. | ||
| I don't really know what they're talking about. | ||
| So I still go get readings. | ||
| When I go to Miami next time, I go to my godmother. | ||
|
unidentified
|
See, this is the reason I still follow it. | |
| This is the reason I still follow it. | ||
| You were asking me why I would still follow it. | ||
| It's because once you get to an understanding of the idea that there are certain spirits within you, and the Orishas represent different spirits, Once you understand that, that's not something you throw away. | ||
| Even if you don't follow the religion anymore, you still have belief in that. | ||
| You still believe in that. | ||
| So my Orisha is Eligua. | ||
| Eligua is the saint. | ||
| He's a trickster. | ||
| Eligua is a trickster. | ||
| Plays little tricks. | ||
| And also the saint of passages. | ||
| So people put Eligua above their door because you're passing from one room into another room. | ||
| And so you identify with that spirit and that becomes part of your identity. | ||
| And you can't whistle in the house. | ||
| What? | ||
| Why? | ||
| You can't whistle in the house. | ||
| Yeah, I don't whistle. | ||
| You can't go in the house because he'll leave. | ||
| So you can't fucking whistle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| You can't whistle? | ||
| No! | ||
| Wow! | ||
| When I was a kid, I'd sit at the table and do... | ||
| Yeah, you can't whistle. | ||
| And my mom would go, touch that fucking table and I'll wake your fucking head. | ||
| Because God lives in the table. | ||
| Now, Joe, I grew up in it. | ||
| They made Saint in me. | ||
| When I made Saint was in November, and they did it up in the Bronx River. | ||
| So they had to break the ice, and they were dark-skinned Cubans. | ||
| And I'll never forget that they rip your clothes off, and then they take whatever your Saint is, they hit you with the number of water. | ||
| So if your Saint is five, you get hit with five things of water, and they dry you up, and you're freezing. | ||
| And when I saw them ripping my mother's clothes off, I was about five, I'm like, fuck you black motherfuckers. | ||
| And I started running down Bronx Boulevard. | ||
| They had to chase me and bring me back. | ||
| I didn't want to do it. | ||
| It's an all-night ceremony. | ||
| It's all night on a Friday. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| All night on Friday, 12 hours long. | ||
| You sleep, and then Sunday is when they read your future to you. | ||
| And then for a week you just live in a corner, white, they paint your head, you're bald. | ||
| So I had to go back to school on Monday bald with a hat. | ||
| They said he's not allowed in here with a hat. | ||
| My mother gave the principal a small nickel and I was allowed to wear the hat from 9 to 3. But then at 3 o'clock I had to go home and change into white clothes for a year. | ||
| For a year? | ||
| I had a dress in white. | ||
| For a year? | ||
| A year! | ||
| So for my cause, I would just have to wear white underwear, white socks, and white t-shirt. | ||
| Because I was a kid, I can't keep wearing fucking white every day. | ||
| I'm ripping shit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So now your hair has to grow back. | ||
| So when I walk into it, there's a ton of Santeria in L.A. Really? | ||
| I don't deal with it at all. | ||
| Because it's all the same thing like everything else in L.A. It's a bunch of white people who didn't grow up in it. | ||
| And there's a hot black guy and they want to really just suck his dick. | ||
| And he's telling them about spirits. | ||
| I saw a video today. | ||
| I saw a video today and I'm like, shame on them. | ||
| It's all confused. | ||
| It's like those white chicks that suck that Hindu dick when they go to hot yoga. | ||
| You know that guy that sucked out of it? | ||
| Bikram. | ||
| Bikram? | ||
| Bikram is a pig. | ||
| He got a bunch of white chicks with hummus flavor in their mouth from sucking that Bikram dick. | ||
| He gets to me inside. | ||
| You suck that fucking dead dick that smells like hummus chips. | ||
| You know, and that's what it is in L.A. Like, I've been invited to two parties. | ||
| First time I went, you know who was in there? | ||
| Who? | ||
| Fucking the dude from that play, Idi Ami. | ||
| Who the fuck played E.D.A. mean? | ||
| Forrest? | ||
| Forrest Whitaker. | ||
| Big Santeria. | ||
| Is he? | ||
| Big. | ||
| Really? | ||
| The chick that won Miss America for eating pussy from behind. | ||
| She's into Santeria? | ||
| They're all into Santeria. | ||
| Oh, Vanessa... | ||
| Vanessa Williams. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's not my Santeria. | ||
| I grew up in a Cuban Santeria. | ||
| You shut your fucking mouth. | ||
| It's a different Santeria because it's African, but it's not Cuban. | ||
| Is it Mexican influence? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| This is white influence. | ||
| It's just white. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Let's dance to the spirits. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's watered down. | |
| Look at that. | ||
| Look at Forrest. | ||
| It's very watered down. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And look at the guy from Danny Glover. | ||
| Danny Glover. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Forrest Whitaker dressed up like... | ||
| Like fucking monks. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Papa played. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| I came up under the very strict, shut your mouth. | ||
| Nobody needs to know your fucking business. | ||
| Look at these two. | ||
| They're playing a role. | ||
| This is what it is here. | ||
| It's more of a... | ||
| The guy that gives me the reads is tremendous. | ||
| I'm going to tell you this man to man. | ||
| Tremendous. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Tremendous. | ||
| I even took Duncan to him. | ||
| Tremendous. | ||
| You took Duncan to him? | ||
| Oh yeah, I took Duncan to him. | ||
| We had him on the podcast and everything. | ||
| The problem with him is I don't like the people around him. | ||
| He has too many people that don't know. | ||
| When I joined this, I knew what I was getting myself into. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| I knew. | ||
| I liked it. | ||
| It had nothing to do with my mother. | ||
| It was to do with my godmother. | ||
| It was my relationship with her. | ||
| In fact, my mother couldn't even say shit to me in front of my godmother. | ||
| When in 85, when I moved in with the benders, I couldn't bring my Santeria shit with them. | ||
| They're fucking Italians! | ||
| So I left it with this gay guy named Martin the Fag, He sold coke at night. | ||
| He was a seamstress in the daytime for a big New York play. | ||
| But when I was a kid, he would go to CBGB's every night and sell coke. | ||
| All these fags walking around today should give thanks to Martin. | ||
| Because he was getting his teeth knocked out and black eyes back in the 70s because he was gay. | ||
| But I liked Martin. | ||
| I left my Saints with Martin. | ||
| And then, years later, I ended up robbing Martin in my cocaine fucking hell. | ||
| So my godmother asked me in 1985, where's your saints? | ||
| I go, they're at Martin's house. | ||
| She goes, you know you're not supposed to have your saints at a gay man's house. | ||
| I'll go get them. | ||
| Listen to me. | ||
| I never saw my godmother again after 95. I talked to Duncan about Santeria, and some company approached me from London, and I did their Santeria podcast, and I got an email on Twitter. | ||
| We know who has your saints. | ||
| They're in Miami. | ||
| 34 years later, I flew to Miami. | ||
| I got my saints. | ||
| You flew to get them? | ||
| I flew to get them. | ||
| I shipped them back. | ||
| You know how my godmother got them to Miami? | ||
| On a bus. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| So six cases on a bus with all your future and your stuff. | ||
| I got my notebook. | ||
| And if you look at my notebook, I'll bring my notebook next time. | ||
| And you read it and you'll go, Joe, they knew shit. | ||
| These motherfuckers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So you believe there's something to it? | ||
| Till the age of 11, I thought they were a bunch of hocus pocus motherfuckers. | ||
| But there was a lady on 26th and Central, and I grew up with her kids. | ||
| Her husband was that big bookie on 118th Street. | ||
| And once a month, she passed the Spirit. | ||
| And people would go there, ten, eight people who were invited. | ||
| And I could tell this cop was eating away at my mother. | ||
| First of all, my mother didn't lay down for nobody. | ||
| My mother was going to shoot that motherfucker herself. | ||
| She was that type of Cuban woman. | ||
| She didn't like being spoken to that way. | ||
| I could see it in her face. | ||
| It was eating her fucking alive. | ||
| And one night we went over to this lady's party. | ||
| The first time I saw the lady drink a bottle of fire water, you know, that 140 proof agua diente? | ||
| So I thought, this is bullshit. | ||
| This is bullshit. | ||
| She emcees that bottle out in the daytime. | ||
| So at night, I would watch her bottles, and they had the label, like they were sealed, because my mother had a bar, so I knew if they were sealed enough. | ||
| Bro, this woman would pass a spirit and then tell you what to do and what not to do. | ||
| On this particular night, she went up to my mother, and she goes, I know what's bothering you. | ||
| And she took a white dish. | ||
| She took a white dish that was just there, and she took a candle, and she turned it over. | ||
| And she went like this, this circular motion under the candle. | ||
| I was 10 or 11, Joe Rogan. | ||
| At that time, did I believe? | ||
| I didn't believe in dick. | ||
| I didn't believe in dick. | ||
| I didn't believe in Jesus. | ||
| I don't give a fuck. | ||
| It's a story they tell you. | ||
| She flipped over the dish, and there was a circle with a guy that looked like a beard. | ||
| She goes, this what's bothering you? | ||
| And my mother goes, yeah. | ||
| And she broke the dish, and she goes, seven days. | ||
| It'll never bother you again. | ||
| Four days later. | ||
| Look it up. | ||
| Nicky Girardo was his name. | ||
| They shot him a thousand fucking times at a place called Rapido Taxi. | ||
| It was a front. | ||
| There was a taxi thing that was a front for cocaine. | ||
| They delivered cocaine. | ||
| Rapido means quick. | ||
| They never had a customer in their cabs. | ||
| He went to make a collection. | ||
| This is the one you told me about? | ||
| They said they got the witness. | ||
| It wasn't no witness. | ||
| It was the Union City cops who shot him. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's like if me and you were partners and all of a sudden I'd come around and start collecting from jail. | ||
| That's how corrupt the system was. | ||
| And in the papers they said he died a hero. | ||
| That he was shot by a street criminal and he was given a hero's burial. | ||
| No. | ||
| And Joey says he was shot by other cops. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| No, they know it. | ||
| Union City was that dirty. | ||
| Did you hear this when you were doing your research? | ||
| No, I didn't. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I told him afterwards. | ||
| Yeah, he told me and I did some research on it. | ||
| Found out that the guy... | ||
| I read the public account of what happened and it was quite different than how Joey described it. | ||
| It was the cops that shot him because he was taking food out. | ||
| And that's what I was saying before about the story we see on the surface and then the real story underneath. | ||
| See, I know all those stories. | ||
| After that, the political system. | ||
| I mean, in his book, he has a section where you actually see battle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go to the police station. | |
| And to make payoffs. | ||
| Like, that's how easy it was. | ||
| You know, Battle got arrested in North Bergen, in my hometown, so I called one of my friends. | ||
| I go, do some research on it. | ||
| They said they never even put the cops on them. | ||
| He owned the town. | ||
| He owned the town. | ||
| He owned the mayor and the police chief. | ||
| And if you owned Union City... | ||
| In fact, they both went to prison eventually for taking money from the gambling... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No mayor... | ||
| Jamie, when you've got a minute, no mayor has ever left Hudson County if it's not through prison. | ||
| The male, the fat guinea, he died because he was 800 pounds. | ||
| Every other mayor ends up in jail for Hudson County. | ||
| In fact, the mayor of Union City is up for corruption charges as we speak, and this is, what, 30 years later? | ||
| I read that. | ||
| I read that recently. | ||
| It's never stopped, Joe Rogan. | ||
| It's never, ever stopped. | ||
| That's why when people tell me stories, I wipe my ass with them. | ||
| Now, and also, this is when you say organized crime is diminished. | ||
| Well, we're talking about organized crime. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's still there. | ||
| It's deeply rooted in the system in certain jurisdictions, and it's not going to change. | ||
| It's just crazy to me that you got so deeply entrenched reading the story that you started getting into Santa Maria. | ||
| I was actually into... | ||
| I was married to a Brazilian for 10 years. | ||
| Ah, so they have a version of Santeria as well? | ||
| They have their own version of Santeria. | ||
| It's called Macumba. | ||
| And what's different about their version? | ||
| It's almost exactly the same. | ||
| They have all the same saints. | ||
| It's the same thing. | ||
| It's the same thing because the slave trade came through Brazil. | ||
| Yes, Africa, Catholicism, mixing. | ||
| Just the music is different. | ||
| With the Cubans, it's a Roomba. | ||
| All this wonderful Roomba music that you hear. | ||
| There's a whole bunch of great music that grows up around it. | ||
| So you were married to a Brazilian woman, you get divorced, you keep the religion. | ||
| Is that what happened? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I can't go to places like Cuba and Brazil because I get so influenced and overwhelmed by it, it changes the direction of my life. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I went to Brazil. | ||
| The first full day I was in Brazil, I fell in love with the woman that I married and lived with for the next 10 years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| When I go to Cuba, it's dangerous to me because I'm so seduced by it. | ||
| I'm so intoxicated by Havana, by Cuban culture. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Well, first of all, it's the most sensual place. | ||
| Havana is the most sensual place I've ever been. | ||
| Everyone flirts. | ||
| The women flirt. | ||
| Doesn't matter if they're married or not married, they flirt with you. | ||
| I suppose guys flirt too. | ||
| Everyone flirts. | ||
| There's like sexual energy everywhere. | ||
| The sky and the climate is just kind of sultry and sensual. | ||
| The music makes your body move. | ||
| Joe, would you let me play a video for you to show you some of the dancing in Cuba? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| When women dance in Cuba, they cover their pussy. | ||
| Because what I'm trying to do... | ||
| The whole dance is me baiting you. | ||
| It's one of the prettiest things you've ever seen in your life. | ||
| It's me coming up to you with this movement. | ||
| Like when I played it, like Yoel, I was getting nowhere with Yoel. | ||
| I was getting nowhere. | ||
| On the podcast. | ||
| Way before the podcast. | ||
| He was tightening up. | ||
| So I had to play Los Papines de Matanzas. | ||
| And once he heard that... | ||
| I could see Nigeria coming alive. | ||
| He even got up and kicked his leg one time, which meant we're on. | ||
| Because it's so embedded in your culture. | ||
| But in Cuban dancing, I'm coming up to you. | ||
| And every time I come up, I'll go like this and go like this. | ||
| And you've got to come and put your ass. | ||
| But the whole time, you'll be covering your pussy. | ||
| Because on the exchange, I'm going to grab your pussy. | ||
| Harvey Weinstein would do phenomenal in Cuba. | ||
| Here's how serious I take it, by the way. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| Oh, I love Afro-Cuban music, Latin jazz. | ||
| So I'm hosting, I'm curating and hosting a Latin jazz series in New York at a bar called Zinc every Thursday night. | ||
| TJ English and his Latin jazz explosion. | ||
| So I get to choose the music, the musicians that perform there, and I host the evening. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You do this every week? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're going to try to just keep it going indefinitely. | ||
| That's phenomenal. | ||
| So this to you was a natural subject to sort of engross yourself. | ||
| Well, I had written, I had published the book Havana Nocturne, which was about the mob in Cuba in the 50s. | ||
| And I really got into it then. | ||
| I made numerous trips to Havana for extended periods. | ||
| So this book was almost like a sequel to that. | ||
| Yeah, it was a nice way to revisit that culture, pick up the thread of that story. | ||
| Because this one is sort of an answer. | ||
| You get to the end of Havana Nocturne and you ask yourself, so then what happened after the mafia got chased out of Cuba? | ||
| What was their response? | ||
| How did they take it? | ||
| I want to show you this woman. | ||
| What does it say? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's the name of this woman? | |
| See how she's holding her pussy? | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| Yeah, she keeps holding her pussy. | ||
| Watch Homie. | ||
| Homie's about 90. Watch him move. | ||
| You were talking about jeans? | ||
| What was it with Yoel? | ||
| See, he went to grab a pussy. | ||
| So the dance is a seduction, right? | ||
| It's a seduction. | ||
| They're engaged in a mutual seduction. | ||
| This is a crazy dance. | ||
| Jamie, what's the name of this? | ||
| Show it to me. | ||
| Gua, say that joke. | ||
| Guauanco is the rhythm, right? | ||
| Guauanco is the rhythm. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Q-U-A-G-U-A-N-C-O. Guauanco. | |
| La, mu, W-E-N. Muñequitos. | ||
| Muñequitos. | ||
| M-U-N-E-Q-U-I-T-O-S-D. Matanzas. | ||
| Matanzas is the province they're from. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Watch how she grabs a pussy every time he comes close. | ||
| now that See, he tried to grab it! | ||
| Did you see him trying to grab it? | ||
| And she blocked it! | ||
| Oh yeah, they don't fuck around! | ||
| That's hilarious! | ||
| So the drumming you're hearing, and the use of what's called the shake-a-ray, that gourd there, and the chanting that's going on, you would hear all that in a santeria ceremony. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| This grabbing the pussy shit is hilarious. | ||
| Hilarious. | ||
| Hilarious. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, he grabs his junk, too, occasionally. | |
| Occasionally, but he's probably just checking. | ||
| How we doing down there? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| See, he's grabbing it, he's squeezing it to see if it's hard. | ||
| See, he's just playing with it. | ||
| He's just threatening to grab, and she grabbed it. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Hilarious. | ||
| So it's very playful. | ||
| It's flirtatious. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this is the culture there. | ||
| That's Cuba. | ||
| You know, it's funny. | ||
| In 1985, I lived in a building in Fort Lee, and there was a Panamanian woman, and she told me that she went to Cuba twice as a young girl, and she wasn't surprised what was going on in Cuba. | ||
| It was God's punishment. | ||
| She goes, it was such a disgusting fucking place. | ||
| And then, it was weird, a couple days after I'm talking to TJ, Somebody on Facebook. | ||
| I did a joke for my CISO special about Club 38. The owner of his name was Willie Vandy. | ||
| And his claim to fame was that his grandfather had the biggest dick in Cuba. | ||
| I grew up with two kids that had a claim to fame. | ||
| One of them, his dad was the best pool player in Cuba. | ||
| And Americans would go down and he'd beat the fuck out of them in the pool. | ||
| They played Chicago. | ||
| Eight ball? | ||
| Whatever, Chicago. | ||
| The other guy's claim to fame was that his grandfather was the guy in Godfather 2 who had the big dick and they called him Superman. | ||
| And on Saturday nights at Club 38 in Union City, he would, on Saturdays, he recreated. | ||
| And he had people come down And it'd be like a comedy show. | ||
| $10 ticket in, 200 people. | ||
| He would get some coked out chick, tie her up. | ||
| Two Cubans like that would play the congas. | ||
| And he'd come out and fuck the lady in public. | ||
| And the Cubans would go crazy. | ||
| With the biggest dick in the world. | ||
| And my joke... | ||
| You would fuck her in public? | ||
| That was the whole thing? | ||
| Yeah, that was the whole thing. | ||
| That was a public fuck show. | ||
| But it went all the way back to Cuba to like 55. Like, the name of the place was... | ||
| The Shanghai Theater. | ||
| The Shanghai Theater, and in Godfather II, they take Michael there, and all of a sudden he goes, I would have never found this place if it wasn't for Johnny Ola, and that's when Michael finds out. | ||
| That he betrayed him. | ||
| So they don't show the guy's dick. | ||
| Wouldn't it have been simpler if the guy with the big dick was also the greatest pool player? | ||
| Because he could just use his dick as a pool stick. | ||
| Yeah, that would have been perfect. | ||
| So they did this article about two weeks ago. | ||
| It's on my Facebook. | ||
| And it's called In Search of Superman. | ||
| Joe Rogan, it was the most disgusting article. | ||
| I had ever read in my life that these white dudes went on a 50-year looking for Superman and the legend of the guy with the big dick. | ||
| In fact, Duval went to Cuba to the location, even though it's close, just to see where it was. | ||
| And what the story is that us as Americans would go down there every week, and that was our first stop, to see this big black Cuban dude fuck the shit out of some poor white chick, you know. | ||
| Yelling and screaming. | ||
| The place was sold out every night. | ||
| I mean, the guy was a gardener. | ||
| The article is sensational. | ||
| I don't know if you can find it. | ||
| It's called In Search of Superman. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Superman of a Van. | ||
| But it came out the same week that they said, what are you fucking crazy? | ||
| They ain't no fake. | ||
| That's real. | ||
| That's why they call him Superman. | ||
| Now, you know, I saw a video of Superman. | ||
| When I was researching Havana Nocturne, I found out that Santo Traficante had a lawyer named Sam Regano, since deceased. | ||
| But Sam Regano used to take a lot of Super 8 videos when he'd go down to Cuba. | ||
| His son, who's currently a lawyer in Tampa, Told me that he had Super 8 footage of Superman that his father had made in the 50s. | ||
| Superman at a private sex show, fucking a girl. | ||
| And I said, ooh, I gotta see that. | ||
| Could I see that? | ||
| I mean, I think that's the only existing video footage anywhere of Superman. | ||
| And he says, yeah, but I'm not gonna give it up. | ||
| You gotta come to Tampa and I'll show it for you. | ||
| So I go down there. | ||
| I'll never forget, he's a lawyer too. | ||
| He says, you've got to come at 6 o'clock after the office closes so then we can watch it. | ||
| And I get there and the cleaning lady's still there. | ||
| So he brings me into the conference room where he's going to show me the film. | ||
| And we've got to sit there and wait until the cleaning lady's done because he didn't want to put this film on while the cleaning lady's in the room. | ||
| So he puts it on. | ||
| The place, the office is completely empty. | ||
| And he shows me this footage. | ||
| And his father had scored it to, like, Wagner or Beethoven, like triumphant classical music. | ||
| And it's at a private show. | ||
| It's in somebody's home. | ||
| They had private sex salons in Havana where you'd go to, like, some rich person's house. | ||
| You'd pay some money. | ||
| You had cocktails, and then someone would clap at a certain time, and you knew that was time for the show, and everyone would sit down, and Superman would come out, and he fucked this Cuban woman who was small. | ||
| He was big, and she was small, and he's banging her from every conceivable angle. | ||
| It was the least sexy thing you've ever seen in your life. | ||
| I mean, it looked like some kind of torture, really. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that was it. | ||
| And this guy had this footage, which is probably worth a lot of money. | ||
| How big was his dick, do you say? | ||
| The dick was big. | ||
| It wasn't... | ||
| No, I say that because it wasn't like... | ||
| I'm not sure it was even the biggest dick I've ever seen. | ||
| I mean it was bigger than my dick. | ||
| It was bigger than normal. | ||
| It was bigger than the- Guys today, it's almost like athletes. | ||
| Like if you go back and look at when Jim Brown was playing football, he was very impressive. | ||
| But was he Herschel Walker? | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Like athletes of today's era are different. | ||
| And if you go back and look at John Holmes, yeah he had a big dick, but was it Lexington Steel? | ||
| Like, these guys have bigger dicks now. | ||
| But the thing that... | ||
| They're more advanced. | ||
| People are growing. | ||
| The thing that freaked me out about... | ||
| The human species is advancing! | ||
| It's advancing! | ||
| The thing that freaked me out about Santo that I enjoyed from your first book, Evander Nocturne, and I wanted to tell Joe the story is that one time Kennedy went to Cuba as a senator. | ||
| And they were having some type of meeting. | ||
| But fucking Kennedy couldn't focus, bro. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He just like, you know. | ||
| And that they were like, what the fuck is wrong with him? | ||
| And Santo Traficante goes, I know exactly what's wrong with him. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| And they tapped him on the shoulder and they bring him in a room. | ||
| He's embellishing this a little bit. | ||
| Tell me. | ||
| This is what I remember. | ||
| This is better. | ||
| This is what I remember. | ||
| I read. | ||
| And that, I guess, Santo, he sicked him on two women, Kennedy. | ||
| Well, he set up a... | ||
| They filmed it. | ||
| He set up a three-way film. | ||
| No, they didn't film it. | ||
| No? | ||
| They wished they had filmed it. | ||
| They wished they had filmed it. | ||
| They set him up in a room with a two-way mirror, and they watched it happening, and then one of them turned to the other and said, shit, we should have filmed this. | ||
| This would make great blackmail material. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, like, Santo was kind of a freak. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How about JFK? He was the freakiest of the freaks, right? | |
| Well, but you've got to keep in mind, he wasn't married. | ||
| He was a young senator. | ||
| He used to get this senator from Florida named George Smathers, and the two of them would go down to Havana. | ||
| This was around 1955-56, when the whole thing was in its heyday. | ||
| And that was a big part of Havana. | ||
| Politicians and businessmen would go on junkets. | ||
| To Havana, like, you know, paid for by the company, weekend retreat, go to Havana, and they'd go to the Shanghai Theater, and they'd have tris, sexual tris, and they'd go crazy. | ||
| And it was out of sight, out of mind. | ||
| It was the original, you know, what happens in Havana stays in Havana. | ||
| It was a whole different country. | ||
| It wasn't going to make the newspapers. | ||
| So they'd go there and they'd rub elbows with Santo Trafficante and Meyer Lansky, and they loved it. | ||
| It was exciting. | ||
| It wouldn't do them any damage back home. | ||
| You know, it's amazing. | ||
| My mother died in 79, and whenever I did something, like if I comb my head differently, or if I wore like an orange shirt, my mom would go, what are you fucking, Rock Hudson? | ||
| And I go, what the fuck are you talking about, Rock Hudson? | ||
| You know, and one day I asked, I go, why do you always call me a Rock Hudson? | ||
| And she goes, because Rock Hudson, I don't maricon. | ||
| And I go, what the fuck are you talking about? | ||
| She told me, she died in 79. My mom told me in 1978, flat out to my face, that fucking he was gay as could be. | ||
| And I'm like, you know what? | ||
| I've heard, I'm sick and tired of you fucking Cubans. | ||
| Because Cubans... | ||
| They used to tell me when I was a kid that they smacked Bruce Lee in Cuba one time. | ||
| That he went down there talking to shit and one of my uncles smacked him in the face. | ||
| Cubans will lie to you just to fucking fuck with you. | ||
| So I thought my mother was fucking me. | ||
| She's like, Rock Hudson is as gay as a $3 bill. | ||
| And I go, what the fuck are you talking about? | ||
| She goes, let me tell you what I'm talking about, alright? | ||
| When I was a little girl... | ||
| Rock Hudson would come to Cuba and we would all go to the hotel. | ||
| You know like when Michael Jackson goes to a hotel and people come outside and they clap. | ||
| And he shook the kid outside the window. | ||
| We would be out there like waiting to see Rock Hudson. | ||
| But the hotel guy would tell us he was up there in a room with a man. | ||
| And I would go, Ma, are you fucking crazy? | ||
| Like I didn't believe her. | ||
| My mother died in 79, 85. Rock Hudson comes on and says he's gay. | ||
| Cuba was just a hiding place for people. | ||
| But did your mother know that Marlon Brando was fucking Richard Pryor? | ||
| No. | ||
| But I found out from this article, if we would have scrolled down a little bit, it says it, that they asked his neighbors, and the neighbors were like, no, he was bisexual. | ||
| And his number one guy that was known every time he came to Cuba was Marlon Brando. | ||
| He was Marlon Brando walking there with two showgirls, and then him and fucking Superman would leave by themselves. | ||
| Well, Brando loved the music. | ||
| He played gongos and congas and he was really into it. | ||
| Well, Pryor's wife was saying that back then they were doing so much coke that everybody just fucked everybody. | ||
| Everybody. | ||
| That's just so crazy. | ||
| Didn't Mick Jagger fuck somebody like David Bowie or George Harris? | ||
| Mick Jagger's wife said she caught David Bowie in bed with Mick Jagger. | ||
| I've done a lot of coke, but I never wanted to fuck you up the ass, Joe Rogan. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| I've done a lot of coke, but I never wanted to fuck another guy. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| In the story, Brando, who was bisexual, took off with Superman, ditching the dancers. | ||
| So Superman was bisexual, too? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In fact, I heard he had died of gangrene. | ||
| Gangrene? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And here it says that he died with a lover. | ||
| From sex? | ||
| Oh, he slept around. | ||
| But gangrene from sex? | ||
| How hard you gotta fuck to get gangrene? | ||
| Maybe fuck this chick that got shot in the ass or something. | ||
| He might have fucked animals. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Cuba was getting dirty, bro. | ||
| Cuba was dirty. | ||
| It was dirty. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| And let me tell you something else. | ||
| There's another, that whole society, that he hasn't touched in on you, that I know he knows about, and that's the Abacoa Society. | ||
| What's Abacoa mean? | ||
| That's the brotherhood of men in Cuba. | ||
| You'll see, as soon as you see an abacoa, you know you're dealing with them. | ||
| Yeah, I don't talk about abacoa. | ||
| They don't giggle, they don't... | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| What is a brotherhood of men? | ||
| I fuck with you. | ||
| A couple of years ago, you were living in Colorado, and I saw a kid with a balloon, and I call you Balloons, and we go for it, me and Eddie. | ||
| You come up to an abacoa and call him his nickname, you got a different situation. | ||
| They'll pull you aside and go, I don't know you, and don't you ever fucking call me that outside the circle again. | ||
| And when they get mad at you, okay, to prove their manhood, they beat you, throw you on the floor, pull your pants down, and slice your ass with a straight razor. | ||
| That's worse than fucking a man. | ||
| Juan did that to two or three people. | ||
| At my mother's wake, the guy couldn't come in because Juan had sliced his ass, and I go, no. | ||
| This guy took me to baseball games. | ||
| Juan, get the fuck out. | ||
| He's staying. | ||
| That's their thing. | ||
| They don't eat pussy. | ||
| They can't be in a room if another man is gay in the room. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| But guess what Y'all Romero told me. | ||
| What? | ||
| It's so dissolved now that there's gay men in Abacoa. | ||
| 50 years ago, bro. | ||
| Bro! | ||
| Some people would call that advanced, Joey. | ||
| That's progress. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| That now there's gay men. | ||
| Well, yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Look at the Sopranos. | ||
| They had gay men. | ||
| But 50 years ago, when two albacoars were in a room... | ||
| You gotta be on your best behavior. | ||
| They don't speak Spanish. | ||
| They have their own language. | ||
| They have their own language. | ||
| Oh, and I know it! | ||
| I know it! | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| They have their own language? | ||
| They have their own language in Spanish. | ||
| It's like a patois. | ||
| It's like a patois. | ||
| It's based on African... | ||
| Monina. | ||
| All those words. | ||
| When I call you Monina, that's my brother in that thing. | ||
| What's the organization of this group? | ||
| I mean, is it a cult? | ||
| Longshore. | ||
| Longshoremen. | ||
| They're the men of Cuba. | ||
| They don't even eat pussy, they're such men. | ||
| And they can fuck other men, and other men can suck their dick. | ||
| They're big in prison systems. | ||
| They can fuck other men. | ||
| Oh yeah, I could pick you up and go, You're no longer Joe. | ||
| You're Josephina. | ||
| Go get a wig and put lipstick on, and I'll fuck you in the ass, and you're going to suck my dick, but don't you ever fucking think you're going to fucking kiss me or touch me, and they beat you. | ||
| Shut up, you fucking whore! | ||
| You can fuck somebody else, but you can't be fucked by another man. | ||
| You can't be fucked by another man. | ||
| That's an abacoa. | ||
| If a man wants to suck your dicks, let him suck. | ||
| I remember one abacoa used to tell me, a guy sucked my dick one time with ice cubes in his mouth. | ||
| It was tremendous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? | |
| When I was in the fourth grade, I was surrounded with abacuas. | ||
| You say hello a certain way. | ||
| I'll show you an abacua video. | ||
| How do you spell it? | ||
| A-B-U-K-U-A. Here it is. | ||
| A-B-A. K-U-A. K-U-A. What does it say? | ||
| El abacua. | ||
| What is it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Frustrado? | |
| Frustrado. | ||
| I was pulling up. | ||
| There's a bunch of them here on YouTube. | ||
| I'll show you the dance one is the one you have to see. | ||
| How they dance, how they move. | ||
| Abacua, Urubu, whatever. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Call out the second one. | ||
| Go to that second one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's an hour long. | |
| And so these are just serious dudes. | ||
| Put in Abacoa and then put in Y-O-R-U-B-A. Let me see what comes up. | ||
| It's also African-based. | ||
| It's also African-based. | ||
| It has musical elements. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Okay, let me show you what an Abacoa is. | ||
| And they're all dressed in white. | ||
| They're all dressed in white. | ||
| They're still dressed in white. | ||
| No women allowed. | ||
| No nothing. | ||
| Play some of this, Jamie, so we can hear it. | ||
| No women. | ||
| Nah, there's women singing. | ||
| A woman will dance every now and then. | ||
| Will dance to it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you see the women on the right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| See how the guy shows up? | ||
| That's an abacoa. | ||
| Look at this fucking beauty. | ||
| The colors are white and red, right? | ||
| You will see red. | ||
| That's the guy. | ||
| They're the... | ||
| They'll take the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. | ||
| They're the... | ||
| You know, just saying that could get a... | ||
| Right there. | ||
| You have to salute with your elbows. | ||
| Get a bad... | ||
| You could suffer a bad... | ||
| So I could go like this. | ||
| Making fun of it. | ||
| Making fun of it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| If I see him, that's how I do it like this. | ||
| Go, give me an elbow. | ||
| You touch elbows? | ||
| Touch elbows. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And now there's actually gay men in there? | ||
| Now it's diluted so much. | ||
| It's been diluted over the years. | ||
| But when I met Juan and Elio, there were two abacuas, Patato and Totico, a Latin band. | ||
| Not the Cube, not the singer. | ||
| He was Abacoa. | ||
| So if you were Abacoa, there was a code? | ||
| Very manly code. | ||
| I come over here, there's a gay man in here, I call you out of the room. | ||
| Like, do me a favor, get that motherfucker out of the room, or if not, you can't talk to them, you can't approach them a certain way. | ||
| So has Cuba experienced a lot of progressive ideology? | ||
| Like, have they changed the way they... | ||
| Now it's very progressive. | ||
| Now these thoughts... | ||
| What's caused this? | ||
| Because they really didn't have the internet. | ||
| Just progress, evolution, changing things. | ||
| But their progress, I mean, they were so isolated. | ||
| They didn't have the internet, right? | ||
| They don't have the internet, right? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I think certain places... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are they getting it now? | |
| I think certain places... | ||
| Yeah, you can get it here and there. | ||
| It's not great. | ||
| It's frustrating when you go there, because you can't... | ||
| What's nice is you go to Havana and you kind of disengage from modern technology. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I mean, you couldn't live there because you can't really do business there. | ||
| But you just kind of disengage from... | ||
| And is it easy to travel there now as far as flights from America? | ||
| JetBlue like a motherfucker. | ||
| JetBlue like a motherfucker. | ||
| It's hilarious. | ||
| I remember when I was a kid, if you had a Cuban cigar, it was like a big deal. | ||
| Like, don't tell anybody. | ||
| We got Cubans. | ||
| Well, that's still illegal. | ||
| No, you can have some of them. | ||
| The embargo still exists. | ||
| Yeah, but you can have some cigars. | ||
| You're allowed to have some Cuban cigars. | ||
| Right. | ||
| See if you... | ||
| What is the amount of... | ||
| I think you're allowed to have like 10. To bring them back. | ||
| Yeah, you can't sell them here. | ||
| Or if you can sell them here, you can't sell a lot. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| I'm happy he wrote this book because... | ||
| I knew the story was out there, Joe. | ||
| Like, we haven't even touched... | ||
| Like, I was raised by an Omega-7 guy. | ||
| Like, he grew up with my father. | ||
| So... | ||
| I told Joey when I first met him, and I was sort of almost done with this book, I said... | ||
| I said, when you read it, you're going to need to sit down. | ||
| Because for a guy like him, he knew a lot. | ||
| And I knew he would come across names that he knew... | ||
| But there's no way you could have been part of this and known the whole thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So you knew who Tati was. | ||
| You knew he was a bad guy. | ||
| He didn't know Tati was a professional assassin for Omega-7. | ||
| I knew Tati. | ||
| He killed. | ||
| My mother warned me. | ||
| My mother used to go, when he picks you up at school, please don't get in the car with him because he's going to get shot one day and I don't People knew battle, and they knew some things about him, but they didn't know. | ||
| No one who was part of it, they thought they knew the whole story, but there's no way you could have known the whole story. | ||
| I didn't know all this. | ||
| You couldn't know. | ||
| I didn't know all this. | ||
| It blew my fucking mind. | ||
| I went to a dance with my daughter, and I came home, and the book was waiting for me. | ||
| You know how Amazon drops it off in front of your house, and they had ripped it. | ||
| And there was other kids and other moms with my wife. | ||
| And all I did was put it in my office, and when I opened it, I saw Dottie and Munchie, and my fucking knee dropped. | ||
| Like, it had hit me in the stomach. | ||
| He kept texting me as he was reading it. | ||
| I text him at 12 o'clock at night, and I go, you have no idea. | ||
| But I didn't know. | ||
| This guy used to go away every six months, and his wife was tight. | ||
| You know the story I told you about my mom would play cards, and then I would put tighty-whities on and dance for the women, and they would give me shots of tequila and make me dance? | ||
| Nina was in that book. | ||
| Nina is in that book. | ||
| When my mother died, I gave Nina my dog. | ||
| I couldn't take that dog. | ||
| So I used to go to Nina's house on 51st Street and cry in the doghouse. | ||
| Like, this is my dog. | ||
| So as soon as I saw Tati, I knew he was on to something. | ||
| Because Dottie was my father's friend and he was the type of guy that would come visit me every week. | ||
| Just because he was my father's friend and give me 50 bucks and take me to the city to get haircuts. | ||
| But his claim to fame was in the seventh grade, my mother told him, I don't know what I'm gonna do with him. | ||
| He's got some fucking girlfriend. | ||
| He won't even talk to me. | ||
| This guy came to my house and gave me a capsule. | ||
| And right in front of me, he filled it up with coke. | ||
| And he goes, let me tell you something. | ||
| Seventh grade. | ||
| Seventh grade. | ||
| He goes, next time this girl comes over here, you sprinkle this coke on a pussy and you lick it. | ||
| And I'm like... | ||
| I didn't even lick a pussy then. | ||
| I had touched it outside the jeans. | ||
| That coke capsule was in my drawer for like a year. | ||
| Like in the back of my nightstand. | ||
| I didn't, you know, I wasn't a drug, nothing. | ||
| And one night my mom came home with three cocktails in it and she's like... | ||
| I got fucking news today from Tati that he gave you cocaine. | ||
| Where the fuck is it? | ||
| I go, it's in my drawer. | ||
| I didn't use it. | ||
| She fucking smacked me. | ||
| She goes, don't you ever fucking take drugs. | ||
| She went and did it. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| She went and did the blast. | ||
| But that guy, when I was in the seventh grade, gave me a capsule of coke. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| And said, put it on her pussy. | ||
| You'll drive her fucking crazy. | ||
|
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That's how demented he was. | |
| The text I remember getting from you as you were reading the book, I was getting every 30 minutes or so I'd get a text from him, it'd be another name. | ||
| It's like, I can't believe you have this name. | ||
| Finally, the last one was, the text said, Nene Carrero, with an exclamation mark and a comma, and it said, you bad motherfucker. | ||
| He couldn't believe some of the names that were in there, and I know that it must have been emotional. | ||
| I said, this is going to be emotional. | ||
| I cried. | ||
| I was crying because there was two banks when I was growing up. | ||
| There was Raleigh and Miguelito, and they were partners with Cheo. | ||
| Miguelito, people used to goof on him. | ||
| He had a pigeon toe, and they would goof on him in front of my mother and go, you know, he could be Coco's father. | ||
| So Miguelito would always duke me a hundred bucks whenever I seen him, but he had a Puerto Rican wife. | ||
| His name was And I guess Nene Marquez had an affair with her. | ||
| Nene Marquez was the barber? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nene Carrero. | ||
| Carrero. | ||
| And when I was a kid, I remember someone shot Nene Carrero in the foot. | ||
| He walked right into the... | ||
| And Joe had become the Wild West. | ||
| Union City had become, if I shot Jamie, the only person that would come after me is Joe. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| There's no cops. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| There was no cops involved. | ||
| And it's like that today still? | ||
| I don't know about that. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| This was the 70s when... | ||
| But there's still corruption. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| They robbed from fucking everything. | ||
| They just... | ||
| When I went home last week, there was problems in North Bergen. | ||
| Right. | ||
| When I was home. | ||
| I stayed in Edgewater, so I didn't even go up there. | ||
| But when the book came out, I got a call from Battle's longtime lawyer, a guy named Jack Blumenfeld, wonderful guy, interviewed him numerous times for the book, knew Battle as well as anybody, defended him in a number of different cases over the years, knew a lot about him. | ||
| I sent the book to him. | ||
| He called me. | ||
| And I don't know him that well, so he was a little, you know, stiff. | ||
| And first he corrected some factual things in the manuscript. | ||
| And then he got real quiet. | ||
| He said, you know, this was very emotional for me to read this book. | ||
| He said, because just all kinds of things kept flooding back. | ||
| You would use a name or you'd describe an incident, and all of a sudden it would flood my memory. | ||
| Same thing that was happening to you when you read it. | ||
| The little detail would go, oh my god, it was almost like an out-of-body experience. | ||
| That's the power of literature, man. | ||
| That's the power of losing yourself in a book to where it engages your memory and your imagination that you're almost reliving it as you're reading it. | ||
| You talk about 3901 Kennedy Boulevard, the home of Charlie Hernandez. | ||
| You know how many basketball games I went into those projects? | ||
| I used to go there at 7 in the morning and shoot 300 jump shots because there'd be nobody there. | ||
| So imagine you're reading a book and you come across that address and it reminds you of what he's saying. | ||
| It was down the block, up the block, down the block was a bar named Ernie's in North Bergen. | ||
| For years, you ran out of beer at five in the morning, you went to Ernie's, and you pounded on the door and Ernie would go, what the fuck you want? | ||
| I want beer, Ernie. | ||
| All right, what do you want? | ||
| Let me get three Apex. | ||
| All right, you should have said so. | ||
| What are you getting emotional for? | ||
| You could be And Ernie would sell you beers. | ||
| And they were the coldest beer in town. | ||
| That was his reputation. | ||
| When we were in high school, 5 in the morning, Ernie, open up. | ||
| You fucking spick fuck. | ||
| You better open up. | ||
| You better at least want four cases, not one, two. | ||
| Get the fuck! | ||
| He would always sell you the two. | ||
| But I grew up in those projects. | ||
| I didn't live there. | ||
| I don't know how many times I went there to play basketball with. | ||
| And Ernie was probably a personal friend of the mayor's. | ||
| Ernie? | ||
| Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Everything was connected. | ||
| Joe and I both know, Joe doesn't remember about who was running North Bergen at the time. | ||
| And like I said, when I became, I fell into that house. | ||
| So whatever they got as kids, I got. | ||
| They were real Italians. | ||
| So do you understand? | ||
| Like if I went to your house, whatever the girls get, I get. | ||
| Who does that anymore? | ||
| They got a motorcycle, I got an Indian motorcycle. | ||
| If they went to Montauk for the weekend, I got to Montauk for the weekend. | ||
| If they got a no-show job, I got a no-show job. | ||
| I remember having a no-show job at Harvest Man when I was in the seventh grade, and the janitors hated me. | ||
| Because I would get there, and they'd have all the desks on top of shit, and they'd be buffing our floors. | ||
| And I'd just walk past them, go get my $80 check. | ||
| And they're like, are you ever going to do anything? | ||
| I'm a Carmine, dog. | ||
| I do what I want. | ||
| I knew you were connected. | ||
| I knew I'd do what I want. | ||
| I was a Carmine Balsamo. | ||
| I did whatever I wanted to. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So listen, let's wrap this up. | ||
| This book is out right now. | ||
| The Corporation, TJ English, and like I said, The Westies is a fucking great book. | ||
| Once you get done with this book, go buy that book, too. | ||
| TJ, thank you very much, man. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| This is great. | ||
| I can't wait to read this. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| This is a really fun podcast, too. | ||
|
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I enjoyed it. | |
| Amazing, amazing stuff. | ||
| All right. | ||
| That's it. | ||
|
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Bye. |
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