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Oct. 29, 2025 - Rudy Giuliani
01:12:27
America's Mayor Live (788): Michael Franzese—Former Mobster & Caporegime in the Colombo Crime Family
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Anything, this is Rudy Giuliani, and this is America's Mayor Live, live from Palm Beach, Florida.
But we have a picture of the White House before it gets expanded.
Oh, that terrible Trump is expanding the White House.
He doesn't have a right to do that.
The other presidents did, but he doesn't because we don't like him.
And even if this is the most beautiful ballroom ever created, they're going to say it's horrible and awful and terrible.
And even if he gets it at a price that's very, very reasonable, they're going to say it's horrible and it's awful.
And even if he doesn't have the cost overruns that they always have so that they can pay off the crooks that they work with and take some for themselves, they're going to say he's awful.
And the people he kept out of it are a bunch of jackasses who have never built anything.
The people who he took out of it are the people who have done projects in New York that took five times longer and cost 10 times more.
Maybe he could bring over the people that are doing the Fed for five times more than they said they would do it.
That's what they used to do.
Well, that's what they did in New York after I left.
I stopped it.
You know what I did?
I would penalize them if they went over.
And I'd pay them and I'd pay them bonuses if they got it done on time.
And then I even gave them bonuses if they got it done early.
I was criticized for that saying, oh, you're wasting money by doing that.
I said, no, I'm not.
Not wasting money.
And you're a bunch of jackasses because you don't understand corruption.
Do you know why these projects take this long?
So that a lot more money, it costs a lot more money and there's a lot more money to throw around.
By Trump taking control of this, this is going to cost probably, when you're finished, this is going to get done before he's out of the White House.
And it's going to get done at least 50 to 70% less than if it became a government project in which all of these idiot, stupid, ridiculous designers who have never built a damn thing in their lives come in and fight for two years.
Well, do we have Gates who has sunk billions of dollars into saving us from global warming, attack politicians viciously who said he was wrong, frightened the living daylights out of anybody that might pay attention to him because they thought he was normal.
And just four years ago, authored a book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, which he described as it'll be worse than COVID-19 pandemic.
And now says that there really isn't a global warming crisis.
He penned a lengthy blog post this week urging a shift away from the doomsday outlook.
So why do we have a doomsday outlook?
Because of him and all the money he put into it and all the money he made from it and all the money Gore made from it.
A scam from the beginning.
Many climate activists have adopted to terrify non-believers into seeing things their way.
He now says, although climate change will have serious consequences, it will not lead to humanity's demise.
People will be able to live and thrive in most places on earth for the foreseeable future.
Thanks.
And also, will you stop being in favor of getting rid of old people?
Huh?
And when are you going to, when does this whole study apply to you?
When you get too old, Gatesy.
You know, this is like the other guy who thinks we should have more taxes, but then doesn't put it in, which you can easily contribute to the government.
Right.
Well, we might have.
Maybe he doesn't want to be criticized anymore for flying his plane and sending out more CO2 than half the governments in the world do.
Well, here's two clips of Bill Gates, one from 2019 and the other from just a few days ago.
And notice a change here.
I wonder what changed.
Bovine flatulences.
Nobody knows how to get rid of how to get cows to stop farting.
Exactly.
Our burping.
And so there is artificial meat, but that's at a very early stage.
If it was a 50% reduction, then you could ignore, okay, leave the cows alone.
But because we're trying to avoid the temperature continuing to go up, you do need to go to zero, not just everything should be solely for climate.
Wasn't the goal here to improve human lives?
climate is super important, but has to be considered in terms of overall human welfare.
Well, let's see, we've got another clip here, Mayor.
This is...
This is Bill Gates just the other day.
This is CNBC.
This is Bill Gates who has now changed his position 180 degrees.
Right.
Okay.
So let's see if we can see if you can glean a difference here.
There's enough innovation here to avoid super bad outcomes.
Climate is a super important problem.
There's enough innovation here to avoid super bad outcomes.
We won't achieve our best goal, the 1.5 or even the two degrees.
And as we go about trying to minimize that, we have to frame it in terms of overall human welfare, not just everything should be solely for climate.
When the climate activists who have been very supportive of what you've done and you've been very supportive of what they've done read this, and if Greta Thunberg is reading this and saying to herself, my goodness, he seems like he is reversing himself, what would you tell her?
I'd say, wasn't the goal here to improve human lives?
And shouldn't we, in our awareness of how little generosity there is to help measure, you know, should we get them a measles vaccine or should we do some climate-related activity?
And if we could take, if we stop funding all vaccines and that, you know, saved you 0.1 degree, would that be a smart trade-off?
That's the kind of question we have to ask.
So I'm a climate activist, but I'm also a child survival activist.
If you think climate is the only problem and it's apocalyptic, or if you think climate's not a problem at all, my memo will make no sense to you.
You'll be like, oh no, it should all be climate.
Or you'll be like, why are you even still talking about this?
What's wrong with him?
Ted, what's wrong with him?
There's something seriously wrong with Gates.
And I don't know what it is, but yeah, yeah, I agree.
He was, he was, he was as, I agree.
He was like his hair was on fire, and that's why he doesn't have it anymore over climate change.
And then it became, now they don't even, I mean, they don't even call it climate change.
They don't know what it is because it isn't.
Do you know, you know, when I found out the revelation he gave us the other day, that it is much more likely, I thought he said 100 times more, 10 times, more people die of excessive cold, which is far deadlier than excessive warmth by 10 times.
You know when I learned that for the first time?
In 2007, when I was reading this book by Bjorn Lornberg, who became an advisor to my presidential campaign, and explained to me that whether there is or isn't climate change,
we're wasting way too much money on it because there are other things that are much more critical to the survival of human beings on earth, like starvation and food deprivation and malaria.
And you go, I go on Ron.
And he pointed out that if we had to go in one direction or another, it's safer to go in the direction of getting warmer than colder because more people die from cold by 10 to 1.
That You can ameliorate the world getting warmer easier than you can the world getting colder.
In fact, there are counterbenefits if the world gets warmer that none of the climate idiots were taking into account.
They weren't idiots.
The climate gangsters weren't taking into account.
Like, you're going to have more food if the earth gets warmer.
You're going to have a longer growing season because you're going to have more land that will be susceptible to being farmed for a longer period of time.
So you will deal with and reduce a thing that kills a lot more people than global warming or climate change or whatever Greta Thornberg-Thunberg is prouding about.
You'll have people eating because a lot more people die of starvation.
I don't know anybody that's died of global warming yet.
And they've been predicting it now for 30 years.
I mean, we're not supposed to be here.
Isn't it about time that they all come forward and confess, mass confession, and tell us the truth that they did this so that they could take a tremendous amount of money and also skewer the politics of the world toward communism and toward authoritarianism?
Amazing.
Amazing.
This should have been on the front page of the Times, but it's not even in the Times.
Not bad.
They just don't cover it.
It's the truth, but they don't cover it.
So we're going to have with us at 8.30.
8.30.
Michael Francis.
Michael Francisi is a former member of the mafia way back 25 years ago who has written and talked and thought and given more consideration to the mafia than anyone that I know in terms of morality and philosophy and family upbringing.
And I thought we might want to talk to Michael a bit about this scandal in the NBA and what he thinks, because it's a little hard from the indictment to figure out exactly what the role of the mafia was in this.
Now, the mafia's role is there is no role, at least outlined right now in the indictment involving the shaving of points or the players, the players controlling the number of points they score so people can win on an over-underbat.
They're involved in the very intricate, supra high-tech poker game cheating.
So we'll talk to him about that.
Now, it's really important to note this because even before Comrade Mondami came along or Imam Mondami, whichever you like, it was Adams, the guy who's getting kicked out of office, who did have a dream of New York, quite a bit different than my dream.
My dream of New York was in New York based on everybody working, being the leading city for just about everything in the country, certainly for finance, certainly for entertainment and for Broadway and for fashion and for things that are not only highly profitable,
but are beautiful and that lift a city to a high place.
A city that has 80 Broadway shows and every week there's a new one and some fail and some make it and you get some of the greatest music, modern music that's written and New York is the place to come and hear it and it's got to be tried out elsewhere before it gets to New York.
It puts New York on a very high pedestal.
I took the number of people coming to Broadway from something like 5 million to 19 million because nobody would come to Broadway because we had the shit kicked out of them.
Watch the movie Taxi Driver and you'll see what it was like before me.
So you know what Adams' view of New York was?
How New York in the future, when they're telling, you know, the financial community is down and you're losing population.
And he said, well, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to make a, we're going to make an absolute fortune.
We're going to have to have legal cannabis.
You make a fortune on that.
And legal gambling.
And now Mondami wants to add to that legal prostitution, selling women's bodies.
So that's going to be the financial rock of New York.
I've already been proven right that legalizing cannabis was one of the biggest mistakes this country ever made.
Because in the city of New York, there now is probably three times more marijuana use.
They always used to argue it'll cut down on the use of marijuana after a while.
No, it's gone up three times.
Number two, it's gotten to be a lot more powerful.
And number three, they said, well, they take organized crime out of it.
I don't know why they didn't believe me.
I knew more about organized crime than all of them combined.
I said it would increase organized crime because they compete with it and they come off with a better product.
And that's why it's getting stronger and stronger and stronger.
Now, in New York, it's absurd.
And Adam should apologize for that vision in New York.
Now in New York, we've got about 100, 150 legal places to go get cannabis.
I just saw an advertisement from one when I was in, I want to tear it down.
And I didn't, but I should have.
But there are probably 2,000 illegal stores.
I'm not talking about the ones that sell it on the street.
I mean, stores.
The legal are being overwhelmed by the illegal.
The number of marijuana overdoses, we've had very few is ridiculous.
We now have deaths from marijuana.
And we now have a little too late to stop all the idiots who legalized it.
All these reports, mostly coming from Europe, because America is afraid to go up against now the cannabis industry.
I mean, they're going to be like the, they're going to be like the military industrial complex.
I'll put out these reports that show that cannabis has a peculiar chemical.
Dr. Maria could explain this better than I can.
That particularly affects the brain in two ways.
It adds to cognitive decline and it adds to depression, which also raises the number of suicides.
And the number of suicides has gone up also quite dramatically of people taking marijuana.
And marijuana has, because of the competition.
I don't know how much stronger it is if you go back to the days in which they were saying, oh, it's less harmful than alcohol.
It's a lot more harmful than alcohol to your brain.
And that's the direction we're going in.
So now we've got Mondami who wants to add to that sex.
Sex work should be legal.
He lied and claimed he never said it.
And then they put him on the air.
He lies about everything.
I mean, it's just, well, of course, he's a communist and he's an Islamic extremist supporter.
So why wouldn't he lie about everything?
That's what they're trained to do.
His father lied about everything.
His father said that the 9-11 attacks were caused by the United States and Israel.
I don't know.
I really don't think that those 19 Muslims that were in those planes, 15 of which came from Saudi Arabia, had much to do with much to do with the United States over Israel.
And it's pretty clear why the 9-11, there's no mystery as to the motive for the 9-11 attack.
Motive is a couple of hundreds and actually over a thousand years old.
And it comes from the head of their religion, Muhammad, who said to kill Jews and to kill Christians and to kill non-believers if they didn't subject themselves to you.
Well, America's not going to subject itself to it.
And we know those people did it in the name of the Muslim religion.
I'm not saying that all Muslims are bad.
I didn't say that.
I said there are more than anybody will let you know, Muslims that believe that.
And it's hard, you know, hard to argue against it since it's right in the Quran, they've taken it out.
So I don't get, I don't get what New York is doing.
I mean, we're all thousands of our citizens are killed by Islamic extremism.
And we're electing a guy who sympathizes with Islamic extremism.
There's no doubt about that, that he sympathizes with Islamic extremists.
And now, now with this thing that he's done with his auntie, he shows what a craven individual he is.
He says that I think about my aunt not being able to go on the subway because of fear.
Like the city of New York is afflicted by Islamophobia.
Hey, screwball, it isn't.
I can testify to that because I was in charge of New York when the attack took place.
My fellow citizens acquitted themselves beautifully, a lot better than you do.
There were no major incidents involving Arabs, Islamic people.
I had a task force developed that very day to protect the community.
The task force wasn't needed after two weeks because nothing happened.
Some words, no serious injury.
Not like the Islamic extremists who burn everything they get their hands on.
And in the decade and two that followed, the number of attacks on Muslims pales in comparison to the number of attacks on blacks, gays, and of course Jews.
No comparison.
So this is a phony victimization, Imam, absolutely phony victimization.
And I mean, we have every right to interpret you as a supporter of Islamic extremism.
You spend your time with one of the most extremist Islamic Imams in the United States, certainly in New York.
I know that personally, because he's been that way for years.
He is, as the leaked report shows, a national security threat to the United States.
And you proclaimed him one of the most influential voices in the Islamic community.
So I interpret that pretty easily as you're a supporter of Islamic extremism.
I have a feeling the national security people will too, and not give you a clearance.
Even if you are the mayor of New York, you don't get a clearance just because the mayor of New York, you're the mayor of New York.
I mean, people make mistakes.
We can't sacrifice our country if the people of New York, only 30% turn out and they turn out to be brainwashed.
So in his case, we have two reasons why this will be an irreparable catastrophe if he's elected.
One, because he's a communist, and two, because he is a sympathizer with Islamic extremism, which means he's also a Jew hater of the highest order who was brought up by an anti-Semite of the highest order and also a sympathizer with Muslim extremism to the nth degree.
How is a city that's been victimized more than any other city in the country by Islamic extremism doing something so stupid like this?
Ted, I was the mayor.
I'm a lifetime New Yorker until now.
If anybody could interpret New York, it would be me.
100%.
I can't explain it.
I can't explain it.
I do not understand how we're doing this.
I don't get it.
I'll never get it.
And you know, it breaks my heart to see the people of New York doing this.
It absolutely breaks my heart.
Right.
This is, I don't know, I can't even say it's sad.
It's tragic.
So it really, it really is.
There is a poll that is strange as hell.
It is the strangest thing.
And I don't know, maybe we can come to a conclusion after we think about this for a couple hours, but I tried today.
He is ahead, 43 to 28.
So the last time we looked, let me show you the number the last time you looked.
You want to take a look at that, Ted?
That was the last time we looked.
Yeah.
That was a lot of bad.
Well, the last time we looked, it was 44, 34, 11.
Now, now it is now, let's see, 43, which is pretty much the same, 28 and 19.
So what has increased, and it's come mostly, and it's come mostly out of Cuomo, the number of undecided.
So now these two different polls, so we may be comparing apples and oranges.
But in the poll last week, Zoran Mondami was at 44.
He's now at 43.
So he lost a point.
Cuomo was at 34.
You know, he went down to 28.
So he's lost six points.
And Sliwa has gone up eight to 19, from 11 to 19.
So people say, well, Sliwa should endorse Cuomo.
Well, why shouldn't Cuomo endorse Sliwa?
Cuomo's already had his chance to be in government.
He scares the living daylights out of people.
And I gave great consideration to something that I don't, I mean, some of my friends call me and they tell me that I have to support Cuomo.
I was on the verge of doing it until I said to myself, I don't have the confidence in him to do it.
There's just too much.
It may be, it may be just another way to the same place, just a little longer.
The only way to get where we want to get, which is a city that is not controlled by the crooked Democrats, is to vote against them.
And if we have to build that up over a period of time, then we do.
You know, it took a while to go from Goldwater to Reagan.
And after a while, somebody, to vote for somebody, they have to reach a threshold of integrity and honesty and decency.
And second person on that ticket doesn't.
And neither does the first one on that.
The third one does.
The third one I can vote for, not hold my nose.
This is the old one.
Yeah, but the new one is 43 for Zohan, 29 for Cuomo, and 19 for Sleewa.
I want to get those numbers up.
But the bad news is that on a one-on-one in this poll, Cuomo does better, but doesn't win.
He does better than, than Sleewa did.
So, and this is the Manhattan Institute.
So, you know, the Manhattan Institute is a conservative organization.
So we would have to assume that this is about as straight, about as good as you're going to be able to do, depending on how much you give credence to a poll.
Right.
And we'll come back to this.
We'll talk some more about it.
I don't know that you build a great city.
Here it says, many Democrats, you know, and many Republicans are holding their nose and voting for Cuomo.
I don't know if you build a great city by holding your nose and voting for somebody.
I think you vote for what you believe in.
And then if you don't make it now, you live and fight for another day based on those.
Some of these principles are immutable principles.
This is not about the erase taxes or lower taxes.
This is about whether people live or die.
But we'll be right back.
Well, we'll be right back.
And right after these commercials, we have waiting on the line a very special guest.
And I want to make sure I get his name right.
Michael Francisi.
Michael Francisi.
That's it.
Well, an Italian's going to get better.
You think I get that name wrong?
Yeah.
A guy from Michigan.
You can tell I'm from Michigan, can't you?
Michigan has a lot of Italians.
You should be able to get.
We went to a very nice Italian restaurant in Michigan.
Metro Detroit.
That's right.
So we'll ask Michael about that and so much more, but we'll be right back.
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Here we are, pretty much at the beginning of the process here at this pristine, I call it a laboratory.
It's not like a factory.
It's like a hospital.
This is the beginning of the process for roasting.
Deep green, very good quality.
Most people don't use this quality.
We deal with small farmers because they like to know who we're dealing with.
They give us the highest quality, all organic, non-GMO.
You should know all Arabica beans.
No Robusto.
All Arabica.
they're gonna go into the roaster and it'll get roasted for about 20 minutes or so oh my goodness Look at these.
My goodness, you're going to want to specially order these.
This is what goes into Rudy's coffee.
Well, we have with us tonight a very special guest who is nationally known, has written several books, lectures all over the country, and does, I think, very, very positive, very, very positive work.
Michael Francisi.
And Michael, it's good to see you again.
Well, it's good to see you, Mayor.
By the way, I wish you were running for mayor right now because you win hands down.
And man, we could use you again back there, that's for sure.
Well, we can talk about that too.
But what I want to ask you about, because I was surprised about this, I was surprised number one by the scandal, the basketball scandal.
I was, you know, I went to Manhattan College, which was at the core of the scandals in the 50s.
And there was a player there who became a hero named Julius Kellogg.
And he was the one who went and told the district attorney that his coach was being offered money by the, then by the mob to fix the games.
Now, these indictments, very interestingly, have mafia involvement, cosinoster involvement, not in the basketball fixing of points, but in the sophisticated poker operation.
So what do you make of this?
And these are the four of the five families.
I heard you say that your former family was left out, the Colombo family.
Who are these guys?
I mean, I don't pay attention the way I used to.
And it's almost as if they're going back to their original business gambling.
Well, you know, it's funny because I woke up Thursday morning to, I mean, who knew this was happening?
But, you know, then the media was contacting me everywhere.
But because I think you know this, normally four families are not involved in any one big scam.
I mean, it happened, you know, in your day with the commission case, but usually you don't see where they're cooperating on such a big scale, all four of them together.
That was kind of surprising.
Yeah, the Colombos, either they got really smart and were able to avoid detection or they were just left out because they don't mean anything.
I don't know which one it was, but I'm not surprised.
You know, I've said this so often, you know, back in the day of prohibition, you know, which was, I always believe the government is what made Cosinostra strong in this country in Prohibition.
That's when we started to make some money and started to get organized.
But we had an 11-year run.
I was in the gas business, as you know, did pretty well, had an eight-year run, and that ended.
But gambling was always the mainstay of my former former life.
It continued to be that way.
The guys love to gamble.
They're pretty sophisticated.
They know it well, and it's never going to go away.
As a matter of fact, you know, it's becoming even stronger with all the access that everybody has.
You know, I'm not surprised at all by the card games, and I'm not even surprised by who got involved with Shaunce Billips and some of these high, you know, high-profile guys.
So it didn't surprise me.
I think the level of sophistication with the new machines and technology that they have, you know, that they have x-rays that could read the cards through the tables.
You know, again, sometimes they sell my former associates short.
And while a lot of them, you know, you wouldn't say that they were really bright, some of them really were.
Oh, I. And they latch on to things like this.
I'd agree with you completely.
I always say I listen to 4,000 hours of them on tape, and they run the gamut from people who are brilliant to people with total jackasses.
But I mean, they have people, they do have people where you say to yourself, boy, that guy could have been really successful.
That is really smart.
I mean, it really, the mob figured out how to lay off bets when nobody had computers or you couldn't do nationwide betting if you didn't weren't able to lay off bets.
Everybody in New York votes, you know, will bet on the Giants and everybody in Los Angeles bet on the Rams.
And the mob figured out how to lay off those bets.
That was a pretty sophisticated thought in the 1940s and 50s.
How to do it on paper.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I used to listen to fat Tony Salerno doing that in the old days.
He was actually a pretty good mathematician.
He was going to do it in his head.
He was very good, actually.
Believe me, I had an incident with him with the gas business and he knew the numbers really well.
But, you know, I don't know if you know this, but back when they brought off-track betting into New York, some of the NYPD people came to us and they said, we're going to put you out of business because we're running it now.
The state is running it.
And you guys are the bookmakers are going to go out of business.
And we said, yeah, let's see.
You know, what happened at that time, it was really funny because what they didn't realize, what happened at that time, guys would go to the track and gamble.
Some of those guys didn't go to a bookmaker.
They just went to the track once a week or a couple of times a month.
But now those same guys could go before they go to lunch on their way home from work and they start gambling, right?
More than they did when they were at the track.
So what happens?
You go to off-track betting, you got to put your credit card down, or you got to lay cash down.
They don't give credit.
But after they lose, which they do, now they're looking for the bookmaker because we gave them credit.
They actually increased our business until they went bankrupt.
The state didn't know how to run it properly.
They should have hired us to do it.
We would have done it well.
But, you know, the more access you have.
This is the point that I've made about marijuana and about all these things.
Whether you agree with that, it's being legalized or not.
You're not going to take organized crime out of it.
You're going to make it bigger because more people then start.
You get more customers.
And then the sophisticated organized crime people figure out a way to give them a product that you can't give them legally.
I mean, or, for example, legally, you wouldn't lay out that kind of money to someone.
You'd have to send them to a bank.
And also, you like to get them into the loan shark also, because then maybe you can take over their business, right?
Yes.
I mean, it all, it all, I mean, absolutely.
Yeah.
You get them, you lend them money when they don't have it.
I mean, that's how the Genovese family basically.
You know, I've been controlled the fashion industry to the guys who used to go gamble at Madison Square Guard.
Absolutely.
I took over a Chevrolet agency that way.
I lent the guy money he couldn't pay and I ended up taking over his agency.
You know, he was a bad gambler.
That's what happened with him.
You know, I've been telling the leagues ever since they recruited me, they recruited me out of prison back in 94 to come and speak to all the leagues.
And I did that with the pros.
And then in 1998, the NCAA jumped on board.
And I've done over 300 schools in the past 25 years.
But I've been telling them the more access that these players have to gamble, the worse it's going to be.
Access opens up the door.
People that never were able to gamble anywhere before, now they can gamble everywhere.
And now they're more of a target for organized crime because we know it.
We hang out with these guys.
We used to meet them in the same clubs.
They used to hang out where we hung out.
And as you know, not all of us were them, these and goes guys.
Sometimes these players were happy to hang out with us.
They wanted to be around us.
Yeah.
And I think before you know it, they're in trouble.
I think it's probably changed even more now.
It would be likely, you know, as you go into a second generation and a third generation, they become more Americanized.
They're not as easily distinguished as some of the old timers who still had the Italian accent.
And that's why maybe they fit even better.
I agree with that.
You know, the one question I've been asked is that all of a sudden, you know, you're hearing about the mob again.
You hear about all four families.
Everybody's commenting to me that, Michael, I thought it was over with.
And I said, no, it's not over.
I said, thanks to, you know, Mr. Rudy Giuliani, you know, with all the racketeering indictments and success that he had.
And then, of course, thanks to the, you know, John Gotti and how he put himself out there.
Yeah.
Guys got smart.
They got smart.
And they said, you know what?
We can't do this anymore.
We got to go back to Omerita.
We got to be silent.
We got to go undercover.
We can't throw ourselves out there.
But I said, they're not going away in my lifetime.
That's for sure.
They're still there.
No, I don't think they'll ever go away.
I think what we accomplished, I'll include you too in that, is we made them into a much more manageable organized crime group.
At the height of their power, they were unlike any other organized crime group ever.
They had what I used to describe as tentacles into legitimate societies that nobody else has.
Russian organized crime doesn't have it.
The Mexican cartels don't have it.
They, like in the Godfather, control the politicians, right?
Remember when he says you got all the politicians in your pocket?
Well, Frank Costello had all the politicians in his pocket.
And so did a lot of the others.
I mean, he's on tape appointing judges in New York.
It's true.
They ran gay bars on the West Side so they could take pictures of guys coming in and shake them down when they had to, if they were on trial or they had influence in Washington.
I don't know.
They might have been involved in the presidency.
We don't know about that for sure.
But I mean, they were at a level that no organized crime group had ever reached.
And they're not there now.
But they're still very, very active.
You're never going to stop crime.
All you're going to do is control it.
I mean, I remember once someone said to me, you brought murder down 70%.
Why couldn't you get it down to zero?
I said, because I'm not God.
I mean, God's got to make human beings different if we're going to get it down to zero.
But I mean, it's interesting to see their role in it and to see how it plays out as to what they're, because the indictment is a little fuzzy on exactly what their role was.
Well, you know, my prediction here is: I said, these are, you know, they're gambling cases.
I don't think you're going to see many people get a lot of time.
You know, out of the 30 people that have been indicted, 35, something like that, there's going to be a lot of pleas.
People are going to plea out.
There'll be some more informants that are going to come out of this.
But I did say this.
If the FBI, if the Department of Justice wants to put a section of their agency and just assign them to this, like they have the SEC on Wall Street, this will never end.
It's going to keep going.
They'll keep making busts because these athletes are going to continue to gamble.
People are going to get in trouble.
Organized crime is going to be involved in it.
And it'll be a constant thing.
I don't know if they want to take it that far, but they certainly can.
Well, you know, when I was the U.S. attorney, I never did much gambling because I couldn't get enough time for it, except when they killed Officer Vendidi.
And originally, it was thought that the mob killed him.
Yeah.
And with the head of the FBI, then, who's a great guy, we arrested every gambler we could find until they gave up to us, the people who did it.
People who did it didn't know they were killing a police officer or agent.
They thought they were killing a Cuban because there were Cubans trying to move in on their business.
And he looked, if you look, he looked and they shot him by mistake.
And that's why they gave him up because they were such jackasses.
It was a very strange case.
And then it went through a number of trials because they tried to prove that they killed law enforcement agents and the jury hung.
And then they reduced the charge to just plain murder and they got convicted.
They got convicted of that.
It was a very, very interesting case.
I mean, they've changed so much, but they take on a different form.
And you've got to be very careful.
Well, Michael, you know what I'd like to do since we don't have all the time we would like here, I'd like to see if we could do like a real one hour, hour and a half in which you do most of the educating, please.
Because people have to hear this.
You also are very, very good on how you avoid this.
I mean, how you stay out of it or even get yourself out of it.
And you've become quite a moral force.
And I think, you know, to make up for what you did in the past, which is admirable.
This is what Jesus talks about.
Redemption.
Yes.
And well, I appreciate it.
I admire you.
I admire you very much for that.
Well, I thank you for that.
That means a lot, more than you might know coming from you.
And I have to tell you, I feel the same about you.
You know, it's amazing.
This is like something very telling in my life that we can come full circle like this.
Of course it is.
It's amazing.
And it is a God thing.
There's no question about it.
And more people can do this.
More people can do this if they hear it, if they hear the hope of it.
So thank you, Michael.
And we'll be checking back with you maybe next week.
All right.
That sounds great.
How are you feeling?
I got to ask a question.
Oh, sorry.
First of all, yes, sir.
How are you feeling?
And then I have two follow-up questions before we go.
I'm feeling great.
Thank you.
Great.
Well, I have to ask, Michael, and this is Ted.
I don't have my camera on.
I have to ask, what was then prosecutor Rudy Giuliani's, how would you guys talk about him within the five families, right?
In the mob, the early 80s, right?
What was his reputation compared to maybe some other prosecutors who were not nearly as successful in taking down the mafia?
Well, we were really worried about him.
As a matter of fact, you know, I have to say this, and I don't want to be offensive to anybody, but we did have a certain code that unlike Italy, you know, we didn't target law enforcement people.
We didn't do it.
But one of the names, one of the names that did come up when people were serious, and it was my boss actually that talked about it, they felt that Mr. Giuliani was enough of a threat that they talked about taking him out.
And I didn't hear that really about anybody else.
So, you know, we knew he was serious.
We knew he was capable.
And obviously, nobody liked him at that point.
That's a good thing for him.
I'm going to tell Michael.
Grant, I have to say this.
People ask me all the time, Michael, it was John Gotti that took the mob down.
He was so out there.
And I said, listen, there was John Gotti.
There was, you know, Joe Colombo was out there.
These guys don't take the mob down.
Yes, it's a big investigation, all that.
I said, U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani took the mob down by using the RICO statute so effectively.
He was the first one that understood it.
He was the first one that used it.
And it was devastating.
And that's what took the mob down to the degree that it took down.
I've said that so many times because that's the truth.
I believe it.
100%.
Let me leave you with one story about Fat Tony since we talked about Fat Tony.
So we had his social club on Pleasant Avenue wired for something like seven or eight months.
It was the second time there was a wire that I participated in.
They also, the NAP Commission had done it much earlier, and that had some very funny stories too.
And I consider Fat Tony the guy who would get the award for the best sense of humor of anybody that at least I covered as a criminal.
So one day we had everybody wired.
We had a car.
We had a house.
We had an office building.
We must have had about eight wires going on.
And we'd always get like great material there.
And then for about two weeks, nothing, nothing.
They're talking about their families.
You got to cut it off.
They're talking about like crime stopped.
So I don't know if I came up with the idea of the FBI.
They said, why don't you put, why don't you send out about 50 subpoenas?
Just subpoena all the names we have to the grand jury.
They'll start talking to each other about what's this about, and maybe we'll get something out of it.
Like, you know, shake up the wire.
So I did that.
So my name is on all of them.
Fat Tony's in his office and guys are coming in.
Just got a subpoena from that effing Giuliani guy.
And he looks at it.
Holy shit.
All of a sudden, about the fifth or tenth subpoena, whatever, he says, you know something?
That effing guy, he never works.
All he does is sign these subpoenas and we're paying a salary.
Oh, gosh.
That's him.
I'm not going to tell you now.
I'm going to save it for when we come back for the hour.
But I have a great, I have a great Fat Tony story that you're going to love.
You're going to crack up, but I'm going to save it.
I'm going to ask you something about him.
I want you to think about it.
Why did his name change from Tony Fatz to Fat Tony?
Way back at the beginning when he was alleged to own Floyd Patterson and fix a fight.
He was described in Time magazine as Tony Fatz.
And then he became Fat Tony.
You got to figure that out for me.
Okay.
Really?
All right.
Thank you, Michael.
It's a pleasure and we used to joke about we used to joke a little bit about Fat Tony.
I bet you did.
He was a character.
And as you say, some of them, some of them got lost you for a second, but you're back.
You know, some of them would make me feel bad.
I mean, I'd listen to them.
I'd say, geez, this guy is figuring this guy could he could be a good lawyer or.
Well, I'll tell you a little bit about my episodes with that.
God bless you.
Thank you.
Well, he was sick.
Well, that's a very exceptional man.
Thank you, Michael.
And we'll we'll organize a longer form interview.
Yeah.
And everyone knows everyone's fired up for that.
We've got a lot of comments about that.
Yes, that's good.
Ted, I'm good next week.
So you just let me know.
Okay.
Anytime.
Thank you.
Oh, this man, he found Jesus or he was handed a Bible by a prison guard.
I didn't I didn't.
I want to ask him, but we'll save that for.
No, no, no.
We'll get we'll get our questions all organized.
And because this is an exceptional situation here.
You know, some of you probably know it.
Some of you don't, obviously.
And I didn't explain it in detail in advance, just that he's an expert on the mob.
He not only that, he was a significant member, a big what they call a big earner.
And his father had to be one of the most feared mobsters of his day, certainly in Brooklyn.
I'm going to ask him this, but I had the impression when I was growing up in Brooklyn, that his father was really effectively.
It's not the top guy in Brooklyn, the guy they feared the most.
You weren't you weren't you weren't going to you weren't going to go up against Sonny Francisi.
Yeah.
His father who lived to 103.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And if you listen to his whole story, a lot of the complications about him being out and being in him being out and then finally making the break has to do with the relationship with his father.
It's fascinating.
So and also if there is something that you need to break yourself of, or even though it's not going to be this, it's something else.
It's all the same process of going to God and asking him for help.
Going to Jesus specifically and asking him for help.
Well, let's let's we already took a break and we want to get off by about nine, 10.
Yep.
Nine 15.
So then go over and see Dr. Dr. Maria on on Wendell TV.
Right.
That's about 20, 25 minutes.
So let's go back to Mondami.
I think we could have probably had a very, very good conversation about him too.
It sounds like Michael is worried about New York.
Right.
Right.
Mayor.
Right.
I mean, it's one thing.
The mob is one thing.
Communism and Islamic terrorism is another, is another thing.
Right.
I mean, the mob never killed 2,000, 3,000 innocent people.
Right.
In fact, when they did kill innocent people, you got killed for doing it.
Right.
I had a guy that did 13 murders, the witness for me.
And of course, the joke was, he was on an unlucky number.
And Oh my god.
Um, um i i got to know him well enough after putting him on the stand and and for all intents and purposes he seemed like a regular guy but he killed 13 people right and i finally asked him the question this was after he was finished being a witness he was in the witness why'd you do it right probably a little more elaborate than that and he said well you know i know what's wrong now and But I never killed a civilian.
You killed 13 people.
Yeah, but they're all members of the mob.
And they all took the same oath I took.
I mostly killed people we thought were turncoats.
I said, yeah, but a couple of them actually weren't.
He said, well, that's the brakes.
God.
Well, Mondami, let's today.
Today, there was a release of his statement that is jarring about the New York City Police Department only two years ago.
We have to make clear that when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it's been laced by the IDF, Israeli Defense Force.
Now, what the hell is the connection between the Israeli Defense Force and the New York City Police Department?
None.
All this does is cement in indelible ink that he's a vicious anti-Semite, a horrible hater of police and law and order, and an Islamic extremist.
This is in addition, of course, to him calling them racists.
We have this on video.
You want to show that?
Yeah.
So this is.
This is in front of his group, the Democrat Socialists of America, which is a communist organization, which he failed to list when he became a citizen eight years ago, which makes his citizenship arguably null and void.
And why the hell that's not being enforced, I don't know.
Because if he's not a citizen, he can't be the mayor.
And they can do it after he's mayor and remove, remove him from office.
But what are we giving him a break for?
He failed to list the Democrat Socialists of America.
The law says you've got to list communist organizations.
If you don't, well, what about for him?
Okay, go ahead.
Well, there it is.
It takes me out of the American political landscape that reminds me of just how tame some of the things are that I'm actually calling for.
And it reminds me of the necessity of grounding ourselves in the struggles as opposed to the fights around the struggles.
For anyone to care about these issues, we have to make them hyper-lobal.
We have to make clear that when the hoop of the NYPD is on your neck, it's been laced by the IDF.
We are in a country where those connections abound, especially in New York City, you have so many opportunities to make clear the ways in which that struggle over there is tied to capital's interests over here.
Okay.
Wow.
I don't even.
How could you vote for someone that links whatever they believe the NYPD has done wrong, which is a lot in his estimation, right?
With the Israeli Defense Force.
I mean, I don't get, I do not get how this guy's a candidate.
He says things like this all the time.
I mean, that statement is not just irrational, it's almost a little bit insane.
I don't care how bad you think the police are.
I don't think, I don't know, I don't care how bad you think the IDF is.
What's the link?
There's no linkage between them.
What it indicates is the forcefulness of his hatreds and how they're extremely dangerous because he associates with people who are terrorists.
The Imam that he was with, who he proclaimed as one of the most influential Imams either in New York or in America, is a foreign security threat to the United States of America.
And he has been one since I was the mayor.
He was an unindicted co-conspirator in the 93 bombing of the World Trade Center.
He was a big supporter of the blind sheikh who killed so many people and also put out a fat war on the federal judge, Judge Muckezi, who sentenced him to life in prison.
He proclaimed that 9-11 was the fault of the United States and Israel.
He's not condemned.
He's not condemned October 7.
I think he's in many ways supported it, that it was necessary.
I get his comments and Mandani's father's comments confused because they're very similar.
His father is a professor at Columbia, and it's one of the reasons why Columbia is such a shitty school.
And I don't know if a degree from Columbia is worth anything.
I think it's worth a place in the Communist Party because you've been trained to be a Marxist.
You'd have to prove that you overcame it.
But I mean, I didn't know they had as many Islamic extremists as they had.
But maybe that's where the Jewish hatred came from.
That's where all the anti-Semitism at Columbia came from.
I mean, this guy wants to see the Jewish people annihilated.
Look, that's the Muslim religion, my friends.
Now, I don't understand him as a Muslim.
I don't understand how you can be a Muslim and say sex work should be legal.
I think you get executed for that in a strict Muslim country.
And even in a not so strict Muslim country, you'd certainly be regarded as a sinner for saying that.
And selling it, you want to make this the minute you make it legal, you're going to have more of these kids doing it.
We already have the most human trafficking in the world due to Biden.
Due to you, it's going to just, Roosevelt Avenue is going to spread to all five boroughs.
At least Adams has tried to quell Roosevelt Avenue.
Get it under control.
There was an article today that there are 12-year-olds on the street.
Where does this come from?
This comes from the communism part, right?
Mandami, this comes from the part where Marx wants to deconstruct all of our morality so that the communists can take control of it.
The goal of Marx and Engels and the Marxists is a society with no, parents have no authority.
They lose the kids at two years old.
God, you get rid of God because he can hold you back from being a good communist.
You'll actually maybe have some compunctions about killing people.
Education, you take over.
You try to get the kid at about two or three years old and brainwash him.
That, of course, was Hitler's theory, who was a socialist and a student of Marx.
That was also Stalin's theory.
Let's get these kids, and that's the theory of the Islamic terrorists.
I was just looking at a video the other night of these kids that are still being taught in the Palestinian schools that to the extent that they exist, they're still being taught from the UN curriculum that you should kill Jews right now.
We pay for it.
Those books were given to them by the United Nations Relief Agency, who had about 130 Hamas employees.
Well, a piece of good news is that Stefanik has pulled one point ahead of Hochl, who, since she doesn't do arithmetic well, might not be able to follow it.
Hochl might not.
This picture of her, I'm not even going to show it to you.
She looks like she's in the dream world somewhere.
But I can't imagine she isn't going to get trounced by Elise in the election after she embraced this guy.
Now, here's one of the things that gets me about Cuomo.
Cuomo has now come out in favor of an Arabic charter school.
Now, that's it's not going to be a religious school.
The guy who he's going to give the charter to emphasize that the school would not preach Islam, but it's going to be for Arabs.
Now, do we have an Italian charter school?
Do we have an Irish charter school?
Do we have a Dominican charter school?
Do we have an Indian charter school?
What's wrong with you, Andrew?
got to suck up all the time.
This is why I couldn't do it.
Because I don't think you believed all those things that you passed back in 2019.
I killed an awful lot of people.
Due to your changes in parole, there are 49 cop killers that have been paroled since that time that are walking the streets of New York.
And I don't know how I can't, my conscience wouldn't allow me to do it.
This is beyond what you did to the old people.
And you're never really explaining it.
It's a little different thing.
I'm not comparing you.
I'm not comparing what you did and what he did.
But the guy I just had on came to terms with what he did.
Understood how it was wrong.
When you can't come to terms with your people you want to vote for you and trust you, an Arabic charter school?
I don't even know if that's legal to have a charter school based on one nationality.
And that's not going to turn into an Islamic breeding, extremist breeding ground.
Of course it is.
A significant number of these people believe literally what Muhammad taught them to kill Jews and Christians.
Just get out the get out the Quran and read it.
It's clear as heck.
And when they yell out, Allah Akbar, they are saying, we're doing this in the name of Muhammad.
We're killing you in the name of Muhammad, as he taught us to do.
The way we say, we're saying the Lord's prayer as Jesus taught us to do.
Jesus taught us to pray, and Muhammad taught them to kill.
If you don't understand that difference, you can't protect us.
You just take us down the same euphemistic road that has led us to this and has cost us thousands of lives.
Time to face the truth.
There's also a group known as Mandami Jews for Zoran.
The guy who's running it is a transgender rabbi and a group of female rabbis.
Now, I didn't know that you could put this up, aren't we?
I don't know if transgender is approved in the Jewish religion.
And I didn't know if there were female rabbis.
You want to play it?
But in any event.
Do you want to play it?
I didn't see any more traditional rabbis as part of that group.
Yeah, let's play that and then we'll wrap up.
Let's look at these rabbis.
Rabbi.
Hi, Rabbi.
Hi.
We're among the thousands of Jewish New Yorkers who've been out door knocking and phone banking to elect Zoran Mamdani.
We're also rabbis.
We know Zoran will fight to make our city affordable and safe for our families.
And for our neighbors of all faiths and backgrounds.
As New Yorkers, we're also just people who live here, who don't want to get priced out of this incredible city that we call home.
We know fellow Jews want to be able to afford housing, transportation, and child care for their families too.
As Jews, as rabbis, as New Yorkers, we believe that all people deserve to thrive.
Zoran agrees.
But let's get real.
This isn't only about belief.
It's about action.
So let's build a flourishing city.
Together.
Let's elect Zoran.
No, where's the guy?
The trans, I didn't want all those women.
But okay, fine.
No, they were there.
He was there.
Did you see him?
Is it a transgender?
Yeah.
Male to female?
Male to female.
I mean, he was one of them.
Yes, yes.
He did the most talking at the end.
Yes.
Well, this guy, this guy is also, you know, this guy is against the state of Israel.
Why don't they at least put that out there?
Jews who don't believe in Israel should listen to this.
He's against the that trans rabbi is against the state of Israel and has been at many, many demonstrations where they yell from the river to the sea, which means to eliminate the Jews in Israel.
Take their homeland from them.
Take their homeland for 3,000 years from them.
What the hell kind of rabbi are you?
Gosh, if the rabbis like that, you don't need rabbis.
To destroy the religion?
To wipe out the people of Israel?
And I don't know, maybe somebody could educate me or I'll go educate myself on this idea of transgender rabbis and female rabbis.
I mean, I dealt with a lot of rabbis.
They didn't look like rabbis to me.
Not the rabbis I remember, and I got about 70% of the Jewish vote.
So I do not consider myself, and I know the Jewish religion really, really well.
In fact, sometimes I tell people I'm half Jewish just to joke around because my name is Giuliani.
And I'll tell you this story about the story about the White House tomorrow.
Oh, I'll see you.
If I feel like it.
Yeah, that's a good thing.
Okay.
So, ladies and gentlemen, it's time to switch over to Wendell TV and see Dr. Maria.
And then you come back to us tomorrow.
We're going to have plenty for you tomorrow.
I want to talk to you about Wikipedia tomorrow.
What a scam that is.
And how dangerous it is to the education of America and to the brainwashing that leads to what we just saw.
So pray for the people of Israel.
Pray for the people of Ukraine.
Pray for the people of Iran.
Pray for our president tonight, especially, because he has a very, very important meeting tomorrow.
Give him all the wisdom, all the strength that he's going to need to move us closer to a peaceful world, which is what we want.
So thank you very much for being with us.
We really appreciate it.
And we'll be with you again tomorrow night, right here at 8 on X and then at 7 on Wendell TV in Axis.
God bless America.
It's our purpose to bring to bear the principle of common sense and rational discussion to the issues of our day.
America was created at a time of great turmoil, tremendous disagreements, anger, hatred.
There was a book written in 1776 that guided much of the discipline of thinking that brought to us the discovery of our freedoms, of our God-given freedoms.
It was Thomas Paine's Common Sense, written in 1776, one of the first American bestsellers, in which Thomas Paine explained, by rational principles, the reason why these small colonies felt the necessity to separate from the kingdom of Great Britain and the King of England.
He explained their inherent desire for liberty, for freedom, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the ability to select the people who govern them.
And he explained it in ways that were understandable to all the people, not just the elite.
Because the desire for freedom is universal.
The desire for freedom adheres in the human mind and it is part of the human soul.
This is exactly the time we should consult our history.
Look at what we've done in the past and see if we can't use it to help us now.
We understand that our founders created the greatest country in the history of the world.
The greatest democracy, the freest country, a country that has taken more people out of poverty than any country ever.
All of us are so fortunate to be Americans.
But a great deal of the reason for America's constant ability to self-improve is because we're able to reason.
We're able to talk.
We're able to analyze.
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