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Transcript
Charles Bufalino
[00:00:00] hey, are you wire tappers out there? Good to be back here in studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins.
You know I’m a retired Kansas City, Missouri Police Intelligence unit. Officer and I I worked a mob for a long time and now I’m still studying the mob. And today we have a a descendant of one of the more famous mob names in the United States Russell Buffalino This is Charles Buffalino
Welcome Charles. Thank you. And I’m actually not a descendant of Russell, but I’m a an extended family member of his right. Basically I never wanted to write a book about our family until and I still didn’t after, after it occurred in 2011 that I stumbled across three pieces of information that all aligned on the theme of the Hoffa disappearance and its relationship to.
Several extended members of my family and there are three things about, there were three little revelations that I experienced, and I don’t really want to go into detail about them now because they’re [00:01:00] all in the book, and frankly, that’s proprietary information for right now until April 28th when the book comes out.
But when I got to the third one it really hit me like a shot that. I knew something about the Hoffa disappearance and my family’s relationship to it that nobody was ever really meant to know. And it bothered me just a little bit and I tried to dismiss it and I went away from it for a couple of days and I thought, this is still bothering me.
So I’m gonna find out a little bit more about the Hoffa disappearance so I can dismiss this suspicion, right? So I’m searching on the web and I’m pretty sure the source that I found, it doesn’t matter. This is pretty common knowledge. The source that I found though was from the UCLA magazine, 1984 or sometime in that timeframe. And it detailed what the FBI was doing in the [00:02:00] aftermath of Hoffa’s disappearance in 1975. And what they did, the presumption that they made was that Hoffa had been cremated, and that’s a story that you may hear. That’s a story you have heard from. I have Ken Lama. Yeah, he got that from Russ himself.
So they took that theory to Bagnas Go’s funeral home in Detroit, which whose clientele had been some of the members on the FBI’s watch list over the years. And Bagnas said, look, we don’t have a crematory. They then went to a place called Central Sanitation. Is that, does that ring any bells for you?
Central sanitation was Zy Vitale’s place Peter Vitali. Yeah. Who was a member of the Detroit Partnership, right? He had two such enterprises. This was the second one of them. And when the FBI went there, they interviewed the lawyer for the facility and asked him to show them around. He showed them [00:03:00] around to the trash compactors, the, the cardboard compactors and said, yeah, occasionally, a homeless person or a bum crimes in there to, catch a nap and ends up being more or less as asphyxiated than crushed per se. But, that’s a rare occurrence. And and then they wanted to see the incinerator.
And they showed him the incinerator and the FBI said, okay, we want another look at that. We wanna make a date and come back. They set a date to come back and central sanitation burned down. Now the, there’s nothing. Unusual about that, except when I was reading the account I’m running across the name Nick Elli, who was the lawyer for the facility who’s giving the FBI the tour and his name was Ringing Bells.
Ringing Bells. And I’m thinking Nick, miss Nikki, is that my cousin? That’s my first cousin Nick from Burbank, [00:04:00] California. Oh really? And how did he get involved in this and. That led me to want to know, okay, who all in the family was in Detroit in 1975, apart from Bill Bino and his three of his close relatives, his siblings who went out there with him that nobody knows their names and Russell and what all was going on out there.
And moreover, I needed to understand better again for myself. How these people really related to one another. What was the nature of Bill Binos relationship with Russell? The real nature. It’s commonly understood that they’re cousins. What does that mean? I have cousins that I’ve never met and I think it’s easy for people to presume that was the case.
That was not the case, bill. And Russell were. In Bill’s mind and owing to a special relationship they had, they were closer than [00:05:00] brothers due to the fact that Bill’s daughter Bill’s rather Russell’s wife was Bill’s daughter’s godmother. That essentially that made Russell Bills. They had a godfather relationship between him and I.
Describe what that means in the book. So Yeah. Which is pretty strong in, in this kind of a family that Godfather relationship’s pretty strong. I may talk about the movie, we’re talking about in Italian family, the Godfather’s pretty strong relationship. Correct. It’s a kind of a, yeah, it’s I get to talk about it in the book because in Montero Sicily, where Bill’s father is from.
If I suggest to you that, I want you to be my child’s godfather, it really doesn’t imply anything, any responsibility you have with respect to the child. That means I want us to be as, I want us to be in cahoots business together, brothers. But I’m sure it meant more to Bill than it did to Russell.
But, it was a token relationship [00:06:00] probably from Russell’s direction, but they certainly were close and they certainly were involved in teamster business together from very early on. So should I spend a minute and tell you what the family structure was like? Yeah. Explain that Family structure from Sicily on, forward in, in kind of a shortened version, but yeah.
Explain that. I’ll do it now. I went ahead and I. Put together some visual aids if you would like to. Yeah. Is this that kind of a show? Can we do multi? Yeah, we can do, yeah, we can do that. Oh, not too many because about half the people that listen to it are audio. I’ll be frustrated. Let’s not do that.
Alright. What we’ll do instead is we’ll talk about so I’m sitting in Pitton, Pennsylvania right now in a house that my grandfather and his brother built. My grandfather was Nikola, my. Grand uncle was Salvato and Salvatore’s role in the greater family was he assembled everybody. He came here in 1901 in just [00:07:00] before the great big 1902 anthracite coal strike that sent about 30,000 people out of the coal fields.
They just, they gave up after a five month strike and went back to the old country or then went west to the Batum fields. So there was a labor shortage. And at the same time, in Sicily, in Montero, especially where sulfur mining was the key industry they were running into a problem where the United States was breaking into the sulfur market in a big way.
It was the fracking process. And eventually the United States and Sicily settled the whole sulfur market thing by treaty. All of that is to say sulfur mines were becoming in trouble, and the last of them would close in the 1970s, the Sicilian mines. So they had this problem where they’re gonna have surface of population, they started to [00:08:00] immigrate and they started to immigrate to the Coalfields, Pennsylvania, where, you know there was this lack of late people to work in the anthracite mines. And Salvatore’s role was to bring them over for probably banks of labor brokers. And once they were here to outfit them with.
Food and lodging and all of their material requirements. So he was working for, if he was not himself the Petron system. So that’s my grandfather and his brother. And eventually they took three other Buffalo men into the country. One of them was Russell’s father and the other that was Angelo and the other.
Brother of Angelo was kalo. They say Charles, but I call him Kalo in the book to distinguish him from other Charles’s. Kajaro was a black hander. [00:09:00] He was a mafioso. Angelo’s father didn’t live for two years. He was killed in a mine explosion that injured my grand uncle. And Russell grew up under Klo, which is right.
Russell was an infant when he arrived. And for several years he bounced in and out of the country back to Sicily and eventually Reland in the country in 1914, living for a time in Buffalo and then back in the Pitton area. So in the Pitton area on my block. So I’m in the kitchen now at the house. On my block was this property, which was a soda factory in a general store.
Next door also in the family was a grocer. Up the street was a hotel, and next to that was a bar. And they all belonged to Kalo and they were all run by my members of my family. My grandfather in [00:10:00] particular ran the bar and the hotel while Salvato and his family, they all had very large families. Were servicing the general store and the.
So that was their role. And all of the children, there were 20 some children between Nicolo, Kalo, JRO, and a third brother. And they all considered Russell their first cousin, despite the fact that there might not have been a familial relationship between Kalo and the other brothers. They all represented themselves as brothers, four men for about 25 years until the family split apart as Sicilian families only can in very grudging way.
But Russell never forgot his relationship to everybody in the family. And at one time or another, every one of those 20 children could reach out to him, rub a lamp, and Russell [00:11:00] would appear and. Do something for them and it was mutual. My father was a professional photographer, probably never charged Russell for a thing.
And it was that way with other members of the family that had their crafts of their own. Yeah. So does that help to. Yeah that when the Binos came over, they were like in, in this patron system. And so Russell just kind. Fell right into that. And your one uncle was already in a black hander from the old school Mafioso.
So they brought that with him. And then you had this one guy, Russell who probably had the oomph, the wherewithal to then rise on, go into that system, rise onto the top. He was really, was born and bred into that system. Yeah, you could say that. He by, people get confused. They assume based on some facts that he was [00:12:00] raised in Buffalo and came up under Macino. Yeah. And I don’t think that’s the case. There’s plenty of evidence within the family and traditions within the family that say, Russell was a very well known quantity in the city of Pitton at the store next door where everybody sat outside drinking soda on a hot summer day, and all the children would fight to entertain the old men.
Russell was there along with Kalo Jro, who was a very day-to-day presence in the family, but. There was a strong relationship between Pitton, Pennsylvania and Buffalo, New York, based on, at the time the Lehigh Valley Railroad. That was the northern terminus of that railroad. So it was an easy trip and there were a lot of labor jobs up there as well with the hydroelectric plant.
So people from Buffalo and people from Pitton, a lot of famili familial relationships between them. And at the same time, in 1920, they could see prohibition coming. And Russell was a [00:13:00] mechanic. Where NASCAR comes from? NASCAR is mechanics souping up cars, so they get away from Yeah.
The police from the the revenues. Yeah. So I’m almost certain that’s Russell’s first reason for being in Buffalo, working for a guy named John Montana. And John Montana would later testify before the rackets committee. In 1997. So Russell worked for him. It was probably, and again, Mandino’s specialty was importing Canadian whiskey.
Yeah, and then there was typical bootlegging they were doing, down here as well as up there. So Russell was probably taking the good stuff down from New York to Pitton area on a regular basis. Pitton is like between Scranton and Wilkes Bar. It’s like a six hour car drive. To Buffalo, and that was his first job.
And then he’s back, and so for all of his [00:14:00] life, he was bi-coastal, right? We think of him as in his later years being in New York City, and then two or three days out of the week being in his Kingston home, which is again just down the street here. But he was that way all of his life.
He did that between Buffalo and Pittston, and there was a lot of interchange between them by 1922 he’s on the record. He had a car accident on the, on a bridge locally that sent him up for a while. So by 1922, you could more or less consider him again a Pitton property. And he ends up marrying in 1928 into the family through the Chandras.
But he was always, a skinny guy. He was, he didn’t really, fit the mold of a classic mobster. He didn’t. He grew up in it. He didn’t show signs of being a real gun toter himself. That makes sense. Yeah, it does. He [00:15:00] probably had a lot of organizational abilities in a certain amount of charisma that would get people to do what he wanted.
His specialty was diamonds and jewelry, and so that, that was a specialty. And his other specialty was cars. And again, that continued to be important right through the end of prohibition 1933 December. And. At that key juncture. So kalo, his grant, his uncle was in a tree partite relationship with two other men that formed the real coal country power.
They were all coal contractors and gangsters in their own right? Okay. And bootleggers. So they were all in this cahoots relationship, and Russell was in their sphere. Through klo a lot of real heavy mob style violence locally in the 1920s [00:16:00] that was related both to union problems in the coal mines, but also the bootlegging, right?
So people were stealing each other’s shipments that needed to be dealt with. Coal miners were going out on Wildcat Strike. There were assassinations related to that big doings in the twenties that probably ended by the middle thirties. The heart of the depression things were so bad for the coal miners, they just assumed worked for substandard wages as go out on strike ’cause they really couldn’t afford to do it.
Yeah. But things calmed down pretty much by then, and by that time things were heating up for the three men that they went on background and gave control over to John Chandra. Now, John Chandra is a co contractor in his own right and he’s running the show for Karo and Vbi and Latour, and it’s [00:17:00] under Chandra that Russell really is in a mentorship relationship with Chandra and Chandra, it seems to really have gentled him somewhat. Because the first three men were, they were just killers. They would just, they would take you out rather than deal with you. And Chandra inherited a new generation in the thirties.
And his career lasted until 1949. And Russell by then was just the natural to take over. Now from Infancy Forward, he had been in the company of the most dangerous man in the coal fields. People who knew New York gangsters for certain, and was in their company as well. So he knew how to get along and he knew how to be quiet, and he became trusted.
That’s probably the thing he was most relied on for. Yeah. Interesting. He was quiet and trusted. That’s, [00:18:00] that is really interesting. People say, and I don’t know how true this is, but they say that, when people have a vacancy and they’re organizational structure, they plug Russell in.
And he was not the kind of guy who was gonna try and muscle in your territory. He was just going to keep the balls in the air for you. Yeah. Until the next guy came back and then just hand ’em right back over. He wasn’t a threat. He did seem to be like the utility man of the northeast mobs. He sure was.
And when app leaking happened. So I was born in 1957. I was born on the anniversary of his father’s death in the coal mine. Huh? Right away. That’s an Oman. Bad things are coming. Russell and two months later, apple Aiken. Yeah. He was real busy in the late 1950s, early 1960s. He was facing deportation for a very long time, and that’s where.
[00:19:00] Bill got a little bit more involved with him because Bill was, an attorney in the family and he was writing letters and doing motions and whatever to keep Russell, you knows, court proceedings to, going on for a long time. Bill eventually wrote a letter to the authorities in Italy that basically said, Hey, don’t take it personally that Russell volunteered to be in the army in 1940. He wasn’t really, trying to get back at you. He was just trying to support his new native country. And and of course there were other people who will tell you there was a suitcase with a million dollars in it that accompanied that letter.
Yeah. But Hitler refused to receive Russell. But Russell was apparently ready to get on the plane. Before that refusal came down. Yeah. There’s a whole slew of those cases. I just did a research on that. All the different guys that they tried to deport during those years and the, and their lawyers and [00:20:00] the how they just kept staving it off and staving it off until many times the government just gave up.
’cause it was just like, okay, you have to wonder if they were really serious about it. I think they were just messing with them, but, yeah. But, bills, bill’s teamster career. Where to begin? So Bill and my father both were born in 1918 and a third relative, Jimmy, they were all born in 1918 and they all graduated high school together.
Bill was at the University of Scranton for a while before it was called that he was majoring in Divinity and his brother Charles, who was already married into. The greater family suggested you need to be, you need to be a lawyer. We’re going to, we’re gonna get you into law school.
And so Bill claimed he had, through his undergraduate, just monitored law classes and approached the dean to say, I’d like to be, I’d like to graduate with a pre-law degree. And [00:21:00] the dean said, sure, why? Sure, why not? And so then Bill went off to, farley Dickinson Law School. Left there just in time to join World War ii, and now he’s assigned in the Detroit area, so it was World War II that brought him to Ellis Air Force Base.
Ah, I think it’s just south of Detroit. I’m not sure exactly where it is, but it’s not far. And in that time, I know you know the name Angela Melley. He is a member of the Detroit Partnership. He’s considered the conser of that organization. He has a brother, and the brother has a son who wants to get into business.
The brother, I forget his name, comes to Pitton, meets with the Buffalo family. He is from, I think, San Cataldo. Which is a neighboring community in Sicily and they say, look we wanna be in business together. So Bill [00:22:00] now is given the name of Mel’s brother and suggested to contact him, which he does. He says just it was randomly, looking for a deserter in Detroit and it occurred to me to call the brother.
So he calls the brother, ends up getting invited to the house. Invited to dinner the next day, proposes to the daughter within three days, and now they’re in the family way. And Bill and Vincent Melly become corners of Belvin Distributing Corporation, I think was the name of it. They were world of to jukebox people.
This is where he meets hfa. They’re in the world to jukebox business. Jimmy James, the head of the local 8 95 of the Teamsters, which was called the Jukebox Local ’cause it was a coin and operated local. Starts picketing them. And now Bill and Hoffa are in a lawyerly [00:23:00] way because Jimmy James asked Toya Hoffa into the picture.
And Bill presses Hoffa makes him the business agent for the local. Very shortly thereafter, deposes Jimmy James makes Bill the president, and later he is formally elected to the role and now he’s a union president a local president for the next 20 years. And a close associate of Hoffa
during the 1960s. So seeing as how I came around so late, I was there to see this. Teamster action because Bill was frequently in Pittston, especially after Hoffa went to Lewisburg Prison, which is 90 minutes down the road. Bill’s sister Mary is my next door neighbor. She’s retired and he comes to visit whenever he goes to C Hoffa, which is every week according to him.
To get instructions to bring back to [00:24:00] Fitz. He’s in Pittston. Moreover, he launches a law office in the city of Pittston downstairs on the other side of the house. His father’s old general store because he needs to, he’s not a trial lawyer in Detroit and he wants to join the Detroit bar. And he has to fulfill a.
The requirements of a by motion thing to be admitted. Other than that, he’s gotta take the test. He doesn’t want to do that. So he just comes, does a couple probates, this and that for three years and now you’re in. So he does that. So he’s by the time I’m 10, I’m pretty well acquainted with Bill. And Bill is, my father.
They’re the close friends. They’re always talking in Mary’s kitchen. I’m sitting there listening, Bill’s running a rator, and they’re laughing about how they sent Bobby Kennedy a parachute because he he said, if I can’t put Hoffa in prison, I’ll jump off the Capitol dome [00:25:00] that I’m a parachute. And he writes about that.
RFK writes about that. So it, it was very interesting having him around. Yeah. And he had a brother that would often come with him. To bodyguard him to bodyguard Hoffa, he wore Hoffa’s money belt. His brother Angelo, they called him Yabo, very big guy. And and sometimes he would bring his son Billy boy. William Bino ii, who later had some fame of his own in the nineties.
Defending white boy Rick in Detroit. Oh yeah, that’s right. I forgot about that. Yeah. So I knew them all and I knew them all in a family way and I was not quite aware that Bill and Hoffa had a falling out. ’cause then I guess that wasn’t fitting information for a 10-year-old. Yeah. But yeah that’s how I know all of them.
And so my real connect to the family is through Bill, his sister Mary. His brother [00:26:00] Yabo. When when Bill retired in 1982 for health reasons, his brother Angelo Yabo returned to Pitton and was my neighbor for the next 10, 12 years. And he was my last connection to the 1920s. And he would tell me things that I had no real frame of reference to understand, about. Running whiskey and whatnot. He didn’t share a lot of stories about that, but every now and then something would escape. And he was just the kind of guy you could tell he’d done a lot of things and I didn’t find out until his funeral. At his funeral an individual came up to me who had traveled to the area from Detroit, probably with William ii.
He just for some reason he squared up with me, put his hand out and said Yabo was like a father to me, and then just told me everything. I never wanted to know about what Yabo had done in Detroit. Working for Angelo Melly, [00:27:00] running a bar for him. Being a bartender, occasionally helping people find their checkbook, that kind of thing.
So he was obviously a very colorful guy. He was obviously very well respected by the Detroit people. At the same time he wasn’t gonna kill anybody. That was not what he did. But the FBI followed him to Angelo Millie’s farm one day. They had an informant in his car, basically. And it became clear, I finally learned why he and his sister Mary, and other members of his family would go to Florida every year and spend about a month in Florida.
They were at Angela Mel’s. Timeshare. Basically he availed Yabo, and this is, somebody at the very top level of the organization down there. So he was not respected.
I have to ask about this as Hoffa and Russell Bino and Bill. As the Teamsters Hoffa starts having problems [00:28:00] with Kennedy and there’s this back and forth there. Then was, there, was there, there’s a lot of talk about that that Kennedy and, he, that he got so personal with Hoffa, which he did, there’s some talk about, maybe they had something to do with the murder of JFK Mo. Mainly it falls to, marcelo down in Detroit, I mean down in new Orleans, but yeah. But still, Bino was right in there among that crew. Was there ever much talk about that even after it happened? Yes.
There’s a lot of talk about it. When Bill Buf, so I’m trying to Dan Mul Day. Dan Mul Day is a researcher who had worked for many years on the Hoffa disappearance. And he spent a lot of time talking to Bill Bino about that. And when he quizzed Bill about, who, who did this right? Bill answered have the CIA investigate the FBI and then have the [00:29:00] FBI investigate the CIA and then you’ll have the answer.
That’s exactly what he said. Interesting. And what he was saying was, yeah, the Bay of Pigs thing, the whole. Pal Kill Castro was something that was known by a lot of people that went missing in 1975, or no. Ended up murdered Johnny Roseli. Yeah. Gian and Gian Kana, I think was 1975 too.
Hoffa was really the third person to go missing in 1975 that had information to contribute about that Uhhuh. Interesting. Or at least was believed to. And when you read Bill Alia’s book, he says Russell also knew something about that. So Russell was becoming edgy. That Bill would say something, or rather, no, Hoffa would say something too much about that because Hoffa was, pretty much a loose cannon by that time In terms of speaking.[00:30:00]
I interviewed that guy with that Billy Leya book. Did you know him? He was Billy, yeah. Do you know him very well? I did not know Billy, my brother knew Billy when they were both young. Okay. My brother Nick, see Nick’s 12 years older than me and I think so is Billy. Yeah. Alright. I did not, I’ve been in his company once or twice, but he wouldn’t know me.
Okay. I was just in curious about that. He seemed like he was a guy that was like, he was always around the binos and during those ta those years, he was like always somewhere around in and around that. It’s a real interesting, contrast between Pittsburgh and Detroit, the Coalfields a more rural area, and then the big city and the auto factories and the teamsters and how these immigrant Sicilians moved into that and moved in on up that, the immigrant way, you get here man, and you start getting better jobs.
You get better jobs, you take care of your relatives and you bring them in. And so it’s just, it’s really an interesting complex there. I [00:31:00] forget who I was talking to. I said some of the history’s not good, right? It’s not, it doesn’t, yeah. It’s not real neat. And I said, feel bad sometimes for some of the people.
And and the party I was talking to said they would swam here if they could have. When I was right, I was expressing concern about the Padron system and how it was sometimes exploitive. I think Salvatore was pretty fair as Padron went. He wasn’t a gouger, but there was a lot of gouging in that system, and it was effectively dead by 1930.
Curiously, by 1930, that’s when the family split apart. That’s when Kelo said, okay. This is not a revenue stream for me anymore. Time to break with the other binos and move on. But the thing about the the Sicilians and the coal mines, they started as really, they started as what’s the word, scabs, right?
Yeah. So there was a lot of union trouble in 1902. You got Welsh minors from. [00:32:00] Ireland everywhere. It was all here. It was like Brooklyn and now we’re coming in to fill this void of 30,000 workers. There’s trouble, a lot of trouble. And the people who are the replacement miners, these Sicilians, they already owe a tithe to their pad.
Drones. Yeah. They’ve gotta go down they’re in this heated place. Now once you get in and eventually it’s 10 or 12 or 15 more years before unions really started to sign contracts with these particular mines in the northern coal field that were run by 1913, by at least three and probably four black handers ran the contracts, right?
So the mafia is to all intents and purpose the mine owner. And they’ve got all of these dependent [00:33:00] people who are, their their agents through the Padron system who are members of the union, and eventually they run for elective positions within the union. And now what you end up with is the company is the union.
And it happened at least once, that an insurgent branch of the United Mine workers went in opposition against its own district leadership. The district leadership’s bodyguard was one of those individuals who was at the same time a union organizer. A partner with one of the black candidates.
So it didn’t work out well. There was a murder involved. Things went badly. It happened ultimately. It’s interesting that, and now you it started out, as union busters, as scabs, right? And [00:34:00] they move in and take over the unions, and then the teamsters come along as the coal kinda goes down and the truck driving is going up, up and up.
And then they just. Move smoothly right into the teamsters Union. Yeah. Where there’s political power and money. That was the seat of political power and a lot of money and the political power the power of the purse, the power of the pension fund and the los, and of course clear out to Las Vegas.
And Russell Vino was right in the middle of all that with the guys from Detroit and Chicago. It was just, it just is a natural progress of of activity. Exactly. And where was it? Just a couple of years ago. Was it in Florida? The Longshoreman’s Union threatened to go out. Yeah, I remember something like that.
What did DeSantis do? He DeSantis mo mobilized the National Guard. Yeah. So that never happened here, but if you think about it so Bill Buffalino at one time the FBI was advised that. Bill was being groomed [00:35:00] to take over the Teamsters. Not by force. Something, God forbid if Hoffa should end up in prison.
Yeah. So that was happening. But I think it was thwarted because Hoffa had a little there was a a situation in his ranks where he, somebody was trying to. Openly deposed him. And it didn’t work out. And he probably did a reorg of his own and that’s when he decided to run fifth for 1965 for the, as his vice president.
So that, so he was trying to head off all, he probably could see it coming. Yeah. And it was in those years that he began to lose a little bit of trust in Bill. And that was the source of their breakup eventually because he got hot with Bill in prison. But think about it. So Bill then, as the president of the Teamsters, imagine the power they had at that time to effectively shut down the country.
Oh [00:36:00] man. Yeah, it was huge power. It was huge. And what’s interesting is Hoffa, then he starts bringing what we affectionately refer to here in Kansas City as Pecker Woods. He brings in Roy Williams down in Kansas City. He brings in Jackie Presser up in cleveland and Fitz Fitz Simmons.
These are all peckerwoods, these are not Italians. Now Italian, some of ’em are behind the string, behind the scenes, pulling some strings. Of course. Yeah, but they’ve got all those guys out front. It’s just it is fascinating to me how these guys have worked. Yeah. Very insidious. And the thing about unionism somebody will tell you that, union membership is down, or union participation is way down from the 1960s.
Yeah. There was a union for everything. Yeah. In the fifties and sixties, bill to, and probably it was to boost his resume. I don’t know. The car washers in the Detroit area. There were 200 car washes and they employed up to [00:37:00] 40 to 50 people each. Just doing this job. It was, to organize them.
The the tactic was I’m not gonna go after the WR and file and get them to vote on anything. I’m going straight to the owner. He is gonna pay me to their membership fees and he’s gonna pay their dues.
That’s how it’s gonna be. And that’s what they did. There were certain, car washers that were not assaulted in this way, and others who were, and they were pretty upset about it. And they took it to the law and there was a grand jury hearing that Bill was invited to attend. But according to Dan Mul day, the judge in the hearing was in their pocket.
And yeah, nothing ever came of it. That was mentioned also before Keith f so a bill was on the hot seat for that and the Zer, the er the Zer company to sell their machines entered into an agreement whereby their service people [00:38:00] would be unionized. And therefore, if you went to a bar, now you’re a union agent for local 9 8 9 85.
Of the teamsters. You go into a bar and you look at the jukebox and it’s not a er. Yeah. Now we’ve got a big problem. Now there’s a picket outside. I guarantee you the picket was Yaba, Bino Bell’s brother. Gotta be big guy with a mortar board walking back and forth. Unfair, this is a scab shop and now what’s gonna happen?
No union truck driver is gonna deliver beer to that bar. Crazy. Yeah. And so that’s right. So that’s how they worked that one out. So that was the extent of Bill’s organizing skills. Interesting. So let’s skip forward here a little bit and we don’t want to give it all away, but we’re talking about the final resting place of Jimmy Hoffa.
So how do you go into that? Just, and we want guys to, you gotta get this book guys. It’s the revelations of a mafia family, the temperatures, [00:39:00] and the final resting place of Jimmy Hoffa. The key words here is the final resting place of Jimmy Hoffa. As you might know, Charles, that’s the hook here and Dan Maldia and you probably have a problem, I gotta say.
’cause he’s pretty sure he knows the final resting place. I know he, he, that’s what he, but there’s another guy who also thinks he knows the final resting place as well as me, but he doesn’t know as far as I go. So his theory expands on the central sanitation. Whereby HAA is brought to central sanitation and cremated incinerated, to me that means ashes.
And what do you do with ashes post cremation? You can throw ’em to the wind or you can do something extremely appropriate and almost poetic with them.
And then move them to a town that is your native [00:40:00] home. That’s what I’m saying. Now, that’s where you come in. Okay. But now, in order to, in order for that to be true I’m willing for that not to be true. In order for that to be true, central sanitation has to be in the mix. And a fellow by the name of, oh my gosh, I’ll never forget his name.
Bernstein. Scott Bernstein is a Detroit reporter. I know Scott. Alright, so last year they had this symposium in which he and Novi Toko and a former prosecutor Yeah. All submitted. Did you see that? I didnt see it, but I remember when it happened. I didn’t even know that was happening and I was wrapping up the book at that time, submitting the second to last draft when I became aware of their theory.
And their theory solves a problem that I had, which is, skeletal remains. Yeah. And I’m not gonna, I’m not going to break [00:41:00] their I’m not gonna give away their findings, but. The problem with an incinerator is it’s not a crematory and it falls 800 degrees short of being able to render, and even, bones have to be crushed afterwards.
Anyway. Yeah, there’s still bones left some their theory pretty much takes care of that, that the bone thing. On top of that, someone else wrote a book Mr. Tubman wrote a book in 2024 that said his parents were, driving in a Detroit suburb on the day Jimmy Hoffa went missing and saw someone being wrestled into a central sanitation truck.
And the father noted that truck was not supposed to be there on, on that day. And of course, the property was one of the properties that were suspected of being the place where Hoffman went missing. Again, and that’s not definitive. If there were ashes involved, I think that I have a [00:42:00] first person memoir of the person that did something with the ashes.
All right guys. And that’s gonna be in Revelations of a Mafia Family, the Teamsters in the final resting place of Jimmy Hoffa, correct Charles? That’s what it is. And it’s gonna be released on what is it? April? 28th. 28th. 28th. All right. Charles Buffalino I really appreciate you coming on and talking about your book.
And guys, you gotta get this book. I’m telling you, it’s I’ve got a advanced copy of it and it’s pretty interesting. It’s readable and it is. Got a lot of great history into it, as you can tell. If you ever wanted to know the immigrant story of Sicilians, this is it, that the, there were huge miners and because they were minors in Sicily, so we had mining activities.
I didn’t know about the whole strike breaking thing. That’s interesting. I knew they came down, like here in Missouri, southwest part of Missouri, we have coal mines and a huge group of Sicilians came down here. [00:43:00] And because I was wondering why. Joy IPA outta Chicago was going dove hunting down in Pittsburgh, Kansas.
I went down there just to, to look around in this little town, front, neck. All the stores are, have Italian names and so I, there’s a little museum down there. So I stopped in. I said, what’s the deal? And she said, oh. She said, tons of people came over from Southern Italy and Sicily. To work in the coal mines around here, and it’s a big coal mining area.
I said, oh, that’s it. That’s it. That is it. That was a safe territory for these Chicago mobsters and Kansas City mobsters to go hunting down there. Okay, so the coal mining is the mining much to know is a big part of the history of the mafia in a way. For sure. And there’s a place in so I thought Pitton had a lot of at, and it does, has a lot of Sicilian, maybe 24% as of the last census.
Yeah. Was recently invited. Last year I went to [00:44:00] Clarksburg, Virginia. 40% Italian to this day. Ah, yeah. And they were all minors. And you go there and there’s no there’s no southern speech pattern. It’s all. Ah they’re Pittsburgh. And I said, why? What’s that all about? Oh, he said, no.
We are a, we’re a suburb of Pittsburgh. We’re two hours away. Yeah. But the stuff we were producing went right to the mills. Yeah. And so that was the language that we spoke. Oh, we darned. And there were so many of them that they spoke their own language. They didn’t try to blend in with the right Scott, people that had been there from the country and from the hills down in there for a while.
I’ll be darned huh. That’s interesting. That is that. And Clarksburg, I’ll tell you that place in the 1950s and sixties, or I’m sorry, in the seventies when the dress factories fell apart, they were burning pittston down. So Piston’s, a lot of old missing buildings. Yeah. But Clarksburg is just like visiting old Pittston.
Huh, interesting. [00:45:00] Pitton, Pennsylvania the the seat of power for Russell Bino back in the day, Northwest. I always, you always hear about Northwest Pennsylvania and up into New York was his territory. And again, he was such an interesting guy because like you said, he was like utility man.
He was going around to different families or, they, you don’t, they don’t ever talk about this big seat of power that he had in his underboss and his. His capos and that right there in that one geographic area. So it’s really interesting. Different anthracite coal was such a product. So there’s batum is coals everywhere else, but there’s only five counties in the United States that has 80% of anthracite coal.
And anthracite coal was the fuel of choice for the industrial revolution. So there was a lot of money here. And so people really can’t understand, just how much wealth there was here. And how a place this small could be somebody’s seat of power, as you say. Yeah. Huh. Interesting. All [00:46:00] right, charles Buffalino I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Okay. All right, we’re done here. I’ll redo that When I stumbled over your name again and got a couple other things to redo, but otherwise it’s it gotta be an easy edit. That’s the guy I like when the guy really knows his stuff and he goes right on through it makes my job easier and I will wait and put this out just about the time.
I gotta make a note right now. Anytime from the 15th forward is fine. I’m sure, we didn’t, I didn’t reveal anything so sensitive that. Anybody can steal.
I’ll be maybe mu Monday the 20th. I got a feeling here either. That’s perfect. 13th? 13th or the 20th? Probably the 20th. I got it written down on the 20th. Okay. That’s awesome. All right, Gary, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you. All right. All right. You made it very easy. Oh good. Oh, and have you have you been in touch with Scott?
You gotta go on Scott Show. I did mention to him, Scott, I’m gonna send you a book when it’s time. I, I didn’t wanna reveal everything again. Yeah. I’m just being real careful [00:47:00] for all these months. But yeah, I have, oh yeah, I’m in. But yeah, get on his show. He has, I think he has bigger fo I know he has a bigger follow than me.
He kinda really gets into the, what’s going on today, which I never do. And he does, I don’t know, I, here in Kansas City, they get bad. I, and I get word back from ’em that they’re bad at me if I mention their names or there’s any mafia today, so I just seem to not mess with that anymore.
Yeah, i’m the same way, I’m not even a fan of this stuff. This is not my thing. Yeah. If it’s the whole, like if Hoffa is here in Pitton I really feel, and my family’s involved in it. It’s like a moral obligation. I’ve got a interesting, yeah, I can see why.
That’s the only reason I, that’s the only reason I even bother to research. Yeah. I just started doing some research on a true crime that’s not mafia and it’s kinda it’s like a breath of fresh air. I think I’m getting a little bit burned out in the mafia thing. I like the [00:48:00] stories. I like the capers and stuff that people do.
I really love that. And so that’s there are some. Interesting people in this. Yeah. And I’ve known a bunch of them myself. My story’s not interesting, but I, yeah. When I was in college, I worked at a pizza shop. The guy was a bookie. Yeah. And every Friday night we’d be with Butchy, scotchy, Ragy Fingers, and the Greenie, and we’d go to the Skyliner Diner after the track, and it would just be, I’ve been at more dice games.
Yeah. They used to rope my head for luck. I was 17. They’re so colorful too. And another thing I’ve learned is, hey. These mob guys, they have so many connections throughout the community Yeah. That most people, they don’t have. When I was a policeman, I didn’t have any idea how many connections I, in hindsight, I realized that how naive we all were, how many connections they really had out in the community, and how those worked and how they I don’t know.
So many people found it colorful or they liked buying something that fell off a truck and then. And they like to [00:49:00] gamble and they’re just throughout the entire community and we didn’t know it ’cause I lived in this narrow little police world. It’s the adulation that people just adore this lifestyle.
And I don’t know, I think maybe if people had less of a sense they were getting bent over by the government all the time. Yeah. Yeah. There’d be less of that. But everybody’s a secret agent in a way, yes. And I’m, everybody wants to be James Bond. And I’m naive enough to write a book about the Mafia and, but everybody I know, they all know better than me.
And I tell some of my classmates, yeah, I wrote a book and they’re like, because they know there’s a whole network up. Yep. All Charles, it was great to meet you. Thank you so much. Great meeting with you. Take care. Bye bye. Bye-bye.