In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins talks with author Tiffany Hanson about her novel My Name Was Jerry Sass, a fictionalized account inspired by the life of her father and the Chicago Outfit.
Tiffany explains how the project began when she searched for information about her father and found almost nothing. A DNA test later connected her with previously unknown half-siblings, opening the door to family stories and long-buried questions about a man who disappeared from her life before she was born.
The conversation explores rumors, memories, and fragments of evidence that suggested her father moved through Iowa, Chicago, Kansas City, and Las Vegas while operating around criminal circles. To protect family members, Hanson chose the fictional name Jerry Sass while weaving historical mob influences into her story. Gary and Tiffany discuss the often-overlooked world of mob associates—men who worked around organized crime families without being formal members. These individuals frequently handled robberies, gambling operations, transportation, and other criminal activities while maintaining distance from leadership.
The discussion also examines Midwestern organized crime, including Chicago’s influence in Iowa, gambling operations in Des Moines and Council Bluffs, and the role these regions played in larger criminal enterprises involving casinos, sports betting, and money movement.
Gary shares insights into Kansas City organized crime figures such as Tuffy DeLuna, discussing surveillance operations, investigations, search warrants, and the realities of law enforcement efforts against organized crime.
This fascinating conversation blends family history, true crime, mob history, and the challenges of uncovering the truth when the evidence has largely disappeared.
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Transcript
[0:00] Hey, all you wiretappers out there. It’s good to be back here in the studio
[0:02] of Gangland Wire. I have an author today. I do a lot of authors, guys. And she has written a book about a relative of hers. And it’s a fictionalized version, historical fiction, you would call it, of a man named, actually, you used the name Jerry Sass, but let me let her tell you about it. And here’s a, here’s a, give you an idea of one of the reviews of it. It’s, my name was Jerry Sass, packs a wallop and pulls no punches. We have a faithless priest, a determined daughter, and a protagonist who is haunted, but not at all that bothered by the decisions he made in his life. My name was Jerry Sass is fueled by a rare mixture of momentum, width, depth, and charges like a Mustang. So there you go, folks. That gives you a little bit that people have said about this book. My name is Jerry Sass. So my guess is Tiffany Hanson. Oh, God, I just screwed that. Tiffany Hanson, right? at Hanson. I usually go over that before I even start at Hanson. Okay. My guest today is Tiffany Hanson. Welcome, Tiffany.
[1:02] Oh, thank you, Gary. So glad to be here. All right, Tiffany, tell us a little bit about yourself. This is a family story and then a little bit about your professional life because it’s interesting too. Yeah, for sure. So I was born and raised in Davenport, Iowa, which if folks don’t know, is right on the Mississippi River, about three hours south of Chicago. And I was raised by my mother and went to college around there and started in a career in radio. So I bounced around from, started in public radio, bounced around through a bunch of commercial stations all over the country, and eventually landed where I am now, which is in New.
[1:48] Gary, during the pandemic, like a lot of people, we had a lot of time on our hands. Yeah, and we’re at home. Yeah, we were all at home. And I was very curious, had always been very curious about my dad. I was raised by my mother. My dad left when she was pregnant with me. So I didn’t know much about him. And what we knew about him really came from the brief relationship that my mother had with him. I started doing some online searches. I just couldn’t find anything. And this is a guy who had ostensibly had been in the Navy. So one would think that I would at least find some kind of military record. I just couldn’t find anything. And my husband, so my husband suggested I do one of those DNA tests.
[2:34] What do I have to lose at this point? I’ve gone my whole life. It just would be interesting to know. And so I did it. And what popped up were a couple of half siblings. This is a little bit more of a common story than I think people realize nowadays. I’m starting to hear from a lot of folks who say they’ve done the same thing. And, oh, oops, there’s a half-sibling here, a half-sibling there. And I made contact and started talking with one of my half-siblings in particular, just about him. Turns out everything that he told my mother was a lie. that he had a whole separate family that my mother knew nothing about.
[3:19] And she also, my half-sibling, did not know a lot about Jerry. What she did know, none of it was good. And we just started trying to piece together some information about him. And I don’t use his real name because she has a real fear that as… Some of the people that he used to come in contact with are still alive, and nobody wants to piss any of those guys off. We just started to piece together what his history might be. I had always grown up making stories about him because I didn’t really know him. So once I started getting these little fragments from her about how he would go back and forth to Vegas, and how he would go back and forth to Chicago, and how there were always guns around, and he was always very mysterious. We couldn’t find anything online. It was just so many questions about what he had done. And he died, I should say, he died in 1985 when I was in high school.
[4:23] So no chance to ask him. Can we say his real name? I don’t want to say his real name because I’m trying to protect her. I try to honor her. She grew up with him. It was not easy. and I appreciate her giving information to me about it. I got you. I got you. So go ahead. And also, no, that’s fine. And I just was going to say the other thing is when I mentioned to her that I was writing this book and I said, half jokingly, I said, I’m not going to use this real name because I wouldn’t want anybody to come after me. And she’s like, you got that right.
[5:02] So the implication being like you don’t want to get on the wrong side of whoever he was associated with but i think one of so then moving the story forward a little bit i’d come up talk to her come up with a lot of speculation and i reached out to you because i was a huge fan of the podcast and i just thought i wonder if he had, mob connections in the midwest he was so much bouncing back and forth between chicago kansas city vegas it just there were too many coincidences yeah for it not to feel like there was some kind of a connection and your initial response back to me was just about we didn’t recognize his name but that there were these people back and this would have been like late 70s mid late 70s early the 80s who were, you called them long guns, which I have a question for you about. But.
[6:01] That is what really sparked this book, honestly, Gary, because I was like, oh, what if he was a long, and this is this, so this is what he is in the book is he’s, he’s basically a long gun. He’s a high, he’s hired gun who has a family that he retreats to in Southern Iowa and, you know, goes out for hits pretty much across the country. So thanks, Gary. You’re welcome. You’re welcome. I was probably thinking about a guy that the guy that did our last mob hit in Kansas City was what we call Peckerwood, non-Italian. I think he might have been Irish. His name was Patrick McGuire. And he was one of those guys. He was just around. And he was around and he did other crimes. And where I got on time was another professional hit that he did for a doctor here in Kansas City to try to kill a rival doctor. But then he ends up doing the last mob hit in Kansas City of a guy named Strada. And he went to jail for it. His boss, a guy named John Mandacina, also was convicted, who was a real deal mob guy. And it was a mob testifying in a gambling thing operation. But other than that, you didn’t know he was convicted particularly. He was a guy, a hang around guy, went to the bars. And so there’s a lot of guys out there like that, that operate both the professional criminal world and the mob world.
[7:28] Yeah. So my question was, is that you describe him as somebody who’s kind of hanging around. Because were these guys were not necessarily part of a quote-unquote family, right? Yeah. He might be attached to a family, like in Chicago, where you have the 26th Street crew, the Chinatown crew, or the Southside, or whatever the name of the crew was. They might be attached because their mob friend was a member of that crew. So they would be what we call an associate, and they would be associated with that crew. Then if somebody wanted to use them for something, they would have to go to that crew and say, Hey, can we do that? Now, like in Kansas City, where you only got one family, then he was, this guy was an associate of this one guy in this family in Kansas City. But in between times, he’d go around and do home invasion, robberies, and things like that. The big kind of big time crime bank robberies and that kind of stuff.
[8:26] Would it have been common for someone to bounce between, say, Kansas City, Chicago, I don’t know, Cincinnati, some of the Midwest, kind of Midwestern hubs? Oh, yeah. Especially what you were talking about was Davenport, Iowa, and then on to Des Moines and Kansas City and Las Vegas. That’s a no-brainer because Chicago has such a big influence all the way down into Iowa that they really ran Iowa when it came to sports gambling and anything that they could run. And then all the way up back in Prohibition days, they developed all these contacts and the different joints and outlets for alcohol that they could sell to all the way over to Council Bluffs. And then gambling came along after that. They had a guy named Fratto and his nephew today, Rudy Fratto, is a higher up outfit guy. And this guy’s name was Louis Fratto. and he was basically the boss of Iowa when it came to gambling and all their business interests, and he operated out of Des Moines. And so then Kansas City was so close in proximity, we sent some guys up to Council Bluffs once to try to organize sports gambling up there. A little later, after Chicago had maybe backed off just a little bit, and I’m sure they did it with Chicago’s permission. So that all between here and Chicago…
[9:48] That would all make sense he was probably in kansas city he maybe came down here and did some stuff in kansas city and then they had all this stuff going on and he was skimming from las vegas casinos that he could have been a it could have been a courier bringing money back he could have done a variety of things something they wanted that they don’t want to have their hands on it at all the tony spalatros in chicago in las vegas yeah he has something he wants done but he doesn’t want his fingerprints to be anywhere close to this thing you use a guy like that so it all makes sense I mean, for a historical fiction book, there’s a lot to work with there from then on. No kidding. Don’t I know it. Don’t I know it. It was a lot of fun, I have to say.
[10:27] Us imagining all the possibilities. Was Iowa, was it some mixed turf? We say in baseball, if you’re from northern Iowa, you’re a Cubs fan, you’re from southern Iowa, you’re a Cards fan, right? Cards fan, yeah. Was it a similar kind of dividing line, you know, there in terms of turf for Iowa for both the outfit and the Kansas City crew or? It was more the outfit. It was all the outfit. It was so big. And they had sent even before during Prohibition, this guy named Cherry Nose Charlie Gioe came down and he had been the boss out of Des Moines for a long time. Kansas City was not really big enough to expand out like that and send somebody up to that. They would always cooperate. We had good connections in Omaha. There was a little family in Omaha. Kansas City would always cooperate. They would know each other. But we never sent people out like that, except that one time that I know I went up to Council Bluffs. And it’s kind of funny. It didn’t last very long. I don’t know what happened up in Council Bluffs, but they came back pretty quickly.
[11:34] What was, was Des Moines really just about gambling at that point then? Kind of late seventies, early eighties? Yeah. Yeah. All about gambling. Most of the Bob was all about gambling. And so in my book, my character, Jerry launders money through this radio station. You know, it’s how I bring in my, my house with radio. Yeah. But for the most part, guys like Jerry would not have been in charge of laundering anything at that point. Would they? They really would have been more those long gun types, those kind of like hangers on would have really been more just, as you said, involved in like petty crime, home invasion kind of stuff. Right. Right.
[12:15] Yeah. When they weren’t doing something as a favor for somebody, I got paid to do something. Then and these are like criminals, just these were blue collar criminals, if you will. Now, the mob will have white-collar criminals out there that has a business of some kind, maybe a, here’s a good one, a buy-here, pay-here car dealership. See him doing that, putting money in a buy-here, pay-here car dealership, because you can take a guy who can sell, but he can’t, he doesn’t have any financing to finance those cars. He’s got to have 50 cars on the lot to really start making money on what he’s buy-here, pay-here car dealerships. So you have to floor plan, you have to borrow money to get those 50 cars on your lot, and then you have to borrow money, and then they start getting the money paid back in so you can launder money through something like that, or a restaurant or an amusement company like pinball and cigarette machines and things like that. A lot of cash money, jukeboxes and all that, the historical things. So they’ll have people that are not mob members and may or may not be Italian that will then have companies like that. So you have two separate people, sets of people, the height, color, and the way.
[13:26] So one of the interesting anecdotes that my half-sibling told me about the real Jerry happened when she was in high school, so this would have been early 80s, maybe.
[13:40] And she was driving home from somewhere too fast, got picked up by the cops, a teenager driving like a ding-dong, and she hands over her license to the cops. And he looks down at it and he says oh you’re jerry sass’s kid and she said yeah and he he handed her back the license and said get out of here i don’t want to have anything to do with that guy he’ll kill me and she said he wasn’t saying it like he wasn’t saying it like that oh he’ll kill me she said it was more like yeah oh he’ll kill me.
[14:21] And I just, it made me wonder how much those, especially in those little towns, those little dotting towns between Chicago and let’s say Davenport, Des Moines, how much those small town cops knew about what was going on back and forth and or were able to do much about it. I really don’t have much experience in that, but I do know that small-town cops, they’ll know everything that’s going on because they’ll know that a local tavern will be, if somebody is taking sports bets, for example, which you’re about during that time frame, somebody’s taking sports bets. They may even make their little sports bets with them before the app, and so they’ll know these guys, and they’ll know that they’re connected to Chicago. They’ll just give it this aura of bigger than life. Oh, he’s connected to Chicago. Oh, that’s connected to Chicago. Don’t want to do anything with him, especially in a small town.
[15:20] Yeah, because you don’t want to turn the eye on you, right? You don’t want to
[15:23] be a problem all of a sudden. So when somebody like Jerry would come in, let’s say, to Kansas City, did you guys know, were they on your radar, those guys, all the time? Or was it like a big question mark? Okay. It would depend. We wouldn’t know it all unless the Bureau, the FBI, had something going in Chicago.
[15:46] They’d overheard something on a wiretap, on a bug or something, and had this guy identified and that he was coming to Kansas City. Then they would tell us. They’d tell the intelligence unit. They wouldn’t tell the whole police department. They’d tell us, intelligence unit, and only if they needed help watching the guy when he came to town. And then you would form up a surveillance squad when somebody like that came to town. It didn’t happen very often. A couple of times, and they knew that Alan Dorfman of the Teamsters Union had a pension fund. Alan Dorfman and Joey Lombardo, who was Dorfman’s control, if you will, his day-to-day control because Lombardo worked out of Dorfman’s office all the time. He just went over to Dorfman’s office to keep track of what he was doing and the pension fund money. We knew They were coming to town, and they told us because they needed some help. And they ended up just coming to a hotel and checking in. Then we watched as several of our mob bosses, Nick Sabella and Tuffy DeLuna, went over to that hotel room. They had a meeting and then left, went back. Interesting story about that. One FBI, they got to join in a hotel room, and he tried the old trick of putting a glass up at the window, a wall. They were real thin walls, and it worked. He picked up a lot of information. Now, some people would say, oh, they really illegally bugged it. But you have to know this guy to know they didn’t illegally bug it.
[17:10] Yeah. So I’m working already on the second book here. And it’s funny you mentioned Tuffy DeLuna. I’m just writing before I got on with you. I’ve got him in my second book here. I’d love to hear more about him.
[17:27] Okay. Well, he was an interesting guy, Tuffy. Was he? Yeah, he was, he came up hardscrabble. He was a young tough out there on the streets. We got an old picture of him wearing his leather jacket and his fedora back in the 50s. And he was in his early 20s, maybe even late 10s. And he was known to be tough. Carl DeLuna, his real name is known to be tough.
[17:50] And his sister and y’all grew up over in Little Italy and what we call the North End. And his sister ended up marrying one of the Civellas, Anthony Civella, the oldest child of Cork Civella and a nephew to Nick Civella, our boss. And these Savellas, they like having blood relations really close and some kind of relations in some way, really the people that are close to them. So they bring Tuffy in and he can rise to the moment, if you will. He was a tough guy. He started out doing grocery robberies, grocery store robberies around the Midwest. They would fly. He had a crew and they would fly to another city and they would take guns with them. Back then you could take guns. They’d rob a grocery store because back in the 70s, 60s, even this started at early 60s and the 60s, everybody cashed their check at a grocery store. I used to cash check at the grocery store or if I needed cash, I would write a little check for five or 10 months at the grocery store. And that was kind of your bank when the bank was closed. And so they kept a lot of cash in there, especially on paydays, where there’s a local factory around there close by that people wanted to cash their checks. So they would do these pretty decent robberies and then they’d mail the money and the guns back to Kansas City. And we know that because.
[19:07] They caught him. The package broke open when it got into the post office here in Kansas City, and they popped several of them. One of them was Tuffy’s cousin that they actually got. I don’t know if he was on that robbery or not, but he was doing that kind of a thing. His cousin, Sam Palma, and a guy named Bean Zinzarello and Nick Sparrow, and they were doing those kinds of things. They had these kind of loosely formed crews that put together two or three guys and go do one and then come back and do that. So that’s how he got his start was that he was a, he’s always been a big card player. The FBI followed him to Denver once during those years, met up with some guys in Denver who were mob, kind of young mob guys, met up with them. And then they all left and went to Portland, Oregon on a plane. He had driven out to Denver. They flew out to Portland and somewhere, I think it was in the airport or something happened, they got wise and they just got nervous and everybody started scattering. So they probably fought in the surveillance, but it felt like they were on their way to do a score of some kind, one of these robberies.
[20:14] And as Tuffy’s laying over, he gets involved in a card game with a guy. He loves to play cards and he cheated him somehow. And that guy called the local police and they made a deal out of it, but then there wasn’t anything they could
[20:26] do about it and sent him going back. And fast forward, you want a little inside personal information about Tuffy Luna. So a friend of mine from up home, I come from a small town just north of here, one of the local lawyers, it’s a huge gambler. A guy loves to gamble. So he tells a story about playing in a big, I think it was a pitch tournament. He used to have the card game of pitch and have these big tournaments and you’d get points. And I don’t remember exactly, I don’t know exactly how it worked where you would get paid, but I think you could get paid. So he’s in a table and this guy, Every time that comes around for him to deal, shuffle and deal, he says he passes. So my friend Larry, finally, he said, hey, you always pass. And then it has to come to me. He said, you need a deal once in a while. He said, oh, okay. So he did. So somebody later on, he said, hey, you know who you were talking to over there? And he said, I don’t know who he is. That was Tuffy DeLuna.
[21:22] And you talk about just the mention of a well-known mobster to a guy, especially from a small town that knows something about that. It strikes fear in their heart. He told this story not too long ago. And it’s still, you can still tell that it kind of struck a little fear in his heart. But he now tells it is kind of his badge of courage, his bread with death. Yeah, so Tuffy. And Tuffy is smart. He moves on. I guess I can tell you a lot more about Tuffy because of these workshops where he sits with Nick Civella. And he’s really, he’s supposedly the underboss, but he really is like the consigliere. He is constantly advising Nick. Nick’s complaining about Lefty Rosenthal. And about he needs to he needs to calm down out there and quit drawing so much attention and he says do you think i could call him directly and toughy says he said i think we ironed that out of the meeting yeah i think you can i don’t know should i call up north and see if i could talk to him directly and toughy says no you can talk to him directly and so finally.
[22:25] He makes a call and he talks to him. And Tuffy says, now, before he makes a call, he says, now, don’t get too rough on this guy. Just take it easy on this guy.
[22:36] And so that kind of a back and forth, which is pretty interesting. Oh, that’s Tuffy DeLuna. He was an interesting guy. I was there when we served the search warrant on his house from the skimming investigation. And he was cordial. The agent, he knew the agent. He didn’t know me. He knew the agent that was leading the whole search squad, and his name was Shea Erie. And Tuffy said, hey, Shea, what’s going on? He said, Tuffy, got bad news for you. We got a search warrant. Okay, come on in. And then we’re there for a while, and his wife was getting upset because we ended up being there until 4 o’clock in the morning. We started about 8 at night. And he said, Sandy, just relax. He said, make these officers some coffee. So she hustles around and begs some coffee for us.
[23:19] And then his kid came home from being somewhere. He was a teenage boy, and he really got upset. So Tuffy said, Sandy said, call so-and-so and have him come and get him. So some other young guy, more like a 20-something-year-old guy, showed up and took the kid out and took him somewhere else. See, it was that kind of guy. He wasn’t just your cruel beast of a criminal. He was a sophisticated criminal and had a home family, home life of the family that he tried to take care of.
[23:46] And the whole nine yards. How did he rise up after, who was it? Was it Cork Civella who died? Nick died. Nick was the boss. He’d been the boss since 1950-some, 57 for sure, because he was caught at the Appalachian Convention in upstate New York, but he wasn’t quite there. They caught him, Joe Filardo, another old-timer from Kansas City at the time, on a train at a train station on their way to Appalachian, New York. So he was a boss for sure then in 1957 and had been for a little bit before that. I’m not sure exactly how long.
[24:22] And then when he died, it was right at the start of all the skimming and search warrants had been served. They served one on Nick’s house, but between the search warrants served and a trial, Nick dies. But they’re in such a ditch array because all of them, Tuffy and Cork and the other guy that was just below Tuffy, a guy named Charlie Moretina, and a couple other guys all had cases. They knew they were all going to the penitentiary behind this. They knew by then that there was no not going to jail for at least a period of time. So it’s a disarray, and they kind of, they don’t really move up during that time. Nothing really happens until after they go to jail, and then they’re out of it. They got such draconian sentences in like 10 years, 25 years, and they’re like 60, 65, 70 years old that they figured out Cork did die in jail. Well, if he didn’t, he got back out in, I don’t know, his middle 80s when he got back out. But he was everything, he’d been in like 12 or 15 years. And that’s just, in that age, you’re not going to come back and do anything.
[25:29] So there’s really was no, he didn’t really rise up, so to speak.
[25:33] So one of the things that I learned about my dad during the researching and stuff for this book was about his death. I mentioned that he died when I was in high school, so he died mid-80s. And the coroner’s report, no, the death certificate just says unknown cause.
[25:56] And there was some sort of question around like how he died, the circumstances of it. It was all very mysterious. And I just wonder at a certain point, I assume that he maybe messed up somehow. Maybe something happened and somebody had their fill with him and just decided that he was done.
[26:26] Because these guys don’t, for the most part, these lower-level guys like you’re talking about, right, that are doing these kind of smash-and-grab kind of things and going in for a hit once in a while, Well, they’re not going to just ride off into the sunset, are they? Yeah, a lot of them do. Really? Yeah, they just get old. Just fade away? They get out of the life and people have passed them by. And so they just go off into some, if they do some time in the penitentiary and they’re gone for a long time and then they come back and try to rebuild some kind of life. But there’s no pension plan from the mob and jobs that they they might help them get a job you see we’ve seen that somebody who has a car dealership oh interesting get them placed in a place like that and but then they just go on because everybody’s going on by them now and so they’ll you just won’t ever hear from them again you say whatever happened to that guy yeah i’ve seen him a long time oh yeah i didn’t see him i heard he’s selling cars i had to buy here pay here car dealership. We’ve had several instances of that where they end up in that. Oh, interesting. Probably be some mob money in that dealership, but then they’ll not really do anything anymore, but they’ll still be connected and associated, still help them make money by running that buy here, pay here car dealership.
[27:48] So that’s what happens to them. I have to say, Gary, for somebody like me who lives in a fictionalized world, your podcasts are just so great. They’re such great fodder to spark my imagination about what’s possible for somebody like my dad and for these characters in my book.
[28:10] Just to sit back and hear your stories has just been a thrill. So I really appreciate it. Tiffany, do you know what geographic area in Chicago that, did she talk about what geographic area that he frequented or was around? That kind of, we’re divided up by geographic areas. Yeah, it was definitely Southside. Definitely Southside. There was a Southside crew. It was Al Palato that ran the Southside crew. When he, you said Tony Spalato, right? Oh, Al Palato ran that. Tony Spalato. Oh, Al Palato.
[28:46] P-A-L-I-T-T-O ran that Southside crew for a long time during those years in the 70s. Okay. Yeah. It was, remind me the difference between the Southside crew and like Tony Spalatro. That’s who I was thinking of. Tony Spalatro was Chicago, was sent to Vegas to run the skim, right? Yes. It was more geographically, came from west of downtown in the- That’s right. Either Taylor Street or the Grand and Grand Street area, just west of downtown, near west. That was, I can’t think of the name. It was Joey Lombardo was connected to that crew. I can’t think of the name of it now.
[29:30] I can’t tell the players without a scorecard. I have to keep a scorecard up here. Yeah.
[29:35] Well, I don’t know how you keep everything that you do in your brain. I honestly, I just, It would seem to me that even the Southside crew, why wouldn’t they just use their own people? Why would they call somebody like Jerry in? I guess just like you said, to keep their fingerprints off something. They didn’t want their fingerprints on something that was important that might ruffle some feathers somewhere else. They didn’t want their fingerprints on it. That’s the reason you would use a guy like that. And who knows what other kind of action he had going on. He might have been a heck of a thief. And then he’s got a lot of goods to fence. He might have been a heck of a jewelry store burglar or was part of a jewelry store burglar or one of these crews that we had a crew of these guys. And they had them in Chicago. There was a policeman named, was it Edward Hanrahan? Was a high-ranking Chicago police officer. And he ran a jewelry theft crew that stole millions and millions of dollars from jewelry salesmen and jewelry stores all around the Midwest. So that’s sometimes those guys will do that. And then if you got a guy that then you fence all of his stuff, then that’s invaluable. You then can make money by fencing his stuff.
[30:48] Interesting. Interesting. It’s the tendrils that crisscross each other between all of these regions and all of these various ways that these groups found to make money off each other. And it’s a little mind boggling. I honestly don’t know how you keep it all straight. It’s a little mind boggling because there’s this one of the things that I was really fascinated about is this. It’s a very opportunistic way of operating. Any little dime, any little opportunity anywhere, and for the most part, they’re going to take it. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I hope you ever read Joe Pistone’s book. He talked about the boring life of the mob. And he said they just sit around these social clubs, and everybody just keeps coming up with different scams all day long. They’re trying to come up with, oh, what do you think? How would this work? What about that? What about that guy down there? Could we do something? down there. So I just sit around and try to dream up scams rather than going to work.
[31:52] And it’s just a constant life of dreaming up scams, dreaming up different jobs they might want to do, may be able to do where an opportunity is. Who do they know in that area? Who do we know? And they’re really no different than your legitimate businessmen who are all in kind of the same area. Certain people that do certain things. And so then you go talk to them and say, You want to do this? You want to try to do this together? It’s really not much different. Everybody’s got a network. If I want something done, I want to get an old car for a reenactment piece I’m doing for a documentary. I know a guy that wheels and deals in old cars. And so he’ll find something for me and work with me on it. And they’re no different. They just got all these contacts all over the place. Much more than anybody, anybody realizes how many contacts they got. Because so many people, they like the romance of rubbing elbows. They know a guy. And of course, they can find something for them that fell off a truck that’s real cheap. We used to have a guy downtown that was the biggest fence. He had a guy that worked at a shipping company that had Polaroid film back when Polaroid film was a thing. It was really expensive.
[32:59] And this guy could get steel off the docks cases of Polaroid film. Because we catch him coming down and leaving this polaroid film and when we took the guy down the fence took him down we got this guy who we’d seen dropping off the polaroid film and found out where he worked and then questioned him about he said oh yeah he said actually he said i got this concession from a guy that that left the warehouse where i work he had been doing this and then he sold it to me so me the connection to junior bradley the fence so then i just continued on so they got all these tendrils out all over the place.
[33:37] Yeah. The Chicago outfit, when it comes to dealing and stolen property, probably has more than any. All those truck lines and all the railroads and all the stuff that gets shipped through Chicago. So they’ve got it all over the place. Yeah, right. Now that I’m out in New York, everybody has a saying, anytime we need anything done, the New York answer is, I got a guy. I got a guy, yes. I’ve used it myself. I’ve got a guy for that. I got a guy for that.
[34:06] So that comes with mob connection. That’s right. Sometimes it comes with both connections. A lot of cops will have a guy. I got a guy. He does that particularly inexpensively. He’ll do it cheap for you for me. That’s right. Just who’s got my name.
[34:22] All right, Tiffany, talk about your book one last time here. Sell your book a little bit. All right, let’s do it. Yes, the name of the book is My Name is Jerry Sass. It’s a fictionalized version of what my father’s life would have been like back in the 60s, 70s, 80s as a kind of low-level mobster making hits out of a small town in southern Iowa. There it is. There it is. My name was Jerry Sass. And it was just a load of fun to write. It was, for somebody who’s always been fascinated with mob lore and mob history, and my own family had connections to Capone back in Prohibition, and so it’s in my blood, Gary.
[35:09] It was just a lot of fun to write. It was a lot of fun to speculate. And, as I said, to just take these little nuggets of stories that I hear about different mobsters and kind of weave them all together and put them in this fictionalized version of Jerry Sass. Really a lot of fun. And then kind of projecting out now to my next books. I don’t know where they’re going to go, but it’s going to be someplace crazy. All right. If you need any help with real-life situations, just shoot me an email. I know it. I know it. Thanks, Gary. We’ll collaborate on that a little bit. I’m always happy to help. All right. Tiffany Hanson. The book is My Name Was Jerry Sass. See, it’s a blisteringly funny and surprisingly heartfelt, highly recommended book. Give that book a shot, you guys. Thanks a lot, Tiffany. Thanks, Gary.