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Transcript
David: [00:00:00] it was interesting because, obviously everyone knows about Cuba and how they ran casinos in Havana until Castro came in and took everything over. And after after they lost Cuba, they started looking for other places that they could set up casinos and smoothly run everything without having a new dictator or a new rebel leader that would take everything from them away.
So they they started looking around and you had obviously Meyer Lansky the Jewish mob boss who worked closely with Luciano, who envisioned gambling as something that would be a pleasant pastime, which would be done by people, honorable people if you will. Not just by drunks, flipping a coin and gambling on dice, but actually having a good time with some good alcohol, some fun women would there, would be there, and just a great atmosphere.
And Lansky was the first in the US to re- revolutionalize gambling operations. So he would actually turn them into these, they were known as carpet joints, which were they had fine food and drinks. They had [00:01:00] good furniture. Everything was just top-notch, and that basically set everything off.
After that, it would just continue to expand. And once they had the know-how and they had the good people running the the crap jack the crap dealers the roulette people, they had all these people working there, they had the expertise to ex- export that to other countries. So once Cuba fell through, they started looking for other venues and they they had their eyes on the Bahamas, which is a similar island as Cuba, which is pretty easy easily corrupted and they just set up their place there.
Eventually, there was just too much exposure and heat on their operations, so they had to look yet again to some new pl- new place, and they ended up in Europe. So they started in London. They then moved on to the Netherlands, where they settled in Amsterdam. And in 1974, they actually had a delegation from the US visiting Amsterdam to check out the local gambling market and to see if there [00:02:00] would be a possibility to invest money in certain casinos there.
And they got in contact with this local crime boss who ran the red-light district in Amsterdam, and he also ran several small-time casinos. And they sat down with this guy and basically made him an offer that he couldn’t refuse. He would help offer protection to the casinos, and they would invest $1 million into a professional casino.
It would be the first professional casino in the Netherlands because we had, there wasn’t any legal gambling. It was done by the state was allowed to run several casinos, but no one else was. So this was like a, pretty much anyone would like to gamble, so there were a lot of illegal casinos, but nothing that would really be impressive, nothing professional.
And once the Italians came here, the Italian Americans, things just took off. At that point, you had professionalized gambling in the Netherlands run by people that were doing this kind of thing since Cuba. And it was actually done by one particular [00:03:00] crew that was under Vincent Alo the guy from the Genovese family.
He was a soldier, but he ran a crew of associates actually all brothers, three brothers the Cellini brothers, Dino, Eddie, and Bobby. And these guys, they were just total professionals as far as gambling was concerned. They ran all these casinos for the mafia, and it was just this core group of people with Lansky Vincent Alo to protect them from the Cosa Nostra Italian American commission, if you will.
And you had these guys basically Doing everything for the mafia. So you had a core group, and they ran gambling schools where they educated their own personnel, and they would expa- ex- export these people to London, to Amsterdam, to Germany, where they ran several casinos. So basically, that is how it all started out.
And you had… At some point, you had [00:04:00] local criminals helping out with protection, if it was possible, if a deal was arranged. And at other times, you had a guy like Charlie “The Blade” Turre who would help out and offer his own protection to the casino operations in London or in a foreign country.
So that pretty much is, in short, how they expanded across the world and how basically they made a ton of money doing that.
gary: So that’s after Castro takes over Cuba and they made a little foray up into the Bahamas, and then moved to Amsterdam, where gambling’s already legal now. That’s Vincent Alo.
That’s the guy they called Jimmy Blue Eyes, I think.
David: Yeah, correct. Yeah.
gary: I always wondered we have our friend Bill Friedman, who’s a mob author, lives out in Las Vegas now, has written a it’s 30 years of gambling be- 30 years of illegal gambling before the Strip, in which he talks about the carpet joints and he talked a little bit about Vincent Alo but not as much as the other Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky.
And he really, [00:05:00] Alo has been under the radar, if you will, in, in the United States. Yeah. He didn’t have the name identification and I suspect this may be a reason why. He turned his interest his attention to Europe and American the FBI and American police were not too interested in what they were doing over in Europe.
Now, those- … those three brothers Cellini. Can you spell that? I’m not familiar with that name at all, and I don’t many of our people may not. They probably wanna Google that last name.
David: Yeah, Cellini is C-E-L-L-E-N E. Sorry. C-E-L-L-I-N-I.
gary: Okay, thanks. Were they from New York? Part of, they were part of the Genovese family from New York?
No,
David: they w- no, they did, they were from Steubenville, Ohio.
gary: Oh, really? Interesting.
David: Yeah. But it, that was pretty much another example of how back then, in those days, you had all these Cosa Nostra families throughout the US. You had 26, I think, in total, and how they all were intertwined. So how you all had…
al Capone was [00:06:00] originally from New York, but then went to Chicago, and they still kept in touch. I think that’s another example of these gangsters basically going all over the place, despite the fact that in those days you didn’t really have the transportation that you have now, or, you didn’t have cell phones, you didn’t have internet, and yet these guys were all over the place, and they had connections everywhere.
They could go to Amsterdam, they could go to the Bahamas, and it was all good. Yeah. And I think that’s… it shows the sophi- sophistication that these guys had the knowledge that they had compared to the guys running things now. I think those guys were truly capable of running a, a large company.
Like a Fortune 500 company. They were capable of that. But the guys running the ship now might not be capable, I think.
gary: Yeah. I’ve met people. I had this one guy who was a source. He probably… He tried to use me all the time as his source, and I tried to use him as my source. But I once told him he, he had this sophisticated auto theft deal going and I once told him, I said, “Man,” I said, “why [00:07:00] don’t apply all those managerial and entrepreneurial skills and create a square business?”
I said, “You could do well.” He said, “Yeah,” he said, “but that wouldn’t be much fun.” I take these guys they have all this skill and ability to manage and understand relationships and create relationships and start businesses. Bill Friedman, again, I- I’ll quote him again. In Las Vegas when they first started trying to operate gambling casinos other than just as a card game in a bar or a lounge,
, They brought in mob guys , because their experience in these carpet joints throughout the United States, and we had two or three here in Kansas City, they always locate them just outside the city in the county where they can pay off the county sheriff and people don’t pay much attention to it anyhow.
They had all the experience in how to run a casino. So they- Yeah … the gaming commission out there turned a blind eye to a lot of those early people in the ’50s to o- open and establish and operate [00:08:00] casinos. And then by the ’70s, that’s when they started kicking everybody out and corporations took over.
But the, it sounds like… I don’t know. D- what about the then the the progress of- These gangster fa-, this the Genovese family in the casinos in Amsterdam, did, how did that kind of progress? Did they expand into other cities in Europe?
David: I think one, one of the interesting things about when we’re talking about the personnel and everything that they were … They were, they s- they sent personnel out here to Amsterdam to teach these local Dutch dealers to how to work the game, how to run the casino.
And these Dutch people, they didn’t really like being told what to do and how to do it. So there was this kind of this cultural divide, if you will, where they didn’t really like it. At one point, you had these these Italians the Cellinis came over and the, there were these Dutch tough guys working the casino as enforcers, as bodyguards, as doormen.[00:09:00]
And the Cellinis came over and they didn’t like the attitude of these guys. They actually wanted … They were used to respect. When they walked into a restaurant or a club, they were respected and people would stand up and they would shake their hand. When they came to the Netherlands, that kind of stuff never happened.
You had these Dutch muscle guys standing in front and they would just barely acknowledge them. And at one point Jacques Cellini was actually fixing one of the slot machines in the casino in Amsterdam and one of these big buff enforcer types threw a paper ball at Cellini’s head. And, Cellini was just out of his mind.
He was pissed off and he a- he actually went to the crime boss who was tasked with running and protecting these casinos for the Americans to, hand out some kind of disciplinary action. He was actually very surprised that n- no, no such thing happened. He was just like, “Oh, just a slap on the wrist.
Just don’t do that kind of stuff. Don’t piss off these Italians.” It was all done very much like it’s [00:10:00] common in this country, where you just basically everyone is equal, everyone has a right to, speak his mind and to just accept what the other person is saying. So everything just went away very calmly.
And, Cellini was so pissed off and he actually, he had to accept the reality of operating a casino in a foreign country at that point. But he did say, according to sources who at the time were talking to reporters, he actually said, “If you had done this in my country, you would’ve been a dead man by now.”
So that’s one of those instances where you have people from two different cultures crashing into each other, and this had all to do with the professionalism of the crew that they were used to working with. So I think that’s interesting to see how difficult it is to not only get qualified personnel, but also to have personnel that realizes, who they are dealing with.
That’s one of the issues that the Cellinis ran into when they were operating abroad.
Aaron: Here’s a kind of a question because here in America, The local mob, whether it be in Kansas City [00:11:00] or Chicago they worked the l local political machine. They worked the system. They got inside the government, so to speak, inside the police department, and was that as easy or possible for them to do in places like the Netherlands or other European countries?
David: It was a lot more difficult. I think in London and the Netherlands it might have been possible. I think that especially the local police, they would definitely pay them off just to get a tip if there was a raid or if there was any investigation going on. But I don’t think they
politicians were very difficult to get to. I don’t think corruption on that level isn’t as common as it is, in, in other countries. So in Western Europe that doesn’t really happen as often. But the police, they definitely had those on the payroll and would, get tips. And they would actually look the other way while this casino, which was illegal, was being set up in the middle of Amsterdam.
This was in the center. This was in … you had the prostitutes which was semi-legal in, in the Netherlands and then you had [00:12:00] this illegal casino which, the police knew it was happening but they didn’t do anything about it. In that respect I think that they were corrupt, but it wasn’t on the same level as as some politicians were bribed or anything like that.
That, that didn’t happen.
At least not that we know of. It mi- it might have but, that hasn’t come out yet. And if it did it, it probably would have come out by now, but this was the ’70s and,
gary: . these are legal casinos already that they’ve infiltrated just like they did in Las Vegas. Now was there legal gambling, say, in Belgium or Germany that they moved into?
David: This was actually illegal gambling. There was no legal gambling. You had legal casinos, but those were all run by the government so you couldn’t infiltrate them.
But they actually set up this casino and the same one in London, they were i- illegal. But you c- you know, it wasn’t really, … It was basically just a crime to operate a casino if you didn’t have a license. That’s what they did. But if you look at the the casino or the gamble law, gambling laws in Europe, they’re very diverse.
So you have, at various points you have [00:13:00] governments that would allow gambling if they could run it themselves. So you have in Belgium and the Netherlands they can … Government runs casinos or certain places where they have slot machines and those kinds of stuff. Video poker machines, that kind of
But no, No gambling where they have a dealer. You can’t have that. You can’t have a human running stuff. So you have a casino, and there’s a couple of them in the Netherlands, and you have a couple of them in Belgium where you have actually personnel running it, where you can play roulette, you can play cards, you can do all that kind of stuff.
And then you have several other places where there’s just video poker machines and slot machines. It’s all machines. And you have to have a license from the government, and the government is the only one that can run a casino, so they won’t g- hand out any license. So right now you have… The problem with gambling at this point is online gambling, because you can’t really stop that.
You can’t stop a Dutch person or a Belgian person or a German person from gambling online. Yeah, right now they’re looking into opening up the gambling [00:14:00] market and giving a outsider the chance to bid on a license. But as far as the illegal and legal side of the casino business and the gambling business it’s very complicated, if you will, because there’s just different rulings and different ideas about that.
If you go to Belgium, it’s different. If you go to England, it’s different. If you go to Germany. So that’s the biggest issue when you’re looking at gambling throughout the decades, by the way, because this has been playing for so long, and it just seems like for some reason we can’t fix this.
We can’t really find a consensus on how to handle this. So I don’t know.
gary: So you have quite a little bit of government, shall we say government-sponsored or government-sanctioned casinos and video poker operations where it’s nothing but machines. And you have… And of course, you’ve got a national lottery, I believe, over there.
And what about- Yeah … gambling on the football or the I guess in, Soccer. That, that had to be huge. Yeah. Is there a government-sponsored sports [00:15:00] betting?
David: Ah, the same, yeah. The government has taken over gambling. It’s I guess it’s the same I think it was what was it, Dutch Schultz in Harlem who had the numbers racket, and then, once that was a success, eventually the government took it from him or from his successors and now they run the lottery in in the US as well, and it’s the biggest thing, it starts out as something that is illegal and then government takes it. I think that’s pretty much how it works. If it’s weed or if it’s gambling, it pretty much comes down to if it makes money and it doesn’t hurt a lot of people, the government is interested in, running it themselves, and I think that’s happened with gambling and weed or medicinal drugs.
the funny thing about the Dutch casinos actually is that they ran a loss and it’s, it sounds, it’s, it doesn’t really
Something smells fishy. when a casino is losing money,
. they’re actually talking about a bankruptcy for these casinos. So there’s a, there’s something going on that, you would expect that the criminals would have a difficult time when in reality, because the Netherlands is known as a free country with a lot of these vices on offer, [00:16:00] that there’s people from France, from England, from Italy, from Spain, Portugal, everyone is coming to the Netherlands to, see these vices, to experience these vices.
So there’s so much action going down that there’s enough for everyone. And it’s also, the Netherlands especially has become like a transit country where people from South America and all these other countries, they come and they get together and they organize they organize drug pipelines.
So you know, you get drugs from South America you bring it to the Netherlands or Belgium. There’s two big ports. You’ve got one in Antwerp in Belgium, and you’ve got one in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. The drugs comes in and from the Netherlands you can ship it anywhere. You can… there’s no borders, so you can just drive your truck to Italy, to Spain or wherever, obviously there, there’s checks and whatnot, but it’s not as there’s a customs every, border you get. It doesn’t happen. So the drug smuggling especially has become just out of control with, It just it’s amazing really [00:17:00] because like you said, we have it all here, so you would expect the market to be saturated, but it’s not.
And especially not because the prison sentences for drugs are not as high. I’m not sure exactly on how it works, but if you get caught with, millions in drug money or some weapons or some… Or weapons are a problem still because we consider those more dangerous than drugs. But if you’re caught with drugs you might, get busted for several hundred kilos, but you can get out- Within a decade.
It’s not like you get sentenced for a lot of years. So you can make a lot of money with a, hardly any risk. It’s not like in the US where if you have a gram of cocaine, it could send you away for life if they feel like it, so I think that really attracts a lot of these drug bosses from all around the world to set up camp here and just organize drug deals just nonstop.
You have British over here, you have Irish over here, you have people from the Middle East who have immigrated to the Netherlands who have set up drug pipelines with [00:18:00] their home country, growing the ha- hashish and the weed back home in the Middle East, in Morocco, and then shipping it over to here. And then from here it goes to England or it goes to Ireland.
That kind of stuff is happening a lot at the moment.
gary: In modern times now the lot organized crime in Europe has morphed into, and same way in the United States, the drug business because it’s so lucrative. , and the Italian La Cosa Nostra mafia has pretty much lost any kind of a stranglehold or a domination of that, those rackets on it because it’s too lucrative again, and they never really, at least in the United States, they maintain a hands-off as far as narcotics as a, as an organization.
They’ll have individual members who may do some action, take a, take on a narcotics piece of action, but mainly they just wanna invest money in it. So in, in more modern times, like these illegal casinos and lottery and sports gambling, is there… For example, you can [00:19:00] make a sports bet in Las Vegas, but you can’t make it in other casinos in the United States, so there’s still a book, and the book is always ran by the La Cosa Nostra mafia is my experience in the United States.
Is there anything like that in modern times in Europe?
David: Yeah, it’s the same thing. It’s not as it- it’s not as big over here. We have online gambling, which is a lot bigger, but, if you look at the American Cosa Nostra, they got a lot of these offshore gambling websites. So they’re, the website itself, you can just go onto it, and then you gamble, and you place your bet in Costa Rica.
So the American Mafia has done that, setup. And I think that if you’re looking at European gambling, we have a similar kind of thing where you go to a website, place your bet on soccer or football or tennis, and it’s actually gotten to the point where I think you had the same thing in the NFL and in, in baseball where you had corruption, where you had match fixing, where, we all know the story about Arnold Rothstein, who fixed the [00:20:00] World Series.
And I think in Europe, we’ve we’re hearing a lot more stories about big soccer matches being fixed by the mafia. That’s not the American Mafia, but it’s the Italian Am- the Italian Mafia the groups from Calabria, the ‘Ndrangheta. You have the Camorra and Cosa Nostra, where they infiltrate these soccer teams, or they get to certain people, and they manage to get a…
if you can bet on who gets the first yellow card or who gets the first throw in when you throw the b- when the ball goes over the line and another player has to throw the ball back into the game, you can actually bet on that. So if if you bribe a certain player and you ask him, “Hey, if you put the ball out and you throw it back in that and that minute,” you got a lot of money on the line.
And what we are seeing right now, and we never really believed that could happen with our local football teams or soccer teams, but right now we’re becoming, we’re realizing that what happened back in the day with American baseball and American football is actually happening [00:21:00] to our own, loving, lovely game as well.
If you’re looking at these activities, I think you you’re gonna see a lot of the Italian Mafia being involved, but also the Chinese gambling syndicates These guys are far away and they have absolutely, there would be no reason for them to be involved in gambling on a second grade team somewhere in a faraway competition in Finland, for instance, or Sweden, but that’s what they’re doing.
They’re trying to get these small teams in smaller competitions, and they’re trying to bribe players and then bet massively on it, and for some reason that’s huge business, and that’s what we’re seeing right now. And there, I don’t know if there’s Italian American mobsters involved in that.
It could well be because, Las Vegas is still the mecca of gambling, and you have a lot of these offshore gambling websites run by American mobsters. So could very well be that they have a certain in with a lot of these guys. But that’s the trend you’re seeing right now that you have [00:22:00] gambling on soccer and online gambling especially, and you have syndicates trying to get close to certain players so they can throw a game.
gary: We had our problems and we have had even maybe up into the fifties that kind of got less. But I know in the modern times the NFL, for example, will hire a, in every city will hire a recently retired FBI agent as to do two things. Many times they hired another guy who was retiree to just give drug tests to the players.
But all they do is just go into the locker rooms, go into the they have complete access to the locker rooms, to the umpire’s locker room which nobody else really has this access in the locker rooms in baseball and football both, in the NFL and the Major League Baseball, and all, and develop sources within that and work with the local FBI and the local police who investigate gambling activities a-and just do nothing [00:23:00] but monitor and look for those kinds of things, and that started really big time back in the seventies.
You guys are probably gonna have to do something like that with the soccer if they haven’t already started doing that.
David: I think the difficulty with Europe is that you have all these countries to where, oh, we don’t have any borders, but we don’t have we’re not like one country, so you have all these different countries, they don’t have any borders, and there’s, not, there’s hardly any unified rules.
There’s no laws that govern all these countries and all these competitions. So I think that’s the biggest obstacle if you’re trying to combat, illegal match fixing in or illegal, it’s always illegal, but match fixing in Europe. I think the difference in America is that you can send a FBI agent to these teams in every city, in every state.
But in, in Europe you don’t have that. You have local cops and they might go there, but they have no clue what’s happening.
gary: Oh, I see what you mean. So that’s what- if it’s a Spanish team, you would have to use a Spanish cop and sp- apply Spanish laws. If it was [00:24:00] Italian, it would be Italian law.
It was- Yeah … all the other different little countries. Wow, that’s, I never thought about that. That is a problem.
David: Oh, we, that’s what we initially, that’s what the, that’s what we all thought was these small time clubs. Now we realize that it, yes, it’s these small time clubs. These are basically like, second rate competitions, but we realize now that they even fixed s- several World Cup games, so that’s the biggest…
it’s bigger than the Super Bowl. There’s more people watching the World Cup every four years than there’s people watching the Super Bowl, so they even got to matches on that level. So once you get to that level and you get to the Champions League, which is like the, all the best club teams in in Europe, they play to, play each other year round to become the best of the best, and they even fix those kinds of games.
So there’s just so much going on that we just ignored because we believed in the game. I think the Americans had that as well in, back in the day in the NFL and, these are our sports heroes, so we do not doubt that these guys are there to, [00:25:00] play the best that they can do for the team.
But, it turns out it’s different. Some of these guys, they get in with a certain girl maybe at a certain club, and the girl turns out to be a, a prostitute working for a certain criminal, and then they, they have something incriminating on this guy, so they can pressure him to maybe throw a game or maybe do something else and that’s how it starts.
Now, once one guy on a team is, infiltrated, he can actually manipulate other players to, to follow his lead or maybe even, if there’s a lot of money to be made. So a lot of these players they might be at the top at a certain point, but some of them will never make it to that level, so once they hear that they can make maybe 200,000, euros or dollars on just one action during one game, they’ll do it.
Now, but once they do that one action, they can’t go back. So once they’re in for life, and they know that, so it’s very hard to find people willing to talk about that and admit that they were in the wrong. So we had Michael Franzese, the Colombo capo, he [00:26:00] was actually talking to people involved in tennis about the dangers of illegal gambling and match fixing and stuff like that, and how the mob would operate to pressure these kinds of players into, getting them to do stuff for them.
gary: Oh, really? He was like… Oh, M- Michael F- Franzese? He w- he’s consulting with them- Yeah … on, on the dan- That’s interesting. Get it right from the horse’s mouth or at least somebody that learned it from the horse’s mouth and-
Aaron: Yeah, and you’re not talking about the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.
You’re talking really about today?
David: Yeah, recent years, I think Michael Franzese talking to I think it was the US Open tennis tournament, and he was talking to several players about the dangers of gambling and the dangers of, these criminals trying to influence you to, just it’s never really about losing a certain game, but it’s about it al- always starts with a small thing.
Like in tennis, it could be, “You know what? First play… throw the first game, the first game, just go down for 40-love,” which is you make no points in the first [00:27:00] game. That’s like you, you’re not, you’re not losing the entire match.
You’re just throwing one little piece of it. And most players would say that’s not so bad,” but it’s a start. And Michael Franzese probably I’m not sure, but I’m thinking that’s what he does. He’s explaining to these players, once you do that, look, you can’t go back. Once you’ve done that, you have to remember that you’re in there now.
You’re in this for life, or you admit what you’ve done, and then you get expelled from your beautiful sports career. So it’s like a lose-lose. You can’t make any money with these guys once you’re in because once you’re in, you have to continue, throwing games and throwing maybe even matches, and at one point, your whole career is de- is dead.
gary: That’s true. On- once they own you as you talked about earlier in I think the first program about, if you do business with these people, then they feel like they own you. And once you do a little bit of business with them, they feel like they own you for life and y- and anything you do is a betrayal, and you don’t wanna- Yeah, exactly
you don’t wanna betray these guys. [00:28:00]
David: And once, once you’re, once you’ve done something for them, they know that, you can’t go back either because they will hold that over your head and tell everyone that you know that you worked for them. And at that point, there’s nothing you can do because if you would, if they would tell people and tell police or tell whoever, it’s your career that’s down, they’ll just go on to the next guy. Yeah. They’re bad. So you have to really keep that in mind, yeah. Now, of course that’s like the feel-good story because, if you start pushing, they might kill you, or they break a leg, or they break an arm, and that’s your whole career. So for these athletes, they really need to watch it.
gary: That’s true. David, this has been great. We’re gonna, I’m gonna start winding down here now. We really appreciate you coming on and talking with us about the the influence, the history of the influence of the American La Cosa Nostra mafia in, in England, and straighten us out about, what kind of action that they did over there what the lay of the land, if you will, is in English particularly with the [00:29:00] Kray brothers, always…
The Kray twins. I always had that question in my mind, and I guess I never really read a comprehensive book on them. I probably will do that now and take a little closer look at them just ’cause I’m a little more interested after talking with you. A- and then the modern-day influence on sports gambling in particular and how how that’s developing much the professional gamblers and the professional gra- gambling class and the the illegal betting on sports operations has, how it progressed in the United States and what’s going on in Europe today in regards to soccer and tennis, which are the huge sports over there.
What about cricket? I’m curious. Do they, is there a book or a line on cricket matches?
David: I think so, yeah. I think, I’m not sure because cricket is n- is only big in Britain and Australia and India. Okay. But I do believe that in India, I think several players have been caught match fixing.
So definitely going down there as well. [00:30:00]
gary: All right. Great. . David we’re really glad that you could be here.
David: Thanks for having me here. I had a blast.