January 22, 2025 • 43 mins
'Mafia Spies' by Thomas Maier, is a true story of espionage and mobsters, based on the never-before-released JFK Files.Revolving around the outlaw friendship of Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana, two mob buddies, and their fascinating world.A spy exposé, murder mystery, and shocking true story that recounts America’s first foray into the assassination business. Who killed Johnny and Sam—and why wasn’t Castro assassinated despite the CIA’s many clandestine efforts?
Mafia Spies is streaming now on Paramount+ and Showtime.
Book is here —> https://www.amazon.com/dp/151077890X?&tag=skyhorsepub-20
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/mysterious-circumstances--5479817/support.
Mafia Spies is streaming now on Paramount+ and Showtime.
Book is here —> https://www.amazon.com/dp/151077890X?&tag=skyhorsepub-20
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/mysterious-circumstances--5479817/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Right, Welcome to Mysterious Circumstances podcast. We have a great
interview for you here today. We have Thomas Mayer, who
(00:39):
is an author and has developed TV shows, and he's
got a new one coming out and it's called Mafia Spies.
And I know for sure my listeners are all about
these episodes. They're all about this knowledge. So when I
got the h when I got the email, I absolutely
had to have you on. Thomas. Welcome, how are you
doing today?
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Thank you so much, Justin for inviting me. I really
appreciate it. I'm looking forward to talking about Mafia's Spies absolutely.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
So let's go ahead and start off a little bit earlier.
How did you get into the Mafia? How did you
get into researching it? Were you around it growing up
or just something you were interested in.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Well, I have worked for the last forty years as
an investigative reporter. I first started at the Chicago Sun
Times and I've been a reporter here at Newsday for
the last forty years. So I've written a number of
things about organized crime over the years. But I also wrote,
as you mentioned, a number of books, in fact two
(01:41):
about the Kennedys. The first book I wrote about the
Kennedys had to do with their Irish Catholic immigrant background
and how it affected their private and public life. And
the second book had to do with the Kennedys and
the Churchills, primarily in England leading up to World War Two.
Actually in both books there was a brief mention of
(02:03):
Sam g and Kanna and more so about JFK's affair
with a woman named Judy Campbell. The fact that I
had worked in Chicago as a reporter, I was very
aware of Sam g and Kanna and the mafia. The
mafia in Chicago is known as the Outfit. And unlike
(02:24):
the mafia that we watch in The Godfather, for instance,
which is based in New York, where you have the
Five Families organized crime families in New York, in Chicago
it's one big gang. It's the gang fundamentally that came
into prominence with al Capone. And my book Mafias Spies
(02:47):
is about g and Kanna and another gangster by the
name of Johnny Roselli in a nutshell, Mafias Spies is
about how the CIA decided to hire these two top
gangsters to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro during the Cold
(03:09):
War and then only for these two characters to wind
up murdered themselves amid congressional hearings into all of this,
and also about the jfk assassination. So I don't know
if you've ever seen the movie Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid, but or even you know some other movies.
(03:30):
But Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kin's kind of like an
outlaw buddy movie. And there's an aspect of that to
mafia spies that In other words, Johnny Rosselli and Sam
g and Kanna were both gangsters that started in Chicago.
They were very young when they worked for Capone, but
by the fifties they were working together in two respects.
(03:56):
By the nineteen fifties, Sam g and Kanna was the
head of the Chicago Mob, the Chicago outfit, but early
on Johnny Roselli, partly because of health reasons, he had
a case of tuberculosis. They sent Roselli out to Hollywood
and he was the mob's Hollywood fixer and he dealt
(04:16):
with a lot of studio heads. He helped convince, for instance,
the head of Columbia to hire Marilyn Monroe, who Johnny
had dated. Johnny was known as Handsome Johnny. That was
his nickname, and indeed he was had that bead boy
charm that apparently a number of women are attracted to.
(04:41):
And Johnny was known to have dated not only Marilyn Monroe,
but also actresses like Lana Turner. If you remember Donna
Reid from It's a Wonderful Life, I couldn't believe that, Oh,
Donna Reid the just right, yeah, exactly. Johnny got married
to an actress and they were briefly married. And he
(05:04):
also met another actress in a place that he was
living in Los Angeles, and her name was Judy Campbell.
And Judy Campbell becomes a major figure in Mafia's spies
because of the connections that she makes with not only
the two gangsters, but also with a young senator by
(05:24):
the name of John F. Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
So the connection later on between Roselle and Gancana when
it comes to Cia and other participants, how does that
all begin?
Speaker 2 (05:39):
It is complicated. You know, It's funny because I can
say what it's about in one line, but then there's
a million different tributaries, as they say, like one big river.
How it comes together. Is that Roselli and g and
Kanna were involved. The Chicago Mob controlled virtually everything of
(06:00):
the Mississippi, So they were involved in Hollywood, they were
involved in Las Vegas, but initially they were also involved
in Havana and a Cuba back in the day, back
in the nineteen forties and fifties after World War Two.
That's the place that everybody from the East Coast would
go down during the winter months. And you know that
(06:23):
phrase about Las Vegas, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Well,
in many ways, that really originates at a Havana and
the Mob had a number of different casinos down there,
and so Johnny Roselli and Sam g and Kanna ran
a casino called the San Sushi on the outskirts of Havana.
(06:45):
A number of different entertainers came there and they made
a load of money until Fidel Castro took power. That
the Mob was in cahoots with the dictator who ran
cubaineteen fifty nine. When Castro comes to power, he throws
the Mob out of Cuba and they barely escaped with
(07:09):
their lives to some extent. And so the Mob was
really upset with Castro. But the reason why the United
States was upset was essentially for two reasons. In the
late nineteen fifties, there were two things that really happened
that shook America's confidence. Bear in mind, we were really
(07:30):
confident after World War II, we controlled first the atom bomb,
the hydrogen bomb. But nineteen fifty seven there was a
satellite called Sputnik that was shot up into space by Russia,
and that was the first time ever that a satellite,
the first time that humankind had ever gone into space.
(07:53):
So that was really frightening to Washington because they were
very concerned about the idea that now that the Russians
had gotten a bomb, that they would somehow be able
to put a bomb on a satellite and they could
attack us from space. So that sent shivers down official
Washington spine there. But then the other thing is, as
(08:15):
I mentioned, when Castro came to power, they were really
concerned about Washington was really concerned about it because Castro
initially portrayed himself as a reformer, but actually he was
a communist who went into basically went into business with
the Russians. The Soviet Union at that time, the Soviet
(08:37):
Union taught Castro how to set up a spy network
not only in Cuba, but as it turns out, in
the United States as well. But official Washington, President Eisenhower
was very so concerned that they secretly decided to assassinate Castro.
And that was a plan that was made to overthrow
(08:59):
Castro and if necessary, to assassinate him. That was made
at the very end of Eisenhower's administration, and it was
a plan that JFK inherited as a new president. And
so those two things spot Nick and Castro becoming a communist,
the idea that somehow rockets from ninety miles away in
(09:21):
Cuba could be shot off and cause World War three,
that was unacceptable. So something had to be done, and
the Eisenhower administration authorized as CIA to essentially get rid
of Castro, and the CIA decided that the best way
to do that, certainly one of the ways to do
(09:41):
that was to retain higher these two gangsters, Johnny Roselli
and Sam g and Kana to kill Castro.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
I want to either, I want to try to confirm
a couple points about Havana. Isn't that the place where
Luciano and Meyer Lansky proved the hit for Bugsy Siegel.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Well, yeah, they would have conferences down in Havana. There's
a photo of Frank Sinatra, who entertained at one of
those things in the late forties and such.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
There are rumors he was a money mule too, apparently.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
You know, Sinatra is like a whole other story hitting
Sinatra is a major character with mafia spies in a nutshell.
Sinatra had problems with his voice at one point in
the fifties. He had been extremely popular in the forties
and such, but his career went in the dumper there
(10:39):
for a while because of his voice problems. And it
was really the mafia who pals that he had known
in coming up in New Jersey that kept him employed.
He was still had singing events, singing dates at various
different nightclubs, so he was always he maintained a certain
(11:01):
loyalty to some of the mobsters that had helped him,
and that's why he's down there in the late forties.
And he becomes really good friends with Sam g and
Kanna that you know, he knows Roselli as well, and
so Sinatra and the rat Pack are a big part
of this story.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Yeah, that is super interesting. I had always heard like
little tidbits about it, but never you know, had the
time to deep dive into into Sinatra and you know
a lot of his I don't want to say accomplices,
but his acquaintances, I should say. But the other thing
that I was going to try to confirm was traffic
Conte was in jail in Cuba for a little bit,
(11:42):
wasn't he.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Yeah, when Cashro took power, they decided they wanted to
get rid of the Gangsterismodes was the way that it
was said in Cuba that, in other words, the dictator
Baptista had a number of gangsters involved in the power.
In fact, my Lanski was kind of like the head
of gambling in Cuba under Batista. So when Castro came
(12:06):
to power, he wanted to get rid of everybody, and
Trafficanti wound up being jailed there for a while. His
lawyer made a deal fundamentally with Raoul Castro, who's who
was Fidel Castro's brother, and he got out. But the
role of Santo Trafficante in this story is really interesting
(12:30):
because he's involved in the plot to kill Castro theoretically,
at least the CIA's plot to kill Cashtro. Santo Trafficanti
is part of that. But was he a double agent?
That's the big question that Mafias Spies raises, because Trafficanti,
who spoke Spanish and was really the mob's hands on
(12:54):
guy in Havana when they controlled casinos there, traffic Kanti
was very much involved in narcotics trafficking, and to do
narcotics trafficking you had to have some cooperation from the
cashtro government because that's where a lot of it went through.
And so there's always a question about traffic Kanti. Not
(13:20):
only was he a double agent in terms of the
CIA's plot, but also what did he have to do
with the ultimate murder of Roselli and sam g and Kanna.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
How long did it take you to research for your book?
Speaker 2 (13:38):
It took me, I'd say the better part to three
to four years. Like I said, I had done books
about the Kennedys, so I was aware of a number
of different things, so I had a little bit of
a head start that way. Another thing that provided a
great deal of a boost for my research, particularly in
(13:58):
terms of finding new stuff was people may remember about
four or five years ago the President Trump allowed the
opening up of the JFK assassination. Those papers which were
released in twenty seventeen and eighteen, there were thousands of
(14:19):
pieces of paper related to the JFK assassination. I wouldn't
say anything that provided a smoking gun as to was
there any type of plot or conspiracy to kill JFK.
There's nothing definitive there. There's some interesting questions, But what
it does provide is a lot of information about the
(14:40):
CIA's plot to kill Castro, which fundamentally was ignored by
the Warrant commissioner who was investigating JFK's death. We had
been trying to kill Castro prior to JFK's assassination, and
Castro warned that two could play this game, and he
said so to just before JFK's assassination, and yet the
(15:04):
Warrant commission never, really to any extent, investigated that. So
those documents that were released as part of the JFK
assassination review, and the papers that were released four or
five years they provided a lot of information about the
CIA's operation not only to kill Castro in Cuba, but
(15:27):
what was going on in Florida. In fact, I think
that's in a way the most interesting part of my
book is just the facility that they ran out. We
were essentially running a war out of Miami, right by
the Miami Zoo where Cuban exiles were being trained, where
Johnny Roselli was down there, and they would go out
(15:47):
in boats late at night on missions to Cuba to
meet other people who already spies who were in Cuba
in attempts to either poison Castro or to try to
assass them with rifles or bazookahs. It's really quite a story.
And the person who was overseeing it was the President's brother,
(16:10):
Robert Kennedy, who was then the Attorney General. So a
lot of that stuff is in those documents, even for instance,
like little things like Johnny Roselli's code number with the CIA.
So there was a lot of stuff that I got
that helped inform this book, and that really gave it
(16:30):
a lot more oop, you know, to use that phrase to.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
What extent was New Orleans involved well with my book?
Speaker 2 (16:40):
And I think the problem with a lot of assassination books,
conspiracy books that go off and wind, you know, on
all these different rabbit holes and such, and so I
tried to keep a pretty steady focus through the two
gangsters as the window into terms in terms of telling
(17:01):
this story. So to answer your question, New Orleans does
come up somewhat. Marcelo that mentioned about him, that was
the organized crime leader in New Orleans, and of course
Lee Harvey Oswald had been there prior to the assassination.
But that's not what my book is about. It's fundamentally
(17:23):
about the plot to kill Castro. Ironically, with Johnny Roselli,
he was an illegal alien from the very beginning. His
real name was Filipo Saco. His family, his parents moved
to Boston. Johnny committed some type of crime, whether or
not it was murder or whatever, but he fled Boston
(17:45):
and that's how he winds up in Chicago as a
young like in his late teens, working for the Capone
gang and he's a driver there. That's where he meets
Sam g and Conna. But with Roselli, he always had
this alias and of Johnny Roselli. That was not his
real name, Johnny Johnny Roselli's. It was a It was
(18:07):
a name that he came up with because there was
a painter, an Italian painter who had done paintings in
the Vatican, and Johnny, who kind of was a pretty educated,
pretty smart gangster. He wasn't you're running He wasn't a
thug in that way. He was a killer, but he wasn't,
you know, a stupid thug. He was a kind of
(18:27):
an elegant guy. And so the idea that he named
himself after a Vatican painter was really amazing Johnny Roselli,
and so he was always afraid of being found out,
that his alias would be found out. And in fact,
in the seventies, when the Senate of the United States
(18:49):
finds out more about what's going on with this CIA
plot that was hatched back in nineteen sixty, fifteen years earlier,
they started investigating it and they are there are running
after Roselli as well, and that's when Roselli tells the
Senate that he knows inside information about the jfk assassination.
(19:13):
The Senate is all ears about that, and that's when
Johnny gets killed. He gets murdered.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
What you need to do is write like ten more
books and expand the Mafia Spy's universe, and then we'll
be totally fine. We need to expand and go out
a little bit more.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Well, it will be a six part series. It's ours
hopefully on Paramount Plus that everybody tunes in. It's going
to be on Paramount Plus, but it's also going to
be on Showtime as well. So I'm hoping that it
reaches millions of people.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
Oh, I will Will it's a fascinating topic. I mean,
anybody who's into any kind of crime or the old
the old time gangsters or mafia or or history. I mean,
it's it's always awesome. Speak of which, how did the
road from the book? How did that all translate into
doing a series? How was that whole process?
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Well, you know, it's interesting. Sometimes it's like birds on
a wire that one flies off and then all the
other birds fly off. Well, when you have a hit
TV show, it's a little bit like that, because some
people inquire about, well, if you had one hit TV
show based upon a book, what else do you have
kid And fundamentally that happened to me around twenty fifteen
(20:31):
or so, I had a book that was a very
different book about love and sex about two researchers named
William Masters and Virginia Johnson. And the name of the
book was called Masters of Sex, And it was on
Showtime for four years. And so I had a great
deal of fun with that. It was a magnificent production
(20:53):
Emmy winning a lot of stars and people like Jeremy Strong,
who was in succession. He was in that program. Alison
Jenny won the Emmy for that. Certainly, Lizzie Kaplan and
Michael Sheen have gone on to many other projects as well.
A lot of people were in that show. So during
that time period, my wife and I would go out
(21:15):
to Hollywood every summer when they were filming. This was
at the old Columbia Lot, which is now owned by Sony.
They were the producers of the film. And I was
invited to go to lunch with a man named Peter Roth,
who was then the head of Warner Brothers Television, and
he had wanted another book of mine and it didn't
(21:35):
work out, but he invited me, my wife and I
to lunch over at Warner Brothers. And so he asked me, so,
what else, what else do you have going on there? Kid?
In so many words, and I said, well, I'm thinking
of doing a book about two gangsters that are hired
by the CIA to kill Castro and they wind up
(21:58):
getting murdered and nobody knows why. And he said, great,
let's do it, and I said, well, you know, I
haven't I'm just doing the research. I haven't started writing
the book yet. So he said, don't worry about So
we put together a contract so it said that it
would be based upon an upcoming book of mine, and
(22:20):
so we went ahead and we actually tried to sell
it to Netflix and to HBO, and I went with
a top showrunner who's terrifically talented. But unfortunately, because I
didn't have the book finished, it was a hard sell.
So we didn't sell it initially. So I went ahead
and finished the book, and so the book didn't come
(22:41):
out into twenty nineteen. And when it did come out,
it was purchased by a fellow named Danny Strong, who
most recently has done Dope Sick, which was on Hulu.
He's a terrifically talented actor and particularly writer and Producer's
had a number of different shows Empire on Fox. He
(23:03):
had shows that won the Emmy on HBO. So Danny
was hoping to develop it, and so was I as
a drama. And then COVID comes along and so we
you know, you could just imagine a show that was
would be based in Washington, Cuba, Las Vegas, Hollywood, Chicago, Florida.
(23:27):
You can't. It was really hard to imagine that getting
done during the COVID shutdown. So Danny was able to
sell it to as a as a docu series to
Paramount Plus. And so it's going to be a six
part Paramount Plus where we have a number of different
experts myself included, who have sit down interviews, but we
also have Paramount provided an extra extra money to do
(23:51):
recreations that were done at the Paramount lot with actors
and such. In fact, the actor who plays Johnny Roselli
who fun of me, is the main character in the show,
along with Sam Jane kind of. But the actor who
plays Johnny Nick and Nunziata, he was in The Sopranos.
He was in six episodes of The Sopranos. And actually
(24:15):
Mafia Spies my show has three clips from The Godfather
as well. Paramount had done The Godfather, so there's a
certain gangland lineage to Mafias Spies, and I think it's
a really I think it's the best spy documentary I've
ever seen because it follows It's not like a term paper.
(24:38):
It follows the two gangsters through this incredible story and
so I think it's people are able to follow it
because you're able to follow the two individuals, the two gangsters.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Oh absolutely, you get that character development and then you
start getting attached and following them along. And I like
the idea of that. So when it comes to control,
you wrote the book, you have a certain way that
you probably envision how the docu series is going to
turn out. How much control did you have over that?
(25:13):
And were there people, you know, Hollywood people in your
ear saying, hey, no, we're going to do it this
way because you know, people want to see that instead
of that the factual thing or is it straight factual information?
Speaker 2 (25:27):
It is very straight factual things and perfect perfect. The
people who are the sit down interviews are top people.
Chris Matthews who's on MSNBC for many many years and
everybody knows him and he's a biographer of the Kennedys.
He talks about the Kennedys. Tim Weiner, who is a
(25:47):
New York Times reporter who was an award winning historian
as well of the CIA and the FBI. He's in
it as well as far as Sinatra. We have James Kaplan,
who wrote the two part biography of Sinatra. We had
Gerald Posner who has written about He wrote Case Closed
(26:09):
about the jfk assassination. We have David Korn who wrote
about the CIA. He's written books about that. We have TJ. English,
who has written books about the whole Cuban experience in Florida,
and he's terrific writer. And I'm sure I'm forgetting people
(26:30):
and actually the best person of all. Well, I'm in it.
I should say that I'm essentially the on air commentator.
I moved the ball along, the narrative along, so I'm
quite a bit in it. But the one that I
think is the one that I find the most pleasing
is Antoinette Giancanna, who is the oldest daughter of Sam
(26:52):
g and Conna. She has a very elegant black dress
on with white pearls and the show and she is
funny and she says a lot of things that I
think are really provocative in the show, and she provides
a sense of what both men were like, both her
(27:13):
father and what Johnny Rosselli was like, in fact that
she had the hots for Johnny Rosselli like a lot
of other women. And so she actually says that in
the show, I had to laugh when I saw that.
And for those who are a little bit older, a
little bit longer in the tooth, like myself, they may
remember Antoinette gi and Conna. There was a book that
(27:34):
was written about her in the eighties that became a
big NBC series called Mafia Princess, and that actually that
book was written with Tony Gankanna and Antoinette, Juan Conna
and another writer his name was Tom Renner. And Tom
Renner worked with me at Newsday and he was a
friend of mine. We worked on the investigative team. So
(27:59):
when I told that to an Antoinette g and Conna,
she said, oh, Tommy Renner. What I remember about Tommy
Renner is that he looked just like my first boyfriend.
And so, you know, it's always made me crack up
when I've listened to Antoinette talk about the past, about
her father, about Johnny Roselli, and about all the things.
(28:21):
She has a theory about who killed her father, and
so she's in it as well. So we have a
lot of top people and it's all based on fact.
If you get a hold of my book, my book
has got more than I think six hundred footnotes in
the back and so all the documents are listed in
the back of the books. It is a fact based
(28:45):
documentary series that I think really does help break the
mold because it's it uses both the recreations in a
very effective way, but very fact based way.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
I actually preferred documentaries that in core par eight reenactments
because it gets you more involved with it. You know,
it puts you more into the setting yourself, and it's
like you're watching a movie, but you're seeing the real
time interviews as as you're watching the recreations. I honestly
enjoy that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Well, the show also has a retro u. The music
is great in Mafia's Spies. It really moves it along,
and it's got that that sixties rat pack Vegas vibe
to it as well. So it's you know, it's entertaining,
it's very informative, but it's all fact based.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
That's my thing. Like when I, like we were talking
a little bit ago, you know, I was involved with
a you know, a documentary through the History Channel, and
the reason they had wanted to incorporate me is because
I basically had no dog in the fight whether John
Dillinger was actually killed in Chicago or whether he wasn't,
I didn't care. I just wanted to present all the
(29:56):
factual knowledge that was available, whether it went with my
opinion or against it. You know, it's not my job
to make you think what I'm thinking. And unfortunately a
lot of documentaries they do that nowadays, and it's.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Well, that's what's different about way I think Mafia Spy's
really Again, for the reason why I said it is
with the fact that the window into this world is
these two gangsters, so you can focus on it. I
think a lot of books and a lot of shows
about conspiracies and whatever, even when they're fact based, they
(30:34):
go off of their like you know, it's hard to follow,
but you can follow this from the very beginning. It
introduces it to these two characters and you follow their
path until the very end of their life and the
end of their life that both murdered in it. It's
very germane to the whole story.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
So while you were researching, what was I guess this
is a two part question. What was something that you
found out you didn't really previously know that just kind
of made you laugh, like, I can't even believe that
that's a real thing. That is funny as hell. And
then the second part is what was a piece of
information that just blew you away that you were like,
(31:17):
I gotta confirm this with another source, because that just
blew my mind.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Well, there's a lot of things that made me laugh.
And I think people that watch Mafia's Spies will see
that it's got a lot of humor. I think the
Sopranos had a certain sense of humor. I think that
God had some funny moment, definitely, and it is well
and Mafia Spies has got a lot of those type
of moments. The whole idea of Johnny Roselli having an
(31:44):
alias and always worried about it, and then how the
FBI finds out about it, I found that amazing and
kind of funny, the way in which they could plotted.
In fact, they actually confronted Roselli and they said Feliposako,
which was his real name, and then and they did
this on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, which is a
(32:05):
very swank type of place, right in front of Cartier's
and all these other high tony type of show stories,
excuse me, and so he was shocked. The funniest thing also,
when Gian Kanna basically demands that Sinatra and the rat
Pack perform in Chicago because they're upset that Sinatra has
(32:30):
not been able to convince the Kennedy administration to work
in their favors. So they have a kind of a
gambling night out in the suburbs of Chicago and the
rat Pack, Sinatra and Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Junior,
and they for the essentially like the weekend. They set
up this little mini vegas outside of Chicago, and Dean Martin,
(32:54):
who had a very funny sense of humor, when the
crowd got too loud, he said, hey, be quiet. You know,
he got to keep it down here because we have
mobsters asleep up in the upper rafts here, and you know,
so there's a lot of funny moments among the two
of them, particularly Johnny Roselli and Sam Jane kind of
(33:14):
that really underlines kind of the outlaw friendship of these
two gangsters. And there's another time when they start there
with Judy Campbell and they're going through a cemetery looking
at names, and they're looking for a real Sacho, a
real person with the name Saco. So Johnny can claim
that's one of his relatives from Chicago, because he has
(33:36):
an alias where he says he was born in Chicago,
and he wasn't. He was born in Italy, so you know,
and they're laughing their heads off about that. So there's
a lot of moments in my book that are described
like that. The most outrageous or most biggest surprise to
me was the extent of how many spies and double
(34:01):
agents were in Florida that were part of a network
of intelligence that Fidel Castro had set up. That in
other words, when Castro became a communist and ruler of Cuba,
he learned how to become a spy from the Russians,
and the Russians go way back in terms of spy,
(34:23):
and they showed him how to set up networks to
protect himself from assassination in Cuba. But also he was
able to plant people who came over apparently as exiles,
but they were sympathetic to Castro's government. And you can
see that in a lot of the documents that I
(34:43):
went through, CIA and FBI documents and other US government
documents where they realized, wait a minute, we're trying to
kill Castro, and it's almost like whack a mall where
they keep all these different tries to try to kill Castro,
and yet they never they all failed. They were never
(35:03):
able to get Castro and why was that? And only
towards the end did one of the characters a CIA
oversee an agent who oversaw that he was known as
the James Bond of the CIA. His name was William Harvey,
and it was really a tough guy, a very good spy,
(35:25):
and he became really good friends with Johnny Roselli. He
really was convinced that Roselli was for real, that he
wanted to kill Castro, that he was a so called patriot.
But he was the one who he finally realized, whoa
wait a minute, how does Castro know about all these attempts.
There's gotta be spies in Florida. So that to me
(35:46):
was the most intriguing surprise of it. And just who
was a double agent is something that I exposed towards
the end of the book.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
I love it, man, this is going to be so informative.
I'm actually excited. I'm going to described to Paramount just
so I can watch this now. So what are your
plans for the future, I mean, are you going to
keep going with the Mafia history and docu series or
do you have anything else planned in the works.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
Well, I have two things I'm going to be doing well.
The first thing that's the first order of things is
my novel called Montalk to Manhattan, and that comes out
in July as well. And that book, I didn't time
it that way, just that's the way the TV show happened.
Mont Talk to Manhattan is a novel of mine, and
(36:34):
it's essentially about a reporter who writes a historical book
about how the Indian lands in Montaugue were stolen by
a tycoon back in the eighteen eighties who ran the
Long Island Railroad. And this tycoon's idea was that when
ships came over from Europe, instead of running the risk
(36:57):
of shipwrecks along the shoreline of Long Island and coming
into New York Harver, they would instead land it at Montague.
Montague kind of sticks out from New York. It's about
one hundred miles away from New York City, and so
they would get on a train. They would land at Montague,
get on a train and go into Manhattan. So the
(37:18):
protagonist of my novel is a modern day writer for
a big New York newspaper. He's covering the Trump campaign
in the summer of twenty sixteen, so it's like set
in that time period, like the rise of Donald Trump,
but it's he has this book and the book becomes
(37:39):
a TV show that they're filming out in Montague. So
the name of the protagonist is a name. The guy's
name is Jack Denton. Actually, there's a video on YouTube
if you want to check it out, as a three
minute video about montagu to Manhattan, and it basically shows
the fundamental story is about this writer who writes a
(38:01):
book now becoming a TV show being filmed out in
Montalk and while it's being filmed, an actress goes missing,
and so it's kind of a fun murder mystery. It
says a lot about, you know, what happened with the
Montauk Indians. It's about it's the summer of twenty sixteen,
(38:21):
and it kind of feels like the summer of twenty
twenty four with Donald Trump running for president and such.
But this was particularly when Donald Trump was still not
all that well known. He was more of a TV preacher,
and so that's kind of like going on in the background,
and it's basically about this protagonist, Jack Denton. Everything He's
(38:42):
hoping that this TV show is going to turn around
his life because everything else is going. He's gotten divorced,
he gets fired in the middle of the book, and
so what happens to him, what happens that there's like
one grand ending there that's a big surprise who the
actress and what happens to Jack Denton is at the
(39:03):
end of this book. So that's really the first thing
that I'm most concerned about with beyond Mafia Spies.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Well, let's go ahead and let people know or if
you want to, let people know when Mafia Spies is
coming out, where the book is available, and just so
the listeners know, I will have all that information in
the episode description as well.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Well. Mafia Spices comes out Tuesday, June fourth, so it's
out immediately. You can buy. There's old versions of the
original versions of Mafia Spice, but there's a new update.
Make sure you get the updated one with the paramount
cover on the book. And there's an update forward that
I have in the book that explains how this book
(39:48):
became a TV show, and that's in this book. But
it's got to cover with Sam g and Kanna and
Johnny Roselli and Bedel Castro and jfk and a number
of the women involve in the story on the cover there.
So that comes out and my novel Mont Talk to
Manhattan comes out July ninth, and so that's being published
(40:11):
by Postthill Press. Mafia Spies is published by Skyhorse And
so you can go onto my website. My website is
Thomas Mayerbooks dot com and so you'll get plenty of
information where to find the books, and you can go
to my publisher's websites, or you can go to Amazon
or any booksellers. Those books are out there, ready to
(40:33):
be ordered, and hopefully plenty of people do buy them.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
Absolutely I know I'm going to be one of those people.
And I'm so looking forward to this docu series and
go watch it, check it out by the book, and
keep your eyes on seeing what Thomas is doing here
in the future. So Thomas, I can't thank you enough
man for thank.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
You so much. Stay tuned to Paramountain showtime absolutely go by,
because Mafia Spies is coming and I'm hoping it blows
the lid off of everything and blows people away with
how just how entertaining it is. I think it's terrific.
You like The Godfather, you like Sopranos, you like any
of those type of shows, any type of spy thrillers.
(41:14):
It's kind of like the two flavors together. It's spying
and the mafia together. That's why it's called Mafia Spines.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
And it was real life, you know it's it was
real life. So I know I'm going to enjoy it
because I you know we're previously talking. I get into
mafia history so hard, so I'm gonna absolutely enjoy watching this.
I know a lot of my listeners will too. So
thank you again for joining me. And you know, if
you ever want to come on and talk about some
(41:42):
more stuff or promote your next book when it when
it's ready, and just let me.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
Know, justin thank you so much. I do have a
spy book coming out next year with.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Oh well, let well, let's hear it.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
What's going on I'm not ready to talk about Okay.
I think they'd be pissed if they if I said it, So.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
That's all right, Well keep in touch, and yeah, we'll
have you on for that too.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
That's about World War two.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
That's gonna be good.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
Well, I hope you have a good rest.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Well, of course, of course, I like I said, when
I got the email, I was like, oh, I have one.
Absolutely I want this interview because that's right down my alley.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
Think I have a great day.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
Thank you too, very appreciated. Ma.
Right, Welcome to Mysterious Circumstances podcast. We have a great
interview for you here today. We have Thomas Mayer, who
(00:39):
is an author and has developed TV shows, and he's
got a new one coming out and it's called Mafia Spies.
And I know for sure my listeners are all about
these episodes. They're all about this knowledge. So when I
got the h when I got the email, I absolutely
had to have you on. Thomas. Welcome, how are you
doing today?
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Thank you so much, Justin for inviting me. I really
appreciate it. I'm looking forward to talking about Mafia's Spies absolutely.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
So let's go ahead and start off a little bit earlier.
How did you get into the Mafia? How did you
get into researching it? Were you around it growing up
or just something you were interested in.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Well, I have worked for the last forty years as
an investigative reporter. I first started at the Chicago Sun
Times and I've been a reporter here at Newsday for
the last forty years. So I've written a number of
things about organized crime over the years. But I also wrote,
as you mentioned, a number of books, in fact two
(01:41):
about the Kennedys. The first book I wrote about the
Kennedys had to do with their Irish Catholic immigrant background
and how it affected their private and public life. And
the second book had to do with the Kennedys and
the Churchills, primarily in England leading up to World War Two.
Actually in both books there was a brief mention of
(02:03):
Sam g and Kanna and more so about JFK's affair
with a woman named Judy Campbell. The fact that I
had worked in Chicago as a reporter, I was very
aware of Sam g and Kanna and the mafia. The
mafia in Chicago is known as the Outfit. And unlike
(02:24):
the mafia that we watch in The Godfather, for instance,
which is based in New York, where you have the
Five Families organized crime families in New York, in Chicago
it's one big gang. It's the gang fundamentally that came
into prominence with al Capone. And my book Mafias Spies
(02:47):
is about g and Kanna and another gangster by the
name of Johnny Roselli in a nutshell, Mafias Spies is
about how the CIA decided to hire these two top
gangsters to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro during the Cold
(03:09):
War and then only for these two characters to wind
up murdered themselves amid congressional hearings into all of this,
and also about the jfk assassination. So I don't know
if you've ever seen the movie Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid, but or even you know some other movies.
(03:30):
But Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kin's kind of like an
outlaw buddy movie. And there's an aspect of that to
mafia spies that In other words, Johnny Rosselli and Sam
g and Kanna were both gangsters that started in Chicago.
They were very young when they worked for Capone, but
by the fifties they were working together in two respects.
(03:56):
By the nineteen fifties, Sam g and Kanna was the
head of the Chicago Mob, the Chicago outfit, but early
on Johnny Roselli, partly because of health reasons, he had
a case of tuberculosis. They sent Roselli out to Hollywood
and he was the mob's Hollywood fixer and he dealt
(04:16):
with a lot of studio heads. He helped convince, for instance,
the head of Columbia to hire Marilyn Monroe, who Johnny
had dated. Johnny was known as Handsome Johnny. That was
his nickname, and indeed he was had that bead boy
charm that apparently a number of women are attracted to.
(04:41):
And Johnny was known to have dated not only Marilyn Monroe,
but also actresses like Lana Turner. If you remember Donna
Reid from It's a Wonderful Life, I couldn't believe that, Oh,
Donna Reid the just right, yeah, exactly. Johnny got married
to an actress and they were briefly married. And he
(05:04):
also met another actress in a place that he was
living in Los Angeles, and her name was Judy Campbell.
And Judy Campbell becomes a major figure in Mafia's spies
because of the connections that she makes with not only
the two gangsters, but also with a young senator by
(05:24):
the name of John F. Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
So the connection later on between Roselle and Gancana when
it comes to Cia and other participants, how does that
all begin?
Speaker 2 (05:39):
It is complicated. You know, It's funny because I can
say what it's about in one line, but then there's
a million different tributaries, as they say, like one big river.
How it comes together. Is that Roselli and g and
Kanna were involved. The Chicago Mob controlled virtually everything of
(06:00):
the Mississippi, So they were involved in Hollywood, they were
involved in Las Vegas, but initially they were also involved
in Havana and a Cuba back in the day, back
in the nineteen forties and fifties after World War Two.
That's the place that everybody from the East Coast would
go down during the winter months. And you know that
(06:23):
phrase about Las Vegas, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Well,
in many ways, that really originates at a Havana and
the Mob had a number of different casinos down there,
and so Johnny Roselli and Sam g and Kanna ran
a casino called the San Sushi on the outskirts of Havana.
(06:45):
A number of different entertainers came there and they made
a load of money until Fidel Castro took power. That
the Mob was in cahoots with the dictator who ran
cubaineteen fifty nine. When Castro comes to power, he throws
the Mob out of Cuba and they barely escaped with
(07:09):
their lives to some extent. And so the Mob was
really upset with Castro. But the reason why the United
States was upset was essentially for two reasons. In the
late nineteen fifties, there were two things that really happened
that shook America's confidence. Bear in mind, we were really
(07:30):
confident after World War II, we controlled first the atom bomb,
the hydrogen bomb. But nineteen fifty seven there was a
satellite called Sputnik that was shot up into space by Russia,
and that was the first time ever that a satellite,
the first time that humankind had ever gone into space.
(07:53):
So that was really frightening to Washington because they were
very concerned about the idea that now that the Russians
had gotten a bomb, that they would somehow be able
to put a bomb on a satellite and they could
attack us from space. So that sent shivers down official
Washington spine there. But then the other thing is, as
(08:15):
I mentioned, when Castro came to power, they were really
concerned about Washington was really concerned about it because Castro
initially portrayed himself as a reformer, but actually he was
a communist who went into basically went into business with
the Russians. The Soviet Union at that time, the Soviet
(08:37):
Union taught Castro how to set up a spy network
not only in Cuba, but as it turns out, in
the United States as well. But official Washington, President Eisenhower
was very so concerned that they secretly decided to assassinate Castro.
And that was a plan that was made to overthrow
(08:59):
Castro and if necessary, to assassinate him. That was made
at the very end of Eisenhower's administration, and it was
a plan that JFK inherited as a new president. And
so those two things spot Nick and Castro becoming a communist,
the idea that somehow rockets from ninety miles away in
(09:21):
Cuba could be shot off and cause World War three,
that was unacceptable. So something had to be done, and
the Eisenhower administration authorized as CIA to essentially get rid
of Castro, and the CIA decided that the best way
to do that, certainly one of the ways to do
(09:41):
that was to retain higher these two gangsters, Johnny Roselli
and Sam g and Kana to kill Castro.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
I want to either, I want to try to confirm
a couple points about Havana. Isn't that the place where
Luciano and Meyer Lansky proved the hit for Bugsy Siegel.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
Well, yeah, they would have conferences down in Havana. There's
a photo of Frank Sinatra, who entertained at one of
those things in the late forties and such.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
There are rumors he was a money mule too, apparently.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
You know, Sinatra is like a whole other story hitting
Sinatra is a major character with mafia spies in a nutshell.
Sinatra had problems with his voice at one point in
the fifties. He had been extremely popular in the forties
and such, but his career went in the dumper there
(10:39):
for a while because of his voice problems. And it
was really the mafia who pals that he had known
in coming up in New Jersey that kept him employed.
He was still had singing events, singing dates at various
different nightclubs, so he was always he maintained a certain
(11:01):
loyalty to some of the mobsters that had helped him,
and that's why he's down there in the late forties.
And he becomes really good friends with Sam g and
Kanna that you know, he knows Roselli as well, and
so Sinatra and the rat Pack are a big part
of this story.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
Yeah, that is super interesting. I had always heard like
little tidbits about it, but never you know, had the
time to deep dive into into Sinatra and you know
a lot of his I don't want to say accomplices,
but his acquaintances, I should say. But the other thing
that I was going to try to confirm was traffic
Conte was in jail in Cuba for a little bit,
(11:42):
wasn't he.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Yeah, when Cashro took power, they decided they wanted to
get rid of the Gangsterismodes was the way that it
was said in Cuba that, in other words, the dictator
Baptista had a number of gangsters involved in the power.
In fact, my Lanski was kind of like the head
of gambling in Cuba under Batista. So when Castro came
(12:06):
to power, he wanted to get rid of everybody, and
Trafficanti wound up being jailed there for a while. His
lawyer made a deal fundamentally with Raoul Castro, who's who
was Fidel Castro's brother, and he got out. But the
role of Santo Trafficante in this story is really interesting
(12:30):
because he's involved in the plot to kill Castro theoretically,
at least the CIA's plot to kill Cashtro. Santo Trafficanti
is part of that. But was he a double agent?
That's the big question that Mafias Spies raises, because Trafficanti,
who spoke Spanish and was really the mob's hands on
(12:54):
guy in Havana when they controlled casinos there, traffic Kanti
was very much involved in narcotics trafficking, and to do
narcotics trafficking you had to have some cooperation from the
cashtro government because that's where a lot of it went through.
And so there's always a question about traffic Kanti. Not
(13:20):
only was he a double agent in terms of the
CIA's plot, but also what did he have to do
with the ultimate murder of Roselli and sam g and Kanna.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
How long did it take you to research for your book?
Speaker 2 (13:38):
It took me, I'd say the better part to three
to four years. Like I said, I had done books
about the Kennedys, so I was aware of a number
of different things, so I had a little bit of
a head start that way. Another thing that provided a
great deal of a boost for my research, particularly in
(13:58):
terms of finding new stuff was people may remember about
four or five years ago the President Trump allowed the
opening up of the JFK assassination. Those papers which were
released in twenty seventeen and eighteen, there were thousands of
(14:19):
pieces of paper related to the JFK assassination. I wouldn't
say anything that provided a smoking gun as to was
there any type of plot or conspiracy to kill JFK.
There's nothing definitive there. There's some interesting questions, But what
it does provide is a lot of information about the
(14:40):
CIA's plot to kill Castro, which fundamentally was ignored by
the Warrant commissioner who was investigating JFK's death. We had
been trying to kill Castro prior to JFK's assassination, and
Castro warned that two could play this game, and he
said so to just before JFK's assassination, and yet the
(15:04):
Warrant commission never, really to any extent, investigated that. So
those documents that were released as part of the JFK
assassination review, and the papers that were released four or
five years they provided a lot of information about the
CIA's operation not only to kill Castro in Cuba, but
(15:27):
what was going on in Florida. In fact, I think
that's in a way the most interesting part of my
book is just the facility that they ran out. We
were essentially running a war out of Miami, right by
the Miami Zoo where Cuban exiles were being trained, where
Johnny Roselli was down there, and they would go out
(15:47):
in boats late at night on missions to Cuba to
meet other people who already spies who were in Cuba
in attempts to either poison Castro or to try to
assass them with rifles or bazookahs. It's really quite a story.
And the person who was overseeing it was the President's brother,
(16:10):
Robert Kennedy, who was then the Attorney General. So a
lot of that stuff is in those documents, even for instance,
like little things like Johnny Roselli's code number with the CIA.
So there was a lot of stuff that I got
that helped inform this book, and that really gave it
(16:30):
a lot more oop, you know, to use that phrase to.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
What extent was New Orleans involved well with my book?
Speaker 2 (16:40):
And I think the problem with a lot of assassination books,
conspiracy books that go off and wind, you know, on
all these different rabbit holes and such, and so I
tried to keep a pretty steady focus through the two
gangsters as the window into terms in terms of telling
(17:01):
this story. So to answer your question, New Orleans does
come up somewhat. Marcelo that mentioned about him, that was
the organized crime leader in New Orleans, and of course
Lee Harvey Oswald had been there prior to the assassination.
But that's not what my book is about. It's fundamentally
(17:23):
about the plot to kill Castro. Ironically, with Johnny Roselli,
he was an illegal alien from the very beginning. His
real name was Filipo Saco. His family, his parents moved
to Boston. Johnny committed some type of crime, whether or
not it was murder or whatever, but he fled Boston
(17:45):
and that's how he winds up in Chicago as a
young like in his late teens, working for the Capone
gang and he's a driver there. That's where he meets
Sam g and Conna. But with Roselli, he always had
this alias and of Johnny Roselli. That was not his
real name, Johnny Johnny Roselli's. It was a It was
(18:07):
a name that he came up with because there was
a painter, an Italian painter who had done paintings in
the Vatican, and Johnny, who kind of was a pretty educated,
pretty smart gangster. He wasn't you're running He wasn't a
thug in that way. He was a killer, but he wasn't,
you know, a stupid thug. He was a kind of
(18:27):
an elegant guy. And so the idea that he named
himself after a Vatican painter was really amazing Johnny Roselli,
and so he was always afraid of being found out,
that his alias would be found out. And in fact,
in the seventies, when the Senate of the United States
(18:49):
finds out more about what's going on with this CIA
plot that was hatched back in nineteen sixty, fifteen years earlier,
they started investigating it and they are there are running
after Roselli as well, and that's when Roselli tells the
Senate that he knows inside information about the jfk assassination.
(19:13):
The Senate is all ears about that, and that's when
Johnny gets killed. He gets murdered.
Speaker 1 (19:21):
What you need to do is write like ten more
books and expand the Mafia Spy's universe, and then we'll
be totally fine. We need to expand and go out
a little bit more.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
Well, it will be a six part series. It's ours
hopefully on Paramount Plus that everybody tunes in. It's going
to be on Paramount Plus, but it's also going to
be on Showtime as well. So I'm hoping that it
reaches millions of people.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
Oh, I will Will it's a fascinating topic. I mean,
anybody who's into any kind of crime or the old
the old time gangsters or mafia or or history. I mean,
it's it's always awesome. Speak of which, how did the
road from the book? How did that all translate into
doing a series? How was that whole process?
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Well, you know, it's interesting. Sometimes it's like birds on
a wire that one flies off and then all the
other birds fly off. Well, when you have a hit
TV show, it's a little bit like that, because some
people inquire about, well, if you had one hit TV
show based upon a book, what else do you have
kid And fundamentally that happened to me around twenty fifteen
(20:31):
or so, I had a book that was a very
different book about love and sex about two researchers named
William Masters and Virginia Johnson. And the name of the
book was called Masters of Sex, And it was on
Showtime for four years. And so I had a great
deal of fun with that. It was a magnificent production
(20:53):
Emmy winning a lot of stars and people like Jeremy Strong,
who was in succession. He was in that program. Alison
Jenny won the Emmy for that. Certainly, Lizzie Kaplan and
Michael Sheen have gone on to many other projects as well.
A lot of people were in that show. So during
that time period, my wife and I would go out
(21:15):
to Hollywood every summer when they were filming. This was
at the old Columbia Lot, which is now owned by Sony.
They were the producers of the film. And I was
invited to go to lunch with a man named Peter Roth,
who was then the head of Warner Brothers Television, and
he had wanted another book of mine and it didn't
(21:35):
work out, but he invited me, my wife and I
to lunch over at Warner Brothers. And so he asked me, so,
what else, what else do you have going on there? Kid?
In so many words, and I said, well, I'm thinking
of doing a book about two gangsters that are hired
by the CIA to kill Castro and they wind up
(21:58):
getting murdered and nobody knows why. And he said, great,
let's do it, and I said, well, you know, I
haven't I'm just doing the research. I haven't started writing
the book yet. So he said, don't worry about So
we put together a contract so it said that it
would be based upon an upcoming book of mine, and
(22:20):
so we went ahead and we actually tried to sell
it to Netflix and to HBO, and I went with
a top showrunner who's terrifically talented. But unfortunately, because I
didn't have the book finished, it was a hard sell.
So we didn't sell it initially. So I went ahead
and finished the book, and so the book didn't come
(22:41):
out into twenty nineteen. And when it did come out,
it was purchased by a fellow named Danny Strong, who
most recently has done Dope Sick, which was on Hulu.
He's a terrifically talented actor and particularly writer and Producer's
had a number of different shows Empire on Fox. He
(23:03):
had shows that won the Emmy on HBO. So Danny
was hoping to develop it, and so was I as
a drama. And then COVID comes along and so we
you know, you could just imagine a show that was
would be based in Washington, Cuba, Las Vegas, Hollywood, Chicago, Florida.
(23:27):
You can't. It was really hard to imagine that getting
done during the COVID shutdown. So Danny was able to
sell it to as a as a docu series to
Paramount Plus. And so it's going to be a six
part Paramount Plus where we have a number of different
experts myself included, who have sit down interviews, but we
also have Paramount provided an extra extra money to do
(23:51):
recreations that were done at the Paramount lot with actors
and such. In fact, the actor who plays Johnny Roselli
who fun of me, is the main character in the show,
along with Sam Jane kind of. But the actor who
plays Johnny Nick and Nunziata, he was in The Sopranos.
He was in six episodes of The Sopranos. And actually
(24:15):
Mafia Spies my show has three clips from The Godfather
as well. Paramount had done The Godfather, so there's a
certain gangland lineage to Mafias Spies, and I think it's
a really I think it's the best spy documentary I've
ever seen because it follows It's not like a term paper.
(24:38):
It follows the two gangsters through this incredible story and
so I think it's people are able to follow it
because you're able to follow the two individuals, the two gangsters.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
Oh absolutely, you get that character development and then you
start getting attached and following them along. And I like
the idea of that. So when it comes to control,
you wrote the book, you have a certain way that
you probably envision how the docu series is going to
turn out. How much control did you have over that?
(25:13):
And were there people, you know, Hollywood people in your
ear saying, hey, no, we're going to do it this
way because you know, people want to see that instead
of that the factual thing or is it straight factual information?
Speaker 2 (25:27):
It is very straight factual things and perfect perfect. The
people who are the sit down interviews are top people.
Chris Matthews who's on MSNBC for many many years and
everybody knows him and he's a biographer of the Kennedys.
He talks about the Kennedys. Tim Weiner, who is a
(25:47):
New York Times reporter who was an award winning historian
as well of the CIA and the FBI. He's in
it as well as far as Sinatra. We have James Kaplan,
who wrote the two part biography of Sinatra. We had
Gerald Posner who has written about He wrote Case Closed
(26:09):
about the jfk assassination. We have David Korn who wrote
about the CIA. He's written books about that. We have TJ. English,
who has written books about the whole Cuban experience in Florida,
and he's terrific writer. And I'm sure I'm forgetting people
(26:30):
and actually the best person of all. Well, I'm in it.
I should say that I'm essentially the on air commentator.
I moved the ball along, the narrative along, so I'm
quite a bit in it. But the one that I
think is the one that I find the most pleasing
is Antoinette Giancanna, who is the oldest daughter of Sam
(26:52):
g and Conna. She has a very elegant black dress
on with white pearls and the show and she is
funny and she says a lot of things that I
think are really provocative in the show, and she provides
a sense of what both men were like, both her
(27:13):
father and what Johnny Rosselli was like, in fact that
she had the hots for Johnny Rosselli like a lot
of other women. And so she actually says that in
the show, I had to laugh when I saw that.
And for those who are a little bit older, a
little bit longer in the tooth, like myself, they may
remember Antoinette gi and Conna. There was a book that
(27:34):
was written about her in the eighties that became a
big NBC series called Mafia Princess, and that actually that
book was written with Tony Gankanna and Antoinette, Juan Conna
and another writer his name was Tom Renner. And Tom
Renner worked with me at Newsday and he was a
friend of mine. We worked on the investigative team. So
(27:59):
when I told that to an Antoinette g and Conna,
she said, oh, Tommy Renner. What I remember about Tommy
Renner is that he looked just like my first boyfriend.
And so, you know, it's always made me crack up
when I've listened to Antoinette talk about the past, about
her father, about Johnny Roselli, and about all the things.
(28:21):
She has a theory about who killed her father, and
so she's in it as well. So we have a
lot of top people and it's all based on fact.
If you get a hold of my book, my book
has got more than I think six hundred footnotes in
the back and so all the documents are listed in
the back of the books. It is a fact based
(28:45):
documentary series that I think really does help break the
mold because it's it uses both the recreations in a
very effective way, but very fact based way.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
I actually preferred documentaries that in core par eight reenactments
because it gets you more involved with it. You know,
it puts you more into the setting yourself, and it's
like you're watching a movie, but you're seeing the real
time interviews as as you're watching the recreations. I honestly
enjoy that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Well, the show also has a retro u. The music
is great in Mafia's Spies. It really moves it along,
and it's got that that sixties rat pack Vegas vibe
to it as well. So it's you know, it's entertaining,
it's very informative, but it's all fact based.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
That's my thing. Like when I, like we were talking
a little bit ago, you know, I was involved with
a you know, a documentary through the History Channel, and
the reason they had wanted to incorporate me is because
I basically had no dog in the fight whether John
Dillinger was actually killed in Chicago or whether he wasn't,
I didn't care. I just wanted to present all the
(29:56):
factual knowledge that was available, whether it went with my
opinion or against it. You know, it's not my job
to make you think what I'm thinking. And unfortunately a
lot of documentaries they do that nowadays, and it's.
Speaker 2 (30:11):
Well, that's what's different about way I think Mafia Spy's
really Again, for the reason why I said it is
with the fact that the window into this world is
these two gangsters, so you can focus on it. I
think a lot of books and a lot of shows
about conspiracies and whatever, even when they're fact based, they
(30:34):
go off of their like you know, it's hard to follow,
but you can follow this from the very beginning. It
introduces it to these two characters and you follow their
path until the very end of their life and the
end of their life that both murdered in it. It's
very germane to the whole story.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
So while you were researching, what was I guess this
is a two part question. What was something that you
found out you didn't really previously know that just kind
of made you laugh, like, I can't even believe that
that's a real thing. That is funny as hell. And
then the second part is what was a piece of
information that just blew you away that you were like,
(31:17):
I gotta confirm this with another source, because that just
blew my mind.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Well, there's a lot of things that made me laugh.
And I think people that watch Mafia's Spies will see
that it's got a lot of humor. I think the
Sopranos had a certain sense of humor. I think that
God had some funny moment, definitely, and it is well
and Mafia Spies has got a lot of those type
of moments. The whole idea of Johnny Roselli having an
(31:44):
alias and always worried about it, and then how the
FBI finds out about it, I found that amazing and
kind of funny, the way in which they could plotted.
In fact, they actually confronted Roselli and they said Feliposako,
which was his real name, and then and they did
this on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, which is a
(32:05):
very swank type of place, right in front of Cartier's
and all these other high tony type of show stories,
excuse me, and so he was shocked. The funniest thing also,
when Gian Kanna basically demands that Sinatra and the rat
Pack perform in Chicago because they're upset that Sinatra has
(32:30):
not been able to convince the Kennedy administration to work
in their favors. So they have a kind of a
gambling night out in the suburbs of Chicago and the
rat Pack, Sinatra and Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Junior,
and they for the essentially like the weekend. They set
up this little mini vegas outside of Chicago, and Dean Martin,
(32:54):
who had a very funny sense of humor, when the
crowd got too loud, he said, hey, be quiet. You know,
he got to keep it down here because we have
mobsters asleep up in the upper rafts here, and you know,
so there's a lot of funny moments among the two
of them, particularly Johnny Roselli and Sam Jane kind of
(33:14):
that really underlines kind of the outlaw friendship of these
two gangsters. And there's another time when they start there
with Judy Campbell and they're going through a cemetery looking
at names, and they're looking for a real Sacho, a
real person with the name Saco. So Johnny can claim
that's one of his relatives from Chicago, because he has
(33:36):
an alias where he says he was born in Chicago,
and he wasn't. He was born in Italy, so you know,
and they're laughing their heads off about that. So there's
a lot of moments in my book that are described
like that. The most outrageous or most biggest surprise to
me was the extent of how many spies and double
(34:01):
agents were in Florida that were part of a network
of intelligence that Fidel Castro had set up. That in
other words, when Castro became a communist and ruler of Cuba,
he learned how to become a spy from the Russians,
and the Russians go way back in terms of spy,
(34:23):
and they showed him how to set up networks to
protect himself from assassination in Cuba. But also he was
able to plant people who came over apparently as exiles,
but they were sympathetic to Castro's government. And you can
see that in a lot of the documents that I
(34:43):
went through, CIA and FBI documents and other US government
documents where they realized, wait a minute, we're trying to
kill Castro, and it's almost like whack a mall where
they keep all these different tries to try to kill Castro,
and yet they never they all failed. They were never
(35:03):
able to get Castro and why was that? And only
towards the end did one of the characters a CIA
oversee an agent who oversaw that he was known as
the James Bond of the CIA. His name was William Harvey,
and it was really a tough guy, a very good spy,
(35:25):
and he became really good friends with Johnny Roselli. He
really was convinced that Roselli was for real, that he
wanted to kill Castro, that he was a so called patriot.
But he was the one who he finally realized, whoa
wait a minute, how does Castro know about all these attempts.
There's gotta be spies in Florida. So that to me
(35:46):
was the most intriguing surprise of it. And just who
was a double agent is something that I exposed towards
the end of the book.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
I love it, man, this is going to be so informative.
I'm actually excited. I'm going to described to Paramount just
so I can watch this now. So what are your
plans for the future, I mean, are you going to
keep going with the Mafia history and docu series or
do you have anything else planned in the works.
Speaker 2 (36:14):
Well, I have two things I'm going to be doing well.
The first thing that's the first order of things is
my novel called Montalk to Manhattan, and that comes out
in July as well. And that book, I didn't time
it that way, just that's the way the TV show happened.
Mont Talk to Manhattan is a novel of mine, and
(36:34):
it's essentially about a reporter who writes a historical book
about how the Indian lands in Montaugue were stolen by
a tycoon back in the eighteen eighties who ran the
Long Island Railroad. And this tycoon's idea was that when
ships came over from Europe, instead of running the risk
(36:57):
of shipwrecks along the shoreline of Long Island and coming
into New York Harver, they would instead land it at Montague.
Montague kind of sticks out from New York. It's about
one hundred miles away from New York City, and so
they would get on a train. They would land at Montague,
get on a train and go into Manhattan. So the
(37:18):
protagonist of my novel is a modern day writer for
a big New York newspaper. He's covering the Trump campaign
in the summer of twenty sixteen, so it's like set
in that time period, like the rise of Donald Trump,
but it's he has this book and the book becomes
(37:39):
a TV show that they're filming out in Montague. So
the name of the protagonist is a name. The guy's
name is Jack Denton. Actually, there's a video on YouTube
if you want to check it out, as a three
minute video about montagu to Manhattan, and it basically shows
the fundamental story is about this writer who writes a
(38:01):
book now becoming a TV show being filmed out in
Montalk and while it's being filmed, an actress goes missing,
and so it's kind of a fun murder mystery. It
says a lot about, you know, what happened with the
Montauk Indians. It's about it's the summer of twenty sixteen,
(38:21):
and it kind of feels like the summer of twenty
twenty four with Donald Trump running for president and such.
But this was particularly when Donald Trump was still not
all that well known. He was more of a TV preacher,
and so that's kind of like going on in the background,
and it's basically about this protagonist, Jack Denton. Everything He's
(38:42):
hoping that this TV show is going to turn around
his life because everything else is going. He's gotten divorced,
he gets fired in the middle of the book, and
so what happens to him, what happens that there's like
one grand ending there that's a big surprise who the
actress and what happens to Jack Denton is at the
(39:03):
end of this book. So that's really the first thing
that I'm most concerned about with beyond Mafia Spies.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Well, let's go ahead and let people know or if
you want to, let people know when Mafia Spies is
coming out, where the book is available, and just so
the listeners know, I will have all that information in
the episode description as well.
Speaker 2 (39:26):
Well. Mafia Spices comes out Tuesday, June fourth, so it's
out immediately. You can buy. There's old versions of the
original versions of Mafia Spice, but there's a new update.
Make sure you get the updated one with the paramount
cover on the book. And there's an update forward that
I have in the book that explains how this book
(39:48):
became a TV show, and that's in this book. But
it's got to cover with Sam g and Kanna and
Johnny Roselli and Bedel Castro and jfk and a number
of the women involve in the story on the cover there.
So that comes out and my novel Mont Talk to
Manhattan comes out July ninth, and so that's being published
(40:11):
by Postthill Press. Mafia Spies is published by Skyhorse And
so you can go onto my website. My website is
Thomas Mayerbooks dot com and so you'll get plenty of
information where to find the books, and you can go
to my publisher's websites, or you can go to Amazon
or any booksellers. Those books are out there, ready to
(40:33):
be ordered, and hopefully plenty of people do buy them.
Speaker 1 (40:36):
Absolutely I know I'm going to be one of those people.
And I'm so looking forward to this docu series and
go watch it, check it out by the book, and
keep your eyes on seeing what Thomas is doing here
in the future. So Thomas, I can't thank you enough
man for thank.
Speaker 2 (40:51):
You so much. Stay tuned to Paramountain showtime absolutely go by,
because Mafia Spies is coming and I'm hoping it blows
the lid off of everything and blows people away with
how just how entertaining it is. I think it's terrific.
You like The Godfather, you like Sopranos, you like any
of those type of shows, any type of spy thrillers.
(41:14):
It's kind of like the two flavors together. It's spying
and the mafia together. That's why it's called Mafia Spines.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
And it was real life, you know it's it was
real life. So I know I'm going to enjoy it
because I you know we're previously talking. I get into
mafia history so hard, so I'm gonna absolutely enjoy watching this.
I know a lot of my listeners will too. So
thank you again for joining me. And you know, if
you ever want to come on and talk about some
(41:42):
more stuff or promote your next book when it when
it's ready, and just let me.
Speaker 2 (41:47):
Know, justin thank you so much. I do have a
spy book coming out next year with.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Oh well, let well, let's hear it.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
What's going on I'm not ready to talk about Okay.
I think they'd be pissed if they if I said it, So.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
That's all right, Well keep in touch, and yeah, we'll
have you on for that too.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
That's about World War two.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
That's gonna be good.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
Well, I hope you have a good rest.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Well, of course, of course, I like I said, when
I got the email, I was like, oh, I have one.
Absolutely I want this interview because that's right down my alley.
Speaker 2 (42:22):
Think I have a great day.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
Thank you too, very appreciated. Ma.
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