#104 Operation Wasteland: Inside the Mafia w/ NYPD Detective Louis Balestrieri

Retired NYPD Detective Louis Balestrieri shares his story of growing up alongside mafia "wise guys" and his path to taking down organized crime in Operation Wasteland. In an era marked by rampant violence, homicides, crack epidemics, and out-of-control robberies, Louie found himself at a crossroads—raised in a neighborhood where mobsters and cops walked the same streets. He opens up about how he could have easily ended up on the wrong side of the law, but instead played a key role in the largest organized crime bust in NYC history—Operation Wasteland, a case that unraveled the Mafia’s stranglehold on NYC’s private sanitation waste industry.

Don’t miss this insider’s look into the Mafia’s shady dealings and the rigged system they controlled and still control to this day.

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#NYPD #OperationWasteland #MafiaStories #OrganizedCrime #WiseGuys #TrueCrime #MobLife #LouisBalestrieri #PrivateCarting #NYCHistory #LawEnforcement #CrimeBusting #InsiderStory #MafiaCorruption #DetectiveTales #wtfricklive

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Pulis, the stylis the m H.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
Yeah, st you down.

Speaker 3 (02:51):
Hello, everybody, welcome to What the Freak Live. It's another
Friday night, Friday. Love that cha. From my job. I'm
a recruiter. I interview people every day, and today I
got so tongue tired on saying tire to the tire.
I'm so t if. The guy I was interviewing, he

(03:15):
was he was up in Connecticut, and he that he
had family in West Virginia. His name was Tyler too, Tyler,
Tyler and Tyre. And I was tired today. Thank you,
Thank you everybody for tuning into What the Freak Live.
We really truly appreciate y'all. Hopefully you're all having an
amazing first month of twenty twenty five. It already feels

(03:35):
like a year. Crazy, right, it feels like a year already.

Speaker 4 (03:39):
Yeah, in the first two weeks.

Speaker 3 (03:41):
Yeah, I'm your host. Family. I got Will Martinez with
me with Dark Friend Radio.

Speaker 4 (03:46):
What's up Will, Good evening. Thanks for having me on.
I appreciate it.

Speaker 3 (03:50):
Well. We we love you.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
You're all. We love you. Over there.

Speaker 3 (03:55):
Stop it Will's getting Will's gonna get a taste of
medicine and of cold weather snap coming through Florida. Yeah,
early weeks. You prepare for.

Speaker 5 (04:04):
This, it's crazy, it's nuts. I'm not prepared for that.
I'm an island boy, you know. I'm just I'm not
South Florida born and raised. I mean, when it gets
down to forty, that's crazy for us, that's just like
that's like blow zero for you guys.

Speaker 4 (04:17):
You know what I mean.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
Well, we've been here, we were I think it was
like I think it was a negative eight. I think
it was with benchill with Winschild. Reasons for it's going
to be like that early this week too.

Speaker 4 (04:31):
Oh no, jeez.

Speaker 3 (04:32):
Hey, the older I get, the more I understand that
I want to move to a place that's one season,
all year round and no snows included in it, because
shoveling snow and ice. My poor dog, he's had major anxiety,
bless his heart.

Speaker 2 (04:47):
Like this was bad.

Speaker 3 (04:48):
Yeah, so but anyway, Yeah, today was thirty six degrees
or something, maybe early forties, and I wore shorts and
a T shirt today and I felt, shit.

Speaker 4 (04:57):
Look look at you mean?

Speaker 5 (04:59):
Well I would have been then like pants and like
you know, three like things of like layers or something.

Speaker 2 (05:04):
Yeah, Well we.

Speaker 3 (05:07):
Are streaming live on Facebook TikTok tonight for the first time.
If you're on TikTok, leave comments. I don't know if
if it will show up in the chat or anything,
and please be active in the chat. Please feel free
to ask any questions or just hey, how are you doing?
We'd love to see you. We are not streaming on
YouTube anymore. We're strictly TikTok Rumble on Facebook. And if

(05:28):
you hear noises, that's my dog next to me. That's
not my stomach, I promise. But Will has a show
called Dark Fringe Radio to podcast Will, what's going on
over there at Dark Fringe.

Speaker 5 (05:41):
Well, the inaugural show for twenty twenty five will be
out tomorrow and it's an interview with a really cool guest.
His name is Mark Ireland. He wrote this book called
Persistence of the Soul. He was nice enough to send
me a copy, but no utheless. It's a really good
story about a guy whose father was a psychic comedium,

(06:02):
a very well known psychic comedium, by the way, and
he didn't go down that route when he became mature.
He decided to go down to the corporate route and actually,
you know, make money and do all that stuff be
in business. Never went down or even entertained any of
the other stuff, But there was a really sad event
that happened. He lost his son and things changed all

(06:25):
the way around one eighty degrees and his life completely changed,
as any other you know, parent would of course, you know,
of course experiencing something like that. And now he is
helping other parents that are you know, going through that
kind of process of grieving of losing a son or
a daughter or something like that.

Speaker 4 (06:46):
So it's a really good book.

Speaker 5 (06:48):
He talks about you know, you know how he's talked
a lot of different psychic mediums and things like that
and gathered a lot of research and it's it's it's
really cool.

Speaker 4 (06:56):
So check it out.

Speaker 5 (06:57):
Derek Frigerada dot com. Tomorrow it'll be out, and I
hope you guys, yay, I.

Speaker 3 (07:00):
Will definitely be checking that out. And what a testimony
and a half. And we need more people like that.
I can't imagine that grief. No parent should. I don't
care how old your kid is, and you're if you're
eighty and your child's sixty, that's still your child, you know, Yeah, regardless,
it's hard, but everybody I just want to say this
too real quick. We'll introduce our guests and we have
a s isle real kind of thing of what we're

(07:23):
gonna be talking about tonight, Operation Wasteland. We're getting into mafia,
true crime. I know this is podcast month, but we
had to reschedule mister Louis b and he was gracious
enough and this is my first opening to put him
in to reschedule, so we're really happy to have him
on this evening. But we are going to have exclusive
content only starting in February. If there's the QR code

(07:45):
up here, it's on Locals if you have a Locals app,
but you can get it through Rumble. If you're on
Rumble right now. Actually, please give us a thumbs up.
That's what a rumble is over here. It really helps
our show. It keeps us in the algorithm of everything,
and we appreciate the sport over there. Please exclusive content
and I'm hoping in twenty twenty five will have giveaways.
We're growing. We're at that cuss folks.

Speaker 4 (08:07):
Yes, it's almost the job.

Speaker 3 (08:09):
Is the do or die here? Can you after twenty
twenty five or is it?

Speaker 2 (08:16):
Or ippy?

Speaker 3 (08:17):
What the freak? Well not I don't. I don't know.

Speaker 6 (08:19):
I love.

Speaker 3 (08:20):
We're right at the cuss And if you don't want
to subscribe every month, that's fine. Just buy us a coffee.
That's I think coffee lately will have you?

Speaker 4 (08:30):
Really? Yes, I'm not a coffee drinking.

Speaker 3 (08:32):
I'm not a coffee drinker. I got it today and
I got it yesterday. I don't know what to deal is.
Maybe it's because it's.

Speaker 4 (08:37):
Okay, what kind of coffee are we talking about? We
call it like importance coffee. I'll see, that's importance. Yeah, vanilla, right,
something vanilla.

Speaker 3 (08:48):
Yeah, sugar, lots of sugar.

Speaker 4 (08:50):
That's not coffee.

Speaker 3 (08:52):
That's coffee.

Speaker 5 (08:53):
To me, that's a glorified sugar drink.

Speaker 4 (08:55):
That's what that is.

Speaker 3 (08:56):
Well give me, give me a glorified sugar drink. Partout
the frink.

Speaker 4 (09:00):
Love over there, I am not judging. Hey, do your thing, girl.

Speaker 3 (09:05):
Well it does really help me. But tonight we have
an amazing guest, so we're gonna bring him on after
this is a real but we have retired NYPD Deck
Detective Louis B. I cannot say his last name. I'm Appalachian.
Don't even let me. We're gonna have him say his
last name. When he comes to the show, shares his
story of growing up alongside mafia wise guys as his

(09:26):
path to taking down organized crime in Operation Wasteland and
then era marked as rampant violence, homicides, crack epidemics, and
I'll control robberies. Louis found himselves at the crossra is
raised in a neighborhood where mobsters and cops walk the
same streets. He opens up about how he can have
easily ended up on the wrong side of the law.

(09:46):
He ended up being ny PD and you know, took
down pretty much the mafia stranglehold on the NYC's private
sanitation waste department, waste industries. Ramba mafia is true crime.
And we're going to play this little sizerole here and
we'll have Louis beyond after. This is a real of

(10:07):
Operation Wasteland. Thank you all will be right back as soon.

Speaker 2 (10:11):
As I.

Speaker 7 (10:15):
Garbage is big business here in New York and in
a lot of places around the country. The private karting
industry has been controlled by the mob for decades. Today,
prosecutors in New York began a clean up, arresting alleged
mobsters on charges that they used violence and economic pressure
to kill the competition.

Speaker 2 (10:34):
Organized crime was controlling the private sanitation industry.

Speaker 6 (10:39):
OSIN stands for Organized Crime Investigations, which investigated the five traditional.

Speaker 4 (10:44):
Organized crime families in New York City.

Speaker 2 (10:46):
Our investigation entailed the Gambinos and the Genovies. What the
hell did I get into?

Speaker 3 (10:55):
These are the best of the best. These are the
guys who took down some of the biggest cases on
the planet. And one of those cases was trash.

Speaker 2 (11:04):
Executed search warrants. Three hundred detectives went out.

Speaker 6 (11:07):
There, arrested seventeen defendants, which included twenty three carting corporations
and trade waste associations. Juliani was so excited he enacted
Local Law forty two, which was called the Trade Waste Commission.

Speaker 2 (11:25):
At the press conference, everybody was there. There were a
million cameras, a million reporters. Everybody was shooting us. Cameras
were going off. This was the largest major case organized
crime case and takedown in the history of New York
and the NYPD and law enforcement. The bad news Bears

(11:46):
conquered organized crime. We did it. Everybody had no confidence
in us, Nobody talked to us. We did it.

Speaker 6 (11:54):
Me Presley, I arrested two of the rival carters. But
I had a team of approximately fifteen ten detectives with
a sergeant and a lieutenant.

Speaker 2 (12:02):
I made detective in six years, and this is going
to be ten years now. I was gonna get second
grade and I had another ten years to make first grade.
I was on my path. I was doing what I
wanted to do, and that never happened.

Speaker 6 (12:18):
Where the FBI tried in nineteen fifty, in nineteen sixty,
in nineteen seventy to do it, and they were unsuccessful.
Where we were, we were called the bad news bears.
Nobody believed in us, especially the supervisors in one police plaza,
but we put egg on their face. We believed in it,

(12:42):
and we did it.

Speaker 2 (12:43):
Bill Breton and Juliani went to Washington, DC and they
were awarded fifty four million dollars. Where did the money go?

Speaker 6 (12:57):
The White House? President Clinton, Mayor Giuliani, and Police Commissioner
Brandon to the White House. We were hearing rumors up
in headquarters that the commanding officer of OCID and our
lieutenant hated us so much that they believed we didn't
deserve grade, and for that, none of us were promoted.

(13:21):
Our sergeant was so upset he put us in for medals,
which we finally got medals. Lou did not get a medal.
Why nobody will ever.

Speaker 2 (13:34):
Know today, I have no idea. All I could say
is they surely took in enough money to pay every
one of those guys, myself included in that team. We
should have all been promoted, okay, and we hung out
to dry. None of us got promoted. We were like distraught.

(13:57):
Nobody cared. That was my killer. I said, the hell
with this, I want out of here.

Speaker 6 (14:02):
The undercovered did a phenomenal job rightfully so promoted the
first grade. Absolutely without him it would have never happened.
But without us protecting him and doing the surveillances of
all these rival cardies and the Trade Waste Commission Trade
waste associations, this would have never happened. It just deflated us.

(14:24):
It just took the ripped the heart out of you.
As far as my family, I did not tell my siblings.
I kept it private. The only one I could confide
in was my partner, Loup. And in the end, nothing
we find out. The commanding officer and I'll lieutenant hated us.
That's just wonderful.

Speaker 3 (14:51):
There we go operational Wasteland. Louis B is on the show.
Welcome Louis B.

Speaker 2 (14:58):
How are you? Thank you so much for that was a.

Speaker 3 (15:00):
Really good clip. That was amazing. I try to find this.
We had a discussion before we went live and I
try to find like I couldn't find this for some
reason on YouTube yesterday or today to get this together.
But that was phenomenal on Louis B. We're we're very
thankful to have you on What the Freak Live. Thank
you and thank you to start this off? Can you

(15:23):
tell everybody your last name?

Speaker 2 (15:26):
My last name is Battleashi Alice Tieri. That's why everybody
calls me Louis B. It's so much easier.

Speaker 3 (15:32):
Yeah, I can't. I can't do it. I probably wouldn't
even be able to spell it unless I practice it
a long time, so I still can't spell it. Well,
amazing work you did up there in New York City,
and I can't thank you enough for coming on and
be impatient to reschedule with this here on What the

(15:52):
Frick Lives. So if you don't mind, since this is
the first time that you're on the show and we
watched this clip, here, can you tell everybody a little
bit about yourself, and then we'll get into the nitty
gritty of some details about what happened.

Speaker 2 (16:05):
Sure. I grew up. I was born in South Brooklyn.
The area was a known Colombo crime family area, Colombo
and Geneviez. There was just organized crime guys all around.
My father had a cousin that was a book maker,

(16:30):
and when I was like four years old, five years
six years old, he would give me a bed to
take down the block. I have to give it to
Uncle Mike. Then when I came back, they give me
five dollars. I thought that was pretty good. I was
running the numbers for them without knowing it, because who's
going to stop a little kid. They go out the

(16:52):
street Uncle Jimmy, who waved to Uncle Mike, and I
ran the numbers down the block. I had the brown
paper back and I had like two hundred dollars in
my bank. My mom says, where'd you get this money?
I got it from Uncle Jimmy. What are you doing
with it? I take the bag down the block and
that was my introduction to how things work. From there,

(17:17):
I moved to East New York, Brooklyn and in East
New York Brooklyn. It was another wise guy area. Everybody
that you saw in Goodfellas grew up in that area. Okay,
it was Scambino crime family people. It was Lukesey crime

(17:38):
family people. Who was Banano crime family people? And I
was a kid, but I was rubbing shoulders with all
the kids of these organized crime guys, and I didn't
know any better. I went to Catholic school and who
am I going to school with organized crime guys kids?

(18:00):
I would say, Hey, John, where's your father? You know,
how come he didn't come to the art festival. He's working.
His father was in jail, you know. I don't want
to mention any names per se, but these were heavy
hit his kids. And from there I went to high
school and I went to Christ the King High School

(18:23):
the Middle Village, Queens, and many of the kids that
went to that high school were from Howard Beach. And
I don't know if you're any thing about Howard Beach, Queens.
It's predominantly Italian. It's predominantly a lot of organized crime
guys are there. John Gotti and his family were there.
A ton of people were there. And who did I
go to school with organized crime guys kids? And we were.

(18:49):
We weren't gangsters, but we had our own little clique.
Was all the organized crime, you know, crime guys kids
and me. I was not an organized crime guy. I'm
a family of fourteen cops believe it or not, Wow,
members in my dad's family who were sanctioned organized crime people.

(19:11):
I'm not one of them. But it was all around me,
That's all I know, You know what I mean. I
picked up their ways from being one of the guys
I went to school with, high school with. Is currently
a a coppo in one of the crime families. Other
people that I knew married organized crime guys, and you

(19:32):
know it was it was just all a right. We
didn't think nothing of it. We didn't. I grew up
when I when I lived in eastern New York, Brooklyn,
I didn't think I was doing anything new.

Speaker 4 (19:41):
It was normalized for you.

Speaker 2 (19:43):
It was we didn't know any better. Like one particular
thing I did, didn't realize I was doing anything wrong.
There was a truck on the block. Cops were chasing them.
The truck trying to make a turn, They hit a curb,
they crashed, the doors of the truck opened. The cops
were chasing these guys out on foot. What do we

(20:04):
do with I look in the back of the truck.
There was ladies pants suits in the back of the truck.
Guess what happened with those pants suits? They went in
my father's garage. A week later, I was a pantsuit salesman.
I don't think I was doing anything.

Speaker 5 (20:20):
It's it's it's what I did.

Speaker 2 (20:23):
It's what we all did. Another time, a truck turned
over on a main thoroughfare and it blocked up traffic,
and uh, my dad came home from work and says,
it took me twenty minutes to travel three block. What happened?
There was an action a truck. What kind of truck?
My wheels are turning? It had saw it on it

(20:47):
ran out at the guy. Of course the street me
it was. We called him frank the Guinea he was from,
and I'm Italian, so I could say that you had
a dumb truck. He did hard labor, concrete work, said
Frankie common. Let's go, what do you do. You're gonna
get me to rest, don't worry about it.

Speaker 7 (21:03):
We go.

Speaker 2 (21:03):
We'd fill up his truck with sod. Next week, everybody
on the block had dust. We scored That's what we did.
Did I think I was doing anything? Noah, I was
fourteen years old. That's all I know. You know, this
is the kind of stuff that I did. All right.
Then from here we moved out from East New York,
which was turning pretty bad. I moved out to Massa,

(21:27):
people Long Island. While I'm there, I hook up with
another bunch of guys and who are they? They were
all related to organized crime?

Speaker 6 (21:36):
Have you?

Speaker 2 (21:37):
And while I'm working there. While I'm there, I start
working for someone, a family of people that own a
pizzeria that was run by organized crime guys. And then
you know, their ways started to rub off on me. Now,
I wasn't dealing drugs, I wasn't killing people. I wasn't

(21:59):
people would baseball bats. I wasn't collecting money we would
we were. We called it hustling.

Speaker 4 (22:05):
We were earning, and opportunity is opportunis.

Speaker 2 (22:10):
We were opportunists exactly. Okay, you know, we did a
lot of stupid things that we were. Okay, when I
was twenty one years old, I drove a brand new Lincoln.
I had money than my dad. How I was hustling,
don't what I had to do? You know, here's somebody.
Everybody and anybody would hey, you corrupt. We had everybody

(22:33):
stealing for us or whatever whatever we had to do.
We had guys that were doing burglaries, bringing us diamond rings.
Take the diamond ring, run downstairs, talk to the manager
of a jewelry store and say, hey, uh, how much
for this ring? I'll give you a hundred. They ran upstairs.
Give you. The guy stole fifty for fifty in my pocket.

(22:56):
We scored. Another thing we did was what cretical. Uh,
if you came in with a bad card, we had
somebody who would tell you to take a walk, you know,
otherwise you're gonna get locked up. A guy comes in
with a card, a big, tall black guy, not to
point on any type of yeah, of course, race have you?
And the name on the uh uh on the credit

(23:18):
card is Tony Jordano. You know that this guy's not
Tony Jordannel. Mister n I did no, I don't okay,
my friend, this is a bad card. And when I
turn my back, you got you better run. The guy
would take off because he doesn't want to get wrested.
What does the guy do? I'm not gonna mention his name.

(23:38):
He calls us, how you doing? Your shoes are here?
We run downstairs and we bang out the card. Everybody
got new suits. What was it? It was a score, you
know what I mean. Do we think we're doing anything wrong?

Speaker 3 (23:49):
No?

Speaker 2 (23:50):
Well we absolutely and uh you know that's just the
way it was. I was a young buck. I always
had a pocket full of money. Uh I'm not say
I don't know. If you saw a goodfellas y Yes, absolutely,
Henry Hill did. Yes, uh, you know, going he went
into nightclubs and this and that. We had that whole opportunity.

(24:11):
We did the same thing. We knew people, you know,
people knew us. It was your wise guy. No, but
because of Hawaii was associated with and affiliated with they
just made that assumption, as crazy as it sounds. Today,
Henry Hill's wife is part of I'll call her my

(24:32):
management team. She's a lovely lady. She's the person who said, listen,
you got to tell you a story to people. People
love this. And here I am today and I'm you know,
just telling U telling the way this is. I'll tell
you the truth, nothing but the truth. Based on my experiences. Now,
while I was doing these crazy things, what happened to
me was I did something really crazy and there was

(24:53):
another guy that I was dealing with. He got arrested,
and that was a that was a scare. I got
a smack in the head, and I decided to go
to work for an insurance company.

Speaker 3 (25:05):
Now, I'm sorry, you went from seats, grew up and
went to insurance company.

Speaker 2 (25:10):
Right, I went to insurance company. That's awesome, those are organized.

Speaker 3 (25:15):
I was gonna say, that's.

Speaker 2 (25:19):
Okay. Now what happens when I start working in the
insurance company. Okay, I see mister Smith, He's trying to
get life insurances. What okay, He's like nine hundred pounds
street teeth in his head. I can't get his dog insurance.
So you know, he wants a lot of wants a
lot of coverage. I might the wheels are turning. You know,

(25:41):
I make a fifty five percent commission. So what do
I do. We send the doctor over to take his
blood pressure. His blood pressure is nine hundred over three fifty.
He's not getting life, got it? So what we did
was we had uh uh to steal a character from

(26:03):
from an old comedian doctor Vinnie Boombots. We send him
over there. He's got a white envelope. When he goes there,
we greet him, he takes the other arm. Oh once
twenty over eighty perfect health. He gets insurance, we get
the commission. Two years later he dies. Everybody's happy, okay.
And then I was selling major medical plans and I

(26:27):
would come say, mister Martinez, how are you good? Who
other than yourself makes the final decisions on these matters
where we're gonna pick up this major medical blame? So
I do, Okay. You came out to me with me.
I took you to lunch, and I took you to
the WHO house and I got you tightened up. You
were happy. You went home that day smiling, and I

(26:50):
got the case. And that's what organized crime does, you know?
They it's business. That's an all loganized crime. But that's
some of the things that I did. So one day
I had decided I was gonna get married, and I
had a fiance, and I decided her father was a cop.

(27:14):
I got a if I want to have a family,
I got to get benefits and this and that, and
I took a lot of tests private sanitationian stay true,
but is that? And whoever called me? I went and
the police department called me, and I turned took that
life and I never looked back. And when I was
a cop, I'm going to tell you this, never stole

(27:36):
a dime, never took a dime from anyone. You could
not pay me off. I didn't steal drugs. That wasn't
the guy who I was. Okay, did I see it
going on? Nope? Okay. Way back in the eighties, we
were self policed. If you were doing something wrong, cops
would whoop your ass. Okay, you you know we didn't

(27:56):
have to. Things were a lot different way back when.
And what I did was I took those ways of
organized crime and I brought him to the police department.
I'm not in a manner that you think organized crime
guys would do. I just I studied their weakness and

(28:18):
I learned to control the controllers. Okay, now that doesn't
make any sense, but I'll give you an example. In
the precinct, we had what was called the ICO, the
integrity control officer, okay, and he was like internal affairs
for the precinct. One night while me and my partner,

(28:40):
great guy, I'll mention him, I love him to death.
I still talked to him. His name of Jimmy Bee,
and he was the best cop I ever worked with.
We happened to catch our ico in his unmarked car.
Now he's out there supposed to be catching us doing
something wrong. We catch him drunk as a skunk and
even drive. Okay, here's what happens. We take him out

(29:05):
of the car. We'd lock down his car, we take
his keys, We put him in our car. We take
him home to his house. We don't say nothing to anybody.
This was on a Friday night, Monday morning. He comes
into work. I give him his keys, didn't say words.
He didn't say two words. Guess what. I control the controller.

Speaker 4 (29:25):
Now.

Speaker 2 (29:26):
If I what I'm saying, I could do anything I
want in that command, because I had him buy his shorthands.

Speaker 3 (29:32):
You know.

Speaker 2 (29:32):
It's also I would do favors for people. Because I
do a favor for you, you owe me, and I
do this for the bosses. They had no idea what
I was doing. If you watch The Godfather, in the
beginning scene of The Godfather, you will see a guy
who is an undertaker, and he asked Don Corleone on

(29:57):
the day of his daughter's marriage, that has to grant
him any wish. He wants, and he asked him for
a favor. He granted him the favor, and he says
to him, thereby one day, I'm calling you back for
your services, and on that day, you're going to have
to help me out. I did the same thing all
the time. Okay, we had what was known as UF

(30:22):
twenty eight's, they will leave of absence forms. Now you
had to fill out this twenty eight and bring it
to the roll call girl. At the time, back in
the eighties, these girls were making eighteen thousand dollars a year.
They were poor. You know, we were making I wasn't
making much more. It was back in the eighties now.
And what I did was I made that twenty eight

(30:46):
form a thirty eight, and he said, what the hell
are you talking about?

Speaker 4 (30:49):
A thirty eight?

Speaker 2 (30:50):
Every time I gave that foreman to the girl, I
slipped a ten dollar bill inside it. It was a
thirty eight. You know, I got the day off. I
control the controller. I also made sure that she ate
well and I brought a bagels in the morning.

Speaker 3 (31:04):
And that's.

Speaker 2 (31:11):
You know what I'm saying, is it is it illegal?

Speaker 4 (31:18):
Skirty?

Speaker 2 (31:22):
That's the type of stuff that that I did. I
became a cop in nineteen eighty four, went to the
police Academy and the first preconct I worked in was
the seventh priesst on the lower east side of Manhattan,
and that precinct was the heroin capital of America. It
was the low reside of Manhattan. It was the worst
possible place to work in. The particular precinct was known

(31:46):
as a dumping ground because anybody who screwed up in
the city is divided up into burroughs. Any cop who
got in trouble in a precinct within the borough got
sent to the seventh Priescinct. It was horrible, when I
tell you horrible. You couldn't get there. You had to
go over a bridge. There was always traffic. There was

(32:07):
no place to eat. So I started at the lowest
rung of the ladder. The only place I could go
is up. And that's how my career went. I was
a very aggressive cop. I enjoyed working with the guys
I did, and we were we were tight, like a family.
I worked some of the best, some of the best
of the best were there and uh, excuse me, uh.

(32:32):
With my partner, Jimmy Mehan, we worked together and we
wound up being put in a robbery car where we
only investigated robberies, and from there we got put into
an anti crime unit. Him and I we took ten
armed robberies in one month. That's unheard of. So they
put us in an in an anti crime unit, which
we were out there to prevent and deter violent street

(32:55):
crimes in progress. Sometimes we rode around in a taxi
cab and we would sit with you and we know,
and we developed a we gotta watch this guy. We
watch what he's doing, you know, and then we jump
out on the car, we do a jump collar, you know.
And from there he went into another robbery unit, and
I went into narcotics. I started to work in Manhattan
South narcotics, which covered fifty ninth Street, River to River

(33:21):
all the way down to Battery.

Speaker 3 (33:24):
Park, which the South Side. Yeah, okay, and I.

Speaker 2 (33:30):
Did narcotics there After that, I moved to Queens because
they broke up our unit, and I went into a
narcotic steam in Queens where we covered the whole burrough
of Queens. While there, I got promoted to detective. Now
this is pretty good. In six years, I got promoted
to detective, which is pretty fast, and I'm talking about

(33:53):
I was taking arrests. Okay, I was taken. There were
months where I was taken eighteen felony college in a month.
We're the team when I was in Manhattan that covered
the Deuce, which is forty Secondary. We're the team that
cleaned up forty second Street when it was it was

(34:13):
full of drugs and crime and prostitution. And we're the
team that cleaned it up. And I was very happy
to be a part of that. And then I went
to Queens because my lieutenant he got promoted to captain
and they were busting up the team. So I went
to Queens. I stayed there. I got promoted to the detective.
After a short time, I went into a unit that

(34:35):
was created by the first George Bush. The father called
heider intensity drug traffick. But he said the Daddy Bush, Yeah,
Daddy Bush.

Speaker 3 (34:50):
He's something else to go ahead.

Speaker 2 (34:56):
You know that didn't matter. He said to the NYPD,
give me thirty of you best detectives and we will
divide them up into three different teams. One team was
gonna do traditional Colombian drugs drug gangs. The second team
was gonna do non traditional drug gangs. And the last

(35:16):
one is going to be Asian gangs. You're gonna follow,
You're gonna do Asian heroin now working in Manhattan, I
had a very very good background on Asian organized crime.
I had written a intelligence paper for for how crimes
within the Asian community work and this and that's what.
That made me pretty knowledgeable. So I took an interview

(35:40):
with an Asian lieutenant and he said to me, you know,
would you consider working I says yeah. He says, you
seem to have the gift to gamble. What have you?
Would you be an undercover? What do I have to
be an undercover? I already got my detective shield. Undercovers
are usually cops trying to do a short time, not sure,

(36:00):
like twenty eight months in an undercover capacity, and then
they get promoted to detective as a reward because it
could be very dangerous. So I'm already a detective. I said, well,
what are you gonna do for me? He says, well,
I will see it that you get another grade level
in detective, which i'd make sergeants pay now, which is
really good. I said, I'll do it. I'll do it.

(36:23):
So now I become an undercover. What I did was
I took the role of one of the organized crime guys,
organized crime associates that I knew from Long Island. He
had a bunch of nephews. Okay, I became one of

(36:47):
his nephews, and I took the name of Louis Besill Okay.
And what I did was I paralleled it to my life. Yeah,
buying self pizzerias and Da Da Da Da. I also
had since I worked in new show, this company. Depending
on the case here he is, depending on we.

Speaker 3 (37:06):
Keep going, don't be described to keep going, but I
want to talk about this here in a second.

Speaker 2 (37:11):
Depending depending on the case I was doing. If I
was doing something down in the Wall Street area. Now,
mind you, I only followed Asian heroin, and heroin is very,
very prominent in the Hamptons on Long Island, and it's
very prominent in down in the Wall Street area. These
guys do heroin. They do a lot of coke, but
they do heroin also. So I had to be able

(37:32):
to walk the talk and talk to talk and because
of my background, they could not trip me up because
I knew what I was talking about. So uh, I
had to learn all about Asian heroin there's a lot
of different kinds of heroin, as heroin that comes from Afghanistan,
from uh from Mexico, from this blasts. I was doing

(37:53):
Asian heroin, the finest heroin in the world. I was
paying white boy prices six thousand dollars an ounce. That's
a lot of money in heroin. Okay. Now, when you
bought Asian heroin, you did not buy it in kilos.
Kilo is two point two pounds, which is one thousand grams. Okay,

(38:13):
With Asian heroin, you bought a unit. A unit is
seven hundred grams, and it came in a brick and
it was stamped by the guy who made it. Very
very tight, tight network, very hard to break into. And
I did it for twenty eight months, and I never

(38:33):
ever got to one of the major Asian players. Some
of the cases that I worked on went into the
Asian triangle, but I was never able to get there. Now,
as I progressed this lieutenant, this Asian lieutenant, and I
we kind of bumped heads and he's a lieutenant. I'm

(38:56):
the detective and I got launched and as a what
the NYPD did to me was I told them I
do not want to do anything traditional, any traditional organized crime,
I'm going to run into somebody that I know. I
don't want to do that. Okay, they knew it. I

(39:18):
knew it as it was when I was buying Asian herolin.
I was back in Brooklyn rubbing shoulders with people that
knew my family. I didn't let them know who I was.
But you know, the biggest thing is you don't want
to get caught and somebody blow your cover. So they
put me in a team. I'm working with another guy. Now.

(39:40):
Where I'm doing organized crime is controlling the Italian bread industry.
And they were telling Italian bread bakers where they could
sell their bread, and they were telling stores who they
could buy their bread from. And what you had to
do is you had to join the bread Bakers Association,

(40:02):
where you're kicking back to the organized crime guys. You
had to go to their meetings and what have you.
And as a rule, you're kicking back twenty percent. And
what I would do, I walk in, Hey, how you doing. Hey,
nice to see it. Uh, this is my brother law
over here. We're gonna we're doing a we got a
new bakery here, you know, and we're doing the neighborhood.
Where do you buy your bread from? We buy it

(40:22):
from Pallagonia's all right? What do you pay? What do
you pay a loaft? Thirty five cents? Listen, I do
it for twenty five I can't do that. What you
mean you can't do that? What new kids on the block?
Come on, we're trying to break in. Give us a break.
Come on? What buy Zon's? You know what I mean?

Speaker 3 (40:36):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (40:38):
Now, I can't do that? Why not association? What association?
We talked about? Associated? I never had my family's in
this busy fifty years, this business fifty years. Where do
you talk about association? I knew what was going on,
but I'm playing the game. Nah, I can't do it.
All right, I'll come back and see you again next
time I come back. What I do is I'm wired
now for sound. I'm gonna get this guy to tell

(41:00):
me he's being squeezed by the organized crime. Come back
in again. I got like twelve loaves of bread. Where's
your brain? These are for nothing? Don't way we could
do something I want to. I moved the bread, put
it on the side, and put my bread over it.
They get they're a little pissed. Off of me. I
can't do Come on, what are you talking about. What
I'm trying to do is lord the organized crime guys

(41:22):
out to visit us and shake us down, And that
was my job to get them to come out. While
I'm there, Me and this other guy, Uh, they decide
they're gonna pull me out of this team and they're
gonna stick me in another team, in this private sanitation team. Now,

(41:42):
in the private sanitation team, these were the bad News Bears.
These are all the screw ups. These are all the
guys that nobody wanted to deal with. If you came
into the unit, you didn't have any sergeant, I wanted
to pick you up and put put you in this team.
You went into headquarters team number one. Now I get there.
I'm working with the worst lieutenant I could possibly possibly wait,

(42:06):
he's a completity. Louis, Okay, I get in this team.
The first three or four weeks I'm in this team,
my reputation gets there before nobody talks to me.

Speaker 3 (42:17):
Hey, Louis, Louis, before we get into bad News Bears
and the department. I want to play this. I want
to play this clip because I'm tired of looking at
him first and foremost of Daddy Bush. Because I remember
when this came out. I was very little, and I
remember us kids, we would always make jokes that President

(42:38):
Bush was holding crack in the Oval office. And this
is a two minute clip. I'm going towards the latter
half of this, but here listen to President Bush. Here,
this is all the contra uh stuff.

Speaker 4 (42:52):
I ran, contra legal drugs.

Speaker 8 (42:54):
I will present to you our national strategy to deal
with every aspect of this threat.

Speaker 3 (42:59):
What's this?

Speaker 8 (43:00):
And I will ask you to get involved in what
promises to be a very difficult fight.

Speaker 3 (43:05):
You get so involved.

Speaker 8 (43:06):
Out of his drawer, this is crack cocaine seized a
few days ago by drug enforcement agents in a park
just across the street from the White House. It could
easily have been heroin. Is that really turning our cities

(43:27):
into battle zones? And it's moving our children? Let there
be no mistake. This stuff is poison.

Speaker 3 (43:36):
I just I just remember that came out during that
time and the commercial nobody wants to be a junkie
when they grow up. And my brother and I would
sit there laugh at as commercials and we're like, we're
going to be junkies. We didn't know what we were
talking about.

Speaker 4 (43:53):
This is your brain, and this is your brain.

Speaker 3 (43:55):
Drugs, drugs, the drug and stuff that was going on.

Speaker 2 (44:00):
Area till around eighty six, eighty seven. It pushed a
lot of the heroin out to where I was working,
and we started to concentrate on cracking cocaine. I did
some major case drug byes while I was in Manhattan.
I bought cocaine, nine outs of cocaine. And I was

(44:21):
working with another undercover and he was supposed to his
uncle was supposed to be a wise guy, and I
was the money man, and we got into a situation
where it I got into this apartment, there was six
locks on the door. The guy decided he was Sicilian.
He took out a knife and he started waving a
knife at my throat my face, and the lieutenant said
to me, listen, get in and get out. Don't fool

(44:44):
with this guy. This is what I'm thinking. And then
everything started going haywire. We wound up making the buy
and when I went downstairs, they says, that's it. They
went upstairs, they kicked the door in and he got
locked up.

Speaker 3 (44:58):
So my question, it's just a side note here with
this Daddy Bush. Was that really crack he pulled out
or was.

Speaker 4 (45:06):
That just a crack?

Speaker 2 (45:09):
It looked like it. It looked like it. Okay, it
looked like it.

Speaker 3 (45:13):
Who knows, God is just weird to me to this day.
And I remember being very little, thinking our president of
the United States pulled up crack.

Speaker 2 (45:22):
It looks like it looks like it looks like crack.

Speaker 4 (45:25):
It even has like the If you look at the
thing it had like, it looks like candy.

Speaker 2 (45:30):
We call that wrong. It looks like it looks to
me like an evidence voucher, okay, voucher drugs. And he
was using it to show let me, let me tell
you something about crack. Okay. Crack in Manhattan was bought
in vials. Okay, okay, little tiny vials. He had blue tops,

(45:53):
red tops, green tops. All right, Now, this is how
ingenious these crack dealers were. They used the vials. The
screws on your eyeglasses came in these little vials. They
bought them. And that's how did a blue a jumbo

(46:14):
one was a twenty dollars vial, A red top meant
something else. That's so ingenious. I gotta give them the
utmost respect for thinking of that. I would have never
thought of that. When I went into Queens, they were
just put it in your hand or whatever. There were
guys dealing out of their mouth. You know, narcotics is
a dirty business. I locked up a lady for dealing

(46:40):
heroin out of a baby's diaper. How much lower do
you get? I observed a woman perform oral sex on
a dog for a hit on a crack.

Speaker 3 (46:52):
Man advisory or whatever on this episode. By the way,
hopefully this doesn't get kicked off on Facebook. It might,
but I can't imagine. I live what they call the
overdose capital of the nation right now. And if you
go to Netflix and you watch the documentary Heroin, that's

(47:15):
my area and the brown bag ladies go to my
church and stuff stuff. That's a little dose of where
no pun intended when I say dose, but that's the
area I live in, so it's pretty widespread. A lot
of pill mills, a lot of that stuff here too.
But your story is very intriguing. I want Will to

(47:35):
ask a question real quick and then we're I want
to we need to talk about this biggest drug bus
that you did, and you worked with Rudy Giuliani on
that with the Sanitation Department. But Will, I want Will
to be able to ask a question real quick.

Speaker 4 (47:50):
Yeah, I just one question I had for you, Louis.

Speaker 5 (47:52):
I mean, obviously, being undercover and doing a lot of
the things that you did, did you ever run into
somebody that you knew you were like, damn shit, I
don't want to bust this guy, but I have to
bust this guy because I don't want to blow my cover.

Speaker 2 (48:04):
Sam, Sorry, say that again.

Speaker 5 (48:05):
While you were undercover doing you know, right different things,
did you ever run into a situation where you were like, damn,
I know this guy. I can't bust him, but I
have to bust him because if I don't bust him,
I'm gonna blow my cover.

Speaker 4 (48:17):
Now, that never happened to me.

Speaker 2 (48:19):
Listen, I had a job to death, get it. I
was sworn to do that job. I was gonna do
it if he had to get arrested. First of all,
as an undercover, I don't make the arrest, as somebody
else make the arrest. But if it was some God
forbid with somebody I knew, or a CoP's kid or
what have you. He screwed up, he's getting arrested, we

(48:40):
would treat him really good. We wouldn't stick him in
genuine population. That's just a courtesy. I extended that to
other people. I'll tell you something that I did as
a cop. I was in uniform on patrol. I had
a guy come off the FDR drive driving a car. Okay.

(49:05):
It was obvious that he was drunk, all right, and
myself and another partner saw him come out of We
almost hit him, so we spin off. We were in
a van. We turned it around, pulled him over. He's
in a duc in a quarter and also builducing a quarter.
This is back in the ages nineteen eighty five. It
was December of nineteen eighty five, right before Christmas. Very

(49:27):
well dressed, black man. Okay, pull him over, roll down
the window. These stinks. He's drunk. And I said, can
I please have your license, your registration, your insurance card.
He had a car with New Jersey devisiplates. I look
at the man. He opens up his wallet and I

(49:49):
see a picture of him, his wife, it's obvious, his daughters,
the sons and grandchildren. I didn't see that man anymore.
You know what I saw saw my father And they said, Tim, sir,
where you coming from? He says, I'm a vice president
for City Bank and we had our Christmas party and
it says it's you know, it was like nine o'clock

(50:10):
in the nineties. I'm just trying to make it home.
I had that one lass drink and it did me in.
It's okay. Now, I know that the month of December,
cops lock up. They'll lock up their mother for overtime
because we need money. And I'm going to take true.
Sorry now okay. Uh so we had a saying college

(50:39):
for dollars. This is what we did. I don't think
this is done anymore, but this is back in the eighties.
Everything went, Everything was a keeper. Okay. Now I know
that I'm going to take this man and I'm gonna
put him in a jail cell in Central Booking in population.
And he's he's got a nice watch on, he's got
he's gonna get okay. And I looked at him. He's

(51:04):
not I know, he's not a bad guy. It's just
mister Brown. Is there anybody home in your house? He goes, yeah,
my wife and my daughter. I says, can we call them?
So he goes. He looks at him, don't let's call
get him on the phone. Go to the phone bill,
tell you donate, Miss Brown, and police officer Boucherie, got
your husband here not feeling well, okay, misplace his keys.

(51:28):
Is there any way you could come here? He doesn't
need medical attention or what have you. You know, is
there any way you could come here and bring us
out of car keys and pick him up? He said, yeah, sorry,
let me let let him talk to it. Uh huh, okay, honey, okay,
I'm over here. Okay, missus Brown, here's the deal. He'll

(51:50):
be here such and such a place. Be careful of
Merry Christmas. Hung up the phone, says to the guy,
give me your keys. Took his keys, locked him in
his trunk. I said, marry Chris, I didn't lock them up.
I let them go. If I did that today, they
locked me. From my dad, I learned. He always told

(52:12):
me everybody you deal with is somebody to somebody. You
are somebody's daughter, you are somebody's mother, You are somebody's brother,
somebody's father, You're somebody to somebody. And treat these people accordingly,
because the way you hurt them, the ripple effect is

(52:32):
gonna be astounding. You're gonna hurt their families. As well.
I mean, if the guy's gonna try and kill you, you
do what you gotta do. Don't get me wrong. And
that's the way I dealt with people. And don't get
me wrong. Now, if I could row down, if I
had to, it was a slap of ramre extravaganza. But
I had six opportunity. I'm very proud of this. Six

(52:55):
opportunities to take a human life. In other words, I
could have killed you while on duty. I didn't kill anybody.
I'm very proud of that. And there were a lot
of other cops who would have been a little looser
on their finger trigger. And I had every opportunity to
shoot you dead, and I didn't do that because I

(53:17):
looked at you as a human being. And that's that's
the way I am today. But now, in today's world,
i'd kill you in a heart.

Speaker 3 (53:26):
The absolutely it's all changed. So tell us about Operation Wasteline.
How did you get into the sanitary.

Speaker 2 (53:35):
I got stuck in the team. I got stuck in
this team. Now I'm working with my partner there, Victor Fiabonni.
Great guy. He's my brother, Okay, I talked to him
all the time. He's like my brother. Today, we're in
this team. Now, nobody talked to me and we finally

(53:55):
after after working in the team, well they realized said
I'm not a bad guy, and we all hook up.
Now we're in this team. Nobody wants to be there.
It's the Bad News Bears. It's ten guys that have
different personalities. It was with nobody did what they We

(54:16):
didn't want to work there. Nobody wanted to work there,
and we didn't want to do this case. We're stuck
with it. Finally, we got to a point in the
case where we grabbed a fire breathing dragon by the tail.
As per my my sergeant at the time, he says, listen,
we're gonna continue to be the Bad News Bears. Nobody
talked to us, Nobody wanted anything to do with us.

(54:38):
If we solve this case, if we do this case,
it's a home run. So as a team, we banned
it together. And I'm not you know, I'm not a
I didn't do this whole case by myself. Every we
were all spokes on a wheel, and I give all
the other detectives credit as well. Everybody we covered. We

(54:59):
had a keep the undercover safe, take them home. We
had confidential informants. We had to pick them up sometimes,
you know, I was out in the field.

Speaker 3 (55:07):
And get in the trash, like on the truck and
stuff and picked.

Speaker 2 (55:11):
Up trash and no, no, we had the under that's
what the undercover. I and my partner Vick were able
to be infiltrated weddings. We went to weddings because if
you saw it in the UH, in the the video
that you played, there was a handsome guy. He was
in a bass suit. He had a full head of hair.

(55:32):
That was me. Now I could talk. I talked to talk.
I know what to say UH. And I could get
into places where most guys who were irish or what
have you couldn't get. In one particular situation, we were
sitting up on a UH. We were sitting and watching
a location that was a catering hall and doing the

(55:55):
wire tap. We had information that they were going to
have a big meeting there. So we're in the parking lot.
We're taking down license plates and we got binoculars. You're
trying to take pictures. You want to see who's there
and so on and so forth. So I see these
guys go into the location. They come out with a
folder underneath their arm. That's what the hell's going on
with this folder. We got to get one of those folders.

(56:16):
So I called my sergeant and I said, Boss, listen,
they're coming out with these folders. We got to get one.
That's the whole key to being here. We got to
find out what's in the folder. So he says, I said,
I'm gonna go in there. He says, you can't go
in there. I says, I'm going in there. He says
you can't. You could be oh by yourself. I sayn't
worry about it. I'll get in there. He says, you
out of your mind. I'm not telling you to go.
I'm going in. So I left my other partners in

(56:40):
the parking lot. There, there's a couple of cars. I says,
I'm gonna go in there. I'm gonna try and steal
one of those folders. I says, if anybody you see
people running, come in help me. I'm in trouble. So
I walk in in front.

Speaker 6 (56:52):
Of the.

Speaker 2 (56:54):
Hall that they were in, these two big gorillas. I said,
oh my god, these guys are gonna stop me. So
what do I do. I go to the men's room.
All right, I go into the men's room. There's like,
you know, fifteen guys in here. Who's waiting to pee,
who's washing hands, who's smoking cigars? So I walk up
to the urinal and I go ooh, the water is

(57:16):
cold at the bottom. Here you got a bunch of
dirty old men where they start doing. They lift the
yellow old time guys. This guy next to me, a
little short old man, goes, ah, that's so funny. Hey.
He goes to me, how's your father? He thinks he
knows me. That's my father. He says, he's inside. I said, now,
I looked him back at the office. You know he's

(57:37):
a pain. He yes, he drives my mother crazy. Okay,
well I left him. My secretary hates me because I
leave him near all day. He drives him crazy. I'm
not gonna bring him. He's gonna break my bulls. So
he thinks he really knows. What do you think about
the price of paying? Oh? You know, I start I
start rolling with the guy. I by my arm around him.

(57:58):
He walks me right into the place. Now as I
walk into the place, the players that I know Antthonny,
what are you doing? Broh?

Speaker 7 (58:06):
Hey?

Speaker 2 (58:06):
How are Antony? Vinnie? Vinny love your body's talk to
you later. And they're talking to people. They wave with you.
They you know, they don't want to look like a moron.
You call their name. You know what I mean? Emily
imm Hey, baby, how are you?

Speaker 4 (58:20):
I'm gonna talk to.

Speaker 2 (58:22):
What do I do? I go sit down at the table?
I sit down at the table. What do I see
on the table?

Speaker 4 (58:28):
Foolers?

Speaker 2 (58:31):
There's a drink at the table. I pulled a drink
next to me. I asked this guy, you got a cigarette.
I don't smoke. I get a cigarette. Here I am
with a cigarette, looking around talking. I set off my beet. Baby, baby,
Jesus Christ, let me tell you something. I start talking
real loud. I should have never married this son of
a bitch. I can't go to the bathroom. When you

(58:51):
called me one hundred times a day, I said, said guy,
do me favor, order me another doers in uh dos
a soda with with a piece of lemon.

Speaker 3 (58:59):
I want to sounds just like a movie. Though this
is good fellas, this is all of this.

Speaker 2 (59:04):
I did it. I did it. I take it what
he called the fold, I put it on my arm.
I walked right out the door. We got that piece
of evidence, took it down to the DA's office and
vouched it. Technically, technically, technically, what I did was a burglary. Yeah,

(59:25):
and not one of the defense attorneys was smart enough
to pick that up. I entered or remained in a
dwelling with the intent to commit a crime there, and
I committed a lossne I took it, put her on
the arm and left. Nope, nope. I have a god
given talent to roll and I did it.

Speaker 3 (59:48):
And Louis, that's what I would give you, the nickname
Louis Whodini.

Speaker 2 (59:57):
You know what everybody tells me, I sound like Joe Patter. Yeah,
you do?

Speaker 4 (01:00:01):
You do? You do?

Speaker 2 (01:00:03):
You find me funny?

Speaker 4 (01:00:04):
Funny out.

Speaker 2 (01:00:09):
But that's what I did. That's who I am. This
case that we did winds up being the largest organized
crime case in the history of New York law enforcement.
We went out, I said, I set up these search warrants. Okay,
we went out, three hundred detectives, We banged all these doors,
We took what we had money. This that the following

(01:00:30):
week we went out and locked everybody up. We were
on the top of the world, the top of the world.

Speaker 4 (01:00:37):
So why did your supervisors of your your your the
upper echelon people shut on you guys like that. What happened?

Speaker 2 (01:00:45):
They hated us?

Speaker 3 (01:00:47):
They they were doing the same stuff or what No, no, no.

Speaker 2 (01:00:52):
They there is a big discrepancy with Irish and Italians
in the NYP day. Okay. These were two Irish bosses
that hated Italians. Okay, And we had some we had
Irish guys in our team and they hated these guys too.
These are Irish guys that hate Irish guys. They treated

(01:01:12):
us like garbage.

Speaker 3 (01:01:14):
We were in literal operation was yeah, really, they.

Speaker 2 (01:01:18):
Treat us like garbage. We were in a we were
in a factory room that had about an inch or dust.
There were rats running up and down the walls, roaches
all over the place. We had one typewriter for ten people.
This guy just treated us like garbage. We didn't get

(01:01:40):
any overtime. He just treated us and he was a
complete idiot. He's dead. Now, what's sad about this whole thing?
In my team? Six out of the ten original guys
that we're there and now now passed on, they will
never get the credit for doing this case. Okay, and
none of us got promoted. What happen? But to me

(01:02:00):
was I got hit in the elbow by a door
and I crushed my owl the nerve, and I said,
you know what, I'm out of here. I retired on
a disability pension. Okay. They they put in for medals.
I never got a medal. I got nothing, no credit whatsoever.
I set up all of these search one.

Speaker 3 (01:02:21):
You were the only one that didn't get a medal.
Is that what that video said?

Speaker 2 (01:02:25):
That's correct, That is correct. They hated me because my
reputation was a boss fighter. I had a problem with
this Asian lieutenant and I he says he was a
martial artist, and I'm I'm a martial artist. I gave
him a shot at the title. I wasn't afraid of
any any boss. It didn't matter to me. What are

(01:02:46):
you gonna do to me? You'll lock me up, You're
gonna lock me up. I don't do anything wrong. What
are you gonna do? You're gonna send me to another
send me to another priest. And I'm not making any
overtime here anyway. You know, you're treating us like garbage anyway.
So I didn't care. They couldn't they couldn't break me
down as a man, and My attitude is first I'm

(01:03:07):
a man, then I'm a cop. Okay, I don't care
what you have on your shoulders, you know, striped stars bars,
It didn't matter. You talk nice to me, I talk
nice to you. That's who I am. I'm an absolute gentleman.
But you're not gonna you know, there is no in
my heart. The way I feel is there is no
statute of limitations on disrespect.

Speaker 4 (01:03:28):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (01:03:28):
You disrespect to me, I'm going after you. And that's
that's who I was. And they didn't. They never promoted me.
I should have been promoted, as per what that lieutenant
told me. I went twenty eight months in an undercover
capacity capacity and they didn't promote me. Then they put
me in another undercover position and they didn't promote me

(01:03:49):
out of that, and they moved me again, and they
put me in the U the uh, the private sanitation team,
which was they did. Nobody wanted to work in that team.
It was really bad.

Speaker 3 (01:04:01):
But I'm here today, Yeah, yeah, I absolutely uh I.

Speaker 2 (01:04:09):
I met a lot of nice people now and hopefully
we will have Operation Waste Land turned into a full
feature film, or we'll have it picked up by a
major network. And this is where our goal is. I
also have a book coming out. Yeah, okay, I won't.
I'm not gonna put it out now until I see
what happens with Operation Wasteland. It's called a Revenge Serve Cold.

(01:04:32):
It's fiction based on fact a lot of things. There's
a lot of organized crime in here. Uh, I'm a
big fan of organized crime. Not that I'm an organized crime.

Speaker 3 (01:04:43):
Guy company here.

Speaker 4 (01:04:49):
Actually, you and my grandfather have something in common. What's
that both rand numbers.

Speaker 2 (01:04:57):
Were both numbers numbers?

Speaker 4 (01:04:59):
You know what the my grandmother ran numbers Connecticut. It's
all good.

Speaker 3 (01:05:03):
Well do we need you need to talk about you
know what it's.

Speaker 4 (01:05:08):
About that will talk about the little family history.

Speaker 2 (01:05:12):
Well, you know why it's a crime. It's a crime
because the government can't tast exactly yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:05:18):
Exactly right, Yeah, they can't regulate it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:20):
And you know why, Yeah, it's a crime.

Speaker 4 (01:05:22):
It's a crime.

Speaker 2 (01:05:23):
You know, everybody in an Italian or Hispanic neighborhood.

Speaker 5 (01:05:26):
Hey play they do they do the last three numbers
of whatever the take was of the of the of the.

Speaker 2 (01:05:32):
Total mutual Yeah, yeah, his if my grandmother had had
a dream and treat nombus came up in the play
there was a dream book, and then you had the
steadies and this and that. It was it's crazy. I
I was dating a girl. She was in a hospital bed.
It was to forty. I played. I gave my grandfather

(01:05:53):
ten dollars forty one combination.

Speaker 4 (01:05:55):
For a great see exactly, there you go.

Speaker 3 (01:05:58):
I was dating girl and she was in a hospital. Ben,
that's all I need to be here.

Speaker 2 (01:06:02):
Well, she was in the hospital. She broke him back.

Speaker 4 (01:06:06):
I went, I saw that number. You're like, oh, ship,
that's the number right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:06:15):
I vision her in the hospital and in the room.
Forty one.

Speaker 3 (01:06:19):
That's the number. So I played will will Do you
have any last question? I have one last question I
want to ask Louis. I want to make sure I
give you a last question before I asked Louis, no, no.

Speaker 5 (01:06:29):
No, I just I wanted to ask you, Hey, you know,
obviously you may have this feature film coming out all
this other stuff, but in the book as well, is
there anything else that you may want to inspire to do?
I mean, because you know, obviously you have to get
to gab. Do you ever think about doing some acting
or anything like that? I mean, that's something maybe you
might be doing in the future as well.

Speaker 2 (01:06:46):
Yeah, well i've been. I've been taking Uh, I'm not
I was an actor to being on the covie. You
have to have to out of course. Yeah, okay, And
a lot of people are telling me. You know, I've
done a number of auditions. People like me, but you
know they're also trying to rope you in to take

(01:07:07):
their their acting course. If they were legitimate organizations, I
shouldn't be doing it. I'm not doing a couple of actors.
I've been off of stuff. If it comes, it comes,
I'm not you know, this is not my livelihood, but
I will enjoy it. If somebody makes me a good offer,
I can be anything that they want me to be.

Speaker 3 (01:07:29):
That's just to give Louis a good number.

Speaker 2 (01:07:34):
Come on.

Speaker 3 (01:07:35):
So, well, I got one last question for you too,
and then we'll start kind of wrapping this up a
little bit. And if we got to do a part
two show, We're going to do a part two show
because you have an amazing testimony and your backstory and
everything is phenomenal. But I have a question about Louis
Giuliani because he's been in the news a lot, right,

(01:07:58):
Juliani Rudy, Rudy, Rudy, Rudy. I'm saying, Louis Rudy, Rudy,
and we all loved him because he was at the
time nine eleven under Bush all that kind of stuff.
Should we trust him?

Speaker 2 (01:08:14):
That's it.

Speaker 3 (01:08:14):
That's a simple question, okay.

Speaker 4 (01:08:19):
Him.

Speaker 3 (01:08:19):
Well, I was orderline on it, like do I trust him?

Speaker 6 (01:08:22):
Do I not?

Speaker 2 (01:08:23):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:08:23):
That's why I asked him.

Speaker 2 (01:08:25):
I well, if you shaw that video clip he went
to Washington with Brack's with the former Police Commission of Bratton,
Bill Brandon. Bill Branton is a very nice man, Rudy Giuliani.

Speaker 3 (01:08:45):
I mean, where did the where did the money? Where
did the money go?

Speaker 2 (01:08:48):
With that? With you all?

Speaker 3 (01:08:49):
But then you know this stuff that gets this stuff
that's going on. He was rated by the FBI, all
that kind of stuff. What do we believe that?

Speaker 2 (01:08:56):
Like, what should we I don't like fifty four million
right now?

Speaker 3 (01:09:01):
Fifty four million.

Speaker 4 (01:09:03):
There's a lot of money.

Speaker 2 (01:09:04):
Okay, Wait a second. At the end of the case,
listen to this, the asset four fiture portion of the case.
I believe they took another three hundred and seventy one
dollars in.

Speaker 3 (01:09:18):
This is all three like laundered money and stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:09:22):
This is all part of this case. We locked up
all together, thirty two people. There were three grand juries
set up. This was big, This was huge. You know what,
I got nothing. I didn't get a dead flower for
getting hurt. Okay, I had two hundred and fifty stitches
in my arm. I didn't get a party. I got nothing.

(01:09:45):
Because we'll leave this for another show. But there's very
very little difference between organized crime and the nypdging.

Speaker 3 (01:09:55):
Well, in a lot of organized crime, it seems like
those people work for the FEDS too. My p Diddy,
but we have his dad. We got a lot of
Larry Maza, A lot of these big names is the best.
We love Larry. Larry's been on the show.

Speaker 2 (01:10:14):
He's a gentleman, he is.

Speaker 3 (01:10:15):
But we find, you know, these big name people end
up working for the FEDS eventually in the long run.
And it seems like our organized crime now is mostly
in our political leaders. I hate, I feel I could
be totally wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:10:30):
People do not understand what organized crime is.

Speaker 7 (01:10:33):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:10:33):
Let me tell you something with this case, okay, okay,
we had to we were sworn to secrecy. We had
to keep this case on the wraps because the Manhattan
Die's Office did not want the Feds to get win
that we were doing this because the FEDS were trying
to break this for fifty years and they couldn't do it.
Now this is a bunch of Mickey mouse detectives from

(01:10:57):
the NYPD that's upon this, and we're breaking the back
of organized crime. Okay, Now there would have been look
at the amount of money that was taken in. Now
I have another feeling, which I'll leave for another uh,
another day, another way that our team was used. Two uh.

Speaker 4 (01:11:26):
I don't want to break it up intentionally. It would
be kind of like the fall guys for the whole thing.

Speaker 2 (01:11:33):
We were told. We were told that we weren't allowed
to buy any stock in Waste Management or Browning Ferious
Industries because we knew that we were going to squash
all these companies. Okay, h we wou we would They

(01:11:56):
would considers us inside the traders. But in reality, after
I retired and thought about this, the question I have
in my mind is when these twenty seven companies got
squashed and they were out of business, Waste Management and
Browning Ferris Industries mopped it all the horse they got

(01:12:17):
the contracts on horse How did that happen? Somebody on
the inside had to be helping them out. The question
in my mind is how many stocks does waste does you,
Rudy Giuliani own in waste management? If you go out
and you look around and you open up your eyes,
you'll see WP. It's a green and yellow lettering. They

(01:12:41):
control everything all around the East coast and Browning Ferris's
Industries covers the west coast now, so they used our
team as pitbulls to do all this damage. And I
think this is just an opinion. I think what they
did was they used us. They got and they went
out and got you know, they had their famili who

(01:13:03):
wouldever invest in these companies? And what people don't understand, see,
we put this, We put this. We used OCA Organized
Crime Control Act and the donnal Lee Acts and laws
that I never heard of to put this case through
to prosecute. If we went through the Feds, if the

(01:13:25):
FEDS took us over, we would use RICO. It's the
racketeering laws that Ruli Jiuliani was very very familiar with. Now,
what people don't understand I live in the South. Now,
we don't have no mafia down here. We are Italian mafia.
We have it. It's not Italian though. The basic definition

(01:13:45):
of what rico is is it's two or more people
engaging in two or more crimes for the period of
ten years or longer.

Speaker 4 (01:13:55):
Okay, insurance coma. That's so vague.

Speaker 5 (01:14:00):
You put it so vaguely that that anything could fall
into that.

Speaker 4 (01:14:03):
That's that's the that's the beauty of that law. It's
like they make it so vague that so many things.

Speaker 2 (01:14:10):
He was a genius. He was a genius for.

Speaker 3 (01:14:12):
Doing he's being charged now for rita way.

Speaker 2 (01:14:18):
The money. Yes, they used this all against him.

Speaker 6 (01:14:20):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:14:21):
Every wise guy out there is applauding me right now
because I can't stand Rudy Well.

Speaker 3 (01:14:26):
I trust you, I do trustee. Louis by on him.
So I was borderloined with him. I didn't know.

Speaker 2 (01:14:32):
I know that I.

Speaker 3 (01:14:32):
Really liked him because of nine to eleven, which played
on our heartstrings.

Speaker 2 (01:14:35):
Everyone let me tell you him mind eleven. Okay, he
woke up that day put on the right pair of shoes.
If you were the mayor, then you would be American's show.
Anybody was Okay, he listen to me loud and clear.
This is what I hold against Rudy the most. You
see him walk in with the candkerchief on his nose,

(01:14:56):
telling stories about he dug up his neighbors, his friends,
this and that that was all staged. Okay, nonsense, he's
he's there in a white shirt. I went down to
nine to eleven. It happened on a Monday. I think
I went the following week. I walked down there and
said to myself, I can't stay here the I I'm

(01:15:20):
gonna get sick. I was already retired. I went down
here as a good American. Uh you know, all the
cops that I knew were retired. We're going down here.
We're gonna you know, we're Americans. We we got attacked
by terrorists. We gotta do what we have to do.
I went down here. I was down here probably two hours,
and I went home. This is no way as you're
going to see people getting sick. A year from now,

(01:15:42):
six months people got sick. Rudy Giuliani, okay, and Christy
Todd Whitman marched thousands of cops, firemen, first responders into hell.
How many people died in nine to eleven? Most people
say three thousands.

Speaker 3 (01:16:02):
I almost say forty five hundred.

Speaker 2 (01:16:05):
How about this, it's probably over twelve thousand dollar when
you count on yeah, all of the cops. We're losing cops,
ten cops a week. Okay, I'm in on this. I
know what's going on here. These cops are getting cancers.
That's one in a million.

Speaker 7 (01:16:19):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:16:19):
You know who's losing this?

Speaker 4 (01:16:20):
So many like class action lawsuits out there? Yeah, I
know about that.

Speaker 2 (01:16:24):
Well, they didn't Rudy and Christy Todd Whitman, knowing that
the air quality was bad, sent these people. Where's Christy
Todd Whitman. Now you don't hear anything about it. Where's
Rudy Rudy? You know, Rudy made millions of dollars two
undred and fifty thousand an hour to sit there this and that.

(01:16:46):
I don't like him, Okay, he sold us out. Rudy
Giuliani when he was running familiar got with the NYPD
on the on the steps of city Hall surrounding him
and this and that, and we helped get votes for
maya while he was a mayor. He never gave the

(01:17:08):
cops a race. So that's my opinion on Rudy. And
when I see him squirreming I mildly applaud. See what
he looks like now he's all hunched over. Okay, I
I don't like him, that's my opinion. I don't tell
anybody else how to what to do with the field.

(01:17:30):
He's a liar. Okay. And you know what goes around
comes around.

Speaker 3 (01:17:35):
Ricos getting getting rico. He's getting rico.

Speaker 2 (01:17:38):
Well, he did a good thing by that. You can
use rico. Uh many, there's many places where you could
apply rico if you know how to run a case. Okay,
a big, a big thing that I'm against his homeowners associations.

(01:18:00):
Oh ask him to recocas with any homeowners association. I've
tried to do it down here in Alabama. Nobody says
nobody wants to listen to me, but it is what
it is.

Speaker 3 (01:18:13):
Well, Louis, we really appreciate you coming on the show.
I have your Facebook page up here for people that's
watching via a video, but for the people that's going
to be listening to this via podcast, where can they
find you best? And we'll let you go, We'll close
out the show. Tell them where they can hime.

Speaker 2 (01:18:31):
Oh, you can find me on Facebook. I'm always I'm
very opinionated. I'm very American. I'm pro Trump. You know,
you believe what you want to believe. I believe what
I want to believe. As a matter of fact, I
did a case for Trump back in nineteen eighty nine.
So I don't know him per se, but I know

(01:18:53):
his people. I know what kind of guy he is.
I am very friendly with his niece who doesn't like him.

Speaker 3 (01:19:01):
Oh yeah, the one that came out. Well, I have
another podcast that maybe you could come on that show
and talk about It's a little bit more politically ran
now that I do a podcast, So maybe you can
come on there and we talk about him.

Speaker 2 (01:19:15):
Listen, you call me. I'll come on once a week
if you will.

Speaker 3 (01:19:18):
Ron Johnson Lose a real deal, a man's man, great
character and glad to call him a friend. Ron Johnson,
Thank you Ron for the comment. Well, Louis, we really
appreciate you. Say your last name one more time because
I can't say it.

Speaker 2 (01:19:32):
Bellastreeri B A L E. S t R R. Yes,
reach out, reach out on Facebook, say hello, I talk
to anybody and everybody. My wife can't stand it. That's
who I am. I love people. Well, I did a job.

(01:19:53):
I did it well. I'm very happy what I did.
I made lots of great friends. And I believe you
never fans show told is when you stoop to help
another human's rate.

Speaker 4 (01:20:02):
You got a great story to tell?

Speaker 3 (01:20:04):
Yeah, you do, and we'll reach out to you. We're
gonna let you go. We'll close out the show. Thank
you so much Louis for being on What the Freak Laugh?
Thank you Operation Wasslam folks, Thank you so much. That's
going to be coming out. I'll be so excited to
watch that. Absolutely in his book. Hopefully that book will
come out to But wow, what a show. What a show,
and he is a talker. Just letn't go with it

(01:20:27):
because these stories are so great you can't stops. It's
just one thing, it's the whole story. So we appreciate
everybody for tuning in for live for the first time
on TikTok tonight. We got three point three thousand hearts.
I can't tell who's watching, so thank you watching on TikTok.

Speaker 4 (01:20:48):
Who watch? Thank you for watching three.

Speaker 3 (01:20:51):
Point three thirty three. That's the conspiracy. It's the government.
The government was watching. They're telling it's the Freemasons. But
we're gonna be back here next Friday, we're gonna get
hop right back into podcast month. I'm really excited about
this podcast coming on. We're gonna have Lee stross on

(01:21:13):
Unlocking Element one fifteen, which is on spaced Out Radio.
He showed up live in my Facebook feed, just on
his personal page a couple of weeks ago or whatever,
and I'm like, he has a podcast called Element one fifteen.
My mind went to nuclear weapons, folks, is a tomic bomb?

Speaker 4 (01:21:34):
Yeah, I know that's the one about what's his name?

Speaker 5 (01:21:38):
That was on Oppenheimer Oppenheimer and no, no, no, but
what's time?

Speaker 4 (01:21:44):
I can't Bob Bob something.

Speaker 3 (01:21:47):
Element Bob Blazar Bob La. Yes, yeah, that's the Element
one fifteen Bob. But I thought nuclear weapons. But I've
been doing a lot of research and missiles and bombs
and stuff now. But that's my own rabbit holes. But
we're gonna have Lee strass on. I find him on Facebook.
Didn't even know he was on space dot Radio. After
I booked him, you know, I found out found out

(01:22:08):
his co host. I love her. She's just a really
great person. I haven't talked to her for a very
long time, but our friend on a it's been on
the show. It's one of her best she's on the coast,
it's one of her best friends, Jackie Harmon. Jackie Harmon's
the co host and I've listened to their show several
times now on YouTube Element one fifteen. So we're gonna
have them on next week Friday night at seven pm

(01:22:31):
Eastern Standard time, right here on with the free clove.
Thank you so much for everybody tuning in. Please share
this show out and we're available on all podcast platforms.
Will any last comments section say bye what?

Speaker 4 (01:22:45):
Thanks so much for coming on?

Speaker 3 (01:22:47):
Yeah TTFN, that's you know what that is?

Speaker 4 (01:22:53):
Oh boy tall?

Speaker 3 (01:22:55):
For now you can do TGIF TG IF two T
T have been talk for now. We'll see you'all next Friday,
seven pm, Easter Statime. Thank you so much. I have
a wonderful, awesome weekend. He's out.