My dad was involved in 30-35 murders. No, he never admitted that to me about anyone in particular. He was indicted for one murder, and he was acquitted in that case, found out guilty. But my dad was, he was a tough guy.
There's no question. So. If he was involved in 35 murders, as the FBI suggests, do you think he was better off behind bars? What I'm getting at here really is if they framed him, was it a net benefit to society that they framed him?
Well, you know, see, let me, I know there's gonna be a tough one, but let me tell you how I think. The right and just side of me, the legally just side of me says that, the government is never allowed to break the law to uphold the law, because if you allow that to happen, then it falls into monarchy, and people are not protected, because if they do it against sunny frionsies, they can do it against anybody. So I believe strictly, the government has enough tools and weapons to get people the right way, and they do 96, 97% of the time, they shouldn't be allowed to violate the law to go after a criminal. That's my feeling on it.
Now, another thing is this. People think when we take an oath, the oath of America, it's an oath to stay silent. It's not an oath to lie, steal, cheat, and kill. Does that happen as part of that light?
Yes. But we're told straight out. Now, try to understand the thinking here. You come into that life, you're told straight out.
We have rules. You don't ever violate another man's wife, daughter's sister, never. That'll cause you to die. During my era, we weren't allowed to deal with drugs.
You deal with drugs, you get caught, you die. You maybe do some other things, you're not honest with people, you disrespect somebody, you hit another maid guy, you die. Now, we understand that, and they tell you, your best friend may be the one that pulls a trigger, because the life comes before anything. That's it.
You don't violate the rules. That's how we maintain control in this life. That's how we existed for 100 years, and that's how it's gonna stay. So now you're saying, okay, we all agreed to this.
We all admitted it. If one of us decides to violate the policy of the law, and we get caught, well, we understand the consequences. So that's how I looked at it, and that's how I justified it. Now, does that say you can go out and start to do random killings?
No. If the boss tells you to go kill somebody because he doesn't like him and you do it, that's not right. But if we kill our own, and you know, you hear a lot of times, well, we only kill our own. But we don't only kill our own.
But if we only kill our own, knowing that we made that choice, well then, okay, I kind of get it in a way. Even though murder is murder and it's a crime, and it's sinful and I understand that. But that's how you justify it. But it wasn't the case that you only killed your own.
Well, for some of us it was, and for others it was not. And I've seen both sides of that. You've never talked about having to kill someone, have you? No.
Why is that? It's just not a subject I can't get into, you know? I, listen, I like to be as honest as I possibly can because I am a Christian and you don't wanna lie to people, but it's not something I wanna talk about. I was wondering, because when I read that, I thought maybe it's because, you know, there's some might be legal retribution, maybe it's because, you know, it's not nice for people to hear about, maybe it's because there's still some kind of like rule why you can't say anything.
But I wondered why, maybe it's one of the above, I don't know. Well, you know, Steve, look, there's a lot of guys on the street now and if you go on YouTube, you'll see a number of them and they've admitted to murders that they were involved and these are made guys and they've admitted to it and many of them had struck a deal with the government. They had immunity for the crimes, they committed even murder. I mean, the government give you immunity for murder if you want to, if they want you cooperate and help them out.
It's amazing, but they'll do it. And so they have immunity, they can talk about their crimes. I didn't cooperate to that, let it all. I don't have immunity for anything that I've done in the past, you know, and listen, you know, our law is here in the United States, if you were standing next to somebody when they murdered somebody else, you're there, you could be charged for murder the same way to them.
So, you know, I'm gonna say I have a, was in that position, I'm just saying that's the law. So, you know, why talk about it? Number one, number two, murder is ugly, you know, it's ugly and you don't ever want to talk about it. I mean, I don't, if I were to do something like that, I wouldn't be proud of it.
I'm not trying to throw my chest out and say, hey, look what I could do, guys go to war, I kill people all the time, you know, in defense of our country, in defense of so. I mean, it's not like, oh God, you know, nobody, I mean, murder happens every single day. Who wants to talk about it? Some people do.
I know, not me. You got closer to the mafia when your father was sent down and this was the point where you decided not to go to school, the boss of the Colombo family, brings you closer to his wing. Do you have to do some kind of training or something to join the mafia, is there any? Or you do?
Oh yeah, well, when you come in and say, here's what happened. I leave there, a captain in a family picked me up and took me to see the boss. Now, unfortunately, Joe Colombo was assassinated. He was shot, seriously wounded.
He lingered for about seven years and then he died as a result of his wounds. So I knew boss to go over and he's passed away now. And I sat with him. This was about two weeks after my father sent word downtown that he was proposing me to be part of that life.
You can't just go up to somebody's head, I'd like to join. Somebody has to propose you, vouch for you, say you have what it takes. There's a lot of nepotism in that life. A lot of fathers brought their sons in, their nephews, whatever.
So in my case, it was my dad that proposed me. And so I sat with the boss and he said to me, here's the deal. You want to become a member of our life. Your father sent the message, is that true?
And I said, yes, he's well, here's the deal. From now on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you're on call to serve this family, the Colombo.