Joseph D. Pistone Quotes

My father was a racetrack bookie.

Jacare is a gangster. He's been in the game for a long time.

As a teen-ager I played cards, shot craps, played pool, went to the track, hung around social clubs. I knew that some card and crap games were run by the mob, and some social clubs were mob social clubs. Even as a kid I knew guys that were here today, gone tomorrow, never seen again, and I knew what had happened.

It takes all sorts of people to make the underworld.

The Italian gangster thing has become a form of the modern-day Western.

I knew so many gangsters, and I call on that experience with them for characters.

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.

We got into all the trouble you could ever imagine. We figured that if the Jones boys and all the gangsters ran Chicago, we had our own territory now. All the stores, all the crime, we were in charge of everything, my stepbrother and my brother.

Unfortunately, the horse racing industry is often penetrated by organized crime.

You see mob guys when you play in nightclubs. It's part of the protocol.

I lived in mafia neighborhoods off and on when I was a kid. If you were in Little Italy, in East Harlem, in Brooklyn... Those neighborhoods were, in those years, dominated by mafia families. You knew it and you felt it, you know?

What good was being the king of the rackets in Newark, N.J., if you couldn't have DiMaggio at your dinner table?

If you look at 'The Sopranos,' there's this notion of a criminal element on its last legs.

If you think about the traditional mafia stories we grew up on, it is always about the death of criminal organisations - things like the 'Sopranos' - the last vestiges of once proud families subsumed by the modern era.

And Alpo ordered guys to slaughter guys, and the whole Harlem was in tears when Rich Porter died.

The Chicago mobs... They practiced their own perverted form of "survival of the fittest." Where the strong clawed their way to the top of a criminal empire. And the weak died in a hail of machine gun bullets.

My daddy was a carpenter that worked with the Jones boys, who are the most notorious in America. The black gangsters, you know, they were no joke. And he was their master carpenter. He used to build their homes, and all I saw when I was 11 years old were dead bodies and tommy guns and stogies, and backrooms, you know, Drexel Wine and Liquor, with the big piles of money underneath.

What do you mean "gangsters"? It's business.

Terre Haute. They used to call it 'Terrible Hut' because it was so wide open. Gambling, red light district, speak-easies. I entertained for all the gangsters. Can't name a gangster that didn't come into the place where I worked.

In the actual story I got with the Bonannos, but I had dealings with other crime families and other criminals, using the Bonannos as my credibility.

My dad's uncles were illegal bookmakers who were known in the area as Peaky Blinders, that's the stories I heard.

My dad wasn't a gangster, and he wasn't a criminal, but he sure liked to rub padded shoulders with them.

I have made only two films on the underworld. I am not educating the people on the underworld.

The mob is a monster, with the hands of Briareus, but the head of Polyphemus,--strong to execute, but blind to perceive.

Al Capone's my uncle. The old days were a lot different. The Latin Casino was the big time. When I got there I figured that I was doing pretty good, because remember, I started in nothing but after hours joints. I can't even name them now, but that's how I got noticed.