Joseph D. Pistone Quotes

I'm Dan Gelber. As a federal prosecutor, I helped put away corporate criminals, corrupt politicians and violent gangs.

The Mafia is a question every time an Italian raises his head.

Prosecutors say my father was the biggest crime boss in the nation... If you really want to know what John Gotti was like, you need to talk to my family. We lived this life.

Members of organized crime continue to exploit their victims the old-fashioned way - through violence, threats and intimidation. As law enforcement has so successfully done before, we will employ our own time-tested techniques to bring them to justice to account for their crimes.

We do not fear you [the Mafia] any more. We will root you out from under every rock, from the dark places where you hide.

Once the state becomes the ultimate beneficiary of crime proceeds, how different is it, really, from being simply the most powerful gang in a battlefield of gangs?

I'm a huge fan of mafia history - mostly the Italian mafia but also their associates, as well as Whitey Bulger and the Winter Hill Gang.

I do a lot of lecturing, at colleges and police schools, and I always get the same questions: 'Do they really kill you? What do they do with the money? How do you become a wiseguy?'

The Italian mafia, they're very [into] construction. They're in a whole different way of operating than they did back in the '20s.

To make crime unprofitable, let the government run it.

The aggressive use of wiretaps is important: It shows that we are targeting white-collar insider-trading rings with the same powerful investigative tools that have worked so successfully against the mob and drug cartels.

I don't know whether crime is dictating business or business is dictating crime.

You don't get John Gotti to testify against his driver. You get the driver to testify against John Gotti.

I wasn't aware of it at the time, but I was a big favorite with the Mafia.

You look at the descriptions of Whitey by law enforcement during his early years, and they sum him up pretty well. He was the same guy 40 years later; he just had $40 million more, and had committed 40 more murders.

[Milwaukee in 1912] was in the grasp of the sinister and slimy hand of special interests, dive-keepers, crooked contractors, petty racketeers, and political bosses. The city was then as graft-ridden as any other.

It’s a giant criminal enterprise, but at least it’s a state.

The can’t collect legal taxes from illegal money.

People love stories about the mafia: 'The Godfather,' 'American Gangster.'

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 I learned about the mob wasn't through lectures at the academy.

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

Undoubtedly, Mexico's crime-related problems have become a focus of attention among lawmakers, law enforcement, and the media in the United States.

For years, Frank Giovinco, as a member of the Genovese Crime Family, instilled fear in victims and perpetrated kickback schemes to tighten the Family's stranglehold over two labor unions.

When you are part of a cartel, you don't have a Costco card that says, 'I'm a card-carrying member of the cartel.'