Louis Stokes Quotes

There is no single field of activity, not a single institution, free of the most brutal sort of corruption. Russia has bred a world-class mafia.

There is one instance that we cite in the report where in one of the conversations a member of organized crime is talking to another member of organized crime and he suggests that Attorney General Kennedy should be murdered.

Organized crime is the dirty side of the sharp dollar.

Our findings with reference to organized crime was that organized crime as an entity didn't participate in the assassination of the president. However, we were unable to preclude the possibility of individual members of organized crime having participated.

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

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

Americans accept that gangsters are running the government.

Well, I'm used to rubbing shoulders with crooks and criminals.

I know nothing of what it is to be a gangster.

A handbook for gangsters.

The three things a Tammany leader most dreaded were in the ascending order of repulsiveness, the penitentiary, honest industry, and biography

Organized crime has a corrupting influence on all Bulgarian institutions including the government, parliament and judiciary. In an attempt to maintain their influence regardless of who is in power, organized crime figures dominate all the major political parties. As these figures have expanded into legitimate businesses, they have attempted—with some success—to buy their way into the corridors of power….

The can’t collect legal taxes from illegal money.

When we started out, there was so much cash involved that it attracted an element you'd rather not do business with.

Italy is a tough country to be a comedian in - I can't invent stuff like this. Nearly eighty crooks in Parliament - that's about one crook in twelve. It's worse than Scampia, the most dangerous Naples slum, which is infested by the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia. There, the criminals are only one in fifteen!

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

When you get to political machines that can control a state, then you're really into organized crime - almost. You're fighting a political mafia.

The Mafia exists in the American imagination because we want it to exist.

I watched 'The Sopranos,' I saw a couple of episodes of 'Mad Men.' I loved 'Seinfeld.' In fact, I got some CDs of 'Seinfeld.' 'Seinfeld' was hilarious. Oh, boy. The Nazi soup kitchen? 'No soup for you!'

The laws of the lowly gangster govern Qaddafi and his sons.

'The Godfather' is the talismanic giant that hangs over everything in the gangster genre.

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

The big insight that I have, not so much from writing 'Red Notice' but from living as the main character of 'Red Notice', is that Russia was and is a criminal state unlike any other sovereign country.

'The Godfather' is a great movie, but it gives them too much credit. What you don't see is what really takes place: the in-fighting, the lying to each other, the scheming against each other to get power.

I know many businesspeople in Russia who have knowingly signed up to effectively compromise their values for their own profit motive to become part of this criminal apparatus in Russia.