Louis Freeh Quotes

Wherever there's opportunity, the mafia will be there.

In Sicily the Mafia kills the servants of the State that the State has not been able to protect.

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

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

When I was 16 I'd watch 'The Godfather,' but I didn't think, 'Right, I'm going to go down the barber's and get some protection money off him.'

I never put my arms around John Gotti, Al Capone or Lucky Luciano.

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

'The Godfather' was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed.

J. Edgar Hoover very famously denied the existence of organized crime up until the Appalachian Meeting, I think, in 1957. It was interesting to me that he clearly had to know that there was such a thing as organized crime and organized criminals as far back as the '20s.

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

One thing I take great pride in is that my case was the one that started the decline of the Mafia.

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

We want 'McMafia' to be a tense gangster story but also a family story. It's a collusion of those two worlds.

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.

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

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.

Mafia is the best example of capitalism we have.

Hell, I'm not saying I'm an angel, but when it came to dirty tricks I couldn't hold a candle to the Irish Mafia.

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

International affairs is very much run like the mafia. The godfather does not accept disobedience, even from a small storekeeper who doesn't pay his protection money. You have to have obedience; otherwise, the idea can spread that you don't have to listen to the orders, and it can spread to important places.

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

Crime, money, power, drugs - are all linked.

The rumors of Frank Sinatra's violence and his ties to organized crime were such that journalists joked in print about me ending up in concrete boots and sleeping with the fishes if I proceeded to write his biography.

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