Criminal Underworld Quotes

Folks who think organised crime is a thing of the past are only kidding themselves.

And in that fraction of a second before anything actually happened, Santino Corleone knew he was a dead man.

I am a writer, a professional journalist with serious credentials in Crime, Craziness, and Politics. I have mingled with dangerous criminals and attended many trials . . . from Hell's Angels, Black Panthers and Chicano street fighters to Roxanne Pulitzer and even Richard Nixon, back in the good old days before he was run out of the White House for fraud, perjury, graft, and criminal negligence.

I grew up in a city, an Italian, knowing what the Mafia was.

He [Professor Moriarty] is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order.

It's been insane. From Whitey Bulger to the Mad Hatter, you can imagine the schizophrenia.

The spookiest thing I can remember about John Gotti is his eyes.

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?'

I talk about Breaking Bad being the most brilliant show ever, and even minor characters have subtle nuances and are fully drawn.

'Our thing' is turning into 'my thing' within the Mafia, just as the larger American society is facing the new realities of the 'me generation.'

The mob will now and then see things in a right light.

The consensus is that no more than five to ten people in a hundred who die by gunfire in Los Angeles are any loss to society. These people fight small wars amongst themselves. It would seem a valid social service to keep them well-supplied with ammunition.

About 25 years ago, I started out as a reporter covering politics. And that sort of just evolved into organized crime, because organized crime and politics were the same thing in Boston.

We're living in a den of thieves

Never piss off a gangster.

...in the middle of Little Italy little did we know that we riddled some middleman who didn't do diddily

I think the "crime novel" has replaced the sociological novel of the 1930s. I think the progenitor of that tradition is James M. Cain, who in my view is the most neglected writer in American literature.

Either you were a hoodlum, or you were a puddle on the sidewalk.

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

The crime film is the most honest American film.

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.

Booze' was once a popular term in the slang or 'cant' of the criminal underworld, which may explain its rebellious overtones today.

I think we have always had a fascination for gangs and gangsters, and I think we always will.

Always a godfather, never a god.

The wine-shops breed, in physical atmosphere of malaria and a moral pestilence of envy and vengeance, the men of crime and revolution.