Mob Influence Quotes

As soon as I understood what was going on in San Francisco, which was in 1965 and '66, I immediately left Chicago where I was working in a nightclub that was being shaken down by the mafia and the police for payments. I mean, it was a real thug world.

Everybody owned stock in the Capone mob; in a way, he was a public benefactor. I remember one time when he arrived at his box seat in Dyche Stadium for a Northwestern football game on Boy Scout Day, and 8,000 scouts got up in the stands and screamed in cadence, 'Yea, yea, Big Al. Yea, yea, Big Al.'

The bridge to Coronado Island off San Diego was built because the mob had a hotel there and needed a way to get people out there.

In the 1950s, when I was hanging around Sullivan's Gym and the Gramercy Gym, there were fixed fights. Mob guys like Frankie Carbo and Blinky Palermo had taken over the sport; one lightweight champion loaned his title to others at least twice; the welterweight division was a slag heap.

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

The mob's not coming back in the Teamsters Union. We've gotten rid of them, and we're free to be free of government supervision.

I had worked in politics with Johnson and Nixon before becoming a historian and biographer. I kept discovering these dirtier, murkier threads in American politics that led back to Vegas' gambling interests and criminal connections.

Surely this is a bad beginning in Lane Seminary. If it is to be governed by the excitements of Cincinnati, and especially … excitements so unreasonable, and if the students are to be placed under laws [so as] to appease the mob, the church will have little hope either from its purity or its influence. [When] it is found that it can be governed by city excitements it may expect to be favored with enough of them. Better far for the Seminary and the honest religion, the mob had torn the building to the ground. It could have been reared again as a standing monument of integrity.

Mob guys had muscle, and where in hell do you think employers got the tough guys when they wanted to break a strike?

On the rare occasions when my family talked about business, the subject was Kansas City's Boss Pendergast and his potential for muscling my dad's small gravel-and-sand operation.

Today's unions are less Mobbed-up than those of yesteryear to be sure, but they're hardly above tactics that would be considered intimidating and coercive.

I was a street guy. I mean, I grew up in an Italian neighborhood with mob guys around. Where I grew up, you gambled, you shot dice, you played cards, you went to the track. So the mob to me was not strange, it was not like I was an F.B.I. agent from Salt Lake City.

The mob taught me how to play gin rummy.

Some places you play in America, it's like 'On the Waterfront.'