- How badly do we not want people to buy this?
- Very badly.
I tell you what, I don't know of
any other mob guy that ever did anything like this.
This belongs on the dark web for sure.
(xylophone music)
- It is Presidents' Day, 2020, and I am all alone
here at the office, because I have decided to return to
the dark web.
Yay.
I've made a couple of videos now about the dark web,
and those experiences were fairly fruitful.
(yelling and screaming)
But I also recently made a series of videos
with a former Mafia member named Michael Franzese.
Michael and I have since become fairly close friends.
He is one of my two favorite Michael's on my phone
and I actually got to thinking, and I got genuinely curious
because in many ways Michael represents an old way of crime
so I wanted to bring him in to look at the dark web
and get his thoughts as to how technology has shaped crime
and how criminal activity can be conducted today.
- [Michael] How are you? Good to see you, my friend.
- Oh, good to see you, sir, good to see you.
- Good to be back.
- You look great.
Very quickly Michael, before we start filming
the video we need just a few cool shots
of you coming out of the car for your intro to kind of--
- Gotcha.
- We want the audience to kind of know, you know,
who you are.
(dramatic music)
- My name is Michael Franzese.
I am a former soldier and caporegime
in the Colombo crime family in New York.
And today I'm here to set foot into the
very dangerous world of the dark web.
- [Aria] Look in the camera.
That's perfect.
And...cut!
Hey, there we go, that's what we like.
(laughing)
So, Michael, what do you know about the dark web?
- Nothing.
(laughing) I don't know anything about it.
- [Aria] The dark web can only be accessed through
special routing software or browsers.
These browsers, for example, I want to clarify,
they're not necessarily bad, anyone can access them,
it's not illegal to have them.
What happens with these browsers, they can't be tracked.
- So, in other words, as a mobster I'd be using the dark web
and not anything on top of that.
- Exactly.
- Gotcha.
- So, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you
some of the marketplaces on the dark web
and get your thoughts.
- Okay, so in other words you can buy a fraudulent Visa,
or MasterCard or Amex?
You can buy these online?
- Yeah.
- Wow.
It's amazing to me that people would
do business online like this, really.
- You can buy a PayPal account with a $4,000 balance.
- What's the price on that?
- 54 dollars.
- So for $54 you can buy a PayPal account
that has $4,000 in it?
- That's what it says right there, you know.
- I tell you what, we weren't this sophisticated in my day.
And when I was indited for racketeering, you know
the underlying acts were fraud,
and one of the fraudulent acts was credit card fraud.
You know credit card fraud has been around forever,
it was a thing that the mob used to get involved in,
we used to get credit card, we printed them up at times
and other times we just got them from other places.
So, for me with that, again, you know
we'd never think that it would be online.
- Let's say this, the dark web existed back in your day
and you were able to have the option of performing,
or your associates performing credit card fraud online,
would you still go with the methods you used back in the day
or would you go online?
- You know, I think part of the reason my former associates,
the mob, got in trouble
'cause we didn't keep up with technology.
You know, there was one time they had bugs
in the parking meters.
We used to go talk by the parking meters
and they had bugged the meters.
One of the reasons so many guys got in trouble,
we never kept up with technology.
We didn't.
And the government was way ahead of us on it.
So, you know, having that in my head, I'd be afraid
to use any of this and leave that kind of a trail.
However, no doubt, guys on the street would be using this.
If this was a, you know an avenue for them to
commit their activity, they would do it,
no doubt about it, and they'd probably get caught
at some point.
- So this is just drugs now,
so give me your thoughts on this.
- So they're selling Xanax, amphetamines...
So this is basically a drug dealers paradise on here.
Oxycodone, oh, gosh that stuff, I'm telling you.
Adderall, oh, gosh.
You know I had daughters that went to college
and I know Adderall was big back then.
As a matter of fact, I was writing a book
and I was on deadline, I had to hand it in
and my daughter was trying to give me an Adderall.
She said, "Dad, you know, this'll keep you awake."
I'll be honest with you, I didn't sleep for three days.
- Oh, Jesus.
- 'Cause I never took a drug in my life, she gave me that,
I said, "How do you kids do this?"
- Did you finish the book?
- I finished the book, oh yeah.
I could write another book at that time!
- Which book was it?
- It was, "I'll Make You an Offer You Can't Refuse."
- Available now!
- Yes, available now.
- Oh, of course, you got it.
- I gotta ask though, in "The Godfather" for example,
you know, one of the plot points was that the Corleone's,
they kind of refused to get into the drug business.
- Right.
- When you were with the Colombo crime family,
was there anything that you guys didn't wanna touch?
- Yeah, a couple of things.
The night I got straightened out, we were told that night,
we deal with drugs, we die.
- Oh, wow.
- No drugs.
As a matter of fact I had a dear friend of mine,
his name was Tony Gock, he was a made guy,
he was a soldier under me.
He got arrested for drugs along with the boss' son.
And he came to me and he said, "Mike, I'm in trouble."
He said, "We sold drugs for an undercover cop",
and I said to him, "Don't worry about it,
"I'm gonna straighten out."
He was an old time guy,
he was so scared, okay, that he was gonna
get walked into a room and get killed
because he got involved in drugs,
he went into a phone booth and blew his brains out.
Killed himself 'cause he said, "I don't want anybody
"to walk me into a room, I'd rather do it myself."
That's the fear of us selling drugs at the time.
So it was off limits.
So whenever you see these stories,
I know there's been movies out there, you know,
where mob guys are involved heavily in drugs, not true.
The Sicilians from the Mafia, they were big drug dealers.
They were heroine dealers.
But we didn't get involved.
We weren't allowed to get involved.
I never sold a drug, I never took a drug in my whole life.
- Until the Adderall.
- Well, until the Adderall, yeah.
I'll be honest with you too, during my time in that life
I don't remember anybody being involved in prostitution.
Never.
And the other thing that I just,
drives me crazy when I hear about it,
you know when they're kidnapping
these kids and selling them.
- Sex trafficking.
- Yeah, sex trafficking.
If any of our guys would've gotten involved in that
in any way they would've got killed.
When I hear about it today I can't believe how
widespread it is, just horrible stuff.
- Unfortunately, the dark web is a place where a lot of,
let's say, video content of such acts
can be found, and sold, and bought.
- Wow.
- A while ago I went on the dark web before,
and I've actually purchased some things off of it.
So we paid money for a set of dark web links,
so you could go further in the dark web,
and I just wanna show you some of the stuff
that these links can lead to.
We're not gonna go and visit any of them
but some of them are quite shocking.
You see what that says right there, next to that?
- [Michael] Pedo videos?
- Yeah.
Pedophile videos.
- God.
How disgusting, that's just horrible.
Horrible.
They gotta be sick, there's no other explanation for that.
You know Ari, I gotta be honest with you,
I mean we did some rough things in my time in that life,
but some of the things that I'm hearing now,
I mean, I just can't believe it.
You know all of these murders, and these kids,
and these gangs, they have no regard or respect
for human life at all.
In our life, I'm not gonna say violence wasn't a part of it,
it absolutely was, I'm not gonna say guys didn't get killed,
they did, no doubt.
But we were told straight out,
when you come into that life we have certain rules
that you have to follow.
And if you don't follow it,
you could pay for it with your life.
And your best friend might be called upon
to take care of that.
You might be called into a room one night
by your best friend, you don't walk out again.
That's one of the horrors of that life.
But murder was taken very, very seriously.
It wasn't random, it had to be approved by the boss,
only the boss can approve a murder,
and there was a lot of discussion about it,
I mean, it was taken very seriously.
We weren't random killers.
I don't know where these people come from, man,
but that's really a dark side of the internet.
- The dark web, obviously, is a place where
you can find the worst of things, but I will say
it's also a place where people can find safety
and kind of the privacy.
A lot of whistle-blowers use it as a way of
spreading documents.
Some people go on Facebook on it
'cause they just don't wanna be tracked.
I believe the New York Times has its own dark website too.
You can find the worst of the worst,
but you can find some good too.
And so, what I wanna do, with you,
is actually we're gonna sell something on the dark web.
- Oh, okay.
- The dark web is a place were some things get sold
that people don't wanna have sold.
So, I wanna sell something that would potentially, you know,
might be a little incriminating,
or embarrassing for the both of us.
- Mm-hm
- And I'm just wondering,
do you have any guilty pleasure songs?
- Oh, God, I mean it's not gonna sound right
because you know, macho, former mob guy and all that,
but, you know, I'm really into musicals,
that's my favorite kind of movies.
- Me too, Michael!
- You too?
"The Sound of Music", until today,
that's my favorite movie of all time, I mean,
the sound of every song in there I love,
and I'm singing it around my house, I sing it with my kids,
they all think I'm out of my mind and crazy.
- So, one might say it would be quite embarrassing,
should a former Mafioso be caught singing
a Sound of Music song?
- I think so, yes.
I think so.
- [Ari] This is our prop house,
we're just gonna go into the costume section.
I'm trying to find some Austrian-looking hats.
I'll be Maria.
Michael and I have a video
that we really don't want anyone to find.
- That's for sure.
- And so, we would like to go through
the process of listing it
on the dark web so in case someone does really wanna
put in the effort to purchase it, they can.
So you spent the weekend, kind of already,
getting yourself established as a vendor.
- Yeah, so the first biggest hurdle to get around
is you need to put a bond down,
because it'll like filter out a lot of the scammers.
If you're putting $500 down upfront,
it's gonna stop a lot of people from just jumping on,
listing fake drugs, getting money and then dipping out.
- You had to pay $500 to become a vendor?
- You had to pay $500 to become a vendor.
- Um, the company would owe me money, yeah.
(nervous laughter)
If they don't wanna pay for it, then you owe me money.
- You want it on the company card.
- So there's a vetting process, too,
the basic stuff is, like, making sure that you're safe
and you're not scamming and whatnot.
You have your crypto wallet verified,
you have your PGP key verified,
like, some semblance of your identification verified,
so, they at least know a little bit about you,
so they know that you're just essentially
an honest vendor coming on.
- Obviously, Michael and I are very honest vendors.
- Obviously.
- We just have one innocent video we'd like
to put for sale on the account, so how do we list it?
- Do we wanna put a title on here so people can find it?
- Yeah, what do we want to put the title, let's say...
Let me get really grabby, "LEAKED VIDEO", in all caps,
"EX MAFIA KINGPIN AND ASIAN MAN".
Oh, oh, and, "HANDSOME ASIAN MAN",
"HANDSOME EX MAFIA KINGPIN AND HANDSOME ASIAN MAN
"CAUGHT SINGING BROADWAY MUSICAL".
And put in brackets, "VERY RARE".
That's a pretty good title, what do you think, Michael?
- It works, yeah.
- Price?
- How much do these things usually go for, you would say?
- This is a first, so...
You tell me what this is worth to you.
- I tell you what, I don't know of any other mob guy
that ever did anything like this, so this has gotta be
a pretty heavy price on this.
Big price tag.
- How badly do we not want people to buy this?
- Very badly.
- Okay.
- This is a deep dark secret,
this belongs on the dark web for sure.
- Tell me what you would want it for in US dollars
and we'll post it for sale with Monero.
- Which is a cryptic currency.
- Which is a cryptic currency, it's a privacy coin.
- Oh man...500 bucks.
- 500 bucks, all right, let's do it for 500 bucks.
- All right, 6.07 Monero.
- I have a feeling the FBI will try to buy this,
and that's it, my whole reputation goes down the sewer,
but in a good way I guess.
People really knew I left that life behind now.
(laughing)
- The thing about selling digital goods like this is
we could have multiple people buying it, too.
(laughing)
If we felt like selling more than one of these,
we could sell more than one, but we could just,
you never know, we might make some money off of this.
- And if we don't deliver then we get a bad review.
We don't want a bad review.
- We don't want a bad review, and this shows me,
quite honestly is that mob guys, former mob guys,
there was a human side to us, too.
We don't show it all the time on the street,
but, you know, this is all in good fun.
- Michael, why don't you do the honors
and hit that list button?
- Right here?
- Yeah, just go ahead and click it.
- Ah, there it is.
What are the odds that we actually sell this thing?
- Probably not very high.
- I'm sorry, Michael.
- It's okay, well no, it's good, it's good!
The only one that's gonna buy this is me,
so that nobody else buys it, that's it.
- So, I guess we just wait.
Jake, thank you so much.
- Of course!
- You're an expert, I guess keep us posted on how things go.
- You always say I'm an expert, I'm just like the
only person at this company that knows anything about it.
- I'm very impressed, I gotta be honest with you.
I would hire you back then.
(laughing)
- Well, if you've got any references...
- Yeah, I do.
(laughing)
- Michael, thank you again for coming.
Dark web, your final thoughts on that.
- Just fascinating, you know it's a whole new...
I mean, I see it from a criminal standpoint,
and I see it from a legit.
It's just a whole new area that I was never aware of.
- And now we have something listed on there together.
- Alright, we'll see how it goes.
All right, man.
- Bye, sir.
- Bye bye.
Take care.
- Take care.
That's my friend.
(mischievous music)