My name is John Pennisi.
I'm a former made member of Lucchese crime family.
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This is "How Crime Works."
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The biggest misconception about Cosa Nostra
and the people that are involved in that life
are people really believe that there is honor,
loyalty, and respect.
These three principles, which Cosa Nostra is based on,
it no longer exists.
Honor, loyalty, and respect have been replaced
by selfishness and greed.
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The rules for a member is the rules of the family
and the rules of Cosa Nostra.
And those particular rules are:
You're not to put your hand on another made member.
You're not to go with another made member's wife,
or even girl, for that matter.
You would need to be fully blooded Italian,
your mother and your father need to be Italian,
your bloodline needs to be all Italian.
But with every rule, there's an exception,
and there has been people
who slipped through the cracks, so to speak.
One of the rules is you shouldn't get involved in lawsuits,
you should not sue people.
And I know that there was a rule
where you're not to get involved in stocks and bonds.
I'm not 100% sure if that's still in effect today.
Specifically in New York,
you were not to kill women and children
or family members in the Mob.
They were not allowed to use explosive devices,
such as bombs, because on the other side,
in Italy and Sicily,
they were known to use explosives
to take out members during a war,
or just to take a member out.
They didn't want that kind of attention in New York.
So there's an exception to every rule.
Frankie DeCicco, who was the underboss
for the Gambino family, had an explosive device
put under his car, and he was blown up
as a result of that.
The "no drug dealing" rule applies
to all the Five Families, but all the Five Families
have drug-dealing activities going on in it.
Every family is going to have certain members
that are involved in the drug business
and kind of turn a blind eye to it
because it brings in so much money.
Cosa Nostra members today have no problem
breaking the rules on a daily basis,
whereas in Carlo Gambino's era,
you couldn't break the rules.
Breaking the rules meant getting yourself killed.
So all these rules that were put in place
for reasons are now being broken.
So when you have an organization
that no longer follows its own rules,
it weakens the organization.
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Before they created the Five Families,
the head of each family was called a father.
So that's where they would get the name godfather.
And at some point, they broke it down to five fathers,
and there was Five Families.
So the Five Families in New York
are the Genovese family, which, in the street,
they were known as the Westside.
That's how we refer to them.
There's the Gambino family. There's Lucchese family.
There's the Colombo family and the Bonanno family.
And they're like the nucleus
of Cosa Nostra for the United States.
So as far as the Five Families all being in New York,
they controlled the entire state of New York.
It wasn't only New York City.
And then you have the creation of the Commission,
which was the idea, basically, of Meyer Lansky,
who looked at it as a board of directors.
The Commission consisted of the head
of each of the families, those Five Families,
and they would basically make decisions
on anything that went on between them.
Territories were divided, obviously,
by what family represented which part of New York City.
It's kind of — they cut their own turf out.
But if it overlapped, that's where a Commission
would come in and make a ruling.
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So when they created the structure of the Five Families,
they set it up more like a military.
From the bottom of that pecking order,
you have the associates, who are considered civilians.
Anybody that's not a made member of that life
is considered a civilian.
Above them are the made members of the family,
which are called friends.
We call them friends in that life.
Above them are captains.
As we say, caporegimes.
They're the head of the crews.
The family is represented by all the crews
that are in that family.
And then above them are the administration of the family.
The top of the administration is the boss,
the underboss, and the consigliere.
And that's the structure of the whole family.
The word Cosa Nostra means "Our Thing."
And that basically means that the structure
of the Mob, or, as people would call it, Mafia,
belongs to them, the members of that life.
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The Mob picks you.
That life, Cosa Nostra, picks you.
You don't pick that life.
So before someone becomes an inducted member
of a family, they become an associate.
And usually how they become an associate
is they're associated to someone
who's already an inducted member.
In order for an associate to be proposed,
I think several factors take place.
One is how good they get along
with whoever it is that they're with,
the soldier that they're with, you know,
that they do what they're told to do.
They keep their mouth closed.
Once you're proposed, a ceremony takes place.
Who's conducting that ceremony is going to be
a member or members of the administration.
Along with them is going to be, obviously,
the captain that's going to propose you that day.
A pistol and a knife are on the table during this ceremony,
and it's mostly there for symbolic reasons.
Your trigger finger,
whether you are a righty or a lefty, is pricked.
Your blood is dropped on a saint, a picture of a saint.
It just symbolizes that the oath that you're taking
the oath that you're about to take,
you're taking it holding that saint in your hand.
And they ultimately light that saint on fire,
and you're moving that saint from hand to hand,
and you're repeating after
whoever's conducting the ceremony.
After which he is explaining the rules of that life to you.
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My position within the Lucchese family was as a soldier,
but there was times that I acted for my captain
in the capacity of an acting captain,
specifically for a sit-down.
The administration would pick the captains of the family.
The requirement to be a captain,
obviously, would be good leadership,
so they would have to see something in that person
to feel that he could lead the crew.
That captain is responsible for each member
of the crew, but he's also responsible
for all the associates that are associated to that crew.
A consigliere position is that of a counselor.
So, he is specifically handling
not only internal what we would call beefs
or struggles inside of the family, but external as well.
The difference between a boss and an underboss,
there's not a whole big difference
with the exception of the title.
Obviously, the boss is the head of the family,
but the underboss holds just as much weight
in that family as the boss.
Overall, a boss's position is to oversee the family.
He's really in charge
of everything that goes on underneath him,
which goes through the administration,
all his captains, all the soldiers in the family,
all the way down to the associates.
The way the life is structured,
the boss is supposed to abide by the same rules
that the captains, his administration,
the soldiers, and everyone else in that life abide by.
A boss of a family or family together
could bring in hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
There's many reasons to fill a boss position.
One, obviously, would be a boss is arrested, incarcerated.
One would be a boss passes away
through health reasons, and, you know,
there is a void in the position.
But then, there's also reasons
like in the Paul Castellano situation,
a boss that they felt was being greedy
and the family turned on the boss.
There's different scenarios where a boss
can be taken out, replaced or ultimately killed
for that matter.
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I think years ago, when it was first created,
the Five Families, there was a lot more corruption
with having law enforcement on the payroll
than as it is today.
I think there's less of that going on,
but that doesn't mean that it doesn't go on.
As far as political influence,
obviously it would go through putting money
in people's pockets for political favors.
In present times, I don't think that they have
the political power that they once had.
I don't think they're able to corrupt
the politicians as they were years ago.
Initially, the Mob took control of the unions by force.
They would put people in.
Those people would corrupt the union,
take over the unions,
and that's how they were able to control
most of the unions, specifically in New York City.
But today, they have their hand in it, you know,
in little areas,
but they don't control the unions like they did in the past.
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Cosa Nostra came to be in New York
sometime in the early 1900s.
This was an organization and structure
that came from the other side,
which means Italy, Sicily.
When the immigrants from those countries
came here to this country,
the Italians were almost like second-class citizens,
and they were discriminated against when they came.
So in the beginning, it was to fight oppression.
But naturally,
that turned into committing organized crime
and criminal acts to gain a profit from.
So when the average citizen started to take notice
of Cosa Nostra here,
I believe that the first reactions
were fear and intimidation.
Because they feared and they were intimidated
over this group of Italians,
they were also fearful to go to law enforcement.
They were fearful to talk out against them.
In turn, Cosa Nostra gained its power because of this.
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So I joined Cosa Nostra
because I came from a neighborhood,
both Ozone Park and Howard Beach,
which was replete with guys in that life.
And I believe that I looked up to them
at that time and wanted to be just like them.
If you are around people that are in that life,
inducted members, at some point you become an associate.
And we were associated, my cousin and I,
to the Gambino family through John Gotti Jr.
And the time I'm talking about,
I was around 14, 15 years old at that time.
So sometime around 2012, I became an associate
and on record with the Lucchese crime family.
By 2013, I was an inducted member in the family.
I stayed an inducted member in the family until 2018.
I ultimately winded up leaving the life
because the family that I was a member of
falsely accused me of being an informant
when it wasn't true.
They now were laying on me,
which meant that they sent people to lay and get my pattern.
Usually when that is done, it's either to A, hurt you
or B, kill you.
I made my decision that I would never go back
to my former friends who turned on me.
So obviously, my life has took a dramatic change.
I'm no longer able to see my family as much as I like to.
I'm not able to live as close to them as I would like to.
I have to watch every place I go, you know,
and be very careful at what I do.
And my plans have to be mapped out
of where I'm going and what I'm doing.
So my life took a big change.
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In my opinion, in 20 years from now,
Cosa Nostra is hardly going to exist in New York.
I don't believe that they're going to be able to survive.
Cosa Nostra now, compared to years ago,
has definitely declined.
And the reason is these sentences
that are being handed out,
the government and specifically the FBI
have unlimited funds.
They're able to go after them.
They're able to take out bosses with the RICO.
As far as earning money by committing crimes
or doing various criminal acts, it's limited today
than it was.
So now, once you limit moneymaking
and money earning, you're taking away power
because money brings power,
and the organized crime today is definitely less powerful
than it was in years past.
In the past few years, there's been an increase
in arrests, and a large number of arrests, in Cosa Nostra.
Specific families are targeted,
and the reason being
is that it's hard for members of Cosa Nostra
to operate without law enforcement,
specifically the FBI, knowing what they're doing.
There are more people that are informants, cooperators.
They have people that are working inside families
with the FBI, giving the FBI information.
That's how they're dismantling families.
Family by family, they dismantle them.
Members of law enforcement from the United States
now work very closely with members
of law enforcement from people outside
of the United States, like Italy and Sicily.
They jointly create cases together.
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I made the decision to create a blog,
and I started just writing from my experiences.
So the first podcast I created
is also the name of the blog,
which is called "Sitdown News,"
and that's all also the name of the podcast.
And I just recently created a second podcast
called "Unlimited Substance."
In the next episode, we'll talk how Cosa Nostra
makes money in 2022. Stay tuned.
which is the laboratory where they will process the leaves.