(4 of 5)
A. The killing. And the treachery. Everybody's jealous of something in "this thing." There's no security, and you're never safe. You learn how to read eyes. You gotta be a good manipulator. You gotta meet somebody; you don't even know if you're gonna come back. You get in a car; you don't known if you're gonna get a bullet in your head. The capos were always trying to trap me, thinking maybe I got more money that I wasn't kicking in. But I used to keep records and slips of paper, weeklies, monthlies, stacks of them for three, four, five years. I turned in every dime. Then I became the boss's righthand man, and everybody was scared to death of me. Now I got the boss's ear, and nobody knows what I'm saying. Everybody trembles now.
Q. What do you think of people who lead straight lives?
A. The average guy who works and pays taxes is a sucker. They're trapped, with kids and a mortgage and car payments, and they can't live. They're just existing. They work from 9 to 5, and they don't even know what day it is. All you gotta do is throw the dirt over them. I didn't want to take that road.
Q. George Anastasia, the Mob chronicler, is coming out with a book, Blood and Honor, about your 30 years as a gangster. This is the stuff that makes for great movies. Are any of the recent Mafia films accurate in their portrayal of what the life is like?
A. I saw Godfather III. It stunk. I didn't think much of the plot, and I didn't see any good reviews of it either. Godfather I was pretty close ((to the real thing)), and Godfather II was good, but this one was farfetched. I remember sitting there and thinking, If these suckers in the theater only knew they were sitting with the real McCoy.
Q. Do you trust anyone?
A. I trust Dave Gentile. He's an FBI agent from Philadelphia who helped me a lot mentally when I was falling apart. There were times I wanted to take pills and just forget about it. He spent a lot of time with me and encouraged me. I thought the other law-enforcement guys were conning me, but he believed in me. He's given me the confidence to do things that I'm afraid of. To me, he's my best friend in the world. I owe my life to him.
Q. Do you believe in God?
A. Yeah, I believe in God. I go to church once a month, but I can't bring myself to go to confession right now. I don't have the balls yet to do that. I don't know if my sins are going to be forgiven, you know. I broke all the commandments. That's something that I wrestle with, and I know I got to deal with it in time, and I want to deal with it. That's the only peace I think I'll have, if I could get to God. But I don't want to use God as an excuse now, because I know in my heart that I would do it all again. I'm talking from the heart. So how could I say I'm sorry? If I say I'm sorry, who am I kidding? I did it, and I loved it.
Q. You helped destroy the Scarfo family, the first Mafia family to be wiped off the map. Not since Joe Valachi has anyone done this much damage to the Cosa Nostra. But here you are with a completely new identity under the Federal Witness Protection Program, somewhere a long way from Philadelphia. What's life like for you now?