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Speaker 6: You are now listening to True Murder, The most Shocking
Speaker 6: Killers in True Crime History and the authors that have
Speaker 6: written about them Geesy Bundy, Dalhmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every
Speaker 6: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 6: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 6: journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Speaker 7: Good evening, This is your host Dan Zupanski for the
Speaker 7: program True Murder, The most Shocking Killers in True crime
Speaker 7: History and the authors that have written about them. In Tampa,
Speaker 7: in nineteen forty eight, known gangster Jimmy Velasco was gunned
Speaker 7: down by a hitman. In the ensuing weeks, when neither
Speaker 7: the Tampa Police Department nor Hillsboro made an arrest, Jimmy's
Speaker 7: brother took the investigation to the governor, who ordered a
Speaker 7: grand jury investigation. In February nineteen forty nine, the findings
Speaker 7: were revealed. Among the discoveries was a payoff list written
Speaker 7: by Velasco prior to his death, detailing the public officials
Speaker 7: he paid off to remain immune to a law enforcement
Speaker 7: The public was captivated by the news, and rumors swirled
Speaker 7: over who was named The grand jury. Never released the
Speaker 7: names on the list and it has been locked away
Speaker 7: ever since. This list detailed to who is who of
Speaker 7: Tampa Bay's leadership, from judges to city councilmen to the
Speaker 7: mayor and sheriff. Some of these names are old, had
Speaker 7: exposed years later by the Cafabre Commission. Others are new
Speaker 7: and previously thought as upstanding leaders. The program we're featuring
Speaker 7: this evening is Tampa Bay Organized Crime with my special guest,
Speaker 7: journalist and author Paul Guzo. Welcome to the program, and
Speaker 7: thank you for agreeing to this interview.
Speaker 5: Paul good thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 7: Well, thank you very much. Very interesting story. We've done
Speaker 7: quite a few, or quite a few mob stories, but
Speaker 7: this is again another little twist. Every city has its dark,
Speaker 7: dark history, and Yampa Bay has got its share. Now,
Speaker 7: let's first off, before we do anything else, I'd like
Speaker 7: to get your background, and basically, after you give you
Speaker 7: the background, tell us why you felt compelled and why
Speaker 7: was important for you to write this article and do
Speaker 7: all the necessary extensive research that you would have to
Speaker 7: be able to do this very very interesting and important article.
Speaker 7: So tell us about your background and then tell us
Speaker 7: why this was an important story for you.
Speaker 5: I've been a journalist in Tampa Bay for about fifteen
Speaker 5: years and the focus of my writing over that Over
Speaker 5: that course of time morphed into history writing, but not
Speaker 5: so much boring history. I don't mean to offend people.
Speaker 5: Write history of this, but not so much as in
Speaker 5: oh and in fifteen hundred, this happened, and this happened.
Speaker 5: I have began specializing in digging up old dirt about Tampa,
Speaker 5: that old mysteries, things that people have just said, this
Speaker 5: will never be solved, so they forgot about it. I
Speaker 5: specialize in digging those up and kind of using that
Speaker 5: historical rearview mirror that you've got fifty years now facts
Speaker 5: to work with. It's to try to figure out what
Speaker 5: it is that exactly happened. The main magazine that has
Speaker 5: employed me doing these I'm a freelance writer. But the
Speaker 5: main magazine i've written for doing stories like this, it's
Speaker 5: called Cigar City Magazine Cigar City Magazine dot com. And
Speaker 5: you know, over the years we've written about everything from
Speaker 5: the Hillsdalo County Sheriff's office having a secret deal with
Speaker 5: Fidel Cashhrow to run him guns in Cuba during the
Speaker 5: revolution in exchange for Santra tropic Conte when Castro One.
Speaker 5: I've written about the first serial killer in the history
Speaker 5: of Tampa, who turned out to be the first Africa
Speaker 5: American serial killer in the history of the US. How
Speaker 5: Tampa Bay is linked to the criminalization of marijuana and
Speaker 5: things like that. I've always specialized in kind of digging
Speaker 5: up things like that. So last August I published my
Speaker 5: first book on true crime, which is a collection of
Speaker 5: stories I've written about over the year's twelve stories about
Speaker 5: infamous characters and events in the history of Tampa. And
Speaker 5: one of them that I wrote about was about the
Speaker 5: murder of a gentleman named Florentino Martinez. He was kind
Speaker 5: of a you, kind of low level numbers runner in Tampa, Florida.
Speaker 5: But he was murdered. It wasn't in broad daylight because
Speaker 5: it was the evening, but there were dozens of witnesses
Speaker 5: around to watch this. He was murdered in front of everybody,
Speaker 5: and when the police showed up, nobody saw a thing
Speaker 5: and it was it became an unsolved murder, but everybody
Speaker 5: in town knew that the murder was roy Velasco. So
Speaker 5: when I wrote the article. The purpose of the article
Speaker 5: was kind of really show how corrupt Tampa was, that
Speaker 5: somebody could murdered out and brought right out in the
Speaker 5: streets like that, and yet the police, city council and
Speaker 5: everybody would just kind of get together and say, let's
Speaker 5: just cover this up. There's no need to solve this
Speaker 5: crime because the person who murdered him is kind of
Speaker 5: on our side. So when I wrote about this, you know,
Speaker 5: I finger Roy Velasco as the guy who did it.
Speaker 5: The book comes out. A few months after the book
Speaker 5: comes out, I get an email from somebody, I'll just
Speaker 5: say this, an anonymous source with a scanned with two
Speaker 5: skinned pieces of paper from the nineteen forties, and he said,
Speaker 5: you probably will know what to do with this. And
Speaker 5: that turned out to be the infamous payoff list, which
Speaker 5: I write about in this article, that revolves around the
Speaker 5: murder of Jimmy Velasco. And that's kind of how I
Speaker 5: got to this story.
Speaker 7: Okay, you've now answered that question why you would feel
Speaker 7: compelled to do this. You've already answered that. Tell us
Speaker 7: what the name of your book is.
Speaker 5: That the name of the book is called The Dark
Speaker 5: Side of It's called The Dark Side of Sunshine, and
Speaker 5: I guess if you're out of town, and it is
Speaker 5: available on Amazon dot com. And it's like I said,
Speaker 5: it's twelve stories, not all criminal stories, and not everybody
Speaker 5: I write about is a criminal. So I like to say,
Speaker 5: twelve infinite stories revolve rangos surround the city of Tampa,
Speaker 5: from axe murderers and serial killers to gangsters, the Cuban
Speaker 5: revolutionaries to the advent of the strip club here in Tampa.
Speaker 5: I covered all. So if you ever, if you want
Speaker 5: to know how much dirty laundry one city can have
Speaker 5: in so many different areas, pick up this book. It's
Speaker 5: you know, even if you know from Tampa, if you're true,
Speaker 5: if you're far at a true crime, you'll enjoy these stories.
Speaker 7: Absolutely. It's a very colorful city, to say the least. Now,
Speaker 7: the thing is too that these you mentioned Cigar City
Speaker 7: magazine And for those people who don't know, I didn't know,
Speaker 7: is that a moniker a nickname for Tampa Bay Cigar City.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Tampa is called cigar City because at one point
Speaker 5: in the height of Tampa cigar industry in the thirties
Speaker 5: and you know, in the twenties, thirties and forties, we
Speaker 5: were the cigar capital of the world. Hundreds of millions
Speaker 5: of hand rolled cigars came out of Ebor City and
Speaker 5: West Tampa, which is the Latin districts in Tampa every year.
Speaker 5: So Tampa, even though we're no longer the cigar capital
Speaker 5: of the world, we've forever been known as cigar City.
Speaker 5: If you've got the big Apple in New York, will
Speaker 5: where's cigar City? There you go. Now, So the magazine
Speaker 5: is not so much a cigar night. We do have
Speaker 5: cigar stories obviously, we cover the history of cigar industry
Speaker 5: and we interview a lot of cigar Ficionado is because
Speaker 5: of Tampa the history of cigar industry. But Cigar City Magazine,
Speaker 5: it's a history magazine that over the years, like me,
Speaker 5: has morphed into covering some of the more fascinating and
Speaker 5: unsolved true crime stories in Tampa.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Great. And the thing is this is on the advent
Speaker 7: of the article being published, and it's a major article,
Speaker 7: a very important article, featured article April fifteenth, of just recently.
Speaker 5: So yes, I'll tell you, I'm sorry, I lost you
Speaker 5: for a second. I'm sorry.
Speaker 7: Yeah, No, I was just going to say that the
Speaker 7: article in Cigar City magazine was just published on April fifteenth, right,
Speaker 7: so it's just the advent of this being public this article.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this is yeah one. No, it came out on
Speaker 5: April first, and yeah, and it's gotten tremendous attention. You know,
Speaker 5: the city's been buzzing about this. This list that I
Speaker 5: write about, which we'll get into a little bit, had
Speaker 5: been locked away, and some of the old timers who
Speaker 5: are around for have even said to me, We've always
Speaker 5: wanted to know who's on that list. Thank you, And
Speaker 5: some of the people who are new to this stuff
Speaker 5: and said, oh my god, we've known Tampa was corrupt,
Speaker 5: and a lot of people have written about Tampa's corruption
Speaker 5: over the years, but this list really does show that
Speaker 5: everybody in the city was dirty. There was no such
Speaker 5: thing as somebody who is not getting a little extra
Speaker 5: couple of dollars stuff stuff in the back pocket at
Speaker 5: the time.
Speaker 7: Now, oh go ahead, sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 5: Oh. I was going to say, you know, I tell
Speaker 5: you a little bitbout Jimmy Velasco.
Speaker 7: Well, that's what I was gonna say. Let's let's go
Speaker 7: back for our audience, and let's let's get a little
Speaker 7: bit of background on the main character of this story, really,
Speaker 7: Jimmy Velasko.
Speaker 5: Tell us all about it comes to you is when
Speaker 5: it comes to his backpack story. I don't know a
Speaker 5: whole lot about that yet, although his family read this article,
Speaker 5: and I'm supposed to be meeting up with them, hopefully
Speaker 5: in May, to get a little more on him. But
Speaker 5: Jimmy Velasco is actually such a mystery in this town.
Speaker 5: There's not a photo of him. My friend Scott Ditchy,
Speaker 5: who wrote the defining book on the Tampa mafia here
Speaker 5: called Cigar City Mafia his book, even this guy who
Speaker 5: spent I think at least a decade investigating in Tampa
Speaker 5: mafia for his book, cannot find a photo of Jimmy Velasko.
Speaker 5: That's how mysterious this guy is. But what people seem
Speaker 5: to know is Jimmy Velasco broke into the numbers industry
Speaker 5: early on, around you know, the nineteen thirties with a
Speaker 5: gentleman named Charlie Wall. Charlie Wall is known as the
Speaker 5: Dean of the Tampa Underworld. He's a man who organized
Speaker 5: unorganized who organized what was then unorganized crime in Tampa.
Speaker 5: He was an Italian. He was a Sicilian. He was
Speaker 5: what you would consider an Anglo had Irish blood, but
Speaker 5: Charlie Wall had the distinction of being able to fluently
Speaker 5: speak Spanish and English. Plus he came from one of
Speaker 5: the most blue blooded families in this city, one of
Speaker 5: the founding fathers. But rather than using his wealth to
Speaker 5: do good things, he decided to go into crime. So
Speaker 5: he became, like I said, the first real down of
Speaker 5: the city of Tampa. Jimmy Velasko broken some numbers industry
Speaker 5: with Charlie Wall working working at his casinos, you know,
Speaker 5: playing the card games, running numbers for him. And one
Speaker 5: thing that Charlie Wall was great at and what kept
Speaker 5: him in power was Charlie Wall knew how to fix election,
Speaker 5: whether it be ballot box stuffing, whether it be paying
Speaker 5: homeless people to vote we're just paying poor people to vote,
Speaker 5: or just knowing how to put money behind the right candidate.
Speaker 5: And he knew by fixing the elections, all of his
Speaker 5: numbers games to be taken care of, because you don't,
Speaker 5: you don't bite the hand to feed you. You. You know,
Speaker 5: when somebody would be elected in the city council or mayor,
Speaker 5: they knew you protect Charlie Wall and he'll get you reelected.
Speaker 5: So Jimmy Velasco learned from the master, He learned from
Speaker 5: the best how to fix elections. So Charlie Wall retires
Speaker 5: in the nineteen thirties and Jimmy Velasco kind of takes
Speaker 5: the reins and he became the man to go to
Speaker 5: the fixing elections. So when candidates wanted to ensure the victory,
Speaker 5: they went to him. And how exactly he went about
Speaker 5: fixing the elections, you know, obviously, like I said, there
Speaker 5: was the old things of stuffing ballot boxes and paying
Speaker 5: people off. Nobody knows exactly what his favorite thing was,
Speaker 5: but it has been said from some of the old
Speaker 5: timers that if Jimmy Velasko promised you to you'd win
Speaker 5: an election. You want an election, So that became his
Speaker 5: main play. Wasn't even so much to casino games anymore.
Speaker 5: It was he made money by by helping candidates win elections,
Speaker 5: and so gangsters would pay Jimmy Velasco to get their
Speaker 5: candidates in office. So he became that type of guy.
Speaker 5: But in the nineteen forties he decided to retire. I
Speaker 5: think the story goes and I'm social meeting with his
Speaker 5: daughter and may I'll be able to find out this
Speaker 5: is true or false. But he was just getting a
Speaker 5: little worried. It's it's it's a stressful life, I'm guessing, uh,
Speaker 5: being you know, being in the in the in the underground.
Speaker 5: So he decided to retire to California, stopped worrying about
Speaker 5: somebody trying to snatch power away from him with one bullet,
Speaker 5: and open up a restaurant there when he left. The
Speaker 5: main people who were in power were Santa Trafficante, which
Speaker 5: a lot of people know if you're a fan of
Speaker 5: mafia history. Santa trauft Conte, of course, helped establish the
Speaker 5: casinos in Cuba. A lot of people pinpoint him as
Speaker 5: perhaps being the mafia member behind the assassination of JFK.
Speaker 5: So truft Content is a pretty well known guy. At
Speaker 5: the time, Travacante was not the man. He shared power
Speaker 5: with another man, uh, with another family called the Italiano family,
Speaker 5: and together they began pulling their resources with the sheriff
Speaker 5: and the police chief and other people to kind of
Speaker 5: solidify their power. Now, as time went on in the
Speaker 5: Trough Contents and Italianos had a war and the trout
Speaker 5: Content family won and they became the prevailing family. But
Speaker 5: at the time it was the topic contest and the
Speaker 5: Italian sharing power here in Tampa. So nineteen forties came
Speaker 5: and there was an election coming up, and it was
Speaker 5: this election where people are saying, we're cleaning up city Hall.
Speaker 5: Everybody in city Hall was pee. There were whispers that
Speaker 5: they were corrupt, and they said, we need to get
Speaker 5: new candidates in here. It's time to clean his place up,
Speaker 5: new candidates who are not on their payroll and who
Speaker 5: are not in you know, buddy buddy with the mafia.
Speaker 5: Of course that's worried him because if you don't control
Speaker 5: city Hall, then they can shut your games down. So
Speaker 5: they needed to make sure that the guys they wanted
Speaker 5: to win won the election. So they called their old
Speaker 5: friend the last go and said, please come back. We
Speaker 5: need your help. So I think they offered him enough
Speaker 5: money that he could not say no. So the man
Speaker 5: who was supposed to be retired from California or a
Speaker 5: safe came back to Tampa and he fixed the election.
Speaker 5: He made sure that their candidates won the election. But
Speaker 5: what happens is when he fixed the election, these candidates
Speaker 5: even though traffic conte and Talliano paid for him to
Speaker 5: fix the election. They kind of saw, well, Trafficante and Taliano,
Speaker 5: they have the power, but this man can help us
Speaker 5: stay in power. And he kind of realized, what without
Speaker 5: Charlie Walleran anymore, this is kind of an open city.
Speaker 5: A man with my abilities, I could probably control the city.
Speaker 5: So he began getting some delusions of grandeur of thinking,
Speaker 5: I'm going to become the man in the city. I've
Speaker 5: been working for other people for years, helping people out.
Speaker 5: Maybe it's my turn to be the boss. So rather
Speaker 5: than return in California, he stayed in Pampa and he
Speaker 5: began running his own games, and he began paying people off.
Speaker 5: And so now he had he had the people on office,
Speaker 5: they more or less owed him the favors. So traffic
Speaker 5: Conte and Italiana, who were in charge, they kind of
Speaker 5: saw their power slipping away a little bit. They kind
Speaker 5: of saw this guy of Alaska who they brought in,
Speaker 5: taking some of the power, and they began getting a
Speaker 5: little worried that he was going to become the main
Speaker 5: power figure in the city of Tampa. So he needed
Speaker 5: to be taken care of. Hence, on the night he
Speaker 5: was murdered.
Speaker 7: Now let me ask him just a couple of questions here,
Speaker 7: because it's fascinating. Now. From the article or from the
Speaker 7: way I read it, it almost sounded like, okay, so
Speaker 7: he's retired, he wants to leave. Now, that's pretty unusual
Speaker 7: for the mob too. You just you just get to retire, right,
Speaker 7: That's that's unusual. So that's sort of a gift. And
Speaker 7: they asked him to come back because he's very valuable.
Speaker 7: He does what he's supposed to do, and and like
Speaker 7: you say, everybody realizes, hey, this guy, this guy's valuable.
Speaker 7: In fact, it goes to his own head. Now it
Speaker 7: almost sounds like that he thought, for a moment, again
Speaker 7: kind of foolish that the people that he knew that
Speaker 7: were legitimate I guess, you know, the politicians and the police,
Speaker 7: law enforcement, those kinds of people were actually the people
Speaker 7: that ran things. But like you say, Trafford, Kanty and
Speaker 7: Italiana will bring them in and they're pretty offended by this,
Speaker 7: and obviously that's why. But for a second, does he
Speaker 7: actually believe that there are more powerful people than these
Speaker 7: gangsters that he knows very very well.
Speaker 5: I don't think it's that. I think he wasn't dumb
Speaker 5: to the game. But it's kind of like, here's how
Speaker 5: Tampa operated. Back then. Everybody was in cahoots. The gangsters
Speaker 5: worked with the politicians, and as long as they got
Speaker 5: the politicians elected, the politicians would say, we will turn
Speaker 5: a blind eye to everything you're doing. One of the
Speaker 5: things that they turn a blind eye to was now
Speaker 5: the gangsters giving the police and giving the sheriffs odd
Speaker 5: office money. By giving them money. By giving the police
Speaker 5: and the sheriff's office money, they also turned a blind
Speaker 5: eye and they said, you're running in a legal game,
Speaker 5: we don't see it. And then on top of that,
Speaker 5: they would also any of your competitors that they would
Speaker 5: shut them down. So say, for instance, if I'm running
Speaker 5: a game and traffic Conte said to me, give me
Speaker 5: a portion of your game, and I said no, the
Speaker 5: next day, the police should come and shut me down.
Speaker 5: In the meantime, traffic Conte might come in the next
Speaker 5: day and open up a casino right where I got
Speaker 5: shut down and open up. The police should let him go.
Speaker 5: So now on top of that, now the gangsters would
Speaker 5: also pay off the attorneys. And by paying off attorneys,
Speaker 5: both prosecutors, defense, and then judges, you even wielded more power.
Speaker 5: Now the police come in and they arrest your competitor,
Speaker 5: he's going to go to court. The defense the judges, obviously,
Speaker 5: since he's on your payroll and you're giving him a
Speaker 5: little extra money, is going to say, of course, this
Speaker 5: guy is guilty. The prosecutor is going to prosecute him
Speaker 5: a little extra hard. And if you secretly have defense
Speaker 5: attorneys in your pocket, now he might hire that defense attorney.
Speaker 5: Now that defense attorney won't even defend him to the
Speaker 5: best of his abilities because he's on your payroll as well.
Speaker 5: So the gangsters were only as powerful as the money
Speaker 5: they were bringing in, because they were only as powerful
Speaker 5: as the people they were to pay off. So the
Speaker 5: power came through money. These people were going to they
Speaker 5: were they were going to back whoever they thought could
Speaker 5: make them the most money. So the Lastica wasn't blind
Speaker 5: to this. So after he helped everybody get elected, he
Speaker 5: knew that wasn't enough. So uh, he started paying people
Speaker 5: off as well. He started giving money to the judges,
Speaker 5: they started giving money to the police, and he's you know,
Speaker 5: he would buy them Christmas presents, liquor and diamond rings
Speaker 5: for the wives and buy them cars. And he would
Speaker 5: do this for the judges and the politician and everybody,
Speaker 5: making his own power play. And he was doing the
Speaker 5: same thing that trafal Contes and the Italiano family were doing.
Speaker 5: But he had one thing up on them. He could
Speaker 5: get these people re elected. They could not do it
Speaker 5: without him. So that's where they got worried. He had
Speaker 5: the money and he had he had the political knowledge.
Speaker 5: So after he won, after he came in and helped
Speaker 5: them win the election, in the following election, they said,
Speaker 5: can you help us again? He said sure, so he helped.
Speaker 5: He helped the guys they wanted win election, except for
Speaker 5: one thing. They were backing one candidate for governor, and
Speaker 5: he said, well, I want governor uh, I want a
Speaker 5: different candidate to win, Governor Warren. And he backed Governor
Speaker 5: Warren instead of their handing candidate, and Governor Warren won.
Speaker 5: So now not only did he have local power that
Speaker 5: he was sharing with them, but now he was the
Speaker 5: only gangster in town that had the ear of the governor,
Speaker 5: which now gave him even more powerful power over them.
Speaker 5: So he was definitely on the verge of taking over.
Speaker 5: When he was murdered. You know this this went all
Speaker 5: the way to the top. This This wasn't just a
Speaker 5: local thing. He was controlling power on every level, all
Speaker 5: the way up to the States. That's how crooked these
Speaker 5: things were. Everybody was in bed with the gangsters.
Speaker 7: Now, just before we talk about the events that happened
Speaker 7: shortly after this, we're going to talk about and people
Speaker 7: probably know this, but and this code used to exist.
Speaker 7: It doesn't seem to existing anymore. But once upon a time,
Speaker 7: you did not if you were going to assassinate somebody,
Speaker 7: And this Velasco must have thought that this must have
Speaker 7: been at least a remote possibility at some point that
Speaker 7: they don't do it in front of your family. So,
Speaker 7: uh continue, But I wanted to mention that because I
Speaker 7: think that's important as well.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was. You know, there was this era in
Speaker 5: Tampa that went from the twenties to the forties was
Speaker 5: known as the Era of Blood. During that time, there
Speaker 5: was about two dozen murders out in the street. You know.
Speaker 5: I don't mean murders as in they snuck into somebody's house.
Speaker 5: I mean close to two dozen people were gunned down
Speaker 5: in the streets of Tampa. Of Tampa, specifically in Ebor City,
Speaker 5: which was their Latin district. So hits were not they
Speaker 5: were not strange. People were getting used to them. But
Speaker 5: you didn't go after people's families. Uh, it was just
Speaker 5: you just you didn't touch them. They weren't involved, Your
Speaker 5: beef wasn't with them. You didn't use them as a weapon.
Speaker 5: It would just consider a little dirty. But the guy
Speaker 5: that the that was hired to eliminate the Alasko, he
Speaker 5: apparently didn't care. Because the Lastico and his family were
Speaker 5: visiting a friend in any Wore City on that evening
Speaker 5: and as they're leaving, he's getting into his car and
Speaker 5: a gentleman ran out of the shadows wearing a trench
Speaker 5: coat and a big hat to cover up his face.
Speaker 5: And this gentleman came firing and he wounded Alasco, but
Speaker 5: Velasko pulled his gun to shoot back, and while he
Speaker 5: did that, the hitman pulled Alasko's wife in front of
Speaker 5: him as a human as a human shield. So at
Speaker 5: that point, what he do except you accept your fate
Speaker 5: other that you're going to kill your wife. So Jimmy
Speaker 5: Lasko is not a nice man. You know. He was
Speaker 5: a gangster, you know, and the gangsters you know, the
Speaker 5: more you read about them, they weren't like they're not
Speaker 5: like they weren't TV or the movies. They're not nice people.
Speaker 5: But he wasn't so much of a scumback that he
Speaker 5: was gonna endanger his wife. So he got murdered. This
Speaker 5: guy actually used a woman as a human shield, which
Speaker 5: is about as low as you get. And that's that's
Speaker 5: really besides just him getting killed. That's one of the
Speaker 5: things that really angered Alaska's brothers. It wasn't just that
Speaker 5: his brother, their brother was assassinated, but they also endangered
Speaker 5: his of Alaska was Jimmy Velasco's wife and his daughter
Speaker 5: who was there as well, So it kind of went up,
Speaker 5: you know, a little above and beyond what was normal protocol.
Speaker 5: So again, now Jimmy Vlaska, like I said, he he
Speaker 5: had people that he was paying off, and these people
Speaker 5: acted like they were his friend. The police chief, the sheriff,
Speaker 5: the governor, the prosecutors. He thought these guys were on
Speaker 5: his side. He got them elected, he was giving them money.
Speaker 5: They were supposed to defend him, that's what the money
Speaker 5: was used for. But when the wife went to the
Speaker 5: police and they and identified what the murderer looked like
Speaker 5: and she did with the sheriff, nobody was arrested. A
Speaker 5: week went by, ten days nobody was arrested. So the
Speaker 5: brothers at that point they realized what was going on.
Speaker 5: They realized the Travalcante and ital else Italiana family probably
Speaker 5: offered the police and the sheriff and everybody else a
Speaker 5: little more money, saying we're taking care of Alaska. We
Speaker 5: don't want him in charge. We're staking our claim and
Speaker 5: if you back us, he's gonna be dead no matter what.
Speaker 5: So it's best if you back us and turn a
Speaker 5: blind eye to what we're gonna do. And of course
Speaker 5: they're gonna do it. He was gonna he was dead.
Speaker 5: There was nothing they were gonna do to stop it.
Speaker 5: So of course you're going to back to winning horse.
Speaker 5: So when the brothers realized what was going on and
Speaker 5: that nobody was gonna investigate the brother's murder, they basically said,
Speaker 5: f you to everybody else. If our brother's going down
Speaker 5: without anybody paying the price, we're bringing everybody down with us.
Speaker 5: So they went to the governor and they said to
Speaker 5: the governor, as you know, we're cooked. You know you
Speaker 5: went to our brother for help. We're coming to you
Speaker 5: for help. Now we are gonna sing, We're gonna tell
Speaker 5: people everything they want to know about Tampa organized crime,
Speaker 5: and we're gonna point finger We're gonna point fingers name named,
Speaker 5: and say, everybody who you think is good and on
Speaker 5: the right side of law, how they're on the wrong side.
Speaker 5: And that's when they wrote the statement. They wrote, uh,
Speaker 5: you know this long samements you can find on Cigar
Speaker 5: City Magazine's website with the article. And they write the
Speaker 5: statement saying, everybody who's in on what they call the syndicate,
Speaker 5: which is the matchmaking of organized crime, law, law enforcement
Speaker 5: and politicians, and how they have formed again what they
Speaker 5: call the syndicate, which is the power structure in Tampa,
Speaker 5: which is making everything corrupt. And they then find their
Speaker 5: brother's old payoff list, which you know, specifically says how
Speaker 5: much his brother was paying people who he was paying,
Speaker 5: what kind of gifts he was giving them, and they
Speaker 5: take that as well, and they expose it to the
Speaker 5: public and they say, here it is, there's everything you
Speaker 5: need to know. Here are all your your knights in
Speaker 5: shining armor. Yet they're they're actually just bad guys like us.
Speaker 5: And before the list got he released to the public.
Speaker 5: It got put before a grand jury, you know, and
Speaker 5: the grand jury said, this list is BS. This is fake.
Speaker 5: Somebody wrote this. This wasn't Jimmy Velasco's list. Somebody wrote
Speaker 5: this after the fact of the murder to get back
Speaker 5: at people to you know, call trouble for no reason.
Speaker 5: And so we're not going to allow this list to
Speaker 5: get released. And they locked it up in a safe
Speaker 5: to never be seen. So for weeks this was the
Speaker 5: headline who's on the list, Who's on the list, and
Speaker 5: people were crushed. Nobody found out. And then, like I said,
Speaker 5: a few months ago, I got the list, so you
Speaker 5: start looking into the name of on the list. First
Speaker 5: thing I did, obviously, I just you know, you go
Speaker 5: to archives of newspapers and you're looking up and you see, oh,
Speaker 5: they said this list is BS. So I thought, maybe
Speaker 5: I don't have anything. This guy gave me this list
Speaker 5: that a grand jury said his BS, So what good
Speaker 5: does this do me? And then I started looking at
Speaker 5: the names. The first thing that happened is the went
Speaker 5: the city council. The list, you know, when originally came out,
Speaker 5: and city council said we're going to go a full
Speaker 5: investigation of this list. People need to know everybody on
Speaker 5: this list. But before we say who's on this list,
Speaker 5: we're going to we have to investigate to make sure
Speaker 5: it's true. And then you look at the list. The
Speaker 5: entire city council is on the list. So the police
Speaker 5: and the sheriff come in and say, we're going to
Speaker 5: investigate the names on this list. We're going to find
Speaker 5: out any people are crooked. The police chief and the
Speaker 5: sheriff are on the list. So the state prosecutor says,
Speaker 5: I'm going to get to the bottom of this too.
Speaker 5: I'm going to do my own investigation. And then you
Speaker 5: see the state prosecutors on the list. So the accused
Speaker 5: were investigating the accusations against them. It was it's just ridiculous.
Speaker 5: But because the public didn't know who was on the list,
Speaker 5: they let this fly and they just said, Okay, these
Speaker 5: people said it's BS. Is probably the BS, without realizing
Speaker 5: that all these people were doing was protecting them, but
Speaker 5: to let you know. And so when I see the list,
Speaker 5: I think it's easy to find out or to see
Speaker 5: in retrospect that this list was not BS. Otherwise the
Speaker 5: city council and the mayor would have said hey, look,
Speaker 5: we're on this list. These guys made it up. We're
Speaker 5: not crooked. Instead, they buried as nobody would see. So
Speaker 5: here's who's on the list to show you how crooked
Speaker 5: this city was. The entire city council was taking bribes
Speaker 5: or was taking payoff from the mafia. The mayor, the
Speaker 5: police chief, the sheriff, the state prosecutor, the county pross acute,
Speaker 5: or you've got I think two or three different judges,
Speaker 5: a handful of attorneys. There was nobody at the top
Speaker 5: of the power structure in the city of Tampa and
Speaker 5: at Hillborough County, which is the county that that Tampa
Speaker 5: is part of, that was not in the back pocket
Speaker 5: of the mafia. Everybody was crooked. Everybody was dirty. Nobody
Speaker 5: was looking out for the best interest in the city.
Speaker 5: They were only looking out for the best interests of themselves.
Speaker 5: And that's what that this list exposed. People always knew
Speaker 5: how corrupt the city was, but I mean the people
Speaker 5: always knew the city was corrupt, but I don't think
Speaker 5: people realize how corrupt it was. You could trust no one.
Speaker 7: You know what they did have to do the good
Speaker 7: benefit though of having prohibition drugs and all kinds of
Speaker 7: stuff that's nicely extortable. Yeah, so there's other there's others.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 7: The thing is if you if you don't really take
Speaker 7: the money, there's just somebody's gonna find out whatever whatever
Speaker 7: you're doing on the side, if anything, then use that
Speaker 7: to their advantage as well. So one way or another,
Speaker 7: I think if I think sometimes if the somebody came
Speaker 7: to and made a request that you either say yes
Speaker 7: or you understand what's saying no means.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And it really wasn't until for what it really
Speaker 5: wasn't untilmost the late sixties early seventies at this city
Speaker 5: finally got cleaned up. I mean, that's how long it took.
Speaker 5: This wasn't something that it ended in the forties or
Speaker 5: the I mean in the fifties. The Key Fauver Commission,
Speaker 5: which was the Senate's committee, you know, to invest the
Speaker 5: organized crime throughout the nation, came in and in their
Speaker 5: national report they fingered Tampa's one of the most corrupt cities.
Speaker 5: They could not believe, you know how everybody was in
Speaker 5: bed with everybody here, and they released this report and
Speaker 5: things still didn't clean up even after that. I mean,
Speaker 5: it really wasn't until the late sixties early seventies where
Speaker 5: the city really finally said goodbye to numbers, running goodbye
Speaker 5: to it all, and they finally started electing officials based
Speaker 5: on credentials. They're not based on who could do who
Speaker 5: a favor the family. Though, I mean to get back
Speaker 5: to the lift. The Velastko did not even truly understand
Speaker 5: how deep this went because they were thinking, we're going
Speaker 5: to release this list. Everybody's going to go down. So
Speaker 5: they gave it to one of the friends who was
Speaker 5: on city council and said, you release it, and if
Speaker 5: you release it, even though your name is on the list,
Speaker 5: you'll probably get impunity for giving yourself up. And so
Speaker 5: he but he got he got played himself because they
Speaker 5: didn't realize that everybody from that They thought they knew
Speaker 5: the police chief, they knew city, then they knew the
Speaker 5: sheriff or against them, but they didn't realize that the
Speaker 5: entire city council would turn on them. They didn't realize
Speaker 5: that the state prosecutor, who they considered a good friend,
Speaker 5: would turn on them. And when they finally even told
Speaker 5: the governor, the state prosecutor, we believe it against us
Speaker 5: as well. When they finally did arrest somebody and charge
Speaker 5: them with the murder of their brother. The governor then
Speaker 5: named the prosecutor, who the brother said is against us,
Speaker 5: to prosecute the brothers the murderer, so obviously he wasn't
Speaker 5: gonna do his best job. So at that point they realized,
Speaker 5: even the governor is against us. And again it came
Speaker 5: down to the Italiana and traffic contes probably said we're
Speaker 5: in charge now. If Alaska's dead, you either join with
Speaker 5: us or you left on the outside. So at that point,
Speaker 5: you know, I don't have proof of this conversation. I'm
Speaker 5: just you know, guesstimating him, but I would guess the
Speaker 5: governor of course, would say, you know, of course I'm
Speaker 5: gonna come with you. Otherwise I'm left out in the cold,
Speaker 5: and you know I need your help. So everybody turned
Speaker 5: her back on the Velasko family. A few years later,
Speaker 5: they did try to get their own sort of revenge.
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Speaker 5: It's complicated murder plot to basically kill everybody I've just
Speaker 5: named except the governor, but with a murder plot to
Speaker 5: take care of the police chief, the sheriff, of the mayor,
Speaker 5: just a host of the county prosecutor or the state prosecutor,
Speaker 5: to just eliminate everybody who screwed them. And they ended
Speaker 5: up getting caught. But of course the things go, they
Speaker 5: got they got to quit it on theirs as well.
Speaker 5: That's just how things go.
Speaker 7: Yeah. Interesting, fascinating actually, And so now how a Cigar
Speaker 7: City magazine were they worried at all about the implications
Speaker 7: of even though it's we're talking about nineteen forty eight,
Speaker 7: now we're talking about twenty thirteen, was there any what
Speaker 7: was there of safeguard that they could publish something like
Speaker 7: this with the impunital.
Speaker 5: What I mean in terms of people pressing charges against you.
Speaker 5: That would be the only real concern. But I don't
Speaker 5: make anything up. Everything that I write is factual, based
Speaker 5: on fact. I never just go out there and make
Speaker 5: blind assumptions. I think when you read the article, you'll
Speaker 5: see everything that I state I believe is true. I
Speaker 5: can I can pretty much argue that I'm right in
Speaker 5: terms of just you know, people seeking their own sort
Speaker 5: of revenge on us. We weren't really worried about that.
Speaker 5: You know, this took place so long ago. Most of
Speaker 5: the the ancestors of even the crooked it's not like
Speaker 5: the ancestors of these people are gangsters. They're all respectable
Speaker 5: members of the community. Now you know, their fathers and
Speaker 5: grandfathers might have been on the wrong side of the law,
Speaker 5: but they're all respectable people. I think the biggest worry
Speaker 5: was hurting feelings. I guess, you know, it's always it's
Speaker 5: always tough writing something about the somebody's grandfather, you know,
Speaker 5: call them out, like, hey, guess what, I know you
Speaker 5: love your grandfather. But he was dirty. He was having
Speaker 5: people murdered, and you know, he was allowing illegal numbers
Speaker 5: running to go on, and he was allowing murder to
Speaker 5: take place, So you hate to write that. But at
Speaker 5: the same time, if you break the wall, sooner or later,
Speaker 5: somebody's going to call you on it. There's really no
Speaker 5: such thing as getting away with a crime anymore, because
Speaker 5: even if you committed to crime two centuries ago, somebody
Speaker 5: can dig up evidence to finally prove that you're guilty.
Speaker 5: And so we just come up with, you know, the thoughts.
Speaker 5: It's not our fault that these people were corrupt. We're
Speaker 5: just writing about it. You know, you always need to
Speaker 5: expose the truth. The like I said, if Alaska family
Speaker 5: did call the magazine and I know the publisher, Lisa,
Speaker 5: I got a little worried, like not that they're going
Speaker 5: to come after, but they're gonna yell at her, she figured.
Speaker 5: But it said they'd love the article, and they said
Speaker 5: next time they're in Tampa and they're hoping May, if
Speaker 5: not then this summer, but they're hoping may. They want
Speaker 5: to meet with us and give us a little more info.
Speaker 5: They said, we got most of the story correct. They said,
Speaker 5: there are a few small things that we you know,
Speaker 5: we might have gotten wrong and they might have some
Speaker 5: info to you know, give us a little more detail.
Speaker 5: So there will be a follow up article, hopefully after
Speaker 5: we meet with the family.
Speaker 7: I guess you were relieved after that.
Speaker 5: Uh, yeah, yeah, I've read about some people before. I've
Speaker 5: been bothered before, because like I said, I do at
Speaker 5: least one of these articles every couple months because they
Speaker 5: take a few months of research. And I've been bothered
Speaker 5: by some people before. Show was a little concerned, but
Speaker 5: usually just drunken phone calls late at night by somebody
Speaker 5: who just, oh, you know, feels like bothering you. So
Speaker 5: but I was a little worried when she said they
Speaker 5: got the call. But I'm glad they liked the article,
Speaker 5: and I'm glad they said I got most of it right.
Speaker 7: Yeah, No, that's that's really a lot of validation actually that. Yeah,
Speaker 7: you know, some of the things that you've put together,
Speaker 7: like two and two does add up to forbe, but
Speaker 7: you have to make some I guess inferences, right, based
Speaker 7: on all the information that you have. So it's good
Speaker 7: that you put all that together. And they were in
Speaker 7: agreement with that essentially. And I think if they were
Speaker 7: had any problems you'd heard of, you would have heard
Speaker 7: about it. So that's interesting and it's interesting what you
Speaker 7: might find out in terms of additional information from those guys.
Speaker 5: I'm hoping. Yeah, I'm not sure if they said that
Speaker 5: one of the brothers is still alive and they might
Speaker 5: be here, or one of the brother's son. I know,
Speaker 5: the daughter is still alive. Who is there on the
Speaker 5: night of the murder? So yeah, who knows that they're
Speaker 5: gonna tell us? You know, who knows what else? You know,
Speaker 5: It's what I It's what I do for a living.
Speaker 5: I dig up old secrets and you expose them. So
Speaker 5: anything else they can tell me will be exciting. And
Speaker 5: the article got such great play around here, and there's
Speaker 5: so much buzz that, uh, you know, I'm hoping that
Speaker 5: the follow up gives a little more info and gets
Speaker 5: people even more excited, you know. So we'll see, though,
Speaker 5: who knows, maybe you know, maybe maybe they're gonn tell
Speaker 5: me everything off the record, which is always the worst
Speaker 5: type of interview.
Speaker 4: Yah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's interesting. Not every city really celebrates its history,
Speaker 7: even though it's especially if it's a criminal history, whereas
Speaker 7: some cities really you now have good friend Ron Francell
Speaker 7: has books that basically tour guides, crime tour guides, you know,
Speaker 7: even with GTS coordinates to be able to tell people
Speaker 7: here are some historic crime locations. Basically now in terms
Speaker 7: of this article that came out in this list that
Speaker 7: makes you know again you talk about Tampa, baby and dirty.
Speaker 7: How has the city reacted to this new information?
Speaker 5: You know, this city is pretty good about when they're
Speaker 5: learning about it, about their all corrupt ways. I don't
Speaker 5: think anybody anymore gets upset about it. I think there
Speaker 5: was a time where people when I was in the
Speaker 5: first person who start writing about Tampa's corupt times, probably
Speaker 5: about fifteen twenty years ago, kind of he started. People
Speaker 5: start digging up some of these old skeletons, and a
Speaker 5: lot of people the time, you know, they say, you
Speaker 5: don't talk about those things.
Speaker 3: What do you do?
Speaker 5: You don't talk about those things? We don't want people
Speaker 5: to know what we used to be, like they're trying
Speaker 5: to hide their theiry laundry. But as time's going on,
Speaker 5: it's kind of become a calling card of the city.
Speaker 5: I think people are kind of proud. It's it's something interesting.
Speaker 5: When tourists come to town, they can, like you said,
Speaker 5: you know, they can go around and look at some
Speaker 5: of these old crime points. I think, you know, shows
Speaker 5: like there's a product of the stuff kind of made
Speaker 5: stories like this kind of cool and effect. The center
Speaker 5: trough of Conte was, you know, like the main calling
Speaker 5: card of the city in terms of mafia. And he's
Speaker 5: so known nationally, so people don't get offended by it
Speaker 5: this anymore. They actually, you know, get kind of excited
Speaker 5: about when you when they get when the new stories
Speaker 5: to come out. I mean a perfect example would be
Speaker 5: when a few years ago I got proofed that the
Speaker 5: Hillsboro County Sheriff's Office, which again Tampa is located in
Speaker 5: Hillsborough County, Florida, had a secret deal with Fidel Castro
Speaker 5: for gun running. And I heard this on tape. I've
Speaker 5: got him on film. Actually, the old head of the
Speaker 5: Hillsborough County Vice Squad, which was the division with the
Speaker 5: Sheriff's office that was charged with bringing out organized crime,
Speaker 5: and the old head of it, while he was on
Speaker 5: his deathbed literally, I mean, you know, he had an
Speaker 5: oxygen tank call on him so he could breathe on
Speaker 5: an interview, said well, we made a deal with Fidel
Speaker 5: Castro Edel Castro is before he came to power, before
Speaker 5: he defeated Batista and became president of the country. He
Speaker 5: actually came to Tampa to raise money for his revolution,
Speaker 5: and he could raise a few thousand dollars here, and
Speaker 5: he formed a fundraising group here that was charged with
Speaker 5: continuing to raise money while when he went off to
Speaker 5: Cuba to start the revolution, collecting medical supplies and clothing
Speaker 5: and even doing a little gun running. And so they
Speaker 5: would sending guns to Cuba. So apparently Ellis Clifton, the
Speaker 5: head of the vice squad, made this deal with Castawa.
Speaker 5: He was here, He's like, look, I need sent to
Speaker 5: traffic Conte. Traffa Conte at the time, was heading up
Speaker 5: the casino industry in Cuba. It was him and Meyer
Speaker 5: Lanski where the two main guys. And as long as
Speaker 5: Traffa Conte was in Cuba, the Hilldo County Sheriff's office
Speaker 5: could not pin any crimes on him. They knew he
Speaker 5: was head of the criminal syndicate here, they knew he
Speaker 5: was one funding all the operations. But as Ellis Clifton
Speaker 5: told me, there were too many people and there was
Speaker 5: too much water in between me and him two to
Speaker 5: ever charge him. So I needed to get him out
Speaker 5: of Cuba into Tampa where we could tell him we
Speaker 5: could arrest him. So he made this deal with the
Speaker 5: Fidel Castro. We'll help you get guns. And when you
Speaker 5: win and you finally expelled traffic Conte from Cuba, you
Speaker 5: know you you give me a call and you let
Speaker 5: me be the one who greets him at the port
Speaker 5: so I can arrest him right then and there. And
Speaker 5: that's what happened. Castro won, obviously, and he kept traffic
Speaker 5: Conti in prison for a few months. So traffic Conte
Speaker 5: paid him a you know, I think a few hundred
Speaker 5: thousand dollars to get released. And then they call Ellis
Speaker 5: Clifton and they said he'll be it so and so important.
Speaker 5: Miami can go get him. And he went there with
Speaker 5: an arrest warrant for a murder that they thought they
Speaker 5: were gonna pin on him with the murder of Anastasia
Speaker 5: in New York City, you know, that famous mafia murder.
Speaker 5: And then unfortunately the uh, his Traffa Conte's attorney, Frank Gurgano,
Speaker 5: was there and he said, actually, your warrant has been canceled.
Speaker 5: You cannot arrest him. But because Cashro did expel Traffa
Speaker 5: Conte as promised, Alice Clifton was able to tell him
Speaker 5: and stay on him at all times until finally to
Speaker 5: conte you know, as Alice Glipton said, just gave up
Speaker 5: and said I can't conduct really any any crime here anymore,
Speaker 5: and kind of moved his operations away from Tampa. But
Speaker 5: so when we wrote that, you know, we were expecting
Speaker 5: a big uproar from the Sheriff's office. We're accusing them
Speaker 5: of a secret deal with an enemy of the United States.
Speaker 5: And when I called them for a quote, they said, oh,
Speaker 5: that sounds kind of cool. So again, it was the fifties,
Speaker 5: it was a long time ago, and you know, even
Speaker 5: people who really know Cuban history would even know that
Speaker 5: he wasn't making a deal with the communist dictator at
Speaker 5: the time, you know, Fidel Cashers before anybody knew he
Speaker 5: was communists and Batista who was looking overthrow with as
Speaker 5: bloody of dictator as they came. So even something with
Speaker 5: that was that scandalous. People you know, seem to get
Speaker 5: excited about. So that's why I write about past crimes,
Speaker 5: because there's no danger. I'm not going to write about
Speaker 5: current criminals. They can come after you. These guys from
Speaker 5: the Fifth from the thirty forties and fifties. They can't
Speaker 5: come after me.
Speaker 7: There seems to be a lot of reminiscing by gangsters
Speaker 7: mobsters about the past as well too, because I've had
Speaker 7: a few programs where I asked that kind of same question. Basically,
Speaker 7: you're not really concerned. You know, things change over time.
Speaker 7: So it's not.
Speaker 5: One of my friends again, Scott Ditchy, who's an author,
Speaker 5: you know, I would like to promote his stuff as well.
Speaker 5: He wrote to gar City Mafia, and he wrote The
Speaker 5: Silent Don which is kind of like the big book
Speaker 5: on Trava Conte. He you know, he writes a lot
Speaker 5: about gangsters from all over the country, and so he's
Speaker 5: always interviewing them, and like he says, look, they're retired
Speaker 5: out of the game. At one point they were they
Speaker 5: were movie stars in their town. They were celebrities. You know,
Speaker 5: the world revolved around them. And now that's passed, and
Speaker 5: so of course they want to recapture some of that glory.
Speaker 5: I guess. And you know, but most of my research
Speaker 5: I've always done come to law enforcement records and things
Speaker 5: like that. I I've talked to a few retired gangsters,
Speaker 5: but I I my main choice for years with the
Speaker 5: gentleman Alis Clifton, because I was before he passed away.
Speaker 5: You know, he really sat down and let me and
Speaker 5: uh my brother who was filming it, really dig and
Speaker 5: get a lot of info from him. And I was
Speaker 5: able to use a lot of the things he told
Speaker 5: me to build on a lot of the stories that
Speaker 5: I've written over the years. So I haven't really interviewed
Speaker 5: a lot of retired gangsters, but you know, if you
Speaker 5: do get hold and they are willing to talk, give
Speaker 5: it all times.
Speaker 7: You know, well, I think a few of them are
Speaker 7: just tiring, you know, getting writers and writing their stories.
Speaker 7: So basically, you know, get it out there and uh
Speaker 7: there's you know. So I've had that a couple of
Speaker 7: times where guys are just, uh, there's pretty to some
Speaker 7: information and here it is, and so there's lots of tales.
Speaker 7: So this is very fascinating. Now when I want to
Speaker 7: ask you, hopefully this is h the gambling game that
Speaker 7: you had, You just threw the name in and I
Speaker 7: have to look it up to see what it was.
Speaker 7: But you can tell us about this game. This is
Speaker 7: it called balto Believe?
Speaker 5: Actually, But yeah, that's you know, my article because it
Speaker 5: was mostly for a Tampa audience. Here in Tampa people
Speaker 5: know bleed is. So it's not the type of thing
Speaker 5: I really need to describe too much in my article.
Speaker 5: But uh, Ballita was Belieit is what the lottery is
Speaker 5: based on. If it wasn't for the game of Blita,
Speaker 5: you would not have a modern day lottery. And what
Speaker 5: Bleita was is they took a hundred ball wooden ball.
Speaker 5: This is how original started. They would take a hundred
Speaker 5: wooden balls, put them in a sack, and people would
Speaker 5: gamble on a combination of ball. If you could bet
Speaker 5: on anywhere from one to three balls, like if you're
Speaker 5: betting on a horse race, you can bet the trifecta.
Speaker 5: You know, you bet the trifecta box everything like that.
Speaker 5: So you bet it with the balls and they would
Speaker 5: take the sack of balls and they would throw it
Speaker 5: across the room and one guy would catch it and
Speaker 5: he would he would try to catch it by just
Speaker 5: a handful of balls, and then he would slowly, slowly
Speaker 5: just grip three balls through the sack. So he would
Speaker 5: come with a pair of scissors and they would snip
Speaker 5: it and whatever three balls he was holding in his
Speaker 5: hand were the winning numbers and you know, payoff for
Speaker 5: anywhere from eighty five to we're at the best eighty
Speaker 5: five to one. So if you hit the checkpot, you'd
Speaker 5: win a lot of money, you know when you know,
Speaker 5: you'd bet anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars.
Speaker 5: But we're talking early nineteen hundreds, really blue collar immigrants,
Speaker 5: you know, rold cigars all day. So for them to
Speaker 5: win a couple hundred bucks or something like that, you know,
Speaker 5: that was huge. And this is the game that overtook Tampa.
Speaker 5: It became the biggest pursuit in the city. It's all
Speaker 5: people wanted to do. This was their most popular pastime
Speaker 5: was this game. And at first it started off people
Speaker 5: would just play it, you know, for fun. Not for fun.
Speaker 5: They would bet on it, but it would just be
Speaker 5: a couple of guys would hold a game and people
Speaker 5: would bet on it. And then I mentioned earlier with
Speaker 5: Charlie Wall. He came in and saw if I organized
Speaker 5: this game and started taking control of the games, there's
Speaker 5: a lot of money to be made in this. And
Speaker 5: so he organized it and started really the first numbers
Speaker 5: running d and people literally would run numbers. They would
Speaker 5: you'd have one guy and he would walk you know, well,
Speaker 5: they had multiple guys. I'm just thinking, like one guy
Speaker 5: would walk into the barber shop and he'd say, hey,
Speaker 5: I'm selling numbers for Charlie Wall's game down on seventh
Speaker 5: and fifteenth tonight. Who once in and people would say, okay,
Speaker 5: I'll take three, forty five and sixty seven and in
Speaker 5: that in that order I went in box and they'd
Speaker 5: write that down, and you know, then he'd keep a
Speaker 5: list of everybody and he'd take their money collected, bring it,
Speaker 5: bring it to the game that night, and then they'd
Speaker 5: pull the numbers and whoever you know bet the waiting
Speaker 5: numbers would win. And then over the years it evolved
Speaker 5: or they didn't even use the balls anymore. When law
Speaker 5: enforcement started to really catch on, they couldn't really have
Speaker 5: like these big games in in a league of casino
Speaker 5: anywhere when law enforces started cracking down, So they would
Speaker 5: start doing things like whatever, three horses went running the
Speaker 5: races today, one, two, and three, those are the numbers,
Speaker 5: or they would you know, they would do stocks like
Speaker 5: they would they would pick three random spots in the
Speaker 5: stock market and they say those the winning numbers today,
Speaker 5: or you know, whatever the score of the baseball game
Speaker 5: is in the third inning, you know, We'll be the
Speaker 5: first two numbers, and then the number of the batter
Speaker 5: who is opening up the next inning, that'll be the
Speaker 5: third number. And they would come up with these clever
Speaker 5: ways to do it till finally Cuba started a national lottery,
Speaker 5: and they at that point they would just whatever numbers
Speaker 5: were announced on the radio, because Tampa could pick up
Speaker 5: Cuba's airway this time, whatever the Cuban national lottery numbers
Speaker 5: were at the time would become Tampa's belet in numbers.
Speaker 5: And that was the game, you know, Like I said
Speaker 5: that spurger organized crime, that was where the money was at.
Speaker 3: Wait, the Lucky landslopts. You can get lucky just about anywhere.
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Speaker 4: It's just these cash prizes add up quick. So I
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Speaker 5: People were making millions of dollars a year by controlling
Speaker 5: these games. I think in nineteen twenty five they said
Speaker 5: twenty seven million dollars was bet on the game in
Speaker 5: the city of Tampa. To really show you, you know
Speaker 5: how big this was. I mean, you're talking as those
Speaker 5: as the modern day lottery, but.
Speaker 7: You were talking about there's all kinds of ways you're
Speaker 7: talking even as it evolved into horse racing, if there
Speaker 7: was ways of the mobsters having the advantage or making
Speaker 7: the advantage, making it advantageous for themselves. But Belita was
Speaker 7: even better because you talked about weighted balls and all
Speaker 7: kinds of already in the rhymative.
Speaker 5: Stage in the early days to fix the games. You know,
Speaker 5: let's say the numbers runners wow, and they came back
Speaker 5: and they said, boy, we had about fifty people bet
Speaker 5: on the number fifteen tonight, and so of course, you know,
Speaker 5: I control the game to the ones number fifteen drawing.
Speaker 5: He wants to win money, he doesn't want to lose.
Speaker 5: So they would do things to make sure they could
Speaker 5: pull the right numbers by putting maybe heavier balls in
Speaker 5: the bag. So when the person grabbed them, he could
Speaker 5: feel around and find the heaviest bag one, or they
Speaker 5: put empty ones in. Sometimes they would do it where
Speaker 5: they would freeze three different balls so that when the
Speaker 5: guy grabbed the bag, he could feel the cold balls.
Speaker 5: You know. So they're always of always of fixing the
Speaker 5: games to make sure that the right numbers that they
Speaker 5: needed got pulled. It was, you know, it's funny when
Speaker 5: you read these stories about some of the clever ways
Speaker 5: these guys came up with it.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a hand over fist money
Speaker 7: because everybody was an accepted thing. So the people were
Speaker 7: all doing it. It was an accepted part of society,
Speaker 7: and then had all kinds of ingenious ways of making
Speaker 7: even more money out of the deal.
Speaker 5: So I had one of my friends who owned a
Speaker 5: little store in Aybor City playing to me. Is said this,
Speaker 5: and this is another reason why these gangsters became so powerful.
Speaker 5: Is these people owed these gangsters who ran these games
Speaker 5: more than anybody else because some people did win the game.
Speaker 5: So let's say, you know, you know old missus Rodriguez
Speaker 5: around the corner. She's been here for two generations. Her
Speaker 5: family has never been able to own a home because
Speaker 5: they're just blue collar immigrants. They can't afford anything nice.
Speaker 5: And then one night she decides to bet you know,
Speaker 5: two dollars on the game, and she hits it, and
Speaker 5: suddenly the next day she's got enough money to put
Speaker 5: a down payment on the house. So even though with
Speaker 5: a game of chance and it was luck that she won,
Speaker 5: whether the game was rigged or not, it wasn't rigged
Speaker 5: in her favor, but she wins. She now whoever ran
Speaker 5: that game, she's looking at them as the greatest person
Speaker 5: in the world because of their game, she got to
Speaker 5: buy a house. So this goes back to the Alasko
Speaker 5: story when I mentioned how roy Velasko murdered at the
Speaker 5: very beginning of when we start talking on roy Velasko
Speaker 5: murdered this guy, Florentino Martinez. So if there are witnesses
Speaker 5: out there and roy Velasco had a gambling house and
Speaker 5: some people depended on his gambling house to win money
Speaker 5: and you know, the help pay their bills, who are
Speaker 5: they going to give in? Are they going to give
Speaker 5: in the guy who's helped them buy a house, or
Speaker 5: are they gonna look at the guy who got murdered
Speaker 5: and say, this guy's never done the thing for me.
Speaker 5: So let's just turn turn our ahead. And this is
Speaker 5: one of the reasons crime was able to flourish here
Speaker 5: is because these people, you know, this was their chance,
Speaker 5: this was their chance out of the poorhouse. This is
Speaker 5: their chance out of the lower class. And you don't
Speaker 5: want you don't want to kill that chance because once
Speaker 5: gambling disappears, your dreams are shot. You're just gonna have
Speaker 5: to be keep working and stay in your spot forever.
Speaker 5: But as long as there are these games a chance,
Speaker 5: you always have a hope of one day fulfilling some
Speaker 5: of your dreams. And so they protected these guys withever,
Speaker 5: and then they.
Speaker 7: Had not much different than the government controls casinos these days.
Speaker 7: You're right, the same thing.
Speaker 5: Well, that's why they end up coming with the lottery,
Speaker 5: because I don't think we just tamp that did these
Speaker 5: types of games. I guess finally the government said, look,
Speaker 5: if people are gonna be gambling, we might all make
Speaker 5: the money off of it. But I mean, another great
Speaker 5: example again would be the roy Velasko when he murdered
Speaker 5: the guy of Florentino Martinez. The reason nobody said the
Speaker 5: thing is because he murdered him in the most popular
Speaker 5: casino in ebore City at the time, El Dorado. It
Speaker 5: had the best games, the best liquor, of the best women,
Speaker 5: and the police knew the place, you know what they
Speaker 5: were doing there, but you didn't go inside. The police,
Speaker 5: you know, they didn't go inside. As long as they
Speaker 5: didn't walk inside and see what was going on, they
Speaker 5: wouldn't have to bust the place because, David, we've never
Speaker 5: been in there. We hear illegal things going, but we've
Speaker 5: had no reason to go in there and check it out.
Speaker 5: But if somebody's murdered inside the club, the police have to.
Speaker 5: You have to go in and investigat a murder. There's
Speaker 5: no way around that. So this guy, Florenceino Martinez is
Speaker 5: murdered inside the club. They drag him out to the
Speaker 5: curb and when the police show up, everybody says, oh,
Speaker 5: we didn't even They said, was he inside El Dorado. No,
Speaker 5: we didn't see him in there. We don't see We
Speaker 5: didn't see a thing. He would just laying on this
Speaker 5: curb dying already. Because if they say he was ens
Speaker 5: at Eldorado, police have to go in. They have to
Speaker 5: shut the place down, and everybody in Tampa's going to
Speaker 5: lose their favorite casino, so they covered up a murder
Speaker 5: because they wanted to keep going there and gambling and drinking,
Speaker 5: you know. After That's how the town operated.
Speaker 7: Sure, you know. And the thing is too that for
Speaker 7: the other people in America, they know of notorious cities
Speaker 7: like Chicago where you know, judges were paid off and
Speaker 7: lawyers were paid off, and any kind of mobster was
Speaker 7: getting powerful mobsters were getting decisions that seemed really actually ridiculous.
Speaker 7: But basically because everybody was paid off, they got acquittals
Speaker 7: on you know, major and important charges. But we're not
Speaker 7: talking about Tapa Bay. It seemed to go much later
Speaker 7: because we're talking about nineteen forty eight when this happened,
Speaker 7: and things didn't even they didn't have a whiff of
Speaker 7: impropriety till nineteen sixty when the Kaffer Commission came to Tampa.
Speaker 7: So so it seemed to be a little bit later,
Speaker 7: if I'm not if I'm not incorrect.
Speaker 5: You know, Tampa in terms of organized crime crime and
Speaker 5: their role in it nationally never really did get the
Speaker 5: respect to deserve. But I think because people did try
Speaker 5: to keep it hush hush for so long. Remember all
Speaker 5: organized crime figures at the time in the forties and
Speaker 5: fifties and into the sixties were funneling their money into
Speaker 5: into the Cuban casinos because that was their way of
Speaker 5: avoiding the government. They would take their money and they
Speaker 5: would invest in in things going on in Cuba, so
Speaker 5: that it was where they were laundering their money. Tampa,
Speaker 5: not Miami. It is Tampa. Is the is closer to
Speaker 5: Cuba than anywhere else in the United States because of
Speaker 5: the sail wins. So Travacante, because of his role in
Speaker 5: Tampa and because of his role in Cuba, was one
Speaker 5: of the most powerful organized crime figures in the country.
Speaker 5: So if you wanted to do anything in Cuba, you
Speaker 5: needed to have some sort of friendship in Tampa. So
Speaker 5: Tampa was playing at the time the biggest role organized
Speaker 5: time crime in the United States, Bigger than Chicago, bigger
Speaker 5: than New York. Everything had to go through Tampa in
Speaker 5: order to make it to Cuba.
Speaker 3: And then it.
Speaker 7: Became especially yeah, and it became especially important when you know,
Speaker 7: in the sixties when cocaine the seventies, Yeah, cocaine became
Speaker 7: real prominent. It became even more important as a you know,
Speaker 7: mob controlled city for sure.
Speaker 5: And what you know, I I've talked to old law
Speaker 5: enforcement officers and they say, probably a really unpopular school
Speaker 5: thought for Cubans here in the US to hear. But uh,
Speaker 5: they say, the most important thing, that the best thing
Speaker 5: ever happened law enforcement in the US was Fidel Castro,
Speaker 5: because they said he expelled all the gangsters and all
Speaker 5: the casinos, and without anywhere to launder their money anymore,
Speaker 5: and without a safe haven to run their crime syndicates,
Speaker 5: they had to do it from the US. And they say,
Speaker 5: from that point on, those individuals really started losing their
Speaker 5: power and it was kind of the death of you know,
Speaker 5: the heyday organized crime. I say, you know, Cuban Americans
Speaker 5: would never want to hear it. And you know, again,
Speaker 5: these law enforcement people are not saying that Casho was
Speaker 5: a good person, but they said, if Casho had never
Speaker 5: expelled organized crime, I mean, my God said that the
Speaker 5: could that those particular families and those enterprises could have
Speaker 5: grown completely larger than we could ever imagine because they
Speaker 5: had a safe haven and they had a place to
Speaker 5: put their money, and without it, they lost a lot
Speaker 5: of their power. So they said, thank Fordel Castro for
Speaker 5: bringing it all to an end.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's very interesting, very interesting. I guess they would
Speaker 7: wish something like that might happen in Mexico right now, Yeah,
Speaker 7: because that's yeah, so much bigger threat, I think.
Speaker 5: Well now, yeah, now a bit in The main issue
Speaker 5: we have in Tampa talked of crime is human trafficking.
Speaker 5: That's uh. I think where Florida's the third biggest hub
Speaker 5: in the country for human trafficking and Tampa Bay is
Speaker 5: a leader in that. So yeah, I guess we haven't
Speaker 5: really cleaned up the city too much as it's falls
Speaker 5: in a different area now.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, it gets worse.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah. And the name of your book that you did
Speaker 7: above the Tampa Bay Dark City.
Speaker 5: So dark Side of Sunshine called the Dark Side of Sunshine.
Speaker 5: And you know, I know your show. There's a lot
Speaker 5: of true crime on uh and you know, some stuff
Speaker 5: with some serial killers. So if you are in a
Speaker 5: serial killer history, the first African American serial killer in
Speaker 5: the history of the US is from Tampa and I
Speaker 5: have history in it. And then there was an action
Speaker 5: murderer story to an action murder of story in it
Speaker 5: in which the story of him murdering his family of
Speaker 5: five with an Act ended up leading to the first
Speaker 5: criminalization of marijuana laws in the United States. So you
Speaker 5: can people who are mad that they got a hide
Speaker 5: smoking joints, you can blame an action murder from Tampa
Speaker 5: and my story I wrote in that for the book,
Speaker 5: and then I'm making High Times a few months ago
Speaker 5: as well. They kind of wrote about the chapter in
Speaker 5: that book too, So if you're into that stuff, my
Speaker 5: book has that for you. Organized crime. I do tell
Speaker 5: the complete history of Charlie Wall who I've mentioned, and
Speaker 5: then I go into the Cuban revolutionaries and you know,
Speaker 5: the sheriff's deal with Castro, and then I move into
Speaker 5: the strip club industry. As you know Tampa, you might
Speaker 5: not know Tampa at one point with the strip club
Speaker 5: capital of the world. We went from from being the
Speaker 5: cigar capital the world to the strip club capital of
Speaker 5: the world in nineties. So I tell their stories as well.
Speaker 7: A lot of presties going on in Tampa, that's right.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 5: I don't just write about crime. I write about nice
Speaker 5: things too. But you know, whenever you write good stories,
Speaker 5: nobody seems to care. You write about a murder, and man,
Speaker 5: the Internet hits on those websites really pile up. It's
Speaker 5: fun to read, you know.
Speaker 7: Yeah, absolutely yeah. And then like you say, you've been
Speaker 7: featured in you're a freelance journalist, but you are featured
Speaker 7: in the Cigar City magazine quite a bit, and they've
Speaker 7: been very supportive in sort of your investigation into organized
Speaker 7: crime in Tampa.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Cigar Citymagazine dot com. I do a lot of
Speaker 5: writing for them, and then the Gentleman I mentioned a
Speaker 5: few times, Scott Ditchy have a lot of writing for them.
Speaker 5: If you're in the true crime I want to learn
Speaker 5: more about Cuba and then tamp organized crime, go to
Speaker 5: Cigar City Magazine dot com. We have there's a lot
Speaker 5: of other stuff on there, but you'll find a lot
Speaker 5: of stuff, a lot of articles written by myself and
Speaker 5: Scott Ditchy. And you know, if we don't write small articles,
Speaker 5: these aren't one thousand word articles. These are in depth,
Speaker 5: long articles like almost like chapters and books that you
Speaker 5: can to this website and spend hours on it.
Speaker 7: And you have scans of the articles themselves as well
Speaker 7: for people that are really into that as well the
Speaker 7: authenticity of the of the time as well, and read
Speaker 7: the headlines and see everything there and so it's great
Speaker 7: and some great photos.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Lisa does a great job laying out the magazine
Speaker 5: and then with the website as well. You know, she
Speaker 5: scans all the old newspaper articles and so you can
Speaker 5: kind of see what the headlines of the times were
Speaker 5: when we're kind of looking back on these times in history.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's very interesting. It's kind of kind of similar
Speaker 7: to a magazine that I'm involved with is a crime
Speaker 7: magazine and very very interesting and there forever as well
Speaker 7: too not you know, it's great now that like programs
Speaker 7: like this or our interview will be archived and probably
Speaker 7: available indefinitely, and especially when people can download it, and
Speaker 7: so it's much better than terrestrial radio I think for
Speaker 7: you know.
Speaker 6: Who was that?
Speaker 7: Can I remember? You know, you're able to listen to
Speaker 7: it over and over again and then look either.
Speaker 5: One of the first things I ask any publication asked
Speaker 5: me to write for them, I like to see myself
Speaker 5: in print and hold it. But I just I also
Speaker 5: want to know what their website traffic is, because you know, Internet,
Speaker 5: like you said it, there forever and an article on
Speaker 5: a magazine just people on Tampa can read. But we
Speaker 5: put these things online and suddenly people from all over
Speaker 5: the country are reading it. I mean, I've gotten comments
Speaker 5: from people in England on some of my articles before.
Speaker 5: So the Internet that's the way to go.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think it's there's a there's a you know,
Speaker 7: a world audience that's interested in America because America always
Speaker 7: looks inward. America often even romanticizes criminals over fifty or
Speaker 7: sixty years after the fact, you know, or at least
Speaker 7: at least what Hollywood does with these characters, you know.
Speaker 7: So it's America has this fascinating reputation and the world
Speaker 7: is drawn to stories in America. Not that you know,
Speaker 7: America created serial killers or America created gangsters, but America
Speaker 7: created the ability to look at themselves and not shy
Speaker 7: away from it, you know. And that's what I think
Speaker 7: people throughout the world look at and again, fascinating information
Speaker 7: like the little nugget that you just talked about, where
Speaker 7: uh you said that the DAA or you know, officials
Speaker 7: in America said, thank god that Castro booted out the mobsters,
Speaker 7: so that America, with its you know, overachieving law enforcement
Speaker 7: could get their hands on them and basically squeezed the life.
Speaker 6: Out of them.
Speaker 7: Because like you say, if they would have been able
Speaker 7: to remain in Cuba and just flourish, the amount of
Speaker 7: power that comes with all that money really does affect everything.
Speaker 5: So yeah, people people like to call Cuba a terrorist
Speaker 5: state now, but uh, if the if the if the
Speaker 5: casinos were still there being run by organized crime, uh,
Speaker 5: Cuba would have been I mean it actually would have
Speaker 5: been a danger. I know there's might. Yeah, people AnGR
Speaker 5: Cuba is not a terrorist date and people like to
Speaker 5: say and they're not a threat to us. But if
Speaker 5: organized crime has stayed there and they were, I mean,
Speaker 5: it would have been a rich country run by criminals
Speaker 5: with within an our plane flight, So then it really
Speaker 5: would have been dangerous.
Speaker 7: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely Well, Uh, Paul, I want to thank
Speaker 7: you very much for this interview and for the great
Speaker 7: article and the great read, and I want to thank
Speaker 7: you very much. Do you have a website or can
Speaker 7: people contact you via Facebook? Is there are other ways of.
Speaker 5: Them on Facebook if you've got to look, look for
Speaker 5: the Dark Side of Sunshine Tampa is my book's Facebook page,
Speaker 5: or you know, you can contact me through Cigar City
Speaker 5: Magazine dot com as well. If you go on there,
Speaker 5: you can find my email address and contact info and
Speaker 5: again my book, you know, if you had a town's
Speaker 5: available on Amazon Dark Side of Sunshine, but go to
Speaker 5: Cigar Citymagazine dot com. You can read a lot interesting
Speaker 5: stuff and you know, again all my contact information is
Speaker 5: on there.
Speaker 6: Well.
Speaker 5: Great.
Speaker 7: I want to thank you very much and please get
Speaker 7: in touch with me on any kind of newood developments
Speaker 7: on this story and whatever else you're going to be
Speaker 7: working on in the near future. It was great having
Speaker 7: you on. Thank you very much.
Speaker 5: Hey, thank you so much for having me on. You
Speaker 5: have a great night, you too. Good night.
Speaker 3: With the Lucky landslopts. You can get lucky just about anywhere.
Speaker 4: This is your captain speaking. We've got clear runway and
Speaker 4: the weather's fine, but we're just going to circle up
Speaker 4: here a while and get lucky. Oh no, nothing like that.
Speaker 4: It's just these cash prizes add up quick, so I
Speaker 4: suggest you sit back, keep your trade table up right,
Speaker 4: and start getting lucky.
Speaker 3: Pay for free at Lucky Landslips dot com. Are you
Speaker 3: feeling lucky? No purchase necessary void. We're prohibited by Law
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