Okay, so, I've been teaching something formally in a classroom since I was 18 years old, and I do have an education minor. I used to substitute teach, but I also knew when I was looking at this last grant cycle. I knew that there were plenty of people who wanted to know more about different topics within beekeeping that I didn't know, but there's a lot of people locally who do know those special topics, and so since I'm a good administrator, I thought, you know, I can help these people and turn them into partners of mine, and so that's what I did. I looked at all the gaps that our current bee clubs and beekeeping classes have, and turned all of that into learning circles. So again, I had three farmer partners in the Iowa Farmers Union who has a booth out here, and I'm sure you've worked with the Farmers Union, so they were my fiscal, oh, they still are my fiscal agent. We still have a few more months to go on the grant, so the things that you see in this presentation are very, very applicable to other producer groups. So I'll go back to the club meetings. I have been running a beekeeping club since 2011, and I've taught beekeeping classes since 2013, so the club almost always meets in person, and I will give everyone a survey in January. We'll just sit around and we'll talk about what do we want to learn this year as a group, and there's just a lot of things we can never, ever get to for topics, because usually we meet after work on a weekday, and it's going to get dark, or if it's summer, you'll see the picture here.  So we're also limited by person who can come and present. There's just a very, very mixed skill level of attendees, and you never know what the weather is going to be like either. And then on the flip side, like, right now is when we start to have beekeeping classes, and it's in a classroom. We can't be outside working bees right now, so we're really limited in what we can actually talk about, and to get everything addressed, you know, just is not feasible to talk about every single thing. We also have Facebook groups, but I think everyone knows Facebook groups have a lot of limits. It is nice to discuss things in between meetings with the Facebook group. It's a lot more manageable than running an email list, and only about half the people in the group are beekeepers, because we just open it up to everyone. So here's an example of why I thought learning circles would be good. One question that we get a lot would be, can you tell me about queen rearing with local genetics? And so we're all sitting in a circle. There's like eight of us, and sure, a lot of us know this, but it's something that you have to learn hands on. You can't just explain it, and then you know all about it. There are national options to take short courses, but, you know, it takes a lot of arranging to go to one of those classes. It's usually not so much about the tuition, but just the logistics, the housing, finding whoever's going to take care of the stuff that you're leaving behind to go there. There's just nothing in Iowa to, so, the other example is, this is a real life example. This is a picture where someone's wanting to know if we can help them get the bees out of this chimney. So I can't even tell where the chimney is. If this is the chimney, how far off the ground this is, is this person's house, is this somebody else's house, is the ground level, like, is this building under demo, like, what's the story? Like, there's just, there's no way. So there's just no way to address all the topics that people are asking for appropriately, either at a club meeting or in a Facebook group. So I knew that other people did learning circles, so I thought we should try to do that. So again, I already knew that there were topics that people wanted, and so I narrowed down and selected topics based on what people had demanded or requested, I guess not demanded. If I knew that there was someone locally as a subject matter expert who could teach in person, hands-on, we were going to go ahead and meet online for some of those quicker topics that were just more specialized, and if it was a topic that was pretty weather-dependent or seasonally-dependent, like queen rearing or doing a split, we would do those in person, and this is how I came up with these topics here. So again, I tried to do something online every month, and then, again, seasonally do these other topics where I knew I could have someone present in person. I'm guessing your group has similar topics. I do want to say I did pay my talent. It's just something that we had to work out. I did charge people $20 as a deposit to save their spot because I could not afford to have anyone flake out on me.  It was not refundable. And I had, so in-person topics were $20, and I had capacity to have up to 20 people, and each time I think I had only two people not show. So pretty good rate. Again, if I'm going to have someone put in a lot of resources because they're live bees, and they had to do a lot of work to get those bees ready to have people come over, I couldn't have them. They need to be compensated for their loss. So again, I could not have people flaking out. So here's some examples. I'm going to give two examples of the online learning circles we did. Everyone always asks about queen bees. I don't know what it would be for you if it's labeling or whatever. But we had the state apiarist come and talk. He has seen way more queens than any regular beekeeper would ever see.  You don't know what Joe down the street is doing or Sally down the road is doing. So he definitely came and added a lot to the meeting. He's very willing to share and very eager. Audiences are very eager to listen to him. This is Wayne. This is an idea that I had. I watched a presentation from Iowa Learning Farms. They did a tractor ride. And it was recorded. And then the farmer was narrating it as it was playing. So that's what we did here. Because, again, this is early April when you have a dead-out, March or April. And I remember this one in particular, because the Iowa women were playing. It was very important that Wayne be done recording so he could get back home to watch the game in time. So we got together. And again, we were presenting all of our online learning circles at night, because most of our beekeepers work. They do it on the side. And we can't do a beekeeping inspection during the nighttime. So we had a prerecorded video, Wayne narrated it live. So we didn't have to worry about weather, worry about sunlight, or anything like that. And we got really good comments back from it. So I just wanted to say the second comment here. I just wish I had had this experience when I first started beekeeping. So, again, I think it's something that you're never gonna know everything there is to know. We did online learning circles. This is wet grafting. So wet grafting is a way to raise queens. This is the one I was saying that there's no in-state class. This was very resource-intensive. So Tyler was the instructor. She's on the left there. Jamie had driven, I think, two hours to come and take this class. Again, I asked them for only $20, but they did have to bring their own headlamp, their own magnifier. We supplied them with grafting tools. They had two different ones to choose from. Tyler, I don't know if you can see them, they're hovering over the board on the table. So Tyler had to time her production so that everybody got one frame of larva at just the right age for them to work on. So it took a lot of resources for her. We had a big show and tell to show all the different kinds of hive tools and grafting tools. We gave them two options. There's actually probably six different options if you wanted to go shopping for one, and you could try one, hold it, see what it was like, and then something, again, you can't really get this unless you're in person. Tyler gave a demonstration manipulating the hive boxes around and then someone came up to make sure she understood it and copied her. And everybody had that opportunity if you wanted to repeat it just to make sure you got it. So here is some of the feedback and then I wanted to look at the second one here where the participants that I tried once at grafting but I failed because I didn't manipulate the hive appropriately. So this class was great and I'm so excited to go home and give it a proper go. Another thing that I just picked up on from listening to people is cutouts. So cutouts are where you have bees who have moved into a structure and they need to be physically cut out in order to remove them. So again, another really, really resource intensive kind of job. This was a barn abandoned, was not being used. It was in Knoxville, the presenter lived in Ames, but again, because he and I were working together on some other things, I can say that there's a lot more demand for people to remove bees than there are beekeepers who know how to do it. So the property owner had to be okay with us coming and hanging out and having lunch with them and do you have electricity? Do you have water? Where can people park? Are you okay with this? It took a good part of the day. And just like the wet grafting workshop, Ben and I hauled in way more equipment just to show everyone these are all the options. These are all the tools you need to have in your toolkit, whether you need them all or not, you don't know until you get to the site and you can survey it just to show everyone this is a real snapshot of all the things that this kind of work entails. So people got to take things home, just like the grafting people got to take home, grafting tools, they got to take home, you know, all the little supplies, these people also got to take home some things as well. And again, I couldn't have lunch order for people if they were gonna flake on me so they had to give me, you know, a $20 deposit. Lots of really good feedback on that. So here is kind of the lay of the land, the audiences, a lot of beginners came to the narrowed video inspections and I do wanna give a little plug, I think after this talk, but down the hallway to the right kit from the Iowa Center for Ag Law and Taxation is gonna give a talk about business transitions. I know there was one about insurance earlier. That is a very, it applies to many, many audiences and that was, I think the highest number of registrations we'd seen. Like I said before, all the in-person learning circles ran at capacity. I think they didn't show up as much for the online because, A, they forgot because they just don't have as much as stake, they didn't give us that $20. They didn't have to take time off and they were kind of counting on recordings to be there afterwards. So I think this was pretty interesting. People drove quite a ways for the right topic. I had an April learning circle in Ames. The June learning circle was in North Des Moines. July was in Knoxville. So this is where everybody drove from. And then when we look at success, we definitely had some repeat participants. And like I said, we always had two people who did not show up even though they gave us their $20. The other thing that I'm really interested to look at is how well did the partners experience pan out? So we had to reschedule our November online learning circle. We're doing that in February. And we've already got people signed up for it. I did get this little feedback here from one of the partners, even though I haven't asked them, he went ahead and he sent me this message here. So it's definitely been something that the partners, they've maybe always wanted to give a presentation. They just weren't sure quite how to get there. And so again, that's where I think my talent is more in producing events and making things happen. I have a pretty wide network and I've been doing this for a long time. So again, that's why I think this was a really good grant for me as a partnership grant. I don't know if there's a limit on the number of partners you can have, but you can ask Krista, she's here, and she would answer that. I will ask the partners later how to do that. If you were gonna do this, I would say this, picture here with the QR codes, I think that's a really big piece of the success I had. So I'd show up at an online, or I'm sorry, I'd show up in person and I'd have a welcome table there. They didn't have to sign up because I already knew who they were. There's only 20 people, but they could come get a drink and then while they were talking and socializing, which they said was one of the best benefits of getting together in person was talking with each other. They also had this little announcement thing where they could scan a QR code because we're out in the middle of the field, right? We're not in a nice room like this. So the next couple online and in-person learning circles were listed on here and they could sign up right then and there out in the field with that QR code so I could get people right away. I did certainly send email to everybody just in case. We had certain things developing that the rest of the wider beekeeping world would not need to know. I kind of wanted to give it a little bit of exclusivity. We also created a private Facebook group because some things you just don't understand unless you're there so you can only talk with each other. Your mileage may vary if you do that or as tended to not have that much traffic like we thought but we didn't know, right? Nobody knew that.  That was, I think, kind of a harder thing to do because then there's no point in person there for that instructor if they need something. I think that it was pretty successful. There's no harm in doing something different. I will say this is kind of like we were talking about the state group or the larger regional groups aren't doing this even though I think it's perfectly natural that they would but they don't. Social media is something that really helped and you can see here the social media, it's all kind of the same color scheme, same fonts. If you can make sure you are putting this out where all those lone rangers are. Everybody loves YouTube and Facebook and if you can be there too and they'll see that, they'll sign up. They would never join whatever club but they would certainly sign up to learn more. That's who I sat with at lunch. He would never join but he would come to hear. So if you have questions you can get a hold of me here. Again, this was my partnership grant. Krista is just down the hallway giving a whole talk about that. But if you have questions about applying for a grant or how to do a learning circle, that's my info. I can give you my card if you want. But yeah, that's it. Yes, I did everything through PayPal. So PayPal can take credit cards or I think there's only one person who wanted to give me a check. No, there are two people who wanted to give me a check and that's fine. So it wasn't too much of a... Nope, and they had a survey after two. So after the end, and you can do that on Zoom, you can give everybody a survey before they leave. That just happens automatically. If you can give people a paper survey, well, before they leave the site, they almost always filled it out and gave it back to me. I also did a model release so that I could use or the Farmer's Union or Sarah could use their image. The next one we're doing is storytelling so it's gonna include their voice, any video. So make sure they sign that release instead of a check mark. We did have a couple people come with their kids because their kids were the ones interested in the topic more than they were. So I had to have the parent sign for the kid and print the kid's name, which you could probably experience that too. Let's see, what can I think of? I don't know, we have a... Oh, I guess I could say I do have a learning circle in the works for this next year. And instead of a $20 deposit, people are gonna pay, I think $125 for queen rearing and they're all on board with it. I think part of it is because they're in town. Again, it's not really the tuition that keeps people from going to Minnesota or going to Montana or Florida. I think it's all the arrangements for what they're leaving behind to go. So I think having it be local is really what makes it doable for them. I don't think it's the money as much. And then I also have to talk to my partner like, hey, Tyler, can we do this for 2024? And I can only pay you a third of what I paid you this last time, because we didn't know if there was gonna be demand for it. And then, like Ben, doing the cutouts, we never know, we kind of, we get a lot of swarm calls and cutout calls, but you kind of have to track the progress like six months beforehand before you can actually say, hey, this is the time and day that we're gonna do this event. It takes a lot of negotiating with the property owner and are the bees still alive? And so if you're gonna do a site visit somewhere, yeah, it's just a lot of negotiating. And I think because it's normally something, Ben would charge a fee for like, hey, I'll take bees out of your barn for $300 or whatever. We just said, hey, you can get it for free. We'll give you lunch. Whatever honey we find, you can keep that honey. We're gonna camp out at your place for like five hours.  I mean, they were interested. So again, you gotta have that right host. So yeah, it took a while to get it all arranged, but it worked out. I mean, I think if it's easy, that's a good sign.


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You can now follow me on all my social media platforms to find out who my latest guest will be and don't forget to click the subscribe button and the notifications bell so you are notified for when my next podcast goes live. Hi Rich Mob from Boston, is that correct? Yeah, my uncle was one of the founders. How we went there along with Buddy McLean. Before we get into everything, no brother, I would like to go back to the start.  I grew up, tell Boston, Dorchester, fourth grade education. I wasn't good in school, finished up my education in prison and I had to tell everybody, I gotta be honest.  What was family life like then? Did you understand what the family business was or were you oblivious to it? I was oblivious till I was a teenager. Quite late then? Yeah, my mother, which is detailed in chapter one of The Devil to Pay of mobsters wrote the petition. Where can people buy it? It's on pre-sale all around the world right now. I think it's in 20 different languages. It's Blackstone Publishing, Barnes & Noble. My daughter, my 27 year old daughter actually said that. She sent me a picture, she said the kind of thing with you and a picture and targets already with your book. But it comes out March 26th, 2024, Blackstone Publishing, but it's everywhere. Did your mom try to keep you away from that leaf? No, aha. My mother was, for lack of better words, a gun mole.  She was pregnant with me. Never met my biological father. I was the bastard seed of the family. Then she was shackled up with another guy that was fixing horse races for the Irish mom. And he beat her pretty bad one night. I think she was about seven months pregnant with me. And the gentleman that raised me, who I consider my father, was a Jewish bookie. That guy disappeared. They said he went to Florida. No one's ever, no one ever saw him again. It's funny though, because everybody always say this, but every bad man I've met, every mother, kidnap, drug lord, prostitute, porn star, they all come from a broken home.  She got hooked on drugs. She eventually died of AIDS. I didn't really care too much for my mother. I was raised, like I said, by Henry Simons, a Jewish bookie. And I think it was 15. A car pulled up on a construction site one day. And the gentleman got out and he walked up to my father. And he said, it's time for him to know who he is.  Yeah. It's been rough, man. But you know something, it's... I chose that path. It was a learning to me.  What did they say? They told him he's coming with us. Simple as that, he's coming with us. Now he needs to know who he is. And it started at 15. I would go to upstate New England, Maine, Vermont. They started with pistols, they started with rifles, learning how to shoot with ex-military guys. And then from there, it was back down to Boston. A lot of crowd-maga stuff.  He's a former mobster. And now he works for the prison system and stuff like that. And he's like, man, they molded the real-life John Wick. It was crazy. Who took you over here? Who was that? My uncle. How he went there? How he went there? James Whitey, Bulger, Stevie, Fleming. They were all uncles. I just call it.  Everybody was an uncle. And you didn't know that life until that moment? Yeah, it started at 15. It started at 15.  Again, it's all detailed in the book. Like, she would shack up. We were in Florida when I think it was eight or nine. She'd be shackin' up with a Greek shipping magnet, Thomas Danasi. And at the same time, she was shackin' up with the chief of the Miami-Dade Police who was arrested and disgraced for corruption. Yeah, she was there. Why did the family wait 15 years to come and get you? I think they just waited for me to come of age. To be used, though? To be used. Like a soldier? To be molded as a soldier. And they took you away, like, for some training camp? Like military school? Not military school. Just putting me with different people to learn different things. What you thinkin' then? Were you just happy to have some sort of family around you? I was, um... Yes, because at that point I was eight or two and I had a tension that I didn't have for my mother. Everybody was waiting on me and it was just... It was crazy. It was crazy. What did you do after that, then? When you come back to Boston? How old? Um... Eighteen. Yeah. So you went away for three years? Yeah, three years. End of learning the family trade? Yeah. What were you doing after that?  Kicking happens, attempted murders, bank robberies, extortion, racketeering. A lot of violence. All violence, yeah. Did you have any signs of violence on the way up to 15 years old? Or were you quite a... No, yeah. Up to 15, yeah. My mother used to beat me daily. Yeah.   But yeah, it was... Like I said, my mother, when she got bad on the drugs, she would entertain gentlemen a lot.  I guess it does something to you. I saw my first murder at five. I was told to go sit on the front porch. And after my mother got done entertaining, a gentleman came out and he would always give me a dollar after he got done screwing my mother. And he was a drug dealer. He was a heroin dealer and gave me a dollar. Cadillac pulled up, got out, took my brother's shotgun, saw it off and blew his brains out while I was standing next to him. He was all over me. And he looked at me and he goes, what did you see, little man? And I said, nothing. I saw nothing. They're whole life.  It's a sad existence because there's so many kids like yourself. We've had that upbringing. It's not a humane thing to see. It's not normal to be getting beatings of parents. Listen, there's got to be some element of discipline, especially in this day and age, we've got a softened generation, but we're beating kids and telling them they're not good and seeing murders and seeing them being abused. That's child abuse for you. There's nobody there to protect you and feel safe. All kids ever want to do is feel loved. Even humans always want to do is feel loved.  That was one of my things until I met my wife. And I've been married several times before. My children, unfortunately, I went to prison when they were toddlers. They grew up without me. We've reunited now. So my whole life, I would not allow myself to love or care for anybody and I would not allow someone of me. It was very toxic. I just put a wall up by myself because I wouldn't allow people to hurt me. And if I love something, then you can hurt me by hurting them. So I just built this wall. When was your first robbery? Oh, Jesus Christ. Well, I'm eight years old. I remember beating a kid with a bat because I wanted his bike. So you had the violence in you anyway? You had that madness? We actually, when I finally got out, man, I was able to follow my passion for music and one of our songs that we just put out on Sony Records, Who Made Distribution is Rage. And it's some of the lyrics and it was the curse of violence lives in me. This is why these podcasts are so powerful because people could then understand you.  I agree with that theory of it. I just, I found that growing up from 15 on everything changed when I came home. Everywhere I went, I could go in to get a coffee or go in for a dinner and they would say how they would run right to the table and there was a manager, the owners, whatever. I tried to pay the bill. Money's no good here. It's okay. And that becomes a drug in itself. It becomes addictive because now you have a different status. And for the longest time I thought oh, everybody respects me. I'm different than everybody. And as I got older, I figured out it's not respect. It was fear. It was fear, which is troubling because it's baggage I carry with me every day. My wife, Christ, I don't, most nights I don't go to bed. I stay on the couch with the dogs because I can't sleep at night. Too many nightmares. Bad. Too many nightmares, man. So after 18 then you come back home. What sort of violence were you getting involved with? Did you enjoy it because you were getting a sense of power and fake work from people? I, it was very alluring to me. The fast cars, the money, the women. What I thought was respect, which was in actuality fear. I thought it was cool. I mean, when you're 18 and everybody is looking at you in a different way and it's like if you're, if I'm walking down this side of the street, they are, they cross the street. It was different in Boston and New England at that time to sit down at the table with James Whitey Bulger.  Karma got beat to death in prison. But to be around these people and raised by these people and molded by these people to be this tool, the boogeyman. That's what they said. I remember going to a meeting in New York. I had to go down and pick up some money and do something and deliver something. And I remember this old timer, old Italian guy. He literally, this was probably about 19 or 20.   Became a boogeyman. I didn't want to be in the limelight. I prefer the darkness, the shadows. There was a switch I used to turn off. There was a switch, an internal switch. And it was just business. But when something needed to be fixed, it fixed it. What sort of stuff were you doing? Stuff I'm not proud of. I'm stuck, I'm not proud of. What was James' way to bulge a leak?  Nothing happened in Boston without Jimmy controlling it. It didn't matter with who. It didn't matter with who. Was he as ruthless as people say it? It was worse. It was a psychopath. So was Stephen Flaney, the rifleman. Complete psychopaths. Anybody that could, well, Stephen, sleeping with his stepdaughter who he raised, which is completely disgusting. And then for him to sit in the same room and watch whitey, strangle her to death.  This episode is sponsored by Fire Away Pizza, the fastest growing pizza company in the UK with over 150 stores. With their fresh quality ingredients and unique pizzas, they will have you coming back for more. Use code james20 for 20% off. That's james20 for 20% off. Why did you do that? Because she got hooked on drugs and they thought she might say something that she saw. Were you just getting told to do stuff for them? I would just get phone calls. Then I would just not ask questions. Like a robot? A machine. Yeah, a robotic machine. But my problem, whereas Jim Whitey, if he killed somebody, he took a nap afterwards and didn't worry about it. Well, someone was digging a hole. Me, I couldn't live with that. I couldn't look at myself in the mirror. I hated myself. So I crawled in a bottle. Drinking? I drank to be able to sleep. I would drink myself into an oblivion every night. And on the pain? Because alcohol suppresses depression and feelings?  It allowed me to be able to live within my own skin because I hated myself. I don't know how many times drunk I've looked in the mirror and maybe to shave, brush my teeth in the morning and took that beat and then just shattered the mirror because I hated myself for the things that I was involved in. But Jim, Jim was very calculating. He kept everything very compartmentalized. There was a South Boston crew, then there was a Dorchester crew, then there was a South Shore crew and he never let any of them mix because if he did, he'd have to share the wealth around the board and he'd want that. So, everything south of the bridge, we kind of took care of. How powerful were they? They ran everything. For an example, I have someone that I consider a friend who's doing a triple life for you now. Obviously, he'll never come home from prison. He was disposing of a body, got caught disposing of the corpse. They didn't have enough evidence to charge him with murder. So, they caught, like I said, he was going to dump the body into the hole. So, he got 10 years for that. And after two years, a parole was bought for him. He got out in two years and David R. Clark. They called him Mr. Plug Ugly. So, there was a piece of work that had to be done in David's Irish.  Because they hold Kelly each other.     So, David was suspected, it wasn't proven, but he was suspected of killing two guys for a contract. Mikey Romano and Richie Devlin in Boston. He's Boston. Power struggle back then with Cadillac Salami and all that stuff. He was Iron Gadget, just a hit man, that's all. He was just doing his job. But he was Allen Perrole for disposing of a corpse. Went into Boston to kill these two guys. He cut a tire. So, a legend says, slice the car, the other guy's tire, he came out and he bent over to look at his tire. He came out of the night club and he said, the fuck, as soon as he bent over he shot him in the back of the head a couple of times. And then Richie Devlin heard the shots, came out and he got shot in the head. And he was driving home. He had a tail light out. He didn't realize it. Stayed trooper, pulled him over. Now, he's already out on parole for getting rid of a corpse. Allegedly just pulled a double murder, a mob hit. He got out of the freaking car and just started shooting. Killed the state trooper. In the process, he himself got shot a few times. But it's just some different Batman. But I mean, he was out, you could buy pearls. You could get out. You could get preferential treatment, Batman. We used to have a furlough program. I said, if I was doing natural life, after five years, I could go home on the weekends if I was a good boy. Just come back by much, 7 a.m. Monday. Come back there and take on Monday morning by 7 a.m. Why is that? It's the way New England works. It's the way Boston worked.  Yeah, it's crazy.  Obviously, I was born in 1971. So I was an 80s child.  It was crazy. How many people were in the crew? My crew? Yeah. Let's just say about a half a dozen. Yeah. Lawyer? Tossworthy? Or did everybody turn in that as well? No one in our crew ever turned. All Irish? All Irish. That's where it goes on that? Yeah. You can love Irish. Love Irish, same as the Scottish. I had an IRA man on, John Crawley. Mm-hmm. He was doing business with it. Waitie Bulger, apparently he was shitting guns over, but...   And he never knew who made the phone. Somebody made the phone call and stuck him in. Good guy, John. Really good guy. I thought it might have been Waitie. Could that have been a possibility or was he always a snitch? Oh, yeah, absolutely. And when everything came out about Waitie, he ratted on his first crew back in the 50s when he got sent to Alcatraz. So he had started ratting right out of the gate. Do you think older top boys are like that? That's why a lot of them say they're a prison? I would like to think there's a few honorable guys.  I was the dark secret no one was supposed to know about because my uncle's brother was a very respected man, family. So I wasn't supposed to exist. He just knocked my mother up. He never ratted. How he went to never ratted. Raymond Patriaca, Sr., never ratted. Jerry and Julo never ratted. Other than that, I could think of they never ratted with all the original regime. How much money were you making back then? $60,000, $80,000 a week as a teenager. $60,000, $80,000 a week. Were you ever happy in that life? I thought I was. I thought I was. I really didn't. What's the worst thing you've seen involved in that life? Cheers. Obviously, we don't want to incriminate anybody, but obviously, things that you can talk about are things that people have been charged with.  Kevin, two weeks, weeks. He was just a whitey's gopher. You know, when he had to go dig up corpses and rebarium, different places. I've seen some pretty crazy stuff. Pretty crazy. I just don't want to incriminate myself or anybody else, but I've seen some pretty gruesome stuff. I mean, my life's online. Everybody knows, man. I think I've been involved in 26 separate prison stabbings. Because it's a different life, man. I just, unfortunately, sometimes I enjoy the violence. Whenever you're not here with my daughter, she said, Dad, my friend's in this and that, and it says this online, and it does this. And I said, listen, things you can't, don't ever ask me that. Do not ask me that. All I can tell you is your father's. I never heard anybody innocent. Some guy trying to pay his mortgage, put his kids through school, and put food on the table, because there was no honor in that. I never heard anyone innocent. But what we kind of specialized in, if you were a gangster, you were fair game. We shook down gangsters and said, when did you go to prison? What age? First time. Useful offender, I think. I had like a nine-month stint for beating somebody up at a club. It's 16 or something like that. What was that feeling? Inside? Well, it's different.  So you sit at a certain table with people, and you're given respect. I don't mind being locked up. That in itself is sad. Is that because you feel safe, and other people are safe that you're not? Because you didn't like hurting people, but you've done it anyway? It got to a point as a good older. There was no enjoyment in it anymore. There was no enjoyment in it. It was just a necessity.  Whatever the problem was, it had to be fixed. It's haunting and troubling when you look at somebody and you grew up with them.   You knew the rules. Whereas they went a whole gang for people they don't know.  The Irish mob war of Boston was the bloodiest mob war in American history. 60 bodies were left laying on the streets during the war. Another 60 or 90 never. They didn't find them. People were getting clipped left and right. Were they connected to, how was the connection with the five families in New York? Were they in contact, or did everybody just do their own thing? Um, no. There was, uh, four stretching tendrils, let's say. They use a fret because of how violent these were. To these families.  But we use a fret too, these five families because of their attention that you were bringing.  Show yourself the phone. Yeah, yeah. Oh, we showed that on camera. What did you say? Are you friends? Yeah. It's always, um, see, the Irish, we just did work. We didn't discriminate.  You never heard a woman. You never heard a child. And you don't go after people's family that are innocent. You just don't do that. There's no one around there. See, when, when did you know that he was a proper nutcase? Did you always know or when did you start to waking up to it that something wasn't right? Mid-twenties. Mid-twenties. There was an argument between I was giving a condominium in the South Shore and then Jim was a Louis, Louisbury Square, Whitey bought the condo directly next door to me. And, um, I remember my uncle showed up. They get into a very heated conversation and he made it clear to Whitey. He said, the kid's off limits. He doesn't give you anything. There's no tribute. There's no kick up.  And then he said to me, he goes, you're going to be moving. I don't want you near him. Not this close.    I don't know. To be honest with you, I don't know. But there was just, you know, there's always, um, lots of stories about when Whitey, um, was down at the L Street bath house in South Boston. Where, um, he... It's a pedophile, I guess. That's what they call it now. Where you could sleep with young girls. Um, we don't know. We do know for a fact. Um, there was a famous actor, Sal Menino.  It was crazy. So he ended up in the run for 16 years? 16 years, yeah. And then he got beaten to death in prison? And he lasted 20, well, 21 hours. Why is that? Karma. I think so. Did he have a lot of hats out in his life? Um, we... When he got arrested in, uh, 2011, his last ditch effort was to try and keep Catherine out of jail. His girlfriend, Catherine Gray. And, um, we ended up being able to look at some of, um, internal official reports where he implicated myself and other people in the Isabella Gardner Museum heist as being the masterminds and as murdering 15 people to keep it unsolved all these years. Yeah. Largest heist in the history of the world. A billion dollars. What was that? How much get recovered? Nothing. How many people did they say they were involved? Well, dead is what they said. No one's ever been arrested, nothing's been recovered. What was that? What was it? What, get stole? 13 items. Most notably was Rembrandt's only seascape, storming the Sea of the Gambley. Where did they get stole from? The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. One billion pounds worth of stolen goods? Yeah, one billion dollars, yeah. That's tasty. It's literally still to this day the largest heist in the history of the world. And they says the Winter Halt Gang was involved? Some people did.  You have to read the book. I believe it's chapter nine. And that chapter is already being optioned for a movie. I partnered with Greg Donis through my other business partner.  I hope he's not winning, because again, we had the Andy Dick fucking. What's it?  Alan L.A. I'm fine. Yeah, so anyways, Greg Donis, Donis Films, his new documentary is Blood Lies and Murder. So, yeah, he's got, we're on Peacock now with that. And that was with Rod Eglet, former head of the FBI, who just gave me a great review on my book. And Thomas Lan, who was the O.J. Simpson co-lead detective on the O.J. Simpson case. So we got a good relationship with those guys. They're now retired. So Greg and I have partnered with Blackstone Publishing, my publishing company. We're doing four one-hour docuseries episodes. And Blackstone is doing an option and an adaption for, I think, six seasons of a scripted series off my book. And then we'll follow up at the end with a prequel film that takes it back to the 60s. One way uncle founded The Irish Mom, went to Hill Gang, and then we'll end it in 71 with my birth. Almost like the many saints of Newark, like they did with the Speranos. So when did you get your big sentence? What year? Which one? Did you not get 21 years or 24? No, no, I was at home. At and out. Acumenal of? Yeah. What was your biggest sentence? Seven or ten, I think. So what was that for? Kidnapping, attempted murder, and something else. What was prison like for you? I don't mind prison. Were you taking drinking drugs on there? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Not drugs. I just... Making a hooch? No, no. Have you ever seen the Poland Springs, like one gallon water bottles? I had a guard that used to fill it with absolute vodka for me. I'm bringing it for 500 bucks a pop. We made a lot of money on... this last sense of the Suboxons, the strips they sell. We could get a bottle of 90. The guards would bring it in. I'd give them $2,000 to bring in the bottle. And we would cut, you know, the guys would cut the strips up into 16s, 30 seconds, halves, quarters, whatever. Anyways, we were knocking down, I don't know, $20,000 a month, $25,000 a month, prison off that? What prisons we in? OCCC, SECC, Concord, Walpole, Szuzeberanowski. What was the worst? Szuzeberanowski. Why? Violence. It's the only level six maximum security prison in the Commonwealth now. How protected were you as in prison by being involved in the Irish mob? They just had a lot of good contacts. A lot of good contacts. Yeah, I never had a problem. And a lot of violence then in prison? Yeah, it's a different element. It's a food chain and there's a hierarchy. If you and I were a prison, right?  I have a fear that you're going to, a concern that you're going to retaliate against me. Or if you beat me up, you're going to have that same concern.  See, you were in prison, Sean. Did you ever think about changing your life and walking away or was it just too hard? Or were you just so caught up in that life where you didn't ever see a get out? Um, my last incarceration, say I got out, what, three and a half years ago? I'm only been out three and a half years. Um, I decided then that I wanted to change that I had given half of my life to the family in the streets. And I just wanted to live my own life where I was left a bit. And when I got out, I met with a lot of people and I said, I don't want this. I don't owe you guys nothing. You don't owe me anything.  I don't want it. I don't want to be looked at as the undisputed, unopposed, aro-fucking-thrown. Because it's something I don't want. I just want to be left alone. And if there's going to be a problem with that, let's table it right now. How did you get out of that life? I just told him I'm done. You become a threat though because of the information that you have as well. No, I think my federal lawyer, Kevin Selvazia, said it best while we were filming a reality show last year. The director asked a question and my lawyer chuckled. And he said, everybody's dead. He has nothing to worry about anymore. They're all dead. Three men can keep a secret. If two are dead. Is that a risk?  He feels if you wouldn't have got out if the top boys were still living. Yeah, I honestly can't even say I looked at it like that. I just... I made up my mind. There were some younger individuals that were using the name and those are some of the people I met with.  Stop riding the coattails.   But not that.  It's over. Whatever happened to your uncle? Died at 91. A free man. At 91, yeah. When did it pass? Oh, it's been, uh, going on four years now. I saw the moment.  Because at that point, you know, I'm in my late 40s and I already knew what time it was. You guys used me.  You wanted to be distanced from.   If they had somebody that owed money or something that needed to be addressed, they said, don't, don't, don't make us send the kid. Did you ever think about killing them? Yeah, that's funny to say that. Um, I had, we just got an email from, uh, Rod Agler, former head of the FBI, and he was telling Greg Donis, um, the, uh, documentary series, he goes, I already know for a fact, if Sean had found Whitey, he would have killed him. And Greg asked me, he goes, is that true, Sean?  Did anybody know where he was?   He was? Yeah, he was a nutcase. So, see, because your uncle passed, was that one of the reasons why you got out as well? Yeah, because, uh, I, I didn't, yeah, absolutely. I didn't know anybody, anything. And I didn't want, uh, the passing of the torch, the proverbial torch.   It's as simple as that. That's, that's your, uh, resume. So to say. You know, I did walk around, man, murder, pain, teardrops. Teardrops, does that represent killings? But the person's done or is that just something? It could be, you're not going to say, yes, do you know what I mean? You're not going to say, you're not going to say, you know what I mean? Um, there's actually, uh, there's actually a thing they have when you go into prison. Um, about teardrops, about all your tattoos. Uh, they say that, um, this is just them, not me. They say that if you have a red teardrop, each one represents five murders. I'm just looking to see if you've got any red ones. How's three? Three red ones, 15. The cameras and all the police officers watching. Is that, is that what your life was then, showing misery and pain? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. How is it now? Is it still the same? Because the mind's a powerful tool.   I, I spent the last several years surrounding myself with good people, honest, hard-working souls, that have nothing to do with any kind of crime, and just, um, rebuilding my relationship, um, with my daughter and my granddaughter, who terrorizes our house, um, and focusing on, um, ironically my music, which is mob rock records. Uh, I spent a lot of time in L.A. with, uh, Ron. And when I'm not in L.A., um, I will lay in bed around the couch with my dogs and with my wife, and I reflect. Um, every year, like a soldier, his survivor's guilt.   Why? Why am I here? I've been shot four times, stabbed six times. Why am I still here and why is he not? Why do you think you're here? I'd like to think that it's to pay something forward. Um, there was a situation, uh, two years ago, I think. Two years ago. I was walking my dog, and I was in downtown Worcester. And I heard a voice call my name out. A young kid, probably about 16, maybe 17 years old. And I'm looking at the kid, and I'm like, Goddamn. I don't know this kid. He's too young. To ever, uh, have been involved with me.   And he said, tune. You're that mobster.   I went on and told my wife. I said, I feel physically sick. I want to vomit right now because that's what he was looking up to me for. It was a very, very hard moment for me. I literally wanted to vomit. That's what all these gangster films and that do as well. Godfather, Goodfellows, Scarface.    But the thing is, right, there's never, I never took, I never derived any amount of pleasure out of hurting another human being. I didn't get off on it. It wasn't a power thing for me. It was just, this has to be done. For who? For whatever reason. If it was a job, it had to be done. I didn't ask questions. I didn't care. I was the machine. He blocked out all your emotions and become cold with the world? Unfortunately, yes. Yeah. How do you then learn to trust him again? What age are you now, Sean? 52. So how do you learn to trust him through that life and never feeling good enough and violent and being cold? It's an ongoing process for me to learn to love, to be loved because it was always a weakness to me. If I showed empathy or emotions to people I thought I was weak and that's something that could have been exploited. Now, again, it's just an ongoing process. I'm not involved with anybody that has anything to do with crime now. Do you have a worry that you could go back? Make a mistake? Yes. I just had this conversation in an interview with a reporter and they asked me, would you ever hurt anybody again? I said, honestly, I can't answer that question because if you hurt, if someone were to hurt my family or someone I loved, a friend, I would just lose it. When are you at your weakest to think? When are you at your saddest? I open my eyes every day. When I open my eyes. When was the last time you cried? Yesterday. Last night, but actually this morning. This morning. Yeah, but that's a good thing. As well. Yeah, because it lets me know that I'm not a monster. I'm becoming a man. Showing emotion? Yeah. We were raised to show emotion as a weakness but showing emotion as a strength? I'm realizing that now. I mean, last night got a little hectic and we were at a function with the mayor of Atlantic City and there were thousands of people there. Music was just insanely loud and a lot of people were coming up and asking to take photos with us and I had probably too many cocktails and I was literally telling Roland, I was telling Rob Schwartz and everybody.  I can't do this. There's thousands of people here. They're bumping into me and not saying excuse me. I mean, if I did my history or my due diligence, right, you'd be locked up, right? You know what happens in the joint if you bump into somebody and you don't acknowledge it and say, hey, pardon me, I'm sorry.   Seriously. So last night, yeah. What's the worst thing about that life of Crane? At the next generation, Caesar is a badge of honor because I think that what a lot of people do not realize and which I just recently realized is that mankind's greatest stock is our youth because that's how we continue. When I'm dead, I'm gone. What are we showing? What examples are we setting for tomorrow's adults? What are we doing? We're shot, yeah. Guy with a gun? Yeah, did you know? So it was? Was it four separate teams? Or are the ones that did four shots? Four separate teams.   But I left the hospital and the reporters are like, Sean, who shot you? I go, Guy with a gun. I said that question, Sean, but do you ever wish that bullet would you? I woke up one of my ex-wives one night and she stopped by because I lived with anybody. Even though I was married, I never lived with anybody until I lived with Charlene. I always kept a separate residence. She stopped by. She was pregnant and she went out on the back porch to smoke a cigarette. I left my door open and he's Boston. I woke up to an individual. I was in bed next to her and she was about six months pregnant at the time. I woke up to an individual burying a 32 inch bayonet into my neck. Should I reach through the neck? Yeah. To the head and the neck? Stabbed me twice. Stabbed me twice. I fought. I fought out of bed. Destroyed the bedroom. threw him down the stairs. So I had a 32 inch bayonet type knife. And he landed at the bottom and started to cut his throat. He was 16 years old. I was a kid. It was his initiation into a gang. So that could put a bullet in your neck. Stabbed you twice just to get into a gang? Making his bones, I guess they said. I didn't cut. I started to cut his neck. But when I saw he was just a kid. I stuffed my fingers into the hole. Two fingers into the hole. Walked across the street. Laid up against the wall. Shed up against the wall. Purchased myself up against the wall. There was a little bodega across the street. The owners came out and they had towels and they were trying to stop the other hole from bleeding. And I was just like, what? Shit, man.  Anybody got a cigarette? Why did you become the target? I guess that was a reputation. That's reputation. It's unfortunate. And to go, honey, what was it? Which chase was it last year? My son. Chase. I got a call from my ex. She said, Chase. Chase has been arrested. 16 years old. So I knew he's been arrested.  I said, right, I hung up. A few minutes later, I got a call. Talked to a lieutenant or captain first. I said, why is my son arrested? Well, he's the prime suspect in a serious crime. So what are you talking about? He said, well, he's under arrest for murder. So I got a phone with him. I said, don't say anything. Wait till the lawyer gets there.  He said, I just want to be like you. Do you believe in yourself? Absolutely. He spent his entire life visiting me and me in prison. What's happening? Are they still in? They didn't have enough evidence to charge him. He got released. I took care of him for 90 days, 120 days, whatever it was. He got released. I got another phone call from my ex. Chase is in the hospital. What's wrong now? I don't know. What's wrong now? I just got out two days ago. Someone tried to kill him. My wife and I, I begged him before all this happened. I said, just come live with us. Go back to school whatever you want. Just come live with us. The last time I cried was just two minutes ago now. Yeah, but it's a good thing. You're showing emotion. You're showing strength.  What it does is I spend every waking moment trying to make a living of men's for the chaos and pain I cause because there's no such thing as a victimless crime.    So if I do something to you I have affected, it's a ripple effect. There is no such thing as a victimless crime.  What's the worst day in your life? I know you've had a lot of pain, a lot of struggle, but is that one of the worst? That's one of the worst and I guess I'll not I guess I again, I tried last year. I got into a disagreement with my wife and she locked the doors in the house. I'll see what the fuck's going on here. This is my house. The bottom door came off. The top door came off. The bedroom door came off. And I was like, please don't lock doors in my house and I just need to grab some clothes. And I went to an Airbnb with a mutual friend of ours. That was probably because that night I had to be rushed to the hospital by a friend because I had a heart attack because I couldn't believe what I just did. And the same thing as when I wrote the book one of the most uplifting moments is my wife told me she didn't care what was in the book she'd always loved the man she met not the person I was before. I have my greatest days now are watching our two-year-old what I call my two-year-old terrorist granddaughter run around the house just get into whatever she wants to get into and watching my wife play with her and the dogs and just my friends Ron's daughter she graduated fifth grade last year flew to LA just to go to her graduation and stuff like that you appreciate things now things that I never appreciated before. The smaller things that are there that last forever, the memories of the smaller things that you think are small but are so great like family time spending time with family try to do the right thing if you accept your message is love can you accept it if never having love your whole life take love can you accept it?