Esteemed colleagues, the debate about the culpability of mentally ill or mentally challenged people. This debate is millennia old, in the Babylonian Talmud in the Bishnah, the sacred writings of the Jews 2,500 years ago. We find the same, it is an ill wrong thing to knock against a deaf mute, an imbecile or a minor. He that wounds them is culpable, but if these people wound him, they are not culpable. If mental illness is culturally dependent, and if it mostly serves as a social organizing principle, what should we make of the insanity defense? What should we make of not guilty by reason of insanity, NGRI? On the other hand, if mental illness is a viable series of clinical entities, and these clinical entities are objective and neutral, the equivalent of, shall we say, tuberculosis or cancer in medicine, then again, what are we to do with insanity defense? People like Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy, vicious serial killers, were declared sane by the courts. There is psychiatric insanity and legal insanity, and there's a gulf, there's an abyss between them. The question is why? Why don't we have a universally agreed upon definition of insanity, which can be easily implemented in psychiatric therapy, therapeutic settings and in courts? A person is held not responsible for his criminal actions. If he cannot tell right from wrong, to use the legal phraseology, if a person lacks substantial capacity, either to appreciate the criminality or wrongfulness of his conduct, then he has diminished capacity. And diminished capacity is only one element. The other element is that the person did not intend to act criminally, did not intend to act the way he did wrongfully, in other words, that he lacked mens rea. And the third element is that a person could not control his behavior, that he had an irresistible impulse.  Mental health professionals prefer to talk about an impairment of a person's perception or understanding of reality. They talk grossly, they discuss mostly, the reality test and whether the reality test is impaired or intact. Mental health professionals hold or regard guilty but mentally ill verdicts to be contradictions in terms to be oxymorons.  You can't be both. But in courts, there's quite a few, there are quite a few verdicts of guilty but mentally ill. All mentally ill people, all of them, operate within a usually coherent worldview, with consistent internal logic and even with rules of right and wrong, with a kind of personalized or customized form of ethics. Yet these rarely conform to the way most people perceive the world. The mentally ill therefore cannot be guilty because they have a tenuous grasp on the reality that the rest of us share. At least this is the view of psychiatry. Yet experience teaches us that a criminal may be mentally ill, even as he maintains a perfect reality test and thus is or can be held criminally responsible. Again, Geoffrey Dahmer for example. The perception and understanding of reality in other words can and does coexist where even with the severest forms of mental illness, the psychiatric limited test of reality or using the reality test is insufficient and life presents complicated nuanced cases which cannot be black and white. This makes it even more difficult to comprehend what is meant by mental disease. If some mentally ill people maintain a grasp of reality, if they know right from wrong, if they can anticipate the outcomes of their actions if they are not subject to irresistible impulses, which is the official position of the American Psychiatric Association if they don't fulfill any of these conditions in what way are they different to us, the so-called normal or healthy folk. If we also share the same attributes, if we have a perfect reality test, if we perceive and understand reality perfectly if we don't have irresistible impulses, if we know right from wrong etc etc and yet we are not mentally ill in which sense other people are mentally ill. And this is why the Insanity Defense often sits ill with mental health pathologies deemed socially acceptable and normal. Take for example love or take religion. Many would argue that they are mental health pathologies and yet because they are socially acceptable, they are not deemed as such. Let's consider a case study. A mother bashes the skulls of her three young sons. Two of these kids die. She claims to have acted on instructions that she had received from God and she is found not guilty by reason of insanity. The jury determines that she did not know right from wrong during the killings. But hold back. Why exactly was she judged or declared insane? Let's try to isolate the elements of her defense. First of all she claims that she believes in God, in the existence of a God, of God. She claims to fully uphold the conviction that there is a being, supreme being, eternal being with inordinate and inhuman attributes. We can agree or disagree about the existence of such a being. We can deem her to be irrational but is she really insane? It does not constitute insanity in the strictest sense because it conforms to social and cultural mores, creeds and codes of conduct in her milieu. Billions of people faithfully subscribe to the same irrational ideas, adhere to the same transcendental rules, observe the same mystical rituals and claim to go through the same experiences. We can stand back and say well this is mass psychosis. This is a form of fully appraisal, shared psychosis. But it is so widespread that it can no longer be deemed pathological, statistically speaking. It falls within the spectrum of normalcy. So this first element of her defense that God spoke to her in my view cannot be a part of the determination of her insanity. She claimed that God spoke to her as do numerous other people. Behavior that is considered psychotic, paranoid, schizophrenia in other contexts is actually loaded and admired in religious circles. Some people who claim to have spoken to God went on to found all new religions, Jesus for example or Muhammad. Hearing voices and seeing visions, auditory and visual hallucinations these are considered rank manifestations of righteousness and sanctity in very wide circles to this very day. Perhaps, but perhaps it was the content of her hallucinations that proved her insane. You could say wait a minute, okay, that she believes in God doesn't render her insane. That she spoke to God or God spoke to her doesn't mean that she's insane because so many millions, maybe billions of people go through the same experiences. So what is normal is statistically defined and if billions go through the same experience then she's normal. But is the content of her hallucinations, is what God told her? What makes her insane?   Alas, the Old and New Testaments both contain examples of God's appetite for human sacrifice. Abraham, the patriarch Abraham, was ordered by God to sacrifice his son Isaac, his beloved son. This savage command by God was rescinded in the very last second when the knife was already to Isaac's throat. Jesus, the son of God himself and an integral part of the dating was crucified, sacrificed to atone for the sins of humanity and it was at the directly haste and command of God. When he was on the cross, Jesus cried out, Why have you forsaken me? A divine injunction to slay one's offspring would sit well with precedent and with the Holy Scriptures in Apocrypha as well as with millennia old Judeo-Christian traditions of martyrdom and sacrifice. Some of these traditions are alive and well in Islam, for example. Okay, you see, maybe even the content of what she heard can be reconciled with religious injunctions but her actions were wrong and they were incommensurate with both human and divine or even natural laws. What she did proves that she is insane. Yes, her actions were horrific but they were perfectly in accord with the literal interpretation of certain divinely inspired texts with certain millennial scriptures, with certain apocalyptic thought systems and with fundamentalist religious ideologies such as the ones espousing the imminence of rapture or such as she had a martyrdom in more extreme strands of fundamentalist Islam such as Wahhabism. Unless one declares these doctrines and writings insane, her actions cannot be construed as insane. When you conform to an ideology or to a religion, then you are not insane. You may be considered radical and extremist, fundamentalist. The whole ideology or religious creed can be condemned as irrational or as cruel but there's no hint of insanity in any of this. We as human beings are motivated by ideological and religious systems and rituals. We are forced to the conclusion that the murderous mother is actually perfectly sane. Her frame of reference is different to ours. That's true but she has a frame of reference. Hence her definitions of right and wrong are idiosyncratic. That's also true. They are not like ours. To her, killing her babies was the right thing to do and in conformity with valued teachings and with her own epiphany. Her grasp of reality, the immediate and later consequences of her actions was never impaired. She knew what she was doing and she believed that she was obeying a higher authority as expressed by her. The auditory cues and various religious teachings. It would seem that sanity and insanity are relative terms dependent on frames of cultural and social reference and they are statistically defined. They are not objective immutable entities. There isn't and in principle can never be or can never emerge an objective medical scientific test to determine mental health or disease unequivocally. Cultural context, societal background and historical precedent are all crucial. Someone is considered mentally ill if he or she fulfills or meets five conditions. One that his conduct rigidly and consistently deviates from the typical average behavior of all other people in his culture and society that fit his profile. So whether this conventional behavior is moral or rational is not material. In Nazi Germany, someone who was not a psychopath and was not narcissistic would have been considered socially deviant and perhaps even insane. So what matters is the statistical aspect. There is no value judgment and there is no moral principle that is applicable. What the majority of people do, this is the background against which we judge insanity. The second test is whether his judgment and grasp of objective physical reality is impaired or not. The third test is whether his conduct is not a matter of choice, but whether it is innate and irresistible. The fourth test is whether the behavior causes him or others discomfort, whether there is ego distantly. And the fifth test, whether this behavior is dysfunctional, self-defeating, self-destructive, even by the person's own yardsticks. That's it. These are the five tests of insanity.  But these are statistical tests and self-reporting tests. What are mental health disorders? What is insanity?  If so, can these disorders be cured by restoring the balance of substances and secretions in this mysterious organ? And once equilibrium and homeostasis are being stated and restored, is the illus gone or is it still lurking there under wraps, so to speak? Is the whole thing reversible? Is it waiting to re-irruct? Are psychiatric problems inherited? Are they rooted in faulty genes, though amplified by environmental factors? Or are they brought on by abusive and wrong nurtures, nature versus nurture? Even these most basic questions are far from determined. These questions are the domain of the medical school of mental health. Others cling to the spiritual view of the human psyche, whatever that is.  And this medium is the so. Spiritual healers, spiritual thinkers, believe in or adopt a holistic approach, taking in the patient, in his or her entirety. As well as the media and the environment within which the patient contextually operates. The members of the functional school of mental health regard mental health disorders as perturbations, disturbances in the proper statistically normal behaviors and manifestations of so-called healthy individuals. Functional school uses dysfunctions as the framework within which to describe mental health disorders. The sick individual, he let ease with himself, he could be stoned, or making others unhappy, deviant. The sick individual is mended or fixed when rendered functional again by the prevailing standards of his social and cultural frame of reference. It's a mechanical approach akin to a garage. Where you bring the patient in and there's a mechanic and a mechanic works on the patient, all kinds of cogs and wheels and nuts flying in the air. And then the patient emerges from the garage, fully fixed, healed and cured. In a way, these three schools are akin to the trio of blind men. These blind men rendered disparate descriptions of the very same elephant. Still, they share not only the subject matter, which is the elephant, but to a counter-intuitively large degree, they share a faulty methodology. As the renowned anti-psychiatrist Thomas Sass of the State University of New York, as he wrote in his article, The Lying Truths of Psychiatry. Mental health scholars, regardless of academic predilection, infer the etiology of mental disorders from the success or failure of treatment, modalities and medications. They apply some treatment, they give some medication, and then if the symptoms disappear, they say, well, now we know what the disease is. If we know which parts of the brain the medication modifies or interferes with or intervenes in, we know where the disorder is and we even know what the disorder is. But of course, this form of reverse engineering is methodologically very wrong. It is unprecedented also. We don't do this in other areas of science, like physics or... This form of reverse engineering of scientific models is sometimes used in other fields and it is sometimes acceptable, but only if the experiments meet the criteria of the scientific method. What I'm trying to say is that the faulty methodology is because we can never replicate the same situations. We can never repeat the experiments. The theory we have must be all-inclusive, must be analytical, must be consistent, must be falsifiable, must be logically compatible, must be monovital and must be parsimonious. Psychological theories, even the medical ones, the role of serotonin and dopamine in mood disorders, for example, all psychological theories are usually none of these things or satisfy a few of these conditions, but not all of them. So when we compare psychological theories to, for example, theories in physics, in both cases we might engage in reverse engineering. We might go from the outcomes of experiments to a theory, but when we do this in physics, it's because the experiment is replicable, because we can repeat the same experiments all over the globe. Thousands of scholars and researchers and academics can repeat the same experiment and get the same result, not so in psychology. The outcome is a bewildering array of ever-shifting mental health so-called diagnosis, expressly centered around Western civilization and its standards. Neurosis, historically-fundamental condition, literally vanished after the 1980s. Homosexuality, according to the American Psychiatric Association, was a pathology prior to 1973. BDSM, bondage and salomazochistic sex was a pathology prior to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. So until 2013, five years ago, if you engage in BDSM, you were a diviant, you had a paraphernalia, but afterwards you were totally normal. Seven years later, narcissism, in 1980, narcissism was declared a personality disorder, and that is almost seven decades after it was first described by Freud. It's a landscape of shifting values. Clinical entities don't behave this way, tuberculosis was defined 200 years ago, and remained the same to this very day. It wasn't taken in and out of medical manuals, and the situation is even much worse when we deal with personality disorder. Personality disorders are an excellent example of the kaleidoscopic nature and landscape of objective psychiatry. The classification of Axis II personality disorders, deeply ingrained, maladaptive, lifelong behaviour patterns, all of them in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. This classification has come under sustained and serious criticism from its inception in 1952, in the first edition of the BDSM. The fourth edition, the fourth iteration, and especially the text revision of the BDSM, adopted a categorical approach postulating that personality disorders are qualitatively distinct clinical syndromes, page 689. And this is widely doubted and widely disputed, and has been substantially modified in the fifth edition in 2013. Even the distinction made between normal and disordered personalities is increasingly being rejected. The diagnostic thresholds between normal and abnormal are either absent or weakly supported. The polythetic form of the BDSM's diagnostic criteria, the fact that only a subset of the criteria is adequate grounds for a diagnosis, this generates unacceptable diagnostic heterogeneity. In other words, people who are diagnosed with the same personality disorder may share only one criterion, or even in extreme cases none. How is this possible? The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, to this very day, fails to clarify the exact relationship between axis 2 and axis 1 disorders, and the way chronic childhood and developmental problems interact with personality disorders. The book contains little discussion of what distinguishes normal character, or personality, or personality traits, or personality style, according to Theodor Millen. What distinguishes all these from personality disorders? Where is the threshold beyond which the personality is disordered? There's a dearth, a lack of documented clinical experience regarding both the disorders themselves, and the utility of various treatment modalities. Numerous personality disorders are not otherwise specified, a catch-all-basket category. Cultural bias is evident in certain disorders, such as borderline, antisocials, his or people. The emergence of dimensional alternatives to the categorical approach has been acknowledged even in the previous edition of the Diagnostic. In page 689 it says, an alternative to the categorical approach is a dimensional perspective, that personality disorders represent maladactive variants of personality traits that merge imperceptibly into normality and into one another, very helpful. But someone like Brian Blackwell received a more lenient sentence for murdering his parents, because he had narcissistic personality disorder.  We don't even know whether Brian Blackwell was normal or not. And yet we had the audacity, both as a court and as a psychiatric profession, to claim that he had diminished responsibility. The following issues are long neglected in the Diagnostic and Statistical Mind. Hopefully they will be tackled in future editions, as well as in current research, but who knows? Their omission from official discourse, hitherto, is startling and telling the profession is avoiding its own shortcomings. There is an issue of the longitudinal course of the disorders, the temporal stability from early childhood onwards. There is an issue of genetic and biological underpinning of disorders. There is an issue of development of personality psychopathology during childhood and its emergence in adolescence. There is a severe problem of comorbidity of various disorders. There is an issue of interactions between physical health and disease and personality disorders. Effectiveness of various treatments, top therapies, psychopharmacology, etc. etc. The field is utterly virgin, I would say, after decades of studies. Indeed, the biochemistry and genetics of mental health is a very thorny issue. Certain mental health afflictions are either correlated with a statistically abnormal biochemical activity in the brain, or they are ameliorated with medication. Yet these two facts are not facets of the same underlying phenomenon. In other words, that a given medicine reduces or abolishes certain symptoms does not necessarily mean that these symptoms were caused by the processes of substances affected by the drug administered. Causation is only one of many possible connections and chains of events. Correlation is another, a third event may have influenced both. To designate a pattern of behavior as a mental health disorder is a value judgment or at best a statistical observation. Such designation is affected regardless of the facts or brain size. Moreover, as we just said, correlation is not causation, deviant behavior, brain, deviant body biochemistry, what used to be called in the 17th century polluted animal spirits. These exist, but are they truly the roots of mental perversion? It is not clear what triggers what. Do the apparent neurochemistry or biochemistry, do they cause the mental illness? Or is it the other way around exactly? The mental illness causes the problems in biochemistry and neurochemistry. That psychoactive medication alters behavior and mood is indisputable, of course. But so do illicit and legal drugs, certain foods. Food can be considered as a form of medication. But also interpersonal interactions. So there are changes in behavior and mood. Environment affects behavior and mood incessantly. But that these changes were brought about by prescription and that this prescription is desirable. This is both debatable and total logical. Let me explain what I'm saying. What I'm saying is this.  You see? The medication is good. But the medication is good because you started from a point that there is mental illness. You made a value judgment that the person is mentally ill and that mental illness is bad for the person and for his social milieu, for his nearest and dearest, for others. And it is because of this value judgment that the medication is considered good or effective. Deviant, if a certain pattern of behavior is described as socially dysfunctional or psychologically sick, clearly every change would be welcomed as healing and every agent of transformation would be called a cure. The same applies to the alleged heredity of mental illness. You see the problem is that there is not enough information. Single genes or gene complexes are frequently and sensationally associated with mental health diagnosis, personality traits or with behavior patterns. But too little is known to establish irrefutable sequences of causes and effects. Even less is proven about the interaction of nature and nurture, genotype and phenotype, epigenetics, the plasticity of the brain and the psychological impact of trauma, abuse, upbringing, role models, peers and other environmental elements. We don't know enough its hubris and arrogance to claim otherwise. Nor is the distinction between psychotropic substances and talk therapy that clear cut. Words and interactions with the therapies also affect the brain, also change its chemistry, also change the angry wire neural pathways, albeit more slowly perhaps, but who knows, maybe more profoundly, maybe more irreversibly, we simply don't know. Medicines, as David Kaiser reminds us against biological psychiatry, medicines treat symptoms, not the underlying processes that yield these symptoms. And there is an issue of the variance of mental disease. If mental illnesses are bodily, if they are empirical, they should be invariant both temporarily and spatially. They should also be invariant across cultures and societies. And this to some degree is indeed the case, but psychological diseases are not context dependent, but the pathologizing of certain behaviors is context dependent. Suicides, substance abuse, narcissism, homosexuality, eating disorders, antisocial ways, schizotypal symptoms, depression, even psychosis are considered sick by some cultures and utterly normative or advantageous in other cultures. And this was only to be expected. The human mind and its dysfunctions, it's alike all around the world, but values differ from time to time, from period to period, and from one place to another. Hence disagreements about the propriety and desirability of human actions and inaction. These about to arise in a symptom-based diagnostic system. You cannot purge, purify, and exclude value judgment, cultural judgment, and social judgment from any system of systematic diagnosis. Again, psychological diseases should not be context dependent, but pathologizing certain behavior is always context dependent, and behavior is a pillar in diagnosing psychological diseases. As long as the pseudo-medical definitions of mental health disorders continues to rely exclusively on signs and symptoms, in other words, on reported and observed behaviors, they remain vulnerable to such discord and devoid of much sought universality and scientific rigor The mentalistic receive the same treatment as carriers of AIDS, or SARS, or the Ebola virus, or smallpox. They are sometimes quarantined against their will, it's called mental asylum, and they are coerced into involuntary treatment by medication, psychosurgery, or electroconvulsive therapy. This is done in the name of the greater good, largely as preventive or preemptive policy, prophylactic. Conspiracy theory is notwithstanding, it is impossible to ignore the enormous interests vested in psychiatry, and especially in psychopharmacology. The multi-billion dollar industries involving drug companies, hospitals, managed health care, private clinics, academic departments, and law enforcement agencies, All these gigantic industries rely for their continued and exponential growth on the propagation of the concept of mental illness and its core alarms, treatment and research. I'm not saying that schizophrenia paranoia does not exist, psychotic disorders, they exist, of course. I'm not saying that people are not depressed, they are depressed, major depressive episodes. I'm not denying the reality of bipolar disorder or catatonia, that's all I'm saying. I'm saying that there's a whole grey area, and it is about 70% of all psychiatry and psychology. There's a whole grey area where diagnosis are not real, uniform, monovilent, invariant, imbutable clinical entities. They are socially and culturally motivated value judgments. Abstract concepts form the core of all branches of human knowledge. No one has ever seen a quark, no one has ever untangled a chemical bond. By hand, no one has served an electromagnetic wave or visited the unconscious. These are useful metaphors, theoretical entities with explanatory or descriptive power. Mental health disorders are no different. They are shorthand for capturing the unsettling quiddity of the other. They are useful as taxonomies. They are also tools of social coercion and conformity, as Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser observed. But relegating both the dangerous and the idiosyncratic to the collective fridges, although it's a vital technique of social engineering, it is not science. And it should definitely, should not permeate the court system. We should not bring the shortcomings and deficiencies of psychiatry and psychology and convert them off-handedly by slate of them into a science. And we should not convince laymen, such as judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys, that we know what we are talking about. In the vast majority of cases we don't. It's too soon, too early. Everything is in its inception, it's just starting. The aim is progress through social cohesion and the regulation of innovation and creative destruction. I agree. Psychiatry therefore reifies society's preference of evolution to revolution. But in the worst case, it is, as I said, a tool of social coercion. It regulating social behavior and relegating dangerous elements, criminal elements, to enclaves where they cannot harm society and sometimes even themselves. This is a noble cause. And it should be unsprapurously and dogmatically even pursued. But we should not call this science. And we should not get ourselves confused. We should not convince ourselves in our own confabulation. Mental illness is a very fuzzy concept. Open to debate. And should be the subject of decades if not centuries of further study.  Thank you for listening. And I hope I haven't been too iconoclastic for your taste. I am not a member of the anti-psychiatry movement. I believe in the validity of some of the constructs. I believe in the benefits that humanity can derive from these fields of study. But I am dead set against pretending that we have all the answers. We hardly started to ask the right questions. Thank you again.


once you get in, once you have a brain bite for that. Jets that are holding, continue hold position. If a jet is level 100 knots, check your throttle and pull max and get airborne. Stop, we'll talk about it at the very end. I expect there will be marshallers. At some point though, you're gonna have to pass behind the jet that's in front of me, so I'm probably going to be turning it. I highly recommend it. I'll just leave it at that. Or what? Do you like it? Yeah. Do you, do you use it? Yeah, I make custom molds like he does. But I use those for years. Absolutely.


Hey there. So in this unit, we're looking at how you can build habits, how you can build some actions into your life before you start to put yourself out there before you start to interview.  And there are four contemporary, contemporary contemplative practices that can support that career growth. And in this unit, I'm going to be teaching you four different kinds. And this week is about action. And so it's about the action. Yeah, it's about thinking about things deeply while you take action. So often, when people think about having a contemplative program or practice in their life, they think it's, you know, meditating, all hands, and it's meditating. And a sitting meditation will get into that in week three is an absolute option. But a lot of people are not interested in that. It can be very challenging place to start. And there's also, if you can get the benefits through another way, then you may not need a sitting practice. Everyone's practice looks different. So for me, I like a combination of in terms of how I'm going to reflect, I like to write and I like to meditate.  They have some depth to it keeps me, yeah, positive. I feel, you know, when I have instincts about things that I shouldn't do or I should do, I feel good. I feel like my practices support me. For some people, that's not through sitting and writing, right? Sitting and writing may be the wrong way to go about it. So let's talk about maybe using how you could use action to do that and what that looks like. So contemplative action is doing contemplations, which is really just deep thinking, deep focus thinking on something. But as you move, and so you are not sitting still, you are moving as you're thinking about things deeply. This could be depending on on how you like to move and what your body can do. This could be dancing, this could be walking, this could be running, this could be yoga, this could be stretching, this could be housework, this could be putzing in your garden. So what we're looking for is there any sort of physical activity that you do, that while you do it, it allows you to be get to a zone where you can ask yourself some deep questions, right? So you're asking yourself, it kind of depends on what you're asking yourself. You know, if you're doing something like the the career cards or thinking about what's next is you might just go, Yeah, when, what kind of place do I want to work at? You know, and then, you know, dig in the garden and see if an answer comes to you.  And maybe it's going for a run and thinking about that as you run. So some people process by doing, right, which is the danger of saying you can only have a contemplative practice if you're, if you're meditating, because maybe that's not good enough for you. So the question ask yourself is really does movement help you process ideas?  Does it, does it allow you? Yeah, do you think of things as you move? It's really quite common for, for that to happen. And so that's your own investigation is go, Okay, does movement help me to process ideas? Is this a way that I can stay in touch with what I'm thinking, what I'm feeling and tune in with my body? Is there a way to build some intuitive skills and to build some focus? So this week, here's a little experiment you can do. Think of a question that you're looking to, you know, looking for an answer for, right? So maybe you have a question, you're like, should I, should I reach out to this person? Or should I write a blog post about this topic? Or, yeah, should I reach out to that old contact? And which introduction is better? So think of a question that you actually want an answer to, and then choose a physical activity, preferably one that you enjoy doing, and just try doing that activity and thinking about the thinking of the question that you have. And see, assess if doing something physically is a way that helps you to get an answer. Does that work for you? Right? That's what you want to reflect on. Do you find answers when you're moving and thinking about something? Does adding movement to your week? Does it, does it give you energy? Does it make you feel good? Does it keep you thinking more positively than you, than you were before? Does it make you feel like you're not stuck? Does it change how you feel about yourself or your career? And if it does, so if you find that adding movement to your week, does some really incredible things to you, then the last question to ask yourself is, what is the least amount possible that you could commit to in a week? Because saying, Hey, I'm going to start if you if you haven't done anything.  If you haven't done any, saying that you can do it 70s a week is a lot. But could you say, make a promise yourself and go, you know what? Two afternoons week, I'm going to go for a walk and ask myself a deep question. Or three mornings. So on Monday, on Wednesday, and on Friday, I'm going to, you know, do a yoga practice. And while I'm in Shavasana, I'm going to ask myself some questions. So really, it becomes Yeah, how could you add this to support the rest of your career work? And yes, at the same time, you can be doing other work, you can be thinking about your values, you can be reaching out to people, you could be writing your resume, practicing your stories, like you could be doing all those things. But with adding some active contemplation to your weekly schedule, help you. And that's what you want to investigate this week. So this week, again, I'll bring it back to your homework. This week is choose a question that you're looking for the answer to, and try thinking about it as you do a physical action, and see if you get an answer. And if it's an enjoyable thing, and if it is awesome, think about how you might use it. And if it doesn't work for you, cool. Next week, we're going to try a different way. All right. So happy exploring. Let me know what activity you choose, and if it works for you. Okay, thanks.


Welcome back to eccentric nature and my tea of the day! Oh yeah! Today I've got peppermint and rose. Forget I do a rose one since I just did the benefits of rose. So what I really want to talk about today is blending herbs, specifically fresh herbs. And when I'm talking about these you have the major four which are the mints, particularly peppermint, rosemary, thyme, and sage. And those are really considered stronger herbs that if you overbrew them at all they can get a little bit bitter or too strong. Peppermint out of those four is probably the least likely to get bitter, but it is still possible if you accidentally add in some of the stems or something along those lines that it can get that way. Same thing can be said for any herbal roots you're using like dandelion root or any other roots that you actually can use from the herbs themselves. So there are certain ones that you can use just the stems or even the roots out of them. And definitely if you're brewing roots they can easily get much more bitter because they're always stronger when you're talking about the roots. So anything that's that strong you only want to have to be a smaller percentage of your tea overall if you're going to taste the blend properly, right? So with this case where I've got the peppermint and the rose, rose being a very light flavor I could you know you could blend just the rose by itself and have a very very light taste kind of like a white tea where you aren't getting much of anything out of it other than the fragrance of it. And so it's very important that when you're putting them together that you generally take at least two to three times more of the lighter herb compared to the heftier herb. So in this case if I got the peppermint you'd say maybe use one teaspoon of peppermint to three teaspoons of rose essentially. If you really want to taste the rose properly. If you just want to have it as an accent flavor that's fine. You can just put some in there and just have it accent the flavor. But if you want to taste the balance between the flavors then you really need to add a lot more of the lighter one otherwise it's going to get overwhelmed by the stronger herb. And Sage, Rosemary are definitely going to do that to you. I think more than any others those two in particular can easily overwhelm any other herb. Thyme or regular peppermint all are in that same area where they can do that to you. Just not quite as much but it's definitely something to consider. If you're looking at blending herbs and just creating your own out of your own garden or if you've managed to just buy some even dry ones in this case where if you just buy dry peppermint and you've just buy dry dried rose or you know any of the other lighter ones or flowers. I mean you could say basil's I don't tend to use as much in tea but you can use some like Tulsi basil and the cinnamon basil. They're very good for tea still and you consider those a little bit more on the lighter side as well. Yeah I mean overall the main thing that you want to consider is just unless it's an accent flavor always have a lot more of it in there in order to balance it out because the peppermint is so strong. It's just like how it's invasive for a garden. It can be invasive for the tea as well so you want to just many things out even it out to make it work better. Now this blend in particular I love it. I love having these two together. It also works really good with lavender in there as well so peppermint lavender and rose is a nice blend as well and that's generally how I'll work it. With most of my blends like this is I like to take one stronger one and then add a couple lighter flavors in there just to see what happens. Sometimes I'll just be like let's take some of this some of that throw a little bit of everything in there and it'll still taste great. So the main thing is is you can just have fun putting mixing and matching and playing around especially if you aren't taking one of these major ones that are really strong that can easily get overbrewed because when you're talking sage and you're talking rosemary in particular three to five minutes really is your max before they start getting bitter in brew time. The other one's peppermint essentially could go longer and so could time a little bit. Time can very much get that woody overtaste after five minutes so it's seven minutes tops on time. Oregano kind of the same way in that range as well. Three to seven minutes max. It can go a touch longer but I wouldn't go too far with it you know but any of the other ones when you're all the other herbs you have the flowers especially almost any flower except for something like hibiscus that has a really strong fruity flavor they can all go a lot longer on their brew time so that's why you have to have that balance in there because the longer it can handle a brew time it means generally it means is the lighter the flavor is or the easier it is to get overwhelmed by a stronger herb so just it just things to consider if you're playing around with teas and you've got some stuff you want just to experiment and throw in together I'm gonna stop there with that because I got some shout outs I want to do. Whoo let's shout it out. Shout out number one. This one's going out to Perkins Life 4. Told you I'd do this a little while back it's just been a while since I've done some shout outs so Perkins Life 4.  Check him out. Shout out number two. Deborah Cabasa actually does she does a lot of shout outs herself as well she generally tends to do like at least one a week where she'll do like a whole list the names of good channels to go check out but she also does lots of those haul videos so thrift store hauls and things like that showing things that she got and also lots of DIY videos she's really cool at the different things that she creates for her house and stuff so if you're into any of those DIY things for your house most more with like crafty things you know not like building huge old tables and different things like that that's not her DIY area she does more really cool craft DIY stuff and yeah I really like her stuff black and tan not not the beer thingy black and tan no this is the channel black and tan I can't remember exactly what his breed is he looks like he's a doberman doberman mix of some kind he's definitely has that look of a doberman overall but maybe not exactly completely doberman you'll have to let me know but his name's Bruce he's a cool dog he's recently been through some tough stuff had to get a little bit of surgery done yeah if you want to check out some cool dog videos go give him a look that would bring us to shout out number four this one's going out to turnings by Turner and this guy is one heck of a craftsman he does all these really cool things with wood primarily builds things with other items in mind too so it's like he does combination but I can't explain it properly I have to go see his channel and find out oh my god but he's like made shaving kits hummingbird feeders pill boxes saxophone mouthpieces I mean all kinds of things aromatherapy necklace I mean come on how cool is that so he makes all these really cool things primarily with some kind of a wood base that he creates to mix in with the other parts so check it out really cool things that he makes shout out number five out west homestead this one's pretty clear as far as what it says on the tent obviously there are home bunch of homesteaders and they actually do a little some shout-outs they go over their food forest and all different kinds of things with their place things with birds they had a little snake action recently so all those fun things that happen with homesteaders you like homesteaders check them out it's the final shout out final shout out time this one's going out to my new gal Liz brusso I love that name brusso and she actually does YouTube tips and she's like in a real-life job and stuff did primarily things with marketing and stuff already and it started doing YouTube tips and she's got some really interesting unique insights that I haven't seen a lot of other people who do tips before that's what I really like most about her why I've really started going on to her channel she has a unique edge really has a special way of looking at things and gives you some interesting different insights on how to approach your tags and how to approach marketing your channel to different people to help try and grow you so you're looking for new ways to grow this brusso is the way to go see that arrived I can do that well all right my friends that's it for the video today I hope you enjoyed all my little tea advice if you have any questions or let me know in the comment section down below otherwise go check out those channels please take care of each other and you guys have a wonderful day


Welcome back into the original gangsters podcast the og I'm your host Scott Bernstein along with my partner in crime my co-conspirator the doctor Jimmy Buccellato. Hi, everyone Today we're going to discuss some current events in the New York Mafia specifically a Trial that's going on right now. It's the murder trial of banana associate salvage Sylvester Sally Dazz Zatola and and the story behind his murder is quite compelling and I think At least what we what we learned throughout this trial in the last month that the lead-up to his murder in 2018 really speaks volumes about where we are in in the mafia in 2022 And we talked a little bit about Mikey knows Mancuso a couple weeks ago when we were discussing the funeral The the funeral parlor brawl that broke out broke out within the banana crime family now We're kind of going to go back into this perennial dysfunction junction of the bananas and we're going to talk about the the Sally Zatola murder the trial where his son is on trial for for ordering his murder and Then we're going to discuss What our thoughts on? Mikey knows as as a boss and I'll I'll I'll tease it out a little bit right now I think Mikey knows Mancuso right now who's been the boss of the bananas for ten years He was acting boss before that Pushing seven years old right now. I think the guy is making a very strong argument for being one of the worst La Cosa Nostra bosses at least in terms of the five families He it seems like every move he makes is very divisive and causes more harm than Produces positive results, but before we do that I'm going to pass it on to my my homeboy Jimmy here and we're going to talk about some of our Polls that we've done recently and then we're going to deep dive Sally does Yeah, so Thanks everyone for following us on social media Please subscribe to us our YouTube channel subscribe to us on audio You know Spotify whatever however you listen to us Apple and please follow us on social media Facebook Instagram Twitter we tried to we read all of the comments Regardless, but we don't always respond to all of them Just we don't always have time, but we definitely follow them We appreciate that and another way we've been trying to engage with our audiences through our YouTube channel in the polls And we talked about the one a few weeks ago with the TV shows sopranos sons of anarchy Etc. And so the last two that we we posted we'll just spend a few minutes talking about this We asked which American crime family outside of New York is the most compelling and So your choices were the Bruno Scarfo family in Philly the Megadino family in Buffalo the outfit in Chicago Patriarcha family in New England and the Tokos really family in Detroit. It's a no-brainer. Yeah, the results were Chicago number one Oh, really? Yeah, see I to me. It's a no-brainer and Pointing towards Philadelphia. They were number two and by far. I mean those two received the most votes by far Detroit was three Patriarcha was four Megadino is that was at the very end with only three percent I mean, we're fascinated by Detroit because that's kind of been our bread and butter And that's where we kind of made our bones as Crime reporters and mafia historians, but honestly like at least if you're studying, you know The modern-day day-to-day machinations of the mafia that Detroit mob is the least interesting They're so stable and under the radar and Functional that you know The dysfunction kind of finds its nooks and crannies, but yeah, that's a good question I guess it depends on like how you contextualize Philadelphia is is such a Soap opera that's been going on now for 40 years Um, I just it's like it's like a train wreck. You just can't look away from Yeah, I guess yeah really if you're just talking about right now Then I think it's Philadelphia or maybe Buffalo believe it or not if you're talking about right now Oh, yeah, I'm talking about right now Buffalo is right in that conversation, right? But historically I'm I'm biased. I'm I'm going with Detroit and But but yeah, maybe it's maybe that's because of my even Chicago I think Chicago falls under that same umbrella as Detroit right now And it's a tribute to the to the leadership of those families. Uh, you know, Chicago has been Pretty low-key. Sure since uh, Mikey Sarno Went away to a fat Mike Sarno went away went away to prison in 2010. It's been 12 years of in relative silence, I mean there was one kind of Some somewhat big case out of the Grand Avenue crew with Bobby Pinocchio Pinozzo um You know, there was a couple associates that were close to the defranzos that got tied up in some stuff, but Yes, it's been pretty hasn't there hasn't been a mob murder there in over over 10 years and um I don't think it I don't think it really compares to what we have going on right now In Philadelphia or Buffalo and I know Ben you're off mic, but do you have a vote for for one of those five? Okay, all right. All right, that's okay. That's fair. I'm a producer. Yeah, that would make you guys sound good That's fair enough. So then the second quote poll we put out there recently Who is your favorite Sunbelt mafia Don so your choices were Carlos Marchello from New Orleans Joe Bonanno Tucson Joe Civello from Dallas Nick Licata Los Angeles or Santo Traficante from Tampa the results Santo Traficante ran away with it with almost 50 percent Carlos from New Orleans comes in second Joe Bonanno a distant third and then Civello and Licata with only one percent each so, you know, I have to say that this is this is just my Impression and I've I've been wrong before but I sense that This vote and this poll and and giving the nod to traficante not that he's not deserving but I sense it might have something to do with Donnie Brasco just in the in the in the in the manner that He wasn't a major figure in the movie Donnie Brasco But he if you watch that movie and that's a movie that is on television quite a bit Um, and if you watched it when it first came out, um You know, there's a storyline in there about traficante and you see Al Pacino and Michael Madsen and Johnny Depp all kind of I don't want to say how cowing to to traficante, but Telling of the audience how important he was right So I don't think there really is a movie Or something from pop culture That gave people kind of an entree to to Marcello or Bonanno. I mean everybody knows who Joe Bonanno is so that's maybe doesn't Um apply that but Sevello and the cata Marcello Marcello was huge. I mean he was the mob boss from norlands and and pulled a lot of strings but I just I feel like anybody that saw Donnie Brasco and retained You know the facts from that movie came away thinking that santo traficante was a pretty big deal And that might have colored some of the Some of the poll results Yeah, I would say I thought maybe Marcello would Top this only because of the jfk like he's just everyone If you if you subscribe to the idea that the mafia played a role in killing jfk Although they would say traficante was also involved but but marcello is you marcello is usually the The the ringleader there. I'm going to go with this again. I'm biased. I'm going with Joe Bonanno and My specialization my primary research interest is anything because the lemarese and that's where my family's from and You know ben you you can hit the siren Joe Bonanno's Baptismal godfather was my ancestor for legi butchilano So I have I went down to Tucson and met with rosalie bonanno and I you know had a You know friendly relationship with them. So I'm going going with jb Um, although he was you know, he was from new york. He was exiled to some but he had he had a family down there I don't think he was recognized by the commission But he had it was more of a crew. I think Sopranos, yeah, but I would go with jb But I mean I I can't argue with traficante. I mean he's a good he's I mean he was He seems more important than the size of his family Same thing with with carlos marcello too in new orleans like those guys carried a lot of weight for not having Really large Right families with a lot of soldiers and things like that, but those guys Especially traficante. I mean he was a major heroine Importer I think in the fifties and sixties though The the tampa family and the new orleans family probably had 50 guys. Oh, okay I don't think you were ever talking a situation where they had 10, right? Okay. Okay. Yeah, so that's yeah, that's decent But both of those families Have disappeared since their titular Uh Since they're the faces of the franchise if you will Died and they know santo dried in the late 80s. Uh, carlos marcello died in the early 90s and uh There's still mob activity in florida in new and new orleans, but it's more um Disparate I think other families have have come in and planted flags I know in new orleans the colombos and the gambinos have operations going on down there and then in florida You know, it's always been a somewhat of a no man's land and now probably even more so that there's not really a Home crime family. Yeah, that was the point donnie brosco that the when they wanted to set up shop down there They had to check in with traficante and get his blessing just to keep things copacetic politically But uh, novello, I mean there were some comments that novella. I'm not an expert that novello was technically a captain under New orleans was he was dallas not even its own I mean, they got a family. They got an invite to uh, apple etching. So, okay Would maybe someone can well when this episode drops someone check in with us because um, there was some feedback that maybe he He wasn't even he wasn't I don't think that in terms of the size of family I think even if dallas was recognized as a family at that time. They did not they didn't have 30 40 guys yeah, yeah, right right and and maybe um Maybe he was uh Either way, they were close with new orleans. I know they were close with new orleans and he think of dallas jack ruby I don't know. It's kind of interesting to me final thing. I'll say I mean it goes down to the The way you want to you want to analyze it in the metrics, but If we're talking about Joe Bonanno, I mean he was one of the founding fathers of the cause of no Sure. Sure. He was a boss of one of the five families. So when he was a young man, right? So, obviously he in terms of um beginning To end Yeah, and you know the full career Bonanno ran circles of course around everyone else in this poll But if we're just talking about Bonanno's Time in arizona as it kind of deposed new york mafia boss sent to to the southwest I don't know if he was sent to the southwest. He kind of took he already had a crew down there took refuge Yeah, because he had already had a crew.  I think he's interesting Largely because of the detroit connection. He was close to and actually was was nick lakata ever in detroit Yeah, so the story of nick lakata was that he Made his bones as a mob guy in detroit Worked for toko and zurili Early on in the toko zurili regime Had some type of falling out with joe zurili And was kicked out of town went to california and climbed The ladder in california for the next 20 years to the point where he became A capo and then an underboss and people in detroit were Made aware that eventually nick lakata is going to be the boss of los angeles and it was you know in everyone's best interest to quell any lingering tensions and uh From from my research, nick lakata wasn't just kicked out of detroit But zurili had put a murder contract on his head. Wow, uh dragna had got it removed but uh come the 1950s when it became obvious that nick lakata was eventually going to take over um the detroit family and the la family decided to marry off, uh blackbill toko's daughter to nick lakata's son Carl lakata and that was a way to bury the hatchet and make everything right again and uh you had this um convoy i guess of of West coast mafia dignitaries that that came into detroit and offered up carl lakata as as kind of the olive branch took to the to the toko's realies and then anybody that's followed uh jimmy nye's reporting and on the show You can then fast forward another 30 years 25 years and carl lakata Had probably had something to do with the jimmy haffa disappearance just in the sense that he most likely Gave his house to the jackalones to use as the as the location of the hit and then and then he was He ended up dead on the six-year anniversary um almost to the minute And there's a lot of people that think that he was killed as a some type of message that he was Trying to leverage his knowledge of the of the haffa of conspiracy against his brother-in-law's the toko's Now We'll just wrap up after this, but you you were close with tony z Excuse me at toward the end of his life, and he had dealings out in california Did he have any thoughts about nick lakata? Did he ever comment on that? Well, he definitely confirmed my suspicions that Carl lakata was murdered and He told me uh Him and his wife had run into carl lakata 24 40 hours before He was found dead at a bank And uh said that he was in really good spirits And the notion that he would have you know killed himself is to them laughable Um, what about the old man though tony z when he would go out to california when he was young? So yeah, so tony so there there was a very Uh symbiotic relationship between the detroit family and what was going on on the west coast jack dragna momo adamo and tony's really actually Told a pretty crazy story and these are so many great anecdotes that just We'll never see a lighted day in book form because he died and we had to put the project to bed But uh, he took his honeymoon To los angeles and i think he spent two or three weeks there and according to tony z When he was on his honeymoon in los angeles The la crime family was having trouble taking care of some business and Either jozerily called tony in la or momo adamo who was the underboss Approached tony. I'm not sure of the order of operation here But according to tony z. He was given a murder contract on his honeymoon That he carried out on behalf of the la crime family in 1949. Wow um some honeymoon so And yeah, he says that he told me that when he they they went by train And he said that uh, they were met at the train station by a group of la mafia administrators led by momo adamo and that uh tony z had been given a rare box of cuban cigars from jozerily to give to A momo a tube. I guess two boxes one from momo adamo and one for jack dragnet Let's do let's see well people respond on social media when you hear this if you want us to do an old school La crime family episode. Let us know. I'd like to I think it's fun um, well, it's just the la is such a a great You know part of the country and there's so much color To los angeles, but you know the mafia there has always been you know dubbed the mickey mouse mafia You know it's always been kind of looked down upon. Yeah, and there's reasons for it Well, I think though, um And again getting into how pop culture colors things or influences things You know the portrayal of jack dragnet in the movie bugsy All right not do any justice right to what was really going on in la jack dragnet was no pushover Yeah, and in that movie they make it look like he humiliated. Yeah, and they embarrass him in multiple scenes And and one scene he actually Bugsy makes him get on the ground and bark like a dog. Right. Yeah. Yeah, so that that wasn't historically Accurate. So anyhow, we'll we'll try to put out some more polls and see what you guys think But let's get back to the lead the lead topic with Mancuzzo you want to you want to give a background on the the murder and and yeah, so Sylvester Zatola longtime New York mafia associate multimillionaire Had a vending machine Joker poker real estate Empire fortune was worth tens of millions of dollars. I think they they estimated as a state at like 50 million books and uh Starting in the nine early 1980s He developed a very close relationship with Vinnie gorgeous, uh, vincent bastiano Who was a high riser fast riser in the banal crime family? Someone that I think if his time on the street would have lasted longer Would have been a household name, uh in america because he had that john goddy quality to him and uh was probably considerably more likable than John goddy, uh But his time on on top only lasted a couple years and then he was brought down by joe Casino who was his boss who you know wired up? Uh, and I and we can talk about that. I've said before I don't like The idea of the government making deals with the boss to then go take down the smaller fish I agree the whole point is to take the smaller fish and go get the bigger fish so, uh Vinnie bastiano and and sally daz I'm not sure where the nickname daz came from. I know that daz was the name of his His vending machine real estate company, but I'm not sure what what the nickname Implies or what it means, but uh sally daz and vinnie bastiano were very close friends more than just Uh associate that gets protection from a mobster. They socialized together their families went on vacation together uh vinnie bastiano actually Use zittola to purchase a House for his girlfriend So when his guma for his guma when uh when bastiano was Um not with his wife. He was with his girlfriend And it was a piece of property that I believe was owned by sally daz and sally daz might have lived close to it And bastiano would have most of his meetings with sally daz at this house and um sally daz was giving bastiano and the banano crime family literally millions and millions of dollars in protection for 30 to 40 years I mean, this is the way the mafia is supposed to work That the tens of millions of dollars that you're giving to the mob For protection is supposed to buy you said protection so Vinnie bastiano goes goes away to prison in the mid-2000s Uh zittola At that time was still paying some form of tribute. He at that point also was doing some business with lukezi's Deluca, I think was the guy. Yeah, and um All of a sudden in the late 2010s He becomes a target for assassination and nobody knew nobody at the time nobody knew why and it was getting a lot of publicity in the new york media because He averted five separate hits on him Where he was shot. He was stabbed There was a very Very concerted effort over a two or three year period To murder him. Was it one of them caught on surveillance? Yes. One was caught on surveillance um And nobody knew where it was coming from And why it was happening, but it was again getting a lot of publicity And eventually he is murdered In a mcdonald's drive-thru in the bronx. A lot of this is happening in the bronx Uh, Vinnie bastiano was from the bronx Sally das was from the bronx. Uh, he was uh Getting a cup of coffee at the drive-thru the the hit team had a gps on his car and Fowled him or found him at the mcdonald's blocked him in and and shot him dead uh at the drive-thru window It eventually comes out That all this was being done by his son He had two sons, uh I think it's salvatore salvatore and anthony anthony was the one that it turns out according to the prosecutors was the mastermind that he Farmed out this hit to members of the bloods United blood nation u bn Which is the la bloods The incarnation of the la bloods in on the east coast is called u bn. Yeah, they're big. Yeah, they're big in prison, too Yeah, uh og mac And I think og dead eye were the two guys that that that brought the brought the bloods to new york and um the trials going on right now and it's anthony's atola and uh A number or maybe one of the hitters and then the other hitters are witnesses And have flipped But what I found most Fascinating by what has come out at this trial and this is where we get into mickey knows mancusa was last week The prosecutors played Phone uh phone conversations that had been intercepted Uh on vini bashandle's prison phone and vini bashandle is In supermax right now down in florida. That's where the worst of the worst are kept He's being kept there because he tried to put murder contracts on the head of judges and prosecutors Which is will always right get you slammed. Yeah by uncle sam But you see pictures of him that that that gets circulated out that uh make its way He still looks good. Still, you know, he's a guy that vini, you know vini gorgeous Let's just talk a second about the reputation. I mean he was a guy that thought very highly of himself was very Um enamored by his appearance. He was a good-looking guy ladies, man You know ladies man always dressed to the nines. His hair was always perfect Remind me of the song from uh, the werewolf of london. His hair was perfect. Yeah, that was vini bashandle um and really fancied himself of modern day john goddy uh And uh played the played the role He had a number of beauty parlors and and barbershops and one of them was called hello gorgeous And that's where you got the nickname vini gorgeous. Um but It's not surprising when you hear this but nobody knew this until a week or two ago that while this You know two year You know just crazy Mob murder odyssey is playing out and and sally das is dodging literally dodging bullets He's and it makes sense. He's reaching out to his rabbi and his his rabbi is vini bashandle and they played a number of phone calls that took place in in 2017 and uh parts of 18 he was killed in 18 between bashandle sally das and then sally das's son salvator and It's vini bashandle is saying this is not right You know, uh, you paid us all this money. We have to protect you. You're my friend. I'm going to protect you I'm gonna call mickey nose Now mickey knows mancuso was the boss of the bananos was appointed acting boss of the bananos Which was the stepping stone to boss the bananos by vini bashandle and mickey mancuso reached out on more than one of i'm more than one occasion To mickey mancuso bashandle did what did I say? You said mancuso. All right, let's start over again vini bashandle reached out on more than one occasion to mickey knows mancuso on behalf of sally das And said you need to protect sally das. He's given us all this money He's my friend He's he's practically family to me I'm locked up. I can't do anything you need to step in right now And mickey mancuso refused to lift a finger Refused to acknowledge sally das as as as an associate as someone that had paid his crime family tens of millions of dollars over the years refused to Send word to the street that you know, nobody's to touch the sky and if anybody touched the sky again You're gonna be hearing from me um, and in fact stop responding to vini gorges all together And as a result There was nothing sally das could do because his son was intent on murdering him And you know the sixth the sixth time was the charm And and they hit him and they killed him and i'm just i'm really shocked I'm not shocked that these conversations were taking place because it makes sense but i'm shocked to learn That there was zero urgency from the mancuso camp And he it appears that he was totally okay with an associate on record with his crime family that had paid Just an unbelievable amount of money to that crime family over the years He was totally okay with hanging him out to dry and a guy was close with the boss the real i mean the real the former boss right? Yeah Uh, so i i was just kind of in shock now again not that these conversations were taking place But what the result of these conversations were that mancuso wouldn't even give vini basciano or sally das the time of day So what's the point really what's the point? Of paying protection. I mean this i mean we're not again. I know i've said this 20 times already He probably paid this crime family 30 40 million dollars Over the decades. Yeah, and and another thing that came out was that Eventually salvatore the son realizes the bananas aren't going to protect them So he he actually hires a private security firm Which obviously that didn't work either but they're but it's just kind of an interesting point of you're paying all this money and then On top of it you've got a higher private security because the bananas aren't going to aren't going to step in now It seems like basciano Was asking questions like who do you think this is who do you think's behind this and there's even some if you if you Want to you know Intimate that basciano might have realized this is coming from his family. Yeah, right. Yeah, like he right He was sort of if you decode like he it seems like he was suspecting Because he was asking because salvatore saying, I don't know. I have we have no idea and basciano was like well What about what about your brother right and then we learned from those? snippets of conversation that there had been a huge rift between anthony and sally death Uh, and and they're talking about it basciano He's talking about it with um with salvatore and salvatore saying, I don't know whenever I bring up my dad to my brother My brother shuts down. They haven't spoken in a long time Yeah, uh, but but the end game for anthony's atola was the 45 50 million dollar real estate Joker poker empire that that uh, his dad was was in control or owned So let me let me put this out there and see what you think. Um I don't know if this is uh Devil's advocate. Maybe I don't know how to frame this but so you traditionally when you when you pay protection to They're paying protect protection to the bananos the the idea is that it's protection from Not only other bananos, but but the other five families or anybody But that's my question. Is that does that hold or is it? just for um Because this came up in our episode last week with about boris and the russians that the russian guy is paying protection to the italians and But he's paying protection from other italians But when the russians try to shake them down the same italians intervene and boris is like Hey, don't this is none of your business. This is between the russians. So you know what I mean? Like, what's the protocol? here, I mean I wonder What my impression is and from interviewing all these guys over the years and Getting as close to the flame as it as it possibly as you possibly can be without Actually being a mob guy or getting burned and I actually have been burned once or twice um You're paying protection from from anybody in anything. Okay uh I mean, I suppose There are exceptions But I don't think I think we're giving Mancuso To if that was the case And that you were only getting protection from other mobsters. I think we're giving Mancuso too much credit. I don't think Mancuso realized that this was coming from. Oh, I see from his kid.  He's not a made guy I see he didn't take an oath. He's not my guy. Right. He's my predecessors guy, right and and To basciano's point I'm sorry. I keep looking to Mancuso's point. Not basciano. I when I get confused with the names. Yeah, you know right, uh To to Mancuso's point If you were going to make the argument for Mancuso He's probably saying yeah, he paid all that money to the family. I didn't see any of it Uh, yeah, right, right You think Joe massino saw rusty rostelli saw Right, any basciano saw. I didn't see any of it. So why am I loyal to him?  That's mickey knows Mancuso, man. Right and and but it's also very telling politically that Even if that's how Mancuso really felt But you would think basciano still had enough juice and respect right That Mancuso would honor his which is going to the point that I don't think mickey Mancuso is a is a Is a barely competent mob boss. Right. I mean he is like it seems that every protocol Is being broken in in the Mancuso regime, right, especially what we're learning in the last couple months Right with the and for people that um might not remember jimmy and I'm interested actually let's get jimmy's Insight in this because jimmy wasn't on that episode with us, but about a month ago. We did a a a super kind of like a mafia super friends We got oh, yeah, we got the og together with john panissi and dave schratt wiser Yeah, uh of new york and philadelphia respectively and we broke down what happened at this Funeral uh where mickey mancuso tells a a shelved Banana wise guy named joe camorano little joe joe c little joe saunders Whose dad joe saunders joe camorano had been You know one of mesinos top guys I think at one time Joe saunders was under boss for conciliary. He's dead, but his son little joe c uh became acting boss of the bananas when mickey mancuso was in prison and And tried to to to take power away from mancuso and pulled the capos Asked all the captains in the family if they wanted mancuso to stay as boss or if they wanted to move Him from acting boss to To the full-time boss that never and it never turns out. Well, yeah that with the columbos Right, but it turned into a war in the columbos and It nothing positive happened in this situation either Uh one of mancuso's guys johnny palazzolo Goes back to Mancuso and says hey, just so you know, your acting boss is trying to take power away from yeah being subversive so mancuso re assembles the administration shelves Joe camorano jr And joe camorano jr from what I hear Uh Is working on a regular nine to five job right now um And is living his life as a civilian He was married to the daughter of A copo named vido gromaldi Uh vido gromaldi was someone that was in charge of a lot of the uh, sicilian faction in the bananos And because of what joe camorano had done Joe camorano jr had done mancuso also Shelved vido gromaldi. So these are gromaldi and camorano jr Are not in the crime family anymore Oh, they're in the crime family, but they're on the bench, right? Vido gromaldi dies at the end of the summer And mickey mancuso Sends word to joe camorano jr saying you are not allowed to go to the funeral And if you go to the funeral You're gonna be physically assaulted Right and joe camorano jr says no one's gonna tell me that I can't go to my own father-in-law's Funeral And oh by the way for the last 30 years 40 years me my dad and my brother have been the liaison to the bikers outlaw bikers, right? So i'm gonna bring with me A bunch of bikers Right, so joe camorano jr shows up at the the the funeral and the uh wake of his Father-in-law he goes to the casket to pay his respects and within 10 seconds is jumped by mickey mancuso soldiers well The camorano camp was prepared for this And there was a van full of bikers in the parking lot that get word I don't know how someone texted or it and within another five or ten seconds the bikers are in the funeral parlor And there's an all-out brawl going on between the bikers and the banano soldiers in front of the casket in front of the casket And the bikers won yeah, and and mickey mancuso's Soldiers got their asses kicked So this has been percolating for the last month nobody knows what what the fallout is going to be There's a lot of people that think that mickey mancuso the only way he can save face here Is if he puts out a hit on on joe camorano jr um Just a total mess just again This is the epitome of dysfunction And and it's and it's on brand for the bananos So, I mean mickey mancuso is it's it's is having a bad year. Yeah, these are two really big black eyes on his You know in terms of his regime and his leadership or lack of lack of leadership And my understanding is camorano Maybe maybe he wasn't popular enough to to to win that poll But my understanding is that he's a he was a popular guy and well like and his dad was below and gremaldi too that they were So this is that sort of just adds to the Looks like bad form. Yeah for mancuso to really pile on here Interesting your insight on this like so on one on one hand If you're mickey mancuso, you're kicking these two guys out of your crime family I don't want to have any to do with you guys anymore So wouldn't couldn't you argue? You've kicked them out. You've put them on the shelf. What right do you then have to say when veto gremaldi dies? Hey, you can't do this or you can't do that You've already You've already made your play and that play was to shelve him right and now you don't really have any Authority over him if he was still your soldier if you were still your capo, right you would have authority Yeah, then because that's the chain of command Yeah, but in this situation, it seems right that At this point, it's none of his business and it's also bad form in the sense of You know, especially with italians and catholicism and the funeral of this, you know, discraziano It seems like a very like disgraceful thing to do. This was his family, right? I think it might be also different let's just say A capo a non shelved capo of the banano crime family dies and there's a wake right then maybe mickey mancuso has The juice or the right to say to camorano and gremaldi don't show up But this was family. This was Joe camorano juniors father-in-law, right? He can't go with his wife to his wife's dad's funeral No, I I agree. It's it's um, I would say it's uh at that point It's none of his business, but let's say to your point that are a hypothetical like let's say he wasn't on the shelf And mancuso was mad about something and said you don't have a right to go there That's the chain of command and he defies him anyhow You still don't cause a scene at the funeral, right?  What if it was later that afternoon, right? Right, why doesn't it have to go down in the funeral home right in long island In front of I'm sure there were a lot of people there that have nothing to do with the mafia, right? Yeah, that's you're just all your dirty laundry is being no right You you put on blast you wouldn't you wouldn't even if he had the right you wouldn't handle it there You would wait until after on neutral territory somewhere um So yeah, these are two big black eyes on his record as in terms of his regime But I would ask I go back to something else with it with the protection like who are you paying protection from? um as it turns out though It is technically another associate trying to kill Sally d it's his own son But my understanding is that anthony was also an associate so then that gets back to the point of His protection money should have entitled him right Regardless of his own son or not it is an associate. So it's not like he was it's not like um The hell's angels were trying to assassinate Sally d or I don't know the russians or whoever the fuck right because in that sense you might say well We're only we're only protecting you from other Italians We're not we're not gonna get involved if if you know whoever else is after you in this case It was another it was an internal thing And after what would you say five or six assassinations five the sixth time got him it seems to me that if mancuso was the boss It seems like that would have been plenty of time for him to gather enough intel from the streets To have to have a pretty good sense that It might be the son who's doing this I'm not close enough to the situation.  Why why would mancuso couldn't have figured that out Why wasn't mancuso? At the very least reaching out to vinnie in prison And having a conversation between two bosses right about whether or not they should get involved or shouldn't get involved But for mancuso to just ignore Yeah, basciano. It's almost more disrespectful or it's equally disrespectful than ignoring sally desk. Yeah, right Yeah, more. It's not more. So because right right more so and and uh, we should also point out that basciano and mancuso were in Dited and convicted of the same murder randy pozolo From i believe o four or they were convicted in o four. I'm not sure When the hit I don't remember someplace in the early 2000s and um mancuso pled out And got 15 years right and just walked out of prison in the last couple years, right And basciano went to trial It got convicted and it's doing life, but it's the same case. I know And and and basciano, I think gave the contract to mancuso who gave the contract to the hitters, but it was a guy that um It's kind of a loudmouth wannabe was really uh obsessed with getting a button and had gotten close with basciano closer to basciano and I think was doing some construction work on basciano's house and The construction work was was shoddy and when he was kind of asked to To fix it.  Wow So it's not even really that gangster the situation of You should have caught that toilet What what's that from? What's that? Oh, I see that was referenced from Unless unless there's also point out Mikey mancuso the type of individual he is the type of human being he is Uh, he went to prison for over a decade for killing his wife So this isn't you know, this is not a Well-adjusted not a very sane stable Individual so maybe it's not Uh crazy to say I think if they said it was a manslaughter um But his wife, uh, they killed him in an argument And he left her like on a park bench next to the hospital It's happened in like 84. I think Well, yeah, if if we have a little bit of time left. What what is mancusos? What's his like bio? What's his background? How do you get to how do you rise through the ranks? So he came up in the purple game That's what I thought not the obviously not the detroit purple game But right in new york in the 1970s guys from harlem and the bronx younger guys Uh came together and and you know, we don't really have it in detroit. So It's foreign to us, but in a lot of these other cities They have what I would categorize as as farm systems. Oh, yeah, right junior varsity. Yeah mob clans Yeah, or or or or or or crews or gangs that are feeder programs for the mafia and A lot of alumni of those gangs will be bosses in the five families and I think each each um Each family has kind of their own handful of feeder groups. So the purple gang Uh became feeders for uh the genovese and the bananos I think that used to be the case in chicago too. Sorry to interrupt. I think they still chicago still has some. Okay. Okay Um, I know the c-notes. Mm-hmm is one. Yeah, they're almost like a street gang, but italian guys Grand avenue c-notes like half Hispanic half italian, right? They work really closely with the grand avenue west side crew Um, but so so man kuso came up as a hitter um As a hitter as a as a hit man with with the purple gang in the late 70s and Um, eventually we're gonna have scott dicci on to talk about his book. Um Then he just wrote that just came out all about the new york purple gang And they they took their moniker from the detroit guys, which are hit the can hit the siren, then my refined relatives And um, and then I actually but let me I always it always goes back to a personal bernie anecdote But uh, you know, I don't know. I've never met mikey knows man kuso but I did have a minor interaction With him or at least his People or his team. I don't remember this uh a year or two ago He shut down my website Mikey man kuso Had his in either him or his kid or his grand kid. I don't know. They were upset with a story that I had done um I think it was a story where I was Comparing and contrasting purple gangs. I was like Detroit purple gang new york purple gang It wasn't something like trivial that he was mad about he was mad about there was a prison photo That I had that I had put on the post and It was like I was like a mugshot. He didn't think it was flattering or something. No, no He said it was he he claimed it was personal property. Oh, yeah And it's not personal property. It's property of the state of course, right? Yeah So he complained to go daddy and go daddy took my website down for like 72 hours And eventually when I got an explanation, they were just like, yeah This mr. Man kuso thinks that and I'm like, so you just on his word you shut down my website, right? Uh, and I said I did not take a personal photo of mr. Man kuso. That's not a personal photo. That's a prison photo, right? um I mean it means public domain, right? So I eventually got back up and running, but it was just I was flabbergasted when I talked to the Go daddy people and they told me who this complaint came from Yeah, I remember that now now when you mentioned that so he so he's just kind of a miserable person so he rose to he rose to the rank starts off and then um And because there was so much The fallout of mesino going down There was so much as you point out dysfunction and it seems like it's just this uh Revolving door of different bosses street bosses under bosses and the bananas because as soon as a guy becomes the acting boss or whatever It's only a matter of time before he gets indicted or with like sale montaña.  Um, I'm I'm probably missing some people. Vinny. I've any battle many. Oh, right. He was he was He was there at some point um I'm looking at something right now and this is coming from the internet So, you know, you can't trust everything you find on a google search But uh, this is telling me here that uh, at some point when basciano was in prison He was upset with what mancuso was doing as uh, acting boss and he tried to put a contract on him. Wow So maybe that might maybe that speaks to why, um Mikey mancuso wasn't responding.  It wasn't responding to Vinny basciano I hadn't seen that before so you know one thing it's it's interesting what the bananas is Right, so they had a reputation for being dysfunctional going all the way back to the banana split in the 60s, right? And uh, where joe banano, you know, is that's where he gets back to our original conversation He gets exiled to arizona and there was a civil war and then, um There was the you know, the tension between is it rostelli? Is it is a carmine galante? We've you know, we've had episodes where we've talked about that and then when mesino Officially takes over there was actually a period of stability for a while with the bananas No, we did stabilize the crime family and for about 10 years mesino became the most powerful Yeah, boss in new york. Yeah, and the bananas became for a flash in the pan Right. They became kind of the ivy league of that's right of of crime families like the genovate right and there so there was like this irony that and and part of that was because The bananas were so dysfunctional that law enforcement started this devote fewer and fewer resources to That family and the commission booted them right right? So they weren't on the radar of the so by the mid 80s the the other five family or the other four families in the five Families were so disgusted with the bananas. They said we don't want you a part of our commission anymore Right, you've lost your seat Which mesino used that to his advantage because he could do things and he wasn't under the same scrutiny His family wasn't under the same and then he brought the commission back together, right, right? And then and then now history repeats itself once he's taken down It's back to um, at least for several years now So the boss back to the dysfunction junction. The boss is between basciano and mancuso worse south the iron worker. Yeah the Baby boss, bambino boss another customer my easy the iron worker who went to canada got caught up in all their power struggles and ended up being murdered vinny tv betel mente And then uh nose mickey nose took over but a big chunk of his early years Was was spent in prison through acting bosses like kami di fori johnny palzolo and then Joe saunders jr. Yeah, or little joe saunders Um, which did which led to the the acrimony that we have right now another thing. I should point out Uh that mancuso was implicated although never charged In the george from canada murder Wow Hmm as being a part of the conspiracy, right? That was we know miscino called the shots on that. Yeah, which in some ways was The beginning of the end for miscino because George from canada was so popular right and a lot of the rank and file felt that that was unnecessary overstepped he overstepped and um, so in a lot of ways that that that was miscino was guilty for Starting the destabilization process In a family that he had actually stabilized for a while ironically miscino's downfall was his insecurity uh, I think he he had this opinion that To the too many people around him were were um Including his brother-in-law uh salvator vitality were too big for their bridges And and that you know, there there was the story that um One of the reasons that george from canada got killed was because he made a comment to miscino about miscino's choice of conciliary tony grasiano tg tg was known to indulge in drug use And uh was known to snort cocaine and uh would show up. I guess at meetings The opinion of the other members of uh participants in these meetings was that that that tg was high and george From canada in early 1999 questioned miscino's judgment at naming him the number three and said to miscino you got a co-cat as your conciliary Yeah, now whether that was true or not miscino took offense to it right and said it's none of your business I'm not asking your opinion. It's none of your business who my conciliar is right, but I think that was an example of how he thought george was gaining that He was gaining influence to the point where he felt it was okay to make a Make a policy advisement To the boss right and and by the way another aspect of not only destabilizing his own family by killing a popular person over something that was We not the punishment didn't fit the crime But then that alienated him from montreal his biggest earner his biggest Then that that led to montreal breaking off right right right and like you said that was a big uh Piece of the machine. Yeah revenus tree for a year for a year for a half half century Right, so that wasn't and bina risotto said at that point.  That's right. Yeah, and then at a certain point in the early 2000s I think messino sent some guys up to montreal and Said something along the lines of uh, you know, you guys have to ask us permission to do x y and z make guys I think and risotto sent word back like hey, no, I don't anymore. No, right. They see we're we're we're on our own Yeah, we're our own family now So, yeah, it's it's a dysfunctional tale, but let me ask you one one thing And i'm not sure we're at on time if we need to wrap up wrap it up. Um in terms of what is this port 10 so This do you think this is going to have something in the bananas where other guys who are paying protection money Are going to start as in the underworld the term is like stand up Like you can't shake me down anymore because i'm not getting anything I'm not getting anything for remember uh step remember beansie and beansie Right, it says i'll step up That doesn't go well. He's a shopping cart Right, that does go well for him. Although although beansie ends up having the last laugh, but he's he's not he's not very I mean, I don't love it, but it's it's such a great line where he says he beansie might never walk again He's like no, there's there's no might never walk in he never he's a shopping cart Right, he's never gonna walk so are there going to be guys is this going to Trickle through that world and people are going to say what if you if you own a small small business in the Talley neighborhood, whatever you're paying extortion money are they're going to be guys saying why am I paying this if they couldn't protect I would if they couldn't protect sally d who's as bought as connected as it comes To the former boss. Yeah, they can't protect him Or are they going to say look this is a this was a family feud it was out of there was nothing we could do about it The son killed the father like this isn't normal operating procedure. What what's going to be the sense on the streets But if you're if you're on the street I think your belief is what my belief is is that A doesn't matter where it was coming from and b I don't think we give man kusa the benefit of the doubt that he knew this was coming from Uh, within right sally dad's he just didn't care. He just didn't care.  Or am I going to get caught in a drive-thru line at mcdonald's and get my head blown off? Yeah, and and so then it could also set up this thing where like That's bad and the uh Uh So if you're paying protection money to a guy who's not part of man kuso's inner circle You might be thinking I ain't getting anything. I'm not going to get anything for my any return. I'm the trickle down from these last two uh revelations with mickey knows is Uh toxic and you know my prediction and I'm gonna I'm gonna kind of go out on a limb here and uh Kind of be bold and what I what I foresee happening over these next couple years Um, you know, I foresee mickey man kuso being removed Uh Maybe i'm wrong and maybe he he rules for the next 10 years 15 years and dies a free man or or what have you I know he just got violated a couple months ago. Yeah for meeting with mobsers. He wasn't supposed to be meeting At least I was paroled in 19 and then got violated in the winter. Um, but I can only imagine the kind of conversations that are being had within the rank and file right now When whether or not you're a supporter of of little joe c or not Uh, I just don't think either of these situations bodes well for looking into the future and feeling confident that mickey man kuso's the is the guy to lead the bananos Um going forward.   There's too much heat. We've already got heat now I mean, there's already heat now. I mean if there wasn't heat before there's right now, right? So let him let him be the but let him what does tony say? I always go make the supranos about Junior he says something to let let him take the I can't remember the lightning rod Like or yeah, whatever whatever term. So there might be where guys are just like It's it's too there's too much heat to be the boss. Let man kuso be the the for for Whatever it's worth. Let him be the boss And that might be a way he hangs on i'm saying if if he does look for vini battolamenti You know my in my opinion as a guy that could eventually Take back the family because I I know that uh You know, he's he's no longer the boss now, but uh, and he was only boss for a couple years in acting capacity but I think he's someone that uh, could potentially feel the void if That family decides to go away from man kuso or if uh, he gets sent back to prison for whatever reason but uh You know he's You know a final word on this is kind of what you see is what you get Whenever you've seen pictures of mickey knows man kuso It reminds me a little bit of tony jackaloney. Just the guy never has a smile on its face. Oh, yeah Yeah, he's just always kind of snarling And it's like I've always whenever I see those type of guys. It's like What's the point of being a mobster? If you're not having fun I mean have as much fun as you can because you're gonna end up dead or in prison at the end of your life so, you know, I always kind of have a Modicum of respect for the vini basciano's or the joey marlino skinny joey. He looks always looks like it's the best day of his life Every time you see him And even messino was like that messino was someone that was uh jovial and would you know talk to people and Not uh It reminds me a little bit of in the 80s. There's footage of um in chicago and in cleveland during the the The casino skimming bus where joey aupa and um jack jack white liqovoli are like going after cameraman with their With their canes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, and even we were talking about at the beginning of the episode joe banano You know the namesake of this family He always he always looked like a million bucks in the in the picture He always looked like he was having the best day no matter what no matter how bad things were He always looked like kept his composure and looked like but I do I do have to say I do I do think it's funny. One of my favorite clips is I think it was during the commission case in the 80s when Fat tony slano gets in the car the guy says do you have any words for us? He goes.  Is that true? Your mother is yeah, right? So I do it. I guess I do admit. I guess there's room for we can be pluralistic or there's room for all sorts of personalities In this world because some of those guys who are more of a sourpuss that they can be have some amusing sound bites too. So Well, anyhow, uh Want to wrap up? Yeah. All right. So thanks for listening and uh keep on Following us, please on social media and spread the word. That's really helpful is um Each day we get comments like oh, we're just discovering your podcast I mean we've been doing this for what four years now But some people are still new and we appreciate that and if you are new Especially on video go back and check out some of our audio episodes because I think there's still some confusion out there Um people are asking for some of the audio episodes. Uh, why can't we see these on youtube? Well, it's because they weren't they weren't video recorded So, uh, there's some really good content there and and listen to it. That's why benny's our mvp. That's right Yeah, we're trying to join the The uh the new age here. So anyhow, thanks for listening. Um jimmy buchelado. Scott Bernstein. We're out