A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Our next guest is interested in the ways organized crime has influenced American presidents as far back as Franklin Roosevelt. Eric Dezenhall is the author of "Wiseguys And The White House: Gangsters, Presidents, And The Deals They Made." He spoke with Steve Inskeep about his latest book and the root of his fascination with the mob.
ERIC DEZENHALL: Well, I grew up around it. I grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, a few miles outside of Philadelphia. It was impossible in my neighborhood not to have a relative, a neighbor, a family friend, a Little League coach who was involved with it. And it took on kind of a larger proportion when I saw that people - you weren't allowed to talk about it. And why is that? And then "The Godfather" came out when I was 10 years old, and it turned out that the character Johnny Fontane - the Sinatra character played by Al Martino - Al Martino, lived right around the corner. So we thought we were at the center of it all, but yet you couldn't talk about it. And I set about the adventure that lasted decades of trying to figure out who exactly these characters are and who they aren't, which is just as important.
STEVE INSKEEP, BYLINE: Oh, you touch on an interesting part here. Because there are so many legends and because it is supposed to be secretive, it is hard to tell - isn't it? - sometimes if someone is a serious mobster or just a small-time crook or just somebody that stories are told about.
DEZENHALL: Well, on any given day, you could stand on the boardwalk and listen to somebody with a toothpick in their mouth making a reference to being able to have things taken care of. One of the things I have found with investigating this and writing this over the years is everybody has a story about why all of this is personally relevant to them. In fact, I find that when I give a book talk, nobody really asks me a question. What they really want to do is they want to tell you about their tie to all of this.
INSKEEP: Who's a president that in your estimation was very close to the mob?
DEZENHALL: I think that the most mob-relevant president was Harry Truman in the sense that he was hand-selected by a Mafia-controlled machine.
INSKEEP: I guess we should pause to explain to people Truman comes from Missouri. He was supported by the Kansas City Democratic political machine and brought up through that machine, and he was kind of the clean face in front of this corrupt political machine. This is what you're saying was a mob-connected group.
DEZENHALL: Now, here's the irony. There's no evidence that Harry Truman ever took a dime, and I don't think that he did. I think that if you look at - what he wrote in his diaries and what he said privately is, there were certain people I had to deal with. I think what makes Truman different than someone like Donald Trump is Donald Trump has been unique in that he doesn't run away from it at all. And regrettably, I have to conclude, when I looked at how he dealt with the mob, that he may actually be right. The way he dealt with the mob was smart because none of it was provably illegal.
INSKEEP: Well, you document in the book how his father and then Trump were in New York real estate, which is - I mean, if you're talking about the construction industry, if you're talking about unions, you're talking about mob ties in New York.
DEZENHALL: Well, that's right. And one of the things that kept coming back to me in this book over and over again was that the people who knew how to use the mobsters were in the long run more clever and benefited more than the mobsters themselves, who were still criminals. This was true of Joe Kennedy as well. Joe Kennedy, you...
INSKEEP: JFK's father, right?
DEZENHALL: JFK's father. You always hear that he was a bootlegger. He was not a bootlegger. He was in the liquor business, and he did - he was in the liquor business legally. Joe Kennedy consistently knew how to do things technically, legally that today we tend to view as illegal, such as insider trading, which is illegal now. Joe Kennedy did it in a way that was at that time legal.
INSKEEP: What's the connection, if any, between this lifelong fascination of yours and your day job running a very well-known crisis communications firm?
DEZENHALL: What the two things have in common is that I spent my career being lied to. And for the record, I'm retired from day-to-day activity at my firm. But being in the crisis management business, I have been lied to day in and day out from morning, noon and night. And when you sit down with people from the mob world or the spy world, which I also write about, I'm lied to. And so what I've had to learn to do is to listen to the lies because they tell me the truth at some level.
And one of the most interesting things about this to me is how many of these mobsters wanted to be seen as legitimate. They wanted to be seen as Americans. In fact, you know, Meyer Lansky got involved with the World War II program to secure the docks around the Port of New York to protect it from Nazi sabotage after he had tried to enlist in the U.S. Army to fight the Nazis but was rejected because of his age - he was 40 - and his size. He was only 5'4". But he desperately wanted to be seen as a patriotic American. And one of the reasons I had access to his thinking and his notes and his records is because he very much wanted the story out about what he did during World War II to fight the Nazis.
INSKEEP: Have you represented someone whose problem was they were accused of Mafia ties?
DEZENHALL: No. I have - you know, I always stuck in my business in the corporate world. I did not want to be anywhere near anyone associated with that and turned that down. In fact, I've - on several occasions, I worked with companies that had been targeted by organized crime, and that we actually had to work with the FBI and the Justice Department to get the mob off the back of a corporate client. But no, I'm actually - despite what I write about, I'm very timid about being anywhere close to that.
INSKEEP: Eric Dezenhall is the author of "Wiseguys And The White House: Gangsters, Presidents, And The Deals They Made." Thanks so much.
DEZENHALL: Thanks for having me.
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