Joe Rogan - Joey Diaz on New Jersey Corruption in the 70's

Really? You put something in that book that really blew my mind. You said that in 1975 or 76 in Hudson County where I'm from there was 40 car bombings. Oh man. Yeah. 40 car bombings. And I remember one. Bombings, not all car bombings. Bombings. Yeah. In Hudson County from 7th Street to 88th Street there, we have Bayonne, Hoboken, that stuff. There was 41 car bombings. That's incredible. There was a time in the 70s in the US where bombings, homemade bombs were like the preferred weapon of organized crime. There was a bombing war in Cleveland over this Irish gangster in the 70s. It was pretty common. There's a movie about that. That's really true. They made a bomb with the nails. The guy that got the Sicilians were going to bomb. They did make a movie about Danny Green. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They were going to bomb in a different movie. Yeah. It's fascinating stuff, man. Now, did anything surprise you when you were putting, I mean, obviously you're well versed in organized crime and well versed in these kind of communities? I think the dominant feeling people will have when they're reading this book is the dominant feeling I had when I was researching it, which was, why don't I know this shit? Right. I mean, this is like really, this is not only a great story, really interesting, but it's a really important history. All this political connection to anti-Castero movement and the role the US government might have played in it and the idea that this criminal conspiracy organization was allowed to go on for 40 years because certain elements in the US government didn't want to go after them because they were afraid it would open the lid on the Cuban relations with the anti-Castero relations with the CIA, the politics of it. That's not only interesting history, it's important history to understand a certain social, political relationship between the US and Cuba, the Bay of Pigs, the residue of the revolution, the way that shaped the Cold War, shaped US politics over a period of about 50 years. So I was like, why don't I know this? This is amazing. This is like almost like a hidden history. I mean, I knew what got reported in the newspapers, but you know, you lift up the rug and you look underneath the rug and you start to get into the details of it. It just makes me so aware that what we're receiving as information on a daily basis from the mainstream media and everything is a version of what's happening. There's a whole other version of what's happening that we don't see. And you usually only find out about it 30 years later, 30 years after the fact. And that's a good thing to know. Yeah. I mean, it sounds to me like this is, I mean, I haven't heard. A peep about this. I mean, when you brought this up to me, Joey, I was like, what? The Cuban organized crime, the corporation. What? What is this? Like, this is not discussed. It's just not discussed. Well, hopefully this will change. I grew up in it and I never talked about it because like I said, I have 100 stories where you goof around, I ain't losing this corpus pussy. Right, right, right, right. There's a lot of shit I say in that. I don't say it because number one, you're not going to believe me. And number two, it's not my position. I was raised as nothing me to say. Do you know what I'm saying? Yes. But I saw that as a child. And then what made it worse for me was moving to North Bergen. Once I moved to North Bergen, I saw what they were doing in Union City in a bigger way, which is all political. I saw things that'll make it tongue drop. That's why I don't give a fuck about politics. And when I see people talking about politics, I want to go up to them and go, if you knew what you were talking about, you wouldn't say a word because you have no idea. We're real. Politics means how it works. If it works like that in a micro system, I can't imagine in a real. So I don't want to pay attention to it. Now, Joey, let me ask you a question. Because Joey and I connected when I had more or less written this book already. If I had come to you way back at the beginning of this, out of the blue, all of a sudden this guy, TJ English, I don't know, I guess you knew the West. So you knew who I was. You knew I was legit. If I had contacted you and said, will you talk to me about this history, would you have done it? With everything. It would take us a week to debrief me. So you would have been ready and willing. I would have told you. Now you see, what's interesting about that. Everything I would have known because somebody has to hear this fucking story. He opened up the door for me. I have a responsibility now that I have another story to add to this. Yes, he does. I have the nuts and bolts of how this worked. Have you thought about an addition to this? I think there's going to be a number of spin off books from this. This is really. The book that comes from this. People will tell their personal story. I will get shot. I will end up dead. Really? I will end up dead. Not because of what I'm exposing. We know who did it. I grew up, when I was growing up, the power in that Hudson County was the waterfront. Gee. That picture in New York City that people see, thousands of people died for that waterfront. That waterfront was controlled by Weehawken. But everybody wanted a piece of it. And North Bergen wanted a piece of it. So my eighth grade teacher was the Weehawken mayor. You ever have a teacher that was a mayor? Why would your teacher be a mayor of a town? Why? Who's ever had a teacher tweet that was the mayor of a fucking town at the same time? I did. And guess what? At the end of my eighth grade year I saw ATF come in and pull him out of there. Really? He did 11 years. What was he doing? He was selling the waterfront. All that? They knew that was money. He was making deals. There's a particular family that I will not mention. Because I won't even make it to the 405. And they were buying that property up in the 60s. No. They were buying that property up in the 60s. They were posing as politicians. They chop up 30 million a month now between four. And then sell it? No, no, no. This is from all the property they own in Hudson County. They bought everything. Jersey City, Hoboken. But they make their profit selling it, no? No, they made their profit renting it. Oh, renting it. The four of them. The four brothers chop up 30 million. They go their own ways. Every month they chop up 30 million. So I saw it from North Bergen. When I tell you stories about Carmine Balsano, he was a cop. He was a cop. I got invited into, he opened up his home to me. Then his son died. The one that was my age. So I became his pseudo son. So here I am running with the Cubans during the week. They're talking about numbers and drugs and everything. And I'm growing up in a cop's house. That's also the driver for the mayor. And he would do whatever. I saw him handcuff dudes and throw beatons on him. They called him Carmine the Torch Balsano because his job was to burn your building down. The last one he burned down, kids were like, Mr. Mr. There's smoke. He's like, here's $10. Go get ice cream. I'll qualify a department. He never called. He faked a heart attack. So you don't have to talk to reporters. First thing you do is you fake a heart attack because you don't have to talk to reporters. That gives you two days to get your story straight with the attorney. You have no idea what I know. Now, the reason I asked, showing the question about whether he would have been willing to talk is a lot of people reached out to me early in this book process, the movie rights were optioned before I even wrote the book based on the book proposal. And that got a lot of media attention. And I started getting emails from nieces and nephews of sons and daughters of key characters in this story. And these were people like Joey, who had kept his personal family histories bottled up for 30 years. Hadn't talked to anybody about it. And now they saw I was doing this book and they needed to get it off their chest. They needed to talk about it. I would go, I met these two girls who were daughters of one of the guys who became a snitch, testified against the corporation. The family went into the witness protection program. These girls had never talked to anybody. When I went to meet with them in a bar, they weren't even sure they were gonna talk to me. We were just meeting to talk about whether they were going to talk to me. I got to meet them. They talked nonstop for three hours. Once they thought they could trust me, they just, they couldn't stop talking about it. They had all the stuff they needed to get off their chest. We were raised not to say, oh, God's, oh, God's. The first raid I saw on my mother, I was five. They sat me on the couch and raided. My mother had already thrown the coke off about the lady downstairs. The landlord had already called her and said the cops are on the way out the door. We lived on the West Side Terrace facing New Jersey. And the lady downstairs, she would pay her rent and tell her, hold this bag. My mother threw it, they came upside us down. They asked us to leave, went to 88th Street. We never got raided. When I moved to North Bergen, I would get raided. Before I got raided, the phone would ring and be Carmine Balzano, tell your mom to clean the house. I'd wake my mom up, tell her to clean the house and come over here. I don't want you to see what's gonna happen. Cops would come and arrest my mother. I would walk to Carmine's house with my basketball right past the cops. And it was that easy. It was that easy. Wow. Do you wish you had ran into Joey before you started writing this? It would have been a different book. Why I enjoyed this book so much is because no matter how much history this motherfucker dropped on you, he let you know who Jose Battle was. He kept you reminded who Jose Battle was. That's big for an author. He never got away from Jose Battle. And when you read the book, no matter what type of person you are, you kind of get mad at Jose Battle, but there's something about Jose Battle you like because you want that guy in your corner. Yeah. Yeah.