 Welcome back into the original gangsters podcast. I'm your host Scott Bernstein. We are now part two of our deep dive into undercover work into the mafia, a masterclass offered to us by Herman Groman. Herman, thanks for joining me again. Sure. Happy to be right now. We're going to talk about how harm almost single handedly sledgehammered the LA mafia to death with his undercover operation. That's not quite true. They're, you know, it's a little hyperbolic, but the point is that by the time Hermes operation came to an end. And they had solved the Herbie Blitstein murder from the movie casino and the once a pretty formidable organized crime group in LA was really on its final legs. So if Herm didn't kill it, he, he helped put him on the ropes where someone else could land the land along with somebody but Charlie Maurer. Right. So just tell us about your undercover work in LA. I believe it started with a 96. Yeah. You know, as we've established before, you know, I had a lot of undercover experience, both going back into the 1970s and Cleveland and some limited undercover work in Detroit as well. And, you know, my first office of assignment in the FBI was Pittsburgh. And we, we got a new system special agent charged by the name of Tony Daniels. And I was a brand new agent this 1980 I just got out of the Academy, a few months earlier. And Tony was a very, very dynamic guy in just a great leader. And because of my background, working undercover with the state and so forth, I sort of migrated in that direction. And again, back in the, you know, the early 1980s, 1979, 1980, the Bureau was really not involved in undercover operations. It was all new territory for the Bureau. And, and I had infiltrated and set up a major undercover operation out of the Pittsburgh operation, Pittsburgh field office in West Virginia where we ended up opening up a small casino and we had the sheriff on the pay on the payroll to protect it. And so Tony Daniels came to me one day and I'm just a young guy. And I've got three months in the Bureau at this point. And hey, listen, we've got an operation ongoing down in Florida. These undercover agents have been at it for about five years now. And they know what they're doing. And what I'd like you to do, because you can learn from these guys, I want you to go down and just hang out with them. And, you know, pick their brains. I said, yeah, okay, great. So I go to Florida. And I go into this. They had a outside of Clearwater, Florida, they had a kind of a little club and it was like a private tennis club inside they had some gambling operations and so forth. And so I met a guy by the middle of a stone and who in talk with him and, and got a few pointers. And for people that might not know that's Donnie Brock. It ended up his undercover name was Donnie Brasco. So, so I cut my, you know, I earned my bones from some good guy. And we've remained friends ever since I talked to him. Not too long ago. In fact, it was kind of funny. I was with an old buddy of mine that was a foxhole buddy from Vietnam and we were touring the mob museum in, in here in Las Vegas. I think I think you're on the board. Yeah, you're on the board. And I've made a couple of presentations down there and so forth. So I'm going through with my friend and we come to this display of Donnie Brasco. And he's looking at it and he's asking me questions. So I got Joe Postone's number on my cell phone I said, hold on a second. I said, Joe, this guy's got some questions for you. So it was great. It was great. I didn't have to buy dinner that night. It was good. But so anyway, I had a background undercover stuff and kind of gravitated toward that. And eventually I ended up in 1993. In Las Vegas from the Detroit FBI office. And initially I got involved in working some public corruption cases and so forth. And simultaneously, at about the same time or maybe a year or two later, the Milano crime family was trying to get established in Las Vegas. And they're frontman or they're on the underboss of the Milano crime family, who interestingly has roots in Cleveland. His debt. His debt. Right. His debt. Carmen Milano's dad was Tony Milano, who was a conciliary of the Cleveland mafia for a long time. Pete Milano and Carmen Milano went out to LA in the 60s, got made and then by the early 80s. He's a home boss and underboss. Herb comes into the picture when Pete sends Carmen out to Vegas to try to build a crew there. Right. And, you know, Las Vegas is tough, you know, especially after Tony splot row and the Chicago outfit, you know, and Detroit and others tried to make their inroads in Las Vegas back in the 1980s. And, you know, it's tough, you know, for the mob to break into the casino business like they did. There's all kinds of rules they have the black book, and all kinds of restrictions. But nevertheless, I think Carmen Milano's. I think his mission was to just get established, put together a small crew walk delicately and see where it goes. And so, so I ended up being introduced through an informant who was an associate of the Gambino crime family in New York. And everybody's got a fat Tony. This guy was fat Tony. But he was really fat. He was about 500 pounds. And I'll never forget the first time I met him, it was on Boulder Highway, just outside of Las Vegas. And my undercover vehicle was a small Jaguar Roadster. And so I go to pick this guy up. And I'm looking at him and think, no way is this guy going to fit my car. So it was very New York. Hey, how you doing? Good to see you. He's one of these guys. And he said, I'm supposed to ride in that toy? Well, Tony, it's the only car I got, man. So we had to put the top down. It was like March, you know, old. And we're going down Boulder Highway and I'll never forget the cars going like this down the highway. And the cops see like something wrong. So they investigate and pull us over. So that was fat Tony. And fat Tony was he was the best informant I ever worked with. And he was the worst informant I ever worked with. He was very, very high maintenance. He would go off in these tangents. But when he was on target, he was on target. And so we set up a It was kind of what you would see on the soprano is a little bit of Bing Club. You know, a lot of these outfits want to have a little club, you know, where they can all kind of get together. Well, through Tony, we set up a place and we call it sea breeze. And it was located just off the strip in an industrial area. And so Tony set this up. We have a lot wired with microphones and cameras and so forth. And through Tony Tony's connections, he was able to eventually get Carmen Milano through Tony's connections in LA to come into the club, essentially set up residency, bring his crew in and set up his operation right there. So it was perfect. And so my role was I was a big time drug dealer. This is my undercover role. And my name was sunny sunny Blake. And, you know, I was used to like to use kind of a nickname for the first name because nobody really knows your first name if they're going to do some due diligence. I said, what's the guy's real name? Well, I don't know, sunny. So I always use the name sunny. And my undercover role, I was a former big time drug dealer. A wholesaler. And I accumulated a lot of money from the behind the scenes in Detroit. And I was going through a divorce. And I pulled up stakes and I went to Las Vegas. And I had a lot of money in hidden businesses, like the auto emissions testing business. And so I had these shops. And what's the deadly an informant who ended up actually being a good friend of mine, and who owned many of these shops. And he allowed me to portray myself as like a hidden owner in the shops. And so it gave me credibility. You know, somebody called, you know, the his main office and talk to him. Yeah, hey, Sonny's not here right now, but he'll be back later. What do you want? So it was great. So, so with that in mind, I began, I was introduced to the first time I met Carmen Milano was really interesting. I had a little offsite location where I was supposed to be operating my little business. And it wasn't far from sea breeze. And again, it was all wired up with videotape and so forth. And one of the objectives of me working undercover at that point was to the teamsters. Not surprisingly, we're involved in ripping off some of these big high end convention operations when they would tear down the convention. If it wasn't electronics or men's apparel or whatever. There would be truckloads of stuff that would just disappear. And the teamsters were involved in that. And so through an informant, I hooked up with one of the teamsters who had some juice and was able to buy a truckload of semi truckload full of clothing from a convention. I had every kind of shirt that you can imagine I had leather shirts I had so sure I had everything you could possibly imagine. And this little office that I had I had a warehouse attached to it. And so I had all the clothing delivered to this warehouse and we put it in there and I paid off the guys. And so I get a call from a guy by the name of Pete Caruso, who was an associate of Carmen Milano's. And he was a real true gangster. I mean he was a bad guy came from New York and done time and sing sing and he was he was a bad guy. And hardcore gangster with a sweet Nick man, they call him cookie. Right. But he's a tough guy you didn't want to mess with cookie. You did. You did. So I get a call from Pete Caruso. And he says hey, he knew about me through Tony and so forth. And he said, it's like a scene right out of the Godfather there was a guy by the name of Alex Gambino, who was no I don't think he was in relation to the New York Ambulance. Maybe I've been, but he had this vegetable distribution mark place in this warehouse house district. And he said, Hey, you know where Alex is. Yeah. He said, come on over here. We want to talk to you. Yeah. Okay. So I'm not sure what's up, but I throw a recorder on. And I go over to the place. And I walk in. And I see this array of people sitting in there. There's fat Tony. There's Pete Caruso. There's a couple of the wise guys. And I see this other guy who I recognize this Carmen Milano, the underboss of the Milano crime family. He's sitting there, not saying anything. And I said, well, what's up guys. And Pete Caruso starts it and he said, Listen, we know that you did that heist over at the convention center. I said, Yeah. And he said, we know that you got a big truckload of stuff and we figure that it's a, you probably got about $50,000 worth of stuff. That you could sell. And I said, I'm not sure what it's worth, but probably not that much, but what do you got mine. He said, Well, he said, this is the way it is. And he's lying, you know, he said the guy that you work with at the teamsters, his name was shorty is one of our guys. I saw. Okay. And he said the way we figure it. If you make $50,000, you owe us half of that. He said, because shorty is our guy. Well, this, this is beautiful, because I'm being stripped down by the body. Perfect. I got to be recorded. Yeah, I got a recorder. I'm thinking, Oh my God, this man from heaven. So, of course, the recorders going. And I see Carmen Milano over there and I argued with him, of course, I said, that's not 50,000. I said, I'll be lucky if I can get 20. And he said, bullshit, you know, we cart. He said, we heard all about it. You got a high end stuff. And I said, Well, whatever. So he said, you, at this point, car Milano says something. He said, you are some money. And I said, you're Mr Milano, aren't you? And he shocked. He said, How do you know who I am? I said, if you're in the business, I know who you should know who you are. Your name's Carmen. He said, That's right. So now I'm talking directly to the underboss, and he's trying to shake me down, you know, for a theft. A big heist. And so he said, you owe us the money. And because I was working undercover and I had to be prepared. I had about 6000 cash in my pocket. And I thought, Oh man, I'm never going to have an opportunity like this again to make a direct payment that's recorded to the underboss of the LA crime family. So I jumped on it. So I pulled, I said, Okay, yeah, you're right. I said, I could probably get about 20,000 of it. I said, I got 6000. He said that'll work. So I pulled it out. It's all in hundreds. You know, I look over Pete Caruso's eyes are about this big, you know, and he says, You got that kind of money on you? I said, Yeah, what do you think? Yeah, of course I do. You think I'm a Trump or something. And so I pay right on the spot. Yeah. So I pay him right on the spot. From that point on, I was this guy. And so every day I would go to the Seabreeze operation. And I'd hang out with these guys. And again, I didn't try to portray myself as a wise guy. I was just a former dope dealer, had a lot of money, and these guys could smell it. And that's why they accepted me. Quickest way into these guys is, I was going to say, it seems to be tried and true and universal in getting your claws into somebody or cutting into somebody is if you show them that you're an earner, you're going to get a lot of doors open for you because they view everything in green. Yeah, it really blinds their judgment. So, so anyway, I was in. And so every day I'd go over there and I'd hang out and have some coffee. We talk about women, we talk about money, we talk about old robberies that Pete Caruso would. He had a great, he had a great story I'll never forget. He said, a guy by the name of Dominic Spinelli, who was part of the, the old crew in Las Vegas, Chicago. You wrote a book, I think. Oh, Dominic did. I think he did. I could be wrong, but I think he wrote a book about some of the stuff. He was a slimy guy. He was a backstabber. He tried to sell me a phony diamond. He did all kinds of stuff. And by the way, Carmen called me up and he said, Hey, I just want to let you know if you're dealing with Dominic, that diamond he's got. He showed you the real one, but he's going to try to swap one out. Okay, thanks. So, but Carmen liked me. And that created a problem too, because these guys were jealous. They, you know, they're like little high school teenage girls. I mean, you know, Carmen loved me and you don't not love me, but he really liked me. And so we would do stuff together. We would talk. But I remember what it, you know, it was interesting because you would think that major Mafiosa figures would be wouldn't be involved in basically petty crime, but they couldn't pass it up. These guys were. And so the difference between the 90s and what is kind of today from that point kind of forward and what was happening, let's say, from the 80s, going back, where bosses would never, they'd have five buffers between them in the street. That's right. And, and Carmen was a smart guy. I think even with the law school, he was never. Yeah, he was a lawyer. I believe he's a lawyer. Yeah. I think he has a license. At one point he had one point he has a license and I think you got disbarred in black book. Yeah, so I mean Carmen wasn't a dummy. But again, he didn't earn his bones on the street. You know, he got his anointment because of who his father was. And the same with his brother Pete in LA. So, I don't think he was respected as much as he thought he was but you know guys will talk about behind his back and so forth. But I'll never forget to give you an example. There was, they're always looking for a little scams they could pull. And so I'm in, in the sea breeze one time and so Pete Caruso starts going on to this, this thing and he says, Listen, this guy that we know was a big, big gambling he's got a lot of money. He owns several nightclubs in LA whiskey or go go couple other places. And he's got this big mansion in Las Vegas. And he comes there and he blows hundreds of thousands of dollars when he comes. And we figure that he's probably got a safe in that house he's got to have a safe. And the house is for sale. And you know you look like a clean cut guy and you got a little background and, and we want you to hook up with a real estate agent. And essentially case the place for me. And I said, Yeah, sounds like a great idea. We'll see what happens. So, I actually ride with karma Milano in the car I'm recording he's involved in this. Essentially, what's going to be a breaking and entering. You know, this thing works out a burglary. So, which just shocked me. So, basically I get my instructions I go to the place. I meet with the real estate agent, I get the tour, and I'm looking for all the nooks and crannies I'm in the cupboards and I'm, you know, down in the closet and I'm looking around. I don't see anything. So, basically came back and had to report that, you know, if he's got a safe in there I don't know where it is, you know, so they eventually decided not to burglarize the place because they just couldn't figure it out but that's the kind of stuff they'd get involved in stolen cars. One time I bought a stolen, I think it was like a 25,000 watt big generator from a construction site. And I had to pay Carmen for that. I mean it was just crazy stuff. So, how many years are you undercover, when in January of 97 fat Herbie Blitstein has murdered Tony splotches former one of his former right hands during the Chicago. Las Vegas rain the whole in the wall gang in the 70s and 80s. They all went to prison. But Herbie did a couple years on the on the bus from that and then came out kind of reestablished some rackets in Las Vegas but he wasn't paying any protection to anybody. And in this kind of raid of his rackets he ends up getting killed. Where, how long have you been undercover then. Well, I was undercover right when that was all happening. And had you been undercover for like two years or a year or how long had you been undercover. Yeah, probably about a year and a half at that point. Okay. All right. So at that point, you said it was kind of like some of your priorities shifted, and it was kind of all hands on deck. Let's now tie the Blitstein murder into anything that we're doing. Right. Well, you know, a couple, a couple of things happened. One of these gangsters, not really gangsters, this guy was the that I was dealing with. When I first went undercover in this, in this investigation, I was meant to be like a stop gap, because I had undercover credentials I had a background, and they really for a big time operation like this. I mean, what the Bureau would do is they'd bring an undercover agent from out of town that had no family here and so forth, and he would stay here. And as I got involved in this thing it just kept developing to the point of, I couldn't get up, and my family lived here. So it became problematic. Cleaning myself from potential surveillance, going home I couldn't go out like a normal person would with her family became very restrictive. And they even got me an apartment that I could go to and then I had to switch vehicle that I'd come out and jump in that car, clean myself and eventually come back home. It was crazy. But this guy, as it happened stance, this guy shorty. And a lot of times when you meet these guys, you know, you don't really know who they are. So, this guy lived actually not far from where my real home was. And one day he happened to drive by and he saw me out in the yard with my wife. And he just kept going. I didn't realize I'd been seen. And so he went right back to Carmen Milano and Pete Caruso. And he said, you know, that guy's sunny. Yeah, you know, I saw him out here at this such and such location. And I'm not sure what's going on with that guy but maybe ain't who you guys think he is. And because we had fat Tony involved there as a informant, we knew right away, you know, about what was happening. So, what I did is we had to act very quickly. And I called the guy that the agent that was my contact agent. And his name was Carl, I said, Carl, get out to my house. I, you know, we got a problem I'll explain it to you. He comes out what's going on. I said, listen, this is the situation I explained it to him. And I said, we have an informant that is going to bring this guy shorty to my house. We actually instructed another informant who knew shorty to bring him to the house. And the deal was, you and my wife are married. And you're a big shot attorney, you travel all the time. That was the undercover story that I gave Carmen Milano, when I was eventually confronted with it. I said, Hey, I met this girl, her husband's a big shot attorney, he's gone all the time. And you know, I go over there and I do my thing with her, you know. And he said, Yeah, yeah, we don't care. You know, you do what you want. But I knew it wouldn't hold water. So they, if you can follow this. So I explained this to my wife as best I can. And now she's involved in this thing, right. So they bring the informant brings this guy to the door rings the doorbell. And they're going to ask a question about some property. That was the roof that they're going to use across the street. And of course, Carl was there with my wife. Carl gives the story. Yeah, I'm a big shot attorney. This is my wife. Yeah, I'm not all the time. So they buy it. But my fate is sealed. You know, you can imagine. If something would happen to me or something would happen to my wife or to my family, you know, FBI HQ would just be a huge career disaster for a lot of people. I mean, you can appreciate you had an undercover agent, you know, they knew where he lived, you didn't pull him out. So basically, from that point on, I had to create a story where I was down in Florida doing a drug deal. And I was about to get indicted. And so I was hiding and down in Florida. And so I called Carmen Milano and I told him, and he said, Don't say anymore. I understand. You just, and then it was interesting. He kind of cleaned himself up on the phone. He said, Sonny, didn't I tell you never to get involved in drugs? I said, what? Sonny, didn't I ever tell you not to get involved in drug deals? Oh, yeah, that's right, Carmen. Yeah, you told me never to get involved in drug deals. Okay. It's that I whenever I'll see you. So that was the end of my involvement at that point. So we had to bring in another undercover agent by the name of Charlie Maurer, who also had a Cleveland connection. He'd been in the Youngstown FBI office. And so he knew all the bad guys and he looked like a gangster. I mean, he could play the role. He actually played for the Cleveland Browns at one point. He was injured. But he was a badass. And so Charlie was able to take that and really nurture that case. And after about six more months, we were able to bring it all together. But by that time, there are many other offices that were involved in this LA obviously was involved Cleveland. I think New York was. And so for, you know, I remember when this surface that I was potentially be compromised. I remember talking to the head of the office who came out to my house and he said that he explained to my wife what was going on. And God bless my wife. I got to tell you something. She's boss. She's they said, well, we're going to move the family. And she's wait a minute. I'm staying here. I don't know. You're so this is, you know, we're barely adjusted here. And, you know, I've got my own career. It's separate from my husband's. And if you tell him to leave, he's got to go. But I don't work for you. So I'm staying here. The bottom line is they had to run a place for us to go and we kind of hit out for until they until the case was over. So it was explained, explained that Carmen Milano cuts a cooperation deal. And then recants it. But even after he recants it, he's kicked out of the mob and there's really no reclamating or bringing back or reversing the damage that had been done. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, Carmen. You know, when they finally did grab the Carmen. And it was presented to him that I was an undercover FBI agent. It was funny, because he said, you know, I really looked up for Sonny, you know, I really liked that guy. And, you know, he's my friend. I mean, it was like he couldn't quite get it through his skull that I was on the other side. And that there is no Sonny that Sonny is actually her. Yeah, so he had, you know, he had a problem kind of, you know, getting that together. Hey, he just didn't quite get it. But you're right. Eventually he did cooperate and then he took it back. And he ended up going to prison. And he wasn't a long sentence, but he died shortly thereafter. So, and that was the end of in Pete Caruso. He went to prison. The guys that whacked Herbie Blitzstein, kind of a millon arrow, he still owes me $1,300 when I was undercover. He went to prison along with his son. And, you know, Herbie used to stop in every now and then he was doing some loan sharking. And again, this guy Pete Caruso was vicious. You know, he just decided and got these guys on board that they should go in and rob Herbie because Herbie's juice with the Chicago outfit wasn't as great. Well, he wasn't kicking up to them. So he didn't have a protection. And he assumed because he had their protection before that he could use that as some type of get out of jail free card with with the LA guys, LA guys had checked with the Chicago guys. And at this point Buffalo was also involved in it. So you had two crime families that wanted a piece of his business they weren't just they did their due diligence the Buffalo guys and the LA guys reached out to Chicago Chicago said we have no hold on him anymore. That's right. And so Herbie was a little bit of Herbie's hubris, because at a point, because he was so close to Tony splotcher he was untouchable, but not 10 years later. No, he wasn't. And they're very fickle. You know, it's all about the money. And like you said Herbie wasn't kicking up, but he did have a profitable business and he was dealing in a lot of gold and jewelry. And so they went into robbing. And we knew that the robbery was actually going to take place but we didn't know that they were going to kill him. And, and they put a gun to his head and shot him and killed him in his own house. Yep. So, so that was the end of an era really that his murder, even though the splotcher crew had been disbanded for 10 years it really kind of like that was the final chapter. There was that casino Chicago era. It was over. But, you know, it was interesting before they whacked Herbie, you know, I'm trying to negotiate myself with the undercover unit at FBI headquarters. And I'm telling him, hey, listen, these are basically a bunch of old fat guys. They talk a lot of shit, but they're not, you know, they do some things here they do, you know, because they were really pushing to have me relocated. You know, so I'm trying to mitigate that I don't want that to happen. And, and they said, Well, that's what you say. And you never know about these guys nice to believe me I know these guys. And, of course, about a week later they whacked herbie. So, so I guess I was off the mark on that. So, well, thank you harm man. This again, these were two great episodes, you can't make this stuff up like you couldn't. I mean, if you jumped into a Hollywood screenwriter's room. I don't know if some of the stuff that at Herm experience in his undercover work if you could have put it on from pen to page like I say it all the time with my guests you guys live a movie script. Well if we do, if we do do a movie script I want you to write. So hopefully, fair enough. So we're going to bring her back I'm sure I'm glad it took us a long time to get him here and that's on me I hadn't asked him, but I felt like these are two, two great experiences and parts of his career that I wanted to emphasize there's more stuff that we can do and and harm and not to digress a little too much. I have some other stuff that's local Detroit stuff that I think maybe you and I can talk about I got a gig now at NBC Detroit. So, maybe there'll be some stuff for us to do where we can kind of hit two birds with one stone give it to some mainstream media in Detroit and give it to the OG pod. Thank you so much. Happy Holidays. Thank you. Thank you. We will talk soon, OG pod. I'm Scott Bernstein out for Herm Gromen and Benny Augusta. This was the story of the LA mafia takedown it doesn't from the horse's mouth right from the source. I'm out.