The Welcome to Mysterious Circumstances Podcast. We have a great interview for you here today. We have Thomas Mayer,

who is an author and has developed TV shows, and he's got a new one coming out, and it's called

Mafia Spies, and I know for sure my listeners are all about these episodes. They're all about

this knowledge. So when I got the, when I got the email, I absolutely had to have you on. Thomas, welcome. How are you doing today?

Thank you so much, Justin, for inviting me. I really appreciate it. I'm looking forward to talking about mafia spies.

Absolutely. So let's go ahead and start off a little bit earlier. How did you get into the mafia?

How did you get into researching it? Were you around it growing up or just something you were interested in?

Well, I have worked for the last 40 years as an investigative reporter. I first started at the Chicago Sun Times.

And I've been a reporter here at Newsday for the last 40 years.

So I've written a number of things about organized crime over the years.

But I also wrote, as you mentioned, a number of books, in fact, two about the Kennedys.

The first book I wrote about the Kennedys

had to do with their Irish Catholic immigrant background and how it affected their private

and public life. And the second book had to do with the Kennedys and the Churchill's, primarily

in England leading up to World War II. Actually, in both books, there was a brief

mention of Sam Jean-Connor and more so about JFK's affair with a woman named Judy Campbell.

The fact that I had worked in Chicago as a reporter, I was very aware of Sam Giancana and the mafia.

The mafia in Chicago is known as the outfit.

And unlike the mafia that we watch in the Godfather, for instance, which is based in New York,

where you have the five families, organized crime families in New York.

In Chicago, it's one big gang.

It's the gang fundamentally that came into prominence with Al Capone.

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