Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins interviews Tony Scarpo about his family and how they fought to establish themselves independently of the Trafficante Mafia Family. Tony’s grandfather migrated from Bari, Italy, to the Pennsylvania coalfields and moved to Tampa, Florida, for an opportunity. His grandfather, Antonio, fought off gangsters in Pennsylvania, and his father, Art Scarpo, found himself in the same battle when they opened a bar and restaurant in Tampa. When the Scarpo family arrived, they encountered the powerful Trafficante family, an established American Mafia family. Tony Scarpo grew to adolescence witnessing and helping his father and uncles fight back against the Trafficantes. As an adult, Tony Scarpo achieved great success as a diamond importer and has become a generous philanthropist. At one point, he asked his sister, “Did we live through what I remember?” This put him on a path to document and memorialize his exciting family history in this book. Tony has obtained interest from a motion picture company, and a screenwriter is working on a script. Please click here to buy the book La Mia Famiglia: Never Let Them Steal Your Name. Subscribe to the Podcast for a new gangster story every week. Support the Podcast. Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwireClick here to “buy me a cup of coffee” To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup  click here To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here.  To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos. To subscribe on iTunes click here. Please give me a review and help others find the podcast. Donate to the podcast. Click here! Transcript SUMMARY KEYWORDS tampa, father, book, mafia, people, dad, family, mob, anthony, italian, story, began, fbi, bar, growing, narcotics, man, sat, brothers, bookmaking SPEAKERS GARY JENKINS, Tony Scarpo   00:00 I don’t know the circumstances of how this meeting came about. He may have been invited. He may have been forced, or he may have been thinking he was going to dinner with friends, but he found himself at a scene straight out of the godfather. Two men he had never seen before asked him to join them for a cup of coffee. The meeting was to take place at hares diner on Hillsborough Avenue. When my dad entered to the well known restaurant, he was escorted back to a dimly lit banquet room, wondering why the main diner tables weren’t sufficient. He heard the door slam behind him. They’re sitting at a four top or two men waiting to meet him. He noticed several other men scattered throughout the room, all standing with their eyes focused intently on him, each man standing at attention as if waiting for some sort of signal. Well, thanks a lot. Anthony. Welcome while you are tappers out there. Back here in the studio gangland wire. You just heard a little short reading from Anthony’s book about the Trafficante mafia and family and his father growing up in Tampa, Florida. Welcome, Anthony. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Well, this is kind of a long torturous trip we took to get here. This date one time, folks, I hate to admit it, but I dropped the ball here. And Anthony got ahold of me a couple of years ago, just before COVID hit. And somehow I was looking back at my old podcast by my podcast group on Facebook and the messages and I see this not that well, what the heck, I never did talk to him. Let’s go find him because I’m thinking about doing something with Scott detail. Or Scott is going to talk about the Purple Gang up in Harlem. But Scott Deitche. If you guys don’t know he is kind of the main premiere historian of the southern Florida crime families. And he has the Ybor City mob tour, which I took if you look on my YouTube channel, you’ll find my kind of going on that tour so you can get a taste for what that’s like right ...