Welcome to the Tudor Dixon podcast.

Well, I have to tell you when I was running for office, I met a lot of guys in Detroit that

I honestly said to myself, does the mob still exist?

Is there really a mob?

And I think when you grow up in the suburbs, in the Midwest, you think, like, these are

all just fantasy stories and you watch the Godfather

and you think nothing was really ever like this. Well, apparently it is, and it was, and we have a,

I don't know if we call him a former mob boss. I guess that's what we'd call you, Michael. We've got

Michael Franzis with us. He's one of the most notorious mob bosses

from the 80s, working as a captain in the Colombo crime family in New York City. Rudy Giuliani

was after him, but he ended up serving 10 years in prison and became a born-again Christian,

left the mob, walked away. How? How do you walk away from the mob, Michael?

Well, thanks for having me, Tudor. You know, it's not easy. I can tell you that. And I never,

I never really had, you know, there's no blueprint for walking away from that life, not entering a

witness protection program and then going on to, you know, be blessed as I have and live a

normal life, fairly normal anyway. But, you know, I was determined, you know, the problem,

Tudor, I always call the mob life an evil life. And I want to be clear on this. I'm not calling

the guys evil. I was one of them. It just happened to be very blessed. But I don't know any

family of any member of that life that hasn't been totally devastated, including my own.

Now, not my wife and kids, but my mother, father, brother, sisters, it was just that they

were all devastated. I mean, they're all, it ended badly for all of them. And when I met

my current wife now, we're going on 40 years married this year, I said,

...