Crook CountyKen walks us through his current day-to-day as he attempts to atone for his life of crime. Then we dive back into the past to his first years inside the mob -- dealing drugs and helping with collections. We meet to a few key mafia characters like “Old Man” Genarro, the Chop Shop King. Kenny gets his first big promotion.
Krook County is released weekly and brought to you absolutely free, But if you want to hear the whole season right now, it's available ad free on Tenderfoot Plus. For more information, check out the show notes. Enjoy the episode.
You're listening to Crook County. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals participating in the podcast. This episode also contains subject matter, including graphic depictions of violence, which may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised.
Previously on Crook County.
I got recruited into the mob when I was seventeen years old.
My father, Kenny, lived a secret double life for over twenty years.
I didn't know if he was in the mob until maybe twenty years after you guys were born.
He was also hiding a destructive heroin addiction.
It's crazy to have someone that would so strong in.
My life and it was everything to me.
So he fucking budged him in the face over drugs because he was destroyed our fucking family.
Until it almost killed him in twenty thirteen, and he called my son Kyle, and he asked Kyle for help. No more secrets, No more lies. It's time I learned the truth. My name is Kyle Tequila. Welcome to Crook County.
Yeah, listen, there are girls in and out of there for years and years and years and years and years.
All right, go in there, crap a deal with the client, come back to LUs, pay us our fucking portion, go to work, get out quick, and wait for the next guy. These girls were pure, pure business, and they made a ton of fucking money.
Episode three, coming clean.
My son Kyle, Justin and Jesse bro Hey, I'll get a Jesse going on.
Brother Justin lives with me.
Jesse's the house.
Manager, all right, and I'm the King, the King, okay, perfect, Well where does the King live?
Today? I'm visiting my dad for the first time in a year. He's showing me around his place of work, a group of small apartments that serve as a halfway house for people in recovery.
So this is one of our units here.
It's a girl's all right, how many units are there?
You got four of you?
That's cool?
Well compound, huh.
That noise you hear is a carpet cleaning crew getting a unit ready for another client.
Everybody's out of here.
Five o'clock and then go, well, you know what, No, you can leave.
No, he also lives here in one of the units. Nice man, it's.
Better than the last place.
I think it's better in the house.
The house felt like really cramped and your room was like in weird.
In a living room.
Yeah, okay, listen, doesn't cost you dying. This is marked Yes, no, buddy, Kyle, because this is my son, Kyle. This is the kitchen so nasty.
Real father, real father, real son.
You know you have a book stock And I look at his hands on my head.
I know, yes, he did well.
So you got you look from him?
You look from him?
No, my mom, I figured as much.
It's hard to believe. It's already been six years since I dropped him off at rehab. He's still not his old strong itself. I don't think he ever will be, but he's come a long way from the shaking, broken down man I picked up from the airport in twenty thirteen.
I'm gonna ask you guys to leave. Why we do this interview.
Because he needs quiet.
I'm gonna do come and yoga.
What are you talking about. I'm trying to go get laid all right, Go get laid.
I don't want to interrupt that. I'll bet yeah, yeah, all right, sounds good, guys. Well Sinatra huh yeah, set the mood. I like it feels right that we're talking about the mafia.
You got Sinatra in the background.
We decide to do the interview in his room because of the noise. It's a tight space with little but a twin bed against the wall and a crate with a cheap lamp on it. I mean, maybe bring a chair in here, or you can sit on the bed. It honestly reminds me of my freshman year dorm room at s i U. All that's missing is a Bob Marley poster tacked to the wall.
You'll talk into it.
I'll just sit.
Right there or something loose.
And so we begin fill me in here, what are you doing these days? And where am I right now?
Right at the very moment.
I am the manager of a sober living area where we have four apartments that we have clients and that are far enough in their recovery, at least sixty days of recovery, but they live under my direction in these apartments.
Here.
Being a drug addict myself who has been sober for six years. I am working with those people and we can hold up to six girls and ten guys, all in separate apartments, and I run them.
I'm in charge of that babysit. That's basically what I do.
I babysits, I drug test, I breath a lize. I make sure they're on track. I make sure they're looking for work. I make sure there's not too much idle time with them. I try. What my job is is to get them ready to go back out in the world. That is what I chose to do. We are very, very sick people, and I am a firm believer in AA. It saved my life, while on the other hand, drugs ruined my life. It ruined everything, ruined my family, ruined my homes, ruined my businesses, ruined everything because I was a raging addict, a raging heroin addict, believe it.
Or not, at my age.
So I came out here to California with my son. My son got me into treatment six years ago. I had a couple relapses, but they got me sober, and like I said, I've been sober for six years and now I work with these people and that is what I do now.
To to thank God for not let me be dead.
Or something else. What happened to my family. So that's my gift back, that's what I do. I'm going to help the people that need to help the most because I know I needed.
A man, I need it a bad So that's what I do.
Yeah, this is a big moment, one that I honestly wasn't expecting. I have never, in all my life seen my dad cry.
Anybody that listen, guys, You guys got family members that are drug addicts, alcoholics. There's someone in your family somewhere, a grandparent and uncle and aunt that Stanatika carries down that gene. Maybe your kids, maybe some of you kids listening to this.
Go get help.
You cannot control this, you cannot. It is the sniper. It is the devil. It lays in wait for you and it will take you out at your weakest moment.
Go get help. Save me fucking life. It saved my life, that's for sure.
Hm hm.
Yeah.
Does anybody?
Does anybody around you know it about any of the stuff? Now you kidding me?
No one knows anything. Oh my god.
They have their they you know, they know them from Chicago. I know I've got a little bit of an accent. They hear it in my They hear word is that I study stuff that I say, and I think the snicker behind my back.
We have.
A gangster, but they don't know anything. I don't tell many stories.
I do not share. We do a thing in treatment in AA that's called sharing. We share a life story. You know what got us into treatment. But I've never shared. That's the one thing I haven't done with AA. Share because it's not something I really choose to share.
Starting a few months into his recovery, I would regularly visit him. It was during these visits that he started opening up about his past. The story here, the memory there, but never the whole picture. It seems he's finally ready to tell me everything. Thanks for joining me on Crook County. For add free listening and exclusive content, dive into tenderfootplus dot com right there in the show notes. Tenderfoot plus is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and other podcast players. You'll unlock access to early episodes, upcoming bonus material, the tenderfoot podcast library of over four hundred ad free episodes, as well as subscriber only specials. Subscribe now at tenderfootplus dot com. I'm gonna warn you this story is very complex, with a lot of characters over several decades long. I'm going to do the best I can to break it down into easy to digest chapters. Some characters may come in and out of focus as the story progresses, so I may mind you about them with a little description or a previously heard sound bite. If you still find yourself getting lost, well that makes me a shitty storyteller, So I'm sorry. But if you do have questions or just want to say hi, please visit us at crookcountypodcast dot com. You can even leave me a voicemail which I may play on a future audience Q and a episode, so that's cool. You can also follow us on all socials at Crook County Podcast. Okay, let's jump back to the very beginning. A seventeen year old kid named Kenny just got accidentally recruited into the outfit for robbing a drug dealer.
So these two come up on me.
I'm sitting down and I'm going I'm thinking to myself, ah, fuck, here we go here. I'm completely unprepared, completely came up on me and the bigger guy goes, The older guy goes, is that him?
And it could?
He goes, yeah, that's him. That's the guy that robbed me uncle. He ran a fucking crew.
So he tells me, he goes, are you looking for a job, Well, yeah, I'm looking for a job. I'm fucking starving here. That's how I got in a fucking outfit. So he was impressed.
Oh, that reminds me. Before we dive into this, I had a serious conversation with a criminal defense attorney about all this. He's very worried about this story going public.
Well, you need to be careful, no matter how much you disapproved of what your father did, if you're going to have the FBI brading down your back because he's not just a street doug. He's connected to a syndicate. If your dad was serving life for murder, the government would be far less interested. Please understand that with your dad being alive, that means others are alive. The information is too recent. The nineteen eighties is yesterday, and I really believe that it's a mistake. I encourage you not to do it.
I also asked my dad to weigh in on this, and here's what he said.
They're all dead. Man.
Yeah, I have to realize that I was really young. That's why they call me a kid. Everybody was at least ten years older than me. At least ten years older than me. And if they're not dead of old age, they're dead from a hit, they're dead from an overdose, or like I said, dead from old age.
I don't think there's anybody left. I doubt it very much.
So after talking it through, we both agreed that for his own safety and mine, to give fake aliases to everyone involved in the outfit and to remove or obscure any specific identifying details about people, places, and dates. I should also know that there's no way for me to prove any of this, since most of the information was never reported anywhere that I'm aware of. I'm going solely here on my dad's word, and I'll leave it at that. So without further ado, let's meet our first character in the outfit, the made guy who recruited my dad, Mickey Gennaro.
He was a powerful man, good guy, businessman, well dressed, well kept, well spoken, good looking guy. Always took time to say hi to me, always took time to the little chat with me, just a little bit I never saw him do that with anybody else. Always took a couple of minutes out to say hi to me. And I liked the way he behaved. He didn't act like a gangster. Okay, he acted like a normal person. He wasn't a sociopath, narcissistic you know mobster guy. You know those guys loved to play the part, love to play the part of gangster. I never could understand that grease ball bullshit. So but he didn't do that, so I admired him.
Mickey was also the son of a notorious street boss they called the Old Man.
And he was at that time, and Cook Connie, the king of the chop shops. They'd heist a car, they'd heist a truck with cars on it and bring him back to his shops, chop the shit out of him, changed the numbers and shipped them out. They shipped them out all over the world, you know, as far as Saudi Arabia. I mean they were going all over the world these cars. And it was a big, big, big money maker. I only saw him a couple times. Kind of a gravelly old guy, I can remember correctly. It looked like a typical fucking greasy gangster. I was to put real fucking grease ball, you know. But he was a very powerful man.
Kenny spent his first year working for Mickey until he learned the ropes.
I was an aaron boy when I first started, a low level, very very low level, dropping money off, collecting gambling money. No hits yet, but you know, doing some beatings. But I always had somebody with me, so I was like assisting the person that was doing the heavy work. So that's kind of where I learned how to do heavy work.
It didn't take long for Kenny to prove his worth, so Mickey gave him a new job.
I was so I'd dope for him on the side and get a half of key. I'd break it up at a scale. Some of it i'd cook up for the free based clients, and the rest of it I just ate bald up. And I can't remember how the freebase sold, I really can't. And that was you smoke that shit whatever. Stuff was insane. It was just just a rush of euphoria. Would just just just just look like a tidal wave, just knock you over. And the problem was, now you're chasing that shit all the time because you don't get that. After that, you get that first hit, that's it. You're not gonna find it. So you know, you're always chasing that first blast anyway, all right, But he.
Wasn't supposed to do that.
That would have been bad for me, and that would have been very bad for him because I was just taking an order, all right. I was just obeying orders. But you can't do that, man, You cannot do that.
No selling dope. This is one of the many strange rules the outfit had for itself that I find fascinating. Their entire enterprise is built on crime, but drugs or where they draw the line.
We could not sell dope. People, We could not sell dope. We were not allowed to sell dope. You got put selling dope. You were big ass fucking trouble is that to bring heat on you?
The whole thing. We don't want to bring any heat on any of us.
So if you're going to do something stupid like sell dope, it's going to bring heat on you. People were coked up all the time, so you're dealing with people that were fucking high twenty four to seven on coked. So no one's in her really right mind, you know, No one's sober. Everybody's fucked up, and it dictated a lot of things. It got a lot of people killed.
That actually makes good sense. And of course everyone knew the risks, but many guys did it anyway. The money was just too good, and Kenny, he was happy to take a small slice of it.
Listen, here's the deal man. This was quick, fast money. All right. This was not my career, and this is not what I chose to do with my life.
I'm seventeen years old, all right. I'm living in a backseat of my car. I'm hungry.
I'm a survivalist, you know. And it's a job, and it's income, you know. I could start to get some security in my life, at least get an apartment, you know.
So I'm taking this. I'm jumping on this.
As I got deeper into the details of my dad's life story, I began to wonder just how much of this stuff is actually true? The no selling drugs thing, for example, how do I even attempt to verify something like this or any other inner workings of an organization notorious for their secrecy, especially in the seventies and eighties, when the Mafia moved through the streets with near impunity. I thought it would be a good idea to find an outside person inspective on the inner workings of the outfit, a mafia expert that could weigh in when necessary throughout this series. So I reached out to veteran crime reporter Jeff Cohen of the Chicago Tribune. Jeff is an expert on organized crime in Chicago and covered one of the largest mafia trials in history, the infamous FBI operation Family Secrets that almost single handedly took out the entire Chicago outfit in two thousand and seven. I sent Jeff a few rough versions of these episodes to get him up to speed.
That's quite the family tale you've got there, Yes.
Yes, unfortunately, yes it is.
Yeah.
Thankfully he agreed to add his voice to this story. So I asked him about the no drugs rule.
Yeah, as crazy as it sounds, it is actually true that most of the time drugs was not their business for variety of reasons. I guess I think it was more difficult for them to control. I think is one of the elements that was typically a You had large amounts of money moving between people that they couldn't necessarily keep their fingers on. It was also a real area of heat back, especially in the eighties when you had sort of the war on drugs.
It just was not a clean business for them.
It wasn't something that they could run tightly, make sure stayed under the radar, they could get reliable money out of it.
It was none of those things.
It would it could go sideways in a minute. You had major federal heat on it all the time, and it was just more trouble than it was worth, I think a lot of times for them, even though it was big, big money. But whorehouses, chop shops, any any kind of a legal business that's along that line definitely would have been within the outfits purview at that time. You know, whorehouses, especially anything related to sex advice. They typically had a piece of it across the Chicago area.
Eventually, Mickey saw a new opportunity for Kenny within the outfit, something a little more permanent, and introduced him to a man named Jack Erickson, a crew boss who would end up playing a much larger role in entrenching Kenny within the ranks.
My boss, my.
Crew boss was Jack Jack Jackie Elemus Erickson, a great guy. I love Jack Man was. I really admired him. He was a great guy, well kept. Still a gangster, but a well kept gangster. You know, his jeens were even creased, you know. He was one of those guys. Everything was perfect on him, clean, neat, nails done, manicure, pedicure.
One of them guys. You know.
Jack became sort of a father figure to young Kenny. Oh.
He was a he was a mentor. He trained me, He trained me. He just took me under his wing and he trained me. I was the young guy.
I gotta remember, I was the absolute youngest guy there. The guy had twenty years on me. You know, I was the kid. So he just kind of took me under his wing and trained me, took care of me, you know, make sure I did everything good, you know, make sure I didn't get in trouble, make sure he had my back. You know, I felt safe. I just felt safe when I went out to do bad work because I knew I had the the you know, the mob behind me. The outfit was on my back, you know, I had that that always to fall back. So that kind of relieved a lot of the fear.
Jack also had a very important job within the outfit, one that required a unique kind of personality and responsibility.
Yeah, he ran the horror houses every night, just bouncing from horror house to horrorhouse, checking on the bank, seeing how things are going, making sure nobody was selling dope, making sure the girls weren't too high because they were always high, making sure the guys weren't too high because they were always high. You know, just kind of keeping things runnable, you know, babysitting basically, kind of like what I do now for a living, babysitting a bunch of drug AICs and alcoholics.
That's kind of what he was doing back then. So that's what that's what That's what Jack did.
Jack saw a lot of potential in Kenny.
He trusted me. He trusted me because I did insteal money. I didn't do dope while I worked. I didn't sell dope while I worked. I just did my job and my count every night, right up there, every night for years. Man, it's hard to find an honest guy in the fucking outfit I was. I was an anomaly, I don't even want to say a rarity, an anomaly.
And so he made him an offer he couldn't refuse. Running the door at one of the brothels in Cook County.
So for the years I spent working in the whorehouses, the clubs, and they were scattered all over Cook County to Page County and Kane County. You can only put them in the unincorporated areas because we had the county police pretty much taken care of. We'd rent a house, a single family home, and we'd get in there, gut it to an extent, put about six bedrooms in there, small rooms with little peoples. They had a peep hole in the door and a peep hole in the walls. Not everyone could be peeped, but if we could peep them, we peeped them. The living room would stay as a living room. The kitchen would stay as the kitchen. We had a front area where they came in a little fourier area there where we would take their id, look them up in the powered catalog that we had.
We actually gave them a fucking idea. Can you believe that shit?
Match the id with the picture, the picture with the face, and then we'd let them in. Now, how did they become members? They would come in. I want to be membered as club. You know, it is a guy. There's a million people out there that want to join the warehouses guys or horny bastards. Okay, the people that frequent horror houses know where horrorhouses are. You don't have to advertise to shit, They just know where they are. They would come in and want to join the club. So we would put them through a process. We would make sure we're check their employment, to check their ID. We even had something with County but the County vice guys where we would have them run something by them.
I don't know what it was.
I can't remember, but we would run something with them and then after we got him checked out. I didn't do the checkout process. That wasn't my job, so I can't really expound.
Too much on this.
So anyway, they became members through a process that we put them through.
Pictures and verification.
Basically, we wanted to make sure they weren't vice, the honest vice.
We wanted to make sure they weren't the honest vice. How's that sound?
Uh sounds like my dad was a bona fide pimp. That's how it sounds. You know, you'd think, after all this time, nothing would shock me anymore, but you would be wrong. All right, what was it like? Once you had got inside.
A guy would come in, bring them in, introduce them. The girls would be sitting there. The girls that'd stand up. I'd introduce them to all the girls by name, name Sindy. We did have drinks. Wasn't a bar, but they would go you want to drink, They go back in the kitchen. They make a guy a drink, most eat his beer, beer and wine, and then they would sit and talk to the girls. And they could go on anywhere from ten minutes to two hours.
They could.
Some guys just came in there and just partied with the girls. Sat partied with them.
We didn't mind. They were members.
Plus, when somebody else came in, it made that person rush a little bit because there was someone else in there. That guy that's already in there was going to take the girl that this new guy came in, you know, I'm saying, So they maybe kick it up a little bit. They'd pick up their make their choice a little bit faster. So right, come in, chattered up with the girls, decide who they like. The girl would take them back to one of the rooms and they would negotiate a deal so much for whatever sex they wanted, they'd seal the deal, the girl would leave the guy in the room. The girl would come out, come see me and say one hundred dollars for blowjob.
And missionary sex.
She would hand me fifty have to take and then she would be on her way.
That was the end of the operation. That was how it worked, very simple.
Did things ever get out of control?
Oh yeah, they got.
I can sold people come and drunk or all coked out, but they didn't.
They got their asses beat bad. We would make a.
Phone call and there would be four muscle showing up within fifteen minutes, and it was just you know, they'd be when we got them to their cars, they'd be we'd put them in their cars and they'd be half hanging, half in, half out, and just County stopped by and they knew it was a whorehouse there, and but we want to keep them on properly. We'd get him out on the street in their cars and yeah, they didn't last long. They got They got beat pretty bad. They got beat really bad.
Just the way.
Who are these people just just drunk assholes in members?
No? Yeah, yeah, these are members.
Yeah, these are members or a guest of a member or a guest of thember member could bring in one guest, all right, and you know, you know, alcohol, drugs turns people weird.
Man, people go stupid sometimes.
I mean ninety percent of the time it was fine, but that ten percent there was you know, something would go wrong. That's just that's just that's just law of average man. Something's abound to go wrong eventually, you know. But we but we jumped on that quick.
I have to keep reminding myself. I'm still only nineteen at this point. Everybody else's age is fresh out of high school, going to bars and trying to get laid without a care in the world. I can tell you I was an absolute moron at nineteen, that's a fact. But I can only imagine three years selling drugs and hanging out beatings at a brothel for the mafia will make it grow up real fucking fast. I wonder, can you even try to have a regular life? What would you do in your free time?
I don't know, hangout.
I had friends, you know, so friends that I'd hang out with, do normal guys stuff, you know, watch football on Sundays.
I was just a normal guy. It's just a normal young guy.
That's all go to bars with my friends, you know, pick up chicks.
You know.
He tells me he wasn't looking for a girlfriend, let alone anything serious. But one night, as things do, all that changed.
I metter at a club called I saw Piece some other place and the splains I think it is, saw her sitting at the end of the bar, beautiful redhead, sexy. I fell in love with her pretty quick, so I just walked up to her.
Just as a matter of course of time. We just ended up dating.
I'm sure you've guessed it already. But that pretty little redhead at the bar was my mother.
I thought your mother was beautiful. I think I was nineteen when I met her. She was twenty. Yeah, I had listen.
I hadn't work to get your mother, damn it.
It wasn't easy, wasn't She wasn't like one of the whores like you just say, hey, come on, let's go.
I had to work for that. I didn't work for your mom. That was a job. That was a job. That was That was a job.
Man.
It was worth it, though, it was well worth it.
Next week on Crook County just look at me now and tremble.
We would have to take bus every once in a while, just so Cook County Cops could show that they're making some progress here when half the motherfuckers were running their own horse on the side out of our fucking clubs.
Crook County is a production of iHeart Podcasts and Tenderfoot TV in association with Common Enemy. All episodes are written, produced, and hosted by me Kyle Tequila. Executive producers are Donald Albright and Payne Lindsay. Original score by Makeup and Vanity Set. Main title song is called Crush by the band Starry Eyes. End credit song is called Trouble, also by the band Starry Eyes. Sound mixed by Cooper Skinner. Thank you to Arn Rosenbaum and the excellent team at UTA for their support, and to my lists attorney Wendy Bench for her guidance. To stay updated on all things Crook County. Follow us on all socials at Crook County Podcast, or leave us a voicemail by visiting crookcountypodcast dot com. For more podcasts like Crook County, search Tenderfoot TV on your favorite podcast app, or visit Tenderfoot dot tv. Thanks for listening. The story continues next week. Thank you for tuning in to Crook County. New episodes are released weekly completely free, but if you're riching for more, check out Tenderfoot Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit tenderfootplus dot com to subscribe for early access to the full series, plus an ad free experience.
