The Crooked Cop Who Played a Wiseguy in Goodfellas & Casino!!!

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Transcript

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Hey guys, I wanted to talk about a book that I picked up that links the mob in the NYPD that I haven't been able to put down. It's called Tin for Sale: My Career in Organized Crime in the NYPD by a guy by the name of John Manka. And I was first drawn to the book because what I discovered was this guy John Manka, after he left the NYPD in disgrace and did some jail time, Martin Scorsese discovered him and put him in the movie Goodfellas, and then later in Casino. So in Goodfellas, in the scene where they're panning the bar and Rayleigh Otor is, you know, going on about all the guys in the bar, he was Nikki Eyes or Nikki Glasses, the guy with the glasses. He goes, Hey, kid. And then Henry later goes to him when they got stolen, they're looking at stolen sweaters, and he takes a television set. And he goes, Yeah, kid, go ahead and take it. But what's even funnier is in casino, he actually plays a part where him and another guy are trying to steal from the casino when Joe Pesci comes over and he says, Um, what are you doing here? And uh this guy Manca goes, We're waiting on Carmine. He goes, I think Carmine's gone. And he goes, Carmine's gone? Carmine's gone? Carmine left. And Joe Pesci goes, Yeah, I think he just left and went to another casino down the block. And they said, Okay. And then Pesci goes into how when he was in Vegas, other crews got off with a warning. But this guy Manca was actually sent to Vegas by the mob to hit two casinos for $200,000. So there's a lot of truth to it. So when I got hired by the NYPD in 1987, the NYPD was kind of going into like a re couple of years earlier, I don't know what year, but maybe eight, ten years earlier, they had gone to the blue and white cars. They got rid of the leather jackets. But they were still paranoid about corruption. And they drilled it into us in the police academy about police corruption and stealing. And they kind of gave us the background about what was going on during the Knapp Commission in the 1970s, that you had meat eaters and grass eaters. Like the grass eaters would take money to avoid giving out tickets, or they wouldn't write summonses in front of a guy's restaurant, and he would give them a couple of bucks or let them eat for free. Petty anti shit. They still didn't want you doing it. And then you had the meat eaters. Those guys were shaking down warehouses, they were into drugs, they were ripping people off, they were doing scores. So this book 10 for sale, this guy Manca, he comes on the job with the NYPD, I think, in 1952, and he got fired in 1963, but he became a detective really quick to his political connections. But some of this guy, I couldn't believe, like he was kind of a loner, but apparently everybody in the NYPD was stealing, especially in the Detective Bureau. Like the cops were more shaking down restaurants and stuff. Detectives were really making a lot of money with these scores. And he was shaking down pimps and bookies. And there's a story in there that he was he was with some girl and he was leaving her apartment in the middle of the night, and he noticed that there was a uh a light on, a light going on inside a jewelry store. So instead of calling 911, he finds out that the back of the jewelry store is open. He goes in with his gun, puts it to the back of the guy, the thief's head, and goes, Don't turn around and get the hell out of here. The thief leaves. This guy, Manka, takes the thief's bag, fills up everything from the jewelry display case, puts it in the bag, and then takes it down to Canal Street the next day and fences it. It got so bad with this guy because he had girlfriends all over the place and it seems like he was a degenerate gambler that he really needed money. So what he was doing was then he started doing stick-ups. I mean, robbing legitimate people in elevators and stuff. And apparently, like the supervisors were on in and on in the detective squad, and he said, like, some sergeants, they wouldn't go out and actively rob with them, but what they would do is they would leave their drawer open. It was almost like a night, like leaving the night light on a motel, like vacancy. And if you went there, nothing was ever said, but you would put cash in the guy's drawer with your like color envelope or something that he knew. There was another thing in the book where I found fascinating that no one wanted to get caught. So what they would do is the cops would go around with self-addressed stamped envelopes, sometimes to their girlfriend's apartment or whatever. And when they would steal or make money on a score or shaking somebody down, they put the money in the envelope. They wouldn't go to the precinct, they would just mail it. So it would never, you know, they get the money a couple of days later. So he winds up getting jammed up, gets fired from the job, and then basically he starts working for Maddie the Horse Ionella, who is a very powerful Genovese captain. Basically, most of the uh sex clubs and peep shows down in Times Square, Matty the Horse owned. Matty the Horse also owned a lot of restaurants, including Umberto's Clam House, where Crazy Joe Gallo was killed in the early 1970s. So he started working for Maddie the Horse, and then somehow he got transferred to the Columbo family. He's never a made guy. I don't think he would ever get made because he was an ex-cop. I mean, I think even if you took a police exam, you weren't eligible to become a full-fledged member of the mafia. So he winds up going to jail, does some time, and then he gets re-indicted, and then he tries to play both ends against the middle where he's feeding federal prosecutors a whole line of bullshit, but giving them just enough, but not giving up anybody in the mob. And finally, you know, after he does his time, they wind up cutting him loose, and now he's persona non grata because the mob doesn't want anything to do with him. He can't do anything with the NYPD anymore. And somehow, somehow, the guy that wrote Goodfellas and Casino, Nick Pellegi, finds him through a mutual friend. And basically, he was the one of the technical consultants on Goodfellas, which that movie was done really well, and Casino. So you could thank John Manka for it. But so I found this book and I said to myself, Oh, I'd love to interview this guy. Sure enough, I get the book, and I find out he died a couple of years ago, and he was like in his 90s, so who knows what had been left of him. So, P.S. I won't be able to interview John Manca, but the book is called Tin for Sale. It's a really good one. If you want to put on Casino or Goodfellas tonight, you'll you'll know exactly who I'm talking about. Let's go to a couple of funny st well, let's go to the true crime section of the New York Post. This is a really interesting case. A fugitive who fled to China after being placed on the U.S. Marshall's 15 most wanted list in June of 2005 was brought back to the United States to face justice. Dan Heirs, 53 years old, the subject of a Dorchester County, South Carolina, for criminal sexual assault with a minor, and he also had a warrant for the murder of his wife, who was found dead on March 15, 2005, in a Goose Creek, South Carolina home. Police allege Ayers shot her in the back of the head while she was sleeping. Harris worked for the Charleston Police Department, but was suspended in 2004 when he was accused of sexual misconduct with a minor and blah, blah, blah. So this guy takes off, and he was actually featured multiple times over the years. Well, he's on the run for 21 years. He was on America's Most Wanted with John Walsh and then The Hunt, that was John Walsh's like spinoff show. So the U.S. Marshals had an act of arrest warrant for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. Deputies arrived in Shanghai, China to take custody and return to the United States. So the feds get involved if local law enforcement suspects that someone has fled the jurisdiction, or it's usually the state. Basically, they'll file what's called unlawful flight to avoid lawful prosecution, which is a federal statute. That means now the FBI, the U.S. Marshal Service, they can come after you. And they have a lot of toys and the manpower and specialized units to do that. This guy had a lot of balls going to China. A very good friend of mine worked for the State Department, has traveled all over the world, has been to China several times, you know, on official business, not just that he went there. And he said, When you go to China, they're all over you. He says they know who you are. He says, like he was there, you know, for official State Department of Business. He goes, they would follow him in teams. They would approach you, you know, and know things about you, always work in an angle. So this guy, they figured out who he was very quickly over there in China. I can get, and the Chinese are obsessed with us. So I guarantee you they squeezed him to learn as much as they could about American law enforcement, what kind of guns, police procedure. And he was a useful idiot for a while. I guess he overstayed his welcome. And they turned him over because the Chinese really aren't doing us any favors. So for them to give him up, they just, you know, they're like flushing their toilet. They don't want him anymore. This guy, he's got that sexual assault case, and then he went and whacked his wife. He's never gonna see the light of day. I can't believe he got the evaded justice for 21 years. Cop shot a gunwielding madman when he refused to drop his weapon outside of Queen's home after an explosion inside the house on Saturday. The NYPD responded at Ocean Crest Boulevard near Harmon Lane in Far Rockaway around noon after receiving 911 calls of shots fired inside the house. His wife told 911 that her 33-year-old husband had killed somebody inside. When police arrived, they found the wife outside. When she told them she had heard gunshots, and when she walked into a room, she saw a body on a bed. She immediately ran out and called 911. Um, by 1215, cops called ESU, so they showed up. And just as they were about to enter the home, there was an explosion inside the house. The gunman who was wearing a bulletproof vest with additional ammunition stuck inside the vest had a shotgun, came out of the house, confronted cops. They told him to drop the gun multiple times. They offered verbal commands. After failing to comply, they lit him up. Police discovered two bodies with bullet wounds inside the home, who were believed to me the man's mother-in-law and sister-in-law. The suspect was taken to Jamaica hospital in critical condition and was undergoing surgery. He has no criminal mental illness. Yeah. So here's a guy that wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. Obviously, he did have some kind of mental illness. You killed two relatives inside your house. He loaded up, probably waited for the cops, and he wanted to go suicide by cop, but not before he took out those people. Set off some kind of explosion in the house. I don't know if the guy had a grenade or, you know, went Walter White and built something, but they said there was an explosion. So that'll bring the NYPD's bomb squad, alcohol, tobacco, and firearms. Looks like this guy might survive, so you know, he's going to be in jail for the rest of his life, and rightfully so. This story is wild. The married police officer who films himself having sex with another cop inside a middle school completely ignored the disgrace in an interview while hit while blasting other officers for having tainted the badge. The balls of this guy. Metropolitan Nashville sergeant Stephen Holland was busted having a fling with the school resource officer Lindra Vidros last year after Vidros' husband, who's also a cop in the forest, discovered raunchy videos on her phone. Holland ignored the scandal in a nearly three-hour podcast interview we gave months after the investigation started into his affair, before it was exposed, to blast other officers as pieces of shit for bringing disgrace to his profession. Holland also revealed on the podcast that he and his wife had just recently rediscovered their Christian faith. Yeah, I'm sure he did. The disgraced cop is married to Tiffany Holland, a respected business development officer who was well known. Vidros, that's the female, resigned when she admitted to hooking up with Holland at least four times inside the Madison Middle School while serving as a school resource officer in May 2025. Her husband turned over evidence he found on Vidros's phone that showed him having sex with Holland on a couch inside the office at the middle school while kids were inside the building and staff could be heard talking outside the door. Another clip uh showed the pair performing yada yada. So you got two cops having sex, one's a school resource officer. This other guy goes holier than now, goes on a podcast and starts talking about other cops that disgrace the badge. She's got all this raunchy shit on her phone. I don't know why people film things if listen, if you're gonna do something wrong or immoral, don't film it. Don't record it. I I don't get it. I guess she wanted to play it back or maybe I don't know what her motive was. But the husband found out he wasn't too happy with it. He brought it to his department. Now it's a friggin' mess. A po d the department I worked for in Florida had something very similar after after I left. It was a guy, and I I knew the guy a little bit, not well, but you know, he liked the ladies. And uh he liked them so much that he went on a domestic, met this woman, liked her, and what wound up happening is well, I don't know if it was a domestic, but he went on a call to this woman's house and they started hooking up, and so much so he would park in like an alley and back of the and back of the house, and then she would get in the radio car and boom, boom, boom. So he wound up, I think the same thing. The husband found out, wasn't too pleased about his wife having sex with a cop. He dropped a dime on the guy, and that was the end of his career. So anyway, um, I I'm gonna I might have two extra episodes coming out this week. Billy Hayes fell through again, unfortunately, but I plan on recording, I plan on interviewing him on Friday. If I come up with another story, I'll have something else out. This book tin for sale, again, it's a great read. I don't know if it's on Amazon, but I think you can find it on eBay or used bookstores. But if you want to know like what went on in the NYPD and how blatant the thievery was back in the day, it's an excellent read. I enjoy it, and I kind of got a kick out of this guy wound up in Scorsese movies. So as always, I'd like to thank everyone for tuning in, especially my listeners in the Bronx. Toronto, Canada, Glen Burney, Maryland, Portland, Oregon, Chicago, Illinois, Houston, Texas, and Wells, Nevada. If you worked in law enforcement and had an interesting criminal background, please drop me a note on Twitter or Instagram at FicFerori50. If you're watching on YouTube, please hit the like and subscribe buttons. If you're really feeling strong, hit the hype button on your mobile app. Now, I'll explain that. I've never told where that came from. Obviously, if you're goodfellas fans and I'm showing a picture of the late Frank Vincent as Billy Bats. When that movie came out, one of my best friends, when we'd be out drinking and just screwing around and stuff, he'd get a couple of drinks in him and he'd start yelling at the bar, who's feeling strong? Come on, tough guy. So I always thought that was funny. And to this day, I just went out with the guy the other night. Um, he was in town and we started hanging out and we were talking about it. He gets a kick out of it that that's on my podcast. So that's where that's from. And if you're enjoying the content, please check out my Amazon author page, just type in my name. Vic Ferrari Like the Car, where you can preview all my NYPD books for free. Thanks again, everyone, for watching, and I'll see you next week.