site at booktv.org. >> okay. i do double duty here. so i am welcoming steve villano who is next, and he is a native of brooklyn, new york, and is the former head of governor mario cuomo's new york city press office with decades of experience in public service, public education, public health and is the ceo of several national and nonprofit organizations. i'm just going to skip to the inhere. he has written quite a bit, there's a long list of things that he has written. he has authored major pieces on ethnic stereotyping in ambassador magazine, he also has talked about actors like stanley tucci and john turturro, he's a labor journalist for the national education association for a decade. he has won numerous awards, and he has a digital poetry book called "we haiku." 9 the list goes on and on. he has won various awards like the digital book publishers of america in 2014, and if there's anything i've left out, steve, please -- [inaudible conversations] [laughter] >> thank you, joanne. it's -- you deserve to be remembered in the annalses of poetry, because i've never heard a poet get the words putana and madonna in the same phrase. it's priceless. it's really priceless. [laughter] this is -- i'm here today, there are a number of people who are my former colleagues from the cuomo administration, a number of new friends, fellow writers who i've met here and representatives of some 50 colleges and universities. sharing the panel with fred is really, this is déjà vu all over again because 20 years ago i was working on an article for ambassador magazine about stereotyping against italian-americans, and who did i call, but the expert at stony brook where fred was then, but fred. and is we chatted a long time. we had never met in person until today. and so this is, it's pretty awesome for me to be here with fred on the same panel. and so i'll go right into my reading. let me just grab my water over here. this is from my book "tightrope." and after my reading, you can get copies of it in the back of the room. my wife carol is manning the table. federal district court, uniondale, summer 1988. i sat shoulder to shoulder with my 22-year-old neff i few michael -- nephew michael. jet black hair, large are, dark eyes and a dazzling kind of smile. michael and i listened to federal prosecutors lay out their case against his father and my brother. earlier that morning, governor mario cuomo had called me at home. after three years of working nearly round the clock with cuomo at the governor's -- at the 2 world trade center office in new york, even sleeping over during snowstorms, i was now his man at the long island power authority laboring long hours to shut down the shorm nuclear power plant for health and safety reasons. you do good work, steve, the governor said. you have great ability and a great future. it's a pleasure working with you. well, you have a pretty good future yourself, governor, i said. oh, no, i have no future, steve, cuomo joked. but you, he said in a serious almost fatherly tone, you have a wonderful future. ninety minutes later, that bright future collided with my brother's present. i was sitting in a federal courtroom hearing government prosecutors ask an fbi agent if it was true that my brother was a bag man for john gotti, collecting money from union officials to buy labor peace. gotti and villano, both names spoken in the same sentence by federal law enforcement officials. my brother, lunged to gotti -- linked to gotti, i linked to cuomo. these were only allegations, i kept telling myself. my brother was not guilty of anything. he could not be. he was my mother's son. mario cuomo detested bums in organized crime as much as i did. he was incensed by the mob innuendos about him or anyone in his family. even the expectation that he had to answer any questions about it outraged him, since he believed that his whole life, quote, had been a statement against that crap, end quote with. what if my family name became the issue? would he keep me on staff? would i have the courage the leave the public service work which i loved? i felt naked. nothing left to protect me, not my carefully calibrated career, not my conservative clothing, not my law degree, nothing. that was my brother up there. we shared the same blood, the same last name. for years we shared the same bedroom with different dreams at the top of the stairs in my parents' house. michael, my brother vinnie and me. our lives intertwined. i looked around the judge's courtroom and winced as i heard our name echo around the room, bouncing off a bench, a chair, the judge's desk. if only i had a sponge, i would scrub the walls, the seats and make our name vanish from every surface it touched. i wanted everything to disappear but could not keep myself away from the courtroom. i had to find out what i suspected but denied for years. yet there was something more, much more. i thought of my mother sitting in the living room of her small apartment in california watching her afternoon stories, "as the world turns" and "search for tomorrow," seeing how everything would somehow take place in the courtroom. i saw her big, round glasses, eyes opened as wide as her heart, watching in disbelief what awaited her first-born child. i imagined her fingering her rosary beads, quietly praying, conducting her own trial, prosecuting herself and forever defending her son. i was my mother's eyes and ears in the courtroom, and i could not leave. real mobsters and friends of mobsters flooded around our family as long as i could remember. unlike the characters played in the movies or on television by deniro and pesci, liotta, gandolfini, there was nothing funny or romantic about it. they used everyone around us as props. they mocked working stiffs like my father who for decades toiled in a beaten-down boiler room in the bowels of a building at 100 east 42nd street that heat or cool the offices of the wealthy accountants and lawyers on the floors above. on sundays my father swallowed his angerrer and shame with a chaser of whiskey or beer when he learned that his oldest son, michael, spent afternoons with gambino family's capo who married into our family and would seven as john gotti's real life godfather into the mob as well as my brother's. carmine, or uncling charlie as we called him, was not the romanticized picture of a suave godfather as popularized in france sis ford coppola's film. that was a caricature that would be modeled after another mobster by marriage into our family whose brother-in-law, my mother's first cousin, starred in coppola's first grandfather movie as aville rain. villain. in stark contrast, picture cary grant and peter lori. a rising star and a favorite of lucky i lieu chan know's, carmine was short and squat, a local gang member who grew up in the east new york section of brooklyn. always meticulously dressed. the tough guy street image of the gambino crime family. uncle charlie rose to the post of capo in 1957 when gambino became the new leader of the organization. he earned his name, charlie wag gones, from hijacking trucks loaded with goods that he could easily fence. gotti, a 17-year-old high school dropout at the time and a local hood from brooklyn, became a member of the crew that year. hired by uncle charlie. my brother michael, nine years older than i, was of a different world than the one gotti was fashioning. growing up, i idolized him for his gentleness and his exalted spot as my mother's first and favorite child. he was calm in ways with me that my father frequently was not. he had endless patience for all types of people but particularly for his little brother whose wide eyes revealed every emotion. michael was my first glimpse of a renaissance man, and for years i denied his drift away from the person i thought he was toward a darker, unrecognizable version of someone i once worshiped. to face his federal abouts -- fallibilities was to peer down into an abyss just waiting for me to slip. between 1955 and 19 -- 1985 and 1988 as gotti rose in celebrity and power, law enforcement officials looked for anything or anyone to leverage against the new king of new york's crime families. my brother's friendship with gotti was a tempting target to squeeze, and federal court was the perfect place to apply that pressure. i studied the smooth, sweet lines of my nephew's face as he sat next to me in court to see if the turmoil and the years of tension took a physical toll on him. he listened as intently as i did to prosecutors talking about a prison term for his father, my brother. linking our last name tightly, ever so tightly to gotti's. years later even john gotti jr., writing with great emotion in a few passages of his book "shadow of my father," his own self-published memoir, understood the terror of being trapped by family history. and this is the son of john gotti. this is quotes from his own memoir. self-published three years ago. death and jail have consumed many fellows. we were really selfish. wives with no husbands present. they were the incident sufferers of our guilt. with the increased media attention to mobsters, the children of men in the life would be teased and ostracized. still more revealing than that was a conversation between john gotti jr. and his best friend, john ruier owe, which was recorded in the federal correctional institute near lake placid on october 5, 2003. and, again, this is john gotti jr. we used to go with our fathers, our fathers never really spent time with us. when they did, they drove us by the club, the bergin hunt and fish club which, by the way, was founded by my uncle charlie. dropped us off at the club, and that was it. we were 10, 11, 12 years old in a club full of men. you're almost forced to emulate these people. okay, you're almost forced to emulate them. there were some guys i genuinely loved, danny wagons, carmine, i loved these guys, but it just seems that most of the people out there, johnny, are real garbage pails. .. all my father had was me and i was the only one who would see him, and he had me for the lawyers -- rung offend for the lawyers. i got trap. couldn't kell him, don't want to live in new york. i want to leave. want to move to carolina. i couldn't disappoint the guy. i had to stay. john gotti jr. i did not care who i disappointed. i knew i had to flee. to build a new life and reject the easy seduction of accepting the old one. my driving desire to get out overrode any concern about whether or not my family's mob-related connections would be bad for marrow cuomo -- mario como's future if i had the opportunity to work for them. they were not me, i kept telling myself. carmine no matter how much my brother and john gotti jr. loved him, was not me. pat -- no matter how deb marry my mother and brother found him to be, was not me. even my brother, michael, as much is a worshiped him as a child, and still wanted to believe the best about him as an adult, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, was not me. i was the third son of a third son. debt destined for special things. my father's hope, ambition, and the small slice of himself he allowed to dream. forget about trying to get to mario cuomo, i heard one of my brother's associates say to him. he's unreachable. that was precisely why i could not forget about mario cuomo. i was drawn by the power of cuomo's intellect. integrate and persona as the a bold contradiction to the stareowtypes of italians. cuomo's visions and values were compelling to me. offering a clear pathway away from my past, chance to contribute to the greater world out there and still retain my family's love. if mario cuomo could do it, faced with a set of different challenges, like not speaking english until he was ought years old, then so could i. how other could i tell mario cuomo that story would appear in the press next day linking mr. brother, hour name to john gotti. how do i talk about organized crime in my family with the one italian-american and elected foreign who personified the complete opposite? i pictured myself on the 57th 57th floor in the press conference room at the world trade center, tower number two. telling report hes that any notion of mario cuomo having mob connections was bullshit because the mob was in my family and the understand word about cuomo was that he was unreachable. in my imaginary press conference i resigned and as an eye witness condemned the mob rumors. instead i condemned myself. for not protecting mario cuomo from my family, and for being unable to resist the pull to work for him in the first place. looking at my work for cuomo, as penance for the sins of my brother and the mobsters who marred our lives. i would do good through public service. i would clean up the family name. i got up and paced around my office. finally i sat down and wrote out a script that i would read to the governor. this is the script. governor, i have some very unpleasant news which i feel obligated to share with you mitchell brother was he sentenced to three months in prison for tax evasion today, and federal court. the judge in his decision also expressed the belief that my brother had some association with organized crime. two two news reporter were present. one i knew. i anticipate there will be a story in tomorrow's paper so i don't want you to learn of this second hand. i read over my little speech, hands trembling. there was no escaping now. no neat rationalizations. i could not pretend that everything would be as it was. the phone on my desk rang. it was the governor. i placed the script in front of me, clinging to it like a life preserver. hello, governor, i said. shaking. what is going on, steve? he said as he usually did. i read my script word-for-word. the governor was silent as i read. i finished, closed my eyes, and waited for mario cuomo's response. my heart pounding. this is mario cuomo: i don't see how it should affect you, he said, without hesitation. i certainly feel for you. but i don't see how it affects you. you are superb pentagon official and shouldn't have any affect on you. stunned issue thanked mario cuomo. looked at the photo on my office wall, a large framed color photograph of the world trade center, a self-contained world where i escape each die for 12 to 14 hours, world of public service and doing good with a brilliant italian american with the highest integrate, world of my own, sealed off from my family. got up and focused closely on the twin towers, tracing my finger across the void between the north tower and the south. where more than a decade earlier, the philipe petite walked barth and forth on a cable strung between them. he made look easy and graceful but spent months practicing and preparing for this balancing act. visiting the world trade center 200 times, he preslice planned every detail, couldn'ting for factors like the wind he could not control. i stepped back a bit. taking in the entire landscape. my mind jumping from tower-to-tower. my eyes stopped and i noticed the shaft of light between the tower. taller than both, beckoning me forward. my highwire ballet was just beginning. thank you. [applause] >> you're watching booktv on c-span2. television for serious readers. here's our primetime lineup: so now we understand how it is that you were able to get waived -- waved into the white house to basically become a potted plant in the west wing lobby. so most of your meetings at the white house were with steve bannon, or at least you were scheduled to meet with steve bannon, and then what would happen? >> i was scheduled to meet with -- i mean, i've had a lot of meetings with steve and steve was one of the pillars of this book, but i basically met with everybody and everybody was under the impression that they were supposed to meet with me. [laughter] >> where did they get this impression from? did that come from the president or because you were talking to steve bannon, they figured, well, we should probably talk to him, too. >> i think it came from -- i mean, i was introduced around by various people, bit hope hicks, the president's kind of personal pr person. kelly ann conway, sean spicer. this was not a mystery here. now, i think on one level nobody quite knew how this came about, and everybody looked a little puzzled by things, but it was -- there was no friction here. >> there was no -- >> friction. nobody was saying, what are you doing sneer everybody was saying, okay, okay, yeah, yay. >> they would see you sitting in west wing lobby and then you would say bannon and they would chuckle and say that's not going to happen. come back and talk to me. >> i became familiar presence around the white house, and i think also very much a nonthreatening presence. the press corps is -- was over there, not far away but i was always careful not to come in as a member of the press and not to act like a member -- the press is a sort of -- they want something. i didn't want anything. i literally was just -- i didn't even have -- >> okay, wait, come on, michael. >> i didn't want anything. i'm just sitting in the west wing lobby hope took taught to all these folks. >> come on, map, really? >> host: i just wanted someone to talk to me. i was like -- [laughter] injury this ises an porn thing. you go in there -- it would be in -- you get -- i don't know -- a 10:00 appointment and go in and then you would sit there, and you would sit there sometimes for hours, and sometimes hours and hours, and it was kind of humiliate, actually, and you had the feeling that people took -- regard me as kind of a pitiable creature. i'm not -- i'm not important enough for anyone to keep their appointment with me. erv always there is and having appointments and their people come out and i'm still just waiting there and the hours are passing. and i did feel humiliated. it was really -- but then it became this kind of thing that people -- it began to work. people would stop and they would try to take care of me. >> how do you -- >> one of the neediest cases. come back, talk to me, and the other thing -- this is an important thing. i basically didn't ask questions. so all reportsers, we ask question. i don't ask questions. i go in and i it there and people just have the urge to talk. >> one reason why people perhaps start to talk from what you're saying -- the key in that is what you said in terms of the initial part of your answer, where you said, you mentioned hope hicks, who is the president's personal p. r. person. when you read "fire and fury" you find out that everybody in this book has his or her own pr person, jared and ivanka, bannon builds up his own pr team. is one of the reasons why -- >> and the president. it's extraordinary, the president, who has a press secretary, and the -- >> a whole communications shop. >> a shop of 40 people but he is conducting his own free lance operation. >> so maybe one reason why people took pity on you as you sat there, as you say, humiliated in the west wing lobby, they knew you were talking to bannon. is it that they realized, oh, my god, he's talking to bannon, need to to can to him to find out what bannon said so i can -- >> that happened later on when they realized that bannon was kind of monopolizing me. in the beginning everybody was talking and confused why they were talking but they were talking. it had come on high from nobody -- nobody actually knew from where it came, it seemed, but there was general feeling that you were supposed to talk to me, i think. >> were people unburdening themselves? >> yes. >> did you feel like a therapist? >> eventually you did. what i saw in the -- this book is really about -- there's a plot line, the transformation that took place is people in the beginning, who were donald trump, arah-rah and then you got the line and then that ban to debraid. gave you the trump line and they were go, err, ha-ha. and it bake very clear that they wanted -- they wanted someone else to know that -- why they had to give this line, they didn't believe it. after moving even further on, then it fell apart entirely, and then they would tell you, this is really a mess here. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> good afternoon, welcome to the heritage foundation, and our lewis layerman awer toum. we we can those who join us on ore heritage.org organization. for our guests inhouse we ask you to check that your mobile device is silenced or turned off, and those watching online you're welcome to send questions or comments at any time, e-mail

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