pence as the rioters approached. thanks to all of you for getting up way too early with us on this thursday. big day, morning joe starts right now. tonight i come to you with a spring in my step, a song in my heart, emotionally and spiritually refreshed because you know how as humans we have to accept the fact that sometimes bad things happen to good people. well, by the grace of god, sometimes bad things happen to alex jones, and that s a good thing. oh, yes, conspiracy theorist alex jones ordered to pay nearly a billion dollars to sandy hook families for lying about the 2012 massacre being a hoax. we will speak with one of the plaintiffs in the case, a sandy hook mother. and you know, mika, we were watching this live, got breaking news. and as the verdicts were coming in, it was so painful. it was so painful. looking at the parents. you know, they re talking about, you know, basically a billion dollars in civic awards, and you just couldn t, you still looked at
Illegal acts they were committing. - it is called the commission, the inner council that runs organized crime in this country. - led by the reputed boss of all bosses, paul castellano, head of the gambino family, four of new york s five godfathers appeared in federal court to face a wide range of racketeering charges. - this is a great day for law enforcement, but this is a bad day, probably the worst, for the mafia. - guilty verdicts today in the federal trial of a group of mobsters. - guilty on all 22 counts of racketeering, conspiracy, and extortion. - judge owen gave the kind of sentence that you have to give to habitual criminals who, at bottom, are murderers. he put them in prison hopefully for the rest of their lives. - rudy was very successful in taking out the mafia as we knew it. he was the motivating factor. he masterminded the case to the indictment and conviction stage. - when giuliani won a case against the commission, he clearly set himself apart in the city as someone w
And it was, like, a select few in there that were more or less organized. - so i said, what if i want to call another garbage guy? and this guy said, try it. - this was just widely accepted as the way things were and not something to tamper with. - the hierarchy of the cosa nostra the boss, the underboss were well insulated from most criminal activities. so it was the low-level street guys that were doing the work. they were the ones that took the rap. and you had plenty behind them to take their spot. so law enforcement was handcuffed, in many respects. - new york has five organized crime families. and they have been permitted to grow and grow and grow and grow. - when rudy took over the office and got involved in this case, he was very enthusiastic about it, very engaging, anxious to get the case going. - my great-grandfather, when he was an immigrant in brooklyn and the black hand at that time wanted him to pay protection money to them, when people say there is no mafia
And these organizations don t exist, i mean, i know from my history that there is such a thing. and i know what it does and what it can do. - the fbi, sometime several years before rudy became the u.s. attorney, had decided to focus in a big way on the five new york mafia families. they had devoted separate squads to focus on individual families. but rudy had the idea, well, let s make the biggest of all mafia cases, where our targets are the heads of the five families. - the commission case was something that i developed actually shortly before i became united states attorney when i was reading some of the materials and reading joe bonanno s book. it occurred to me that we could do a racketeering case against the commission of the mafia. - joe bonanno, who was the head of the bonanno family years ago who was in retirement, wrote a book called man of honor. - he had basically written the book to describe his interaction with the mob. i can remember rudy reading us passages from the b