THE LAST JEWISH GANGSTER-David Larson

became a fearless gangster. Throughout his career as a criminal, he robbed banks and drug dealers alike, ran a finger of an international stoletn car ring, kidnapped drug lords, and even became a hired gun. At his lowest, he ended up doing time for his mother's counterfeiting operation in Mexico's most dangerous prison. Hardy's criminal code of conduct combines elements of tough Ukrainian Jew and warm Southern Baptist, whether dealing with family and friends or fellow inmates. During a combined

twenty six years spent in prisons and jails. He maintained this characteristic Gregaria's strength throughout his astonishing life, which Hardy was shot eleven times, committed fourteen hits from the mob twice, wore wires for Rudy Giuliani to nab dirty cops, wrote a letter to JFK to get out of military prison, choked the Hillside, shared prison time with notorious criminals, and even spent ten years in Hollywood working as muscle for a B studio, where it was even cast in non

speaking roles. The book they were featuring this evening is The Last Jewish Gangster The Early Years, with my special guest author David Larson. Welcome to the program, and thank you so much for this interview. David Larson.

put in touch with Hardy. He said his schedule was wide open. He was living in Section eight housing on Fumes in a little studio apartment of converted garage. And we met a little restaurant on ALCOHOLM Boulevard in San Diego, and he was quite something from the first moment I laid eyes on.

He's to be involved also in the promotion of the movie. However, just before it was released, he was arrested for murder. So Disney One of Us the Pictures just scrapped the launch and quietly released it to no fanfare. Patrick Swayzee Holly Berry start in the film. So Hardy was looking at Bobby Debrino, who he met two years before he met me, as being his next savior, and Dobrino was just not up to the task. He put together meetings, He even videotape party hadn't come up to Hollywood sent

a car for him. A Hardy like that, Oh I'm important at all, and everything just fell apart. The guys followed through was non existent, so Hardy was left holding the empty bag. So when his therapist suggested he might have found her writer he had heard me read this opening paragraph, Hardy was just salivating sid Police. So that's how we got introduced.

it goes, and I'll take copious notes for months. He just told me what he did. He bounced all around. He robbed this drug dealer, and he partnered with these guys. He robbed banks, and then he was in Hollywood doing this and met this actor and he went somewhere with Ben Gazzara, Stuart Whitman. He was dropping all these names, Chuck Connors, he partied with him a lot, and after a while I used the tenants to listen, accept and encourage.

I never challenged. I just listened, accepted it, and encouraged. And sooner or later, instead of telling me what he did, he told me why he did it. And that was fascinating that as soon as he opened that door, and I realized the impact that his mother had his life, her rejection of him, and then how he spent the better portion of his life trying to prove to her he was worthy of her love.

his crib. Then sitting on his daddy Roy, his grandfather, his southern grandfather's lap and his grandfather tickling him, and the time they would spend together and holding his grandmother's hand, going to school, meeting kids, and the traditions the great grandfather Abraham would every Friday night and Saturday night or just huge family gatherleries and everybody, uncles and aunts, all brought a special dish, traditional Jewish dish, they went to synagogue.

He was just steeped in a lot of that until his grandfather died. When he was eight, His great grandfather died and then just everything traditionally surrounding the Jewish faith fell apart, and he really clung to his grandfather, Daddy Roy at the time. But his mother would interject herself into his life. One time, she happened to come by her father's her father's house for breakfast and noticed Michael had some red marks on his neck and where did

you get those? And Michael said, well, my teacher, you know, grabbed the back of my neck because I was out of line going to the fire drill, and these were welts on his neck like. And so she showed up that afternoon, threatened to kill the teacher, cut off her hands to the teacher never came back. To the school, and Michael was proud of that moment, but then he realized later on he was just like a possession. It could have been her car was scratched and she would have reacted the same.

In nineteen forty three, when she was eighteen, Buggsy Siegel arranged for her to do a screen test in Hollywood, and she was that steeped and that involved, and she he flew her out to Hollywood. She screen tested and they told her that she was a nice talent at redhead, but they started rattling off. We got Lucille Ball, we got great Garson, Rita Hayward, you know, and I said, your talent, but we got a full stable under contract altogether. So she went south to San Diego to go spend

some time with her aunt and lick her wounds. And that's where she met her first cousin, Roy. He looked like a cross between the actor Jim Davis from Dallas and Rory Calhoun, big tall, six one sixty two, dark, wavy hair, and they hit it off, and they hit it off too well. She got pregnant, so Hardy was born at two first cousins. That was a shame that his mother carried with her, and that's a shame he carried.

So when she got back to Brooklyn, she just dumped Michael Hardy with her parents to raise so she could keep on running with a mob, and her involvement with Meyer Lansky kept on growing. After Bugsy was gunned down in nineteen forty seven, she took up with Joey Adonas and then started running dirty money down to Havana to launder from Mayor Lanski. During the fifties, they set her up with the largest bookmaking operation in New York City.

She had dozens of apartment set up with telephone lines running in and out, big numbers racket, and she had a protection of the mom. Anytime the police came around, it was just taken care of. And she handled payouts to dirty judges, politicians, and cops. So there's a steady stream of cars that showed up in front of her apartment or brown spelt all the time. And she had a nice little money box in her buffet. As she would pull out, there'd be envelopes in there with someone's

name on it, and she would just hand those. They'd get her peck on the cheek and shake her hand. The double partment would be on their way. And so Michael grew up seeing all that, he kept on coming around her, wanting to be near her, figure her out, and she'd keep on shoeing them off like he was a fly, just buzzing around. She didn't want anything to do with him.

men anyway she could. One of the last husbands she had was a federally from Mexico that saved her from being raped in prison. She treated him just She made him sleep on the floor, she did dishes. She he worked at a Hojo's. You know, just get out of the house, keep yourself busy, you know. And he wanted a child so bad. He thought she was ten years younger than she was, so she went. She showed up

one day. Michael was running a stolen car, a finger of a stolen car ring, driving cars out to the West Coast, and she was selling and they'd split the money. About twelve hundred dollars a car. She showed up one time with a baby. Where'd you get it? He said, well,

I know you're pregnant. No. No, she she had bought the baby from someone in Mexico and she was going to get some assistance for it, and that was just another scam of hers and was going to keep her husband happy that she had a baby, and he ended he ended up going to Tijuana party and got in trouble and thrown in jail for five years, So it

kind of took care of him. She quietly divorced him, and she couldn't get the paperwork she needed because the baby's birth certificate looked like it was obvious forgery, so she just gave the baby back to someone.

life other than what his mother subjected him to. He still has a lot of anger. And you say this is part of the why tell us about that?

cheap little knockoff watches. They were supposed to be Rolexes or something something less. He picked him up for a dollar seventy five. He try and sell them in a bar somewhere, pretending he was a merchant marine on tough times, and he brought his son along to try and add to the plea a little bit. He just saw his father scamming people, and his father took him down to TJ to think he was going to get his son laid for the first time. You know, the boy hardy

looked at his father, just like who are you? You know, even took him to Hollywood, he introduced some some people just trying to impress him, trying to be his father, but he's so far from it. Hardy, Hardy's the control for his life as far as a male influence. All stopped when he was twelve years old, when his grandfather died and his mother didn't even let him go to

the funeral in North Carolina. He had to stay home and he tried to commit suicide, went into his aunt's medicine cabinet, took a bunch of pills, curl up in the ball in he bed. Just he woke up in a hospital with his mother standing there for rating him because he was so thoughtless. She had to drive all the way through the night back from North Carolina. Who does he think he is? So you can see how a kid would grow up feeling so alone and just joined it, not belonging to anything.

power of the gun, as you're right, when.

a gun. And when he goes back to Brooklyn, he takes that gun with him and it's a year later and he's bigger and he's filling out jackets, bigger, better, and he forms a gang at his school and the first time he uses a gun on another person is when there's a big gang fight after school against a group of kids called the Corsair Lords. He he fires one shot in the air and then fire shots in their legs, when this crowd of nearly one hundred are coming at him and his buddies that were about twelve.

And after that, when they all meet at the local pizza place, that's when he realized, looks around the table, he's gone the way of the gun. Now he can't hang around these boys anymore.

with a judge. And she intercedes when she has to, and she's really upset that she's being bothered by the activity, but she is a legal guardian, so she has called upon every once in a while to dip her toes into those unwonted waters of taking care of her son.

out a couple thousand dollars, big score. They're out party and Gene and Richie come and find them, and they get an altercation and they beat the living crap out of the John Gott He finds out about it afterwards, and they come hunting for him, and Hardy gets shot twice by them. Once in the wrist as he goes to park his car the night in through his front windshield, and then once the next day and a big shootout where a bullet goes through a door of a car

and hits in the stomach. Each time he goes and gets gay nursed to mend him up. He even raised his shirt up when I was interviewing him to show that the scar that he the shot that he took, and his belly was still kind of weeping lead from a shot that he took in the early sixties. You know, he tangled with some pretty seasoned people within the mob as well, but he was on the outskirts. He didn't he never really worked for the mob. He did hits

for them. It was his contract work. Again. He was just got paid one thousand dollars apiece to go perform hits. And for him, it was hoping that the news would get back to his mother and she'd be proud of them.

channel it somewhere. Channel that rage that got stepped on. But then in August of that year, at the Berlin War, all went up and there was all this news around at the mill Basin racket club, where his mother had a membership, and everybody was talking about, oh my god, another war. It's going to be Germans or the Russians, and to him as Commis or Nazis, and he didn't

care which it was. So he sent for his birth certificate because he was born in Cornatto Hospital in San Diego, and it came back and he was over seventeen and a half and he joined up and the only time his mother ever cooked him a meal was the night before he left, and she made a pot rust and he went to the service ready to do wage war

against against one of those opponents. He didn't care. And part way through oh must have been six stapes through basic training, he realized Kennedy was a pussy and they weren't going to go to war, that Berlin Wall was going up and nobody was doing anything. So he decided he'd wage war against the army. They went a wall and he was final captured and court martialed and thrown

in the brig for six months. When he find out found out that he was after he did it six months, he was going to go back into basic training again. He took his eighth grade ed education and wrote a letter to the Commander in chief of JFK at the time, and he pulled a Jew card and I'm being persecuted as Jew, and to some extent he was. But ten days later a colonel shows up. You want to get out? Party goes yep. They let him out, but that shame

followed him for most of his life. He went and got a tattoo of a big eagle on his left forearm because you know a ranger, well, he was never a ranger. He didn't even finish basic training, but he just felps a longing to be a part of something and just couldn't pull it together.

of women aged eighteen plus. It is formulated with nutrients to help support brain health, bone health, blood health, and provide antioxidant support. Ritual invested in a gold standard university led clinical trial to prove the impact of Essential for Women eighteen plus.

you'd expect from Ritual. My wife Lisa and I were initially very impressed with Ritual successful clinical trials and Lisa decided to try Rituals Essential for Women eighteen plus. She was dutifully impressed afterwards, and when Ritual for Men fifty plus became available, I began to take Ritual every day as well. It's been over two years for me and much longer for Lisa, and we both continue to feel a significant difference every day. Right now, Ritual is offering

my listeners ten percent off your first three months. Visit ritual dot com slash murder and turn healthy habits into a ritual that's ten percent off at ritual dot com slash murder. Now, David, we were speaking about what the military was going to do, what Michael J. Hardy thought the military would do for him, but as you say, it produced nothing but shame and disappointment. What happens after he's still looking for to belong to something and to someone what happens in his life.

He's smart enough to not get caught, and they case things out in cars and stuff, and he meets a girl along the way, gets her pregnant again. He's feeling his way through everything, not quite sure what he's getting into. He ignores the girl that he got pregnant. He meets another one and he ends up marrying her. For their honeymoon, they go down drive down to Washington, d C. He sets up a meeting at the Pentagon because he's going to try and get rid of his dishonorable discharge. Right,

and what a beautiful honey, honey. Let's go to DC and oh, by the way, I want to hang out at the Pentagon. So he gets this meeting at the Pentagon and they basically laugh them out of the room. What are you doing you You went a wall, you disobeyed orders, you wrote a letter, you broke the Chaine in command letter, wrote a letter to the president. And he was just devastated. Hung around there a little bit more. On his drive back home, his car broke down just

as he just as he pulled into Brooklyn. He swapped it out for another car right away, picked up some groceries, and just walking up to his apartment, just things were where he left them. You know, it's orange on the sink, will Philly curtains. He was assessing his life. He was stealing car parts. He was working with his uncle who owned the same uncle that owned a little pet store, and they'd resell a monkey because people couldn't handle the monkey go crazy in their homes, so they kept on

giving the monkey back and kept only selling it. He's just going, I got to do something different. This is just my life's not going anywhere. And he starts coming out of that, he starts escalating his life at grime.

just so easy. Then he went to a police supply store and he got some fake badges and started pretending he was undercover cops and these he'd show up and these drug dealers going way to mac pay for protection. He'd tie them up anyway, take all their money, take all their drugs. He was selling a lot of those drugs to the manager of Antony and the Imperials, just as a way of getting rid of some of the contraband. Yeah, the banks. He made a couple of guys down from

Boston that had robbed some banks. When he was out clubbing. He met them and these guys were talking about needing an extra man a driver. So he knew Brooklyn well enough, so he set it up. He'd steal a car, he case out, they kise out the bank ahead of time. He knew the routes, exit routes and everything real well. A certain amount of time they'd wait out in the car, drop these guys off, they'd come running back out. They'd have the money to go, split it up four ways.

He decided, you know, it's like it was like the kid on the playground. Jeez, guys, can I play too? And he said, what's the take for me to get in the game. Get a big gun? So he mail ordered for a machine gun. And they wouldn't send them to sell you the whole machine gun, and they'd send you a sell you a commemorative Thompson machine gun, and they'd have a fake barrel was fill full of cement, but the same company would sell you a separate barrel

that worked. So he put one together, filled it full of you know, the cartridge full of bullets, and he went down on his mother's basement and he decided to let loose a couple of bursts. That's when he forgot bullets ricochet. He was lucky he didn't get shot. But then he was in the game, someone else driving the car. He got to go in the bank, he got to

yell everybody down, and he just loved that power. The biggest score they had was a little over thirty grand and for the you know, for the early sixties, that's that's big money.

just didn't talk to him about those things. As as a sixteen year old kid, he came to her and wanted this is in nineteen sixty, asked her if he could do collections for her numbers racket, and she just looked at a sculp, what you what are you going to do? So well? Collect some money? I can hurt people. No, no, Michael, no no, And she kept on rebuffing him. Its just everything that he ever wanted to get recognition for with her, she just never came to it.

The Kriller plants at the arrest for armed robbery of the Greenville Bar in New Jersey and saw he went to Bordentown Reformatory, assumed that it was he had to be under eighteen when he committed crime. Hardy was nineteen, and had he read it correctly, Hardy would have been three. Struck in New York had been gone away for a long, long, long time, so he just uh. He spent two and a half years at the Bordentown Reformatory. He took that as they allowed conjugal visits. His wife got pregnant, he

had a son was born to him. When he was in performatory, it was a working farm. He got to do everything, cows, chickens the last thing when of the last things he did was grades detail. A lot of the prisoners in there had died and they would bury them. And then five years later his job was to dig him up and they put him in a grinder and used to defer life the fields. After that. He didn't need any vegetables there, but he got his ged while he was in prison there. He really had these hopes.

There were times where he reset his life and this is one of them too. In his first time really doing serious time two and a half years of Boardtown, New Jersey, and he got out, got his ged, came back. It was his young son, his wife if they went to live with the mother for a while and she just nagged him to death to the point where he just had to leave. She kicked him out.

You know, you got shot, forget about it, you got your face beat in, forget about it. You know, I don't I don't need this right now. They were worried about the Prafaccis. They were they were worried about a bunch of guys fighting each other. Stop it, guy, stop it. So they got He get his hands slapped a little bit that time, and his buddy that he was doing jobs with just decided it was too much. He said, you know his real this is a real tight friend

that he robbed all kinds of people. He illicit crap gates. He come in and bust everybody. Everyone dropped their drawers, give them all their money, take off. Do things like that. They were pretty dangerous, and Bobby Dobrinos just said, can't do it, and he ends up being a cop. Debrino does, and Hardy almost feels like he's been betrayed. It never really deals with that guy again.

So join me and the fun. Sign up now at chumbacasino dot com.

He goes through Robert Shapiro, goes through a couple of big, big, big names, and here's from somebody that Jimmy Blatt is supposed to be pretty good, and he ends up landing Jimmy Blatt, who has never worked a murder case before, but he had worked in the court system, had been on the DA side, And Jimmy says, well, if I'm going to you know, Marcia Clark is on the DA team coming after Hardy, And Jimmy says, well, if I'm going to know who I'm defending, who I'm sitting next

to in court, You're gonna have to tell me more. You're going to tell me everything about your background. So Hardy in nineteen ninety and nineteen ninety one starts telling Jimmy his story. Every five chapters. You break away and we break away, and Jimmy and Michael are are going over some kind of strategy or Michael's pissed off because Jimmy's he thinks Jimmy is cutting deals behind his back. Something something's going on. He's not paying the right attention.

Jimmy's getting excited about hearing hearing a story about Sammy de Bolgravano, and Hardy's thinking, what about me? You know, he's just got got that kind of ego. But Jimmy's very patient, works and works through this whole thing with him. It takes them over a year, just about a year before he's able. Jamie kept on telling you this. The longer we wait, the softer they become, they become less interested. This another case takes precedence. We just delay, We just delay,

We just slow him down. And Harty's going nuts. He's being kept in Wayside Supermax from Van Eyes, and he asked to go to La County to the Millionaire's row and because they have better food. He's been there couple of times before, and Jimmy didn't even know about that. Tell me how you got there a couple of times before, and Hardy explained some of those instances. And Hardy convinces him to increase his bail so that it will allow him to go to millionaires grow in La County. There's

better food, law library, all that stuff going on. So he's just trying to do anything because he's just so bored just sitting around doing nothing, and that time is eating away at him. His paranoia, you know, thinking that something worse is going to come out, when Jimmy knows just the opposite. The longer it takes, the less interested we are in the case, something else pops up that takes over their attention.

Michael's asking for guarantees. In that storytelling, we get to the story about his mother and Michael in Mexico.

really thick. He could almost feel it, but it looked great, but it was real thick, and ten dollar bills and ten dollar bills, and they tried passing some off at McDonald's, but you know, he could only go so fast, so far, so far, so fast, and she ended up suggesting they go down to Tijuana. Those Mexicans won't know what's good us money. So they go down to their racetrack, Agua Caliente,

and they're just there. Go buy a one dollar ticket, get nine dollars change, eight dollars change, and doing it well. They hit a trifecta thirteen thousand dollars and everybody's jumping up and down, feeling great about it. And he goes to collect it and there's a bunch of federal allies around him that arrest him. Well, he doesn't say anything, but mother, his mother gets all anxious because where's the money,

So she sends other people up. They are a group of five of them that went on the strip, and they get arrested. They get nabbed for passing phoning money, and they turn around and point down to the crowd. There's other three people surely and the other two and they arrest them all and they keep them in a Tijuana jail for sixteen days. And during that time, mother just keeps working on hardy, working on it. Please, I can't do the time. I don't know the language helped me.

Help me? You know you do this you all the time. I'll send you money. I'll take care in so party, party, finally agrees, and the first book ends with him him they're opening the doors. They drive across a dusty road the middle of the day from the Tijuana jail to La Mesa to La Mesa del Diablo, the prison in the words most dangerous prison, and they open up the doors and he jumps out and so starts in incredible.

He's set to do twelve years. There. Secret services come down because they're part of the Treasury Department and they say, hey, we want to piece this guy because Hardy confessed it was his money, and they said, when he gets out, let us know where. If he dies, let us know because we'll be waiting for him. That's just one of the law enforcement agencies is waiting for him. And from there, Harty he's got to figure out how to survive in a Mexican prison where check this out. This about us

strange is. You can see Tuesdays, Tuesday nights were for girlfriends to visit the prison. Right Thursday nights were for wives, and Sundays they would open the gates to the prison, let whole throngs of people come in with fruit carts and taco trucks and they played baseball in the big yard. There were eight hundred and twenty five prisoners there. Whole families lived in the prison, and it was just you could have a gun or a knife, but the rules were you couldn't use them on a guard to escape,

but you could use them for self protection. Wow. So this place was just like the wild West, but with a set of rules. That and a month or two into his stay. Now this is in the second book, a gay drug lord that cade competitor in half. It was his whole family to bring him in. This guy starts doing all kinds of building, building himself a great big plaza suite, all these other little part around there

instead of the hovels that they had before. And eventually Hardy goes to work for him as his gringo pistolero, selling drugs to the twenty five Americans that are in there and doing collections for him, and he's observing. They have restaurants. This also most dangerous, but it was the most entrepreneur prison. They had restaurants in there, a jewelry store. You could go set up a business there as long

as you gave kickbacks to the commandante. There was an ex NFL player that Hardy became real good friends with that was always planning prison escapes. There was Ann Michael's mother through all this, never showed up, never sent money.

contacted the authorities. They set up an interview. He drew them a map of where Hardy's wife was buried. Now this is not mother, this is not Robert's mother. But five years before it was Thanksgiving, Hardy's wife came out at him with the thirty eight fired A couple of times he shoved her. She cracked her head on a sink. They went to bed. Later on that night she calmed down. He woke up in the morning she was dead next

to him. So the son Hardy, rapped her in a rug, put in a huge toolbox, and his son eventually they or so later helped him burier in the backyard. So the sun draws the authority is a map where the body's buried. The authorities look at each other and say, well, thank you very much, but we aren't going to give you an extra time off. You know, you're aiding, embedding in a murder, you know, disposing the body. I mean, got all these all these charges there, just be thankful

we don't charge you with anything else. So that they have, they got worn out for Harty's arrest, and that's when they that's when they collect him in Laya and then they take them up to the Vista jail and then some detectives from Van i Ice managed to come down and pick them up and take them up to La So starts the long process of sentencing, eventual sentencing for murder. You say something, are you right?

me and she pulls me down. You know, he did have a chance in May of nineteen ninety before she died to have a little come to Jesus with him to find out why she just never understood she was just just used him or just cast him aside, and she just admitted finally she didn't know what to do with him. He was a mistake baby, just just she was. She was scared, you know, she you know, it didn't that didn't assuay too much, but Lisa gave him an answer.