February 24, 2025 • 37 mins
In this episode, Tudor speaks with Kyle Tekiela, the son of a former mafia hitman and host of the hit podcast "Crook County." They explore the complexities of Kyle's father's life, from his recruitment into the mob as a young man to his struggles with addiction and the impact on his family. The conversation delves into themes of duality, corruption within law enforcement, and the lasting effects of family secrets. Kyle shares his journey of uncovering his father's past and the challenges of reconciling the man he knew with the criminal he became. The Tudor Dixon Podcast is part of the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Podcast Network. For more visit TudorDixonPodcast.com
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the Tutor Dixon Podcast. The other day, I
have to say I was reading this article and I thought,
this is crazy. The story about this family. The dad
was a firefighter and then come to find out after
he was injured on the job and he ends up
with a drug addiction through the pain meds, that he
(00:22):
actually had a secret life as like this main mafia
hick guy in Chicago. So he's known as like Kenny
the Kid in Chicago. But his kids don't know anything,
his wife doesn't know anything. So I read this and
it's from the perspective of his son. His son has
a podcast called Crook County because it was done and
(00:42):
I'm assuming Cook County, Illinois, and so I'm like, well,
I got to reach out to this guy. His name
is Kyle Tequila and he's here on the show today.
Thank you so much for being.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Here, Thank you for having me appreciate Your.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Story is wild. And I think, you know, I'm one
of those people that's always kind of had a fascination
with did this really ever happen?
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Was?
Speaker 1 (01:03):
How serious is the mafia? You know? And having grown
up I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, so
I was there when this was happening, you know, and
I think we think al Capone happened a million years ago,
but this was like the al Capone group. Your dad
was a part of this.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yeah, the Mob was was pretty much, you know, at
a peak power through the sixties, seventies, and eighties and
started to fall apart in the nineties, and then Operation
Family Secrets was a huge federal investigation and sting that
took down pretty much all the Five families in the
early two thousands, which you know is twenty years ago
(01:42):
but still fairly recent, you know. And so yeah, my
dad was deep in the Mob during the time that
they were still very much powerhouse in Chicago.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
So his story is like he gets recruited as a kid,
he gets kicked out of the house at sixteen, at seventeen,
he gets recruited to be kind of a hit man, right, Well.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Didn't start out as a hit man. I mean, basically
he was a homeless kid. His mom kicked him out
of the house at gunpoint because he was protesting their
divorce that they were getting. And I mean that just
kind of tells you right away with kind of family
environment that he was used to.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
So when he hit the streets.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
He was living out of his car, and you know,
he's seventeen years old. He doesn't really know what the
hell to do with his life, and he doesn't have
any assets. It's not like she gave him any money.
So he was desperate and he decided to rob this
local drug dealer that he saw kind of running around
and figured that he can get some cash and some
drugs and start a little drug dealing business. Unfortunately, this
(02:42):
drug dealer was related. He was the nephew of one
of the top coppos in that part of Chicago. You know,
there's multiple crews all over the place. His crew was
the South Side crew.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
He was the nephew.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
And when he robbed him, of course, the guy goes
to his uncle and tells him what happened, and then
they go and find him. And so Kenny's sitting at
this restaurant, you know, with all this stuff, about two
days later and feeling pretty good about himself, and then
he sees these two dagoes walk up to him and
he knows it's all over at that point, and they
basically question him and he goes, did you rob my nephew?
(03:17):
And he goes, yeah, and he admitted to it and
told him the story, and the guy thought he had
spunk and basically, instead of punishing him, invited him into
the mob.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
I mean, it's an interesting situation because it's like, Okay,
what could have happened. He probably could have ended up
dying himself or he goes into this life. And I
feel like that's somewhat of a recurring theme as I
listened to him speak on your podcast. And that's the
interesting part about your podcast is it's actually him speaking
about this life. The recurring conversation that he seems to
(03:48):
go back to is like I didn't know what else
to do. I kind of felt like I had to
be in this. And yet the mom and me, the
mom of today, here's your mom talking and your mom
is so frustrated, like how did this happen under my nose?
And how did he How did he choose this over
our family? And it seems like there must have been
(04:08):
a point when the family was doing well enough without
this that he could have walked away. But can you
walk away from the mob?
Speaker 3 (04:17):
That's exactly it.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
You can't once you're in, and once you've done the
things that he did, you know, kind of going back
to what we were saying, he didn't start off as
a hit man. He kind of started off as almost
like an apprentice, and you would follow people around and
you would learn what they do. He learned, you know,
what this person does and what this person does, and
you know, his first, I guess real career in the
mob was was running their whorehouses, or one of the whorehouses,
(04:40):
and it ended up turning into multiple whorehouses. He was
like one of their top managers who ran these these clubs,
and these clubs are where a lot of extortion happened
and where they got a lot of their leverage over
elected officials and the sheriff, et cetera. You know, because
they all got their kinks and they all go to
this place which is safe and very well regulated. They
did they tested all the girls. Like my dad explains
(05:00):
it to me, it's very professional, very business like. But
of course, you know, it's still mob related and there's
a lot of crazy stuff that happens. And you know,
there was a robbery at one of the clubs and
it was actually an inside job. It was discovered and
they tasked my dad with taking him out, you know,
and that was his first hit, and so they realized
(05:23):
that he could do that and he had that in him,
and then that's when that started. But that didn't start
till his early twenties. So he was probably in the
mob for about five years before he did his first
you know, hit, but he became a very trusted man
and they could rely on him. But you're right, you know,
he when he was twenty eight, he wanted out really bad.
(05:44):
And you know, he was about ten years eleven years
into the mob at this point, and he had been
studying to become a firefighter paramedic after being inspired by
watching American Airlines Flight one seventy nine crash right out
of OHAA Airport, which killed about two hundred and eighty people,
the largest domestic airline crash in history and I think
it still might be. And he said he was close
(06:07):
enough to that crash this was, yeah, nineteen seventy nine,
that he could feel the heat of all that jet
fuel burning. You know that O'Hare is very near where
one of the clubs was that he was working that night,
and that inspired him seeing all these people go in
and try to save the day. And so he'd been
studying on his own to become a firefighteror paramedic, and
(06:29):
when he was twenty eight, he passed all his tests
and he basically asked the same guy that recruited him
into the Mob, that same Coppo, if he could go
and try to start a civilian life. He had been
dating my mother for years and they had a serious relationship.
They wanted kids, and they basically made a deal that
he can go and do that, he can have his
(06:50):
little life, but when they call on him, he needs
to answer. And so that was their agreement. So basically
they had an inside man in the Chicago Fire Department
doing their dirty work as a first responder whenever they
needed him to. So it kind of worked both ways.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Wow, so you have to think about the psychology behind
that for your dad too, to be to see that
tragedy happen while he's working at a club owned by
the Mob and then saying, man, maybe that's what I
want to do. There's got to be some part of
you that feels so much guilt that you have to
replace that with heroism. So here you have a guy
(07:24):
who can save lives and a guy who can take lives.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Yeah, a hero by day and hit man by night.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
That's pretty wild. And you guys don't know any of.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
It, No, not until twenty thirteen. And I was twenty
eight at that time, which is kind of funny because
he was twenty eight when you decided to go, you know,
become a civilian. But yeah, we just thought he there's
so much here. Obviously, this is a very there's a
lot of threads to this story, so it's hard to
kind of crack it all in a couple of minutes.
But yeah, so he had, like you said in the beginning,
(07:57):
he had this really bad injury as a firefighter. And
at that point, I was like, you know, thirteen or
fourteen years old, so we had been living a very
normal suburban lifestyle in West Chicago.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
And he really was your hero.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
Well, yeah, I loved it.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
I mean he was a wonderful dad. I mean he
was so big and charismatic and you know, the center
of attention always. He just had this electric personality and
I mean he was a special guy. And then you know,
you could really start to see the change after that
accident happened. He's on a lot of opiates at that
time because the pain was so bad, and of course,
you know, like a lot of people.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
They have the same story.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
The opiate pills are not enough for the doctor stuff's
prescribing them, and they had to take to the streets
to continue their addiction to it.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
And that's what happened.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
He started doing Heroin, Street Heroin, and then it just
completely overtook his life and everything changed. Basically by the
time I got into high school, by the time I
got out of high school, like it was one man,
and then by the end of it, he was a monster.
And for me, that was really hard because I didn't
understand why. I mean, he had everything. He had a
(09:00):
great family. We had a great family, he had a
great life.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
We were happy.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
I remember being a kid and being like, wow, like
I'm so lucky my parents aren't divorced. I had so
many friends who had divorced parents, so it was it
was hard. It was a shock to me, and so
I left home. I went to college and I basically
just focused.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
On my life.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
I couldn't deal with the pain of home selfishly. But
I was young and to mature and I didn't want
to deal with it and started my career in film
and TV, which is something I always wanted to do.
Met my wife when I moved to Atlanta right out
of school and got married really young, got married at
twenty three. And I think that's one of the reasons
why I got married really young, because I wanted to
(09:38):
build my own family and kind of like erase the
pain of my you know, my first family. And so
I lived my life and I was a strange for
my father for five six years. You know, we'd every
now and then talk on the phone, but it just
got less and less and less until there was none
for several years.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
And then he called me in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
I'd been living in LA, had already deep into my career,
it's already married, and we were talking about having kids
of our own, and he calls me and he says,
this is it. I need help or today is my
last day. Come to find out later that he had
a gun in his hand and he was going to
kill himself. So flew him out to LA the next day.
I had no idea what to do, so I just
(10:19):
kind of figured out how to deal with the rehab
thing and booked him at a spot and dropped him off,
picked him up at the airport, dropped him off, and
didn't talk to him for a couple of weeks until
he you know, do you do this detox thing? And
so once he got through detox, we started talking again,
and that's when you can see the change in him.
You can see that he was starting to wake up.
(10:40):
And that's when he started laying these little hints on me, like,
you don't know anything about me.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
There's so much so you're an adult before you even know.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
I just thought he was a fucked up heroin addict. Gosh,
and that's bad enough, by the way.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
And your mom doesn't know either, no.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
No, And you know, that's one of the things I
had to dig into because I'm like, how do you
not know?
Speaker 3 (11:03):
Yeah, they've known.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Each other since he was nineteen and she was twenty.
So he was working the clubs and you know, he
was on the scene and hanging out with all these
you know, big mafia guys.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
But she didn't know.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
She admits that she was very immature and ignorant of
all of it. She and you know, there's a term
ignorance is bliss, and I think that really might totally
applies to my mom, and willful ignorance too, you know.
She I think if there was something nefarious going on.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
She would willfully ignore it.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
What was her family life like before that.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
Well, there's a lot of she has a lot of
daddy issues, let's put it that way.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
I mean, and not to like try to dig into that,
but it seems like.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Man, that's what we're doing.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Really wanted that perfect life, you know. So it was
almost like she was looking past everything else because she's like,
I've got the two kids, the white picket fence. I'm good.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
That's exactly right.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
And the reason is is because her dad died when
she was really young of cancer, and then a year
later her brother died of leukemia at her older brother.
So the two men in her life and she was
probably fourteen fifteen when these two deaths happened and completely
sug her. Yeah, she one hundred percent was looking for
the perfect life and the perfect man and to replace
(12:15):
those two men that she lost way too young.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
And then you've got this guy, and he I mean,
when you do have these powerful friends, it seems like, wow,
he's cool, he's got all this going on, and then
he becomes a firefighter. But that to me, you said, well,
then they had somebody on the inside. But you talk
in the podcast about how they owned cops. And that
is so awful in my mind because we I had, honestly,
(12:42):
before I got into this, before I got into the
political world, I had this Pollyanna view of people go
into service because they want to save people. They're all
good hearted, Like, I just don't know what I was thinking.
I just didn't realize the amount of corruption. But as
I'm listening to this, I think about the corruption in
Washington and the amount of I mean, even when you
talk about the whorehouses, I remember a few years ago
(13:05):
there was they were starting to expose that there was
I guess essentially like a whorehouse in a modern day
whorehouse in these outskirts of DC, and a lot of
the elected officials were using this and they're all freaking
out like they're going to expose us. But I mean, who,
how do people get trapped in this? But how deep
(13:26):
does this go? What does owning cops mean?
Speaker 3 (13:30):
There's a lot there.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
Well, you know, there's a line that my dad says
in the show where he goes guys are horny bastards,
and he's one hundred percent right. I mean, they'll you know,
and look, I mean, let's just be honest, A lot
of the people that go into politics, they weren't the
coolest kids in school, and I think they are trying
to find that that power, you know, to try to it.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Has been called the Hollywood for ugly people, so.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
I mean it kind of it kind of makes perfect sense, honestly.
So yeah, and why do you think there's so many
people in power that have to fuck their interns? You know, like,
just go find a real woman. You know. I'm not
to say that she's not a real woman, but like,
stop trying to use your power position to you know,
get laid. I think it's disgusting. But but yeah, I
mean that's why they go and find whorehouses because you know,
(14:20):
it's supposedly secret and then get their kinks out and
they could feel like big powerful men or whatever. And
they pay for it, and that's of course an asset
that's going to be used against them by by people
on the other side or other even other governments or whatever,
and of course by the mob, you know, so.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
They can get leverage.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
So they took advantage of that and they did it
very very successfully. But yeah, owning cops, it wasn't just
through that, but it was through payola, through I mean, like,
it's not like police officers back in the eighties were
making a lot of money, so you know, they would
pay them of course. And also there are a lot
of bad people back in the seventies and eighties. And
the Jeff Cohen, who is the Chicago Tribune reporter who
(15:00):
I kind of recruited to to do commentary on the show,
He's got a great take on this. He's like a
lot of the police officers up until the late eighties
and early nineties were legacy police officers, Like their grandfather
was a police officer, the father was a police officer.
Now they're a police officer. And corruption goes way back
to the root of law enforcement, like the beginnings of
(15:21):
organized law enforcement in every major city, it's like all payola.
It's all you know, pay to look the other way.
It's tons of corruption. And they knew that and that
was half of their business was just getting payola. They
were basically like their own little mob. And so a
lot of that like is trickled down tradition, and so
it's easy for them to get caught up in the
mafia because they see, you know, people, they see these
(15:43):
guys giving them money to basically do things that they
would do anyway of so of course they're going to
do it. And it wasn't until there was all this
like internal affairs and you know, investigation stuff and hiring
outside of the family legacy, so to speak, that started
to kind of come to an end. And you know,
it's obviously not the same now. Of course, there's still
(16:03):
people that are corrupt. Back then it was, it was
very different.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
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(17:17):
stay tuned, we've got more coming up. So what was
the real business of the mob in Chicago? I mean,
I hear, I see that the whorehouses could be big business,
But there had to have been more than that. There
had to be something else that was gluing this all together.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Sure, well, I mean a lot of it is. What's
the stereotype of They always own waste management companies and
construction companies. Well, how do you think they get those
giant contracts? You know a lot of those are government contracts,
like federal buildings or like huge commercial buildings. So they're
making legitimate money through nefarious means by leverage. You know,
It's not like there's a bidding system, and then they
(17:58):
got the fair bid and they're the.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
And waste management comes in handy when you're murdering people.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
Yep, you said it.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Gosh. I mean, honestly, I feel like it's something we
all watched at movies growing up and we were like, oh,
that's crazy, but you your dad lived this.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
There's a lot of stuff that I can't even put
in the show just for safety reasons. And that was
one of the things that we talked about before releasing
the show was how deep can we go? So I
feel like we did a pretty good job of really
telling the story and so the audience can understand the
world and there's enough there's enough stories, like specific stories
(18:40):
to really like put yourself in there and like imagine
yourself in these moments without having to literally dig up
bodies or point a finger at someone and say that
guy killed this guy or whatever. And we did that
specifically to protect us because we didn't want to be,
you know, a snitch or a rat or whatever. Like
you have to be really careful with that stuff. Even today,
(19:01):
the way I describe the show is more like a
family show, a family drama with a father and a son,
kind of unraveling the relationship and the history of their
family wrapped in a mafia package.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
And it sounds like.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
You've listened to a few episodes, so maybe you can
agree with that if you've heard it.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Yeah, family from the standpoint of it's about a family,
maybe not listening to.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
It with the kids, definitely don't listen to it.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
What you did not that kind of a family show.
But no, yeah, I mean, honestly it is. It's fascinating because,
like I said, we've all kind of heard about this
from the outside, and you've heard about the stories of
somebody who had a double life, so it's kind of
like a double whammy of everybody's sort of major morbid curiosities.
(19:47):
What is the mob like and what would it be
like if we had a family member that we found
out was having a totally separate life. And I think
your mom when I hear her, I probably relate most
to your mom because as the mom of the family,
I think about, Yeah, I can see how she would
choose to not want to dig any deeper or question
(20:08):
why you were seeing things. But you and your brother
saw some things that I would say, like in my life,
it would have been really weird for me to see
my dad have a road rage incident and knock somebody,
like punch someone in the face on the side of.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
The road multiple times.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
By the way, you guys didn't it didn't like it
was like you must have known something about keeping your
mouth shut because he wasn't violent at home, but you
didn't say anything when he got back in the car.
You know.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
It's one of those things like you look back at
it and you go, how did you not? But when
you're twelve years old or ten years old and you
see your dad beat the shit out of somebody on
the side of the road and then get back in
the car and he's back to dad again, it shocks you.
You don't you have no idea how to deal with that. Yeah,
I mean it's weird. It's weird to look back at
it because it feels like a dream. And those memories
(20:59):
kind of faded away until I started talking to my dad,
until he started opening up to me, and then all
these things, these waves of things came back to me
like oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
Now it makes sense.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
But it literally felt like a dream, and so you
kind of put it away like a dream.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
You know, yeah, I guess if you don't have the
context of why it's happening, then your child mind would
be like, wow, that's weird. Obviously he's really mad. I'm
not going to say anything. Don't want him to get
mad at me. I mean, I imagine my own like
situation with my kids if I freaked out. I think
they they wouldn't think it was something deeper because you're
a kid. But when you're listening to it at the time,
(21:34):
you're like, oh my gosh, how do you not kind
of start to put the stuff together. But your mom
really seems like she's in the dark. And then she
she's even in the dark about the fact that he's
an addict until was it his brother that came to
her and was like, he's an addict.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Right, Yeah, Again, she had this wilful ignorance, you know,
and she she's still you know, I love my mother,
but like she still kind of has this like fantasy
like that she relies on in her head to kind
of keep her with from going absolutely insane, and so like,
you know, she doesn't even have a TV. She just
watches home videos from like the good old days. Like
(22:08):
that's literally what she does, like she's like reinforcing the
memories that were good in her life, and like that's
the family that she lives in in her head every day,
not the family that it turned into, you know, and
that's hard. I mean, I don't even try to tell
her not to do that anymore. I just say, you know,
I just want my mom to be happy. And if
that's what makes you happy. Looking at you know, home
videos of home videos of us when we're five and
(22:29):
six years old makes you happy, then good for you.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
You know so.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
But you know, I think that goes back to her
being completely destroyed by the two men in her life
dying within a year of each other when she was ten, eleven,
twelve years old.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
I can't remember exactly how old she was.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Well, And I'm sure she saw him as a hero too,
because here you have this life that you've always wanted.
You can go out and say, my husband's a hero.
He's legitimately a hero. He goes out and saves lives
every day. He saved your life when you were young.
She looked at him as like this bigger than life figure,
and he seems like he was a bigger You talk
about him being very charismatic, and I imagine that helped
(23:08):
him out quite a bit in his in his side business,
in both businesses, you know, being me, he was attractive guy.
I'm sure that people just kind of like they were
probably drawn to him. And then she finds out that
he's an addict, and that starts, and you say, through
your high school years he really changed. Still, at what
point does your mom find out that he was working
(23:31):
in the mob because she says that she's taking him,
I think, to rehab when he says I've killed peep
in and holds his hand up to her head like
a gun. Does she know at that point he really
has no.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
She just thinks he's fucked up on heroin and saying
stuff and just basically being like as mean and evil
as possible.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
So imagine what that's like. That's the last time she
saw him, right, Yeah, So there's no closure there.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
No, No, It's taken a very very long long time
and a lot of kind of hard tough love on
my part to kind of like wake her up and
try to get her to move on and try to
rebuild her life because she, I mean, she just went
through a serious depression after he finally like left the
house and went into rehab because now everybody's gone. Now
it's like real, you know, Like it's weird because it's
(24:20):
a lot of psychology here and a lot of layers
to it. But it's like, as long as he was around,
you know, maybe he would he would go back to
the old Ken, Like there's a chance maybe he would
be you know. So it's like she kept holding on
to this dream, like again, she watches home videos from
twenty five thirty years ago of the good old days,
like that's what she wants in her That's what she
wants a reality to be. So she keeps holding onto that.
(24:42):
And so when he finally came to California and I
put him into rehab, and he starts telling me all
these things, and then I have to have this conversation
with my mom.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
Be like do you did you know this?
Speaker 2 (24:51):
And then that's when I start my really my investigation
was once I find out from Ken, when I'm twenty
eight years old and twenty thirteen, then I have to
go and ask my mom if she knew about any
of this, and when she tells me she doesn't, then
now I got to go ask his brother. And then
I then the whole thing unravels, and that's kind of
how this whole thing came together.
Speaker 3 (25:09):
This wasn't a podcast.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
It was an investigation of a son trying to figure
out who the hell's family really is.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
And then so does anybody in the family, now, did
anybody know?
Speaker 2 (25:19):
So his brother, he has a twin brother, a fraternal
twin brother. His brother knew that he was working with
mob people, like at a club, not that club, but like,
you know, bartending at like a bar that they owned,
that kind of stuff, hanging out with you know, goof
falls that he knew or were connected, et cetera. But
(25:40):
he they had a very tumultuous relationship to growing up
with their own family, and there was a lot of
separation there. So his brother's name is Rich, So, you know,
he says in his interview, is like I didn't want
to know, I didn't care to know. I didn't talk
to Ken at that time. I didn't want to talk
to Ken at that time. So whatever you want to
do with his life, he could do. So there was
a lot of like operation and so people didn't dig.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
You know.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
The only person that had a real opportunity.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
To dig was my mom.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
She didn't, So it's like Ken had this kind of
like you know, open lane to do all the stuff
because no one was pressuring him and no one was
asking questions. And the other interesting thing too, is being
a firefighter paramedic, your schedule, your work schedule is like
twenty four hours on and forty eight hours off or
somewhere in between, so there's a lot of time that
(26:27):
he can go. I got another extra shift, so he's
got a full twenty four hours to go do whatever
the hell he wants without any questions. So it's not
like you worked in nine to five and like, oh
where you go and you're staying late at the office,
Like you know, he's gone for days without any questions.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
So it's just wild.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Man.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
It's like once you add up all the pieces, it's
like the perfect it's like this crazy perfect situation.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
You know that that is very unique and interesting and
sadly it's my family.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
Are you mad?
Speaker 2 (26:59):
I'm mad that.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
I'm mad that.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
My brother had to my younger brother had to go
through high school with a monster of a father. He
was at home during the worst of it. I'm mad
that that my own son doesn't have a functioning set
of grandparents. I'm mad that there isn't people in our lives,
(27:23):
adults that we can look up to that are family members. Really,
my wife and I both she's got kind of, you know,
not a similar situation.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
No one really has a similar situation.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Her family's a little messed up too, you know. She
was like abandoned by her biological father as an infant,
and she's had a couple step dads, you know, so
there's like there's like no like really like we are
the patriarch and matriarch of this new generation. Like we
have to be the rock that the rest of that
my son and his kids if he has them, and
(27:56):
you know, and going down the line, like we have
to be the foundation that starts this family. And there's
no one before us that we can rely on or
point to that and that that pisses me off, But
you know, it's something that I'm done being mad about it.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
And my son's ten years old.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
I've my wife and I have taken on that role
and we're proud that we can craft I guess, like
a new family legacy out of the ashes of an
old one.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Do you ever feel like you're looking over your shoulder
from your dad's past.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
No, you know not, I don't.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Actually there were times before where there where things were happening,
like when I was putting him through rehab and he
was living closer to me in Los Angeles, you know,
he was using our address for mail, and so like
we'd get weird stuff and every now and then they'd
be like we'd see like a car, and it was
maybe it was a lot of paranoia because we just
(28:51):
found out all this shit. I'm not saying it was
actually real and we were in any real danger, but
it was a weird period of time where we didn't
know what to think. We didn't know if you was
still connected, We didn't know if any of this stuff
was real at all.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
It was it was a very bizarre time.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
And I think all this stuff has kind of sorted
itself out, and now we're at the point where, you know,
I'll tell you a one story and I think kind
of encapsulates it is that when the trailer for the
show came out a couple of weeks ago, it's the
first time it's been announced to the world, right, And
within a day, I get a a instant message, you know,
(29:26):
on Instagram DM on Instagram from this guy, and it's
a name that I know. It's a last name that
is a historically very significant last name within the Chicago mafia.
And so I'm looking at this last name and I'm going,
oh my god. And so I DM him back and
I go, you know, I say his last name like
as in this guy, like as in the alias, and
(29:48):
he's like, yeah, that's my grandpa. So I'm like day one,
I'm like, oh my god, I'm on the radar. That
That's when I started freak out a little bit. Then
a day later, I'm trying to like smooth it over with.
I'm like writing stuff down. I'm like, hey, don't worry,
I'm not snitching.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
I'm not this. I'm not that.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Like, it's a really great show. You should give it
a listen and check it out. It's like nothing like
silence for twenty four hours. So the next day I
open up Instagram and I see a message from him,
and it's like, this looks insane.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
This looks so cool.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
I actually have my own book and I'm trying to
get a screenplay going, and we should talk about maybe
doing like a podcast. So it's like, Oh, these guys
just want to tell their story, Like, there's no longer
that like take the guy out for talking. It's like, no,
they all have their story. The mob is not what
it used to be. It's still around, but it's not
what it used to be. A lot of these guys
have legitimate businesses and a lot of their you know,
(30:38):
their children and their grandchildren live very very normal lives
that are not connected to the mob, and people just
want to tell their story. I think I think we're
kind of in the clear.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
It's interesting. I mean, I think that's the number one
thing when people start listening to this, like how can
you talk about this? How can he talk about it
without getting in trouble legally?
Speaker 2 (31:00):
That would be I think more realistic than some kind
of mob retaliation. Is some old fed listens to it
or whatever and goes, oh, man, that sounds like this.
That's a possibility, absolutely, And that's something that we did
talk about. I talked to a criminal defense attorney and
he's like, do not release this. So unless your dad
(31:21):
is dead or in jail for the rest of his life,
do not release this. And I played that clip for
my dead and he said, look, you know I did
what I did. I've made peace with it and for him,
he telling his story to me and kind of getting
rid of all these secrets and opening up and like
(31:41):
lifting that burden off of him that he's held on
for so long is more important than anything any kind
of redemption that comes his way. You know, he's not
living a great life.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
Let's just put that right now. He's not living a
happy life.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
He's a mess still, and you know, I think I
think it would be a release actually if something happened.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Stick around for more coming up with Kyle Tequila, But
first let me tell you about my partners at IFCJ.
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(32:26):
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(33:14):
eight eight four eight eight four three two five. Now
stay tuned. We've got more after this. There's so much
I want to dig into about his life, but I
know that it's all there and I want people to
listen to it. So it is the Crook County Podcast.
You really should listen to it. But I want to
ask you just I want to end on this. You
(33:37):
said you grew up with this hero like you loved him.
He was bigger than life. Your mom thought he was great.
Then there was the the injury, which to me is
interesting in and of itself that this guy who was
obviously living this wild lifestyle outside of your family home,
what took him down was an injury and the opioid
(33:57):
crisis really, it's like crazy to me, what would be
happening if he had never had that injury? Would you
would you know, what would have happened to your family?
Speaker 3 (34:05):
You know?
Speaker 1 (34:06):
And that I mean it's kind of twofold. You've got
the mob, but you also have like, Okay, really this
is an example of these families that have been torn
apart by this opioid crisis as well because your dad
turned into a different person. So your dad was this great,
amazing guy that you held in high esteem in your
high school years, then your brother's high school years, he
(34:26):
turns into what you've described as a monster. Has he
Have you seen that charismatic guy return as a sober
person or he's is he totally changed now?
Speaker 2 (34:37):
That that guy, sadly, I think is dead. He's he's old,
he's exhausted, he's not healthy, he's on a bunch of
medications for a bunch of different things, and he's you know,
kind of barely hanging on. He goes in and out
of like mental hallucinations.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
Even it's bad, it's not.
Speaker 2 (34:59):
It's really ugly, and you know, I feel I feel sad,
I feel really sad for him. But yeah, sadly, that
guy's dad, the old Ken is dead and if he
had never had that injury, I think he would have
kept a secret for the rest of his life.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Wow. Wow, that's wild. So tell people where they can listen.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
It's everywhere you get podcasts, Apple, Spotify, Amazon. It's currently
the number two series out of all all series right
now on Apple Podcasts and number number two true crime
on Spotify. It's doing really well and I'm thrilled and humbled,
and the responses that I'm getting from people when they
text me or dm me just off the charts.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
And I think you'll love it.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Give it a listen you will, I mean, and I
do think it's unique in the fact that it is
your journey and you take us along on your journey
to learn more and just kind of pick the brains
of your mom and your family members and your brother,
and that I have to say. I mean, I appreciate
it because I think your journey, although it is radical,
(36:10):
like you said, your wife's life, had similar similarities in trauma.
I think anybody would look at this and go, man,
that's crazy. But I like the way he did it.
I like the way he talked about it because it's
hard to confront family.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
It is, but you know what, once you do, once
you get the strength to do it, it feels really
good and it clears a lot of it exercises.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
A lot of demons.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
So yeah, I think one of the lessons just to
end this thing is one of the takeaways of the
show is that secrets do kill, and having an open
conversations about the hard truths you know is the only
way that you know that you can have a very
strong family and keep a strong family. If you can't
(36:52):
talk about hard things, then it's all going to fall
apart at some point.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
Powerful Kyle Tequila, thank you so much for coming out today.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
Thank you for having me Tutor.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
Absolutely everybody check out Crook County. It is really very fascinating,
and I thank you for joining this podcast. For this
podcast and others, always go to Tutor dixonpodcast dot com,
or you can head over to the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts and join us next time.
Have a blessed day.
Welcome to the Tutor Dixon Podcast. The other day, I
have to say I was reading this article and I thought,
this is crazy. The story about this family. The dad
was a firefighter and then come to find out after
he was injured on the job and he ends up
with a drug addiction through the pain meds, that he
(00:22):
actually had a secret life as like this main mafia
hick guy in Chicago. So he's known as like Kenny
the Kid in Chicago. But his kids don't know anything,
his wife doesn't know anything. So I read this and
it's from the perspective of his son. His son has
a podcast called Crook County because it was done and
(00:42):
I'm assuming Cook County, Illinois, and so I'm like, well,
I got to reach out to this guy. His name
is Kyle Tequila and he's here on the show today.
Thank you so much for being.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Here, Thank you for having me appreciate Your.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Story is wild. And I think, you know, I'm one
of those people that's always kind of had a fascination
with did this really ever happen?
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Was?
Speaker 1 (01:03):
How serious is the mafia? You know? And having grown
up I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, so
I was there when this was happening, you know, and
I think we think al Capone happened a million years ago,
but this was like the al Capone group. Your dad
was a part of this.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yeah, the Mob was was pretty much, you know, at
a peak power through the sixties, seventies, and eighties and
started to fall apart in the nineties, and then Operation
Family Secrets was a huge federal investigation and sting that
took down pretty much all the Five families in the
early two thousands, which you know is twenty years ago
(01:42):
but still fairly recent, you know. And so yeah, my
dad was deep in the Mob during the time that
they were still very much powerhouse in Chicago.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
So his story is like he gets recruited as a kid,
he gets kicked out of the house at sixteen, at seventeen,
he gets recruited to be kind of a hit man, right, Well.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Didn't start out as a hit man. I mean, basically
he was a homeless kid. His mom kicked him out
of the house at gunpoint because he was protesting their
divorce that they were getting. And I mean that just
kind of tells you right away with kind of family
environment that he was used to.
Speaker 3 (02:18):
So when he hit the streets.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
He was living out of his car, and you know,
he's seventeen years old. He doesn't really know what the
hell to do with his life, and he doesn't have
any assets. It's not like she gave him any money.
So he was desperate and he decided to rob this
local drug dealer that he saw kind of running around
and figured that he can get some cash and some
drugs and start a little drug dealing business. Unfortunately, this
(02:42):
drug dealer was related. He was the nephew of one
of the top coppos in that part of Chicago. You know,
there's multiple crews all over the place. His crew was
the South Side crew.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
He was the nephew.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
And when he robbed him, of course, the guy goes
to his uncle and tells him what happened, and then
they go and find him. And so Kenny's sitting at
this restaurant, you know, with all this stuff, about two
days later and feeling pretty good about himself, and then
he sees these two dagoes walk up to him and
he knows it's all over at that point, and they
basically question him and he goes, did you rob my nephew?
(03:17):
And he goes, yeah, and he admitted to it and
told him the story, and the guy thought he had
spunk and basically, instead of punishing him, invited him into
the mob.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
I mean, it's an interesting situation because it's like, Okay,
what could have happened. He probably could have ended up
dying himself or he goes into this life. And I
feel like that's somewhat of a recurring theme as I
listened to him speak on your podcast. And that's the
interesting part about your podcast is it's actually him speaking
about this life. The recurring conversation that he seems to
(03:48):
go back to is like I didn't know what else
to do. I kind of felt like I had to
be in this. And yet the mom and me, the
mom of today, here's your mom talking and your mom
is so frustrated, like how did this happen under my nose?
And how did he How did he choose this over
our family? And it seems like there must have been
(04:08):
a point when the family was doing well enough without
this that he could have walked away. But can you
walk away from the mob?
Speaker 3 (04:17):
That's exactly it.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
You can't once you're in, and once you've done the
things that he did, you know, kind of going back
to what we were saying, he didn't start off as
a hit man. He kind of started off as almost
like an apprentice, and you would follow people around and
you would learn what they do. He learned, you know,
what this person does and what this person does, and
you know, his first, I guess real career in the
mob was was running their whorehouses, or one of the whorehouses,
(04:40):
and it ended up turning into multiple whorehouses. He was
like one of their top managers who ran these these clubs,
and these clubs are where a lot of extortion happened
and where they got a lot of their leverage over
elected officials and the sheriff, et cetera. You know, because
they all got their kinks and they all go to
this place which is safe and very well regulated. They
did they tested all the girls. Like my dad explains
(05:00):
it to me, it's very professional, very business like. But
of course, you know, it's still mob related and there's
a lot of crazy stuff that happens. And you know,
there was a robbery at one of the clubs and
it was actually an inside job. It was discovered and
they tasked my dad with taking him out, you know,
and that was his first hit, and so they realized
(05:23):
that he could do that and he had that in him,
and then that's when that started. But that didn't start
till his early twenties. So he was probably in the
mob for about five years before he did his first
you know, hit, but he became a very trusted man
and they could rely on him. But you're right, you know,
he when he was twenty eight, he wanted out really bad.
(05:44):
And you know, he was about ten years eleven years
into the mob at this point, and he had been
studying to become a firefighter paramedic after being inspired by
watching American Airlines Flight one seventy nine crash right out
of OHAA Airport, which killed about two hundred and eighty people,
the largest domestic airline crash in history and I think
it still might be. And he said he was close
(06:07):
enough to that crash this was, yeah, nineteen seventy nine,
that he could feel the heat of all that jet
fuel burning. You know that O'Hare is very near where
one of the clubs was that he was working that night,
and that inspired him seeing all these people go in
and try to save the day. And so he'd been
studying on his own to become a firefighteror paramedic, and
(06:29):
when he was twenty eight, he passed all his tests
and he basically asked the same guy that recruited him
into the Mob, that same Coppo, if he could go
and try to start a civilian life. He had been
dating my mother for years and they had a serious relationship.
They wanted kids, and they basically made a deal that
he can go and do that, he can have his
(06:50):
little life, but when they call on him, he needs
to answer. And so that was their agreement. So basically
they had an inside man in the Chicago Fire Department
doing their dirty work as a first responder whenever they
needed him to. So it kind of worked both ways.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Wow, so you have to think about the psychology behind
that for your dad too, to be to see that
tragedy happen while he's working at a club owned by
the Mob and then saying, man, maybe that's what I
want to do. There's got to be some part of
you that feels so much guilt that you have to
replace that with heroism. So here you have a guy
(07:24):
who can save lives and a guy who can take lives.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Yeah, a hero by day and hit man by night.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
That's pretty wild. And you guys don't know any of.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
It, No, not until twenty thirteen. And I was twenty
eight at that time, which is kind of funny because
he was twenty eight when you decided to go, you know,
become a civilian. But yeah, we just thought he there's
so much here. Obviously, this is a very there's a
lot of threads to this story, so it's hard to
kind of crack it all in a couple of minutes.
But yeah, so he had, like you said in the beginning,
(07:57):
he had this really bad injury as a firefighter. And
at that point, I was like, you know, thirteen or
fourteen years old, so we had been living a very
normal suburban lifestyle in West Chicago.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
And he really was your hero.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
Well, yeah, I loved it.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
I mean he was a wonderful dad. I mean he
was so big and charismatic and you know, the center
of attention always. He just had this electric personality and
I mean he was a special guy. And then you know,
you could really start to see the change after that
accident happened. He's on a lot of opiates at that
time because the pain was so bad, and of course,
you know, like a lot of people.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
They have the same story.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
The opiate pills are not enough for the doctor stuff's
prescribing them, and they had to take to the streets
to continue their addiction to it.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
And that's what happened.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
He started doing Heroin, Street Heroin, and then it just
completely overtook his life and everything changed. Basically by the
time I got into high school, by the time I
got out of high school, like it was one man,
and then by the end of it, he was a monster.
And for me, that was really hard because I didn't
understand why. I mean, he had everything. He had a
(09:00):
great family. We had a great family, he had a
great life.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
We were happy.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
I remember being a kid and being like, wow, like
I'm so lucky my parents aren't divorced. I had so
many friends who had divorced parents, so it was it
was hard. It was a shock to me, and so
I left home. I went to college and I basically
just focused.
Speaker 3 (09:15):
On my life.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
I couldn't deal with the pain of home selfishly. But
I was young and to mature and I didn't want
to deal with it and started my career in film
and TV, which is something I always wanted to do.
Met my wife when I moved to Atlanta right out
of school and got married really young, got married at
twenty three. And I think that's one of the reasons
why I got married really young, because I wanted to
(09:38):
build my own family and kind of like erase the
pain of my you know, my first family. And so
I lived my life and I was a strange for
my father for five six years. You know, we'd every
now and then talk on the phone, but it just
got less and less and less until there was none
for several years.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
And then he called me in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
I'd been living in LA, had already deep into my career,
it's already married, and we were talking about having kids
of our own, and he calls me and he says,
this is it. I need help or today is my
last day. Come to find out later that he had
a gun in his hand and he was going to
kill himself. So flew him out to LA the next day.
I had no idea what to do, so I just
(10:19):
kind of figured out how to deal with the rehab
thing and booked him at a spot and dropped him off,
picked him up at the airport, dropped him off, and
didn't talk to him for a couple of weeks until
he you know, do you do this detox thing? And
so once he got through detox, we started talking again,
and that's when you can see the change in him.
You can see that he was starting to wake up.
(10:40):
And that's when he started laying these little hints on me, like,
you don't know anything about me.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
There's so much so you're an adult before you even know.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
I just thought he was a fucked up heroin addict. Gosh,
and that's bad enough, by the way.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
And your mom doesn't know either, no.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
No, And you know, that's one of the things I
had to dig into because I'm like, how do you
not know?
Speaker 3 (11:03):
Yeah, they've known.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
Each other since he was nineteen and she was twenty.
So he was working the clubs and you know, he
was on the scene and hanging out with all these
you know, big mafia guys.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
But she didn't know.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
She admits that she was very immature and ignorant of
all of it. She and you know, there's a term
ignorance is bliss, and I think that really might totally
applies to my mom, and willful ignorance too, you know.
She I think if there was something nefarious going on.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
She would willfully ignore it.
Speaker 1 (11:31):
What was her family life like before that.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
Well, there's a lot of she has a lot of
daddy issues, let's put it that way.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
I mean, and not to like try to dig into that,
but it seems like.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Man, that's what we're doing.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Really wanted that perfect life, you know. So it was
almost like she was looking past everything else because she's like,
I've got the two kids, the white picket fence. I'm good.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
That's exactly right.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
And the reason is is because her dad died when
she was really young of cancer, and then a year
later her brother died of leukemia at her older brother.
So the two men in her life and she was
probably fourteen fifteen when these two deaths happened and completely
sug her. Yeah, she one hundred percent was looking for
the perfect life and the perfect man and to replace
(12:15):
those two men that she lost way too young.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
And then you've got this guy, and he I mean,
when you do have these powerful friends, it seems like, wow,
he's cool, he's got all this going on, and then
he becomes a firefighter. But that to me, you said, well,
then they had somebody on the inside. But you talk
in the podcast about how they owned cops. And that
is so awful in my mind because we I had, honestly,
(12:42):
before I got into this, before I got into the
political world, I had this Pollyanna view of people go
into service because they want to save people. They're all
good hearted, Like, I just don't know what I was thinking.
I just didn't realize the amount of corruption. But as
I'm listening to this, I think about the corruption in
Washington and the amount of I mean, even when you
talk about the whorehouses, I remember a few years ago
(13:05):
there was they were starting to expose that there was
I guess essentially like a whorehouse in a modern day
whorehouse in these outskirts of DC, and a lot of
the elected officials were using this and they're all freaking
out like they're going to expose us. But I mean, who,
how do people get trapped in this? But how deep
(13:26):
does this go? What does owning cops mean?
Speaker 3 (13:30):
There's a lot there.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
Well, you know, there's a line that my dad says
in the show where he goes guys are horny bastards,
and he's one hundred percent right. I mean, they'll you know,
and look, I mean, let's just be honest, A lot
of the people that go into politics, they weren't the
coolest kids in school, and I think they are trying
to find that that power, you know, to try to it.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Has been called the Hollywood for ugly people, so.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
I mean it kind of it kind of makes perfect sense, honestly.
So yeah, and why do you think there's so many
people in power that have to fuck their interns? You know, like,
just go find a real woman. You know. I'm not
to say that she's not a real woman, but like,
stop trying to use your power position to you know,
get laid. I think it's disgusting. But but yeah, I
mean that's why they go and find whorehouses because you know,
(14:20):
it's supposedly secret and then get their kinks out and
they could feel like big powerful men or whatever. And
they pay for it, and that's of course an asset
that's going to be used against them by by people
on the other side or other even other governments or whatever,
and of course by the mob, you know, so.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
They can get leverage.
Speaker 2 (14:36):
So they took advantage of that and they did it
very very successfully. But yeah, owning cops, it wasn't just
through that, but it was through payola, through I mean, like,
it's not like police officers back in the eighties were
making a lot of money, so you know, they would
pay them of course. And also there are a lot
of bad people back in the seventies and eighties. And
the Jeff Cohen, who is the Chicago Tribune reporter who
(15:00):
I kind of recruited to to do commentary on the show,
He's got a great take on this. He's like a
lot of the police officers up until the late eighties
and early nineties were legacy police officers, Like their grandfather
was a police officer, the father was a police officer.
Now they're a police officer. And corruption goes way back
to the root of law enforcement, like the beginnings of
(15:21):
organized law enforcement in every major city, it's like all payola.
It's all you know, pay to look the other way.
It's tons of corruption. And they knew that and that
was half of their business was just getting payola. They
were basically like their own little mob. And so a
lot of that like is trickled down tradition, and so
it's easy for them to get caught up in the
mafia because they see, you know, people, they see these
(15:43):
guys giving them money to basically do things that they
would do anyway of so of course they're going to
do it. And it wasn't until there was all this
like internal affairs and you know, investigation stuff and hiring
outside of the family legacy, so to speak, that started
to kind of come to an end. And you know,
it's obviously not the same now. Of course, there's still
(16:03):
people that are corrupt. Back then it was, it was
very different.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
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stay tuned, we've got more coming up. So what was
the real business of the mob in Chicago? I mean,
I hear, I see that the whorehouses could be big business,
But there had to have been more than that. There
had to be something else that was gluing this all together.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Sure, well, I mean a lot of it is. What's
the stereotype of They always own waste management companies and
construction companies. Well, how do you think they get those
giant contracts? You know a lot of those are government contracts,
like federal buildings or like huge commercial buildings. So they're
making legitimate money through nefarious means by leverage. You know,
It's not like there's a bidding system, and then they
(17:58):
got the fair bid and they're the.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
And waste management comes in handy when you're murdering people.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
Yep, you said it.
Speaker 1 (18:07):
Gosh. I mean, honestly, I feel like it's something we
all watched at movies growing up and we were like, oh,
that's crazy, but you your dad lived this.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
There's a lot of stuff that I can't even put
in the show just for safety reasons. And that was
one of the things that we talked about before releasing
the show was how deep can we go? So I
feel like we did a pretty good job of really
telling the story and so the audience can understand the
world and there's enough there's enough stories, like specific stories
(18:40):
to really like put yourself in there and like imagine
yourself in these moments without having to literally dig up
bodies or point a finger at someone and say that
guy killed this guy or whatever. And we did that
specifically to protect us because we didn't want to be,
you know, a snitch or a rat or whatever. Like
you have to be really careful with that stuff. Even today,
(19:01):
the way I describe the show is more like a
family show, a family drama with a father and a son,
kind of unraveling the relationship and the history of their
family wrapped in a mafia package.
Speaker 3 (19:12):
And it sounds like.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
You've listened to a few episodes, so maybe you can
agree with that if you've heard it.
Speaker 1 (19:18):
Yeah, family from the standpoint of it's about a family,
maybe not listening to.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
It with the kids, definitely don't listen to it.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
What you did not that kind of a family show.
But no, yeah, I mean, honestly it is. It's fascinating because,
like I said, we've all kind of heard about this
from the outside, and you've heard about the stories of
somebody who had a double life, so it's kind of
like a double whammy of everybody's sort of major morbid curiosities.
(19:47):
What is the mob like and what would it be
like if we had a family member that we found
out was having a totally separate life. And I think
your mom when I hear her, I probably relate most
to your mom because as the mom of the family,
I think about, Yeah, I can see how she would
choose to not want to dig any deeper or question
(20:08):
why you were seeing things. But you and your brother
saw some things that I would say, like in my life,
it would have been really weird for me to see
my dad have a road rage incident and knock somebody,
like punch someone in the face on the side of.
Speaker 2 (20:21):
The road multiple times.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
By the way, you guys didn't it didn't like it
was like you must have known something about keeping your
mouth shut because he wasn't violent at home, but you
didn't say anything when he got back in the car.
You know.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
It's one of those things like you look back at
it and you go, how did you not? But when
you're twelve years old or ten years old and you
see your dad beat the shit out of somebody on
the side of the road and then get back in
the car and he's back to dad again, it shocks you.
You don't you have no idea how to deal with that. Yeah,
I mean it's weird. It's weird to look back at
it because it feels like a dream. And those memories
(20:59):
kind of faded away until I started talking to my dad,
until he started opening up to me, and then all
these things, these waves of things came back to me
like oh my god, oh my god, oh my god.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
Now it makes sense.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
But it literally felt like a dream, and so you
kind of put it away like a dream.
Speaker 1 (21:13):
You know, yeah, I guess if you don't have the
context of why it's happening, then your child mind would
be like, wow, that's weird. Obviously he's really mad. I'm
not going to say anything. Don't want him to get
mad at me. I mean, I imagine my own like
situation with my kids if I freaked out. I think
they they wouldn't think it was something deeper because you're
a kid. But when you're listening to it at the time,
(21:34):
you're like, oh my gosh, how do you not kind
of start to put the stuff together. But your mom
really seems like she's in the dark. And then she
she's even in the dark about the fact that he's
an addict until was it his brother that came to
her and was like, he's an addict.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
Right, Yeah, Again, she had this wilful ignorance, you know,
and she she's still you know, I love my mother,
but like she still kind of has this like fantasy
like that she relies on in her head to kind
of keep her with from going absolutely insane, and so like,
you know, she doesn't even have a TV. She just
watches home videos from like the good old days. Like
(22:08):
that's literally what she does, like she's like reinforcing the
memories that were good in her life, and like that's
the family that she lives in in her head every day,
not the family that it turned into, you know, and
that's hard. I mean, I don't even try to tell
her not to do that anymore. I just say, you know,
I just want my mom to be happy. And if
that's what makes you happy. Looking at you know, home
videos of home videos of us when we're five and
(22:29):
six years old makes you happy, then good for you.
Speaker 3 (22:31):
You know so.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
But you know, I think that goes back to her
being completely destroyed by the two men in her life
dying within a year of each other when she was ten, eleven,
twelve years old.
Speaker 3 (22:44):
I can't remember exactly how old she was.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Well, And I'm sure she saw him as a hero too,
because here you have this life that you've always wanted.
You can go out and say, my husband's a hero.
He's legitimately a hero. He goes out and saves lives
every day. He saved your life when you were young.
She looked at him as like this bigger than life figure,
and he seems like he was a bigger You talk
about him being very charismatic, and I imagine that helped
(23:08):
him out quite a bit in his in his side business,
in both businesses, you know, being me, he was attractive guy.
I'm sure that people just kind of like they were
probably drawn to him. And then she finds out that
he's an addict, and that starts, and you say, through
your high school years he really changed. Still, at what
point does your mom find out that he was working
(23:31):
in the mob because she says that she's taking him,
I think, to rehab when he says I've killed peep
in and holds his hand up to her head like
a gun. Does she know at that point he really
has no.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
She just thinks he's fucked up on heroin and saying
stuff and just basically being like as mean and evil
as possible.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
So imagine what that's like. That's the last time she
saw him, right, Yeah, So there's no closure there.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
No, No, It's taken a very very long long time
and a lot of kind of hard tough love on
my part to kind of like wake her up and
try to get her to move on and try to
rebuild her life because she, I mean, she just went
through a serious depression after he finally like left the
house and went into rehab because now everybody's gone. Now
it's like real, you know, Like it's weird because it's
(24:20):
a lot of psychology here and a lot of layers
to it. But it's like, as long as he was around,
you know, maybe he would he would go back to
the old Ken, Like there's a chance maybe he would
be you know. So it's like she kept holding on
to this dream, like again, she watches home videos from
twenty five thirty years ago of the good old days,
like that's what she wants in her That's what she
wants a reality to be. So she keeps holding onto that.
(24:42):
And so when he finally came to California and I
put him into rehab, and he starts telling me all
these things, and then I have to have this conversation
with my mom.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
Be like do you did you know this?
Speaker 2 (24:51):
And then that's when I start my really my investigation
was once I find out from Ken, when I'm twenty
eight years old and twenty thirteen, then I have to
go and ask my mom if she knew about any
of this, and when she tells me she doesn't, then
now I got to go ask his brother. And then
I then the whole thing unravels, and that's kind of
how this whole thing came together.
Speaker 3 (25:09):
This wasn't a podcast.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
It was an investigation of a son trying to figure
out who the hell's family really is.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
And then so does anybody in the family, now, did
anybody know?
Speaker 2 (25:19):
So his brother, he has a twin brother, a fraternal
twin brother. His brother knew that he was working with
mob people, like at a club, not that club, but like,
you know, bartending at like a bar that they owned,
that kind of stuff, hanging out with you know, goof
falls that he knew or were connected, et cetera. But
(25:40):
he they had a very tumultuous relationship to growing up
with their own family, and there was a lot of
separation there. So his brother's name is Rich, So, you know,
he says in his interview, is like I didn't want
to know, I didn't care to know. I didn't talk
to Ken at that time. I didn't want to talk
to Ken at that time. So whatever you want to
do with his life, he could do. So there was
a lot of like operation and so people didn't dig.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
You know.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
The only person that had a real opportunity.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
To dig was my mom.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
She didn't, So it's like Ken had this kind of
like you know, open lane to do all the stuff
because no one was pressuring him and no one was
asking questions. And the other interesting thing too, is being
a firefighter paramedic, your schedule, your work schedule is like
twenty four hours on and forty eight hours off or
somewhere in between, so there's a lot of time that
(26:27):
he can go. I got another extra shift, so he's
got a full twenty four hours to go do whatever
the hell he wants without any questions. So it's not
like you worked in nine to five and like, oh
where you go and you're staying late at the office,
Like you know, he's gone for days without any questions.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
So it's just wild.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Man.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
It's like once you add up all the pieces, it's
like the perfect it's like this crazy perfect situation.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
You know that that is very unique and interesting and
sadly it's my family.
Speaker 1 (26:55):
Are you mad?
Speaker 2 (26:59):
I'm mad that.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
I'm mad that.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
My brother had to my younger brother had to go
through high school with a monster of a father. He
was at home during the worst of it. I'm mad
that that my own son doesn't have a functioning set
of grandparents. I'm mad that there isn't people in our lives,
(27:23):
adults that we can look up to that are family members. Really,
my wife and I both she's got kind of, you know,
not a similar situation.
Speaker 3 (27:31):
No one really has a similar situation.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Her family's a little messed up too, you know. She
was like abandoned by her biological father as an infant,
and she's had a couple step dads, you know, so
there's like there's like no like really like we are
the patriarch and matriarch of this new generation. Like we
have to be the rock that the rest of that
my son and his kids if he has them, and
(27:56):
you know, and going down the line, like we have
to be the foundation that starts this family. And there's
no one before us that we can rely on or
point to that and that that pisses me off, But
you know, it's something that I'm done being mad about it.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
And my son's ten years old.
Speaker 2 (28:11):
I've my wife and I have taken on that role
and we're proud that we can craft I guess, like
a new family legacy out of the ashes of an
old one.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
Do you ever feel like you're looking over your shoulder
from your dad's past.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
No, you know not, I don't.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Actually there were times before where there where things were happening,
like when I was putting him through rehab and he
was living closer to me in Los Angeles, you know,
he was using our address for mail, and so like
we'd get weird stuff and every now and then they'd
be like we'd see like a car, and it was
maybe it was a lot of paranoia because we just
(28:51):
found out all this shit. I'm not saying it was
actually real and we were in any real danger, but
it was a weird period of time where we didn't
know what to think. We didn't know if you was
still connected, We didn't know if any of this stuff
was real at all.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
It was it was a very bizarre time.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
And I think all this stuff has kind of sorted
itself out, and now we're at the point where, you know,
I'll tell you a one story and I think kind
of encapsulates it is that when the trailer for the
show came out a couple of weeks ago, it's the
first time it's been announced to the world, right, And
within a day, I get a a instant message, you know,
(29:26):
on Instagram DM on Instagram from this guy, and it's
a name that I know. It's a last name that
is a historically very significant last name within the Chicago mafia.
And so I'm looking at this last name and I'm going,
oh my god. And so I DM him back and
I go, you know, I say his last name like
as in this guy, like as in the alias, and
(29:48):
he's like, yeah, that's my grandpa. So I'm like day one,
I'm like, oh my god, I'm on the radar. That
That's when I started freak out a little bit. Then
a day later, I'm trying to like smooth it over with.
I'm like writing stuff down. I'm like, hey, don't worry,
I'm not snitching.
Speaker 3 (30:02):
I'm not this. I'm not that.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
Like, it's a really great show. You should give it
a listen and check it out. It's like nothing like
silence for twenty four hours. So the next day I
open up Instagram and I see a message from him,
and it's like, this looks insane.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
This looks so cool.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
I actually have my own book and I'm trying to
get a screenplay going, and we should talk about maybe
doing like a podcast. So it's like, Oh, these guys
just want to tell their story, Like, there's no longer
that like take the guy out for talking. It's like, no,
they all have their story. The mob is not what
it used to be. It's still around, but it's not
what it used to be. A lot of these guys
have legitimate businesses and a lot of their you know,
(30:38):
their children and their grandchildren live very very normal lives
that are not connected to the mob, and people just
want to tell their story. I think I think we're
kind of in the clear.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
It's interesting. I mean, I think that's the number one
thing when people start listening to this, like how can
you talk about this? How can he talk about it
without getting in trouble legally?
Speaker 2 (31:00):
That would be I think more realistic than some kind
of mob retaliation. Is some old fed listens to it
or whatever and goes, oh, man, that sounds like this.
That's a possibility, absolutely, And that's something that we did
talk about. I talked to a criminal defense attorney and
he's like, do not release this. So unless your dad
(31:21):
is dead or in jail for the rest of his life,
do not release this. And I played that clip for
my dead and he said, look, you know I did
what I did. I've made peace with it and for him,
he telling his story to me and kind of getting
rid of all these secrets and opening up and like
(31:41):
lifting that burden off of him that he's held on
for so long is more important than anything any kind
of redemption that comes his way. You know, he's not
living a great life.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
Let's just put that right now. He's not living a
happy life.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
He's a mess still, and you know, I think I
think it would be a release actually if something happened.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Stick around for more coming up with Kyle Tequila, But
first let me tell you about my partners at IFCJ.
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(33:14):
eight eight four eight eight four three two five. Now
stay tuned. We've got more after this. There's so much
I want to dig into about his life, but I
know that it's all there and I want people to
listen to it. So it is the Crook County Podcast.
You really should listen to it. But I want to
ask you just I want to end on this. You
(33:37):
said you grew up with this hero like you loved him.
He was bigger than life. Your mom thought he was great.
Then there was the the injury, which to me is
interesting in and of itself that this guy who was
obviously living this wild lifestyle outside of your family home,
what took him down was an injury and the opioid
(33:57):
crisis really, it's like crazy to me, what would be
happening if he had never had that injury? Would you
would you know, what would have happened to your family?
Speaker 3 (34:05):
You know?
Speaker 1 (34:06):
And that I mean it's kind of twofold. You've got
the mob, but you also have like, Okay, really this
is an example of these families that have been torn
apart by this opioid crisis as well because your dad
turned into a different person. So your dad was this great,
amazing guy that you held in high esteem in your
high school years, then your brother's high school years, he
(34:26):
turns into what you've described as a monster. Has he
Have you seen that charismatic guy return as a sober
person or he's is he totally changed now?
Speaker 2 (34:37):
That that guy, sadly, I think is dead. He's he's old,
he's exhausted, he's not healthy, he's on a bunch of
medications for a bunch of different things, and he's you know,
kind of barely hanging on. He goes in and out
of like mental hallucinations.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
Even it's bad, it's not.
Speaker 2 (34:59):
It's really ugly, and you know, I feel I feel sad,
I feel really sad for him. But yeah, sadly, that
guy's dad, the old Ken is dead and if he
had never had that injury, I think he would have
kept a secret for the rest of his life.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Wow. Wow, that's wild. So tell people where they can listen.
Speaker 2 (35:24):
It's everywhere you get podcasts, Apple, Spotify, Amazon. It's currently
the number two series out of all all series right
now on Apple Podcasts and number number two true crime
on Spotify. It's doing really well and I'm thrilled and humbled,
and the responses that I'm getting from people when they
text me or dm me just off the charts.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
And I think you'll love it.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Give it a listen you will, I mean, and I
do think it's unique in the fact that it is
your journey and you take us along on your journey
to learn more and just kind of pick the brains
of your mom and your family members and your brother,
and that I have to say. I mean, I appreciate
it because I think your journey, although it is radical,
(36:10):
like you said, your wife's life, had similar similarities in trauma.
I think anybody would look at this and go, man,
that's crazy. But I like the way he did it.
I like the way he talked about it because it's
hard to confront family.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
It is, but you know what, once you do, once
you get the strength to do it, it feels really
good and it clears a lot of it exercises.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
A lot of demons.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
So yeah, I think one of the lessons just to
end this thing is one of the takeaways of the
show is that secrets do kill, and having an open
conversations about the hard truths you know is the only
way that you know that you can have a very
strong family and keep a strong family. If you can't
(36:52):
talk about hard things, then it's all going to fall
apart at some point.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
Powerful Kyle Tequila, thank you so much for coming out today.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
Thank you for having me Tutor.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
Absolutely everybody check out Crook County. It is really very fascinating,
and I thank you for joining this podcast. For this
podcast and others, always go to Tutor dixonpodcast dot com,
or you can head over to the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts and join us next time.
Have a blessed day.
Host
Tudor Dixon
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