It's been said that Lucchese captain Johnny Dio was a tremendous earner, pulling in $100,000 a week and at Christmas he'd hand his wife a box stuffed with $50,000 with a note: Go buy you some nice clothes, honey.

I think the career ender for Johnny Dio came when he foolishly blinded journalist Victor Riesel, there was no way he was going to continue his Mafia career in any meaningful way after such a high-profile, front-page vicious attack like that. I felt bad for the journalist, I would've felt less bad if he would've just shot him in the head instead of blinding him.

Dio was a master corrupter and manipulator, not unlike his close associate Tony Ducks. He controlled dozens of labor unions, influenced others, was a master infiltrator of NYs garment district where he'd actually gotten his start under the tutelage of his uncle Jimmy Doyle, etc. He was extremely heavy into stock frauds and manipulations, bankruptcy frauds, etc.

But the major problem was that Johnny Did also has a very vicious streak in him. Which both served him well over the years, but later became his downfall. One more major flaw was that his greed knew no boundaries.

Those two cracks in his armor later led to him being jailed for life, and dying behind bars at age 65 (if memory serves me).