Life of a Mafia Enforcer for John Gotti

Informer Sal Polisi

From the Mirror Online: His accent is straight out of GoodFellas but his manner is mild and friendly. In the tone of voice I might use to ask if he’d like a cup of tea, Salvatore Polisi tells me he once sliced off a man’s testicles.

The former New York mobster known as Crazy Sal says that yes, “it was bloody”. But when I press him, he just shrugs: “I was used to it. I’d been stabbed, shot in the back, I beat people with a bat. It was part of the landscape when you were in that life.”

As we speak about the Mafia’s dark heyday in the 1960s and 70s, 68-year-old Polisi’s Noo Yoik accent makes my ­questions sound more primly English than I ever thought possible.



Back in the day, he gambled, hijacked cars and robbed banks for a living. He never killed – as far as he knows – but he dug graves, beat up anyone who crossed him, and was primed to chop up bodies.

“You got away with everything – the cops were on the take,” he says.

The day he delivered the unkindest cut of all he was issuing a traditional mob warning. Polisi was just out of prison, where a member of the Lucchese crime family had done him a favour by getting him a phone call. To pay it back, Sal was told to fly to Florida and do the dirty on a man who was sleeping with a mob boss’s girl.

“I went to the guy’s house and a young woman opened the door. I pushed her in,” he recalls. “I tied this guy with rope to a pool table and sliced underneath the back of his testicles. She was screaming. The guy was begging. I punched him in the nose and broke it. Then I left him.

“Looking back it was a terrible thing to do but it was like being in the jungle, living with animals. It was survival. If I didn’t do it I might have been killed.

“I was crazy, nuts, and I was proud of that. It was my defence. I ran people over, beat them with bats. I felt like I had authority, a licence for violence. You had to make a name for yourself or they’d take advantage of you.”READ THE REST