Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1095 - TJ English & Joey Diaz
Uploaded: 2018-03-26T22:38:27.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1095 - TJ English & Joey Diaz' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-03-26. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1095 - TJ English & Joey Diaz' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-03-26. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1095 - TJ English & Joey Diaz

Oh, okay.
Boom, and we're live with Joey Diaz and TJ English.
Joey turned me on to you a long time ago, Mr. English.
He gave me a copy of The Westies, right?
What year was that?
98, 99.
A long time ago he gave me that book.
Yeah.
It's fantastic.
Really fascinating stuff.
Yeah.
First book I published.
Was it really?
The Westies, yeah, 1990.
How did you guys find out of each other?
He wrote a book.
A friend of mine turned me on to a book named Havana Nocturne that was a small
book, a fascinating
read, and I was just blown away by it.
And I went to a party one night, and there was a literary agent there, and I go,
do you
fucking guys read Havana Nocturne?
They go, we optioned it.
And I was like, that's fucking it.
That's going to be a great book.
It broke down how Fidel took over it from three different cities, how it was
going down
in three different categories.
And then I heard that he was writing a book about West New York and Union City
Cubans,
where I grew up.
And I emailed him, and I told him who I was, that my mother had a bar, and I
grew up in
that shit.
And he hit me back, and we became friends.
He came to a show.
Yeah, Joey reached out to me, you know, unfortunately, when I was just about
finishing this book.
So I had done most of the work, and it was down on paper.
But it was a trip.
It was like he was like a character who walked out of the book.
And I wished I'd met him earlier, because I hadn't met too many characters like
him.
Union City's an amazing place.
I don't think people realize it.
It's one of those little enclaves.
It happens to be Cuban.
It's like a mafia neighborhood, but it was Cubans, not Italians.
Or it was like Hell's Kitchen, which I wrote about in the Westies, which was an
Irish neighborhood.
Very intense neighborhood.
High premium on loyalty.
Young males running loyalty games on each other all the time from the age of
six.
How so?
What do you mean?
How far you'll go?
Turn the sucker up.
How far will you go for me?
What are you willing to do for me?
In the case of Hell's Kitchen in the Westies, it was cut up bodies.
It was not only would you kill somebody for me, but will you make the body
disappear?
And they tested each other with the cutting up of the bodies.
In Union City, a lot of it was political.
Some of it was political.
How anti-Fidel are you?
How badly do you want to kill Fidel and help us reclaim our lost homeland?
That was kind of behind a lot of things.
It wasn't spoken about a lot, but it was sort of a hidden motivation.
Westies was a really fantastic book.
Like, you went deep into that whole sort of sub-scene.
You know, it's a very interesting crime-infested area.
Well, what I try to do with these books is to tell the macro story, the larger
historical,
sociopolitical story, and then get intimate and tell the interpersonal stories
between the
characters that actually live the story.
That's a challenge.
You've got to find people who are willing to talk to you and share information
with you that
they've kept quiet probably most of their lives.
And then you get at the interpersonal stuff, because these stories really are
just human
beings caught up in something that's bigger than them.
And how long, when you're writing a book like The Corporation, which is your
new book, or
Westies, or any of your books, how much time do you spend doing the research,
and how much
time do you spend actually writing the book?
It takes about three years to do these books on average, and two of those years
is research,
probably.
Wow.
Yeah, a lot of research.
So do you bring this to the book company, the publisher, and you say, hey, this
is what
I want to write a book about?
You do a proposal.
And I do very, very detailed proposals.
For The Corporation, I did a proposal that was 125 pages long.
And it's a chapter-by-chapter breakdown.
It's almost like a condensed version of the book, and you get more money from a
publisher
that way as an advance, because you're showing them the whole thing,
practically.
They can see the finished product, almost.
And also, you know, the movie interests.
There was movie interest in this one, The Corporation, based on that proposal.
Interesting.
Yeah, it was optioned based on that proposal before I even started writing the
book.
Really?
Yeah.
So what is The Corporation about?
The Corporation is the story of a Cuban-American organized crime organization
that began in
the mid-1960s and existed all the way to the end of the century.
And it was led by this mobster named Jose Miguel Battle, who was kind of a
legendary figure in
Cuban-American circles, because he was a hero from the Bay of Pigs invasion,
the attempt
to reclaim Cuba, take back Cuba, the invasion, 1961, which was a disaster for
everyone involved.
Battle wound up in prison, along with the rest of the brigade.
And when he got out and came back to the U.S., he was determined to get Castro
and take back Cuba.
So he set up this criminal thing, and it was based on one racket, primarily,
bolita, the
number, the lottery, the illegal lottery.
Before the lottery was legal, it was illegal, and it was controlled by
organized crime.
And it was a huge moneymaker, big moneymaker for the mob going back to the 1920s.
Everyone bets the number.
Little old ladies bet the number, priests, cops.
You know, you can bet a nickel, you can bet a dime, you can bet $10,000.
Hugely profitable for whoever controls and organizes it.
Well, the Cubans controlled and organized it on the eastern coast of the United
States,
from New Jersey and New York all the way down to Miami.
And the guy who controlled it was Battle.
And he became legendary based on that.
They controlled the whole number system?
Because I know there was a lot of Italians that were involved in that as well,
right?
Well, they went to the mafia.
One of the first things Battle did, Battle had been a cop, a vice cop, in Havana
in the 1950s.
Before the turnover.
Yeah, during the era when the mob, Joey was talking about Havana Nocturne.
And that's what that book was about, the era of the mob in Havana in the 50s.
Meyer Lansky, Santo Trafficante, and how they controlled that until Castro came
along and spoiled the party.
And the revolution happened and they got chased out of there.
Battle had been a vice cop in Havana during those years.
And he knew all those high-ranking mobsters.
And, in fact, he was a bag man who delivered money from the skim at the casinos
in Havana to the presidential palace.
So, Battle knew how the world went round.
And he made those connections.
And when he finally gets to the U.S. and wants to start his own thing,
first thing he does is go to Santo Trafficante and says,
can you make the proper introductions for me?
Trafficante introduces him to Fat Tony Salerno in New York City,
who controls the numbers racket for all five families.
And Battle says, look, things are changing in Cuba.
Over the next couple of decades, you're going to have tens of thousands,
if not hundreds of thousands, of Cubans coming to live in the United States.
They all bet the number.
That's a huge market.
If you let me take over this thing and organize it,
you will get your piece of everything.
And the Mafia said yes.
And so the Cubans took over.
And they controlled everything.
I mean, in New York City in the 70s and 80s,
there were probably 200 to 300 bolita spots where you could go bet the number.
That's what the Cubans called it, bolita, little ball.
And so they controlled it.
And they took care of the Mafia.
And everybody got fat and happy for a while until it turned bad
and they started killing each other.
Now, Joey, when you heard about this book,
this is something that you were very intimately involved in when you were a kid.
Very.
You know, I come on your show and I tell you,
there's a hundred stories I can tell you and there's a thousand I can't.
And when he told, when I read the thesis for this book,
I just knew.
I just fucking knew.
You know, I grew up in numbers.
When I went to Catholic school on Saturdays,
when I came home on Fridays,
on Saturdays at the age of eight,
I was sent to different locations in the city,
the Bronx, Brooklyn,
and I would make $50 going to run errands,
running numbers,
go tell this guy the first number of the day is two.
You know, so I grew up in it.
I grew up in a house where the bookie would call my mother by three o'clock
and go, what's the numbers for the day?
And my mother would give him a fucking laundry list.
You know, and it's very interesting.
In this book, he also covers the mysticism of the number.
So if I'm at your house and your daughter walks in with a hockey shirt
and her number's 13,
I'll look at you and go,
Joe, give me a number from zero to nine, five.
And I pick up the phone and I bet $5.13.
If I look out my window and the cop car is $5.06,
I put $5 on $5.06.
If I have a dream about an eagle,
when I go down to the Bolita spot,
there's books that they sell, books of dreams.
And I take that book and I look up eagle,
and if eagle's number eight,
I pay $8.13.
It's, you know, you were mentioning a couple months ago
that your grandmother took numbers.
Yeah.
Grandmother was Sicilian.
Sicilian people have the same,
every day they live,
today's the day.
Yep.
Today's the day, Joe Rogan.
Yep.
Today's the day I'm hitting the number.
I'm not getting, you know.
That's all she talked about.
That dream, that dream of, again,
we're going back to an immigrant mentality.
Yeah.
That those three numbers today,
if God wants,
if God is real,
what he says is true,
my number's going to come out today.
Yeah.
When is my ship going to come in?
Right, right, right.
You know, you work a plain Jane dream,
you're a blue-collar person,
and on the way home every day by 3.30,
you put the number in.
That's it.
That's what you do.
It's something to believe in.
That's something to believe in.
Yeah.
Numerology.
And with Cubans,
it was very mystical.
It was tied into dreams and belief.
The idea was you bet the number,
and you try to make your dreams come true.
That's literally what you're doing.
You're trying to make your dreams come true.
And the Bolita guys,
the Boliteros,
the ones who control it,
they're the dream makers.
They're the guys who are making it possible
for your dreams to come true.
So they had tremendous stature in the community.
In the community.
They were dream solvers.
So you work TJ's Jose Battle,
and you're an independent bookie.
Your job is to sit at a Brindy Lounge in West New York
from 10 to 3 drinking,
and all day long people come in and go,
Joe, give me $5.17, $3.
Give me $3.03, $1.
At 3 o'clock, 3.30, a number comes out.
If that number wins.
If I give you $5.00,
you get $3.000 from Battle.
You give me $2.500.
So you make $5.00 off the top,
and then I tip you.
The thing that Battle did was he didn't take 10 points.
He let you run your independent action
unless you called it into him.
You ever watch the movie with Mickey Rourke and the Chinese people?
You're the dragon.
Yeah, great fucking movie.
It was a great movie when he says,
you know, for years the Chinese were bringing in the heroin
and they were selling it to the Italians.
You know, a $50,000 investment could make you $500,000.
Chinese weren't seeing that.
Like, they weren't seeing that.
Why?
Because they couldn't bring it out.
They couldn't sell it.
Black people and Spanish people bitch slapped them to death.
So the same thing happened with Bolita.
Fat Tony Salerno knew that he had a big thing coming with the Cubans,
but Cubans want to put a bet in with Cubans.
Do you understand me?
Italians, they want to put a bet in with Italians.
Puerto Ricans, they want to put a bet in with a Puerto Rican.
Isn't that a big thing that was with the numbers?
It was that it was a community thing.
It's a community thing.
Because everybody would talk about the numbers.
It wouldn't be like the lottery is some sort of a government-funded thing
and it seems like it's got a lot of red tape and official
and there's no wiggle room.
The numbers seem to be closer to th