I gotta' tell you about this big jamook named David Friendland, who is a suitcase (i.e. a mob lawyer) with a very big motor mouth. He could sell life insurance to your dead grandmother, he never shuts up. He's also what you call, flamboyant.
Friendland was the lawyer for Johnny Dee - that’s Johnny Digilo (above), an ex-boxer and a lieutenant in the Genovese crime family in New Jersey. Now, the Genovese have been running Jersey unions since forever, and they made Johnny Dee Treasurer of the Longshoreman’s Local 1588 in Bayonne. Johnny is a little crazy sometimes, but he's a big earner, and between the Union pension skim and the protection rackets, not to mention the loansharking, its a cash cow for the Genovese.
This Friendland (above) is brought in by his old man when the kid graduates law school, back in 1961. Father and son are both Teamster suitcases, so it seems like the perfect deal, one hand watches the other - you know? But the younger Friedland, first he's oobatz – he's crazy – and then he decides to become a politician. That oughta make everything perfect, but for one little problem.
See, in 1966 Johnny Dee approved a one 'G' loan to this car wash goomba named Julius Pereria. The vig is fifty small a week, until Pereria pays off the principal. Of course he never pays off the principal. That's the whole point of making the loan. And a year later this goomba borrows another 'G', under the same terms. So now the vig goes up to $100 a week. Well, when the hundred a week adds up to seven “G's', and the goomba is still hasn't paid off a dime of the principle, Pereria decides he's paid enough.
This goomba Pereria gets outraged and calls the state police. Now he's really in trouble. And when four of Johnny Dee's associates visit the Du-Rite Car wash in Iselin, Pereria won't come out of the toilet. So the boys leave him a few messages, smashing up a couple of windows, some water pumps and electric motors. To the state police this is evidence. But Pereria gets the message and suddenly develops amnesia in court. Case closed, right? Wrong.
The local D.A. now has a hard on for Johnny Dee, and calls Pereria in front of a Grand Jury. Safe behind closed doors the goomba remembers again, and Johnny Dee gets indicted for racketeering. This is a problem. And that's where this jamook Freidland comes in to our story.
Its 1968 by now, and Friedland is still a suitcase for the Teamsters, but now he's also a state representative from Hudson County and the “quintessential New Jersey politician”. Flamboyant, you know? He approaches the goomba's suitcase and tells him, if Pereria doesn't take a $6,500 cash gift from Johnny Dee in exchange for dropping the whole thing, then Johnny Dee is going to sue him, Pereria, for slander or liable or false arrest or something.
When Pereria takes too long thinking about the offer, Johnny Dee (above, light jacket)) calls and tells the goomba if the doesn't take the money then people are going to come down to the car wash and "chop your fucking head off!" Not surprisingly, that intimidates Pereria all over again.
But, see, the problem is not that Pereria can't be intimidated. Oh, he's intimidated. And he takes money. The problem is, the goomba has a record of not staying intimidated. So Friedland shows the $6,500 to Pereria, But instead of handing it over, Friendland puts it in his desk drawer. He says he's gonna hold onto it until Pereia suffers another memory lapse in front of the new Grand Jury. So Pereria does, and the charges against Johnny Dee are dropped, again.
Of course, on his own, Friedland takes a fee for holding the cash. And the goomba's lawyer takes his cut. By the time the cash gets to Pereria, there's only like $2,500 left. You gotta love suits. What Johnny Dee did was called extortion. What Friedland did was called an out-of-court settlement.
Anyway, now the D.A. is so pissed, he brings ethics charges against Friedland. The New Jersey Supreme Court suspends Friendland's law license for six months. He doesn't lose his seat in the Jersey Senate, of course. But Friedland is now on the Fed's radar.
All this is B.R., Before RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, named after some ancient movie gangster. Anyway, After RICO, in 1971, the feds start prosecuting the family bosses. And knocking them off.
By 1979 they are down to smaller fish, indicting Friedland and his old man for taking a 360 “G” kickback for setting up that $4 million loan from their Teamster's local 701 pension fund to Johnny Dee. On Wall Street they call that a “finders fee”, business as usual. Across the river in Jersey, that's a RICO violation. And in 1980 Friedland and his papa are convicted and the jamook is forced to resign from the state Senate.
Well, this jamook Friedland doesn't want to go to prison. So in 1982 he turns C-double U, a cooperating witness. He even wears a wire. Now this could be a problem, a connected suitcase wearing a wire. Except everybody knows Friedland is a jamook, and that he's facing serious jail time. Nobody is going to talk to him;. What strunz of a prosecutor signed that deal? But Friedland is nothing if not adaptable. He tells the feds a long and colorful story that leads pretty much no where, and then he disappears into the witness protection program.
...The smoldering brunette named Colette Golightly, who had just dumped her cold and cloudy Indiana optometrist husband for sunny Boca Rotan, Florida (above). Now single, she becomes an underwater photographer, which is how she meets David Friedland. Underwater. And together they are gonna go straight. Right? Fur-getta-bout it!
Two years later the Jamook gets indicted again, for falsifying loan documents. And in 1986 he gets convicted again. And this time the feds are not interested in a deal. Friedland is going to have to do something really flamboyant to get out of this one. Like, name names. And his boss, Johnny Dee, has got to be thinking, this jamook is finally gonna start singing. Maybe he ought to clip Friedland first. And this is exactly what Friedland is also thinking.
So, the jamook drowns. While scuba diving, 12 miles off Grand Bahama. His good buddy, Jack Wynn, tells the Coast Guard he personally saw the Friedland take pain killers just before he disappeared beneath the waves, with only half an hour of air in his tanks. And, of course, hours later he still had not surfaced. Of course Wynn does not radio the Coast Guard until the next morning, and while they search most of the next day, they really don't expect to find anything. And they don't. But they can't prove Friedland isn't really dead.
Until...a month after he makes a clean getaway, the flamboyant David Friedland, jamook extraordinaire, reappears healthy enough to call his lawyer from beyond his watery grave and insist he is innocent. Which nobody believes that anymore. But for once, Freidland's timing is really good.
Back in Jersey in April of 1988, Friedland's old boss, Johnny Dee, beats the racketeering rap for the Teamster loan. But his people who run the local 701 are convicted. And all the Genevese union officers, including Johnny Dee, are forced out. Not that the management goes clean, but all the Genevese union officers are replaced by Gambino union people.
This angers the Genevese bosses because of the loss of income, and they blame Johnny Dee. In May pf 1988 the Genevese mob takes Johnny Dee for a ride in a Lincoln Continental, and put five .38 rounds into the back of his head. He is next seen floating down the Hackensack river.
This provides a major distraction, while the jamook and Colette are playing hopscotch across the globe, with the FBI half a step behind; from Bermuda, to Kenya, to Switzerland, to France, to Venice, to Hong Kong, to Singapore. When they get to Sri Lanka the feds lose track of them.
And then for a year, the jamook and Colette disappear completely. Clean getaway. Almost. Because Friedland keeps popping up in various countries, like a whack a mole, just long enough to empty various bank accounts he has under various names, before vanishing again. And then the feds get a phone call from a string of coral atolls out in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
The cops in the Republic of the Maldive Islands had gotten curious about a flamboyant American resident named Richard Smith Harley who seems to be floating in money. He's an avid scuba diver, with pockets full of cash that nobody seems to know where it came from. And he has invested this cash in a half dozen local diving schools.
And it seems the flamboyant mister Harley likes to have his picture taken with his scuba students, feeding sharks, while holding dead fish held in his teeth. Flamboyant. He even started a health clinic on tiny Bondos Island (above), and everybody there calls him “Pappa”.
But what really peaks the Maldive cops' interest is that every couple of months Harley would get his American passport stamped when he flew out of the Maldives (above). But when he flew back, always a few days later, it was never stamped to show entry into any other country. It was like he was traveling into the Twight Zone. So the cops started comparing Harley's passport photo with the pictures on their alert sheets. And early in December of 1988, they found a match - David Freidland. Same jamook. A couple of days later Frieland was arrested, and at the end of December the feds brought him back to the states.
“Tanned and smiling”, David Friedland tells the press, “I had a good time, but I'll tell you it's good to be back." (above) Apparently it was not good because he was coming home to his wife Carol, and their daughter, because he wasn't doing that. Rather, the smoldering Colette came to the states to be with him, if only on visiting days. Awaiting sentencing the jamook announced he had converted to Christianity, and tried to cut another deal with the feds. But nobody was impressed anymore. That's the problem with being flamboyant. Over time the your bilge tends to fill with water, until you are not so buoyant anymore You are just flam.
In 1989 the bars of the Correctional Complex in Coleman, Florida (above) finally slam shut behind the Flamboyant jamook. And they did not open again until July of 1997, when David Friedland was released from a West Palm Beach halfway house. The jamook told a reporter, “''I can't tell you the nights that I lay awake just crying, because I realize the opportunity I had to do so much good, and how I blew it.”' He never stopped selling this stuff. He was by then about 60, and after working for a Florida advertising firm, he retired to Boca Roton, with Colette. And he finally learned to shut up.
Maybe the final word on the jamook belongs to Thomas Kean (above, left), who became the Republican governor of New Jersey, thanks in part to the political deals he cut with the Democrat David Friedland (above, right). Kean described him as “He was one of the most brilliant people I ever worked with. He just was a bit crooked.” Just a bit, do you think? Another jamook.
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