Introducing: The Confessions of Anthony Raimondi
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It's like my father says, "No matter what you do in this world, you're going to pay a price."

Anthony Raimondi wants to make peace with God. I'll probably drop dead of either cancer or a heart attack. There's nothing I can do that's going to stop it. Recent health problems have Anthony reflecting on his 30 years in the Brooklyn Mafia. On the street, you got a problem with a guy, the guy gets whacked, who gives a shit, you know? But there's one murder from his past that Anthony Raimondi worries might get him turned away at the pearly gates. I'm going to go to heaven, God's going to say, nah, fuck you, you killed one of my popes.

A shocking update here from the Vatican. Pope John Paul I has died. The youngest pope to die in 400 years. They said he died of a heart attack, but he had no heart problems. I'm Mark Smerling, filmmaker and podcaster. But for the past year, I felt like a priest, taking dizzying confessions from a brutal mafia enforcer. He says, I want to be like you guys. My cousin Mac pulled out a gun and he put it right to my mouth.

From his baptism into the family business at just 16... You think you got the balls to do this? Just walk up to somebody and blow their fucking brains right out? ...to committing international stock fraud. I mean, we had fucking two, three, four hundred thousand shares. AT&T, Coca-Cola, IBM. With an unlikely partner. Paul Jacob Marcinkus. This was the head of the Vatican Bank. Whoa! And how this unholy union...

may have led to papacy. My grandfather, he goes, we got to get rid of the Pope. We got to kill him. I said, I'm not killing no fucking Pope, Papa. Anthony's written his own book of biblical proportions. This is the guy who, like, supposedly directly talks to God. There might just be too biblical to be gospel. ♪

Anthony doesn't look familiar to me at all. So he's a fabulist. You know, some bits true, some bits fabulous. There's fabulous, and then there's... It goes beyond fabulous. All great lies have a place to see truth.

See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Not asking questions to this day. I'm not a curious person. I never knew him to be a schluffer, but again, that's just me. When we were completing the research, I thought something really grave, possibly even that the Pope had been murdered. The Confessions of Anthony Ramondi, a new series from USG Audio and Truth Media. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. And I'm saying to myself...

How'd I get into this mess?