The ‘Ed Sullivan Show’ With Felons : If it sells, a new TV program would bring mobsters and ex-cons into Middle American homes

With the clock on the corner of the TV screen ticking madly away, Bob Adams adjusts the stethoscope to his ears and delicately applies a No. 80 drill bit to the lock of a bank-size combination safe. He’s done this before. Adams came close to doing a few years in a state penitentiary for doing this. Before he went legit.

The wild cheering of the studio audience doesn’t faze him as he delicately applies a thumb and forefinger to the lock.

“Come on, Bob, open that safe, baby!” screams host Shecky Green.

The audience takes up the chant: “Go Bob! Go Bob! Go Bob!”

With 23 seconds to go on the video clock, the door to the safe swings open. Adams takes a bow. The audience goes wild.

Cut to a kitchen on a Glendale sound stage. Aladena (Jimmy the Weasel) Fratianno is putting the finishing touches on a tray of lasagna. Nobody has to explain why this week’s star of “Cooking With La Cosa Nostra” is wearing a burglar mask underneath his chef’s hat. If you testified against the entire hierarchy of the West Coast Mafia and then went on TV, you’d wear a mask too.

“OK, here I am, I’m gonna put the sausage and pork chops into the sauce; that’ll make the sauce richer,” says Jimmy. You know that name. He confessed to involvement in 11 contract murders for the Mafia before he became the highest-level mobster ever to turn government witness. “I’m gonna wrap it in foil so the stove don’t get all messy.”

Cut to Wild Willy Parsons, the 6-foot-5 ex-biker-turned-stand-up-comic who glumly surveys the studio audience. “I’ll be honest with you, folks,” Willie says, almost tripping over the word. “There aren’t a lot of jobs a guy like me can get. I mean, let’s face it, would you want to go into Benihana and have me swinging knives at your table?”

Welcome to “Crime Time,” a proposed weekly half-hour celebration of larceny, loan sharking, conniving and contract murder that features some of the most notorious gangsters in America in a combination talk show-comedy-variety format suitable for prime-time TV.

With a $400,000 pilot already making the rounds in network and syndication TV markets all over Hollywood, “Crime Time’s” producers promise in future episodes such underworld talents as reputed Gambino crime family boss John Gotti reminiscing about the old neighborhoods of Brooklyn and a fellow who was convicted of chopping up his neighbor and Federal Expressing him to various parts of the U.S. reading testimony from his murder trial to the strains of “Some Enchanted Evening.”

“Nobody in TV that I know of is trying to do a variety show, prime time,” says creator and co-producer Mark Weinberg. “This is just an old-fashioned variety show. Basically, it’s the ‘Ed Sullivan Show’ with felons.”

Weinberg, 34, figured he had a unique insight when it came to bringing the mob into Middle American living rooms.

A former fund-raiser for District Atty. Ira Reiner and fund-raising host for Democratic Presidential candidate Walter Mondale and Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), Weinberg earned his living as a commodities broker. His clients included Mayor Tom Bradley and a coterie of FBI agents, Secret Service agents, judges and bankers.

But his investment career hit a snag in 1984, when people like Matthew (Matty the Horse) Ianello, Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno and other purported luminaries of the Genovese crime family started showing up on his list of business contacts. The Commodities Futures Trading Commission didn’t think much of Weinberg’s New York business associates, even when Weinberg told them he had courted Mob figures only at the request of the FBI in Los Angeles as a secret informant.

The FBI in New York opened its own investigation to find out why so many of Weinberg’s investment clients were losing money on silver options that went suddenly sour whenever Weinberg’s New York and Las Vegas contacts became involved.

Weinberg blamed the Mob for looting his accounts. He blamed the FBI for refusing to publicly admit he had been working as an undercover source, secretly taping conversations with his underworld contacts at the FBI’s request. He installed a security system on his Beverly Hills house and started talking about “getting whacked.”

Finally, with civil suits claiming more than $10 million in losses from former clients and the loss of both his major trading licenses--none of the suits went to trial, with settlements made to most plaintiffs, Weinberg said--he went where any other down-on-his-luck Wall Street whiz kid would go: Hollywood.

Weinberg’s business history appears to have prepared him to cash in on America’s perennial fascination with its criminal underbelly.

But where most of the networks have focused on endless spinoffs of “The Untouchables” or real-life dramatizations of infamous crimes, Weinberg figured nobody had yet figured out a way to exploit robbery and mayhem for its obvious comedic potential.

“All the crime shows I’m aware of on TV are all realism shows--you know, ‘America’s Most Wanted’ kind of things,” Weinberg said. “Nobody’s trying to do comedy with mobsters. A lot of these guys have a great sense of humor--you know, what strikes a murderer as funny is very interesting. Jimmy the Weasel gets on and he laughs as he talks about how he tossed a load of dynamite under Mickey Cohen’s bed.

“Most of these guys come across as a bunch of moronic thugs,” Weinberg admits. “But like, take Harry Hall (former Teamsters Union public relations executive convicted of three fraud counts in 1982). Harry Hall comes across as very charming, and that’s because he’s one of the greatest con artists of all time.

“See, we want quality mobsters and felons and Justice Department personnel. Somebody that knocked over a 7-Eleven isn’t much fun. I don’t want low-echelon morons. We could take them, but they’d be boring. The Peter Principle works in the Mob too, you know.”

Hence the negotiations for Fratianno’s appearance both on the “Cooking With La Cosa Nostra” segment and on a separate talk show segment. Fratianno will have been in front of the cameras enough that he’ll have to get an AFTRA card for his next “Crime Time” appearance, the show’s executives say.

Then there’s Gotti, reputedly the most powerful Mafia figure in America, whom Weinberg telephoned a few months ago with a pitch for the show. How do you talk John Gotti into making a fool of himself on national TV?

“He hung up on me a few times, till I finally convinced him we were doing comedy and he could say anything he wanted,” Weinberg explains. “He said at first, ‘I don’t like to talk to the press.’ And I said, ‘Mr. Gotti, I’m not the press. I’m a producer.’ He said, ‘So what?’ ”

Gotti still hasn’t signed, but he has tentatively agreed through his attorney to be filmed in New York in an interview segment with the show’s executive in charge of production, Jim Henderson, former longtime chief of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Strike Force in Los Angeles. Henderson functions as the president of the Crime Time Co.; Weinberg is the creator and executive producer, but not an officer of the corporation.

Gotti has also reportedly agreed to do a “Cooking With La Cosa Nostra” segment--featuring linguine with clam sauce.

“Basically, I’ve been negotiating entertainment-type contracts with the Mafia,” Weinberg says. “It’s interesting, ‘cause there’s no difference negotiating with the Mob or with certain agents. You have about the same problems. Everybody’s trying to extort you.”

Before he signed longtime Las Vegas comedian Shecky Green as host, Weinberg says a former Mafia enforcer hired to host the talk-show segments “tried to extort me” out of an extra $4,000 when he learned Jimmy the Weasel was making more than he was. (The enforcer apparently claims it was a legitimate contract beef.)

Then, Peter (Pete the Greek) Diapioulas, Crazy Joe Gallo’s unsuccessful bodyguard on the night that Gallo was shot to death in Umberto’s Clam House in New York in 1972, refused to appear on stage with Jimmy, calling him a “snitch.” Weinberg says an extra $4,000 took care of that problem too.

“I get threatened more working on this show from my cast than I did while trading commodities for the Genovese family (as an undercover source for the FBI),” Weinberg says.

Not all of the show is laughs. Henderson, who successfully prosecuted former Los Angeles mob bosses Dominic Brooklier and Peter J. Milano, said a variety of ex-FBI agents, Secret Service agents and federal prosecutors have also agreed to appear in talk show and game show segments.

“I guess the original idea for this came from a discussion between an ex-FBI agent and myself on the way to an Angels game,” Henderson recalls. “Mark was driving, and we were just sort of talking about old times, and some of these unbelievably interesting stories we had, and Mark said, ‘That’d make good TV.’

“What we had in mind was sort of leaning toward the comic line, and part human interest kind of stuff. We didn’t want guys on there telling us how they killed people and stuff, but some of the more interesting things, like the guy that went into the Witness Protection Program and the night before, he took out a juice loan from a gangster, knowing that the government was going to disappear him from the face of the Earth on the following Thursday.”

Planned for future segments:

Ernest Gallo (who is not associated with the famous wine-making family) recounting the days when his Halifax Gang moved out to Los Angeles and formed a shoplifting crew that was raking in $10,000 a week in business suits and fur coats.

Pete the Greek reminiscing about the night he and his union buddies snuck into a crowded--and at the time, non-union--New York restaurant with a box full of white mice. “We open the box, and all of a sudden all these mice run out,” Diapioulas recalls happily. “The next morning, we get a phone call. See how it works?”

Harry Hall, in the show’s pilot, gets two minutes to convince the studio audience he wasn’t guilty of bilking a business associate out of $200,000. “What I must tell you is they didn’t tell the man I had paid back $80,000 . . . and they didn’t even allow me into the grand jury,” says Hall, his voice rising as the seconds click by. “And I would like to say, P.S., his two attorneys were former assistant United States attorneys!”

Hall screams as the buzzer sounds. “All right,” Green tells the audience. “Is Harry Hall a corrupt con artist or is he a misunderstood guy with a heart of gold?”

The applause meter decides in Hall’s favor. “Well, Harry, you won,” Green announces. “Bob, tell Harry what he’s won.”

“Invective Hurling,” a semi-weekly segment in which audience members decide what Mafioso spoke the dirtiest on federal wiretaps. “It’s an LCN (La Cosa Nostra) sport,” Weinberg explains. “We have to bleep, obviously, most of it, but we get the point across.”

In another wiretap segment, recorded gangster conversations are played to barnyard animals. Don’t ask why.

“Felon Search,” the criminal equivalent of amateur talent night, features square-dancing bookmakers, a yodeling extortionist and Wild Willy Parsons.

In one segment, famous trial attorneys will be asked to repeat their most important closing arguments for a studio audience while a professional laugher rolls on the floor in front of the jury.

To no one’s surprise, the “Crime Time” crew wasn’t able to win major studio advance financing with pitches like these. So Weinberg himself came up with the $400,000 for the pilot filming and editing. “Nobody makes a pilot and pays for it himself,” Weinberg acknowledges. “But I’ve been gambling my entire life, so I figured why not take one more shot?”