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started to make the club come back -- and then I also undertook an effort to get Passannante to come into the club and met with him, and he was smart enough to realize that he had to break out of the Tamawa operation, and I believe that he got permission from Carmine to do that. He would not have done that without permission, because Carmine was sort of like an uncle to him -- one hesitates to use the word “godfather” -- but he was his political mentor, and he had to get permission, and he did and he came to the club. I consider that a brilliant stroke on my part.

Now we come to the time when I ran for district leader if you want to get to that.

Yes.

Well, 1963 I go up to see Steve Smith -- I remember it very well -- at the Pan Am building, and I told him that we at the VID were going to beat Carmine; we didn't have a candidate yet, but we would, and urged him not to let the Kennedy people get involved against us on the grounds that the official club, after all, was the DeSapio club at that time. That's not totally true. The official club was not the DeSapio club. It was expected they would win simply because Lanigan wasn't running again, and Carmine was, and the VID had suffered this enormous defeat in the Assembly race. It was not only a defeat for Ed Koch; it was a defeat for the VID.