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There was this firm, euro atlantic, that was set up in florida and that firm secretly owned big blocks of totally worthless stocks. stocks in what were essentially made up worthless companies. but then in conjunction with the mob, with the columbo crime family to be specific, that firm in florida basically set up a new york outpost. they set up a boiler-room in new york. and the mobsters and the crooks who worked at that boiler-room were assigned to artificially drive up demand for these worthless stocks by a variety of illegal and very mob-like means. basically forcing people to buy these sto...

Tabloid-friendly name of billy fingers. within a couple of years of this stock scheme being shut down and excelled from the u.s. securities industries for its crimes wild bill, aka billy fingers who's described in the indictment as a captive of the columbo organized crime family, he would soon be murdered in a basement in brooklyn. they would not find his body until nine years later at a mob dumping ground outside the all county flooring supply store in long island, new york. by then his family had gone into witness protection. authorities were able to identify his body officially by his denta...

That they did in and out of that check-cashing place. $800,000 in cash on a thursday. the following tuesday they pick up another $188,000. the following day, on wednesday, another 136,000 large. all in cash. gigantic bags of money that they're presumably throwing in the trunk of some mobster car and driving off with in new jersey to go pay off the various crooks involved in this scheme and presumably to have like carmela hide it in the crawlspace with the ak-47s and the gold bars. another way you know this was not your typical white-collar crime was the list of guys named in the indictment. al...

Even though they kept talking to fred. >> we kept going to the husband. >> reporter: playing dumb, of course, but hoping he'd panic and call el cubano. >> i mean, at the point we were calling almost every day but, again, trying to give a reason so he wouldn't become more suspicious than what he was. >> reporter: oh, just one more question, sir. >> exactly. i felt like columbo. oh, one more, sir. >> reporter: this was a game, of course, with deadly consequences. >> reporter: death has a way of bringing people together, as it did in the case of lynn schockner. she was a private woman, had very f...

Dysfunction that. >> you have strong feelings about this. >> every decade, you get somebody like peter faulk as columbo or carroll o'connor as archie bunker. someone you can't imagine anyone else afterwards. james gandolfini is that as tony soprano. >> it's supposed to be a mafia story. >> it's also about everyday life. >> did you know that an italian invented the telephone? >> alexander graham bell is italian? >> see what i'm talking about. antonio finucci invented the telephone and he got robbed. everybody knows that. >> who invented the mafia? >> what? >> "the sopranos" took the mystery out...