YouSaid · the spoken record

John Miller

lines on the record: 89
first: 2024-01-18
most recent: 2024-01-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But from Bratton's standpoint, you know, the mayor didn't come up with any of these ideas. You know, the mayor didn't invent Comstat or any of these crime fighting systems, you know. The mayor wasn't there for that. So he enjoyed getting the cred And as Jack Maple used to say,”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, the mayor of New York is a national figure, a more than a local figure, but with Giuliani, I mean, the clashes with Bratton started right away. And it was strange to me because, you know, I was new to being in government. I'd come out of years as a reporter. But the whole idea of you've got this police commissioner who is cutting crime to levels it's never been cut before. You know, why are you mad at him? And it turned out that he was mad at him because he was getting credit for it. And Giuliani felt not heaping enough of that credit on the mayor, and I mean from Bratton's standpoint, he was new to this level of politics also. He was a guy from Boston.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when he was mayor, I saw a very different side of him And that's where, listen, you can't be in these jobs, whether it's U.S. Attorney or Mayor, without having a certain amount of ego. And”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that Juliani I knew as the U.S. attorney was like Thomas Dewey. You know, he was the mob busting prosecutor who was going to come through New York and clean it up. And he went after the mob with the commission case. And, you know, the next case and the next case and he was dismantling organized crime's hold on New York City by these sweeping prosecutions. He was very focused on cleaning up New York and using the power of a federal prosecutor to do it.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was a shock to the system. You spend twenty years of your life as a reporter, you know, from the time you're in the ninth grade till you're, you know, thirty something years old, trying to figure out like, how do I find out all those secrets and then how do I get them on the air? Then your first day as deputy police commissioner, you walk in and you look on your desk and there's the overnight reports and the forward-looking reports and the confidential sheets and everything. You go through it and you're like, oh my God, this is just like an encyclopedia of incredibly great stories. And then your second thought is what if it gets out?”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Once I went to work for Bratton, he said, you know, we can't just turn the city upside down to do what we need to do to cut crime. We need to tell people this is what we're going to do. Then we need to tell them we're doing it. Then we need to tell them we did it and this is how it's working. We're going to need real end-to-end communications. Can you do that? I'm like, got it.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, under a thousand shootings in a city of 8.6 million, 20,000, he really changed the city. But he said he was going to do that. And he had a brilliant strategist, Jack Maple, who was coming with him. And Maple said to me one night in Elaine's restaurant, You know, we need to get somebody to do the deputy commissioner for media relations, the DCPI. You know, who knows the police department well enough but knows the press well enough to get our message out because we're going to shake things up. And I said, me. And he said, ah, you can't afford it. You're in your TV job. You're making money, blah, blah, blah. He said, listen, I'm in for the adventure. You know, let's do it.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting question, but if you've spent your whole life kind of on one side of the yellow tape, looking over the crime scene, you always wonder all those people on the other side of the yellow tape. They know everything, they've got all the facts, they're going to give you what they want to give you, they're going to hold back they're going to want to hold back. I always enjoyed, you know, the level of sources where I usually pretty much knew what they knew. So you always wonder, what would it be like to be on the other side? And when Bill Bratton, who basically changed the entire culture of American policing and for a time, ended crime as we knew it in New York, you know, we knew 6.9 murders a day, 100,000 robberies, 5,000 murder. He brought that down to 300 murders a year, not even one a day. Right.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think I knew my way around the subject matter and the parameters of it. The mob wasn't supposed to cross that line and kill a reporter, but I don't know if there really are rules on that side of the track, but that was the unspoken rule. On the other hand, to be realistic about it, I was licensed to carry firearms I had received multiple threats from multiple other stories including drug cartels and things like that, but I kind of counted on the idea of it's not going to be John Gotti. It's going to be some young up-and-coming wise guy who wants to impress his boss by saying like I, you know, Beat this guy up, or I broke his legs, or I did something. So, you know, it was calculated risk.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty much, and I mean, Gotti was cordial to me in our in-person counters. But, you know, I also listened to the tapes and heard the way he talked about people, including me.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, turning states evidence about the juror and the detective who had sold the names of the jurors and allowed them to target them for bribery. But I think, you know, at that point, he was looking at, am I going to beat this case or am I going away for life? So whatever minor annoyances I brought on were probably the least of his problems.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, Gotti was very interesting about his ego, about his sensitivities. You could go on the air and say John Gotti, the feared boss of the Gambino family is, you know, suspected to control unions and entities and companies and has killed dozens of people. He wouldn't mind that at all because that made him that powerful feared guy Things he didn't like were talking about drug dealing, which his family was involved with, his brother's and other things. So I broke the story of Sammy Gravano, his underboss.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that might have been it And he said, Well, I tell you what, none of my people will ever bother your people again, but don't ever do this again. You want to ask me a question? Just ask it. The result of that was that after that I had this odd license to walk up to him, ask him two or three questions, he would give two or three quips usually, non answer answers But that video appeared early and often on NBC, and it kind of created the, you know, because people just kept seeing me and John Gotti walking around talking that that's what we did. We just walked around Chatting all day.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And at the end of it, when we had enough, because I could see Godi was getting angry. I walked off with him and told the camera crews, okay, go back to your cars, we're good. And he said, what was that all about? I said, well, your people always push my people. He said, we always treat each other like a gentleman. I'm like, that's not treating people like a gentleman knocking people down.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I could have, would have should have because I knew my mobsters in more ways than one. And the next morning I was in front of Gotti's clubhouse. And then, you know, we just kind of stalked him around. It always ended up with his bodyguard's, you know, kind of pushing the cameramen and we all ended up, you know, rolling around on the ground. And then Gaudi was gone. We never quite got the shot. So one night I just showed up with five camera crews and we surrounded him. It was more people than they could block the cameras of or push around. The advantage of working at a”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I did this live shot. You were looking at the body of Big Paul Castellano, the boss of all bosses of organized crime, and this murder signals not just a mob hit in Midtown Manhattan in front of dozens of witnesses, but it signals something that is going to change the face of organized crime. A murder like this would have to be authorized by the mob's commission, which he headed, or it has to be a renegade move, which could signal war. And I finished the live shot and walked off, and a guy took me by the elbow. Interestingly it was a chief in the NYPD's intelligence division, ironically, which I would later head. And he said, Gaddy, he didn't even pronounce the name right. He said, the guy's name is Gaddy, John Gaddy. He's behind all this.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gotti burst onto the scene like a comet. You know, he didn't just slowly appear. He went from being nobody a captain in a crime family in a place in Ozone Park, Queens to suddenly being this mythic figure overnight and literally overnight december sixteenth, nineteen eighty five with the assassination the mob hit of Big Paul Castellano, the boss of the Gambino crime family, the head of the mobs commission. In Midtown, Manhattan as Christmas music blared from speakers and, you know, people were passing with their shopping and everything. Multiple gunmen shot him and his bodyguard as they got out of a car in front of Spark Steakhouse and then fled into the night. And I got to the scene very quickly because NBC was in Rockefeller.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm like, maybe. So it kind of blew my cover because I was trying to be the normal college kid to rout my life out. But after a year of that, I literally ran out of money because I was making just enough to get by, but not enough to qualify for financial aid. So I said, well, I'll get back to this later and never really got back to it”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a letter from the head of Metro Media Television. Clip. I submitted everything and I got in and took out student loans and all that. So I would go to college taking communications 101, fly back to New York on the Boston Shuttle, which was 40 bucks. In 1978, do the weekend news both nights, get paid for that, then fly back to college and go back to school, and it was like over Christmas break. My roommate, Gary Saperstein, said. I think I saw you on the news this weekend when I went home.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Graduated high school at 17. I was a street reporter at 18, I was, you know, working full time as a reporter on the streets of New York, which is the number one television news market in the country. But my boss said You should go to college, and I'm like everybody who's in college wants to do what I'm doing right now, and he said. This job will be here when you get back. But you know, you need to round yourself out. You need to have the experience of going to college. You need to Feel like a kid again. You know, you'd need to live in a dorm and get drunk with the boys and do all that college stuff. So I applied to a bunch of colleges. I got rejected by a lot of them. But one of them, Emerson in Boston. Great communication”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. By the time I was 16, I was a full time reporter and, you know, covering the night side in New York and. The rest, as they say, is history.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the cell phone had not been invented. So literally on the way back with the film, I stopped at a payphone and called my dad and said, hey. Somebody blew up Uncle Frank's tomb. What does it mean? You know, they can't kill him twice. And he said it's a signal. It means look for who just got out of jail. Somebody's just come back on the scene, and this is their message that all bets are off. They're taking over the family. So that's what I went on with that night, quoting a source.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were a low budget operation, but very scrappy and always first on the scene by Hooker by Crook. So when they ran out of reporters at night, they would send a camera crew, but they needed a microphone holder, so they say kid, go with the crew, go to this thing if anybody's talking, make sure we get it. So I became the de facto night reporter, which then caused these worlds to mix and sometimes crash. One night there was a bombing in Queens, an explosion, and we got to the scene and it was in a cemetery, and it was a mausoleum, and the smoke was still coming out of the tomb, and I looked up in the name on the mausoleum was Costello. And I'm like, is this Frank Costello the gangster's tomb? And they're like, yeah, somebody just blew it up.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm not sure they knew that I was fourteen. They knew I was some kid, and they hired me to work after school, so I would take the two thirty bus, skip seventh period, which was Jim, so I don't know if they cared. And then get to channel five. I'd work from three to eleven. So when the 10 o'clock news went off at 11, I'd catch the 11.30 bus, which was a real race to get to, you know, the bus in time and then go to school again. But my job was to answer the phone, listen to the police radio. And get coffee or whatever they told me to do. But I was really good at listening to the police radio because I had had years of training just riding around in my father's call knowing that's a good call. Was a small staff. It wasn't like NBC or CBS. You know, they said at Channel 5 News, when the shot called for Ariels, we stood on a chair.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But This was kind of the strange mix of my father's world because being a Broadway gossip columnist and moving through the nightlife meant brushing elbows with celebrities, club and restaurant owners, there was the necessary injection of the requisite mobsters because they moved in and out of the same circles. Cops, robbers, and it was a really interesting education because you lived normal life. You got up, you had breakfast, you know, you rode your bicycle to school. You went through the third and fourth grade. Then you had your other life living in dad's world. Then you went back to normal life playing with your friends. And like, what'd you do last night? I'm like, I went to a homicide in midtown. And, you know, then a fire in the Bronx and then, you know, we had dinner at this place.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gotten the contract to take out this hit on the boss. Who would later, in his own right, become the boss of the Genovese crime family.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was, and he was having dinner with my dad that night in Monsignor, the French restaurant, with my mom, you know, my father left and Costello got in a cab and... When he got out at his apartment building, Vincent the Chinjagati, who was kind of a button man at the time who would”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And I realized something which was They don't care if you're 12 years old, if you have the shot. It was the great equalizer. It allowed me to kind of become a news guy in the ninth grade.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was taken in a clinical way, and at some point, around the age of 12, I realized I was seeing, but I wasn't collecting. So I started taking pictures. And now I'm riding around with my dad. I'm taking the pictures. He's driving me to the Daily News and to the New York Post, into the New York Times, into the AP. So he was freelancing these stories.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They never said anything about it. But it's an interesting question because I saw things that a normal kid wouldn't see. But, you know, it was”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean. I think It got me addicted as a boy to expecting to have a front row seat. Know you'd be on the scene when it was happening. Did it bother you that there were dead?”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then, you know, rush us back home, put us to bed. Then he would go back for the late show to collect more items and stories.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes. It was definitely a two way street. And this was an all-cash operation. So, you know, that meant sleeping late into the day. But he was also a guy who wanted to spend time with his children. So, you know, he would pack me and my sister, Greg, into the car, and we would go off. And, you know, it might be on a school night, like opening night at the Copa, Frank Sinatra, or Sammy Davis, Bobby Darren, up to the dressing room, autograph pictures. The selfie would not be invented for generations yet.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was. A fascinating childhood because you had a father who had a twenty four seven job, you know, and the twenty four seven part of it meant, you know, going to the Copacabana and the El Morocco and all the clubs in New York where every hat check girl and every Mater D and every captain had a tip for him about who had just come in with whom or who had just got thrown out of the room. He probably had a tip for them.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then Miller would do the same for Rellum, who was high at risk because he got the second string items, and soon there was a full tilt column ward going on in the paper between them calling each other names. I don't think anybody ever caught on to the idea that they were all the same guy.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But he was also a guy who was loath to make a correction. So if Miller got something wrong, Rellum would point it out in his column. My esteemed colleague blew it again last week.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The good items, the juicy stuff went into John J. Miller. The items he was a little shaky about went into John Rellum, which was Miller spelled backwards on the idea of, well, if it bounces back, it's not on me.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was for the New York Inquirer which would go on to become the national inquirer, but then it was a New York weekly paper, and he wrote kind of the Broadway Gossip as his main dish, but he was somebody from Hollywood and somebody from London and somebody from Harris. And he would just, you know, there was this frenetic little office with him and his secretary and the items and the calls would come in and they would go on different spikes. You know, this is Europe, this is London, this is Hollywood, this is Broadway. And I mean, that's how he stayed organized as to which column the stuff went into. The more interesting. Dynamic of his nom de plumes was”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They are one person who is also named John Miller, but also named John Rellum, which was Miller spelled backward. And that was my father who wrote seven weekly columns under six different names, one of them being his own.”
2024-01-18 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 564 — John Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source