My best friend was Davey Hall. Davey was a used car dealer who ran a $20 limit poker game twice a week in Rockford, Ill. with his partner Harold "Butch" Fassard. The game was patronized by primarily fellow car dealers and their friends. It was at this game i collected my first chip. The D is for Davey and the B for Butch.
Around the spring of 1991 Davey was approached by Rockford mobsters and was told to pay a street tax. Davey refused. On April 11th, 1991, the mob planted a bomb on his front porch. You can read about the bombing and the Rockford mob here:
http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/blogs/profile-rockford-crime-family-mobster-salvatore-galluzzo
The bomb went off just as a player, Stevie Christidis, was arriving. My great friend Mike Crosby answered the door and was blown down the stairwell into the basement and broke his back. He has been living with horrific pain ever since. Poor Stevie Christidis took the brunt of the blow. He lost his penis, testicles, bladder, and most of his intestines. After spending a year in the hospital he spent the rest of his life wearing a bag and walking with a cane. He had a family and a thriving business, both fell into financial ruin. As for Davey, he was unscathed but had to leave his job, his wife, and his young twin boys for safety's sake. His personal and professional lives were never the same again. He died of diabetes complications in 2000, broke, estranged from his family. I was lucky, it was Thursday afternoon and i was in school at the time of the bombing. This event resulted in dozens of victims, millions in hospital bills, and millions more spent by government/police agencies investigating the incident...all over a few hundred dollars in unpaid street tax.

I only tell this story due to the insults, attacks, and negative reactions I received from CCGTCC representatives for expressing my opinion about Culotta as a speaker. There is basis for my opinion, I was a first hand witness to the pain and suffering guys like Culotta cause.

A couple of posters compared Culotta to Moe Dalitz rationalizing "Dalitz killed more people than Culotta". Dalitz built businesses, employed people, paid taxes, gave to charity, and is responsible for the building of schools, churches, hospitals, etc. Even Joan Rivers once said on the Howard Stern Show that Dalitz treated the entertainers so well she would have done any sexual favors that he wanted! Moe Dalitz actually had some redeeming qualities. Dalitz was a philanthropic visionary while Culotta is nothing more than an abusive, murdering thug.
Doug Smith, your reaction to my opinion surprises me the most. I have seen your pro-Israel posts and i agree with you 100%. The holocaust is perhaps the most despicable event in human history. The Jewish people were robbed of their assets, victimized, abused, tortured, and murdered. After what they have been through, I believe all Jewry should take every step necessary to protect themselves and their land. That being said, imagine if you were a member of say, the German beer stein collector's club, and at their annual meeting they booked a nazi to regale the crowd with stories of atrocities against Jews that the speaker himself personally carried out. How would you react to something that hits so close to home? I assumed you would be an advocate for the victims, not a promoter of the victimizer.