About Us

Mob ad·ja·cent. mäb / əˈjās(ə)nt / Adjective. Next to or adjoining a group of people known for being disorderly and intent on causing trouble or violence.

Based on their true story, brothers Jeffrey and Michael Gentile, Jr. discover a parallel world hidden behind their suburban façade. In their world, mobsters come to dinner, thieves deliver bounty off the backs of trucks, and sometimes men with badges knock on the front door. For the Gentile brothers, normal is what happens every day.

Their father, nightclub entrepreneur Mike Gentile, manages a tricky balancing act: Suburban husband and father, nightclub owner, respected member of the community, and longtime friend to notorious mobsters. Heat, hoodlums and Hollywood stars filter in and out of his family’s lives as casually as the milkman and the mailman. No one ever wondered about the effect being steeped in a world of crime and criminals on a pair of impressionable young boys when The Wonder Years collides with The Sopranos.

Career criminals became trusted friends and honorary uncles, the kind of men who brought fat envelopes to weddings, graduations, and funerals – people like Sam Giancana, Frank Cerone, his cousin Jackie Cerone, along with an assortment of hoodlums, gangsters, bone-breakers, second-story guys, dirty cops, and dodgy lawyers. Anyone might turn up at their front door. And Mike’s boys were watching.

Episode 1: The Intersection of Hoodlum and Gangster. Learn how a chance encounter with a Sicilian crime boss in 1943 put the Gentile family mob adjacent for decades.

Episode 2: Boys Become Men. It's 1945. Mike Gentile is building a successful future with a little mob adjacent assistance.

Episode 3: War Adjacent. It's 1950. The Korean War is raging, and Mike is war adjacent in Alaska, but he finds a way to make the best of a bad situation.

Episode 4: Nightcaps.  It's 1956. An incident at a nearby bar brings a mob boss to the rescue in his bathrobe and bedroom slippers and shows the Outfit’s power.

Episode 5: Courtroom Adjacent. It's 1956. Mike buys a bar adjacent to the courthouse, and 30 years later, one customer pays a long overdue tab.

Episode 6: Retail Adjacent. It's 1962. When Mike decides to buy Mary Ann a mink coat, a fence brings an array of stolen goods to review over coffee and dessert.

Episode 7:Nightlife. It's 1963. Mike opens a nightclub on a street the media dubbed "the new Glitter Gulch." Mike Sr. living large. And then things start getting complicated.

Episode 8: Respect. It's 1976. Mike Jr. spends time with the mob bosses and learns how people put things in tidy little compartments.

Episode 9: Partnerships. It's 1975. After Mike Jr. makes some bad choices, his father has to go back to the bosses for help, and their help came with a price tag.  

Episode 10: Family Friends. It's 1995. The Gentile family learns some final lessons about what it means to be mob adjacent

Jeffrey and Michael Gentile Jr. return to Chicago's Little Italy with a WGN-TV-9's Emmy-winning anchorman Larry Potash

Mob Adjacent takes viewers inside the Chicago Outfit for an unprecedented look behind the iron curtain of omerta.

Hardcore Italians

Michael Carioscia

"I couldn't believe the stories Mike was telling me during our podcast. From the JFK assassination, to Frank Sinatra's association with the mob, Mike Gentile tells unbelievable stories that grab your interest."

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