A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership

by James B. Comey

We are experiencing a dangerous time in our country, with a political environment where basic facts are disputed, fundamental truth is questioned, lying is normalized, and unethical behavior is ignored, excused, or rewarded.

How true!

agreement with the Italian government to cooperate with the Americans,

their own narrative to explain and justify their killing. None of them saw themselves as bad people. And to a person, they all said the same thing: The first time was really, really hard. After that, not so much. Mutolo had killed so many people that he couldn’t remember them all. After naming nearly thirty, he added that we should assume there were seven or eight more. At one point, he recalled killing a man named Galatalo. Then he recalled hitting another man named Galatalo with a meat cleaver, but the man had not died. On the witness stand, he remembered that he had actually killed yet another man named Galatalo, making it two Galatalos killed and one Galatalo merely hit in the chest with a meat cleaver. During the day, I was in court as Mutolo testified, spilling the secrets of the Mafia’s reign of death and crime, while my evenings were spent meeting with Sammy the Bull Gravano in a safe house controlled by the United States Marshals Service. Gravano had previously testified in Brooklyn federal court against family boss John Gotti, where defense lawyers made much of his