Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (124 page)

A federal grand jury also accused two sons of the late Joe Colombo of resorting to a familiar ploy in a “comeback” attempt to gain support in the Colombo family. They were indicted for allegedly extorting and bilking companies of hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts for remodeling buildings and offices.

And far from finished with construction payoffs, the Genovese family has persisted in exploiting New York’s drywall-carpentry industry. A decade after
federal and state authorities boasted that they had broken the borgata’s grip on the industry and its captive union locals, a capo and twenty-one underlings were indicted for fraud and labor racketeering involving multimillions of dollars.

All of these construction industry crimes were uncovered as products of investigations begun before 9/11, when the Cosa Nostra was still a priority target for the government.

Disputes over the Mob’s retention of power in a pivotal national union—the International Brotherhood of Teamsters—resurfaced in 2004. A group of twenty investigators and lawyers resigned in mass protest, complaining that teamsters’ president James P. Hoffa, son of the vanished Jimmy Hoffa, was stifling their efforts to uproot Cosa Nostra connections. The head of the cleanup effort, Edward Stier, a highly respected former federal prosecutor, asserted that Hoffa had interfered with probes into “pockets of organized crime” and corruption by teamster managers. Following numerous investigations and convictions of its highest leaders, the union in 1989 was placed under a federal monitoring system empowered to eliminate Mafia influence. Seeking to end government oversight, the younger Hoffa chose Stier in 1999 to lead a self-policing experiment known as RISE—Respect, Integrity, Strength, and Ethics—staffed with former FBI agents. Dismissing Stier’s documented allegations as “reckless and false,” Hoffa pledged his commitment to eradicating any remaining Mob influence. The resignations of his own appointed investigators, however, highlighted a chronic problem: the hazards of permanently reforming unions with histories of endemic Mafia penetration.

Even Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s wary anti-Mafia administration was embarrassed by a project at Giuliani’s front door. Shortly before his term ended, companies supplying concrete for a $22 million restoration of City Hall Park were swiftly dropped after
The New York Times
reported that under previous corporate names the outfits had been implicated in labor-peace deals with mobster families.

Through their persistent presence in the construction industry, mafiosi even tried to profit directly from 9/11. Lucchese underboss Steven Wonder Boy Crea pleaded guilty to extorting payoffs from a company engaged in the removal of the World Trade Center debris. And the Bonannos tried unsuccessfully to steal and sell scrap metal from the Twin Towers ruins.

In the aftermath of concentrated crackdowns in the 1980s and ’90s, New York’s billion-dollar construction industry appears nearly as vulnerable as ever to determined gangsters. The obstacles blocking fundamental reforms in the
industry were illustrated by a singular setback suffered by Giuliani. His administration imposed regulatory and licensing rules designed to weed out wiseguys and Mafia-linked companies from major wholesale food markets and the garbage-carting industry. When Giuliani tried to enact similar legislation to scrutinize building projects, he was blocked by an intractable combo of high-voltage developers, contractors, and unions who bottled up the proposed bill in the City Council. Since then, no politician has dared to raise the issue of strict oversight of that corruption-prone industry, and its unions, always heavy contributors to election campaigns.

Often, the Mafia seems determined to retain a semblance of historic ties. A sidelight in Joe Massino’s 2004 trial revealed that Perry Criscitelli, a reputed Bonanno soldier and Little Italy restaurateur, was the president of the Feast of San Gennaro Committee, which presumably had been cleansed of Mob control by Mayor Giuliani’s administration. Criscitelli was forced to resign from the panel overseeing the celebrated tourist attraction, but not before his Mulberry Street restaurant, Da Nico, topped Giuliani’s recommended list for Republican Party convention delegates that year as his favorite dining spot in New York.

Other Cosa Nostra standbys rediscovered in the new century were Garment Center “protection” payoffs for labor peace, practices dating back to Lucky Luciano’s heyday. The extortion artists came from Sammy Gravano’s old Gambino crew in Brooklyn, which thrived long after his defection.

Auto “chop shops,” another favorite Mob pastime, are said by the police to be still going strong, earning a Genovese faction in Brooklyn $2.5 million a year by reselling stolen car parts and air bags.

While time-tested crimes continue to support the five families, they have been simultaneously exploring new multimillion-dollar enterprises. Their imaginative innovations covered a wide spectrum of enterprises:

Telephone bill frauds
: Capo Salvatore Tore Locascio, the son and heir of convicted Gambino underboss Frank Locascio, and nine other soldiers and associates were accused of filching over $200 million in five years from thousands of unwitting customers. A gimmick dreamed up by the mobsters was enticing thousands of victims to sample adult entertainment such as sex-chat lines, dating services, and psychic readings. The thefts were based on “cramming,” a trap in which callers were clipped for up to $40 a month on their phone bills after being deceived by “free trial” advertisements. Investigators said tech-savvy mobsters devised a maze of shell companies that billed the callers indirectly through local telephone utilities. Assessing the swindle as one of the largest ever pulled
off by the Mafia, Philip Scala, the head of the FBI’s Gambino Squad, remarked, “The profit from that fraud alone makes the Gambinos look like a Fortune 500 company.”

Bootlegged CDs
: A Genovese group in Long Island counterfeited 10,000 compact disks a week for years, netting $2.5 million annually in profits before the scheme was thwarted.

Credit cards
: In Queens, Genovese soldiers teamed up with store cashiers and clerks to copy credit card numbers, which were then used to manufacture fakes. The dishonest employees were paid $50 for each swiped number, while the bogus credit cards were sold for $1,000 apiece to clients who quickly purchased thousands of dollars worth of goods before the victims were alerted. Computer hackers working for a Bonanno crew pulled off a similar operation, obtaining credit card numbers issued by Mexican banks. The fraud was masterminded by capo William “Big Willie” Riviello, who camouflaged the operation by working out of a Bronx mushroom-packaging warehouse.

Health care
: A New Jersey Genovese crew took over a company that arranged and managed group medical, dental, and eye-care programs for employers and unions. Administrators were strong-armed into approving excessive fees for spurious medical services, which the Mafia pocketed. The New Jersey attorney general’s office stumbled onto the scheme while eavesdropping on the crew’s bookmaking activities, but was unable to obtain an accurate estimate of the amount swindled.

Phone cards
: The Gambinos stole several million dollars by setting up companies providing prepaid phone cards. The mobsters distributed the cards through retail stores, mainly in neighborhoods populated by immigrants who use them to call overseas. Each card supplied by the Gambinos was typically sold for $20, but most were worthless after $2 or $3 in calls because they had not been programmed for the listed amount. No one was arrested for the flimflam of low-income victims, many of whom were illegal aliens fearful of complaining to the police. And guess who snared the illegal profits?

The Mafia’s continued activities in New York demonstrate that holdouts can survive and still prosper from gambling, loan-sharking, and protection rackets. But a wider resurgence rests heavily on the ability of a new crop of mafiosi to shift into modern avenues of crime. A revival would not surprise G. Robert Blakey, the principal author of the RICO law. He views the recent incursions of
the five families into financial and health industry crimes as the latest chapter of the Cosa Nostra’s Darwinian survival adaptability. Characterizing the Mafia as “a mirror image of capitalism and a recurring capitalist disease,” Blakey notes that it has always fed off technological innovations and subverted laws intended to govern industries, unions, and drug usage. “We don’t win the war against the Mob,” he advises, “all we can do is contain or control it.”

Blakey and other experienced anti-Mafia campaigners fret that the government’s devaluation of its perennial enemy will boomerang. “Keeping a boxer down is easier than knocking him down a second time,” Blakey says. “By withdrawing resources, we’ll just have to go back and complete the job at a larger cost.”

Despite pronouncements of unabated vigilance, law enforcement’s roller-coaster efforts against the traditional crime families are unmistakably in a downward cycle. FBI Director Mueller said as much in a National Public Radio radio interview in September 2003. In light of 9/11, he asked the public to “recognize that we can’t do everything,” and urged local authorities to pick up the slack left by the bureau’s emphasis on counterterrorism and newer priorities.

State prosecutors and police forces, confronting terrorism as well as violent crime pressures and budget restraints, show less zeal than previously to engage the Mob. In New York, the state Organized Crime Task Force, which was established to coordinate cases and tackle Mob-infested industries, had 140 investigators, lawyers, and backup personnel in the 1990s. The staff was gradually cut to about 60. A Republican administration stripped the agency of its independence, folded it into the state attorney general’s office, denied it a separate budget, and sometimes sidetracked it into investigations unrelated to organized crime. A new attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, a Democrat, maintains that he is trying to revitalize the unit but is hamstrung by budget restraints. Spitzer vaulted into national prominence by unearthing large-scale Wall Street, corporate, and insurance industry scandals. On the Cosa Nostra front, however, he made scant headlines in his first seven years in office. Spitzer considers the families “atrophied and much weaker” than in the 1990s but recognizes that “they are morphing into different areas.” Regardless of budget slashes, he vows that his “leaner, meaner” task force can still help throttle the mob—a pledge that might be hard to fulfill with reduced personnel and priority commitments to other areas.

Similar organized-crime and intelligence-gathering divisions in other states long plagued by the Cosa Nostra were eliminated or downsized. Officials in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, and Florida have minimized the Mafia’s contemporary importance and danger. Short on money, states are reluctant to pay for specialist training of organized-crime investigators and for undercover operations requiring extensive surveillance without guaranteed success. Phone taps and bugs, almost always essential for convictions, can tie up six agents daily for months—a staggering outlay for strapped local police and district attorneys faced with persistent violent crime problems.

Daniel Castleman, the prosecutor in charge of the Manhattan DA’s organized-crime division, wants more, not less, manpower committed against the Mob. “Anyone who thinks the Mafia is dead is engaged in wishful thinking,” he emphasizes. “There are still functioning crews ready, willing, and able to take advantage of human foibles. And there are still young hoods who want to emulate and perpetuate the gangster lifestyle.”

Unless the FBI vigorously reasserts itself, law-enforcement aspirations for quickly finishing off the Mafia appear dim. Frederick Martens, the former executive director of the Pennsylvania Crime Commission, and former chief of organized-crime intelligence for the New Jersey State Police, warns that federal and local authorities have been “deluded” into believing that the flood of convictions at the turn of the century signaled the Mafia’s doom. “I can’t help being reminded of the generals in Vietnam who used body counts, fictitious as they were, to claim victory,” he says.

While Mafia infrastructures appear to have been substantially damaged, Martens fears that the relaxed law-enforcement posture will rejuvenate the families. “Flexibility and durability are hallmarks of the LCN. Given a window of opportunity, they will take full advantage of it.”

The FBI’s overconfident assessment that the Bonanno and Colombo families were rudderless and moribund led to a painful setback at the end of the twentieth century. For eight years, the FBI saved manpower by using one squad to bird-dog both borgatas. The main result of this economy was a dramatic revival of the Bonannos under Joe Massino’s leadership. “The lesson we learned is that you cannot deemphasize vigilance on any of the families,” comments Bruce Mouw, who was temporarily in charge of the combined squad. “All are capable of comebacks.”

Renewed energy is even evident in the shell-shocked Colombo family. Through Bonanno defector James Big Louie Tartaglione, the FBI learned that
the Colombos, in the 2000s, asked other families to appraise a list of ten applicants selected for induction as made men. The ability to replenish its shattered ranks shows that the Colombo Mob still can count on a steady supply of recruits.

Another cautioner about a federal pullback is Andrew Maloney, the former U.S. Attorney on whose watch John Gotti was finally convicted. “If the government lays off, they’ll be back,” Maloney forecasts. “They [the Mafia] resemble a vampire; you have to put a stake through their heart and that has not been done.”

Throughout the onslaughts against their families, America’s wiseguys have retained a precious asset that contributes to their survival. It is the media’s romanticization of mobsters, subtly encouraging acceptance of the Mafia as just another aspect of the nation’s culture. The Oscar-winning
Godfather
movies in the 1970s set the stage for the public perception that a biased Wasp-run society had compelled a tiny segment of Italian-American immigrants to form criminal bands and resort to violence and stealth as their only means of acceptance and advancement. A raft of novels and films spiced with empathetic and comedic touches, such as
Prizzi’s Honor, Analyze This, The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight
, and
Bugsy
, cast some mobsters as high-living, lovable rogues. These films present them as dedicated criminals; yet, too often, they are given redeeming qualities, a revered code of honor, loyalty, and obedience. Their quest is simply the American ideal of obtaining wealth and respect, even if an occasional homicide and betrayal is required.