Friday, August 24, 2018
Remembering Sidney Korshak - Fabled Fixer for the Chicago Mob
Sidney R. Korshak, a labor lawyer who used his reputation as the Chicago mob's man in Los Angeles to become one of Hollywood's most fabled and influential fixers, died on Saturday at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 88.
His death came a day after that of his brother, Marshall Korshak, a longtime Chicago politician who died in a hospital there at the age of 85.
Although the two brothers shared a law office in Chicago for many years, their careers diverged considerably. Marshall Korshak led a distinctly public life as a glad-handing Democratic machine politician, serving, among other things, as State Senator and city treasurer and dispensing thousands of jobs as a ward boss. But Sidney Korshak pursued power in the shadows.
It was a tribute to Sidney Korshak's success that he was never indicted, despite repeated Federal and state investigations. And the widespread belief that he had in fact committed the very crimes the authorities could never prove made him an indispensible ally of leading Hollywood producers, corporate executives and politicians.
As his longtime friend and admirer, Robert Evans, the former head of Paramount, described it in his 1994 book, "The Kid Stays in the Picture," Mr. Korshak could work wonders with a single phone call, especially when labor problems were an issue.
"Let's just say that a nod from Korshak," Mr. Evans wrote, "and the teamsters change management. A nod from Korshak, and Santa Anita closes. A nod from Korshak, and Vegas shuts down. A nod from Korshak, and the Dodgers can suddenly play night baseball."
Sometimes, to be sure, it took more that one call. At one point when police had him under surveillance, Mr. Korshak, who was careful not to make business calls on telephones that might be tapped, was seen entering a public phone booth carrying a paper bag full of coins.
Although Mr. Korshak generally made his calls to solve major problems faced by clients like the Los Angeles Dodgers, Gulf and Western, M.C.A., Las Vegas hotels and other large corporations, he also used his clout on lesser matters.
Among the stories circulating yesterday, for example, was one about the time the comedian Alan King was turned away at a plush European hotel by a desk clerk who insisted that there were simply no rooms available. Mr. King used a lobby phone to call Mr. Korshak in Los Angeles and before he hung up, the clerk was knocking at the door of the phone booth to tell Mr. King that his suite was ready.
The son of a wealthy Chicago contractor, Mr. Korshak graduated from the University of Wisconsin and received a law degree from DePaul University in 1930. Within months of opening his law practice, according to extensive research conducted by Seymour M. Hersh and Jeff Gerth for The New York Times in 1976, he was defending members of the Al Capone crime syndicate.
His reputation was made in 1943 when a mobster on trial for extorting millions of dollars from Hollywood movie companies testified that when he had been introduced to Mr. Korshak by a high-ranking Capone mobster, he had been told, "Sidney is our man."
That became even more apparent in 1946, when a Chicago department store chain faced with demands for payoffs from rival unions engaged him, and the problem almost magically disappeared.
Within months, Mr. Korshak, who had been shunned by the city's business elite, was in demand for his services as a labor lawyer who could stave off demands from legitimate unions by arranging instant sweetheart contracts with friendly unions, often the teamsters.
Mr. Korshak, who sometimes boasted that he had paid off judges, solidified his standing among Chicago's business, civic and social leaders by giving ribald late-night parties featuring some of Chicago's most beautiful and willing showgirls."Sidney always had contact with high-class girls," a former Chicago judge told The Times in 1976. "Not your $50 girl, but girls costing $250 or more."
Mr. Korshak moved to California in the late 1940's and found Hollywood executives as eager as Chicago businessmen to hire him to insure labor peace.
He added to his reputation and his usefulness when it became known that he could arrange loans of millions of dollars from the teamsters' infamous Central States Pension Fund, which, among other things, helped finance the growth of the Las Vegas casino industry, often with Mr. Korshak serving as the intermediary and sometimes as silent partner.
It was a reflection of his power that when Mr. Korshak showed up unexpectedly at a Las Vegas hotel during a 1961 teamsters' meeting, he was immediately installed in the largest suite, even though the hotel had to dislodge the previous occupant: the union's president, Jimmy Hoffa.
In an era when mob figures were forever being gunned down by rival gangsters or sent to prison by determined prosecutors, Mr. Korshak seemed to lead a charmed life. That was partly because his mansion was protected by extensive security measures, partly because he was adept at using his role as a lawyer as a shield against probing grand jury questions and partly because he was careful to distance himself from the fruits of his own activities.
He never, for example, served as an officer of the various corporations formed to carry out his complex schemes. Even his legal work left no paper trail. Never licensed to practice in California, he maintained no Los Angeles office and had bills mailed from Chicago. He was famous for never taking notes or even reading contracts.
As a result, he became so valuable to the mob and its corrupt union allies that lower-level mobsters were ordered never to approach him, lest they tarnish his reputation for trust and integrity.
At the same time, he was so valuable to more or less legitimate businesses that the executives who hired him would never breathe a word against him.
Mr. Korshak is survived by his wife, Bernice; three children, Harry of London, and Stuart and Katy of Beverly Hills, and five grandchildren.
Marshall Korshak is survived by his wife, Edith; two daughters, Marjorie Gerson and Hope Rudnick of Chicago; four grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.
Thanks to Robert McG Thomas Jr. on January 22, 1996
As 2 of His Most Trusted Advisors Face Jail Time, Some Say @RealDonaldTrump Sounds Like Crime Family Mob Boss John Gotti
Following the conviction of two of his top lieutenants, Donald Trump has adopted the gangster parlance of another New Yorker famously terrorized by Robert Mueller: John Gotti. “I know all about flipping, for 30, 40 years, I’ve been watching flippers,” Trump explained in an interview with Fox News that aired Thursday, referring to the deal his former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, cut with federal prosecutors this week. “If you can say something bad about Donald Trump and you will go down to two years or three years, which is the deal he made, in all fairness to him, most people are going to do that,” he told Fox host Ainsley Earhardt, who appeared to be trying her best to maneuver the president toward more advantageous talking points. Instead, Trump lashed out again and again at those he has described as “rats” for speaking with federal law-enforcement officers about the conduct they witnessed in the course of his 2016 campaign.
If the White House was at all concerned about the president of the United States emulating La Cosa Nostra, they did nothing to stop Trump from happily publicizing his remarks on Twitter, where he shared multiple clips from the interview. In perhaps the most revealing moment, he suggested that cooperating with prosecutors should itself be made a crime—and that anything his former associates are telling Mueller about him are lies to save their own skin. “I have seen it many times,” he continued, leaning in toward Earhardt. “I have had many friends involved in this stuff. It’s called flipping, and it almost ought to be illegal.”
Trump’s casual admission that he has had “many friends” involved in flipping, or being flipped on themselves, is the sort of thing that would, in another era, shock Republicans and generate weeks of controversy. Instead, party leaders are largely excusing the president’s criminal idiom as just more locker-room talk. “Eight years ago to 10 years ago, Trump was not what I consider to be a pillar of virtue,” Orrin Hatch, the second-highest-ranking official of the U.S. Senate, told The New York Times on Wednesday, after Cohen testified that Trump had directed him to break the law by facilitating hush-money payments to two women who allege they had affairs with the future president. “I think most people in this country realize that Donald Trump comes from a different world. He comes from New York City, he comes from a slam-bang, difficult world.” Trump’s prolonged campaign to tar the Justice Department (often with sarcastic quotation marks around the word “Justice”) has itself been tacitly adopted by all but a few outspoken G.O.P. leaders.
On the campaign trail, Trump’s rough reputation as a brash Manhattan real-estate magnate was part of his appeal. More recently, however, the seedier side of his playboy lifestyle has overwhelmed the gilded facade: associations with criminals and con men, payoffs to women, out-of-court settlements, non-disclosure agreements. Trump’s hard-core fan base appears to be giving him a pass—the interview with Earhardt itself epitomized the casual indifference with which Fox News has treated the majority of the president’s scandals. Trump’s allies in Congress, however, sound increasingly worried that the appearance of criminality surrounding the president’s inner circle—and his tacit support of their behavior—will hurt the party’s chances of holding onto the House in November. The Times reports that “Publicly and privately, Republicans conceded that the guilty pleas did not look good and were not optimal heading into the midterm election—especially as the party struggles to keep its hold on the House.”
Still, as the Times notes, Republican lawmakers aren’t doing much about the convictions, or Trump’s Goodfellas-inspired response, other than to distance themselves from his most overt indulgence of white-collar crime. (On Wednesday, Trump called Manafort “brave” for refusing to “break” under pressure.) “It is bad news for the country, bad news for these people involved who either pled or were found guilty,” Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama told the Times, but said he didn’t want to get too involved while he focused on appropriation bills: “I don’t know other than what I read and see.” Senator Lindsey Graham described his “No. 1 goal right now” as to “keep doing my day job” and let Mueller do his.
For now, Republicans are pinning their hopes on the ability of the Trump-media industrial complex, namely Fox News, to keep the heat off Trump while helping to discredit Mueller’s investigation into the president. Trump himself seems to be betting on the booming economy as a firewall in November. “I don’t know how you can impeach somebody who’s done a great job,” Trump told Earhardt. If he were impeached, he argued, “Everybody would be very poor.” But the president’s habit of talking like a mafioso isn’t doing the party any favors. When asked Thursday whether he agreed with Trump that flipping should be illegal, Texas Senator John Cornyn—a former state Supreme Court justice and attorney general—perfectly encapsulated how the G.O.P. has found itself boxed in by the president’s “slam-bang” understanding of law and order. “Uh, I have to think about that a little more,” Cornyn told reporters on Capitol Hill. “That’s uh—I’ve never heard that argument before.
Thanks to Tina Nguyen.
If the White House was at all concerned about the president of the United States emulating La Cosa Nostra, they did nothing to stop Trump from happily publicizing his remarks on Twitter, where he shared multiple clips from the interview. In perhaps the most revealing moment, he suggested that cooperating with prosecutors should itself be made a crime—and that anything his former associates are telling Mueller about him are lies to save their own skin. “I have seen it many times,” he continued, leaning in toward Earhardt. “I have had many friends involved in this stuff. It’s called flipping, and it almost ought to be illegal.”
Trump’s casual admission that he has had “many friends” involved in flipping, or being flipped on themselves, is the sort of thing that would, in another era, shock Republicans and generate weeks of controversy. Instead, party leaders are largely excusing the president’s criminal idiom as just more locker-room talk. “Eight years ago to 10 years ago, Trump was not what I consider to be a pillar of virtue,” Orrin Hatch, the second-highest-ranking official of the U.S. Senate, told The New York Times on Wednesday, after Cohen testified that Trump had directed him to break the law by facilitating hush-money payments to two women who allege they had affairs with the future president. “I think most people in this country realize that Donald Trump comes from a different world. He comes from New York City, he comes from a slam-bang, difficult world.” Trump’s prolonged campaign to tar the Justice Department (often with sarcastic quotation marks around the word “Justice”) has itself been tacitly adopted by all but a few outspoken G.O.P. leaders.
On the campaign trail, Trump’s rough reputation as a brash Manhattan real-estate magnate was part of his appeal. More recently, however, the seedier side of his playboy lifestyle has overwhelmed the gilded facade: associations with criminals and con men, payoffs to women, out-of-court settlements, non-disclosure agreements. Trump’s hard-core fan base appears to be giving him a pass—the interview with Earhardt itself epitomized the casual indifference with which Fox News has treated the majority of the president’s scandals. Trump’s allies in Congress, however, sound increasingly worried that the appearance of criminality surrounding the president’s inner circle—and his tacit support of their behavior—will hurt the party’s chances of holding onto the House in November. The Times reports that “Publicly and privately, Republicans conceded that the guilty pleas did not look good and were not optimal heading into the midterm election—especially as the party struggles to keep its hold on the House.”
Still, as the Times notes, Republican lawmakers aren’t doing much about the convictions, or Trump’s Goodfellas-inspired response, other than to distance themselves from his most overt indulgence of white-collar crime. (On Wednesday, Trump called Manafort “brave” for refusing to “break” under pressure.) “It is bad news for the country, bad news for these people involved who either pled or were found guilty,” Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama told the Times, but said he didn’t want to get too involved while he focused on appropriation bills: “I don’t know other than what I read and see.” Senator Lindsey Graham described his “No. 1 goal right now” as to “keep doing my day job” and let Mueller do his.
For now, Republicans are pinning their hopes on the ability of the Trump-media industrial complex, namely Fox News, to keep the heat off Trump while helping to discredit Mueller’s investigation into the president. Trump himself seems to be betting on the booming economy as a firewall in November. “I don’t know how you can impeach somebody who’s done a great job,” Trump told Earhardt. If he were impeached, he argued, “Everybody would be very poor.” But the president’s habit of talking like a mafioso isn’t doing the party any favors. When asked Thursday whether he agreed with Trump that flipping should be illegal, Texas Senator John Cornyn—a former state Supreme Court justice and attorney general—perfectly encapsulated how the G.O.P. has found itself boxed in by the president’s “slam-bang” understanding of law and order. “Uh, I have to think about that a little more,” Cornyn told reporters on Capitol Hill. “That’s uh—I’ve never heard that argument before.
Thanks to Tina Nguyen.
Monday, August 20, 2018
Leadership of MS-13 Attempt to Expand the Gang into #Mafia Organized Crime Family with "The Program"
The meeting in Richmond, Va., quickly dispensed with routine matters, including introductions, before the senior leadership got down to business. Teamwork and recruitment, said one top official, needed improvement. Also, anyone wanting to kill a rival must secure prior approval.
Mara Salvatrucha, the violent international street gang known as MS-13, had its share of headaches by the time of its fall 2015 meeting, which was surreptitiously recorded by U.S. authorities. One proposed solution was to better manage its estimated 10,000 U.S. members along the lines of other corporate-style criminal gangs, such as the Mafia or drug cartels.
MS-13 leaders created a catchphrase, “The Program,” for widening its influence and improving cash flow. “What we are asking is total cooperation,” a top leader told the group by speaker phone from El Salvador. “Let’s all work together, united, you know.”
For years, MS-13’s impact on the U.S. was local—confined to specific neighborhoods and cities scattered across the country as the gang used violence to secure and hold turf.
Then, federal officials tracked an alarming development. As MS-13’s influence grew, so did its ambition to leverage its network of local franchises into a cohesive, national brand. That would vault MS-13 into territory once occupied by the Mafia, and now held by Mexican drug cartels.
A series of trials that wrapped up this summer in Boston shows how MS-13 is pushing to make that leap by streamlining its management structure and creating uniform standards, much like a multinational company. The question, one that will determine whether MS-13 can make the jump to national significance, is whether that transformation can impose order on its unruly, violent young members.
The group, partly because of its success in the U.S., has become a political football, with President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions using gruesome acts by MS-13 members to push the administration’s tight immigration policy. The attorney general has called MS-13 “one of the most dangerous groups in America,” while Mr. Trump has declared its members to be “thugs” and “animals.” Democrats and lawmakers in favor of looser restrictions say their rhetoric is overblown.
Federal and state law-enforcement officials say MS-13 gang membership has grown by several thousand members over the past decade or so. It stretches to at least 40 states and the District of Columbia, according to the Justice Department.
“They have definitely showed their organizational capacity in terms of ordering violence and in terms of recruiting and replenishing the ranks,” said Derek N. Benner, a top official at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations.
MS-13 has drawn recruits by branding itself as an ultraviolent enterprise, according to federal officials, a gang image of protection and status. Yet while it dabbles in drugs, street robberies and petty extortion, its profits are minuscule. Federal raids of MS-13 residences typically net little more than a handful of knives, loose cash and occasionally a gun.
Dues range from $15 to $30 a month, largely paid by MS-13 members who work as laborers, construction workers or dishwashers. Most of the money is wired to gang leaders in El Salvador, to pay for phones and weapons. What’s left is pooled locally for knives, guns and recreational drugs.
“The way they are acting right now, they are not going to reach the level of organization of, say, the Mexican Mafia or the Italian mob,” said George Norris, an investigator with the Anne Arundel County, Md., State’s Attorney’s Office and a court-sanctioned gang expert. “They are just too violent. As other gangs have discovered, newsworthy violence is bad for business.”
MS-13 was founded in the 1980s in and around Los Angeles by immigrants from El Salvador, who had fled their country’s civil war. In their new neighborhoods, they found themselves surrounded by hostile gangs. For protection, they formed their own group, which they called Mara Salvatrucha.
After an alliance with the Mexican Mafia for protection inside California prisons, Mara Salvatrucha became MS-13—M is the 13th letter of the alphabet, a sign of respect for their new partners.
U.S. immigration crackdowns in the 1980s ended up sending members of MS-13 to El Salvador, where the gang took root and transformed into a transnational enterprise.
The first time federal agents began tracking the MS-13 organizational push came during a 2013 gang-wide conference call. The line was shared by about two dozen leaders in California and El Salvador, according to law-enforcement officials and court records. The goal of the call was consolidating members “under a single, cohesive leadership structure,” U.S. prosecutors said in court papers.
“The sales pitch was that everybody in MS-13 will benefit,” a federal law-enforcement official said. “The local members would get more money, guns, cars and support from the gang if they were arrested. Meanwhile, larger amounts of money would flow back to the leadership in El Salvador.”
While prosecutors in New Jersey were tracking the gang’s efforts to expand, federal agents and prosecutors in Boston were in the early stages of an MS-13 investigation in the Boston area, a probe that resulted in charges against 61 alleged members from at least eight cliques. Many who later pleaded guilty provided information about the gang’s inner workings.
Five gang members have testified in court. All were immigrants from either El Salvador or Honduras who entered the U.S. illegally. Some said they were recruited to join MS-13 by neighbors, friends at work or school classmates.
They admitted to committing street crimes, assaults and killings largely targeting rivals and suspected informants. Their weapon of choice was a machete because, as one gang member said, it allowed him to “cut somebody’s head off easily, and that person will not scream or make noise.”
Mauricio Sanchez testified he traveled to the U.S. from Honduras in 2008, and once in the Boston area, he was recruited by MS-13 members. After joining the Eastside Clique in 2013, he said he embraced the gang’s mandate for violence and focused his energy on “doing hits on the rivals.”
Mr. Sanchez described how he and other members of the Eastside Clique chased members of the rival 18th Street gang and nearly beat one to death. “He was a small guy,” testified Mr. Sanchez, now 30. “I hit him on the head, and we were all beating him…. He looked like he was in bad shape.”
Jose Hernandez Miguel testified he was deported to El Salvador in 2009 but returned two years later. Members of his Everett clique chipped in $1,000 to help pay for his illegal re-entry into the U.S.
Mr. Hernandez Miguel and other witnesses explained how members were kept in line under the organizational push from El Salvador. Short beatings were given for drinking too much or missing too many meetings. Before then, local cliques were largely autonomous.
Two members were savagely kicked after MS-13 leaders in El Salvador saw a photo of graffiti on a high school wall hailing their clique without permission. At the time, the local clique was essentially on probation, awaiting the arrival of a new leader from El Salvador.
Josue Alexis De Paz aspired to join the gang while living in El Salvador. He sold drugs, kept an eye out for rivals and extorted delivery drivers.
After being interrogated about his work by police, Mr. De Paz’s family paid $9,000 to have the teenager smuggled into the U.S., and, they hoped, out of trouble. He settled near Boston and soon joined the Everett clique.
Mr. De Paz, now 21, became a junior associate. In April, he testified how suspicion grew that another member was a snitch. Mr. De Paz and an associate were told to “make the soup,” code for killing the suspected informant, 16-year-old Jose Aguilar Villanueva, known by friends as Fantasma.
In a deserted park, Mr. De Paz testified he grabbed Mr. Aquilar Villanueva from behind and held him, while the other man stabbed the teenager.
“Then Fantasma kicked him,” Mr. De Paz said in court. “I took out my folding knife and I also stabbed him.”
They left the teen for dead and tossed away their knives and bloody clothes. Gang leaders were impressed by the work and promised to promote them to full gang status. The two associates were arrested before they got the chance. Only later did they learn Mr. Aguilar Villanueva was never an informant.
Despite their obsession with betrayal, the Boston-area MS-13 members didn’t suspect anything of the man who turned out to be their greatest threat,
Federal agents had recruited an El Salvadoran man convicted in Florida on federal charges of trafficking drugs for Mexican cartels. He returned to the U.S. from El Salvador and took the role of an unlicensed taxicab driver, shuttling members of more than a half-dozen MS-13 cliques in the area.
For nearly three years, the informant secretly recorded conversations in his car and at gang gatherings. He captured on video the promotions of junior associates—chequeos—to full-fledged gang member—homeboy—a process that included a ceremonial 13-second beating.
As trusted member of Eastside Loco Salvatrucha, the informant participated in the FBI’s biggest intelligence coup, secretly recording the December 2015 meeting in Richmond, Va. The informant drove gang leaders to meet with more than a dozen other leaders from around the U.S. His recordings, prosecutors said in court papers, provided rare “firsthand insight into the inner workings of MS-13, including its organizational structure and hierarchy.”
The meeting was held at the home of the head of the gang’s East Coast program, Jose Adan Martinez Castro, 28, who has since pleaded guilty to federal racketeering charges and awaits sentencing.
Mr. Castro kicked off the gathering by explaining he had been tapped by senior gang members in El Salvador to take charge. There was too much infighting among U.S. cliques, he told the group, according to court papers that included a lengthy summary of the informant’s recording.
The gang leader provided guidance on how to conduct “hits” on rivals and informants, telling other leaders that such killings “have to be coordinated and requested beforehand.” He cautioned members against wearing Nike Cortez sneakers because police had figured out it was a gang favorite. He encouraged more drug dealing because he had extra product to sell.
The local leader dialed his counterpart in El Salvador, Edwin Manica Flores. One by one, those in attendance picked up the cellphone and introduced themselves to Mr. Flores, who was described in court papers as “one of the El Salvador-based leaders of MS-13’s East Coast Program.”
Mr. Flores, who is in custody in El Salvador, couldn’t be reached for comment.
During the meeting, Mr. Flores warned associates that their enemies “are filling up the turfs around us” and that they would benefit financially from cooperation.
The MS-13 leader, court papers allege, also emphasized the need for careful vetting of members and associates.
“You guys know how hot things are,” the leader said, according to prosecutors. “Be very careful, all of you that are there, brother, be very careful…. The FBI gives them a car, gives them money, gives them everything, and when they give them all that, they loosen their tongues.”
Mr. Flores’ warning was prescient, but late. Within weeks, FBI agents and police were fanning across Boston with arrest warrants.
Thanks to Del Quentin Wilber.
Mara Salvatrucha, the violent international street gang known as MS-13, had its share of headaches by the time of its fall 2015 meeting, which was surreptitiously recorded by U.S. authorities. One proposed solution was to better manage its estimated 10,000 U.S. members along the lines of other corporate-style criminal gangs, such as the Mafia or drug cartels.
MS-13 leaders created a catchphrase, “The Program,” for widening its influence and improving cash flow. “What we are asking is total cooperation,” a top leader told the group by speaker phone from El Salvador. “Let’s all work together, united, you know.”
For years, MS-13’s impact on the U.S. was local—confined to specific neighborhoods and cities scattered across the country as the gang used violence to secure and hold turf.
Then, federal officials tracked an alarming development. As MS-13’s influence grew, so did its ambition to leverage its network of local franchises into a cohesive, national brand. That would vault MS-13 into territory once occupied by the Mafia, and now held by Mexican drug cartels.
A series of trials that wrapped up this summer in Boston shows how MS-13 is pushing to make that leap by streamlining its management structure and creating uniform standards, much like a multinational company. The question, one that will determine whether MS-13 can make the jump to national significance, is whether that transformation can impose order on its unruly, violent young members.
The group, partly because of its success in the U.S., has become a political football, with President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions using gruesome acts by MS-13 members to push the administration’s tight immigration policy. The attorney general has called MS-13 “one of the most dangerous groups in America,” while Mr. Trump has declared its members to be “thugs” and “animals.” Democrats and lawmakers in favor of looser restrictions say their rhetoric is overblown.
Federal and state law-enforcement officials say MS-13 gang membership has grown by several thousand members over the past decade or so. It stretches to at least 40 states and the District of Columbia, according to the Justice Department.
“They have definitely showed their organizational capacity in terms of ordering violence and in terms of recruiting and replenishing the ranks,” said Derek N. Benner, a top official at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations.
MS-13 has drawn recruits by branding itself as an ultraviolent enterprise, according to federal officials, a gang image of protection and status. Yet while it dabbles in drugs, street robberies and petty extortion, its profits are minuscule. Federal raids of MS-13 residences typically net little more than a handful of knives, loose cash and occasionally a gun.
Dues range from $15 to $30 a month, largely paid by MS-13 members who work as laborers, construction workers or dishwashers. Most of the money is wired to gang leaders in El Salvador, to pay for phones and weapons. What’s left is pooled locally for knives, guns and recreational drugs.
“The way they are acting right now, they are not going to reach the level of organization of, say, the Mexican Mafia or the Italian mob,” said George Norris, an investigator with the Anne Arundel County, Md., State’s Attorney’s Office and a court-sanctioned gang expert. “They are just too violent. As other gangs have discovered, newsworthy violence is bad for business.”
MS-13 was founded in the 1980s in and around Los Angeles by immigrants from El Salvador, who had fled their country’s civil war. In their new neighborhoods, they found themselves surrounded by hostile gangs. For protection, they formed their own group, which they called Mara Salvatrucha.
After an alliance with the Mexican Mafia for protection inside California prisons, Mara Salvatrucha became MS-13—M is the 13th letter of the alphabet, a sign of respect for their new partners.
U.S. immigration crackdowns in the 1980s ended up sending members of MS-13 to El Salvador, where the gang took root and transformed into a transnational enterprise.
The first time federal agents began tracking the MS-13 organizational push came during a 2013 gang-wide conference call. The line was shared by about two dozen leaders in California and El Salvador, according to law-enforcement officials and court records. The goal of the call was consolidating members “under a single, cohesive leadership structure,” U.S. prosecutors said in court papers.
“The sales pitch was that everybody in MS-13 will benefit,” a federal law-enforcement official said. “The local members would get more money, guns, cars and support from the gang if they were arrested. Meanwhile, larger amounts of money would flow back to the leadership in El Salvador.”
While prosecutors in New Jersey were tracking the gang’s efforts to expand, federal agents and prosecutors in Boston were in the early stages of an MS-13 investigation in the Boston area, a probe that resulted in charges against 61 alleged members from at least eight cliques. Many who later pleaded guilty provided information about the gang’s inner workings.
Five gang members have testified in court. All were immigrants from either El Salvador or Honduras who entered the U.S. illegally. Some said they were recruited to join MS-13 by neighbors, friends at work or school classmates.
They admitted to committing street crimes, assaults and killings largely targeting rivals and suspected informants. Their weapon of choice was a machete because, as one gang member said, it allowed him to “cut somebody’s head off easily, and that person will not scream or make noise.”
Mauricio Sanchez testified he traveled to the U.S. from Honduras in 2008, and once in the Boston area, he was recruited by MS-13 members. After joining the Eastside Clique in 2013, he said he embraced the gang’s mandate for violence and focused his energy on “doing hits on the rivals.”
Mr. Sanchez described how he and other members of the Eastside Clique chased members of the rival 18th Street gang and nearly beat one to death. “He was a small guy,” testified Mr. Sanchez, now 30. “I hit him on the head, and we were all beating him…. He looked like he was in bad shape.”
Jose Hernandez Miguel testified he was deported to El Salvador in 2009 but returned two years later. Members of his Everett clique chipped in $1,000 to help pay for his illegal re-entry into the U.S.
Mr. Hernandez Miguel and other witnesses explained how members were kept in line under the organizational push from El Salvador. Short beatings were given for drinking too much or missing too many meetings. Before then, local cliques were largely autonomous.
Two members were savagely kicked after MS-13 leaders in El Salvador saw a photo of graffiti on a high school wall hailing their clique without permission. At the time, the local clique was essentially on probation, awaiting the arrival of a new leader from El Salvador.
Josue Alexis De Paz aspired to join the gang while living in El Salvador. He sold drugs, kept an eye out for rivals and extorted delivery drivers.
After being interrogated about his work by police, Mr. De Paz’s family paid $9,000 to have the teenager smuggled into the U.S., and, they hoped, out of trouble. He settled near Boston and soon joined the Everett clique.
Mr. De Paz, now 21, became a junior associate. In April, he testified how suspicion grew that another member was a snitch. Mr. De Paz and an associate were told to “make the soup,” code for killing the suspected informant, 16-year-old Jose Aguilar Villanueva, known by friends as Fantasma.
In a deserted park, Mr. De Paz testified he grabbed Mr. Aquilar Villanueva from behind and held him, while the other man stabbed the teenager.
“Then Fantasma kicked him,” Mr. De Paz said in court. “I took out my folding knife and I also stabbed him.”
They left the teen for dead and tossed away their knives and bloody clothes. Gang leaders were impressed by the work and promised to promote them to full gang status. The two associates were arrested before they got the chance. Only later did they learn Mr. Aguilar Villanueva was never an informant.
Despite their obsession with betrayal, the Boston-area MS-13 members didn’t suspect anything of the man who turned out to be their greatest threat,
Federal agents had recruited an El Salvadoran man convicted in Florida on federal charges of trafficking drugs for Mexican cartels. He returned to the U.S. from El Salvador and took the role of an unlicensed taxicab driver, shuttling members of more than a half-dozen MS-13 cliques in the area.
For nearly three years, the informant secretly recorded conversations in his car and at gang gatherings. He captured on video the promotions of junior associates—chequeos—to full-fledged gang member—homeboy—a process that included a ceremonial 13-second beating.
As trusted member of Eastside Loco Salvatrucha, the informant participated in the FBI’s biggest intelligence coup, secretly recording the December 2015 meeting in Richmond, Va. The informant drove gang leaders to meet with more than a dozen other leaders from around the U.S. His recordings, prosecutors said in court papers, provided rare “firsthand insight into the inner workings of MS-13, including its organizational structure and hierarchy.”
The meeting was held at the home of the head of the gang’s East Coast program, Jose Adan Martinez Castro, 28, who has since pleaded guilty to federal racketeering charges and awaits sentencing.
Mr. Castro kicked off the gathering by explaining he had been tapped by senior gang members in El Salvador to take charge. There was too much infighting among U.S. cliques, he told the group, according to court papers that included a lengthy summary of the informant’s recording.
The gang leader provided guidance on how to conduct “hits” on rivals and informants, telling other leaders that such killings “have to be coordinated and requested beforehand.” He cautioned members against wearing Nike Cortez sneakers because police had figured out it was a gang favorite. He encouraged more drug dealing because he had extra product to sell.
The local leader dialed his counterpart in El Salvador, Edwin Manica Flores. One by one, those in attendance picked up the cellphone and introduced themselves to Mr. Flores, who was described in court papers as “one of the El Salvador-based leaders of MS-13’s East Coast Program.”
Mr. Flores, who is in custody in El Salvador, couldn’t be reached for comment.
During the meeting, Mr. Flores warned associates that their enemies “are filling up the turfs around us” and that they would benefit financially from cooperation.
The MS-13 leader, court papers allege, also emphasized the need for careful vetting of members and associates.
“You guys know how hot things are,” the leader said, according to prosecutors. “Be very careful, all of you that are there, brother, be very careful…. The FBI gives them a car, gives them money, gives them everything, and when they give them all that, they loosen their tongues.”
Mr. Flores’ warning was prescient, but late. Within weeks, FBI agents and police were fanning across Boston with arrest warrants.
Thanks to Del Quentin Wilber.
Friday, August 17, 2018
Loan Shark Ronald “Ronnie G” Giallanzo, Acting Captain in the Bonanno Organized Crime Family, Imprisoned for Racketeering Conspiracy
In federal court in Brooklyn, Ronald “Ronnie G” Giallanzo, an acting captain in the Bonanno organized crime family of La Cosa Nostra, was sentenced by Chief United States District Judge Dora L. Irizarry to a total of 14 years’ imprisonment for racketeering conspiracy, including predicate acts of extortionate extension and collection of credit, as well as a related violation of the conditions of supervised release imposed for a prior racketeering conviction. As part of his plea agreement with the government, the Court also ordered Giallanzo to pay $1.25 million in forfeiture and sell his mansion in Howard Beach, Queens, which was constructed using the criminal proceeds of the defendant’s loansharking business. Giallanzo was also ordered to pay $268,000 in restitution to his victims. Giallanzo pleaded guilty in March and June 2018.
Richard P. Donoghue, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, and William F. Sweeney, Jr., Assistant Director-in-Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation, New York Field Office (FBI), announced the sentence.
“Today’s sentence punishes a violent mobster for running a massive loansharking operation that victimized a community and earned him millions in illicit profits,” stated United States Attorney Donoghue. “Giallanzo is headed to prison, forced to sell his mansion built on ill-gotten proceeds and held responsible for brazenly committing many of his crimes from behind bars while serving another organized crime-related sentence. Together with our law enforcement partners, this Office will continue to vigorously investigate and prosecute members and associates of organized crime.” Mr. Donoghue thanked the Queens County District Attorney’s Office, the New York City Police Department and the U.S. Probation Department of the Eastern District of New York for their assistance in the investigation.
“Members of these mafia families continue to prey upon the people of their communities, lining their pockets on the backs of victims through intimidation and acts of violence,” stated FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Sweeney. “While these criminals lead lavish lifestyles, their victims struggle through years of financial distress and the constant fear of what will happen to them when they can no longer pay. The FBI New York Joint Organized Crime Task Force has been doggedly tracking members of the mafia for decades, and our work to round them up and put them in prison will not stop.”
Between 1998 and 2017, including eight years while incarcerated on a prior racketeering conviction and for nearly two years while on supervised release, Giallanzo ran a loansharking operation in which he loaned millions of dollars in cash at exorbitant weekly interest rates. Giallanzo then directed a crew of Bonanno family soldiers and associates to enforce the collection of the debts through violence and threats of physical injury. Giallanzo used more than $1 million of the extortion proceeds to purchase, reconstruct and furnish a mansion, which featured five bedrooms and five bathrooms, radiant heated floors, high-end appliances, a built-in aquarium, wine cellar, home gym, three kitchens and a salt water pool with a waterfall.
Richard P. Donoghue, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, and William F. Sweeney, Jr., Assistant Director-in-Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation, New York Field Office (FBI), announced the sentence.
“Today’s sentence punishes a violent mobster for running a massive loansharking operation that victimized a community and earned him millions in illicit profits,” stated United States Attorney Donoghue. “Giallanzo is headed to prison, forced to sell his mansion built on ill-gotten proceeds and held responsible for brazenly committing many of his crimes from behind bars while serving another organized crime-related sentence. Together with our law enforcement partners, this Office will continue to vigorously investigate and prosecute members and associates of organized crime.” Mr. Donoghue thanked the Queens County District Attorney’s Office, the New York City Police Department and the U.S. Probation Department of the Eastern District of New York for their assistance in the investigation.
“Members of these mafia families continue to prey upon the people of their communities, lining their pockets on the backs of victims through intimidation and acts of violence,” stated FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Sweeney. “While these criminals lead lavish lifestyles, their victims struggle through years of financial distress and the constant fear of what will happen to them when they can no longer pay. The FBI New York Joint Organized Crime Task Force has been doggedly tracking members of the mafia for decades, and our work to round them up and put them in prison will not stop.”
Between 1998 and 2017, including eight years while incarcerated on a prior racketeering conviction and for nearly two years while on supervised release, Giallanzo ran a loansharking operation in which he loaned millions of dollars in cash at exorbitant weekly interest rates. Giallanzo then directed a crew of Bonanno family soldiers and associates to enforce the collection of the debts through violence and threats of physical injury. Giallanzo used more than $1 million of the extortion proceeds to purchase, reconstruct and furnish a mansion, which featured five bedrooms and five bathrooms, radiant heated floors, high-end appliances, a built-in aquarium, wine cellar, home gym, three kitchens and a salt water pool with a waterfall.
Monday, August 13, 2018
Have Connections to the #Mafia Marked @RealDonaldTrump's Entire Career?
Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas titled their classic group portrait of Harry S. Truman’s foreign policy team, “The Wise Men.” A book about Donald Trump’s associations might be called “The Wise Guys.”
Mario Puzo would’ve been just the man to write it. Martin Scorsese could option the movie rights. And if he’s not in prison when filming starts, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort deserves a role. Though Manafort hasn’t been accused of Mafia membership, Smooth Paulie certainly acts the part, judging from testimony at his trial in federal court on charges of fraud and tax evasion. He has a closet full of suits worthy of John Gotti (though even the Dapper Don might have balked at an ostrich-skin windbreaker) and a maze of offshore bank accounts dense enough to addle Meyer Lansky.
When Manafort’s turncoat lieutenant Rick Gates took the stand to detail their alleged conspiracies, I was transported to the day back in 1992 when Gotti’s underboss Sammy Gravano began singing at the federal courthouse in Brooklyn. Gotti’s lawyers attacked Sammy the Bull by demanding to know how many people he’d whacked. Manafort’s team asked Gates how many affairs he’s had.
If it seems harsh to compare Manafort to a mobster, take it up with President Trump, who got the ball rolling with a tweet before the trial began. “Looking back at history, who was treated worse, [Al] Capone, legendary mob boss . . . or Paul Manafort?” Trump mused. And the president ought to know: He has spent plenty of time in mobbed-up milieus. As many journalists have documented — the late Wayne Barrett and decorated investigator David Cay Johnston most deeply — Trump’s trail was blazed through one business after another notorious for corruption by organized crime.
New York construction, for starters. In 1988, Vincent “the Fish” Cafaro of the Genovese crime family testified before a U.S. Senate committee concerning the Mafia’s control of building projects in New York. Construction unions and concrete contractors were deeply dirty, Cafaro confirmed, and four of the city’s five crime families worked cooperatively to keep it that way.
This would not have been news to Trump, whose early political mentor and personal lawyer was Roy Cohn, consigliere to such dons as Fat Tony Salerno and Carmine Galante. After Cohn guided the brash young developer through the gutters of city politics to win permits for Trump Plaza and Trump Tower, it happened that Trump elected to build primarily with concrete rather than steel. He bought the mud at inflated prices from S&A Concrete, co-owned by Cohn’s client Salerno and Paul Castellano, boss of the Gambino family.
Coincidence? Fuhgeddaboudit.
Trump moved next into the New Jersey casino business, which was every bit as clean as it sounds. State officials merely shrugged when Trump bought a piece of land from associates of Philadelphia mob boss “Little Nicky” Scarfo for roughly $500,000 more than it was worth. However, this and other ties persuaded police in Australia to block Trump’s bid to build a casino in Sydney in 1987, citing Trump’s “Mafia connections.”
His gambling interests led him into the world of boxing promotion, where Trump became chums with fight impresario Don King, a former Cleveland numbers runner. (Trump once told me that he owes his remarkable coiffure to King, who advised the future president, from personal experience, that outlandish hair is great PR.) King hasn’t been convicted since the 1960s, when he did time for stomping a man to death. But investigators at the FBI and U.S. Senate concluded that his Mafia ties ran from Cleveland to New York, Las Vegas to Atlantic City. Mobsters “were looking to launder illicit cash,” wrote one sleuth. “Boxing, of all the sports, was perhaps the most accommodating laundromat, what with its international subculture of unsavory characters who play by their own rules.” But an even more accommodating laundromat came along: luxury real estate — yet another mob-adjacent field in which the Trump name has loomed large. Because buyers of high-end properties often hide their identities, it’s impossible to say how many Russian Mafia oligarchs own Trump-branded condos. Donald Trump Jr. gave a hint in 2008: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”
For instance: In 2013, federal prosecutors indicted Russian mob boss Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov and 33 others on charges related to a gambling ring operating from two Trump Tower condos that allegedly laundered more than $100 million. A few months later, the same Mr. Tokhtakhounov, a fugitive from U.S. justice, was seen on the red carpet at Trump’s Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.
Obviously, not everyone in these industries is corrupt, and if Donald Trump spent four decades rubbing elbows with wiseguys and never got dirty, he has nothing to worry about from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. But does he look unworried to you?
Thanks to David Von Drehle.
Mario Puzo would’ve been just the man to write it. Martin Scorsese could option the movie rights. And if he’s not in prison when filming starts, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort deserves a role. Though Manafort hasn’t been accused of Mafia membership, Smooth Paulie certainly acts the part, judging from testimony at his trial in federal court on charges of fraud and tax evasion. He has a closet full of suits worthy of John Gotti (though even the Dapper Don might have balked at an ostrich-skin windbreaker) and a maze of offshore bank accounts dense enough to addle Meyer Lansky.
When Manafort’s turncoat lieutenant Rick Gates took the stand to detail their alleged conspiracies, I was transported to the day back in 1992 when Gotti’s underboss Sammy Gravano began singing at the federal courthouse in Brooklyn. Gotti’s lawyers attacked Sammy the Bull by demanding to know how many people he’d whacked. Manafort’s team asked Gates how many affairs he’s had.
If it seems harsh to compare Manafort to a mobster, take it up with President Trump, who got the ball rolling with a tweet before the trial began. “Looking back at history, who was treated worse, [Al] Capone, legendary mob boss . . . or Paul Manafort?” Trump mused. And the president ought to know: He has spent plenty of time in mobbed-up milieus. As many journalists have documented — the late Wayne Barrett and decorated investigator David Cay Johnston most deeply — Trump’s trail was blazed through one business after another notorious for corruption by organized crime.
New York construction, for starters. In 1988, Vincent “the Fish” Cafaro of the Genovese crime family testified before a U.S. Senate committee concerning the Mafia’s control of building projects in New York. Construction unions and concrete contractors were deeply dirty, Cafaro confirmed, and four of the city’s five crime families worked cooperatively to keep it that way.
This would not have been news to Trump, whose early political mentor and personal lawyer was Roy Cohn, consigliere to such dons as Fat Tony Salerno and Carmine Galante. After Cohn guided the brash young developer through the gutters of city politics to win permits for Trump Plaza and Trump Tower, it happened that Trump elected to build primarily with concrete rather than steel. He bought the mud at inflated prices from S&A Concrete, co-owned by Cohn’s client Salerno and Paul Castellano, boss of the Gambino family.
Coincidence? Fuhgeddaboudit.
Trump moved next into the New Jersey casino business, which was every bit as clean as it sounds. State officials merely shrugged when Trump bought a piece of land from associates of Philadelphia mob boss “Little Nicky” Scarfo for roughly $500,000 more than it was worth. However, this and other ties persuaded police in Australia to block Trump’s bid to build a casino in Sydney in 1987, citing Trump’s “Mafia connections.”
His gambling interests led him into the world of boxing promotion, where Trump became chums with fight impresario Don King, a former Cleveland numbers runner. (Trump once told me that he owes his remarkable coiffure to King, who advised the future president, from personal experience, that outlandish hair is great PR.) King hasn’t been convicted since the 1960s, when he did time for stomping a man to death. But investigators at the FBI and U.S. Senate concluded that his Mafia ties ran from Cleveland to New York, Las Vegas to Atlantic City. Mobsters “were looking to launder illicit cash,” wrote one sleuth. “Boxing, of all the sports, was perhaps the most accommodating laundromat, what with its international subculture of unsavory characters who play by their own rules.” But an even more accommodating laundromat came along: luxury real estate — yet another mob-adjacent field in which the Trump name has loomed large. Because buyers of high-end properties often hide their identities, it’s impossible to say how many Russian Mafia oligarchs own Trump-branded condos. Donald Trump Jr. gave a hint in 2008: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”
For instance: In 2013, federal prosecutors indicted Russian mob boss Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov and 33 others on charges related to a gambling ring operating from two Trump Tower condos that allegedly laundered more than $100 million. A few months later, the same Mr. Tokhtakhounov, a fugitive from U.S. justice, was seen on the red carpet at Trump’s Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.
Obviously, not everyone in these industries is corrupt, and if Donald Trump spent four decades rubbing elbows with wiseguys and never got dirty, he has nothing to worry about from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. But does he look unworried to you?
Thanks to David Von Drehle.
Friday, August 10, 2018
Omarosa - Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House - Reputedly Backed by Secret Recordings
The former Assistant to the President and Director of Communications for the Office of Public Liaison in the Trump White House
, Omarosa Manigault Newman, provides an eye-opening look into the corruption and controversy of the current administration.
Few have been a member of Donald Trump’s inner orbit longer than Omarosa Manigault Newman. Their relationship has spanned fifteen years—through four television shows, a presidential campaign, and a year by his side in the most chaotic, outrageous White House in history. But that relationship has come to a decisive and definitive end, and Omarosa is finally ready to share her side of the story in this explosive, jaw-dropping account.
A stunning tell-all and takedown from a strong, intelligent woman who took every name and number, Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House, is a must-read for any concerned citizen.
, Omarosa Manigault Newman, provides an eye-opening look into the corruption and controversy of the current administration.Few have been a member of Donald Trump’s inner orbit longer than Omarosa Manigault Newman. Their relationship has spanned fifteen years—through four television shows, a presidential campaign, and a year by his side in the most chaotic, outrageous White House in history. But that relationship has come to a decisive and definitive end, and Omarosa is finally ready to share her side of the story in this explosive, jaw-dropping account.
A stunning tell-all and takedown from a strong, intelligent woman who took every name and number, Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House, is a must-read for any concerned citizen.
Tuesday, August 07, 2018
MS-13 Gang Members Charged with Murder Conspiracy and Attempted Murder of 16 Year Old
Melvi Amador-Rios, Santos Amador-Rios, Yan Carlos Ramirez and Antonio Salvador were charged in a four-count indictment with assault, murder conspiracy and attempted murder in-aid-of racketeering, along with a related firearms offense. The defendants were arrested and were arraigned before United States Magistrate Judge Marilyn D. Go at the federal courthouse in Brooklyn.
Richard P. Donoghue, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, William F. Sweeney, Jr., Assistant Director-in-Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation, New York Field Office (FBI), and James P. O’Neill, Commissioner, New York City Police Department (NYPD), announced the indictment.
“As alleged, the defendants are members of MS-13, an international gang known for its culture of violence and murder,” stated United States Attorney Donoghue. “They used their positions to direct, instruct and assist lower-level gang members to shoot and kill a suspected rival on the streets of Jamaica, Queens. We will continue to work with our law enforcement partners to hold accountable those who spread fear in our communities by participating in such acts of violence.” Mr. Donoghue thanked the Queens District Attorney’s Office for its assistance in the investigation.
“Since January 2016, the FBI Safe Streets Gang Task Forces in Queens and Long Island have arrested more than 45 of the most violent MS-13 members in the area and charged them with murder, attempted murder, arson, and assault,” stated FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Sweeney. “Today’s operation is a continuation of this coordinated and sustained effort. The task force will not stand by while this gang engages in meaningless violence in an attempt to use fear to poison and control our communities.”
“Through close collaboration with our law enforcement partners at the FBI and the Eastern District of New York, the NYPD will continue to conduct aggressive, precisely-directed investigations into criminal groups like this,” stated NYPD Commissioner O’Neill. “Such cases result in strong indictments that ultimately send these criminals to prison. And this important work stanches the violence – which is an essential step toward healing gang-plagued communities and fulfilling our duty to work with and protect all New Yorkers, in every neighborhood.”
According to court filings, the defendants are members of the La Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. Melvi Amador-Rios is the leader of the Centrales Locos Salvatruchas (CLS) clique of MS-13, which operates in Jamaica, Queens. On October 22, 2016, Amador-Rios directed a low-level CLS member, known as a “chequeo,” to obtain a firearm from his brother, Santos Amador-Rios, and use the firearm to murder a rival gang member. The CLS chequeo obtained the firearm and enlisted two other CLS chequeos to assist in the murder. Yan Carlos Ramirez and Antonio Salvador instructed the three CLS chequeos how to use the firearm to carry out the murder. During the early morning hours of October 23, 2016, in Jamaica, Queens, the three CLS chequeos confronted the suspected member of the rival 18th Street gang, beat the victim and shot him in the head. The victim survived the attack, but is now a paraplegic.
This indictment is the latest in a series of federal prosecutions by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York targeting members of the MS-13, a violent international criminal organization. The MS-13’s leadership is based in El Salvador and Honduras, but the gang has thousands of members across the United States, comprised primarily of immigrants from Central America. Since 2003, hundreds of MS-13 members, including dozens of clique leaders, have been convicted on federal felony charges in the Eastern District of New York. A majority of those MS-13 members have been convicted on federal racketeering charges for participating in murders, attempted murders and assaults. Since 2010, this Office has obtained indictments charging MS-13 members with carrying out more than 45 murders in the district, and has convicted dozens of MS-13 leaders and members in connection with those murders. These prosecutions are the product of investigations led by our law enforcement partners including the FBI’s Safe Streets Task Force, comprising agents and officers of the FBI and NYPD.
Richard P. Donoghue, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, William F. Sweeney, Jr., Assistant Director-in-Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation, New York Field Office (FBI), and James P. O’Neill, Commissioner, New York City Police Department (NYPD), announced the indictment.
“As alleged, the defendants are members of MS-13, an international gang known for its culture of violence and murder,” stated United States Attorney Donoghue. “They used their positions to direct, instruct and assist lower-level gang members to shoot and kill a suspected rival on the streets of Jamaica, Queens. We will continue to work with our law enforcement partners to hold accountable those who spread fear in our communities by participating in such acts of violence.” Mr. Donoghue thanked the Queens District Attorney’s Office for its assistance in the investigation.
“Since January 2016, the FBI Safe Streets Gang Task Forces in Queens and Long Island have arrested more than 45 of the most violent MS-13 members in the area and charged them with murder, attempted murder, arson, and assault,” stated FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Sweeney. “Today’s operation is a continuation of this coordinated and sustained effort. The task force will not stand by while this gang engages in meaningless violence in an attempt to use fear to poison and control our communities.”
“Through close collaboration with our law enforcement partners at the FBI and the Eastern District of New York, the NYPD will continue to conduct aggressive, precisely-directed investigations into criminal groups like this,” stated NYPD Commissioner O’Neill. “Such cases result in strong indictments that ultimately send these criminals to prison. And this important work stanches the violence – which is an essential step toward healing gang-plagued communities and fulfilling our duty to work with and protect all New Yorkers, in every neighborhood.”
According to court filings, the defendants are members of the La Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. Melvi Amador-Rios is the leader of the Centrales Locos Salvatruchas (CLS) clique of MS-13, which operates in Jamaica, Queens. On October 22, 2016, Amador-Rios directed a low-level CLS member, known as a “chequeo,” to obtain a firearm from his brother, Santos Amador-Rios, and use the firearm to murder a rival gang member. The CLS chequeo obtained the firearm and enlisted two other CLS chequeos to assist in the murder. Yan Carlos Ramirez and Antonio Salvador instructed the three CLS chequeos how to use the firearm to carry out the murder. During the early morning hours of October 23, 2016, in Jamaica, Queens, the three CLS chequeos confronted the suspected member of the rival 18th Street gang, beat the victim and shot him in the head. The victim survived the attack, but is now a paraplegic.
This indictment is the latest in a series of federal prosecutions by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York targeting members of the MS-13, a violent international criminal organization. The MS-13’s leadership is based in El Salvador and Honduras, but the gang has thousands of members across the United States, comprised primarily of immigrants from Central America. Since 2003, hundreds of MS-13 members, including dozens of clique leaders, have been convicted on federal felony charges in the Eastern District of New York. A majority of those MS-13 members have been convicted on federal racketeering charges for participating in murders, attempted murders and assaults. Since 2010, this Office has obtained indictments charging MS-13 members with carrying out more than 45 murders in the district, and has convicted dozens of MS-13 leaders and members in connection with those murders. These prosecutions are the product of investigations led by our law enforcement partners including the FBI’s Safe Streets Task Force, comprising agents and officers of the FBI and NYPD.
Monday, August 06, 2018
John Tortora Jr AKA "Johnny T" of the Genovese Crime Family, Arrested In 1997 Murder-For-Hire Of Richard Ortiz #LaCosaNostra
Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, William F. Sweeney Jr., Assistant Director-in-Charge of the New York Field Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), and Charles Gardner, the Commissioner of the City of Yonkers Police Department (“YPD”), announced the arrest of JOHN TORTORA JR., a/k/a “Johnny T,” on charges of racketeering conspiracy, murder in aid of racketeering, and murder for hire. The murder charges arise out of TORTORA’s role in the November 11, 1997, murder of Richard Ortiz, 29, in Yonkers. TORTORA was arrested in Yonkers by FBI agents and Yonkers PD detectives. TORTORA was to be presented before the U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel W. Gorenstein at the United States Courthouse in Manhattan. The case has been assigned to United States District Judge Sidney H. Stein. An initial pretrial conference is scheduled for August 14, 2018, at 3:00 p.m., before Judge Stein.
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said: “As alleged in the indictment, the defendant was responsible for the stabbing death of Richard Ortiz over 20 years ago. Today, thanks to the remarkable dedication and perseverance of the FBI and the Yonkers Police Department, the defendant faces charges for his crimes.”
FBI Assistant Director William F. Sweeney Jr. said: “The arrest of John Tortora should remind everyone that justice delayed is not justice denied. Whether a crime was allegedly committed decades ago or just days ago, the FBI will maintain the same tenacity and we will be relentless toward ensuring those who commit violent crimes be held accountable for their actions. The FBI New York Office never does these investigations alone, and we want to thank the Yonkers Police Department for their help in successfully solving a case from more than 20 years ago.”
Yonkers Police Commissioner Charles Gardner said: “This arrest for the 1997 murder of Mr. Ortiz demonstrates the resolve and commitment of law enforcement to hold those accountable for their actions and serves as a warning to all members of La Cosa Nostra engaging in violent criminal activity in our communities. We will continue to work with our federal partners to aggressively target alleged criminals and criminal enterprises operating in our City. I would like to thank the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the FBI for their invaluable support and efforts in this investigation.”
According to the allegations contained in the Indictment[1] and statements made in court:
From in or about 1997 up to and including in or about 2018, TORTORA, an associate and later a member of the Genovese Crime Family, along with other members and associates of La Cosa Nostra, committed a wide range of crimes, including murder, extortion, gambling, and narcotics trafficking. In particular, TORTORA hired others to kill Richard Ortiz in order to further the goals of the Genovese Family. As a result, on November 11, 1997, Ortiz was brutally stabbed multiple times, causing his death.
TORTORA, 61, of Yonkers, New York, is charged with conspiracy to commit racketeering, murder in aid of racketeering, and murder for hire.
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said: “As alleged in the indictment, the defendant was responsible for the stabbing death of Richard Ortiz over 20 years ago. Today, thanks to the remarkable dedication and perseverance of the FBI and the Yonkers Police Department, the defendant faces charges for his crimes.”
FBI Assistant Director William F. Sweeney Jr. said: “The arrest of John Tortora should remind everyone that justice delayed is not justice denied. Whether a crime was allegedly committed decades ago or just days ago, the FBI will maintain the same tenacity and we will be relentless toward ensuring those who commit violent crimes be held accountable for their actions. The FBI New York Office never does these investigations alone, and we want to thank the Yonkers Police Department for their help in successfully solving a case from more than 20 years ago.”
Yonkers Police Commissioner Charles Gardner said: “This arrest for the 1997 murder of Mr. Ortiz demonstrates the resolve and commitment of law enforcement to hold those accountable for their actions and serves as a warning to all members of La Cosa Nostra engaging in violent criminal activity in our communities. We will continue to work with our federal partners to aggressively target alleged criminals and criminal enterprises operating in our City. I would like to thank the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the FBI for their invaluable support and efforts in this investigation.”
According to the allegations contained in the Indictment[1] and statements made in court:
From in or about 1997 up to and including in or about 2018, TORTORA, an associate and later a member of the Genovese Crime Family, along with other members and associates of La Cosa Nostra, committed a wide range of crimes, including murder, extortion, gambling, and narcotics trafficking. In particular, TORTORA hired others to kill Richard Ortiz in order to further the goals of the Genovese Family. As a result, on November 11, 1997, Ortiz was brutally stabbed multiple times, causing his death.
TORTORA, 61, of Yonkers, New York, is charged with conspiracy to commit racketeering, murder in aid of racketeering, and murder for hire.
Chicago Gangs Making a Comeback, Shooting at Least 40 People in 7 Hours #MurderCapital
At least 40 people were shot in Chicago over the weekend during the seven hours from midnight Saturday to early Sunday morning, with four fatalities, city police said on Sunday, a stark violent streak in a city where authorities say gun violence has been decreasing this year.
"These were both random and targeted shootings on our streets," said Fred Waller, Chief of the Patrol Division of the Chicago Police Department, in a press conference.
He said most of the shootings are connected to gang violence in the city of about 2.7 million people, the third-largest in the United States.
Police said gunmen targeted a block party, a gathering after a funeral, and other gatherings on a night where thousands of people gathered for a downtown concert.
Local media reported that the brunt of the violence happened in the city's West Side, where 25 people were shot in separate attacks.
Waller touted that shootings in 2018 were down from last year.
The Chicago Tribune, which has been tracking shooting statistics, reported earlier this month that shootings in the city have declined, with 533 fewer shootings as of Aug. 1 than the same time in 2017. "By no means do these statistics show that we have a victory," Waller said.
He said that police are working with other law enforcement groups to target gang activity. "I promise we will not be defeated," Waller said.
More specifics on the shootings were not immediately available late on Sunday.
"These were both random and targeted shootings on our streets," said Fred Waller, Chief of the Patrol Division of the Chicago Police Department, in a press conference.
He said most of the shootings are connected to gang violence in the city of about 2.7 million people, the third-largest in the United States.
Police said gunmen targeted a block party, a gathering after a funeral, and other gatherings on a night where thousands of people gathered for a downtown concert.
Local media reported that the brunt of the violence happened in the city's West Side, where 25 people were shot in separate attacks.
Waller touted that shootings in 2018 were down from last year.
The Chicago Tribune, which has been tracking shooting statistics, reported earlier this month that shootings in the city have declined, with 533 fewer shootings as of Aug. 1 than the same time in 2017. "By no means do these statistics show that we have a victory," Waller said.
He said that police are working with other law enforcement groups to target gang activity. "I promise we will not be defeated," Waller said.
More specifics on the shootings were not immediately available late on Sunday.
Friday, August 03, 2018
Is the Answer to Who Murdered Sam Giancana on the Family Secrets Organized Crime Tour?
A Mafia turncoat who ushered in one of the biggest Mob trials in US history is now sharing tales of his former life as a streetwise soldier for the infamous Chicago Outfit, during the fascinating two-hour Family Secrets tour around the Windy City.
‘It’s not just a Mob story, it’s a family story, too,’ says Frank Calabrese Jr., who became so desperate to escape life in organized crime that he ratted out his own father, the Outfit’s Chinatown crew boss, Frank Calabrese Sr., by wearing a wire for the FBI and testifying against him at trial in 2007.
‘Nobody likes to hear their family called dysfunctional and nobody likes to be called a rat, but it is what it is,’ says Frank Jr., 58. ‘I hope that people can get takeaways from it.’
The Family Secrets tour operates several times a week and kicks off from Chicago Chop House in the heart of downtown. Frank Jr., perched at the front of a 37-seat bus, doesn’t hold back on exposing what Mob life is like, warts and all, as he revisits scenes from his family’s crimes and other landmarks.
‘Some things are embarrassing, but in order for people to understand, I have to be straight up with everybody on everything,’ he notes. ‘It does take a lot out of me, because I’m seeing these stories as I’m telling them.
While the bus winds its way throughout the city, including Little Italy, Chinatown and other neighborhoods, Frank Jr. relates his tale of growing up here with a dad who could be kind and loving one minute, then ‘sociopathic’ and ‘explosive’ the next.
He starts the tour with recollections of how Frank Sr., a made man who went by the nickname ‘Frankie Breeze,’ began grooming him at a young age to become proficient in loansharking, gambling and the Chicago way.
One tale he spins is the day Frank Sr. appeared to get into an altercation with a man in the family’s driveway. Upset, Frank Jr., then a teenager, ran and grabbed a baseball bat from the garage and snuck up on the duo.
‘I could see my dad look, and he had this little smirk on his face, like he was all proud of me,’ says Frank, adding there was no fight that day. ‘I didn’t know what my dad was capable of at the time, but years later I was like, “Boy, that guy was lucky.”’
Soon the pair started going on father-son field trips so Frank Jr. could watch and learn. One of his final tests occurred when his dad came home from his ‘so-called work’ and brought him into the bathroom. Frank Sr. turned on the ceiling fan and faucets in case the government was listening.
‘Son, we just killed two guys,’ Frank Jr. recalls his dad telling him as he watched the teen’s face carefully to see what his reaction to the news would be.
All Frank Jr. could think at the time was how his buddies’ fathers probably weren’t having similar conversations in their houses. ‘I’m so excited about it, but I can’t run and tell anybody,’ he says.
Very quickly, recounts Frank Jr. as the bus winds its way through Chicago traffic, he graduated to ‘violence, arson, collections’ and other sketchy gangland behavior. ‘I eventually bought in to all of this, and I was good at it.’
The longer Frank Jr. spent under the tutelage of his ruthless dad, the more Outfit tactics he added to his growing arsenal.
One trick Frank Sr. and other Mob bosses often employed was to tell the aspiring Mafioso they were on their way to kill somebody, even if they had no intention of carrying out a hit.‘They’re just testing you to see if you’re really up to it,’ explains Frank Jr., who today credits his uncle, Nick Calabrese — his dad’s brother and fellow made man — with protecting him from committing the most terrible of crimes: murder.‘I didn’t realize it until years later, but he saved me from my father,’ says Frank Jr. ‘He saved me from crossing a line I couldn’t cross back over.’
That doesn’t mean Frank Jr. didn’t learn how to test his friends’ loyalty by producing a dead body.
On the Family Secrets tour, Frank recounts for his guests the day his dad instructed him to place some sandbags in the trunk of his car and throw a sheet and shovel over them. He then told him to pull up to his pals and tell them he accidentally hit and killed a guy and he needed help burying the body. ‘Let me know how many guys get in the car,’ Frank Sr. told his son.
Hollywood has always played a large role in glorifying Mafia life, and Frank Jr. takes time during the tour to spin some of his favorite related tales, including his memory of seeing Casino, the 1995 film based in part on the Chicago Mob.
“It’s funny, because when I’m watching the movie in the theater I could see that they’re wrong about a lot of stuff, but I had to sit there and shut up because who am I gonna tell?” he laughs.
Talking about the movie, which showcases the Tangiers Casino, the cinematic substitute for the Chicago Outfit’s preferred real-life Vegas hangout, the Stardust, sparks another of Frank Jr.’s recollections.
In 1972, when he was 12, says Frank Jr., he traveled with his dad to Sin City and loved spending his time at the Circus Circus Hotel & Resort’s video arcade. Proving he was developing the chops for manipulation, Frank Jr. says he would wait for his pop to join 20 or 30 of his associates at the dinner table before asking him for money to go play games ‘My dad would give me three or four dollars,’ recalls Frank. ‘Then the guys would say, “Come here kid.” I’d leave there with like $200 or $300 dollars in my pocket!’
On occasion, West Coast royalty would head to Chicago, and Frank Jr. takes his tour bus to Rush Street, once the place to see and be seen for major entertainers, like rumored Mob man Frank Sinatra.
Sinatra, says Frank Jr, had connections to the Mafia, and he claims the Calabreses had ‘direct ties’ to Ol’ Blue Eyes, a Chicago club-scene favorite in the ‘50s and ‘60s, because Frank Sr. was close to the crooner’s longtime comedic opening act, Pat Henry. However, he adds, ‘that doesn’t mean Sinatra was involved in doing illegal activities.’
Despite his family’s familiarity with the glitz and glamour that comes with organized crime, Frank Jr. explains that working in the Mob actually required him to live life under the radar to keep the heat off his family and associates.
‘You learn deception,’ he says. For instance, instead of three-piece suits, fedoras and flashy jewelry, he and his cohorts wore baseball caps, ski jackets and eyeglasses to blend in with their surroundings and not appear too flashy. ‘We didn’t drive Mercedes and BMWs, like you see in the movies. We drove Fords and Chevys.’
And when the older Mob bosses got together to discuss business, it wouldn’t be at a fancy social club.‘They would meet at McDonald’s,’ says Frank Jr. ‘If you walked past them you would think they must be talking about retirement, but they could have been planning a high-profile murder.’
Not that anyone would understand if they happened to overhear. ‘We were so aware of the FBI that everything we did was in code,’ he points out. ‘I could talk to my father in a conversation and he has four names and I have four nicknames. You’d think we were talking about six to eight people and we were really just talking about one another.’
In fact, a discussion about recipes could really be about a hit.
What’s not coded on the tour is Frank Jr.’s refusal to sugarcoat the Mob’s deadlier side, and he goes into detail about the rise and fall of the Outfit’s most infamous upper echelon of villains, including Sam Giancana, who ruled from 1957 through 1966 and was alleged to have played a part in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Giancana’s fatal mistake, says Frank Jr., was he became too high profile. In 1975, Giancana was supposedly meeting somebody he trusted in the basement kitchen of his home in Oak Park, Illinois. He wound up dead, shot multiple times in the head and neck. Frank Jr. claims he and the FBI ‘know who did it’ and it was somebody nobody would ever suspect — but he refuses to tell.
Frank Jr. does spill information on his father’s sordid history of hits. He says he found out later in life that Frank Sr. was part of a crew of hit man dispatched to take care of guys ‘causing problems.’ His preferred method of killing, says his son, was ‘to strangle you and cut your throat ear to ear,’ a method Frank Sr. liked to call the Calabrese necktie.
Despite the intense times, life in the Mafia was filled with just as many boring days and nights, especially when it came to casing targets.
According to Frank Jr., surveillance often included getting a windowed van and putting a refrigerator or dishwasher box inside with little holes poked through the cardboard. One of the Outfit’s henchmen would have the unfortunate task of sitting inside the box with two jugs — one for drinking water and another for waste — and staring out at their target to gather information for as long as 24-hour stretches.
Life in the Mob also meant always looking over your shoulder and making sure the FBI wasn’t on your tail. But if they were, Frank Sr. ‘had a sense of humor,’ and he once wrangled the unwitting owner of a Greek diner into helping him throw off the Feds.
Frank Sr. went into the man’s restaurant, sat at the counter and ordered a cup of soup. When he finished, he asked to speak to the owner, who he hugged and shook his hand. When the proprietor asked if they knew each other, the mobster told him no and that he just wanted to compliment him on his fine food. He then darted out the door.
The FBI quickly descended on the diner and its confused owner. Agents demanded to know why he was speaking to Frank Sr., but they refused to buy the man’s pleas of ignorance.
‘Poor guy,’ laughs Frank Jr. ‘My father always used to do that.’
Other times, the mobsters wouldn’t have to worry about police following them because they would head to an auto yard, steal license plates from a car of similar make and model to what they were going to use in a crime and swap them in. ‘If the cops run the number while we’re driving it matches the car and it matches the color so they’re not going to pull us over,’ explains Frank Jr.
One of Frank Jr.’s favorite stories he recounts on the tour is about how his ‘master thief’ father loved to rob weddings. Frank Sr. would take advantage of the fact everyone was drinking and not paying attention to steal the purses filled with cash set aside for the newlyweds. Other times, Frank Sr. would be more brazen and bring a crew to help line up guests against the wall and steal their jewelry.
‘I don’t talk about this like I’m proud of it, but it was what we knew,’ explains Frank Jr.
As time passed, the elder Calabrese became increasingly paranoid and violent, and his son grew desperate to escape the Outfit. ‘I feared my dad more than anything,’ he reveals of the man who once held a loaded gun to his head and threatened to kill him.
Salvation, Frank Jr. says, finally arrived in 1995 when the feds indicted him, his father, and several Outfit crewmembers. He pleaded guilty to charges of racketeering, extortion, mail fraud, perjury and intent to defraud the IRS. The son and dad were eventually incarcerated together in Milan, Michigan, where Frank Jr., sentenced to serve 57 months, hatched a risky plan to free himself from his father’s omnipotence.
He mailed a letter to the FBI on July 27, 1998, and offered to help agents entrap the killer. In what became known as 'Operation Family Secrets', Frank Jr. agreed to wear a wire behind bars and tempt his dad into talking about several gangland murders.
‘I just wanted my father to leave me alone, and the only way I could figure out how to do that was to keep him locked up,’ he says of the life-changing realization.
Frank Jr. was released from prison in February 2000. Seven years later, the 'Family Secrets' trial he was responsible for sparking created a firestorm both in the press and behind the scenes. After testifying on the stand against his dad, Frank Jr. went into a private room, where he had tears rolling down his face because he realized their courtroom confrontation was probably the last time he would see the man alive.
Frank Calabrese Sr., found responsible for 13 murders — likely a fraction of the number he actually committed — died in solitary confinement of heart failure on Christmas Day 2012.
Confirmation he made the right choice by ratting on his dad came when Frank Jr., who wrote the 2011 memoir Operation Family Secrets: How a Mobster's Son and the FBI Brought Down Chicago's Murderous Crime Family, learned Frank Sr. tried to put out a $150,000 contract on his head before he died. He believes one of the big reasons he’s still alive to tell the tale is nobody trusted the cagey Mob boss to actually pay up once the job was completed.
Now ‘every day is like a gift,’ Frank Jr. says. ‘I try to be a good person and I try to surround myself with good people.’
And he gives tours and shares his story as a way to somehow make amends with his dark past.
‘I have to deal every day with what I know,’ Frank Jr. explains. ‘I’m not trying to glorify something. I want people to realize you can change your life around; I want to do something good.’
Thanks to Aaron Rasmussen.
‘It’s not just a Mob story, it’s a family story, too,’ says Frank Calabrese Jr., who became so desperate to escape life in organized crime that he ratted out his own father, the Outfit’s Chinatown crew boss, Frank Calabrese Sr., by wearing a wire for the FBI and testifying against him at trial in 2007.
‘Nobody likes to hear their family called dysfunctional and nobody likes to be called a rat, but it is what it is,’ says Frank Jr., 58. ‘I hope that people can get takeaways from it.’
The Family Secrets tour operates several times a week and kicks off from Chicago Chop House in the heart of downtown. Frank Jr., perched at the front of a 37-seat bus, doesn’t hold back on exposing what Mob life is like, warts and all, as he revisits scenes from his family’s crimes and other landmarks.
‘Some things are embarrassing, but in order for people to understand, I have to be straight up with everybody on everything,’ he notes. ‘It does take a lot out of me, because I’m seeing these stories as I’m telling them.
While the bus winds its way throughout the city, including Little Italy, Chinatown and other neighborhoods, Frank Jr. relates his tale of growing up here with a dad who could be kind and loving one minute, then ‘sociopathic’ and ‘explosive’ the next.
He starts the tour with recollections of how Frank Sr., a made man who went by the nickname ‘Frankie Breeze,’ began grooming him at a young age to become proficient in loansharking, gambling and the Chicago way.
One tale he spins is the day Frank Sr. appeared to get into an altercation with a man in the family’s driveway. Upset, Frank Jr., then a teenager, ran and grabbed a baseball bat from the garage and snuck up on the duo.
‘I could see my dad look, and he had this little smirk on his face, like he was all proud of me,’ says Frank, adding there was no fight that day. ‘I didn’t know what my dad was capable of at the time, but years later I was like, “Boy, that guy was lucky.”’
Soon the pair started going on father-son field trips so Frank Jr. could watch and learn. One of his final tests occurred when his dad came home from his ‘so-called work’ and brought him into the bathroom. Frank Sr. turned on the ceiling fan and faucets in case the government was listening.
‘Son, we just killed two guys,’ Frank Jr. recalls his dad telling him as he watched the teen’s face carefully to see what his reaction to the news would be.
All Frank Jr. could think at the time was how his buddies’ fathers probably weren’t having similar conversations in their houses. ‘I’m so excited about it, but I can’t run and tell anybody,’ he says.
Very quickly, recounts Frank Jr. as the bus winds its way through Chicago traffic, he graduated to ‘violence, arson, collections’ and other sketchy gangland behavior. ‘I eventually bought in to all of this, and I was good at it.’
The longer Frank Jr. spent under the tutelage of his ruthless dad, the more Outfit tactics he added to his growing arsenal.
One trick Frank Sr. and other Mob bosses often employed was to tell the aspiring Mafioso they were on their way to kill somebody, even if they had no intention of carrying out a hit.‘They’re just testing you to see if you’re really up to it,’ explains Frank Jr., who today credits his uncle, Nick Calabrese — his dad’s brother and fellow made man — with protecting him from committing the most terrible of crimes: murder.‘I didn’t realize it until years later, but he saved me from my father,’ says Frank Jr. ‘He saved me from crossing a line I couldn’t cross back over.’
That doesn’t mean Frank Jr. didn’t learn how to test his friends’ loyalty by producing a dead body.
On the Family Secrets tour, Frank recounts for his guests the day his dad instructed him to place some sandbags in the trunk of his car and throw a sheet and shovel over them. He then told him to pull up to his pals and tell them he accidentally hit and killed a guy and he needed help burying the body. ‘Let me know how many guys get in the car,’ Frank Sr. told his son.
Hollywood has always played a large role in glorifying Mafia life, and Frank Jr. takes time during the tour to spin some of his favorite related tales, including his memory of seeing Casino, the 1995 film based in part on the Chicago Mob.
“It’s funny, because when I’m watching the movie in the theater I could see that they’re wrong about a lot of stuff, but I had to sit there and shut up because who am I gonna tell?” he laughs.
Talking about the movie, which showcases the Tangiers Casino, the cinematic substitute for the Chicago Outfit’s preferred real-life Vegas hangout, the Stardust, sparks another of Frank Jr.’s recollections.
In 1972, when he was 12, says Frank Jr., he traveled with his dad to Sin City and loved spending his time at the Circus Circus Hotel & Resort’s video arcade. Proving he was developing the chops for manipulation, Frank Jr. says he would wait for his pop to join 20 or 30 of his associates at the dinner table before asking him for money to go play games ‘My dad would give me three or four dollars,’ recalls Frank. ‘Then the guys would say, “Come here kid.” I’d leave there with like $200 or $300 dollars in my pocket!’
On occasion, West Coast royalty would head to Chicago, and Frank Jr. takes his tour bus to Rush Street, once the place to see and be seen for major entertainers, like rumored Mob man Frank Sinatra.
Sinatra, says Frank Jr, had connections to the Mafia, and he claims the Calabreses had ‘direct ties’ to Ol’ Blue Eyes, a Chicago club-scene favorite in the ‘50s and ‘60s, because Frank Sr. was close to the crooner’s longtime comedic opening act, Pat Henry. However, he adds, ‘that doesn’t mean Sinatra was involved in doing illegal activities.’
Despite his family’s familiarity with the glitz and glamour that comes with organized crime, Frank Jr. explains that working in the Mob actually required him to live life under the radar to keep the heat off his family and associates.
‘You learn deception,’ he says. For instance, instead of three-piece suits, fedoras and flashy jewelry, he and his cohorts wore baseball caps, ski jackets and eyeglasses to blend in with their surroundings and not appear too flashy. ‘We didn’t drive Mercedes and BMWs, like you see in the movies. We drove Fords and Chevys.’
And when the older Mob bosses got together to discuss business, it wouldn’t be at a fancy social club.‘They would meet at McDonald’s,’ says Frank Jr. ‘If you walked past them you would think they must be talking about retirement, but they could have been planning a high-profile murder.’
Not that anyone would understand if they happened to overhear. ‘We were so aware of the FBI that everything we did was in code,’ he points out. ‘I could talk to my father in a conversation and he has four names and I have four nicknames. You’d think we were talking about six to eight people and we were really just talking about one another.’
In fact, a discussion about recipes could really be about a hit.
What’s not coded on the tour is Frank Jr.’s refusal to sugarcoat the Mob’s deadlier side, and he goes into detail about the rise and fall of the Outfit’s most infamous upper echelon of villains, including Sam Giancana, who ruled from 1957 through 1966 and was alleged to have played a part in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Giancana’s fatal mistake, says Frank Jr., was he became too high profile. In 1975, Giancana was supposedly meeting somebody he trusted in the basement kitchen of his home in Oak Park, Illinois. He wound up dead, shot multiple times in the head and neck. Frank Jr. claims he and the FBI ‘know who did it’ and it was somebody nobody would ever suspect — but he refuses to tell.
Frank Jr. does spill information on his father’s sordid history of hits. He says he found out later in life that Frank Sr. was part of a crew of hit man dispatched to take care of guys ‘causing problems.’ His preferred method of killing, says his son, was ‘to strangle you and cut your throat ear to ear,’ a method Frank Sr. liked to call the Calabrese necktie.
Despite the intense times, life in the Mafia was filled with just as many boring days and nights, especially when it came to casing targets.
According to Frank Jr., surveillance often included getting a windowed van and putting a refrigerator or dishwasher box inside with little holes poked through the cardboard. One of the Outfit’s henchmen would have the unfortunate task of sitting inside the box with two jugs — one for drinking water and another for waste — and staring out at their target to gather information for as long as 24-hour stretches.
Life in the Mob also meant always looking over your shoulder and making sure the FBI wasn’t on your tail. But if they were, Frank Sr. ‘had a sense of humor,’ and he once wrangled the unwitting owner of a Greek diner into helping him throw off the Feds.
Frank Sr. went into the man’s restaurant, sat at the counter and ordered a cup of soup. When he finished, he asked to speak to the owner, who he hugged and shook his hand. When the proprietor asked if they knew each other, the mobster told him no and that he just wanted to compliment him on his fine food. He then darted out the door.
The FBI quickly descended on the diner and its confused owner. Agents demanded to know why he was speaking to Frank Sr., but they refused to buy the man’s pleas of ignorance.
‘Poor guy,’ laughs Frank Jr. ‘My father always used to do that.’
Other times, the mobsters wouldn’t have to worry about police following them because they would head to an auto yard, steal license plates from a car of similar make and model to what they were going to use in a crime and swap them in. ‘If the cops run the number while we’re driving it matches the car and it matches the color so they’re not going to pull us over,’ explains Frank Jr.
One of Frank Jr.’s favorite stories he recounts on the tour is about how his ‘master thief’ father loved to rob weddings. Frank Sr. would take advantage of the fact everyone was drinking and not paying attention to steal the purses filled with cash set aside for the newlyweds. Other times, Frank Sr. would be more brazen and bring a crew to help line up guests against the wall and steal their jewelry.
‘I don’t talk about this like I’m proud of it, but it was what we knew,’ explains Frank Jr.
As time passed, the elder Calabrese became increasingly paranoid and violent, and his son grew desperate to escape the Outfit. ‘I feared my dad more than anything,’ he reveals of the man who once held a loaded gun to his head and threatened to kill him.
Salvation, Frank Jr. says, finally arrived in 1995 when the feds indicted him, his father, and several Outfit crewmembers. He pleaded guilty to charges of racketeering, extortion, mail fraud, perjury and intent to defraud the IRS. The son and dad were eventually incarcerated together in Milan, Michigan, where Frank Jr., sentenced to serve 57 months, hatched a risky plan to free himself from his father’s omnipotence.
He mailed a letter to the FBI on July 27, 1998, and offered to help agents entrap the killer. In what became known as 'Operation Family Secrets', Frank Jr. agreed to wear a wire behind bars and tempt his dad into talking about several gangland murders.
‘I just wanted my father to leave me alone, and the only way I could figure out how to do that was to keep him locked up,’ he says of the life-changing realization.
Frank Jr. was released from prison in February 2000. Seven years later, the 'Family Secrets' trial he was responsible for sparking created a firestorm both in the press and behind the scenes. After testifying on the stand against his dad, Frank Jr. went into a private room, where he had tears rolling down his face because he realized their courtroom confrontation was probably the last time he would see the man alive.
Frank Calabrese Sr., found responsible for 13 murders — likely a fraction of the number he actually committed — died in solitary confinement of heart failure on Christmas Day 2012.
Confirmation he made the right choice by ratting on his dad came when Frank Jr., who wrote the 2011 memoir Operation Family Secrets: How a Mobster's Son and the FBI Brought Down Chicago's Murderous Crime Family, learned Frank Sr. tried to put out a $150,000 contract on his head before he died. He believes one of the big reasons he’s still alive to tell the tale is nobody trusted the cagey Mob boss to actually pay up once the job was completed.
Now ‘every day is like a gift,’ Frank Jr. says. ‘I try to be a good person and I try to surround myself with good people.’
And he gives tours and shares his story as a way to somehow make amends with his dark past.
‘I have to deal every day with what I know,’ Frank Jr. explains. ‘I’m not trying to glorify something. I want people to realize you can change your life around; I want to do something good.’
Thanks to Aaron Rasmussen.
Thursday, August 02, 2018
Reputed Mexican Mafia Leader Allegedly Ordered Killing of his Lieutenant from Prison
Prosecutors announced the indictment of eight alleged members of the Orange County Mexican Mafia involving a robbery that left a man dead and an attempted murder of one of their own in Placentia.
Suspected gang leader Johnny Martinez, 42, was incarcerated in the Salinas Valley State Prison in Monterey County when he allegedly orchestrated the crimes in 2017. He was already in prison for murder and two counts of attempted murder, officials said.
Martinez communicated with his No. 2 man, Gregory David Munoz, a 30-year-old inmate at the Calipatria State Prison in Imperial County, in connection with the murder of Robert Rios outside the victim's Placentia home, according to the Orange County District Attorney's Office.
Munoz allegedly contacted three other accused gang members-Ysrael Jacob Cordova, 33, Ricardo Valenzuela, 38, and Augustine Velasquez, 22-to take money and drugs from Rios, according to officials.
Munoz then directed a man named Charles Coghill to retrieve a Chrysler 300 and semiautomatic firearms in Santa Ana, drive to an Anaheim hotel and pick up Cordova, Valenzuela and Velasquez on Jan. 19, 2017, OCDA said.
Cordova, Valenzuela and Velasquez then allegedly got out of the vehicle armed with the weapons, walked through Rios' front gate and confronted the victim in the front yard. Cordova shot Rios in the chest and left leg before he and the two others fled, according to prosecutors.
Emergency responders found the victim unresponsive outside the residence. He was later declared dead of a gunshot wound, OCDA said.
Security cameras at the home captured the crime, the agency said.
On or around July 28, 2017, Martinez allegedly directed Frank Mosqueda, 39, of writing a "kite" or message authorizing the murder of Munoz, his former top associate who had been released from prison.
Martinez read a text message from Munoz saying he was at his girlfriend's home in Placentia, according to OCDA. He then texted 30-year-old Omar Mejia, an inmate at Calipatria State Prison, to organize Munoz's murder, the agency said.
Mejia then allegedly asked Mosqueda, who was living in Huntington Beach, and Robert Martinez of Corona to commit the murder.
That evening, the two met in Placentia and drove to Munoz's location, OCDA said.
Shortly after 11:11 p.m., the pair assaulted Munoz and two female victims outside a home in Placentia, according to prosecutors. Mosqueda allegedly shot Munoz eight times, hitting him seven times in the legs back and arm. He also aimed the gun in the foreheads of the the other victims, OCDA said.
Munoz was taken to the hospital and survived his injuries, the agency added.
Placentia police arrested Mosqueda at his parole office in Irvine on Aug 8, 2017. Robert Martinez had been in custody at Orange County Jail, according to OCDA.
Johnny Martinez was charged with conspiracy to commit a crime, murder, first-degree residential burglary and street terrorism in Rios' murder. If convicted as charged, he could face life in state prison without the possibility of parole.
In the second incident, he was charged with attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder, two counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm and street terrorism. He could face 75 years to life in state prison if convicted of those charges.
Charges against Munoz, Cordova, Valenzuela and Velasquez included conspiracy to commit a crime, murder, first-degree residential burglary and street terrorism. All of them could face life in state prison without the possibility of parole.
Robert Martinez, Mejia, Mosqueda were charged with attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder, two counts of of assault with a semiautomatic firearms and street terrorism. Robert Martinez and Mosqueda were also charged with one count each of being a felon in possession of a firearms.
They could face 75 years to life in state prison.
Coghill, the accused driver in the January 2017 murder, was charged in a separate case, according to OCDA.
"Our recommendation to the [Department of Corrections] is that these people be put some place and watched in some manner so they can't make these communications," O.C. District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said.
The Mexican Mafia became "much more active and violent" since Johnny Martinez took control of the Orange County Jails in 2016, according to the agency. "You can't really predict who's the next straw man to come along when one gets deposed," Rackauckas said.
Suspected gang leader Johnny Martinez, 42, was incarcerated in the Salinas Valley State Prison in Monterey County when he allegedly orchestrated the crimes in 2017. He was already in prison for murder and two counts of attempted murder, officials said.
Martinez communicated with his No. 2 man, Gregory David Munoz, a 30-year-old inmate at the Calipatria State Prison in Imperial County, in connection with the murder of Robert Rios outside the victim's Placentia home, according to the Orange County District Attorney's Office.
Munoz allegedly contacted three other accused gang members-Ysrael Jacob Cordova, 33, Ricardo Valenzuela, 38, and Augustine Velasquez, 22-to take money and drugs from Rios, according to officials.
Munoz then directed a man named Charles Coghill to retrieve a Chrysler 300 and semiautomatic firearms in Santa Ana, drive to an Anaheim hotel and pick up Cordova, Valenzuela and Velasquez on Jan. 19, 2017, OCDA said.
Cordova, Valenzuela and Velasquez then allegedly got out of the vehicle armed with the weapons, walked through Rios' front gate and confronted the victim in the front yard. Cordova shot Rios in the chest and left leg before he and the two others fled, according to prosecutors.
Emergency responders found the victim unresponsive outside the residence. He was later declared dead of a gunshot wound, OCDA said.
Security cameras at the home captured the crime, the agency said.
On or around July 28, 2017, Martinez allegedly directed Frank Mosqueda, 39, of writing a "kite" or message authorizing the murder of Munoz, his former top associate who had been released from prison.
Martinez read a text message from Munoz saying he was at his girlfriend's home in Placentia, according to OCDA. He then texted 30-year-old Omar Mejia, an inmate at Calipatria State Prison, to organize Munoz's murder, the agency said.
Mejia then allegedly asked Mosqueda, who was living in Huntington Beach, and Robert Martinez of Corona to commit the murder.
That evening, the two met in Placentia and drove to Munoz's location, OCDA said.
Shortly after 11:11 p.m., the pair assaulted Munoz and two female victims outside a home in Placentia, according to prosecutors. Mosqueda allegedly shot Munoz eight times, hitting him seven times in the legs back and arm. He also aimed the gun in the foreheads of the the other victims, OCDA said.
Munoz was taken to the hospital and survived his injuries, the agency added.
Placentia police arrested Mosqueda at his parole office in Irvine on Aug 8, 2017. Robert Martinez had been in custody at Orange County Jail, according to OCDA.
Johnny Martinez was charged with conspiracy to commit a crime, murder, first-degree residential burglary and street terrorism in Rios' murder. If convicted as charged, he could face life in state prison without the possibility of parole.
In the second incident, he was charged with attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder, two counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm and street terrorism. He could face 75 years to life in state prison if convicted of those charges.
Charges against Munoz, Cordova, Valenzuela and Velasquez included conspiracy to commit a crime, murder, first-degree residential burglary and street terrorism. All of them could face life in state prison without the possibility of parole.
Robert Martinez, Mejia, Mosqueda were charged with attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder, two counts of of assault with a semiautomatic firearms and street terrorism. Robert Martinez and Mosqueda were also charged with one count each of being a felon in possession of a firearms.
They could face 75 years to life in state prison.
Coghill, the accused driver in the January 2017 murder, was charged in a separate case, according to OCDA.
"Our recommendation to the [Department of Corrections] is that these people be put some place and watched in some manner so they can't make these communications," O.C. District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said.
The Mexican Mafia became "much more active and violent" since Johnny Martinez took control of the Orange County Jails in 2016, according to the agency. "You can't really predict who's the next straw man to come along when one gets deposed," Rackauckas said.
Tuesday, July 17, 2018
Operational Guide for Preventing Targeted School Violence Released by @SecretService Releases
The United States Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center released another tool in support of the effort to end the prevalence of targeted violence effecting the Nation, the world, and most importantly – our schools. ENHANCING SCHOOL SAFETY USING A THREAT ASSESSMENT MODEL – An Operational Guide for Preventing Targeted School Violence, was developed to provide fundamental direction on how to prevent incidents of targeted school violence.
The guide provides schools and communities with a framework to identify students of concern, assess their risk for engaging in violence, and identify intervention strategies to mitigate that risk.
The Secret Service created the National Threat Assessment Center in 1998 to focus on research, training and threat assessments related to various forms of targeted violence. Following the tragedy at Columbine High School in April 1999, the Secret Service partnered with the Department of Education to study 37 incidents of targeted violence that occurred at elementary and secondary schools. The goal of that study, the Safe School Initiative (SSI), was to gather and analyze accurate and useful information about the thinking and behavior of students who commit acts of violence. The findings of the SSI led to the establishment of threat assessment programs in schools – something the Secret Service remains fervently committed to.
“The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting tragedy served as the impetus to go beyond our past work and go in depth regarding the how - how do we solve this epidemic?” said Secret Service Director R. D. “Tex” Alles. “The report truly is an operational guide and I am confident that if embraced and followed by our Nation’s communities and schools, that we will together reduce the occurrence of violence and the tragic loss of life.”
To ensure no school goes overlooked, the new guide is available to the public and for download at DHS.gov/school-safety-and-security and www.SecretService.gov. The Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center will also be printing and distributing copies to schools across the country.
This report is not the end of the Secret Service’s work to prevent school shootings and targeted violence. Work is currently underway to release an updated comprehensive study with an anticipated completion date in the spring of 2019.
The guide provides schools and communities with a framework to identify students of concern, assess their risk for engaging in violence, and identify intervention strategies to mitigate that risk.
The Secret Service created the National Threat Assessment Center in 1998 to focus on research, training and threat assessments related to various forms of targeted violence. Following the tragedy at Columbine High School in April 1999, the Secret Service partnered with the Department of Education to study 37 incidents of targeted violence that occurred at elementary and secondary schools. The goal of that study, the Safe School Initiative (SSI), was to gather and analyze accurate and useful information about the thinking and behavior of students who commit acts of violence. The findings of the SSI led to the establishment of threat assessment programs in schools – something the Secret Service remains fervently committed to.
“The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting tragedy served as the impetus to go beyond our past work and go in depth regarding the how - how do we solve this epidemic?” said Secret Service Director R. D. “Tex” Alles. “The report truly is an operational guide and I am confident that if embraced and followed by our Nation’s communities and schools, that we will together reduce the occurrence of violence and the tragic loss of life.”
To ensure no school goes overlooked, the new guide is available to the public and for download at DHS.gov/school-safety-and-security and www.SecretService.gov. The Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center will also be printing and distributing copies to schools across the country.
This report is not the end of the Secret Service’s work to prevent school shootings and targeted violence. Work is currently underway to release an updated comprehensive study with an anticipated completion date in the spring of 2019.
Monday, July 16, 2018
5 Reputed Members of Colombo Crime Family Indicted for Racketeering, Extortion, and Related Charges
A 32-count indictment was unsealed in federal court in Brooklyn charging two inducted members and two associates of the Colombo organized crime family (the “Colombo family”) with racketeering, including predicate acts of extortion, extortionate collection, money laundering and illegal gambling. The indictment also charges one inducted member of the Gambino organized crime family of La Cosa Nostra (the “Gambino family”) with extortionate collection and a related conspiracy. The indictment relates to the defendants’ alleged criminal activities in Brooklyn, Staten Island and elsewhere between December 2010 and June 2018.
The defendants—Jerry Ciauri, also known as “Fat Jerry,” a member of the Colombo family, Vito Difalco, also known as “Victor” and “The Mask,” a member of the Colombo family, Salvatore Disano, also known as “Sal Heaven,” an associate of the Colombo family, Anthony Licata, also known as “Anthony Suits,” a member of the Gambino family, and Joseph Maratea, an associate of the Colombo family—were arrested arraigned before Magistrate Judge Ramon E. Reyes, Jr.
Richard P. Donoghue, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, William F. Sweeney, Jr., Assistant Director-in-Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation, New York Field Office (FBI), and James P. O’Neill, Commissioner, New York City Police Department (NYPD), announced the charges.
“This investigation shows that members of La Cosa Nostra continue to prey on members of our community, enriching themselves and their criminal network by making extortionate loans and using threats of violence to collect,” stated United States Attorney Donoghue. “Rooting out traditional organized crime’s dangerous and corrupting influence continues to be a high priority for this Office and our law enforcement partners.”
“As alleged in the indictment, these defendants instilled fear in the hearts of their victims through threats of violence,” stated FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Sweeney. “These extortionate threats are the trademark of the mafia’s power, but in the end all it does is expose their weakness. While criminal organizations such as La Costa Nostra continue to work hard to imbed fear and danger within our communities, the FBI New York Joint Organized Crime Task Force is working even harder to ensure the public’s safety and security.”
“The mob is certainly diminished, but it is not dead,” stated NYPD Police Commissioner O’Neill. “These groups require our constant vigilance. By working in close collaboration with our law enforcement partners in the FBI and the Eastern District, the NYPD will continue to ensure public safety through aggressive investigation and the dismantling of these types of organized-crime organizations.”
As alleged in the indictment and court filings, Ciauri is charged with making extortionate loans and with using extortionate means to collect debts from six victims, as well as laundering the proceeds of his loansharking business in order to conceal his involvement.
Disano is charged with using extortionate means to collect debts from three victims and with assisting Ciauri in laundering the proceeds. On one occasion, Ciauri threatened to shoot a loansharking partner who had fallen behind making payments to Ciauri. He subsequently recruited another associate to stalk that partner. On another occasion, Ciauri enlisted an associate to slash a victim’s tires in the middle of the night.
Difalco is charged with making extortionate loans and with using extortionate means to collect debts from eight victims. In one conversation, Difalco threatened a loansharking victim by telling him that he had a past history of setting on fire the cars of those who failed to make timely payments; Difalco told the victim, “Good things happen to me when I stay calm see like I was by your house the other day…. Four years ago, I would have put the Benz on fire.”
Maratea is charged with using extortionate means to collect debts from five victims. To ensure that Maratea and Difalco could find their debtors, Difalco and Maratea required debtors to provide a copy of their driver’s licenses and contact information.
Each of the defendants faces a maximum of 20 years’ imprisonment on the racketeering, money laundering and extortionate collection offenses. The charges in the indictment are merely allegations, and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
The government’s case is being handled by the Office’s Organized Crime & Gangs Section. Assistant United States Attorneys Elizabeth A. Geddes and Mathew S. Miller are in charge of the prosecution.
The Defendants:
The defendants—Jerry Ciauri, also known as “Fat Jerry,” a member of the Colombo family, Vito Difalco, also known as “Victor” and “The Mask,” a member of the Colombo family, Salvatore Disano, also known as “Sal Heaven,” an associate of the Colombo family, Anthony Licata, also known as “Anthony Suits,” a member of the Gambino family, and Joseph Maratea, an associate of the Colombo family—were arrested arraigned before Magistrate Judge Ramon E. Reyes, Jr.
Richard P. Donoghue, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, William F. Sweeney, Jr., Assistant Director-in-Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation, New York Field Office (FBI), and James P. O’Neill, Commissioner, New York City Police Department (NYPD), announced the charges.
“This investigation shows that members of La Cosa Nostra continue to prey on members of our community, enriching themselves and their criminal network by making extortionate loans and using threats of violence to collect,” stated United States Attorney Donoghue. “Rooting out traditional organized crime’s dangerous and corrupting influence continues to be a high priority for this Office and our law enforcement partners.”
“As alleged in the indictment, these defendants instilled fear in the hearts of their victims through threats of violence,” stated FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Sweeney. “These extortionate threats are the trademark of the mafia’s power, but in the end all it does is expose their weakness. While criminal organizations such as La Costa Nostra continue to work hard to imbed fear and danger within our communities, the FBI New York Joint Organized Crime Task Force is working even harder to ensure the public’s safety and security.”
“The mob is certainly diminished, but it is not dead,” stated NYPD Police Commissioner O’Neill. “These groups require our constant vigilance. By working in close collaboration with our law enforcement partners in the FBI and the Eastern District, the NYPD will continue to ensure public safety through aggressive investigation and the dismantling of these types of organized-crime organizations.”
As alleged in the indictment and court filings, Ciauri is charged with making extortionate loans and with using extortionate means to collect debts from six victims, as well as laundering the proceeds of his loansharking business in order to conceal his involvement.
Disano is charged with using extortionate means to collect debts from three victims and with assisting Ciauri in laundering the proceeds. On one occasion, Ciauri threatened to shoot a loansharking partner who had fallen behind making payments to Ciauri. He subsequently recruited another associate to stalk that partner. On another occasion, Ciauri enlisted an associate to slash a victim’s tires in the middle of the night.
Difalco is charged with making extortionate loans and with using extortionate means to collect debts from eight victims. In one conversation, Difalco threatened a loansharking victim by telling him that he had a past history of setting on fire the cars of those who failed to make timely payments; Difalco told the victim, “Good things happen to me when I stay calm see like I was by your house the other day…. Four years ago, I would have put the Benz on fire.”
Maratea is charged with using extortionate means to collect debts from five victims. To ensure that Maratea and Difalco could find their debtors, Difalco and Maratea required debtors to provide a copy of their driver’s licenses and contact information.
Each of the defendants faces a maximum of 20 years’ imprisonment on the racketeering, money laundering and extortionate collection offenses. The charges in the indictment are merely allegations, and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
The government’s case is being handled by the Office’s Organized Crime & Gangs Section. Assistant United States Attorneys Elizabeth A. Geddes and Mathew S. Miller are in charge of the prosecution.
The Defendants:
- JERRY CIAURI (also known as “Fat Jerry”) Age: 59 Brooklyn, New York
- VITO DIFALCO (also known as “Victor” and “The Mask”) Age: 63 Brooklyn, New York
- SALVATORE DISANO (also known as “Sal Heaven”) Age: 48 Brooklyn, New York
- ANTHONY LICATA (also known as “Anthony Suits”) Age: 49 Brooklyn, New York
- JOSEPH MARATEA Age: 42 Brooklyn, New York
Wednesday, July 11, 2018
The Good Mothers: The Story of the Three Women Who Took on the World's Most Powerful Mafia #Ndrangheta
The electrifying, untold story of the women born into the most deadly and obscenely wealthy of the Italian mafias – and how they risked everything to bring it down
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The Calabrian Mafia—known as the ’Ndrangheta—is one of the richest and most ruthless crime syndicates in the world, with branches stretching from America to Australia. It controls seventy percent of the cocaine and heroin supply in Europe, manages billion-dollar extortion rackets, brokers illegal arms deals—supplying weapons to criminals and terrorists—and plunders the treasuries of both Italy and the European Union.
The ’Ndrangheta’s power derives from a macho mix of violence and silence—omertà. Yet it endures because of family ties: you are born into the syndicate, or you marry in. Loyalty is absolute. Bloodshed is revered. You go to prison or your grave and kill your own father, brother, sister, or mother in cold blood before you betray The Family. Accompanying the ’Ndrangheta’s reverence for tradition and history is a violent misogyny among its men. Women are viewed as chattel, bargaining chips for building and maintaining clan alliances and beatings—and worse—are routine.
In 2009, after one abused ’Ndrangheta wife was murdered for turning state’s evidence, prosecutor Alessandra Cerreti considered a tantalizing possibility: that the ’Ndrangheta’s sexism might be its greatest flaw—and her most effective weapon. Approaching two more mafia wives, Alessandra persuaded them to testify in return for a new future for themselves and their children.
A feminist saga of true crime and justice, The Good Mothers: The Story of the Three Women Who Took on the World's Most Powerful Mafia, is the riveting story of a high-stakes battle pitting a brilliant, driven woman fighting to save a nation against ruthless mafiosi fighting for their existence. Caught in the middle are three women fighting for their children and their lives. Not all will survive.
.The Calabrian Mafia—known as the ’Ndrangheta—is one of the richest and most ruthless crime syndicates in the world, with branches stretching from America to Australia. It controls seventy percent of the cocaine and heroin supply in Europe, manages billion-dollar extortion rackets, brokers illegal arms deals—supplying weapons to criminals and terrorists—and plunders the treasuries of both Italy and the European Union.
The ’Ndrangheta’s power derives from a macho mix of violence and silence—omertà. Yet it endures because of family ties: you are born into the syndicate, or you marry in. Loyalty is absolute. Bloodshed is revered. You go to prison or your grave and kill your own father, brother, sister, or mother in cold blood before you betray The Family. Accompanying the ’Ndrangheta’s reverence for tradition and history is a violent misogyny among its men. Women are viewed as chattel, bargaining chips for building and maintaining clan alliances and beatings—and worse—are routine.
In 2009, after one abused ’Ndrangheta wife was murdered for turning state’s evidence, prosecutor Alessandra Cerreti considered a tantalizing possibility: that the ’Ndrangheta’s sexism might be its greatest flaw—and her most effective weapon. Approaching two more mafia wives, Alessandra persuaded them to testify in return for a new future for themselves and their children.
A feminist saga of true crime and justice, The Good Mothers: The Story of the Three Women Who Took on the World's Most Powerful Mafia, is the riveting story of a high-stakes battle pitting a brilliant, driven woman fighting to save a nation against ruthless mafiosi fighting for their existence. Caught in the middle are three women fighting for their children and their lives. Not all will survive.
Monday, July 09, 2018
Where the Mob Bodies, Bootleggers and Blackmailers are Buried in the Lurid History of Chicago’s Prohibition Gangsters
In 1981, an FBI team visited Donald Trump to discuss his plans for a casino in Atlantic City. Trump admitted to having ‘read in the press’ and ‘heard from acquaintances’ that the Mob ran Atlantic City. At the time, Trump’s acquaintances included his lawyer Roy Cohn, whose other clients included those charming New York businessmen Antony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno and Paul ‘Big Paul’ Castellano.
‘I’ve known some tough cookies over the years,’ Trump boasted in 2016. ‘I’ve known the people that make the politicians you and I deal with every day look like little babies.’ No one minded too much. Organised crime is a tapeworm in the gut of American commerce, lodged since Prohibition. The Volstead Act of January 1920 raised the cost of a barrel of beer from $3.50 to $55. By 1927, the profits from organised crime were $500 million in Chicago alone. The production, distribution and retailing of alcohol was worth $200 million. Gambling brought in $167 million. Another $133 million came from labour racketeering, extortion and brothel-keeping.
In 1920
, Chicago’s underworld was divided between a South Side gang, led by the Italian immigrant ‘Big Jim’ Colosino, and the Irish and Jewish gangs on the North Side. Like many hands-on managers, Big Jim had trouble delegating, even when it came to minor tasks such as beating up nosy journalists. When the North Side gang moved into bootlegging, Colesino’s nephew John Torrio suggested that the South Side gang compete for a share of the profits. Colesino, fearing a turf war, refused. So Torrio murdered his uncle and started bootlegging.
Torrio was a multi-ethnic employer. Americans consider this a virtue, even among murderers. The Italian ‘Roxy’ Vanilli and the Irishman ‘Chicken Harry’ Cullet rubbed along just fine with ‘Jew Kid’ Grabiner and Mike ‘The Greek’ Potson — until someone said hello to someone’s else’s little friend.
Torrio persuaded the North Side leader Dean O’Banion to agree to a ‘master plan’ for dividing Chicago. The peace held for four years. While Torrio opened an Italian restaurant featuring an operatic trio, ‘refined cabaret’ and ‘1,000,000 yards of spaghetti’, O’Banion bought some Thompson submachine guns. A racketeering cartel could not be run like a railroad cartel. There was no transparency among tax-dodgers, no trust between thieves, and no ‘enforcement device’ other than enforcement.
In May 1924, O’Banion framed Torrio for a murder and set him up for a brewery raid. In November 1924, Torrio’s gunmen killed O’Banion as he was clipping chrysanthemums in his flower shop. Two months later, the North Side gang ambushed Torrio outside his apartment and clipped him five times at close range.
Torrio survived, but he took the hint and retreated to Italy. His protégé Alphonse ‘Scarface’ Capone took over the Chicago Outfit. The euphemists of Silicon Valley would call Al Capone a serial disrupter who liked breaking things. By the end of Prohibition in 1933, there had been more than 700 Mob killings in Chicago alone.
On St Valentine’s Day 1929, Capone’s men machine-gunned seven North Siders in a parking garage. This negotiation established the Chicago Outfit’s supremacy in Chicago, and cleared the way for another Torrio scheme. In May 1929, Torrio invited the top Italian, Jewish and Irish gangsters to a hotel in Atlantic City and suggested they form a national ‘Syndicate’. The rest is violence.
Is crime just another American business, a career move for entrepreneurial immigrants in a hurry? John J. Binder teaches business at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and has a sideline in the Mob history racket. He knows where the bodies are buried, and by whom. We need no longer err by confusing North Side lieutenant Earl ‘Hymie’ Weiss, who shot his own brother in the chest, with the North Side ‘mad hatter’ Louis ‘Diamond Jack’ Allerie, who was shot in the back by his own brother; or with the bootlegger George Druggan who, shot in the back, told the police that it was a self-inflicted wound. Anyone who still mixes them up deserves a punishment beating from the American Historical Association.
Binder does his own spadework, too. Digging into Chicago’s police archives, folklore, and concrete foundations, he establishes that Chicago’s mobsters pioneered the drive-by shooting. As the unfortunate Willie Dickman discovered on 3 September 1925, they were also the first to use a Thompson submachine gun for a ‘gangland hit’. Yet the Scarface image of the Thompson-touting mobster was a fiction. Bootleggers preferred the shotgun and assassins the pistol. Thompsons were used ‘sparingly’, like a niblick in golf.
Al Capone’s Beer Wars is a well-researched source book. Readers who never learnt to read nothing because they was schooled on the mean streets will appreciate Binder’s data graphs and mugshots. Not too shabby for a wise guy.
Thanks to Dominic Green.
‘I’ve known some tough cookies over the years,’ Trump boasted in 2016. ‘I’ve known the people that make the politicians you and I deal with every day look like little babies.’ No one minded too much. Organised crime is a tapeworm in the gut of American commerce, lodged since Prohibition. The Volstead Act of January 1920 raised the cost of a barrel of beer from $3.50 to $55. By 1927, the profits from organised crime were $500 million in Chicago alone. The production, distribution and retailing of alcohol was worth $200 million. Gambling brought in $167 million. Another $133 million came from labour racketeering, extortion and brothel-keeping.
In 1920
, Chicago’s underworld was divided between a South Side gang, led by the Italian immigrant ‘Big Jim’ Colosino, and the Irish and Jewish gangs on the North Side. Like many hands-on managers, Big Jim had trouble delegating, even when it came to minor tasks such as beating up nosy journalists. When the North Side gang moved into bootlegging, Colesino’s nephew John Torrio suggested that the South Side gang compete for a share of the profits. Colesino, fearing a turf war, refused. So Torrio murdered his uncle and started bootlegging.Torrio was a multi-ethnic employer. Americans consider this a virtue, even among murderers. The Italian ‘Roxy’ Vanilli and the Irishman ‘Chicken Harry’ Cullet rubbed along just fine with ‘Jew Kid’ Grabiner and Mike ‘The Greek’ Potson — until someone said hello to someone’s else’s little friend.
Torrio persuaded the North Side leader Dean O’Banion to agree to a ‘master plan’ for dividing Chicago. The peace held for four years. While Torrio opened an Italian restaurant featuring an operatic trio, ‘refined cabaret’ and ‘1,000,000 yards of spaghetti’, O’Banion bought some Thompson submachine guns. A racketeering cartel could not be run like a railroad cartel. There was no transparency among tax-dodgers, no trust between thieves, and no ‘enforcement device’ other than enforcement.
In May 1924, O’Banion framed Torrio for a murder and set him up for a brewery raid. In November 1924, Torrio’s gunmen killed O’Banion as he was clipping chrysanthemums in his flower shop. Two months later, the North Side gang ambushed Torrio outside his apartment and clipped him five times at close range.
Torrio survived, but he took the hint and retreated to Italy. His protégé Alphonse ‘Scarface’ Capone took over the Chicago Outfit. The euphemists of Silicon Valley would call Al Capone a serial disrupter who liked breaking things. By the end of Prohibition in 1933, there had been more than 700 Mob killings in Chicago alone.
On St Valentine’s Day 1929, Capone’s men machine-gunned seven North Siders in a parking garage. This negotiation established the Chicago Outfit’s supremacy in Chicago, and cleared the way for another Torrio scheme. In May 1929, Torrio invited the top Italian, Jewish and Irish gangsters to a hotel in Atlantic City and suggested they form a national ‘Syndicate’. The rest is violence.
Is crime just another American business, a career move for entrepreneurial immigrants in a hurry? John J. Binder teaches business at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and has a sideline in the Mob history racket. He knows where the bodies are buried, and by whom. We need no longer err by confusing North Side lieutenant Earl ‘Hymie’ Weiss, who shot his own brother in the chest, with the North Side ‘mad hatter’ Louis ‘Diamond Jack’ Allerie, who was shot in the back by his own brother; or with the bootlegger George Druggan who, shot in the back, told the police that it was a self-inflicted wound. Anyone who still mixes them up deserves a punishment beating from the American Historical Association.
Binder does his own spadework, too. Digging into Chicago’s police archives, folklore, and concrete foundations, he establishes that Chicago’s mobsters pioneered the drive-by shooting. As the unfortunate Willie Dickman discovered on 3 September 1925, they were also the first to use a Thompson submachine gun for a ‘gangland hit’. Yet the Scarface image of the Thompson-touting mobster was a fiction. Bootleggers preferred the shotgun and assassins the pistol. Thompsons were used ‘sparingly’, like a niblick in golf.
Al Capone’s Beer Wars is a well-researched source book. Readers who never learnt to read nothing because they was schooled on the mean streets will appreciate Binder’s data graphs and mugshots. Not too shabby for a wise guy.
Thanks to Dominic Green.
Thursday, July 05, 2018
7 Members #Crips Street Gang Indicted for Drug Trafficking
A seventh defendant, Tysheim Warren, was arrested in connection with a nine-count indictment filed in federal court in Brooklyn, also charging Javier Blackett, John Paul Balcazar, David Maldonado, Hassan McClean, Kevin Raphael and Andrew Rose with crimes stemming from their participation in a drug-trafficking organization that distributed more than 400 grams of crack cocaine in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens/Flatbush neighborhoods of Brooklyn. The indictment was returned by a grand jury on May 10, 2018. Blackett, Maldonado, Raphael and Rose were arrested on May 15, 2018. Balcazar was arrested on May 18, 2018, and McClean was arrested on May 22, 2018. They were arraigned and ordered detained pending trial. Warren was arraigned this afternoon before United States Magistrate Judge Steven M. Gold and ordered detained.
Richard P. Donoghue, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, William F. Sweeney, Jr., Assistant Director-in-Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation, New York Field Office (FBI), and James P. O’Neill, Commissioner, New York City Police Department (NYPD), announced the charges.
According to the indictment and court filings, the defendants’ drug-selling operations centered around several residential buildings approximately three blocks southeast of the Prospect Park ice skating rink. Since March 2017, members of law enforcement made numerous controlled purchases totaling more than 400 grams of crack cocaine from the defendants’ organization and intercepted, pursuant to court order, communications discussing their distribution of significantly more narcotics. Blackett, a member of the Eight Trey set of the Crips street gang, was the leader of the organization; Raphael was one of his principal suppliers; and Balcazar, Maldonado, McClean, Rose and Warren were workers.
“The residents of Brooklyn are entitled to streets that are free of the dangerous drugs the defendants were allegedly selling,” stated United States Attorney Donoghue. “This Office, together with our law enforcement partners, will continue to work tirelessly to put drug dealers out of business and hold them accountable for their crimes.”
“These dealers are alleged to have operated very close to a place where families go, where children play and where people find sanctuary in the city,” stated FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Sweeney. “When doing business with gang members and drug dealers, violence inevitably follows and innocent people could have been caught up in it. The FBI Metro Safe Streets Task Force works every day to protect the community from these dangerous gang members and preventing them from proliferating their deadly drugs.”
“The NYPD’s efforts to eradicate drug trafficking are greatly strengthened by our close partnerships with the FBI and the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District,” stated NYPD Commissioner O’Neill. “I commend everyone involved in this case, particularly the investigators who put themselves directly in harm’s way. Those who illegally deal in narcotics should be prepared for the full weight of our nation’s best law enforcement professionals to bear down upon them.”
If convicted of the conspiracy charge, the defendants face a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment and up to life in prison. The charges in the indictment are merely allegations, and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
This case is part of Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN), a program bringing together all levels of law enforcement and the communities they serve to reduce violent crime and make our neighborhoods safer for everyone. Attorney General Jeff Sessions reinvigorated PSN in 2017 as part of the Department’s renewed focus on targeting violent criminals, directing all U.S. Attorney’s Offices to work in partnership with federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement and the local community to develop effective, locally based strategies to reduce violent crime.
Richard P. Donoghue, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, William F. Sweeney, Jr., Assistant Director-in-Charge, Federal Bureau of Investigation, New York Field Office (FBI), and James P. O’Neill, Commissioner, New York City Police Department (NYPD), announced the charges.
According to the indictment and court filings, the defendants’ drug-selling operations centered around several residential buildings approximately three blocks southeast of the Prospect Park ice skating rink. Since March 2017, members of law enforcement made numerous controlled purchases totaling more than 400 grams of crack cocaine from the defendants’ organization and intercepted, pursuant to court order, communications discussing their distribution of significantly more narcotics. Blackett, a member of the Eight Trey set of the Crips street gang, was the leader of the organization; Raphael was one of his principal suppliers; and Balcazar, Maldonado, McClean, Rose and Warren were workers.
“The residents of Brooklyn are entitled to streets that are free of the dangerous drugs the defendants were allegedly selling,” stated United States Attorney Donoghue. “This Office, together with our law enforcement partners, will continue to work tirelessly to put drug dealers out of business and hold them accountable for their crimes.”
“These dealers are alleged to have operated very close to a place where families go, where children play and where people find sanctuary in the city,” stated FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Sweeney. “When doing business with gang members and drug dealers, violence inevitably follows and innocent people could have been caught up in it. The FBI Metro Safe Streets Task Force works every day to protect the community from these dangerous gang members and preventing them from proliferating their deadly drugs.”
“The NYPD’s efforts to eradicate drug trafficking are greatly strengthened by our close partnerships with the FBI and the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District,” stated NYPD Commissioner O’Neill. “I commend everyone involved in this case, particularly the investigators who put themselves directly in harm’s way. Those who illegally deal in narcotics should be prepared for the full weight of our nation’s best law enforcement professionals to bear down upon them.”
If convicted of the conspiracy charge, the defendants face a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment and up to life in prison. The charges in the indictment are merely allegations, and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
This case is part of Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN), a program bringing together all levels of law enforcement and the communities they serve to reduce violent crime and make our neighborhoods safer for everyone. Attorney General Jeff Sessions reinvigorated PSN in 2017 as part of the Department’s renewed focus on targeting violent criminals, directing all U.S. Attorney’s Offices to work in partnership with federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement and the local community to develop effective, locally based strategies to reduce violent crime.
Prequel to #TheSopranos - The Many Saints of Newark - Hires Thor Director Alan Taylor
Alan Taylor of Thor: The Dark World and Terminator Genisys will be taking the helm of a feature film set prior to hit early 2000s TV crime drama series The Sopranos. Broadcast between 1999 and 2007, HBO’s The Sopranos won 21 Emmy Awards and five Golden Globes over the course of its impactful nine-year run.
James Gandolfini, who played conflicted crime family patriarch Tony Soprano, passed away in 2013, but The Sopranos creator David Chase and co-writer Lawrence Konner have found a way to continue the series’ legacy, through a prequel film directed by Thor: The Dark World’s Alan Taylor.
According to The Wrap, The Many Saints of Newark will be set in the 1960s in New Jersey, north-eastern US, during a time of extreme tension between Newark city’s Italian and African-American communities. Other than that, New Line Cinema is keeping tight-lipped about plot details, leaving fans to wonder which characters from the series will be found within the movie treatment.
Taylor’s own background was in TV, working his way through a slew of episodic dramas — Homicide: Life on the Street, The West Wing, Sex and the City, Mad Men, Game of Thrones and more.
In fact, he has previous experience with The Sopranos, having directed nine of its episodes, including one of its final episodes, the Emmy-winning season six Kennedy and Heidi.
James Gandolfini, who played conflicted crime family patriarch Tony Soprano, passed away in 2013, but The Sopranos creator David Chase and co-writer Lawrence Konner have found a way to continue the series’ legacy, through a prequel film directed by Thor: The Dark World’s Alan Taylor.
According to The Wrap, The Many Saints of Newark will be set in the 1960s in New Jersey, north-eastern US, during a time of extreme tension between Newark city’s Italian and African-American communities. Other than that, New Line Cinema is keeping tight-lipped about plot details, leaving fans to wonder which characters from the series will be found within the movie treatment.
Taylor’s own background was in TV, working his way through a slew of episodic dramas — Homicide: Life on the Street, The West Wing, Sex and the City, Mad Men, Game of Thrones and more.
In fact, he has previous experience with The Sopranos, having directed nine of its episodes, including one of its final episodes, the Emmy-winning season six Kennedy and Heidi.
Monday, June 25, 2018
Organized Crime is Global, and Flourishing: the Mafia Makes Massive Profit from Migrant Crisis
In the spring of 2015, I flew to Sicily to report a story about the European migration crisis. Then, as now, hundreds of thousands of migrants from Africa and the Middle East were crowding into small fishing boats and flimsy rubber dinghies in Libya, Egypt and Turkey and setting out across the Mediterranean for Europe. In 15 years, 22,000 had drowned en route. But if the humanitarian crisis was well known and comprehensively reported, I had been tipped off that a central explanation for this catastrophe had received less attention. Anti-mafia prosecutors in Palermo were claiming to have evidence suggesting that one answer to why so many refugees and migrants were heading to Sicily was because the Italian Mafia wanted them to.
In Sicily, I interviewed the prosecutors and reviewed their evidence, and talked to Carabinieri, anti-mafia activists, refugees and social workers. Where the world had seen an unprecedented emergency, Italy’s gangsters had perceived an unrivaled opportunity. North African and Middle Eastern gangs handled the trafficking across the Mediterranean. But once the migrants arrived, mafiosi were making millions from them, sometimes putting them to work on farms for as little as €3 a day, sometimes taking a cut from Nigerian prostitution rackets, but mainly by infiltrating and corrupting Italy’s immigration system. The mafia’s men inside these authorities ensured that mafia businesses were awarded contracts for the construction and management of refugee reception centers. Each migrant earned the mafia €28 per head per day. A three-year contract to run Europe’s biggest migrant center at Mineo in eastern Sicily was worth €97 million. A Carabinieri surveillance team in Rome recorded one mobster, convicted murderer Salvatore Buzzi, boasting in a phone call to an associate: "Do you have any idea how much I make from immigrants? Even drugs aren’t as profitable!"
The story was a startling correction to the idea of the Italian Mafia as historic. It also repudiated any notions of mafia glamor. Here was a vast present-day criminal conspiracy making tens of millions from the excruciating suffering of hundreds of thousands of people and 3,000 to 4,000 deaths every year. This was not the stylish menace of "The Godfather" or "Goodfellas" or even Elena Ferrante. This was sordid, venal and deadly.
My last two interviews were in Rome. Through friends, I contacted a journalist in the capital who specialized in mafia stories, Laura Aprati, and asked her to set up two interviews, one with a Carabinieri chief, another with a senior anti-mafia magistrate, both of whom she knew. Laura’s price was €250, plus my mandatory attendance at a showing of a play she had co-written with another journalist and two anti-mafia activists at a school in a run-down, mafia-heavy area on the outskirts of Rome. "You will come," commanded Laura.
The play turned out to be a one-woman show, accompanied by the mournful bow of a single cellist, set against a plain, blood-red backdrop. At the time, I spoke no Italian and understood very little of the drama, but one thing I did manage to catch was the name of the play’s protagonist, Maria Concetta Cacciola. That single name turned out to be the key that unlocked another hidden world. Concetta, as I later read in several thousand pages of judicial documents, had been born into a family that worked for one of the ruling clans in the Calabrian Mafia, the ’Ndrangheta, in the toe of Italy. In May, June and July 2011, she had testified against her family in return for entry to Italy’s witness protection program. By doing so, she was following the example of two other ’Ndrangheta women, her friend Giuseppina Pesce, who came from Concetta’s home town of Rosarno on Calabria’s west coast, and Lea Garofalo, who was from Pagliarelle, a mountain village above Calabria’s east coast. Concetta, Giuseppina and Lea all shared the same motivations for giving evidence. They wanted their children to have a different life, away from the blood and killing of the mafia; and they had all been accused of having an affair.
The three women’s testimony blew the secret world of the ’Ndrangheta wide open. Like Sicily’s Cosa Nostra and the Camorra in Naples, the ’Ndrangheta (pronounced un-drung-get-a and derived from the Greek andrangheteia, meaning "society of men of honor and valor") had been founded in the tumultuous years around the unification of the Italian peninsula in 1861. Like the other two mafias, too, the ’Ndrangheta covered its criminality with a veneer of righteous revolution: their infiltration and corruption of the economy and the state was part, so the mafioso narrative went, of an honorable, southern subversion of the new northern-dominated Italian state. But at the time, little else was known about the organization. For most of its existence, the ’Ndrangheta had been considered a poor cousin to Cosa Nostra and the Camorra, country bumpkins in dusty suits who might extract protection from the local trattoria but never strayed far from their groves of oranges, lemons and olives.
Thanks in part to the three women’s testimony, that caricature was revealed as woefully out of date. In their statements to police and in court, which ran to thousands of pages, the women described a global monster. Eventually, Calabria’s prosecutors would conclude that the ’Ndrangheta had a presence in 120 of the world’s 200 countries and a global income of $50-100 billion at its upper end, around $10 billion more than Microsoft’s annual revenue. They ran heroin, marijuana and 70 percent of the cocaine in Europe. They extorted Calabria’s businesses for billions of euros every year and, further afield, embezzled and rigged contracts from the Italian government and the European Union worth billions more, even cornering the market in the disposal of nuclear waste, which they dumped in the Red Sea off Somalia. Their empire linked a mob war in Toronto to a cocaine-delivering pizzeria in Queens, New York, called Cucino a Modo Mio (I Cook My Own Way) to the reported ownership of an entire Brussels neighborhood to mining in Togo.
Their gun-running business directly affected the destiny of nations: Franco Roberti, head of Italy’s anti-mafia directorate, told me the ’Ndrangheta was selling weapons to several sides in Syria’s civil war. But it was laundering their riches and those of other crime groups from around the world, which the Calabrians did for a fee, that made the ’Ndrangheta a global power. Millions of people worked in their companies, shopped in their stores, ate in their restaurants, lived in their buildings and elected politicians they funded. Giuseppe Lombardo, a Calabrian prosecutor specializing in the ’Ndrangheta’s finances, told me that by buying up the government debt of two Asian countries, Thailand and Indonesia, then threatening to dump it, the ’Ndrangheta had blackmailed entire nations into letting it operate on their territory. Their money, said Lombardo, had elevated the group to a position of invulnerability. They now occupied a "fundamental and indispensable position in the global market," he said, one that was "more or less essential for the smooth functioning of the global economic system."
That almost no one knew any of this until the last decade or so is no coincidence. The secret of the ’Ndrangheta’s success was secrecy or, as they called it, omertà. As I describe in "The Good Mothers," their great flaw turned out to be the claustrophobic family loyalty and murderous misogyny with which they enforced it. The women of the ’Ndrangheta had lives as restricted as women living under conservative Islam. To persuade them to talk, all the prosecutors had to do was offer them and their children an alternative.
The investigations built on Concetta’s, Giuseppina’s and Lea’s evidence brought down several large crime families and shook the ’Ndrangheta to its core. What unnerves me, still, is that such a giant, global enterprise could function for so long without anyone knowing. That revelation sits alongside two other disturbing modern truths: that globalization assists illicit business as much as it does legitimate commerce; and that the era of global, mass connectivity has, paradoxically, decreased how what we know about the world as the conversation narrows to a few common narratives (Trump, terrorism, #Metoo) and the truth is subsumed by noise.
What I discovered about the ’Ndrangheta has made me curious about other, equally unfamiliar organized crime groups. Years of research lie ahead. But I can already say with some confidence that the great hidden truth of our era is that terrorism is a spectacular distraction from the real threat: the rise of global organized crime. From drugs to guns, cyber-attacks to the dark web, political financing to narco-states, people trafficking to child abuse, tax havens to smuggled wine, counterfeit watches to fake news, nail bars to hand car washes and money laundering through property and financial markets from London to New York to Hong Kong to Johannesburg, organized crime is all around us. The most remarkable thing about that? Almost nobody seems to have noticed.
Thanks to Alex Perry.
In Sicily, I interviewed the prosecutors and reviewed their evidence, and talked to Carabinieri, anti-mafia activists, refugees and social workers. Where the world had seen an unprecedented emergency, Italy’s gangsters had perceived an unrivaled opportunity. North African and Middle Eastern gangs handled the trafficking across the Mediterranean. But once the migrants arrived, mafiosi were making millions from them, sometimes putting them to work on farms for as little as €3 a day, sometimes taking a cut from Nigerian prostitution rackets, but mainly by infiltrating and corrupting Italy’s immigration system. The mafia’s men inside these authorities ensured that mafia businesses were awarded contracts for the construction and management of refugee reception centers. Each migrant earned the mafia €28 per head per day. A three-year contract to run Europe’s biggest migrant center at Mineo in eastern Sicily was worth €97 million. A Carabinieri surveillance team in Rome recorded one mobster, convicted murderer Salvatore Buzzi, boasting in a phone call to an associate: "Do you have any idea how much I make from immigrants? Even drugs aren’t as profitable!"
The story was a startling correction to the idea of the Italian Mafia as historic. It also repudiated any notions of mafia glamor. Here was a vast present-day criminal conspiracy making tens of millions from the excruciating suffering of hundreds of thousands of people and 3,000 to 4,000 deaths every year. This was not the stylish menace of "The Godfather" or "Goodfellas" or even Elena Ferrante. This was sordid, venal and deadly.
My last two interviews were in Rome. Through friends, I contacted a journalist in the capital who specialized in mafia stories, Laura Aprati, and asked her to set up two interviews, one with a Carabinieri chief, another with a senior anti-mafia magistrate, both of whom she knew. Laura’s price was €250, plus my mandatory attendance at a showing of a play she had co-written with another journalist and two anti-mafia activists at a school in a run-down, mafia-heavy area on the outskirts of Rome. "You will come," commanded Laura.
The play turned out to be a one-woman show, accompanied by the mournful bow of a single cellist, set against a plain, blood-red backdrop. At the time, I spoke no Italian and understood very little of the drama, but one thing I did manage to catch was the name of the play’s protagonist, Maria Concetta Cacciola. That single name turned out to be the key that unlocked another hidden world. Concetta, as I later read in several thousand pages of judicial documents, had been born into a family that worked for one of the ruling clans in the Calabrian Mafia, the ’Ndrangheta, in the toe of Italy. In May, June and July 2011, she had testified against her family in return for entry to Italy’s witness protection program. By doing so, she was following the example of two other ’Ndrangheta women, her friend Giuseppina Pesce, who came from Concetta’s home town of Rosarno on Calabria’s west coast, and Lea Garofalo, who was from Pagliarelle, a mountain village above Calabria’s east coast. Concetta, Giuseppina and Lea all shared the same motivations for giving evidence. They wanted their children to have a different life, away from the blood and killing of the mafia; and they had all been accused of having an affair.
The three women’s testimony blew the secret world of the ’Ndrangheta wide open. Like Sicily’s Cosa Nostra and the Camorra in Naples, the ’Ndrangheta (pronounced un-drung-get-a and derived from the Greek andrangheteia, meaning "society of men of honor and valor") had been founded in the tumultuous years around the unification of the Italian peninsula in 1861. Like the other two mafias, too, the ’Ndrangheta covered its criminality with a veneer of righteous revolution: their infiltration and corruption of the economy and the state was part, so the mafioso narrative went, of an honorable, southern subversion of the new northern-dominated Italian state. But at the time, little else was known about the organization. For most of its existence, the ’Ndrangheta had been considered a poor cousin to Cosa Nostra and the Camorra, country bumpkins in dusty suits who might extract protection from the local trattoria but never strayed far from their groves of oranges, lemons and olives.
Thanks in part to the three women’s testimony, that caricature was revealed as woefully out of date. In their statements to police and in court, which ran to thousands of pages, the women described a global monster. Eventually, Calabria’s prosecutors would conclude that the ’Ndrangheta had a presence in 120 of the world’s 200 countries and a global income of $50-100 billion at its upper end, around $10 billion more than Microsoft’s annual revenue. They ran heroin, marijuana and 70 percent of the cocaine in Europe. They extorted Calabria’s businesses for billions of euros every year and, further afield, embezzled and rigged contracts from the Italian government and the European Union worth billions more, even cornering the market in the disposal of nuclear waste, which they dumped in the Red Sea off Somalia. Their empire linked a mob war in Toronto to a cocaine-delivering pizzeria in Queens, New York, called Cucino a Modo Mio (I Cook My Own Way) to the reported ownership of an entire Brussels neighborhood to mining in Togo.
Their gun-running business directly affected the destiny of nations: Franco Roberti, head of Italy’s anti-mafia directorate, told me the ’Ndrangheta was selling weapons to several sides in Syria’s civil war. But it was laundering their riches and those of other crime groups from around the world, which the Calabrians did for a fee, that made the ’Ndrangheta a global power. Millions of people worked in their companies, shopped in their stores, ate in their restaurants, lived in their buildings and elected politicians they funded. Giuseppe Lombardo, a Calabrian prosecutor specializing in the ’Ndrangheta’s finances, told me that by buying up the government debt of two Asian countries, Thailand and Indonesia, then threatening to dump it, the ’Ndrangheta had blackmailed entire nations into letting it operate on their territory. Their money, said Lombardo, had elevated the group to a position of invulnerability. They now occupied a "fundamental and indispensable position in the global market," he said, one that was "more or less essential for the smooth functioning of the global economic system."
That almost no one knew any of this until the last decade or so is no coincidence. The secret of the ’Ndrangheta’s success was secrecy or, as they called it, omertà. As I describe in "The Good Mothers," their great flaw turned out to be the claustrophobic family loyalty and murderous misogyny with which they enforced it. The women of the ’Ndrangheta had lives as restricted as women living under conservative Islam. To persuade them to talk, all the prosecutors had to do was offer them and their children an alternative.
The investigations built on Concetta’s, Giuseppina’s and Lea’s evidence brought down several large crime families and shook the ’Ndrangheta to its core. What unnerves me, still, is that such a giant, global enterprise could function for so long without anyone knowing. That revelation sits alongside two other disturbing modern truths: that globalization assists illicit business as much as it does legitimate commerce; and that the era of global, mass connectivity has, paradoxically, decreased how what we know about the world as the conversation narrows to a few common narratives (Trump, terrorism, #Metoo) and the truth is subsumed by noise.
What I discovered about the ’Ndrangheta has made me curious about other, equally unfamiliar organized crime groups. Years of research lie ahead. But I can already say with some confidence that the great hidden truth of our era is that terrorism is a spectacular distraction from the real threat: the rise of global organized crime. From drugs to guns, cyber-attacks to the dark web, political financing to narco-states, people trafficking to child abuse, tax havens to smuggled wine, counterfeit watches to fake news, nail bars to hand car washes and money laundering through property and financial markets from London to New York to Hong Kong to Johannesburg, organized crime is all around us. The most remarkable thing about that? Almost nobody seems to have noticed.
Thanks to Alex Perry.
Friday, June 22, 2018
Cook County Circuit Judge William Hooks Frees Accused Cop Killer Jackie Wilson from Prison
After more than 36 years in custody, an accused cop killer who alleges notorious ex-Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge tortured him into confessing was ordered freed Friday while awaiting his third trial on the charges.
Jackie Wilson, 57, was granted a recognizance bond by Cook County Circuit Judge William Hooks, who last week tossed out Wilson’s murder conviction after finding that Burge and detectives under his command had physically coerced his confession to the 1982 slaying of two Chicago officers.
The judge said special prosecutors “utterly failed” in their arguments to keep Wilson in prison, adding that they appeared to want him to view the case “through the lens of a court sitting in 1982 or 1988 without considering the revelations that have come to light over the last three decades.”
Wilson is likely to walk out of Cook County Jail as soon as later Friday.
The ruling to free Wilson comes as special prosecutors filed paperwork earlier this week indicating they will ask an appeals court to reverse Hooks’ decision to toss the conviction and order a retrial.
Wilson has twice been convicted of teaming up with his now-dead brother, Andrew, who prosecutors say fatally shot Officers Richard O’Brien and William Fahey during a traffic stop in 1982. His first conviction was tossed out after an appeals court ruled that he should not have been tried simultaneously with his brother. At the retrial in 1989, a jury acquitted him of Fahey’s murder but convicted him of O’Brien’s. He was sentenced to life in prison.
Hooks held a lengthy hearing Thursday at which a team of special prosecutors laid out their case for keeping Wilson in custody pending a third trial. Prosecutors summarized the expected testimony of several witnesses, including eyewitnesses who implicated Wilson as well as correctional officers who allegedly heard him take credit for the slayings while in custody.
Thanks to Megan Crepeau.
Jackie Wilson, 57, was granted a recognizance bond by Cook County Circuit Judge William Hooks, who last week tossed out Wilson’s murder conviction after finding that Burge and detectives under his command had physically coerced his confession to the 1982 slaying of two Chicago officers.
The judge said special prosecutors “utterly failed” in their arguments to keep Wilson in prison, adding that they appeared to want him to view the case “through the lens of a court sitting in 1982 or 1988 without considering the revelations that have come to light over the last three decades.”
Wilson is likely to walk out of Cook County Jail as soon as later Friday.
The ruling to free Wilson comes as special prosecutors filed paperwork earlier this week indicating they will ask an appeals court to reverse Hooks’ decision to toss the conviction and order a retrial.
Wilson has twice been convicted of teaming up with his now-dead brother, Andrew, who prosecutors say fatally shot Officers Richard O’Brien and William Fahey during a traffic stop in 1982. His first conviction was tossed out after an appeals court ruled that he should not have been tried simultaneously with his brother. At the retrial in 1989, a jury acquitted him of Fahey’s murder but convicted him of O’Brien’s. He was sentenced to life in prison.
Hooks held a lengthy hearing Thursday at which a team of special prosecutors laid out their case for keeping Wilson in custody pending a third trial. Prosecutors summarized the expected testimony of several witnesses, including eyewitnesses who implicated Wilson as well as correctional officers who allegedly heard him take credit for the slayings while in custody.
Thanks to Megan Crepeau.
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