Mafia Memorabilia War Heats Up

There is a Chicago mob war underway, but it is unlikely to result in bloodshed. But the fight is actually 1,800 miles away from Chicago.

From 1955, when the reign of Mayor Richard J. Daley began, through today with his son, Mayor Richard M. Daley, Chicago has shunned any official recognition of the city's gangland past. But Las Vegas -- for decades controlled by the Chicago Outfit -- is embracing its rich organized crime history.

With not one but two Mob museums planning to open this year, a fight for Chicago Mob memorabilia is now on.

On one end of the famous Las Vegas strip will be the Las Vegas Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, also known as the Mob museum. It is Mayor Oscar Goodman's $50 million pet project in a former federal building, much of it funded by tax money. After countless delays, the official Mob museum is set to open late this year.

At the other end of the strip -- and in direct competition -- is the privately owned and operated Mob Experience. It will fire the first shot with preview parties next week and a grand opening in early March, with interactive holograms of Hollywood Mob figures leading tourists through the exhibits.

"We are not setting out to glorify the Mob by any mean, and nobody in Las Vegas is looking to glorify the mob. But at the same time we are not looking to vilify these people either. I think in the process of collecting these artifacts and being exposed to the stories of the family members, we've been given the greatest Mob story never told," said Jay Bloom, Mob Experience partner.

The late Chicago Outfit boss Sam "Momo" Giancana is among those depicted in exhibits. His daughter Antoniette is among the family members of major Mob figures hired as paid contributors to the Mob Experience. And she is happy to deliver her father's glory days in Vegas.

"It was glorious. I wished he were here now. We were treated like kings, queens and princesses and princes. There was nothing that Sam needed or wanted in this town, it was given to him gladly with love and respect," said Antionette Giancana, Mafia princess.

The Mob Experience will feature memorabilia from the Giancana family along with personal mementos from Bugsy Seigel, Meyer Lansky and others, including Chicago's long-time Mob emissary to Las Vegas Anthony "Tony Ant" Spilotro.

Thanks to Chuck Goudie

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The Russian Mafia Code

Like it's American counterpart, the Russian Mafia has a code that all members must follow. They have 18 rules to love by and if you break the rules, the punishment is death.

1. The crime family is your new family. Distance yourself from your real family.
2. Do not have a family of your own. No wives or children allowed. Girlfriends are okay.
3. Have another source of income, a real job.
4. Help other members with support, but material and otherwise.
5. Never reveal anything about your cohorts and associates.
6. If necessary, take the rap for a fellow thief.
7. Hold meetings to settle disputes.
8. Freely participate in these meetings.
9. Punish the guilty parties as determined at these meetings.
10 Do not flinch from performing these unpleasant duties even though the convicted party may be a friend.
11 Learn the "Fehnay" or Russian Mafia Slang
12 Never get in over your head with gambling debts.
13 Coach and mentor younger hoodlums-in-training
14 Always maintain a network of informants among the lower echelon of criminals
15 Be able to handle your liquor, nobody likes a sloppy gangster
16 Do not mingle with the police in social situations or join any social or community clubs. The Elks Club is vertoten
17 Avoid military service, stay out of the draft
18 Always keep your work to another member of the Russian Mafia

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FBI Expands Use of National Data Exchange to Fight Organized Crime

Colorado law enforcement working an organized crime case identified a “person of interest” during its investigation but couldn’t find a current address or much else on the individual.

So a state trooper searched the FBI's Law Enforcement National Data Exchange, or N-DEx, which revealed the subject as a person of interest in an out-of-state drug case worked by a federal agency. The trooper contacted that agency and learned that this individual had been named in other drug-related cases in California.

Based on that information, the trooper began reaching out to other federal, state, and local agencies in California and beyond…and soon discovered that his subject was a member of a violent gang headquartered in Los Angeles that, up until then, wasn’t known to be operating in Colorado.

This process of connecting the dots between seemingly unrelated pieces of criminal data housed in different places is the backbone of N-DEx. The system enables its law enforcement users to submit certain data to a central repository—located at the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division in West Virginia—where it’s compared against data already on file from local, state, tribal, and federal agencies to identify links and similarities among persons, places, things, and activities across jurisdictional boundaries.

Until now, N-DEx—accessed through a highly secure Internet site—has only been a viable option for a relatively limited number of agencies.

Now, the FBI's about to take N-DEx to the next level: When its final phase is delivered later this month, N-DEx will truly live up to its name…and over time will be available to thousands more law enforcement and criminal justice agencies around the country.

A quick look at how N-DEx has evolved:

• 2008: The first phase gave participating agencies basic capabilities, including the ability to create link analysis charts and to search several thousand incident/case report records and arrest data to help determine a person’s true identity.
• 2009: The second phase supported 100 million searchable records and added the capability to do full-text and geospatial searches. It also enabled users to exchange information with each other and to subscribe to automatic notifications concerning people/cases of interest to them.
• This month’s third and final phase will add probation and parole information to the database, as well as enhancements to some of its existing capabilities. And best of all, the N-DEx interface has been completely redone, giving it the look and feel of a commercial search engine, complete with filters and more streamlined result sets. Now, N-DEx will now be able to support 200 million searchable records, and with future modification, that number can readily increase to two billion records.

Entering information into N-DEx is easy. Agencies participating in state or regional information-sharing systems that “feed” N-DEx don’t have to do anything. For other agencies, once their data is mapped to N-DEx, contributing data will be as easy as a monthly download and submission. And for smaller agencies without automated record management systems or with fewer records, information can be loaded manually.

Bottom line: N-DEx is a powerful investigative tool that will, according to CJIS Assistant Director Dan Roberts, “help keep our communities safer, not only by linking criminal justice data together as never before, but also by enabling investigative partnerships across jurisdictions.”

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