Guilty Pleas in Organized Crime Gambling Ring

Two men with reputed ties to organized crime pleaded guilty on Tuesday to participating in an illegal gambling ring run out of a wholesale produce market at Hunts Point in the Bronx.

John Caggiano, who the authorities say is an associate in the Genovese crime family, admitted in State Supreme Court in Manhattan that he “knowingly advanced and profited from unlawful gambling.” In exchange for his plea to enterprise corruption, a felony, Mr. Caggiano, 59, will receive a sentence of one and a half to four and a half years in prison. He must also forfeit $176,000.

His co-defendant, Douglas Maleton, 60, admitted that he had been a runner for the numbers and sports-betting operation and pleaded guilty to attempted enterprise corruption, for which he will receive a one-year sentence. He must forfeit $591.

“Today’s pleas go a long way to ridding our public wholesale markets of organized crime,” said Michael J. Mansfield, the chairman of the city’s Business Integrity Commission, which was created in 2001 to help end mob influence in the trash-hauling companies and wholesale markets.

Mr. Mansfield also said Tuesday’s pleas were only part of the battle. “There are always going to be influences of organized crime in an organization that has the ability to generate $1.2 billion in sales,” he said.

Mr. Caggiano and Mr. Maleton were 2 of 11 men who were arrested in November 2006 as part of a gambling ring that the authorities said generated $200,000 a year in profits. All but one of the 11 men have pleaded guilty. Robert Russo, who the authorities contend is the head of the operation, is scheduled to go on trial next month.

Mr. Caggiano, the son-in-law of Dominick Cirillo, the former acting boss of the Genovese family, owned and operated C&S Wholesale Produce Inc., one of the terminal market’s biggest produce wholesalers. The authorities said that he ran the day-to-day operations of the ring, often conducting business from his headquarters at C&S.

The commission began investigating the company in 2004, Mr. Mansfield said. By 2006, after the Manhattan district attorney’s office brought charges against the 11 men, the commission began its own proceedings against C&S, Mr. Mansfield said. In May 2007, the commission expelled C&S from the market, finding that the company “lacked good character, honesty and integrity,” Mr. Mansfield said.

Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, said the investigation relied on “quite extensive electronic surveillance over a long period of time.”

The case was under Mr. Morgenthau’s jurisdiction because some of the operations were run out of an apartment in Lower Manhattan, the authorities said.

Justice Bruce Allen is scheduled to formally sentence Mr. Maleton on Oct. 10 and Mr. Caggiano on Nov. 3. Both men declined to comment.

Thanks to John Eligon

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The FBI's Community Outreach Program

Talk about a quick turnaround. In May, the FBI alerted their partner, Clear Channel Outdoor, about a fugitive wanted for armed bank robbery in Milwaukee. Clear Channel quickly featured the man on its digital billboards in and around the city. By the next morning, the fugitive had turned himself in. Apparently, he saw his mug shot on a billboard and, in his own words, “did not like that.”

It’s just one of the many recent operational successes for the FBI's Community Outreach Program. You know that they have special agents across the globe gathering clues and intelligence and solving cases. But did you know that they also have a network of community outreach professionals nationwide supporting their work every day?

They do, and they count on these professionals more than ever to build partnerships with all manner of civic, minority, religious, and ethnic leaders and organizations at national and local levels…to help us get our arms around evolving threats and demographic changes…and to strengthen our overall efforts to prevent crime and terrorism. That includes everything from developing anti-gang strategies to building trust with Muslim leaders.

The FBI's partnership—headed by their community outreach specialist in Philadelphia—led to the groundbreaking agreement with Clear Channel to feature FBI fugitives and emergency notices on its digital billboards in dozens of cities across the country starting late last year. Two more digital billboard providers—Adams Outdoor and Lamar Advertising—have since joined the initiative. So far, at least eight fugitives have been captured as a direct result of publicity from the billboard program.

Each year, their outreach professionals nationwide—who now number 65—come together with representatives from FBI Headquarters for a weeklong conference to build on successes like these. This year’s conference—held in Tampa in June and led by Brett Hovington, chief of the Community Relations Unit at FBI Headquarters—was particularly productive. The participants wrestled with tough issues, shared insights and best practices, explored the many tools available for successful outreach, and heard from a variety of experts and leaders, including FBI Deputy Director John Pistole and Assistant Director John Miller, head of the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs.

For the second straight year, one outreach partner—the FBI National Citizens’ Academy Alumni Association—held a simultaneous conference, getting into the weeds of finding ways to build a safer America by supporting our mission and participating in joint sessions with the community outreach professionals.

During his presentation, Miller summarized the importance of the FBI's community outreach specialists, calling them “unsung heroes” who “build bridges that our special agents can walk across” and who have their hands “on the pulse of the community” by reaching into schools, neighborhoods, corporate boardrooms, mosques, and churches. The work, he said, is vital and not always easy—including late night meetings and some “uncomfortable questions to answer.” Miller also praised the FBI's Citizens’ Academy alumni, who take their own time to support the FBI and “lead us to the next door and the next door and the next.”

For more information on the FBI's Community Outreach program, visit their “In Your Community” website.

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Open City: True Story of the KC Crime Family 1900-1950

For 25 years, William Ouseley was considered public enemy number one ... if you were a mobster, that is.

The FBI agent earned the ongoing assignment to help take down the powerful crime families that had thrived in Kansas City for decades. And these weren’t simply small-time hoods. “The conception is driven by the media and the movies that they’re just some thugs that mainly kill each other and are involved in some basic criminal activities,” Ouseley says. “I don’t think people understand the impact organized crime has had on the underpinnings of our society: infiltration of business, infiltration of the labor unions, infiltration of politics and government.”

Ouseley, who retired from the FBI in 1985 as supervisor of the Kansas City Field Division of the Organized Crime Squad, got to see the toils of his labor justified through the prosecution, conviction and dismantling of the notorious Civella cartel. Now the longtime Lenexa resident has written his first book, “Open City,” which traces the birth and spread of organized crime in Kansas City. “After 21 years of working on the street, there were a lot of people encouraging me to tell the stories,” he says. “The history took me over, though. I found it was a book in itself. That’s why I only got from 1900 to 1953.”

Ouseley, a fit-looking 72-year-old with a prominent Bronx accent, encountered plenty of obstacles when assembling the project. “The most difficult thing about it is that everybody of any significance is dead,” he says. “I wasn’t too interested in people telling me tales that I had no way knowing if they were true. A second problem was that during the heyday of the mob and the machine, they cleaned out all the records from the police department. That was part of their power. So piecing together some of the history of these people and how they came to be was very difficult.”

The title “Open City” may at first seem like a reference to Roberto Rossellini’s famous 1945 film about oppression in wartime Italy. But Ouseley says he chose the name because of the freedom the mob experienced during their heyday in Kansas City. “I wanted to capture the fact that it was a wide-open, anything goes, captive city completely dominated by a corrupt machine and an organized crime family,” he explains. “It was a haven for the gangsters of the ’20s and ’30s. They all came up here for R&R. It was an open city in the negative sense.”

“Open City” revels in the “gangster era” that continues to be a source of fascination for true crime aficionados.

Through meticulous research, Ouseley traces the roots of crime societies in Southern Italy and Sicily, which became known as the shadowy Black Hand once they arrived in the Midwest.

What began as an insular gang extorting local businesses in “Little Italy” in the early 1900s developed into a formidable juggernaut during Prohibition, eventually allying itself with the political engine run by boss Tom Pendergast.

One hilarious story in the book tells of the State Line Tavern, which sat directly on the state line at 3205 Southwest Blvd. Gamblers moved to the west side of a white line that divided the building if Missouri police raided the joint, and to the east if officers hailed from Kansas.

The slow incursion by these organized crime factions paved the way for Kansas City’s most infamous mobster: Nick Civella.

“In the beginning when we learned what we were up against, it didn’t appear to be too significant in the national scene,” Ouseley says. “But we came to find out that Nick Civella was a major player nationally, mainly due to the fact that he owned Roy Lee Williams. With him having Williams, who became the IBT (International Brotherhood of Teamsters) president, we came to find out that Nick was one who had to be included at the table in many of the schemes that involved the use of unions and pension funds. The Las Vegas case that closed out my career sort of proved that.”

Ouseley’s expertise in this area led to a featured appearance on “60 Minutes,” in which he was utilized as the central expert during a story about a major Teamster figure from Cleveland who became an FBI informant.

At the age of 50, however, the agent decided to retire from the profession. He says, “There were a number of reasons. I had 25 years in. I had seen the demise of the Civella dynasty. The timing was right. I had to retire at 55 because it’s mandatory. With the big case that ended the whole saga, I wouldn’t say there was nothing left to be done, but the major portion had been done. Then my wife was after me to quit.”

After his stint with the bureau, Ouseley spent 15 years as the NFL security representative for Kansas City. (“The theory behind the department was to protect the integrity of the league,” he says.) After he left the NFL in 2000, he worked on his own as a security consultant, private investigator and public speaker.

Although he’s been away from the gritty drama of mob case work for more than two decades, he still keeps up with where organized crime stands in Kansas City.

“From what I understand it’s on a very low end,” he says. “The last of the ‘tough guys’ in Civella’s entourage — Carl DeLuna — died about two weeks ago. The last of the sons and grandsons of the racketeers, they have been pummeled with these cases. They’ve lost all of their main assets — the politics, the labor — and that was the substance of the mob. They’re semi-legitimate now. They run some of the topless bars and things like that.”

Surprisingly enough, Ouseley claims that at no point during his FBI tenure did he fear his life was in danger.

“There’s sort of an unwritten rule there, and that goes toward the misconceptions that people have,” Ouseley says.

“This is the business of crime and corruption. As a business, their main objective is to further and protect their business interests. They know that to hurt an agent or a prosecutor or even a news person would be detrimental. They would get heat like they don’t normally get. If they killed an agent, we would shut them down. We would take the whole office and just shut down everything they did, even if we had to park a car in front of every gambling operation. But we would not have the ability to do that if left alone.”

Thanks to Jon Niccum

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60 of 62 Mobsters Have Pled Guilty Since Fed Takedown in February

Even for an infamous gang of mobsters already weakened by federal prosecutions spanning decades, Feb. 7, 2008 was an unusually bad day for the Gambino organized crime family.

Hundreds of federal agents fanned out across the city and elsewhere in a roundup of 62 suspects from all walks of Mafia life, from reputed acting boss John "Jackie Nose" D'Amico _ a crony of former boss John Gotti _ to common street thugs.

At the time, authorities made headlines by hailing the takedown as one of the largest in recent memory and predicting it would further cripple a storied crime family formerly led by the legendary "Dapper Don."

Six months later and with far less fanfare, 60 of the defendants have pleaded guilty, with many taking deals that will put them behind bars for three years or less. Two of the pleas were entered Thursday and one case was dismissed last week, leaving a lone defendant charged with murder facing trial.

The U.S. attorney's office in Brooklyn, which has a long history of prosecuting high-profile Mafia cases with lengthy trials and sentences, has called the case a success. But some defense attorneys suggest the many plea deals show the office overreached and became overwhelmed as the judge pushed for a speedy outcome. "There's no such thing as a 62-defendant trial," said one of the lawyers, Avraham Moskowitz. "So what's the point? The point is to make a splash."

Extortion charges against his client, a New Jersey construction official, were quietly dropped earlier this month after prosecutors conceded they didn't have enough evidence against him. But by then, the lawyer said, an innocent man had seen his reputation ruined by stories linking him to co-defendants with nicknames like "Tommy Sneakers" and "Joe Rackets."

"My client's experience suggests they brought an indictment without careful evaluation of the evidence," he said. "He had his name dragged through the mud for no reason."

Former mob prosecutors say there was nothing haphazard about the Gambino case. Instead, they say, it reflected a calculated shift in strategy favoring carpet bombing of the entire enterprise over strategic strikes against leadership.

"In my view, this is groundbreaking," said James Walden, a former federal prosecutor in Brooklyn who won major convictions against the Bonanno crime family. "They essentially took out the entire organization in one fell swoop" _ an approach designed to reap a new crop of cooperators and rattle those mobsters still on the street but under surveillance.

"It disrupts the family and creates an environment of insecurity," he said. "It causes people to get nervous and talk about things they normally wouldn't talk about."

Prosecutors in Tampa, Fla., took a separate shot at the Gambinos last week, naming John A. "Junior" Gotti in a murder and drug trafficking indictment linking him to three New York City murders from the 1980s and '90s. Three previous cases brought against the Gotti scion since 2005 ended in mistrials.

Randy Mastro, another ex-prosecutor who targeted mob ties to construction as a deputy mayor to Rudy Giuliani, said the two cases have demonstrated the government's resolve to combat a resilient foe. The Brooklyn prosecution, in particular, was "an innovative approach to an endemic historical problem," he said. "Whether it will work, time will tell."

The 80-count Gambino indictment charged the defendants with seven murders, three dating back more than a quarter century, "mob-tax" extortion of the construction industry and racketeering. Among the crime were the slaying of a court officer and extortion at a failed NASCAR track.

Authorities said the case was built with the help of an informant in the construction industry who made three years worth of secret recordings implicating many of the defendants. The arrests, they added, coincided with a smaller sweep of accused gangsters in Italy in a bid to sever the relationship between the Sicilian Mafia and the Gambino family.

On Thursday, reputed capo "Little Nick" Corozzo and co-defendant Vincent DeCongilio avoided a trial scheduled for next week by pleading guilty. The indictment alleged Corozzo ordered the Jan. 26, 1996, murder of a rival mobster. Corozzo now faces 12 to 15 years in prison for murder conspiracy _ by far the harshest term for any of the defendants _ and DeCongilio 12 to 18 months for lesser crimes.

According to prosecutors, Corozzo, 68, was part of a three-man committee of capos formed in 1994 to help "Junior" run New York's Gambino family while his father was in prison, serving a life sentence for murder and racketeering; the elder Gotti died behind bars in 2002.

In May, D'Amico, the acting boss originally charged with racketeering, pleaded guilty to extorting a cement company out of $100,000 and could serve less than two years in prison. The plea, his lawyer said afterward, shows "a lack of evidence and quality of evidence."

Thanks to Tom Hays

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Reputed Mob Associate is Good Family Man and Neighbor, Bad Citizen

In the annals of Chicago organized crime, among "No Nose," "Joe Batters" and "The Lackey," mob underling Joe Venezia was never awarded a nickname.

Yesterday, the 65-year old Venezia may have earned his own mob moniker. Joe "The Family Man" Venezia.

That was the gist of Mr. Venezia's plea for mercy as he stood to be sentenced by U.S. District Judge James B. Zagel. Venezia contended that he should get a break because he was a good family man to his wife and kids.

The government contended that Venezia was a good member of another family: the Chicago Organized Crime family, where he worked for an illegal video poker racket in the suburbs.

In the end, Judge Zagel brushed aside Venezia's standing in the Venezia family. "He is a good family man and a good neighbor," Zagel said. "He is not a good citizen."

With that, Zagel sentenced the aging hoodlum to 40 months in federal prison and three years of probabtion once he is released.

Venezia pleaded guilty to gambling and tax offenses that were leveled against him in the landmark Operation Family Secrets mob case, but he was not implicated in any of the 18 murders allegedly committed by some co-defendants.

Thanks to Chuck Goudie and Ann Pistone

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