The New Chicago Gang

By the mid 1970’s the Chicago mob still kept its influence around the state of Arizona since the city of Phoenix and its underworld was allegedly still controlled by underworld figures with strong Chicago connections. One group of the Chicago faction was still under the control of Joseph Tocco and the other one was also still under the control of the old Melrose Park group aka the Grand Avenue crew under a new leadership since during the early 1970s two of the prime leaders for the Grand Avenue crew, Sam Battaglia and Phil Alderisio, both died in jail.

So, the new overseers for the crew’s rackets in AZ were Tony Spilotro, a Las Vegas enforcer for the Chicago family, and Paul Schiro, a Chicago hoodlum with connections to the New York mob. Schiro arrived in Phoenix back during the early 1960’s together with Spilotro and were considered as two of the most dominant mob figures who were mainly involved in gambling, burglary, fencing of stolen goods, and drug trafficking.


Tony Spilotro

The full extent of the narcotics ring in Phoenix wasn’t known, but government investigators had documents that the gang supplied a major portion of hard drugs for the Chicago market. In fact, the Outfit used Arizona’s strategic position for which I already talked about at the beginning of this story. You see, the gang was funneling drugs from Mexico into the Chicago area through the Arizona territory. The gang was a mixed crew of burglars and dope peddlers, including Phoenix-based Frank Moreno and Fred Pedote, Arden Lee Smith, a heavy narcotics dealer who fled to Mexico to escape a jail term, and Brian “The Mad Pineapple” Ho, a weapons and drug dealer who worked in a Phoenix service station. Since Spilotro spent most of his time in Las Vegas, it was for his pal Schiro to run the day-to-day operations. Federal agents valued the drug traffic at the time at around $8 million per year.

Never Break The “Omerta” #2

Back in 1969, the U.S. Attorney’s Office made an indictment against Chicago Outfit boss Jackie Cerone and also four other members Joe Ferriola, Don Angelini, Dom Cortina and Frank Aureli, on interstate gambling charges, thanks primarily to Louie Bombacino’s testimony. After that Bombacino went to Tempe, AZ; and lived under the name “Joseph Nardi”. During his stay in Tempe, Bombacino was eventually caught peddling stolen irrigation equipment and also profited from a gambling and prostitution rings. So in 1975 the Chicago Outfit again presented its rule in Arizona, especially when Bombacino started his car in the morning of October 6 and suddenly a dynamite explosion ripped his Lincoln Continental, that blew out 75 of his neighbors windows and hurled portions of his car a quarter of a mile away. The hit on Bombacino was allegedly carried out by Tony Amadio, old time member and hitman for of the late Chicago Heights boss Frank LaPorte and also close associate of Joe Tocco.


Louis Bombacino

Reunited in Crime

Stories were continuously circling around that there was still a big rivalry between former New York mobsters and the Chicago guys for control of organized crime in Phoenix, according to published accounts of a series by a team of investigative reporters. The stories said Phoenix "has a flourishing but disjointed network of organized crime operatives” and that they mostly “fought” over the legitimate businesses that they controlled, such as the entertainment industry, the music tape industry, real estate business, the garbage industry and various food and service- related operations. Also, the sport betting business was a very heavy gambling action during this period.

One news report stated that Joe Tocco exerted influence of sorts over street level activity on one side of the “street”, while on the other side was Edward “Acey” Duci, Bonanno crime family associate, who was probably the most vocal of the New York group mobsters. He used to talk publicly to reporters about their rivalry with the Chicago guys and he once said “I think they're nothing but rejects from the Chicago mob. We're gonna eat up the Chicago boys."


Edward Duci

But it seems the reality was quite different. For example, Chicago mobster Paul Schiro had no problems with anyone because he was all about business. In a joint operation with other NY mobsters, the “Phoenix mob” moved in to control of an extensive network of massage parlors. They also had a several Phoenix lawyers and judges in their pocket, who were availing themselves with prostitutes and orgies.


Paul Schiro

In January 1976, based on mob and law enforcement intelligence information, a mob meeting reportedly was held in Sierra Vista, Arizona. Previously Joe Bonanno moved to 255 Sierra Vista Drive, where he was continuously overseen by federal agents. Representatives at the meeting were from all over the states and it was said that some came from as far away as Denver, Colorado; including members of so-called the Smaldone Family. During this period federal agents made reports that Bonanno used the alias “Mr. Veccio” and made several trips to Colorado. Also, federal officials noted that after each visit, Joe’s sons allegedly would fan out in meetings by passing the information or messages from their father.

After the meeting story goes that the mob had developed a silent partnership by skimming money from Arizona’s greyhound racing industry, land fraud and also in stealing gold. Exactly how the Phoenix mobsters were aligned is hard to determine because loyalties and alliances changed almost every day.

Once a Criminal, Always a Criminal

Guys like Joe Bonanno and Pete Licavoli had to be very careful not to be seen together or in the company of other mobsters. Because of their criminal past, now they carefully nurtured their images as retired businessmen.

Maybe there’s no real hard evidence (except for the book called “The Arizona Project” which was written by a team of investigators) for Bonanno being involved in crime during this period but that’s not the case with Licavoli. Back in 1973 Licavoli was caught on a wiretap by an ATF informant, talking about counterfeit bills, including 200 Uzi machine guns from Israel. However, in the fall of 1976 Licavoli was not arrested for the wiretap conversations but instead for receiving a stolen painting and offering to sell it to an undercover FBI agent from the art gallery that he owned. Licavoli was convicted and sentenced to 18 months in prison.


Licavoli

The Big Businesses

The corrupt government officials during the 70’s made Arizona a gold mine and an irresistible mecca for ambitious gangsters seeking opportunities outside the established crime hierarchies of Chicago and the Eastern seaboard.

Ned Warren was a dangerous con artist who found great fun in selling undeveloped land in Yavapai County to unsuspecting buyers." Born as Nathan Jacques Waxman in Boston, he came to Arizona in 1961, one year after his parole from Danbury federal prison. Warren’s primary racket was selling lots in substandard or effectively nonexistent subdivisions in the Arizona desert to people who regarded such purchases as investments, and also bundled the loans his investors took out on the plots and resold them as securities. Robert Goldwater, the brother of Senator Barry Goldwater and Harry Rozenzweig, the former GOP boss in the state, were the secret power brokers behind the land fraud operations. Later Warren divided his earnings and funneled it to a real estate commissioner and also to the Mob, especially the Chicago Outfit.


Ned Warren

The land fraud scheme was one thing and the gold thing was another. The Mob also stole systematic diversion of gold and other precious metals from Motorola plants in the metropolitan Phoenix area. At the time many millions of dollars in gold per year were being used as plating on circuit boards and in other electronic components. The operation was supervised in Phoenix by Chicago mobster Paul Schiro who made sales of reprocessed gold bars on the international billion-dollar market. Schiro’s worked or posed as a cook at the Cappy’s Sandwiches bar at 51st Street. The place was located directly across the street from the Phoenix Motorola plant where most of the gold was being stolen.

For some reason Motorola executives never called the cops on the sizable organized crime diversion of gold that went out the back. The mob must have had remarkable leverage on important people at Motorola to gain that degree of silence. Everything started in the late 1960’s when the Motorola company needed a place to build a new plant in Tucson. They turned to Sam Nanini for the land purchase. Before becoming a prominent Tucson fixture, former Chicagoan Nanini had a history of ties to Chicago organized crime figures from the old days such as Mike Carrozzo, Joey Glimco, and Louis Campagna. The Outfit made over $500,000 a year from the skim and by the mid 70’s the Treasury Department had become aware of the bad situation with Motorola in Arizona. The scam lasted until 1982 when the government got interested in the whole case.

Cleaning The Closet

Leonard Hoffman of Prescott Valley, Inc. another Great Southwest holding was a close associate of Ned Warren and rumors were that he wanted to testify against Warren if he didn’t get the proper amount of cash for his actions. Later Hoffman died in a mysterious crash with his private plane in January 1973.

In 1975, Ed Lazar was one of Warren’s closest associates and also president of Warren’s Consolidated Mortgage Corp. One day Lazar decided to testify before a grand jury about the sale of virtually worthless land for as much as $400 million and also regarding his past business dealings with Warren. Warren knew a lot of people so the information got to him and so he wanted Lazar, the crooked real estate commissioner and every one else who was considered a threat, to be eliminated. Warren turned to his partners in the Chicago Outfit, looking to advance his own stature in his own way. The Mob sent for Chicago Heights member Nick D’Andrea and Robert Hardin and so in February 1975, Jack West, a retired lumberman disappeared and was never found. Three days later after the disappearance of West, Ed Lazar was slain in a Phoenix parking garage stairwell by two hitmen. The next day Lazar was scheduled to testify about Warren’s shady dealings but it was obviously too late.


Ed Lazar

Don Bolles was a Phoenix news reporter who loved to write about organized crime and to expose them, and so one day Bolles made an investigation about possible dog track skim money going to the Mob, something which led to a spin-off as a “big time story”. Bolles as a reporter for the Arizona Republic and had been hunting for proof of a Mafia silent partnership in the state’s greyhound racing industry. So on June 2, 1976, a dynamite bomb was detonated by remote control beneath the car seat of Bolles’ Datsun Sedan in a Phoenix hotel parking lot. He had gone there to meet a source named John Adamson, a local hoodlum who was suspected in setting him up. Before lapsing into a coma, Bolles’ last words were “Mafia”, “Adamson” and “Emprise” which in fact was a company known as Emprise Corp. from Buffalo, N.Y. Bolles was in coma for 11 more days, and finally died on June 13, 1976, after the amputation of both legs and one arm. Bolles had the power to uncover much of Arizona's underworld figures, or big businessmen involved with people in organized crime but his murder virtually halted all organized crime activities in the Valley for at least two or three years.


Don Bolles

Later John Harvey Adamson, who was one of the hitmen in the Bolles murder, said that he was hired by Phoenix contractor Max Dunlap and that James Robison, a Chandler plumber, detonated the bomb. They acted on the orders of Kemper Marley, a Phoenix rancher and liquor magnate. The late Bolles previously had written stories about Marley something which allegedly forced him to resign from the state Racing Commission. But there’s also another side of this story.

Years later, after Roy Romano became an informant, he said that the guys who carried out the hit were allegedly people that worked for Joe Tocco. Accarding to Romano, the guys who allegedly planted the bomb were John Harvey Adamson, William Rocco D'Ambrosio and Frank Mossuto and by that time they worked for Romano who in turn answered to Tocco. Romano also said that the killing was a mistake. The dynamite bomb was planned to explode before Bolles got into his car and later to telephone him with a message to stop writing about organized crime activities in Phoenix. The real truth is that the investigation into Bolles' death was horribly botched and police records were destroyed or permanently misplaced.

In 1976 Tony Serra, another close associate of Warren, was in prison for land fraud. One day Serra decided to give clues to investigators and claimed that he knew the whereabouts of other incriminating evidences against Warren. So in January 1977 Serra was found dead in his jail cell and no one was ever blamed for his murder.

In the end, Ned Warren or the "Godfather of Arizona Land Fraud," was finally convicted in 1978 of 20 counts of land fraud while managing Western Growth Capital Corp and Consolidated Mortgage, which sold land in Yavapai and Yuma counties. Real Estate Commissioner J. Fred Tally resigned after the allegations that he had received bribes collected by Warren from land developers. Talley died before he could answer the charges. Joseph Patrick, an aide to Congressman Sam Steiger, faced an indictment that he lied to a grand jury about dealings with Warren. Ned Warren died in 1980 while he was still in prison.

Beginning of The End

The 1980’s was a very bad period for the Mob because the government started putting a lot of pressure on organized crime and that same situation also gave the birth of many informants, and so the Outfit’s empire in Arizona also started crumbling down.

Roy Romano had stepped onto the public stage in the fall of 1983, when, in return for immunity from prosecution, he turned state's evidence against Phoenix Mob representative Joseph Tocco and also gave detailed testimony about his own criminal activities as a member of Tocco’s crew. The 64-year old Tocco started serving a state prison term for racketeering in Arizona and he pleaded guilty to controlling an illegal enterprise and filing false tax returns and to witness tampering, obstruction of a criminal investigation, extortion, prostitution, fraud, robbery and conspiracy to commit burglary and theft. In exchange for reduced sentence for crimes that could have cost him 60 years, Tocco also provided the government with some useful information about the Bombacino murder and implicated Tony Amadio who at the time was serving a term for burglary in California. This means that Joe Tocco also became a “rat”.

On Valentines eve February 13, 1985 Chuckie English went up to Horwaths, a Chicago area restaurant, and later he was shot to death on the parking lot by two men in ski masks. The same year the Mafia Commission Trial began in New York and crippled the Eastern families forever, followed by the 1986 trials in which the top administration of the Chicago Outfit was also convicted for skimming profits from Las Vegas casinos and sent to jail. Also, the same year in June, Tony Spilotro and his brother Michael were beaten and strangled to death in Bensenville, IL, and buried in a cornfield in Enos, IN. After Spilotro's murder, Paul Schiro allegedly became the overseer of the Outfit's interests in Arizona and was allegedly allowed to carry out his own burglary operations. Besides that, the underworld in Arizona completely changed during the 1980s but that doesn’t mean that the old rackets disappeared, but instead they gradually were taken over by new owners.

Never break the “Omerta” #3

Even though by this period the national mob was on its knees, they still managed to enforce their rule of silence. Emil “Mal” Vaci was a close associate of Schiro and also worked as a maitre d' at Ernesto's Backstreet, 3603 E. Indian School Road. But his real job was being a hitman and also one of the key operatives for the Outfit. In early 1986, Vaci testified twice before a grand jury investigating organized crime in Las Vegas casinos. He also had been granted immunity and was due to testify a third time but on the night of June 7 1986, 73 years old Vaci was drove around Phoenix in a car by his Outfit associates who in turn pumped six bullets from a .22-caliber pistol into the back of his head, wrapped him in plastic and dumped him into a canal along 48th Street between Thomas and McDowell roads.


Emil Vaci

Goodbye Chicago Mob

On January 24, 1995 Joseph “Buddy” aka "Papa Joe" Tocco died at the age of 72 in a minimum-security unit at a state prison in Perryville. Tocco was found collapsed on the floor of his prison cell with a internal bleeding. Paul Schiro was convicted in 2001 for his role in the mob-connected jewelry theft ring headed by William Hanhardt, a former Chicago police chief of detectives, and sentenced to 5 1/2 years in prison. Also, in 2007 a federal judge in Chicago sentenced 71 years old Paul Schiro to 20 years in prison during the so-called Operation Family Secrets trials. The court also concluded that Schiro was responsible for the 1986 murder of his friend Emil Vaci. Schiro did not pull the trigger on his friend but was in a nearby car, acting as a lookout and listening to a police scanner, according to court testimony. In fact, this was simply a reminder that Arizona has totally lived out its Chicago Outfit connections.

New Operations

During the 1990’s Allen Glick, who was previously used as a puppet for the Chicago Outfit at the casinos in Las Vegas, had financial ties with Jerry Simms, the owner of Turf Paradise in Arizona. The controversy over the new owner of Turf Paradise racetrack has erupted into a squabble between state agencies, with a Gaming Department investigator ripping the state Department of Racing for research into the background of Jeremy E. "Jerry" Simms. Simms was bribing a coastal commissioner and lent large sums of money to Allen Glick. In 1995 Simms loaned $2.2 million and received back nearly $2.6 million from Glick. Then Simms made a couple of more loans and failed to report on his 1996-98 tax returns in which Simms wrote off as gambling losses. The tax write-offs were not legitimate. Like Glick, Simms also helped the FBI win numerous convictions while testifying under an immunity agreement. Simms, a bank founder and financier, says he was naive and stupid but never knowingly broke the law. He says he went to the FBI when he realized his associates were corrupt. Records show Simms did not go to federal authorities until nearly two years after the bribes and extortion attempts. In the year of 2001 the governor of Arizona has dismissed Racing Department director Jim Higginbottom over a controversy involving the background check and subsequent licensing of Simms. Simms, who acquired Turf Paradise from Hollywood Park the same year, was issued a three-year permit by the racing commission to operate Turf Paradise and off-track wagering venues statewide.


Allen Glick

On November 25, 1997 members of New York’s Genovese and Bonanno crime families were indicted in a massive stock fraud and manipulation indictment. The mobsters acquired a large position in the stock of HealthTech International Inc., a Mesa, Arizona, health and fitness firm that was traded on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange. Tens of thousands of shares were given to the mobsters by top HealthTech officials Gordon Hall and Joe Kirkham. During a 12-month period, the mobsters made over three million dollars and still used violent methods to intimidate co-opted brokers and HealthTech executives and to make sure they played ball with the Mob. By 1999 many of the mobsters were sent to prison.

In 2002, the Arizona Attorney General, together with the U.S. Customs Service and the Arizona Department of Public Safety in Scottsdale, seized over thirty million dollars in luxury homes, cars, cash, jewelry, and bank accounts throughout Arizona from individuals operating a company that primarily sold "penis enlargement" pills over the Internet. The individuals named in the civil forfeiture action were Michael A. Consoli and Vincent J. Passafiume allegedly connected with one of the New York crime families.

Death of a Legend and Arizona Today

Joe Bonanno died on May 11, 2002 of heart failure at the age of 97. He was buried at Holy Hope Cemetery & Mausoleum in Tucson, Arizona; and also marked the end of the Italian Mafia in that same state. Today narcotics and prostitution are everyday operations of the hundreds of multinational gangs that operate throughout Arizona. Gambling has largely become legit and Phoenix became the nation's capital for the human smuggling trade and the consequences of all these activities are magnified because of the limited local economy, segregation, lack of community and weak institutions.

Some say that in the past Arizona was a much safer territory than it is today. In the old days the Mob guys used to have control over crime, but today it’s a “dog eat dog” area. These days many blood thirsty drug cartels formed by meth dealers and human smugglers rule the streets of Phoenix, and the old days of businessmen and politicians socializing with the underworld are long gone. Now, the people with most power and means to make a difference usually live behind walls in Paradise Valley and north Scottsdale, far away from the crime lords and dangerous streets.



Cheers