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 theres 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 a ATF informant, talking about counterfeit bills and 200 Uzi machine guns from Israel. However in the fall of 1976 Licavoli was not arrested for the wiretap conversations but 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.


Pete 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 "debonair, smooth as silk, handsome, devil may care, con artist who found great fun in selling undeveloped land in Yavapai County to unsuspecting buyers." Born as Nathan Jacques Waxman in Boston, came to Arizona in 1961, one year after his parole from Danbury federal prison. Warren had two prior convictions on conspiracy and confidence game charges. He served a year in New York State on the latter charge after investors forked over $39,000 for a musical, "The Happiest Day" that was never produced. His primary racket was selling lots in substandard or effectively nonexistent subdivisions in the Arizona desert to people who regarded such purchases as investments. Warren also bundled the loans his investors took out on the plots and resold them as securities. In the West and Midwest, Warren’s crew used slide shows to depict subdivisions that in no way resembled the actual property. He divided his earnings and funnelled it to a real estate commissioner and the mob. Warren also had his fingers in countless pies, from vending machine distribution to nightclubs. Warren had his own loyalties for the mob, especially for the Chicago Outfit. 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.


Ned Warren

The land fraud scheme was one thing and the gold thing was another. The mob 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 mob ties to such notorious gangsters as Mike Carrozzo, Joey Glimco, and Louis Campagna. They made over $500,000 a year from the skim and by the mid 70’s the Treasury Department had become aware of a bad situation with Motorola in Arizona. The scam lasted until 1982 when the government got interested in the case.

Cleaning The Closet

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

In 1975, Ed Lazar was one of Ned Warren’s closest associates and also president of Warren’s Consolidated Mortgage Corp. One day he decided to testify before a grand jury about the sale of virtually worthless land for as much as $400 million and also his past business dealings with Warren, a defunct partnership he had long since had cause to regret. Warren knew a lot of people so the information got to him. Now he wanted Lazar, the crooked real estate commissioner and every one else who was considered a threat, eliminated. He turned to his other partners in the Chicago mob, looking to advance his own stature in his own way. The Chicago mob sent for Nick D’Andrea and Robert Hardin. 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 men hitman. The other day Lazar was shedled to testify about Warren’s shady dealings.


Ed Lazar

Don Bolles was a Phoenix reporter who loved to write about the mob and to expose them. Bolles made an investigation about possible dog track skim money going to the mob which led to a spin-off as the “big story”. Bolles had a good sense of where the serious risks lay among the topics on which he was working. Bolles as a reporter for the Arizona Republic 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 Don Bolles’s 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. Bolles, in his last statement before lapsing into unconsciousness, he mentioned the words Mafia…Adamson and Emprise. Emprise Corp. was a Buffalo, N.Y. company. Bolles lived 11 more days, finally dying on June 13, 1976, following amputation of both legs and one arm.


Don Bolles

Bolles had the power to uncover much of Arizona's underworld figures, or big businessmen involved with people in organized crime. The Bolles murder virtually halted some of the organized crime activities in the Valley for two or three years.

Theres a story that Bolles had a growing awareness of the land fraud skim, which was operated by Ned Warren. John Harvey Adamson, who was one of the hitman 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. Bolles had written stories about Marley said to have forced Marley to resign from the state Racing Commission.

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 people that worked for Joe”Buddy” Tocco. John Harvey Adamson, William Rocco D'Ambrosio and Frank Mossuto were the guys who planted the bomb and by that time they worked for Romano who served Tocco. He also said that the killing was a mistake. The dynamite bomb was planned to explode before Bolles got into his car and telephone him later with a message to stop writing about mob 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, a close associate of Warren was staying in prison for land fraud. One day he 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.

Either way Ned Warren, commonly called 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 Ned 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 in prison.

The Beginning of The End

The 1980’s was a very rough period for the mob because the government started putting a lot of pressure on the mob. The biggest problem for the mob was that a lot of informants were “born” from that pressure. The Outfit’s world in Arizona also started crashing 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 boss Joseph Tocco and gave detailed testimony about his own criminal activities as a member of the Tocco crew. The 64 year old Tocco started serving a state prison term for racketeering in Arizona. 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 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.

On Valentines eve February 13, 1985 Chuckie English went up to Horwaths, a Chicago area restaurant, with an old friend and dined on roast pig. After they finished they went into the parking lot and as Chuckie reached his car two men in ski masks walked up and opened fire killing him. Following that they ran off into the alley behind the restaurant and were never caught.

The same year the Mafia Commission Trial began in New York and crippled the Eastern mob forever.

In 1986, the top administration of the Chicago Outfit was also convicted of skimming profits from Las Vegas casinos and was sent to jail. Also the same year in June, Tony "The Ant" Spilotro and his brother Michael were beaten and strangled to death in Bensenville, IL, and buried in a cornfield in Enos, IN, five miles away from the Outfit’s boss Joey Aiuppa’s property near Morocco, Indiana. Story goes that the Outfit leaders ordered the executions because they blamed Spilotro for the skimming conviction because of his misbehaviour in Las Vegas. Theres another story that the real target was Michael and that Tony was killed to prevent any revenge. After Spilotro's murder, Schiro allegedly became the overseer of the Chicago mob's interests in Arizona and was allowed by the Outfit to carry out his own burglary operations.
The underworld in Arizona changed during the 1980s. In some ways, some of the old mobsters went “legit" but that doesn’t mean that the old rackets disappeared, but they gradually were taken over by new owners.

Don’t 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 Tony Spilotro and Paulie Schiro in Las Vegas and Phoenix. Vaci worked as a maitre d' at Ernesto's Backstreet, 3603 E. Indian School Road. But his real job was to be a hit man and a key operative for Spilotro. 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 something happened that prevented him from doing it. On the night of June 7, 1986 73 year old Vaci was drove around Phoenix in a car by his Outfit associates and they 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.

Bye Bye 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, the last of the Arizona mohicans, 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 year old Paul "the Indian" Schiro to 20 years in prison during the so-called Operation Family Secrets trial. 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. Mob killer turned government witness Nick Calabrese testified at trial that Schiro took part in the planning of Vaci's killing. Calabrese said he and an accomplice pulled Vaci into a van, then Calabrese shot Vaci several times in the head.


Paul "The Indian" Schiro

The Family Secrets case may be remembered as the final chapter in the bloody history of the Chicago mob. It was another reminder that Arizona has totally lived out its Chicago Outfit connections.

New Operations

Remember Allen Glick? Well during the 90’s Glick, who was used as a puppet for the Chicago mob 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 Alan Glick. In 1995 Simms loaned $2.2 million and received back nearly $2.6 million from Glick. Than 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.

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. In a 12 month period, $3 million scam, the mobsters bought securities at rock bottom prices and sold them at huge profits after brokers helped raise the price of the stock artificially high by over pitching it to unsuspecting investors. The gangsters used their usual hardball hoodlum methods to intimidate co-opted brokers and HealthTech executives and 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 $30 million 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

Joe Bonanno was the man who survived Italian fascism, Mustache Petes, and his own bloody war, died on May 11, 2002 of heart failure at the age of 97. He was buried at Holy Hope Cemetery & Mausoleum in Tucson, Arizona.

Arizona Today

Today narcotics and prostitution are everyday operations of the hundreds of multinational gangs that operate throughout Arizona. Gambling has largely become legit. 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. Another thing is that the local police force isn’t as corrupted as it was in the past. But I can also 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, today it’s a dog eat dog world. Blood thirsty drug cartels formed by meth dealers and human smugglers rule the streets of Phoenix with no code of honour between them. In the old days many businessmen and top government officials socialized with the underworld and lived side by side but today the people with the most power and means to make a difference live behind walls in Paradise Valley and north Scottsdale far away from the crime lords.

Right now Phoenix, Arizona is one of the most extensive drug centers of America, and now it's under jurisdiction of one of Mexico's most dominant and brutal crime syndicates, the Sinaloa Cartel. With a formidable authority south of the border, the cartel uses Phoenix as a starting point for their North American activities. The Cartel’s real money is made by selling large amounts of the product to the rest of the U.S. In 2013 the government identified 8 Sinaloa cartel leaders along the Arizona-Mexico border. This drug cartel distributed their products in several location's including San Diego, New York and Texas, among other places.



This article is completed from various infos that can be found on the internet.