OPERATION JERSEY BOYZ: From a tattered mob case, bitter charges flare

Jean Rimbach and Shawn Boburg for NorthJersey.com

This story originally ran in December 2012.

It was one of Bergen County’s most spectacular gambling busts ever.

Under the code name Operation Jersey Boyz, a team from the county Prosecutor’s Office and the state police swept out across North Jersey on Dec. 1, 2004, and hauled in dozens of alleged mobsters and their associates from multiple crime families. Also seized were guns, drugs and more than $1 million.

The investigation was credited with chopping down a virtual money tree for the mob.

But the results haven’t matched the early headlines. Since the dragnet, charges have been dismissed, plea bargains struck, court records sealed. Nobody has been sentenced to a day in jail.

It might have all faded from view if not for two lawsuits with explosive allegations of law enforcement corruption related to the rub-out of one of those arrested, a reputed Lucchese-family soldier who lived in Tenafly named Frank Lagano.

The suits and the gambling case itself offer a rare glimpse into the murky world of mob investigations, confidential informants and the interplay between sometimes rivalrous law enforcement agencies.

Revealed is a tangled and complicated story that spans more than eight years and is filled with large characters, thorny legal decisions, quick judgment calls and suspicions. It hangs on three entwined elements — Lagano’s 2007 slaying, a judge’s ruling to throw out thousands of wiretaps critical to the gambling case and the actions of a respected mob investigator whose agency was not involved in Operation Jersey Boyz but who became enmeshed in it in a combustible mix of ways.

That investigator, the late James Sweeney, brought the first of the suits, contending he was fired from his job at the state Division of Criminal Justice for pursuing serious questions — against his bosses’ |wishes — stemming from Lagano’s arrest and murder.

The more recent suit, filed in late summer by Lagano’s estate, is largely based on Sweeney’s claims but goes further. Among the allegations: Investigators with the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office stole money from Lagano after his arrest; the office’s onetime chief of detectives, a legendary county lawman named Michael Mordaga, pushed Lagano to hire a handpicked criminal attorney; and somebody from the office leaked sensitive information that led to the rub-out.

Those allegations have sparked vehement denials from Mordaga and Bergen County Prosecutor John L. Molinelli, who has launched a furious counteroffensive against the lawyers who brought both actions. Two weeks ago, though, Molinelli withdrew a bid for contempt charges against Sweeney’s attorney after Bergen County’s top judge derided the move as “deeply troubling.”

Molinelli says the real issue behind the latest lawsuit is an attempt by the Lagano family to bully his office into returning confiscated cash that is the product of gambling, money laundering and extortion.

“They are dealing with a prosecutor that is not going to be intimidated that way,” he said.

In many ways, the allegations in both suits are most provocative about Mordaga, once cited by then-Gov. James E. McGreevey as the most decorated law enforcement officer in county history. They contend that Mordaga and Lagano had a personal and business relationship that soured after the bust and that Mordaga borrowed money from and vacationed with Lagano. The rules of conduct for the Prosecutor’s Office prohibit such a relationship.

When the claims about Mordaga were raised in the Sweeney lawsuit, Molinelli said, his office reviewed them and found none “to be of any merit whatsoever.”

Mordaga dismissed all the claims as “bogus.”

“I have never had a personal relationship with Frank Lagano. Or a business relationship. None,” he said in a telephone interview.

Mordaga said bills for his county-issued cellphone, obtained by The Record, would support his assertions. But, in fact, those bills indicate repeated contact between the two men. When this was related to Mordaga, he called the information “surprising.”

— Lagano becomes a focus

The Jersey Boyz case began in early 2004, with authorities focused on a small café on Park Avenue in East Rutherford. Inside Caffe Roma, a red-awninged storefront on a busy commercial street, patrons placed bets along with their orders for pastry and cappuccino, authorities said. Molinelli would call it a Genovese crime-family base, and said at the time that the owner was not thought to be involved in the illicit activity.

The joint team marshaled undercover officers, informants and street surveillance. Wiretaps were key: Some 21,000 calls flowed through a listening post in the Prosecutor’s Office.

To win approval for wiretaps, law-enforcement agencies have to persuade a judge to allow them to intrude on citizens’ most sensitive and constitutionally protected privacy rights. It’s typically an exhaustive process. Applications can run more than 100 pages, and if misstatements or omissions of relevant information surface later, they can jeopardize the evidence provided by the taps.

In gaining authorization from Superior Court Judge Marilyn C. Clark, investigators had to show what steps they had already taken to gather information and justify why less intrusive techniques weren’t viable. And they had to periodically renew the authorization to keep listening.

As the probe progressed, information about two offshore gambling operations surfaced. So did an assortment of activities, including loan-sharking, extortion and trafficking in stolen property, according to authorities.

Lagano became a focus “quite some time” after the start of the probe, Molinelli said.

Known by some as a smart, charismatic builder, Lagano seemed the picture of a wealthy suburbanite. He could be seen around Tenafly carrying The Wall Street Journal, striking up conversations at the local diner or talking on his cellphone about stocks. In addition to his homes in Tenafly, Lagano built two multimillion-dollar houses in Alpine in the 1980s.

But authorities had long associated him with organized crime. One state official said law enforcement documents dating to 1989 identified Lagano as a Lucchese family member “involved in loan-sharking across North Jersey.”

— Mordaga in charge

Directing the investigation for the Prosecutor’s Office was Mordaga, known for daredevil arrests and cracking cold cases during his storied 30-year career.

While with the Hackensack police, his exploits included saving a man who dangled from a bridge and clinging to the hood of a speeding car as he shot at a drug dealer through the windshield.

When Mordaga was named chief of detectives for the Prosecutor’s Office in 2002, McGreevey made the announcement himself, at the same time he nominated Molinelli.

That larger-than-life persona is reflected in Mordaga’s cellphone records from his time as chief. Amid routine police business, there are calls to a good number of the region’s elite and powerful, as well as to clients of his private security consulting business. The Record analyzed 34 months of bills from January 2003 to September 2006, most of which list outgoing calls only.

The records show nine brief calls to Lagano phones, starting in April 2003, months before the investigation was launched the next January.

They include three calls to his home and cell on Christmas Eve of 2003.

When told about them, Mordaga offered differing explanations.

“I have no knowledge of that at all,” said Mordaga, who retired in 2007.

Later in the same interview, he added that “every conversation” he had with Lagano was “professional” and “police business.”

And he said any conversations “are under seal because they’re related to the case.” He did not offer an explanation why most of the calls predated the investigation.

Molinelli said he was “unaware” of the calls but was not bothered by them. “I can’t give you an explanation for the calls,” he said, adding, “I’m sure Mike makes a lot of phone calls to a lot of people.”

One possible reason for contact would be that Lagano was a confidential informant for the Prosecutor’s Office, but Molinelli said he was not.

Mordaga’s cellphone records also show calls to Lagano’s attorney after his arrest. The lawsuits allege that in purportedly trying to steer Lagano to an unnamed defense attorney, Mordaga told him the lawyer could make “90 percent” of his legal problems go away. Mordaga denied the allegation, saying he “never” recommended an attorney.

Lagano’s attorney, Carl Losito, was the only lawyer for any of the defendants who appears on Mordaga’s cellphone bills the day after the bust; there are a total of six outgoing calls to Losito in the week after the arrest. The Record could identify only one other call in the phone records to a law firm or attorney representing other defendants in that week. Losito declined comment.

“There’s probably other attorneys we were calling, too,” Mordaga said when asked about those records. “And like I said, it’s part of a sealing order.”

Molinelli, too, dismissed the significance of the calls to Losito, maintaining that it’s “very common” for the chief of detectives or other high-ranking officers to talk to defense attorneys after an arrest. He said he has “every faith” that Mordaga did not violate state rules prohibiting law-enforcement officers from making referrals to criminal defense attorneys.

There is another indication that Mordaga and Lagano had crossed paths independent of the probe.

John Doyno, a Saddle River accountant who described himself as an acquaintance of both men, said the two knew each other for perhaps 15 or 20 years. Doyno said he prepared Mordaga’s taxes for a time and also did work for Lagano, including forming one of his corporations.

“Once in a while they had dinner together,” Doyno said. He recalled joining them at a restaurant on one occasion at least a decade ago.

Asked if the two men were friends, he replied, “Oh, no doubt about it.”

— Sweeney, a voice on tape

After nearly a year of collecting wiretaps and other evidence, more than 100 officers fanned out on that December morning in 2004, executing about 20 search warrants at homes and businesses. Among the biggest fish was Joseph “The Eagle” Gatto, who allegedly inherited his father’s position as boss of the Genovese family’s North Jersey gambling rackets. Authorities said Gatto controlled one of the two offshore “wire rooms” in Costa Rica where bets were processed.

More than $264,000 was seized from Lagano, whose home and safe deposit box were searched. He was charged with racketeering, promoting gambling and loan-sharking. Molinelli identified him as the point man for the Lucchese family in the scheme.

At a news conference, Molinelli said the bookmaking operation turned out to be much larger than his office had anticipated. “There were millions and millions and millions of dollars changing hands,” he said.

But the case was already in trouble.

The issue revolved around a startling conversation picked up on a phone tap.

According to a state police affidavit, detectives monitoring a call on Oct. 5, 2004, heard the voice of a man who they determined was an investigator for an agency not involved in the case — James Sweeney.

Sweeney’s agency, the state Division of Criminal Justice, handles investigations for the state attorney general. He was overheard talking to one of his confidential informants — who turned out to be a target of the Jersey Boyz probe — and telling him that another agency had been asking about him.

“I’m telling you don’t worry about it. If it was something, I’d come and get ya, I’d pick you up off the street,” Sweeney said.

The affidavit does not provide any details about what agency Sweeney was referring to and does not indicate that the conversation was related to the Jersey Boyz case. Several law enforcement officials said such an exchange between an investigator and a source would be permissible under any number of circumstances, but it was impossible to determine from the limited excerpt in the affidavit whether this was one of those cases.

A former Marine, Sweeney spent much of his more than four decades in law enforcement as an organized-crime investigator for three state agencies. Those who worked alongside him recalled the Upper Saddle River resident as a hard-nosed investigator and a “trusted” colleague whose knowledge of underworld activities ran deep.

But the picture is more conflicted than that.

Sweeney was let go by the state in 2008, nearly four years after the intercepted call. As an “at will” employee of the Attorney General’s Office, he could be dismissed without explanation, and he said in his suit that he never got one.

— Clark faces a big decision

The investigators for Operation Jersey Boyz faced a critical juncture concerning the overheard conversation: What to do with such sensitive information? Their decision: They didn’t tell Sweeney’s agency. They didn’t tell their legal team, according to a sworn statement signed by Molinelli. And, most importantly, they also didn’t tell the judge overseeing the wiretaps.

Marilyn Clark has a reputation as a tough-minded but fair jurist, known for her attention to detail. She was the first woman to serve as a Superior Court judge in Paterson, after working as an assistant Bergen County prosecutor until 1989, and the first to be named presiding judge of the criminal courts in Passaic County. She is a daughter of the best-selling mystery novelist Mary Higgins Clark of Saddle River.

She is also one of a select group of Superior Court judges designated to consider wiretap requests in New Jersey.

When she did finally get the news about the intercepted call, a year after the raid, she stopped the case in its tracks — and eventually tossed out all the wiretaps and search warrants and the evidence that emerged from them.

Her thinking is not fully reflected in public documents – she sealed her 103-page decision on the matter. But in a letter to the attorneys in the case, the clearly alarmed Clark wrote that some of the wiretaps were “tainted because of the failure of the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office to inform me … of certain information that would have alerted me to serious legal issues.” She cited the existence of a confidential informant as creating those issues.

The letter also shows she was disturbed not about the substance of the conversation but the fact that the Prosecutor’s Office had continued to seek wiretap authorizations without telling her that one of the suspects in the case was an informant with another agency.

Her decision was a rare move that surprised even veteran defense attorneys on the case.

Some legal experts say one issue may well have been the caution that courts often display before authorizing wiretaps, in deference to privacy protections. In this case, the question might have been whether authorities exhausted all other means to obtain information in a less intrusive way — for example, through Sweeney and his informant.

In an affidavit, a state police supervisor said he didn’t realize there was an obligation to notify Clark. But Detective Sgt. Hugh A. Johnson’s sworn statement also laid bare deep divisions and mistrust between law enforcement agencies. He wrote that his team did not want to risk compromising the investigation by informing Sweeney’s agency. He described Sweeney’s conversation with his informant as another example of what he termed the unprofessional way that agency handled informants. “There was no question in my mind that the line between CI and handler was clearly blurred in this instance.”

Sweeney’s agency, meanwhile, opposed releasing any information to the defense out of concern that it would reveal the identity, and risk the safety, of the informant.

Three years of appeals and closed-door hearings followed Clark’s ruling, with an appellate panel restoring some of the evidence in its own sealed decision. A third of the cases were ultimately thrown out.

Amid the legal turmoil, Lagano was killed. On the afternoon of April 12, 2007, while getting out of his BMW in the parking lot of a Middlesex County diner he owned, he was shot in the head. In the days that followed, investigators said they were treating it as a mob hit. His killing remains unsolved.

The case against Lagano would have gone forward had he not been gunned down.

— Sweeney resurfaces

Sweeney filed his lawsuit two years after he lost his job. In it, he laid out a sequence of events that included a surprising turn. After his gambling arrest, Lagano wanted to talk — and at least some of what he wanted to talk about involved Mordaga. The mobster met Sweeney — introduced to him by Sweeney’s source.

Lagano then became another of Sweeney’s informants, according to the lawsuit.

Among its allegations of corruption in the Prosecutor’s Office, the lawsuit described the purported relationship between the former chief of detectives and Lagano. Sweeney attributed the information in part to Lagano and Lagano’s immediate family.

The suit used only initials, but the details made it clear he was referring to Mordaga, Lagano and the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office.

Sweeney claimed that he had told his bosses about the alleged corruption but that they took no action and then retaliated against him because they believed he was continuing to pursue the murder and corruption investigation after they told him to stop.

The Attorney General’s Office declined to comment, either about the circumstances of Sweeney’s termination or about whether they had conducted an investigation into his corruption allegations.

A Superior Court judge sealed Sweeney’s lawsuit, saying disclosure could cause “serious injury to a person or entity.” Sweeney died at age 70 in July 2011, after which the suit was withdrawn.

For a time, it seemed that his claims had died with him. But in late August of this year, Lagano’s estate filed its lawsuit in federal court against the Prosecutor’s Office, Mordaga and the state Criminal Justice Division. The suit, which in many instances mirrors Sweeney’s earlier filing, further alleged that unnamed members of the Prosecutor’s Office had told mobsters that Lagano was Sweeney’s confidential informant — thereby causing his death.

Molinelli said his office had no knowledge that Lagano was a state informant.

Frank Lagano Jr., the trustee of the Lagano estate, told The Record in an email message that the aim of his family’s lawsuit is to “unearth the truth.” He added, “This will not happen in Bergen County without the intervention of the federal courts.”

In a statement to The Record, Mordaga defended the handling of the Jersey Boyz case, saying: “The integrity of my detectives and [state police] detectives was beyond reproach.”

John Molinelli has had a high-profile decade as prosecutor, gaining attention for his aggressive pursuit of child predators and for solving generation-old murder cases. His office won a corruption conviction earlier this year against Hackensack’s longtime police chief, and he earned praise for his arrests of two suspects in a series of synagogue attacks.

He has attacked the lawsuits head on, asking a judge to find Sweeney’s lawyer, Robert Tandy, in contempt of court for allegedly leaking sealed material to the Lagano family’s lawyer.

Tandy did not comment. But a state judge delivered a blistering critique of Molinelli's request during a hearing last month, saying the prosecutor had scant proof to back up the “naked allegations.”

Superior Court Judge Peter Doyne, the assignment judge in Bergen County, also questioned Molinelli's authority to unilaterally seek contempt charges.

“Twenty years on the bench, and I've never seen an application like this,” Doyne said. He gave Molinelli a week to withdraw it; Molinelli did so last week.

Molinelli has said he also intends to seek sanctions against William H. Buckman, the Lagano family attorney, noting his accusation that investigators stole money “is just an absolute lie from an attorney at law.” He called the allegation “mind-boggling” because, he said, Buckman knows the money was seized under the state’s forfeiture law.

“We have always offered the Lagano family to give us some legitimacy of the money,” Molinelli said. “They have never done that.”

Buckman said the prosecutor would be “way off base” in seeking sanctions against him.

Asked if he had any independent verification of the allegations in the federal lawsuit, beyond the Sweeney complaint, he declined to comment.

“The federal lawsuit has not come into full swing yet,” he said.

And what of the defendants in the gambling case that started it all? Charges filed against 15 of them were thrown out. A grand jury failed to indict Gatto, the reputed Genovese kingpin, who has since died.

Several defendants pleaded guilty to downgraded disorderly persons charges or agreed to a deal with prosecutors and got probation.

A handful skipped court dates and are referred to in current court records as “inactive” fugitives.

https://northjersey.com/story/news/...-mob-case-bitter-charges-flare/95017790/

Update on Lagano’s case

https://northjersey.com/story/news/...mobster-slaying-gets-tossed/70094076007/

Suit that said Bergen law officers caused mobster's execution-style slaying gets tossed

April 10, 2023

A federal judge has brought a long-running lawsuit by the family of a slain North Jersey mobster to a close, finding that his estate failed to prove the key elements of a case that blamed Bergen County law enforcement for his execution-style slaying 16 years ago in the parking lot of an East Brunswick diner.

The family of the late Frank Lagano, a reputed member of the Lucchese crime family who lived in Tenafly, claimed that former Chief of Detectives Michael Mordaga and others in the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office caused Lagano's 2007 killing by intentionally blowing his cover as a state informant.

The estate, which first sued in 2012, maintained that Mordaga and Lagano had a personal and business relationship, potentially creating a motive for the alleged disclosure. Mordaga has long denied he had a relationship with Lagano or played a role in his death.

U.S. District Judge Katharine S. Hayden concluded in a 21-page opinion that “because the estate failed to satisfy the essential elements of a state-created danger claim,” Mordaga and the Prosecutor’s Office are entitled to their request for summary judgment, which asked for dismissal with prejudice.

An order was issued on March 24 granting defense motions and directing that the case be closed.

In her ruling, Hayden explained how the estate’s case rested heavily on a single comment allegedly made by Mordaga during an encounter with Lagano — with a lack of proof that it was ever said. The supposed comment surfaced in an internal memo written by a now-deceased state investigator who was fired by the state Division of Criminal Justice, and who the judge said may have drafted it as a “counterattack.”

The judge noted that a lengthy portion of that memo — a transcript of a call between Lagano’s son and an attorney — revealed “Lagano was tangled in a web of questionable business dealings and partners prior to his death, which made him inherently vulnerable to danger. It also brings into focus several possible suspects and motives for Lagano’s murder.”

Finally, Hayden highlighted how the estate made last-minute shifts to its central claim “in apparent recognition” that additional evidence showing Lagano was outed as an informant had failed to materialize during discovery.

“Whether viewed as a Hail Mary shot at the buzzer, or an effort born out of grief and frustration to lay blame somewhere for Lagano’s unsolved murder, the Estate’s arguments … do not have merit,” the judge wrote.

The estate’s attorney, Christopher Markos, had no comment on the ruling. Asked if the estate is considering an appeal, he said, “We’re still weighing our options.”

Attorney Benjamin Clarke, who represents Mordaga, said, “We are gratified that the court has determined the estate’s claims to be factually unsupported and has rejected them firmly and finally.”

“To anyone following the case closely, the falsity of plaintiff’s claims has long been obvious,” said Clarke. “It has taken a long time for the mis-accusations against Michael Mordaga and the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office to be shown for what they are: pure fiction.”

“We are happy that the record has at last been set straight,” he added.

The case has come at a cost to taxpayers. As of mid-February, legal fees exceeded $880,000 to defend Mordaga and the Prosecutor’s Office and to represent the Division of Criminal Justice, according to a document obtained through an open records request. The division was dropped early on as a named party in the case, but current and former employees were deposed as witnesses.

— Operation Jersey Boyz

The estate’s lawsuit was part of a bizarre and complicated story arising from Lagano’s December 2004 arrest in a high-profile but flawed illegal gambling bust led by the Prosecutor’s Office — code-named Operation Jersey Boyz — involving dozens of alleged mobsters and their associates. The operation also spawned a 2010 lawsuit by the late James Sweeney, who claimed he was fired from his job as an investigator with the state Division of Criminal Justice for pursuing serious questions — against his bosses’ wishes — stemming from Lagano’s arrest and murder.

Sweeney became enmeshed in Jersey Boyz when he was overheard on a wiretap talking to one of his sources — who turned out to be a target of the probe — telling him that another agency had been asking about him. No one alerted Sweeney’s agency or the judge overseeing the wiretaps, a serious misstep by the Prosecutor’s Office that caused the Jersey Boyz case to unravel.

It is unclear from available documents what Sweeney was talking to his informant about. But records show the judge was disturbed not by the substance of the conversation, but because the Prosecutor's Office continued to seek wiretaps without telling her an informant with another agency was a suspect in the case.

Sweeney’s suit claimed that his source who was a target of the probe introduced him to Lagano, who also became an informant. The suit alleges Lagano and Mordaga had a personal and business relationship that soured after the arrest.

The Lagano family’s lawsuit was largely based on claims in Sweeney’s suit — withdrawn after his death in 2011 — but took them further, in part, by alleging that the intentional leak by Mordaga and others in the Prosecutor’s Office caused his death.

The estate also leaned heavily on a memorandum Sweeney penned, a portion of it devoted to the alleged business and personal relationship between Mordaga and Lagano. Sweeney wrote that the information in his memo “provides a possible motive” for Lagano’s death “if allegations are pursued and proven.”

Lagano was gunned down on April 12, 2007, in the parking lot of the Seville Diner, which he co-owned. He was shot in the head as he stepped out of his BMW.

The estate claimed that revealing Lagano was an informant “constituted a state-created danger in violation of his constitutional rights.”

— Narrow issue

The case was halted in 2013 when a federal judge dismissed the estate’s claims against the Prosecutor's Office and Mordaga. But it was restored on appeal in 2016, allowing many of the explosive allegations contained in the original suit — including Lagano’s alleged relationship with Mordaga — to be explored in federal court. One claim centered on an alleged business arrangement between the two and a personal injury attorney.

Despite its complex history and the reams of information in the case, the judge wrote that the issue at hand was narrow: Was there enough evidence for a jury to determine that Mordaga disclosed Lagano as a confidential informant to members of organized crime, and that this disclosure led to his execution?

That disclosure ultimately came down to a comment made during an alleged encounter between Mordaga and Lagano while he was dining at a restaurant with developer Anthony Trobiano, described in Sweeney’s memo.

Mordaga allegedly attempted to rekindle his relationship with Lagano, telling him he could arrange for Lagano to avoid prison time and get back half of the money that allegedly went missing during a search of his home, but he was rebuffed. At some point, Lagano went to another establishment; Mordaga followed and said, “Don’t count on Sweeney helping you. He’s going to jail.”

The estate argues that Mordaga’s “Don’t count on Sweeney” comment effectively disclosed Lagano’s status as a confidential informant for the state, the judge wrote.

But it’s unclear from the memo whether anyone but Lagano heard the comment, Hayden noted, as well as where and when it was made. And, she said, the estate has “demonstrable proof problems about whether Mordaga ever uttered those words.”

Sweeney, the judge wrote, was not questioned under oath about the memo before his death, nor was it ever authenticated by anyone in the Division of Criminal Justice. And although it “appears legitimate on its face, it emerged not by way of the thousands of pages of documents the DCJ produced during discovery, but in response to a subpoena the Estate served on Sweeney’s widow Charlotte.”

“The Sweeney memorandum could possibly provide a potential link between Mordaga’s comment and Lagano’s murder, but that link is far too attenuated to establish what is required for a state-created danger claim — a “direct causal connection” between the comment and the murder,” Hayden wrote.

— Encounter at the Stony Hill Inn

The judge said the estate made a “misguided” attempt to fill in the gaps in the Sweeney memo with testimony by Lagano’s daughter.

Corinne Lagano testified at her deposition that her father “was friends with” and “socialized” with Mordaga.

She recalled a night when she was working at the Stony Hill Inn in Hackensack — she did credit card processing — when her father was having dinner with Trobiano and the late Frank Walsh when Mordaga walked up to the table and “at some point it seemed like voices were raised.”

But Corinne said she wasn’t paying much attention and didn’t “overhear the exact conversation.” She said the encounter was a month before her father’s killing, conflicting with the Sweeney memo that put the exchange more than two years earlier, closer to the time of Lagano’s gambling arrest and search of his home.

She also added Walsh, who died in 2009, to the narrative. Walsh, chairman of an international trucking company, served two years in prison after pleading guilty to making thousands of dollars in payoffs to a mob-tainted?Teamsters local in exchange for sweetheart union contracts.

Of the four people allegedly in earshot of the comment, Hayden wrote, two are dead and the other two — Mordaga and Trobiano — denied under oath that the comment was ever made.

“Despite years of discovery, the Estate has failed to uncover any disclosures other than Mordaga’s ‘Don’t count on Sweeney’ comment,” Hayden wrote.

— Veering from its original claim

In light of that, she wrote, the estate veered from its original claim.

Hayden explained that in all versions of its original complaint, the estate used the comment by Mordaga only to show the former chief believed Lagano to be a confidential informant for Sweeney and the Criminal Justice Division.

It alleged that Lagano was outed as an informant to “members of traditional organized crime families” arrested in the Jersey Boyz investigation “at some point after Mordaga made the comment.”

But facing a lack of evidence, the judge wrote, “the estate has now changed course,” urging instead that the comment caused the execution and that it was made to individuals “associated with” organized crime.

“Even if the court were to assume that Trobiano heard Mordaga’s comment, the record is devoid of evidence demonstrating that Trobiano is or ever was a member of organized crime,” she wrote. Nor was Trobiano arrested in connection with the Jersey Boyz investigation.

“The Estate has failed to demonstrate that a genuine issue exists as to an essential element of its state-created danger claim — namely, that Mordaga’s comment was the cause of Lagano’s death,” she concluded.

That guy most likely almost definitely would not have been killed if this happened today.

There's no reason to think that he wouldn't have been killed today. He was whacked in 2007, which still makes it a 21st century mob hit. I bet people would've said the same thing before Michael Meldish was gunned down in 2013. You're talking as if this hit took place back in the 1970s.

There hasn't been a mob hit in like ten years.

Well, it is a fact that LCN, does not mark possible rats for death anymore.
Meldish was not a rat.

Meldish what happened after Meldish is the reason there are not any murders anymore.
It took out the acting boss, the underboss for life.
A capo for I think 10 years.

Its just not worth it look what the Govt did to convict these guys.
They made up all the evidence.

There was nothing linking Crea and Madonna to these crimes, they paid these informants to lie

Yeah, but still for these hits to have taken place in 2007 and 2013 respectively, is nothing short of amazing. The mob was long considered dead by those years. You just never never know when the next hit will take place. For someone to say that it won't happen, what are you a psychic? As far as there not being a mob hit in 10 years, what if they haven't had any serious reason to kill anyone? Does the mob have some kind of murder quota they're supposed to meet every year that I don't know about?

I agree even today anyone can be killed at any time without notice.
It’s up to the boss of that family.

At one point in time as soon as it was known or thought that you were a RAT, your family and sometimes others would try to kill you.

One of their jobs was to “KILL THE RATS”
For the most part that just does not happen anymore.

That’s what I mean.

It used to be viewed in LCN that once you killed someone you were now in it as much as any other member, so now that you killed you sold your soul and you are officially one of the boys.

Now if a guy was in on it it’s a HUGE LIABILITY and he now has a “GET OUT OF HAIL FREE CARS”
So if your a capo and have an associate an order to kill, that associate gets pinched for a big pinch, he is like fuck it, I’ll give up the murder and walk free.

If your 1/2 smart your not ordering murders your shelving guys, or chasing guys away.

And this is now what allows guys like Arillotta in Springfield to not only come back to town, but to actually run a podcast out of the social club that he used to frequent as a made guy. Ironically, if either of the Geas brothers were on the street, I doubt that he would be anywhere east of the Mississippi.

Arrillotta allegedly worked out a deal with Calvanese



https://www.masslive.com/news/2023/...-not-at-all-contrite.html?outputType=amp

I still wouldn't be surprised if somewhere down the road he turns up dead. They haven't forgave or forgotten shit. Then again, this happens in Italy quite often. Guys who turned pentiti have turned up years later once again running their own clans. The papers will even use words like "former pentito." But I wonder if that starts happening in America, will the feds start considering reforming the witness protection program and change how they deal with turncoats?