This article was written on March 9th in USA Today.
The mafia is on shaky ground By Richard Willing, USA TODAY
NEW YORK — The Sopranos returns to HBO television Sunday night with a dark story line: The indictment of a Mafia associate in New York threatens the family business in New Jersey. But the problems of Tony Soprano's fictional crew are small compared with the woes facing what's left of the real Mob.
The storied Italian-American Mafia has been diminished by relentless prosecutions and by a weariness of Mob life that has led some younger members to consider what would have been unthinkable in previous generations: getting out.
The Mafia remains active in various criminal enterprises. However, wiretap transcripts and other court filings, as well as interviews with former mobster Michael Franzese and historians of organized crime, reveal how its influence is dwindling:
• Cosa Nostra, once a nationwide organization of Italian-American mobsters, is down to one outfit in Chicago and New York City's five organized crime families — the Bonannos, Colombos, Gambinos, Genoveses and Luccheses. They are "about all that's left," Mob historian Selwyn Raab says.
• During the past eight years, men alleged to have been the bosses or acting bosses of all five crime families in New York have been convicted and imprisoned.
John "Junior" Gotti, son of the late "Dapper Don" John Gotti, is being tried here on federal racketeering charges, including the kidnapping and shooting of radio talk show host Curtis Sliwa in 1992. Another accused acting boss — Vincent "Vinny Gorgeous" Basciano of the Bonannos — is being tried on racketeering charges that include murder. At least 64 alleged Cosa Nostra members or associates are awaiting trial on federal charges.
•Omertà, the Mafia's code of secrecy, isn't what it used to be.
Since 2002, the lengthy prison sentences that federal racketeering convictions can carry have led at least a dozen "made" mobsters to agree to testify against colleagues in return for recommendations of leniency. Court records say that in January 2005, Bonanno boss Joseph "Big Joe" Massino wore a concealed recorder to collect evidence against his alleged successor, Basciano, while the men visited in jail.
Two Mafia leaders in their 40s who grew up in what mobsters call "the life" — Gotti and Salvatore "Tore" LoCascio, a Gambino family capo, or crew leader — have said in court pleadings that they have retired from organized crime and are pursuing legitimate careers. A wiretap transcript in court records suggests that Basciano also was considering a career switch when he was arrested in November 2004.
And Franzese — now a writer and public speaker — simply walked away from organized crime after leaving prison in 1995.
Although Mafiosi swear to an oath to remain gangsters until death, none appears to have suffered a reprisal.
Meanwhile, some of the Mob's most vaunted traditions seem shopworn.
When Franzese was inducted into the Colombos in 1975, he says, there was a solemn ceremony followed by a banquet. In the mid-1990s, when "Little Joe" D'Angelo was "straightened out" (Mob slang for inducted) by the Gambinos, he got a hamburger in a Queens diner, D'Angelo testified last week at the Gotti trial.
He said the Mob bosses who inducted him, including "Junior" Gotti, didn't bother to burn a picture of a saint in D'Angelo's hands, as ritual required. Instead, someone wrote "saint" on a piece of paper and drew a cross.
"The new (Mafia) guys are less professional and less focused" than their predecessors, says Robert Castelli, a detective for the New York State Organized Crime Task Force from 1984-95 who teaches at Iona and John Jay Colleges.
However, "they're like your grass. You keep cutting it, and it keeps growing back."
An enduring mystique
Cosa Nostra was founded in 1931 by legendary gangster Charles "Lucky" Luciano to impose order on the nation's violent criminal rackets. The structure he set up for each family — boss, underboss, consigliere (counselor), capos and soldiers — helped the Italian-American Mob become a permanent feature of the underworld landscape.
"There were Irish gangs before (the Mafia), and certainly Russians and Jamaicans and what-have-you since," says Raab, author of Five Families, a history of the Mafia in New York City. "But they all fade when the individual in charge goes." Only Cosa Nostra, he says, has been able to "re-create itself"' from generation to generation.
The Mafia's traditions — besides secrecy, members' vow to defend their family's honor — along with books and films such as The Godfather series fostered an enduring mystique that has helped make The Sopranos a ratings hit.
"It's a lifestyle that has as much to do with ignorance and pathology as anything else," says Randy Mastro, a federal Mob prosecutor in the 1980s and later New York City's deputy mayor. But "they still have media allure."
Recent indictments suggest that Cosa Nostra continues to make much of its money through unglamorous crimes such as labor racketeering, bookmaking and lending cash at exorbitant rates.
At Junior Gotti's trial, D'Angelo, the Gambino soldier, testified that the family used a Laborers Union local it had corrupted to permit contractors to hire non-union help.
The contractors then kicked back part of their savings to the Gambinos. Contractors also provided no-show jobs for people such as himself who were "with the Gambinos," D'Angelo told the court.
There was big money in other forms of labor racketeering. Mastro says that Mob control of New York City's private trucking industry inflated the cost of hauling garbage to $1.5 billion annually by the mid-1990s. By eliminating this "Mob tax," through oversight and a series of prosecutions, Mastro says city officials have shaved $600 million a year off hauling costs.
James Jacobs, a New York University law professor and author of Mobsters, Unions and Feds, says Mafiosi were hired by union organizers in the early 20th century to combat company toughs. Now, he says, they specialize in "selling the rights of workers."
The baby boomer generation of mobsters added some wrinkles to the Mafia's methods. Two decades ago, when he was with the Colombos and in his 30s, Franzese moved in on a scheme hatched by a Romanian-born criminal that used shell corporations to defraud the U.S. government of taxes on retail gasoline sales. The scam netted $150 million over two years, a presidential commission on organized crime later found.
Per family rules, Franzese says, he kept some of the money and "whacked up" the rest to his Mob superiors. He pleaded guilty to racketeering and was jailed in 1985. Franzese was released on parole in 1990, then returned to prison in 1991 for a parole violation. He finished his sentence in 1995.
Now 54 and based in Los Angeles, he speaks regularly to athletes and business groups about Mob life and his conversion to Christianity, which he says occurred while he was imprisoned.
The Mob's Internet scams
In recent years, mobsters also have used technology in their moneymaking schemes. A Gambino family soldier, Richard "Richie from the Bronx" Martino, ran a telephone and Internet scam whose profits dwarfed Franzese's take, court records say.
New York Daily News
Martino
Martino, born in 1959, lured users with offers of free sex chats and pornography. Sophisticated software then tagged their phone and credit card numbers with unauthorized charges.
The scheme, which ran from 1996 to 2002, exploited changes in telecommunications law to boost profits by adding local fees, a federal indictment alleged.
The take: $230 million, according to Roslynn Mauskopf, the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn.
The scheme was run through incorporated businesses that had offices and professional staffs. The corporate culture could be unorthodox, however. Court records say that in 1991, a salesman for a firm that Martino believed had cheated him was abducted from a Manhattan street, beaten and shot in the groin with a stun gun.
Per Mob rules, Martino shared his receipts with Salvatore LoCascio, his capo in the Gambino family, the indictment charged. LoCascio pleaded guilty to participating in the fraud but argued at his sentencing that the money he received — $10 million — was a royalty for helping to set up what he believed was a legitimate company.
LoCascio, a community college dropout also born in 1959, later agreed to sell some of his property — a home in Scarsdale, N.Y., and two homes and a shopping mall in Naples, Fla., valued at more than $10 million — to settle a $4.7 million forfeiture ordered by the court.
Then, through his attorney, LoCascio did something remarkable for a man who'd sworn to be loyal to the Mafia until death: He admitted he had been a member of organized crime in New York City, but argued that he had dropped out of the Mob after moving to Florida in 2000.
LoCascio said he became a stay-at-home dad who takes care of his wife, Diane, a multiple sclerosis patient, and coaches Little League baseball. "I have made a genuine effort to start a life ... (and) will continue to remain a law-abiding citizen and be productive in my community," LoCascio said.
U.S. District Court Judge Carol Amon sentenced LoCascio to 2½ years in prison, a relatively lenient punishment that Amon said was largely because of Diane LoCascio's illness. Martino, who also pleaded guilty, got nine years.
Nightclubs and easy money
Is it really possible to say arrivederci to Cosa Nostra and live to tell the tale?
Franzese, who is writing a book on the perils of sports gambling, believes the Mafia "let it go" in his case because he relocated to California and didn't testify against family members. Franzese says he expects more defections as Mob life becomes more difficult.
"The life has major attractions — friends everywhere, doors opening to a million rooms, all the Mob lore," he says. "You don't think about the consequences right away. (Eventually) you find out it's just the opposite of everything you thought."
Meanwhile, prosecutions and untimely deaths continue to thin the ranks.
Wiretap transcripts filed in the Basciano case indicate that the Bonannos have fewer than 100 soldiers, about half their historical strength. Jim Margolin, spokesman for the FBI in New York City, says the other four families are similarly afflicted.
However, as Castelli suggests, would-be "wise guys" apparently keep coming. In 2002, the Bonannos were considering whether to induct about 10 prospective family members, according to information gathered by a defector, James "Big Louie" Tartaglione, federal court records say.
Joseph Coffey, who tracked the Mafia for more than 30 years as a detective for New York City police and the state anti-Mob task force, predicts Cosa Nostra will continue to attract recruits no matter how many leaders are imprisoned.
"It's the high life, the nightclubs, the bimbos, the easy money," Coffey says. "It's always been that."
Don't tell that to D'Angelo, the Mob turncoat. In court papers, he estimated that during his 20 years in organized crime, he made about $600,000 — or only about $30,000 a year.
Last July, when he agreed to plead guilty to racketeering, D'Angelo said he had $259 in cash, a mortgaged house titled in his girlfriend's name and thousands of dollars in uncollectible street loans.
Through the years, D'Angelo said, he ignored advice from more senior mobsters such as Junior Gotti, who warned him before his induction that "it's not an easy life."
Now, having confessed in court to two slayings, stock fraud, illegal gambling, labor racketeering, construction fraud and extortion, D'Angelo is in federal custody awaiting sentencing. He agreed to testify against Gotti in hope of receiving a lenient sentence, he said. Asked by a prosecutor what sentence he could get, D'Angelo answered correctly: "Up to life."
And what sentence is he hoping for? "Like everybody in prison," D'Angelo told the prosecutor, "I'm hoping to go home yesterday."
____________________________________________________________
Don Cardi
