Showing posts with label Tino Fiumara. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tino Fiumara. Show all posts
Sunday, July 2, 2023
Saturday, January 22, 2022
Thursday, July 5, 2018
The mafia still wields influence over the New Jersey ports
The Huck Finn on Morris Avenue in Union is an unremarkable, typical Jersey diner, where the usual three-egg omelets and burgers share the menu with Greek salads, tuna sandwiches and, of course, meatloaf.
But it has a more notorious claim to fame. In November 2005, authorities made a gruesome discovery in the trunk of a silver Acura that had sat undisturbed for weeks in the back of the diner’s big parking lot.
Alerted by a foul odor and the swarming of flies around the car, police found the decomposing body of Lawrence Ricci—an alleged Genovese crime family capo with hooks into the waterfront, who had disappeared weeks earlier in the midst of his own racketeering trial.
Face down with a grey sweatshirt over his head, somebody had put a bullet in his brain.
Lawrence Ricci
Marlon Brando in Elia Kazan's 1954 film On the Waterfront.
A man identified by law enforcement officials as Stephen Depiro leaves the federal courthouse in Newark in 2011, after at least 15 people were arrested in New Jersey in connection with a waterfront corruption scheme involving the collection of "Christmas tribute" money exacted from dockworkers.
Nighttime on the waterfront.
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
NJ longshoreman loses job after going to notorious Genovese mobster's birthday party
A New Jersey longshoreman lost his cushy job on the docks after attending a notorious mobster’s birthday bash -- a party that he claims he only attended so as not to disappoint his “proud Italian” father.
Pasquale Pontoriero today lost his license to work as a hiring agent at Ports America in Jersey City after he was caught attending a birthday party for notorious Genovese crime capo Tino “Shark Eyes” Fiumara.
Because of the New York and New Jersey Waterfront’s well-documented problems with organized crime, workers on the docks are strictly forbidden from associating with gangsters, even socially.
But Pontoriero broke that rule five years ago when he showed up at Fiumara’s birthday bash at Rothman’s Steak House in Long Island.
At several Waterfront Commission Hearings, Pontoriero repeatedly took the fifth nearly every time he was asked about his connections to organized crime, including when he was asked if he ever favored hiring people under directions from the mob.
His lawyers argued that Pontoriero had to go to the mob celebration because his father — who also wanted to attend — was too sick to drive, according to the Waterfront Commission ruling.
“There was no way a son of a proud Italian father could refuse,” his lawyers reasoned, according to the ruling.
His father, Antonio Pontoriero, was tight with the infamous Fiumara, who died in 2010.
He once sprung for the alleged killer’s bail, according to the court papers.
But the administrative law judge Patrick McGinley wasn’t persuaded.
“There is no father, Italian or otherwise, who would have insisted his son have dinner with a notorious crime figure,” he wrote.
The younger Pontoriero also met with alleged Genovese soldier Steven DePiro at the same birthday dinner.
All of the revelers took a limo with Fiumara from his lawyer’s office.
Pasquale Pontoriero today lost his license to work as a hiring agent at Ports America in Jersey City after he was caught attending a birthday party for notorious Genovese crime capo Tino “Shark Eyes” Fiumara.
Because of the New York and New Jersey Waterfront’s well-documented problems with organized crime, workers on the docks are strictly forbidden from associating with gangsters, even socially.
Tino Fiumara
At several Waterfront Commission Hearings, Pontoriero repeatedly took the fifth nearly every time he was asked about his connections to organized crime, including when he was asked if he ever favored hiring people under directions from the mob.
His lawyers argued that Pontoriero had to go to the mob celebration because his father — who also wanted to attend — was too sick to drive, according to the Waterfront Commission ruling.
“There was no way a son of a proud Italian father could refuse,” his lawyers reasoned, according to the ruling.
His father, Antonio Pontoriero, was tight with the infamous Fiumara, who died in 2010.
He once sprung for the alleged killer’s bail, according to the court papers.
But the administrative law judge Patrick McGinley wasn’t persuaded.
“There is no father, Italian or otherwise, who would have insisted his son have dinner with a notorious crime figure,” he wrote.
The younger Pontoriero also met with alleged Genovese soldier Steven DePiro at the same birthday dinner.
All of the revelers took a limo with Fiumara from his lawyer’s office.
Monday, May 23, 2011
A plea to let N.J. adoptees find themselves
I am case number KC 114343 in the New Jersey foster care system, and like thousands of other adoptees — some women like me, some black like me — I will not have a right to my birth certificate unless Gov. Chris Christie signs the Adoptees Birthright Bill (A1406/S799) passed this month by the state Assembly (and the Senate in March).
Though Christie and I are set in different positions on this issue, I write this piece to show how adoption touches everybody’s lives in unexpected ways, even strangers.
A few years before I was born, my biological grandfather was brutally murdered and dumped in the Kearny swamps. The prime suspect in his gangland killing was the late mobster, Tino Fiumara, a fearsome convicted Genovese crime family captain who is also a distant relative of Christie’s. As I learned more about my biological family of origin, I discovered this odd twist of history that neither the governor nor I willed, but nonetheless ties our fate.
My grandfather’s 1969 murder set off a chain of tragic events that led to my birth mother’s mysterious suicide and then to me being case number KC 114343. In my book “That Mean Old Yesterday,” I tell how my adoption and reunion with my birth family unfolded even without access to my original birth certificate. But here I wish only to explain that while neither the governor nor I can undo unchosen family ties and choices, as he prepares to sign or veto the bill, he is now empowered to heal what fate has dealt.
Surely my circumstances are different from my adopted brothers’ and sisters’ without the right to access their original birth certificate, but together we share a wish to discover who we were on the way to determining who we might want to be.
Christie can grant me access to the key document that affirms my legal identity as an American citizen and gives a factual accounting of my beginnings instead of an amended certificate that erases my past and legally defines my birth parents and me as nonrelated strangers forever.
In addition to my birth parents’ names, I will be able to see my stamped footprint, the hour and minute I was born, how much I weighed and other traces of my identity. Access to this document will finally give me a sense of continuity. No longer will I feel as if I sprang from some mysterious nowhere, and no longer will I be dependent on what others selectively choose to tell me about my birth.
As well as finally being able to identify ourselves fully, vital gains for legions of adoptees will come from signing this bill into law.
First, the bill’s most obvious and irrefutable benefit will allow adoptees and our offspring to become aware of health issues that affected our biological predecessors. Not knowing vital medical information leaves us handicapped in determining our potential health risks.
By granting unrestricted access to our birth certificates, Christie will also affirm that adoptees have the same veritable civil right as any other non-adopted citizen, a right covered under Articles 7 and 8 in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states: “All children have the right to a legally registered name, and nationality” and “Governments should respect children’s right to a name, a nationality and family ties.” If Christie does not restore adoptees’ civil rights, we will remain a segregated and discriminated class of citizens subject to restrictions that apply only to us.
Contrary to the fear-based hypothetical scenarios offered by opponents seeking to thwart adoption reform, from the ACLU-N.J. on to New Jersey Right to Life, open access will not lead to disastrous results. We need only to consider facts from the eight states that have passed similar bills since 2000 and the two states that never sealed adoptees’ birth certificates — Alaska and Illinois.
In states allowing open access, adoptees do not arrive unannounced in droves at their birth parents’ doorsteps to shame or stalk them. The naysayers also argue that the bill violates the privacy of birth parents, will encourage abortions and will harm the institution of adoption. These assertions are false and do not weigh sufficiently to justify denial of the fundamental rights of adoptees.
First, birth mothers who relinquished their children were never legally promised anonymity. Simply put, they do not have any legal rights or authority over their offspring and they do not have the right of privacy from the children to whom they gave birth.
Second, in the states that have similar birthright laws, adoptions have increased and abortions have decreased. A study by the American Adoption Congress reports that between 2000 and 2008, abortions declined 16 percent in Alabama, 14 percent in Kansas, 8 percent in Delaware and 5 percent in Tennessee. Alaska and Illinois, the states that never sealed birth certificates, have the highest adoption rates in the nation. The study also found that most adoptees it tracked don’t seek a reunion and 95 percent of birth parents welcome a reunion.
In 1994 while a student at the Lawrenceville School, I was reunited with my biological relatives thanks to the support of the New Jersey Adoption Registry. I was 15 and estranged from my adoptive parents after the Division of Youth and Family Services removed me from their home because of child abuse. Given my special circumstances, the registry served as an unpaid intermediary and unsealed my records.
Within a few weeks of submitting my application, I was furnished with a two-page report explaining some of the circumstances that led to my adoption. The report did not include names or addresses of my biological relatives. Though it was not the fantasy reunion I imagined I’d have on “Oprah,” I don’t regret the journey. What I’ve learned about my origins is not great, but it is better than knowing nothing at all.
People who are not adopted cannot fully understand what it is like to have their name, identity and origins kept a state secret. I don’t pretend to speak for all adoptees, but I can say that from personal experience, it is a terrible way to live and navigate the world. For 33 years I’ve carried the emotional baggage of loss, separation and unanswered questions.
Despite having met my biological relatives and despite the fact that both my parents are deceased, it is still illegal for me to obtain my original birth certificate. Christie can change this and finally help me conclude my personal journey to know myself, to seek closure and identity, and to realize the true meaning of equality. The bill is not perfect, but it is far better than the current situation of exposing adoptees to major health risks while denying us a more poignant image of our infant footprint and universal human rights.
Gov. Christie, there are no doubt myriad such stories that may or may not be as dramatic and layered as mine. I respectfully urge you to listen with your ears, your mind and your heart to the voices of adoptees like me.
Three years ago, on Mother’s Day, I finally visited my mother’s unmarked grave in Paramus, where she shares a plot with my grandfather. When I asked the cemetery officials about erecting a headstone, I was told that I needed to verify that I am a next of kin. Unfortunately, because I am denied access to my original birth certificate, I cannot prove that I am my mother’s daughter.
Gov. Christie, you have the redemptive power to help me put their souls to rest and achieve peace — something long overdue.
http://blog.nj.com/njv_guest_blog/2011/05/a_plea_to_let_nj_adoptees_find.html
Though Christie and I are set in different positions on this issue, I write this piece to show how adoption touches everybody’s lives in unexpected ways, even strangers.
A few years before I was born, my biological grandfather was brutally murdered and dumped in the Kearny swamps. The prime suspect in his gangland killing was the late mobster, Tino Fiumara, a fearsome convicted Genovese crime family captain who is also a distant relative of Christie’s. As I learned more about my biological family of origin, I discovered this odd twist of history that neither the governor nor I willed, but nonetheless ties our fate.
My grandfather’s 1969 murder set off a chain of tragic events that led to my birth mother’s mysterious suicide and then to me being case number KC 114343. In my book “That Mean Old Yesterday,” I tell how my adoption and reunion with my birth family unfolded even without access to my original birth certificate. But here I wish only to explain that while neither the governor nor I can undo unchosen family ties and choices, as he prepares to sign or veto the bill, he is now empowered to heal what fate has dealt.
Surely my circumstances are different from my adopted brothers’ and sisters’ without the right to access their original birth certificate, but together we share a wish to discover who we were on the way to determining who we might want to be.
Christie can grant me access to the key document that affirms my legal identity as an American citizen and gives a factual accounting of my beginnings instead of an amended certificate that erases my past and legally defines my birth parents and me as nonrelated strangers forever.
In addition to my birth parents’ names, I will be able to see my stamped footprint, the hour and minute I was born, how much I weighed and other traces of my identity. Access to this document will finally give me a sense of continuity. No longer will I feel as if I sprang from some mysterious nowhere, and no longer will I be dependent on what others selectively choose to tell me about my birth.
As well as finally being able to identify ourselves fully, vital gains for legions of adoptees will come from signing this bill into law.
First, the bill’s most obvious and irrefutable benefit will allow adoptees and our offspring to become aware of health issues that affected our biological predecessors. Not knowing vital medical information leaves us handicapped in determining our potential health risks.
By granting unrestricted access to our birth certificates, Christie will also affirm that adoptees have the same veritable civil right as any other non-adopted citizen, a right covered under Articles 7 and 8 in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states: “All children have the right to a legally registered name, and nationality” and “Governments should respect children’s right to a name, a nationality and family ties.” If Christie does not restore adoptees’ civil rights, we will remain a segregated and discriminated class of citizens subject to restrictions that apply only to us.
Contrary to the fear-based hypothetical scenarios offered by opponents seeking to thwart adoption reform, from the ACLU-N.J. on to New Jersey Right to Life, open access will not lead to disastrous results. We need only to consider facts from the eight states that have passed similar bills since 2000 and the two states that never sealed adoptees’ birth certificates — Alaska and Illinois.
In states allowing open access, adoptees do not arrive unannounced in droves at their birth parents’ doorsteps to shame or stalk them. The naysayers also argue that the bill violates the privacy of birth parents, will encourage abortions and will harm the institution of adoption. These assertions are false and do not weigh sufficiently to justify denial of the fundamental rights of adoptees.
First, birth mothers who relinquished their children were never legally promised anonymity. Simply put, they do not have any legal rights or authority over their offspring and they do not have the right of privacy from the children to whom they gave birth.
Second, in the states that have similar birthright laws, adoptions have increased and abortions have decreased. A study by the American Adoption Congress reports that between 2000 and 2008, abortions declined 16 percent in Alabama, 14 percent in Kansas, 8 percent in Delaware and 5 percent in Tennessee. Alaska and Illinois, the states that never sealed birth certificates, have the highest adoption rates in the nation. The study also found that most adoptees it tracked don’t seek a reunion and 95 percent of birth parents welcome a reunion.
In 1994 while a student at the Lawrenceville School, I was reunited with my biological relatives thanks to the support of the New Jersey Adoption Registry. I was 15 and estranged from my adoptive parents after the Division of Youth and Family Services removed me from their home because of child abuse. Given my special circumstances, the registry served as an unpaid intermediary and unsealed my records.
Within a few weeks of submitting my application, I was furnished with a two-page report explaining some of the circumstances that led to my adoption. The report did not include names or addresses of my biological relatives. Though it was not the fantasy reunion I imagined I’d have on “Oprah,” I don’t regret the journey. What I’ve learned about my origins is not great, but it is better than knowing nothing at all.
People who are not adopted cannot fully understand what it is like to have their name, identity and origins kept a state secret. I don’t pretend to speak for all adoptees, but I can say that from personal experience, it is a terrible way to live and navigate the world. For 33 years I’ve carried the emotional baggage of loss, separation and unanswered questions.
Despite having met my biological relatives and despite the fact that both my parents are deceased, it is still illegal for me to obtain my original birth certificate. Christie can change this and finally help me conclude my personal journey to know myself, to seek closure and identity, and to realize the true meaning of equality. The bill is not perfect, but it is far better than the current situation of exposing adoptees to major health risks while denying us a more poignant image of our infant footprint and universal human rights.
Gov. Christie, there are no doubt myriad such stories that may or may not be as dramatic and layered as mine. I respectfully urge you to listen with your ears, your mind and your heart to the voices of adoptees like me.
Three years ago, on Mother’s Day, I finally visited my mother’s unmarked grave in Paramus, where she shares a plot with my grandfather. When I asked the cemetery officials about erecting a headstone, I was told that I needed to verify that I am a next of kin. Unfortunately, because I am denied access to my original birth certificate, I cannot prove that I am my mother’s daughter.
Gov. Christie, you have the redemptive power to help me put their souls to rest and achieve peace — something long overdue.
http://blog.nj.com/njv_guest_blog/2011/05/a_plea_to_let_nj_adoptees_find.html
Monday, February 14, 2011
Reputed North Jersey mobster Stephen "Beach" Depiro a family man of contradictions
Stephen "Beach" Depiro has been described by federal authorities as a major player in the New Jersey underworld, a veteran mobster who has risen through the ranks and now oversees the highly lucrative rackets along the North Jersey waterfront.
The balding, 5-foot-7 Union County resident is, according to one underworld source, a "flashy" wiseguy out of the John Gotti, celebrity gangster mode, favoring fancy cars, nice clothes, and a manicured look.
But court documents filed by his lawyer as Depiro, 55, tries to win release on bail after his arrest last month offer a different picture of the man the FBI has listed as one of the highest-ranking Genovese crime family soldiers in the state.
The contradictions are stark and fascinating:
Depiro, according to his lawyer, goes to Mass every day. But authorities allege that he has used violence and intimidation to enforce the mob's control of gambling, loan-sharking, and labor racketeering along the waterfront.
In a letter to the court supporting Depiro's request for bail, three priests and a deacon at his church - St. Theresa's in Kenilworth - cited "his sincerity" and his "participation in pastoral programs" and added that "some of our parishioners . . . told us they are inspired by his prayerful attitude and kindness." Yet the FBI says he was closely aligned with the late Tino Fiumara, one of the most feared mobsters in New Jersey, and is a top associate of Michael Coppola, a mob capo and suspected hit man who was once part of a murder team known as "The Fist."
His criminal record indicates he's never been convicted of a violent crime. But federal prosecutors say he took over the mob's interests along the docks after Lawrence Ricci, a Genovese crime family soldier, was killed in 2005. Ricci was shot in the head, his body left in the trunk of a car parked behind a North Jersey diner.
Depiro is the lead defendant in a pending racketeering case in federal court in Newark that details the mob's alleged control of the New Jersey waterfront.
He has been held without bail since his arrest on Jan. 20, but his New York attorney, Sarita Kedia, has filed a motion seeking his release pending trial.
Prosecutors have opposed the motion.
Court filings in that dispute have provided the wildly divergent descriptions of the reputed wiseguy.
From law enforcement's perspective, Depiro is a gangster who has sworn an oath "to serve the ends of the Genovese . . . family above all else."
And he has done that, they allege, through the extortion of International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) dockworkers who are forced to kick back to the mob in order to work; through a lucrative illegal sports-betting operation; and through a loan-sharking and extortion racket tied to the gambling enterprise.
He has also consistently associated with mob figures, they say, even while free on bail or under supervised release and despite court-ordered prohibitions.
Depiro was one of several crime family members, prosecutors say, who helped Coppola live in hiding for more than a decade as he avoided arrest in a murder case.
And since at least 2005, they allege, Depiro "has managed and controlled the crime family's waterfront rackets," which some estimate generate more than $1 million annually for organized crime.
Defense documents, on the other hand, paint Depiro as a family man in the most honorable sense of that term, and as someone who cares deeply for his loved ones.
He is, according to those filings, a man who sought court permission while under house arrest last year to visit his mother's grave on Mother's Day; to take his elderly aunt to the cemetery on another occasion and then join her for lunch; to visit his father's grave on Father's Day; and to fete family members celebrating birthdays and graduations at such restaurants as La Campagna in Millburn, La Griglia in Kenilworth, and the posh Stella Marina in Asbury Park.
His fiancée and self-described "life partner," Michele Caruso - they have been together 15 years, she wrote in a letter to the court - said Depiro had been "a second father to my son, from toddler to high school graduate."
She called him a "dedicated and personable man," a "role model in our family" who is "capable of handling any situation with thoughtfulness and maturity."
That, of course, is not the picture emerging from snippets of wiretapped conversations that are now part of the racketeering case in which Depiro and 14 associates have been charged.
In those conversations, Depiro is picked up discussing the extortion of the ILA locals with both Fiumara, who died in September, and Coppola, who was jailed last year after his conviction in another racketeering case.
The kickbacks from dockworkers alone, prosecutors say, generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash for the mob each year.
Prosecutors also cite other conversations in which a top associate threatened a deadbeat gambler with a baseball bat if he didn't come up with the money owed to Depiro's gambling operation.
"He needs his hands to work," reputed mob enforcer Richard "Dickie" Dehmer said of his target. "He ain't working no more for a while."
FBI surveillance reports also detailed Depiro's meeting on several occasions with Fiumara at a Long Island restaurant and associating with mobster Daniel Dellisanti, whose criminal record includes convictions for drug dealing and murder, prosecutors said.
Whether Depiro goes to Mass every day, and even if he is a caring son and father figure, authorities argued that he was "the most recent successor" to Fiumara and Coppola and head of a "violent crew that has controlled the crime family's port-related rackets for decades."
He has, they pointed out, no legitimate source of income. Yet he clearly lives well, dining at fine restaurants and driving a Jaguar and a Mercury Mountaineer.
He has, according to his own lawyer, been approached several times by FBI agents who wanted him to cooperate. It was, apparently, an offer he could refuse.
"Each time, the FBI agents found Mr. Depiro in the same church, where he . . . attends services each morning," the lawyer wrote.
Prosecutors say Depiro's mob associations and the charges outlined in a 53-count indictment returned last month support the argument that he is a danger to the community and should be denied bail.
But not everyone in the community agrees.
The priests and deacon at the Church of St. Theresa, in a letter written Jan. 27, conceded that the charges Depiro faces are "serious."
But, they wrote, "through the years of consistently seeing him in church and from our countless conversations with him, we all agree to the fact of his sincerity and his desire to live his life consistent with what our Christian faith teaches."
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20110214_Reputed_North_Jersey_mobster_Stephen__Beach__Depiro_a_family_man_of_contradictions.html?viewAll=y
The balding, 5-foot-7 Union County resident is, according to one underworld source, a "flashy" wiseguy out of the John Gotti, celebrity gangster mode, favoring fancy cars, nice clothes, and a manicured look.
But court documents filed by his lawyer as Depiro, 55, tries to win release on bail after his arrest last month offer a different picture of the man the FBI has listed as one of the highest-ranking Genovese crime family soldiers in the state.
The contradictions are stark and fascinating:
Depiro, according to his lawyer, goes to Mass every day. But authorities allege that he has used violence and intimidation to enforce the mob's control of gambling, loan-sharking, and labor racketeering along the waterfront.
In a letter to the court supporting Depiro's request for bail, three priests and a deacon at his church - St. Theresa's in Kenilworth - cited "his sincerity" and his "participation in pastoral programs" and added that "some of our parishioners . . . told us they are inspired by his prayerful attitude and kindness." Yet the FBI says he was closely aligned with the late Tino Fiumara, one of the most feared mobsters in New Jersey, and is a top associate of Michael Coppola, a mob capo and suspected hit man who was once part of a murder team known as "The Fist."
His criminal record indicates he's never been convicted of a violent crime. But federal prosecutors say he took over the mob's interests along the docks after Lawrence Ricci, a Genovese crime family soldier, was killed in 2005. Ricci was shot in the head, his body left in the trunk of a car parked behind a North Jersey diner.
Depiro is the lead defendant in a pending racketeering case in federal court in Newark that details the mob's alleged control of the New Jersey waterfront.
He has been held without bail since his arrest on Jan. 20, but his New York attorney, Sarita Kedia, has filed a motion seeking his release pending trial.
Prosecutors have opposed the motion.
Court filings in that dispute have provided the wildly divergent descriptions of the reputed wiseguy.
From law enforcement's perspective, Depiro is a gangster who has sworn an oath "to serve the ends of the Genovese . . . family above all else."
And he has done that, they allege, through the extortion of International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) dockworkers who are forced to kick back to the mob in order to work; through a lucrative illegal sports-betting operation; and through a loan-sharking and extortion racket tied to the gambling enterprise.
He has also consistently associated with mob figures, they say, even while free on bail or under supervised release and despite court-ordered prohibitions.
Depiro was one of several crime family members, prosecutors say, who helped Coppola live in hiding for more than a decade as he avoided arrest in a murder case.
And since at least 2005, they allege, Depiro "has managed and controlled the crime family's waterfront rackets," which some estimate generate more than $1 million annually for organized crime.
Defense documents, on the other hand, paint Depiro as a family man in the most honorable sense of that term, and as someone who cares deeply for his loved ones.
He is, according to those filings, a man who sought court permission while under house arrest last year to visit his mother's grave on Mother's Day; to take his elderly aunt to the cemetery on another occasion and then join her for lunch; to visit his father's grave on Father's Day; and to fete family members celebrating birthdays and graduations at such restaurants as La Campagna in Millburn, La Griglia in Kenilworth, and the posh Stella Marina in Asbury Park.
His fiancée and self-described "life partner," Michele Caruso - they have been together 15 years, she wrote in a letter to the court - said Depiro had been "a second father to my son, from toddler to high school graduate."
She called him a "dedicated and personable man," a "role model in our family" who is "capable of handling any situation with thoughtfulness and maturity."
That, of course, is not the picture emerging from snippets of wiretapped conversations that are now part of the racketeering case in which Depiro and 14 associates have been charged.
In those conversations, Depiro is picked up discussing the extortion of the ILA locals with both Fiumara, who died in September, and Coppola, who was jailed last year after his conviction in another racketeering case.
The kickbacks from dockworkers alone, prosecutors say, generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash for the mob each year.
Prosecutors also cite other conversations in which a top associate threatened a deadbeat gambler with a baseball bat if he didn't come up with the money owed to Depiro's gambling operation.
"He needs his hands to work," reputed mob enforcer Richard "Dickie" Dehmer said of his target. "He ain't working no more for a while."
FBI surveillance reports also detailed Depiro's meeting on several occasions with Fiumara at a Long Island restaurant and associating with mobster Daniel Dellisanti, whose criminal record includes convictions for drug dealing and murder, prosecutors said.
Whether Depiro goes to Mass every day, and even if he is a caring son and father figure, authorities argued that he was "the most recent successor" to Fiumara and Coppola and head of a "violent crew that has controlled the crime family's port-related rackets for decades."
He has, they pointed out, no legitimate source of income. Yet he clearly lives well, dining at fine restaurants and driving a Jaguar and a Mercury Mountaineer.
He has, according to his own lawyer, been approached several times by FBI agents who wanted him to cooperate. It was, apparently, an offer he could refuse.
"Each time, the FBI agents found Mr. Depiro in the same church, where he . . . attends services each morning," the lawyer wrote.
Prosecutors say Depiro's mob associations and the charges outlined in a 53-count indictment returned last month support the argument that he is a danger to the community and should be denied bail.
But not everyone in the community agrees.
The priests and deacon at the Church of St. Theresa, in a letter written Jan. 27, conceded that the charges Depiro faces are "serious."
But, they wrote, "through the years of consistently seeing him in church and from our countless conversations with him, we all agree to the fact of his sincerity and his desire to live his life consistent with what our Christian faith teaches."
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20110214_Reputed_North_Jersey_mobster_Stephen__Beach__Depiro_a_family_man_of_contradictions.html?viewAll=y
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
FBI roundup exposes modern day Mafia
Image via WikipediaCrimes include murder, extortion, gambling, drug dealing, and the corruption of labor unions
The names have changed, but the games are the same.
That's the assessment in law enforcement and underworld circles nearly two weeks after a massive FBI mob roundup in which 127 alleged organized crime members and associates were arrested.
Murder, extortion, gambling, drug dealing, and the corruption of labor unions were detailed in more than a dozen indictments returned in northern New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island.
The Jan. 20 arrests - and the unrelated apprehension of reputed Philadelphia mob underboss Martin Angelina three days earlier for allegedly beating his girlfriend - say a lot about the state of the American Mafia, a once-secret "honorable society," according to law enforcement sources.
Today the mob is not so secret and not very honorable.
Hundreds of hours of conversations from phone taps and body wires worn by cooperating witnesses, some of them mob members, are at the heart of the federal indictments. The evidence-gathering techniques rely on the modern mobster's rejection of omerta, the once-sacrosanct code of silence.
Angelina's arrest, after an early-morning altercation that had his South Philly neighbors calling police, is a more personal issue. But, investigators say, it casts Angelina as more punk-like than principled.
While none of those charged in the New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island cases was a household name - the celebrity-gangster days of John Gotti and Joey Merlino also appear to be history - the racketeering charges were all too familiar.
The case out of Newark, for example, focuses on the Genovese crime family's control of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) and the loading of cargo ships at New Jersey piers.
In an account that reads like an update of the 1954 film classic On the Waterfront, federal prosecutors alleged that the Genovese organization has been involved in "the nearly three-decades-long extortion of port workers" from three ILA locals.
Stephen "Beach" Depiro, 55, a reputed Genovese soldier, was the mob's point man, authorities say. Among other things, the indictment contends that ILA members had to kick back part of their Christmas bonuses to the mob in order to work.
Union leaders also were charged in the 53-count indictment. Authorities allege that they maintained their positions by looking out for the crime family's interests rather than those of their members.
The indictment listed the salaries of seven of those ILA leaders. They ranged from $230,512 to $532,719.
Authorities said Depiro, who is being held without bail, succeeded late mob boss Tino Fiumara and jailed Genovese capo Michael Coppola in controlling the waterfront.
In comments that underscored how little things have changed since Marlon Brando's Terry Malloy went up against a corrupt union boss in On the Waterfront, Paul Fishman, the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, said, "Workers should be free to pursue an honest living without being worried that their own union representatives will shake them down."
Shakedowns and extortions were spread across the indictments. The charges included allegations that the Colombo crime family controlled a New York cement- and concrete-workers' union and that the mob used threats of violence to collect payoffs from strip clubs and go-go bars.
There were also five killings, one linked to an internecine power struggle in the Colombo crime family and two stemming from a dispute over a spilled drink in a bar in Queens, N.Y.
U.S. Attorney Eric Holder, the nation's top law enforcement agent, attended a news conference in Brooklyn where the arrests were announced. His presence was seen as a signal that the Justice Department, which has shifted its priorities to terrorism and street gangs, recognizes the Mafia is still a threat.
While some pointed to the arrests as another nail in the Mafia's coffin, others say the cases show how the mob regenerated itself while the feds were focused elsewhere.
"The Mafia is wounded, but not fatally," Selwyn Raab wrote in an op-ed article published in the New York Times on Jan. 23. Raab, a former reporter, is the author of Five Families, a definitive history of the Mafia in New York City.
The indictments, Raab argued, "demonstrated how effectively" the crime families regrouped after a series of investigations in the 1990s that brought down now-deceased kingpins such as Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, who headed the Genovese organization, and Gotti.
On the same day Raab's piece appeared, the New York Post offered a withering critique of the mob's fading fashion sense. Gone are the tailored suits and cashmere overcoats favored by Gotti who, not for nothing, was known as the Dapper Don.
Quoting from an editor at GQ magazine, the story and photos detailed the shabby dress of the defendants picked up in the roundup. There were sweat suits and hoodies, camouflage jackets and tight-fitting windbreakers worn by goodfellas with nicknames like Junior Lollipop, Tony Bagels, and Jello. Dapper Dons these were not.
But while the dress code had relaxed, the racketeering gambits hadn't changed.
In the late 1980s, Gotti's Gambino organization was involved in extorting a famous New York gentleman's club known as Scores.
Court testimony from the club's former owner indicated that different mob crews ran the club's valet parking and coat-check room and took kickbacks from dancers and bartenders. Scores generated several million dollars in cash each week during its heyday, the former owner said.
In the current case, 83-year-old Luigi "Baby Shacks" Manocchio, retired head of New England's Patriarca crime family, is charged with extorting similar establishments around Providence, R.I., for the last 18 years.
Two clubs, the Cadillac Lounge and Satin Doll, and one monthly payoff of $2,900 are listed in the indictment. But other clubs and substantially more cash are believed to be part of the scheme.
The arrests, which included sports-betting charges, came just three weeks before one of the biggest betting days of the year, Super Bowl Sunday. Law enforcement and gambling experts estimate that from $2 billion to $3 billion is wagered illegally on the game, most of it with mob-connected bookmakers,
The arrests also came just days after Angelina, Philadelphia's reputed mob underboss, was charged with aggravated assault, simple assault, and reckless endangerment. Angelina was taken in after neighbors on the 1800 block of Johnston Street called police about a screaming woman who was being beaten.
A mug shot of Angelina shows the shirtless mobster hours after his early-morning arrest. His hair is disheveled and there are scratch marks and what appears to be a quarter-sized bite mark on his bruised face.
Once described by a federal prosecutor as "a bully running with a gang of misfits," Angelina, 49, is considered the number-two man in the crime family headed by alleged mob boss Joseph "Uncle Joe" Ligambi.
Low-key and circumspect, Ligambi, 71, has quietly run the operation for a decade. He is, authorities say, the principal target of a federal racketeering investigation of the Philadelphia-South Jersey mob that could include three slayings. Indictments in the investigation are expected within two months, according to law enforcement sources.
The high-profile Angelina, on the other hand, has been arrested for drunken driving, domestic violence, and spitting on a police officer, all in the last three years.
To many in law enforcement, his recent mug shot, with its scratches and bruises, is the face of the 21st century mob: a less-than-noble society.
"He's just a mess," said a police detective familiar with Angelina's antics.
http://www.policeone.com/news/3294059-FBI-roundup-exposes-modern-day-Mafia/
That's the assessment in law enforcement and underworld circles nearly two weeks after a massive FBI mob roundup in which 127 alleged organized crime members and associates were arrested.
Murder, extortion, gambling, drug dealing, and the corruption of labor unions were detailed in more than a dozen indictments returned in northern New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island.
The Jan. 20 arrests - and the unrelated apprehension of reputed Philadelphia mob underboss Martin Angelina three days earlier for allegedly beating his girlfriend - say a lot about the state of the American Mafia, a once-secret "honorable society," according to law enforcement sources.
Today the mob is not so secret and not very honorable.
Hundreds of hours of conversations from phone taps and body wires worn by cooperating witnesses, some of them mob members, are at the heart of the federal indictments. The evidence-gathering techniques rely on the modern mobster's rejection of omerta, the once-sacrosanct code of silence.
Angelina's arrest, after an early-morning altercation that had his South Philly neighbors calling police, is a more personal issue. But, investigators say, it casts Angelina as more punk-like than principled.
While none of those charged in the New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island cases was a household name - the celebrity-gangster days of John Gotti and Joey Merlino also appear to be history - the racketeering charges were all too familiar.
The case out of Newark, for example, focuses on the Genovese crime family's control of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) and the loading of cargo ships at New Jersey piers.
In an account that reads like an update of the 1954 film classic On the Waterfront, federal prosecutors alleged that the Genovese organization has been involved in "the nearly three-decades-long extortion of port workers" from three ILA locals.
Stephen "Beach" Depiro, 55, a reputed Genovese soldier, was the mob's point man, authorities say. Among other things, the indictment contends that ILA members had to kick back part of their Christmas bonuses to the mob in order to work.
Union leaders also were charged in the 53-count indictment. Authorities allege that they maintained their positions by looking out for the crime family's interests rather than those of their members.
The indictment listed the salaries of seven of those ILA leaders. They ranged from $230,512 to $532,719.
Authorities said Depiro, who is being held without bail, succeeded late mob boss Tino Fiumara and jailed Genovese capo Michael Coppola in controlling the waterfront.
In comments that underscored how little things have changed since Marlon Brando's Terry Malloy went up against a corrupt union boss in On the Waterfront, Paul Fishman, the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, said, "Workers should be free to pursue an honest living without being worried that their own union representatives will shake them down."
Shakedowns and extortions were spread across the indictments. The charges included allegations that the Colombo crime family controlled a New York cement- and concrete-workers' union and that the mob used threats of violence to collect payoffs from strip clubs and go-go bars.
There were also five killings, one linked to an internecine power struggle in the Colombo crime family and two stemming from a dispute over a spilled drink in a bar in Queens, N.Y.
U.S. Attorney Eric Holder, the nation's top law enforcement agent, attended a news conference in Brooklyn where the arrests were announced. His presence was seen as a signal that the Justice Department, which has shifted its priorities to terrorism and street gangs, recognizes the Mafia is still a threat.
While some pointed to the arrests as another nail in the Mafia's coffin, others say the cases show how the mob regenerated itself while the feds were focused elsewhere.
"The Mafia is wounded, but not fatally," Selwyn Raab wrote in an op-ed article published in the New York Times on Jan. 23. Raab, a former reporter, is the author of Five Families, a definitive history of the Mafia in New York City.
The indictments, Raab argued, "demonstrated how effectively" the crime families regrouped after a series of investigations in the 1990s that brought down now-deceased kingpins such as Vincent "The Chin" Gigante, who headed the Genovese organization, and Gotti.
On the same day Raab's piece appeared, the New York Post offered a withering critique of the mob's fading fashion sense. Gone are the tailored suits and cashmere overcoats favored by Gotti who, not for nothing, was known as the Dapper Don.
Quoting from an editor at GQ magazine, the story and photos detailed the shabby dress of the defendants picked up in the roundup. There were sweat suits and hoodies, camouflage jackets and tight-fitting windbreakers worn by goodfellas with nicknames like Junior Lollipop, Tony Bagels, and Jello. Dapper Dons these were not.
But while the dress code had relaxed, the racketeering gambits hadn't changed.
In the late 1980s, Gotti's Gambino organization was involved in extorting a famous New York gentleman's club known as Scores.
Court testimony from the club's former owner indicated that different mob crews ran the club's valet parking and coat-check room and took kickbacks from dancers and bartenders. Scores generated several million dollars in cash each week during its heyday, the former owner said.
In the current case, 83-year-old Luigi "Baby Shacks" Manocchio, retired head of New England's Patriarca crime family, is charged with extorting similar establishments around Providence, R.I., for the last 18 years.
Two clubs, the Cadillac Lounge and Satin Doll, and one monthly payoff of $2,900 are listed in the indictment. But other clubs and substantially more cash are believed to be part of the scheme.
The arrests, which included sports-betting charges, came just three weeks before one of the biggest betting days of the year, Super Bowl Sunday. Law enforcement and gambling experts estimate that from $2 billion to $3 billion is wagered illegally on the game, most of it with mob-connected bookmakers,
The arrests also came just days after Angelina, Philadelphia's reputed mob underboss, was charged with aggravated assault, simple assault, and reckless endangerment. Angelina was taken in after neighbors on the 1800 block of Johnston Street called police about a screaming woman who was being beaten.
A mug shot of Angelina shows the shirtless mobster hours after his early-morning arrest. His hair is disheveled and there are scratch marks and what appears to be a quarter-sized bite mark on his bruised face.
Once described by a federal prosecutor as "a bully running with a gang of misfits," Angelina, 49, is considered the number-two man in the crime family headed by alleged mob boss Joseph "Uncle Joe" Ligambi.
Low-key and circumspect, Ligambi, 71, has quietly run the operation for a decade. He is, authorities say, the principal target of a federal racketeering investigation of the Philadelphia-South Jersey mob that could include three slayings. Indictments in the investigation are expected within two months, according to law enforcement sources.
The high-profile Angelina, on the other hand, has been arrested for drunken driving, domestic violence, and spitting on a police officer, all in the last three years.
To many in law enforcement, his recent mug shot, with its scratches and bruises, is the face of the 21st century mob: a less-than-noble society.
"He's just a mess," said a police detective familiar with Angelina's antics.
http://www.policeone.com/news/3294059-FBI-roundup-exposes-modern-day-Mafia/
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Tino Fiumara Escapes the Law One Final Time
By all accounts, the F.B.I.’s concern was clear: Just make sure he’s really dead.
This unusual directive was inspired by one formidable man’s cunning, his central role in a yearlong investigation into the mob’s grip on the waterfront, and his body count: a dozen murders — several victims were F.B.I. informers — that for a time helped transform New Jersey into the Genovese crime family’s abattoir.
Still, the seemingly simple task of confirming that the man, Tino Fiumara, had indeed died of pancreatic cancer last year was not without its complications — a testament to the notion that even in death, his reputation for being elusive lived on.
If merit outweighed mortality, Mr. Fiumara’s name certainly would have been added to the list of 127 reputed organized-crime figures who were arrested on racketeering and other charges in a multistate roundup two weeks ago, according to several people briefed on the matter.
It was also likely, the people said, that had he lived to make the list, the names of his victims, whom investigators believe he either killed himself or ordered murdered, would have been listed on a separate roster as part of the murder charges that the government was seeking to bring against him.
There were Flat Nose Pete and the Colucci brothers, shot to death inside a Newark social club in 1967.
More than a decade later, Richard Santos, known as Sir Richard for his fine haberdashery, had an unfortunate encounter with a sawed-off shotgun as he walked out the front door of his home. Kid Candy made it a few steps farther: He got it in his driveway.
In the intervening years, six other fringe mob figures fell: four shot with the same .22-caliber pistol; one strangled; one stabbed. In 2005, a capo in the Genovese crime family who was on trial in Brooklyn ended up in the trunk of a car parked outside the Huck Finn Diner in Union, N.J. He had two bullet holes in his head.
An imposing figure who kept fit in his later years and favored cashmere sports jackets and turtleneck sweaters, Mr. Fiumara, at the time of his death, was on the three-man panel that ran the Genovese family, yet was not a household name. But he had a reputation on both sides of the law for being as canny as he was ruthless.
He once traveled in the trunk of a car to defeat surveillance, according to an account provided to investigators by an informer. He also routinely drove the wrong way down one-way streets, traveled up highway off-ramps, regularly switched cars and even rode a bicycle — sometimes traveling through parks into which cars could not follow — to lose his F.B.I. pursuers, according to court papers.
He never used his home phone to discuss mob business and eschewed cellphones, communicating only with pagers and pay phones, and maintaining a list of some 20 locations at any given time where he knew he could be neither watched nor overheard, according to court papers.
Indeed, Paul J. McCarthy, a veteran F.B.I. agent who spent at least four years investigating Mr. Fiumara in the 1990s, said in a 1998 affidavit that the man had used “more extensive countersurveillance techniques than I have ever seen in all my years in law enforcement.” The application was for a roving wiretap so agents could listen in on his pay phone calls.
And Mr. Fiumara was nothing if not discreet. For example, it was not widely known that his brother was married to an aunt of Chris Christie, New Jersey’s governor.
When Mr. Christie became the United States attorney in New Jersey in 2002, his distant familial relationship led him to recuse himself from his office’s investigation into Mr. Fiumara. But Mr. Christie, who as a 29-year-old lawyer visited Mr. Fiumara in prison in 1991, did not disclose the tie when his office announced a plea bargain in that case.
It was Mr. Fiumara’s reputation for cunning, though, that prompted initial skepticism in some quarters when word came that he had died on Sept. 16.
One F.B.I. supervisor sent two agents to confirm Mr. Fiumara’s demise. They visited the Long Island funeral home that had buried him; the proprietor assured them that Mr. Fiumara, who had moved to South Huntington, N.Y., to live with his girlfriend after his 2005 release from prison, was indeed dead, according to one person familiar with that inquiry who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the matter.
But the funeral director also noted that he had been one of Mr. Fiumara’s close friends, and that response did not instill confidence in the official, the person said. The investigators were then ordered to go to the hospital where Mr. Fiumara was being treated when he died. There, they were finally satisfied: Mr. Fiumara, the head of the Genovese family’s waterfront rackets, was indeed dead.
“Law enforcement vilified him, and people who knew him liked him, so he was a complex guy,” Mr. Alfano said last week.
The lawyer, who had also represented Mr. Fiumara during the recent investigation by the F.B.I., federal prosecutors in Newark and Brooklyn, the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor and several other agencies, was hesitant to answer questions about his client’s history.
“All I can tell you is he was always a gentleman with me, and I’m very sorry that he passed away,” Mr. Alfano said.
It was not because Mr. Fiumara exemplified the qualities of a gentleman, however, that fellow crime figures held him in such high esteem.
Court papers filed last year in the case of another Genovese crime family figure said a government informer had told the federal authorities that in the late 1970s, the man and Mr. Fiumara were both part of a Genovese family hit team known as “the Fist.”
Four of the old murders for which the authorities were investigating Mr. Fiumara — in which the same .22-caliber pistol was used to kill informers or potential witnesses — have been linked to the group, officials said. The four men had either talked to the authorities about Mr. Fiumara’s mob supervisor, John DiGilio, or had been planning to do so but were killed first.
Among them were the 35-year-old principal of East Side High School in Newark, who was linked to Mr. Fiumara’s bookmaking activities, and a wiretapping expert who had bugged the office of Mr. DiGilio’s lawyer, apparently as part of an effort to make it appear that the F.B.I. had done so illegally.
That man, Franklin Chin, had earlier had the distinction of being something of an unorthodox literary muse. He had put a bug in a brothel at the request of the establishment’s madam, Xaviera Hollander, who later used the tapes to write her book “The Happy Hooker.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/02/nyregion/02mob.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
This unusual directive was inspired by one formidable man’s cunning, his central role in a yearlong investigation into the mob’s grip on the waterfront, and his body count: a dozen murders — several victims were F.B.I. informers — that for a time helped transform New Jersey into the Genovese crime family’s abattoir.
Still, the seemingly simple task of confirming that the man, Tino Fiumara, had indeed died of pancreatic cancer last year was not without its complications — a testament to the notion that even in death, his reputation for being elusive lived on.
If merit outweighed mortality, Mr. Fiumara’s name certainly would have been added to the list of 127 reputed organized-crime figures who were arrested on racketeering and other charges in a multistate roundup two weeks ago, according to several people briefed on the matter.
It was also likely, the people said, that had he lived to make the list, the names of his victims, whom investigators believe he either killed himself or ordered murdered, would have been listed on a separate roster as part of the murder charges that the government was seeking to bring against him.
There were Flat Nose Pete and the Colucci brothers, shot to death inside a Newark social club in 1967.
More than a decade later, Richard Santos, known as Sir Richard for his fine haberdashery, had an unfortunate encounter with a sawed-off shotgun as he walked out the front door of his home. Kid Candy made it a few steps farther: He got it in his driveway.
In the intervening years, six other fringe mob figures fell: four shot with the same .22-caliber pistol; one strangled; one stabbed. In 2005, a capo in the Genovese crime family who was on trial in Brooklyn ended up in the trunk of a car parked outside the Huck Finn Diner in Union, N.J. He had two bullet holes in his head.
An imposing figure who kept fit in his later years and favored cashmere sports jackets and turtleneck sweaters, Mr. Fiumara, at the time of his death, was on the three-man panel that ran the Genovese family, yet was not a household name. But he had a reputation on both sides of the law for being as canny as he was ruthless.
He once traveled in the trunk of a car to defeat surveillance, according to an account provided to investigators by an informer. He also routinely drove the wrong way down one-way streets, traveled up highway off-ramps, regularly switched cars and even rode a bicycle — sometimes traveling through parks into which cars could not follow — to lose his F.B.I. pursuers, according to court papers.
He never used his home phone to discuss mob business and eschewed cellphones, communicating only with pagers and pay phones, and maintaining a list of some 20 locations at any given time where he knew he could be neither watched nor overheard, according to court papers.
Indeed, Paul J. McCarthy, a veteran F.B.I. agent who spent at least four years investigating Mr. Fiumara in the 1990s, said in a 1998 affidavit that the man had used “more extensive countersurveillance techniques than I have ever seen in all my years in law enforcement.” The application was for a roving wiretap so agents could listen in on his pay phone calls.
And Mr. Fiumara was nothing if not discreet. For example, it was not widely known that his brother was married to an aunt of Chris Christie, New Jersey’s governor.
When Mr. Christie became the United States attorney in New Jersey in 2002, his distant familial relationship led him to recuse himself from his office’s investigation into Mr. Fiumara. But Mr. Christie, who as a 29-year-old lawyer visited Mr. Fiumara in prison in 1991, did not disclose the tie when his office announced a plea bargain in that case.
It was Mr. Fiumara’s reputation for cunning, though, that prompted initial skepticism in some quarters when word came that he had died on Sept. 16.
One F.B.I. supervisor sent two agents to confirm Mr. Fiumara’s demise. They visited the Long Island funeral home that had buried him; the proprietor assured them that Mr. Fiumara, who had moved to South Huntington, N.Y., to live with his girlfriend after his 2005 release from prison, was indeed dead, according to one person familiar with that inquiry who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the matter.
But the funeral director also noted that he had been one of Mr. Fiumara’s close friends, and that response did not instill confidence in the official, the person said. The investigators were then ordered to go to the hospital where Mr. Fiumara was being treated when he died. There, they were finally satisfied: Mr. Fiumara, the head of the Genovese family’s waterfront rackets, was indeed dead.
Salvatore T. Alfano, a Bloomfield, N.J., lawyer who had represented Mr. Fiumara in several criminal cases, said that his client had not been charged in any murders, and that he was unaware of any evidence the government had linking him to any of the killings.
“Law enforcement vilified him, and people who knew him liked him, so he was a complex guy,” Mr. Alfano said last week.
The lawyer, who had also represented Mr. Fiumara during the recent investigation by the F.B.I., federal prosecutors in Newark and Brooklyn, the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor and several other agencies, was hesitant to answer questions about his client’s history.
“All I can tell you is he was always a gentleman with me, and I’m very sorry that he passed away,” Mr. Alfano said.
It was not because Mr. Fiumara exemplified the qualities of a gentleman, however, that fellow crime figures held him in such high esteem.
Court papers filed last year in the case of another Genovese crime family figure said a government informer had told the federal authorities that in the late 1970s, the man and Mr. Fiumara were both part of a Genovese family hit team known as “the Fist.”
Four of the old murders for which the authorities were investigating Mr. Fiumara — in which the same .22-caliber pistol was used to kill informers or potential witnesses — have been linked to the group, officials said. The four men had either talked to the authorities about Mr. Fiumara’s mob supervisor, John DiGilio, or had been planning to do so but were killed first.
Among them were the 35-year-old principal of East Side High School in Newark, who was linked to Mr. Fiumara’s bookmaking activities, and a wiretapping expert who had bugged the office of Mr. DiGilio’s lawyer, apparently as part of an effort to make it appear that the F.B.I. had done so illegally.
That man, Franklin Chin, had earlier had the distinction of being something of an unorthodox literary muse. He had put a bug in a brothel at the request of the establishment’s madam, Xaviera Hollander, who later used the tapes to write her book “The Happy Hooker.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/02/nyregion/02mob.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Seven Union County Residents Charged in 'Largest Mob Takedown in U.S. History'
Indictments were unsealed Thursday against 18 New Jersey residents on charges that include racketeering, extortion and illegal gambling, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Newark announced. The case centers on mob control of the International Longshoremen’s Association, and several of the defendants are either current or former members of ILA leadership.
Of the 17 people arrested in New Jersey on Thursday (one was already in custody), only one is identified as a “made” member of an organized crime family. Federal authorities said Stephen Depiro of Kenilworth, a reputed Genovese soldier, is part of the crew formerly headed by Genovese capo Tino Fiumara and has run the crime family’s waterfront rackets since at least 2005. Depiro and reputed Genovese associates are charged with forcing port workers to hand over “tribute payments” each year around Christmas, when the workers receive an end-of-year bonus. Federal authorities said the extortion of the dockworkers has been going on for three decades.
Among those charged in the 53-count indictment were reputed Genovese associate Albert Cernades, 75, of Union, the former president of ILA 1235; and Nunzio LaGrasso, 60, of Florham Park, the vice president of ILA 1478.
Seven others were charged with extorting ILA members, including Thomas Leonardis, 53, of Glen Gardner, the current ILA 1235 president; Robert Ruiz, 52, of Watchung, the local’s delegate; and Vincent Aulisi, 78, of West Orange, a past local president.
Also charged were Richard Dehmer, 75, of Springfield; Edward Aulisi, 51, of Flemington; Michael Trueba, 75, of Kearny; Ramiro Quintans, 52, of Basking Ridge; Salvatore LaGrasso, 60, of Edison; Anthony Alfano, 76, of Union; Tonino Colantonio, 32, of Kenilworth; John Hartmann, 41, of Kenilworth; and Guiseppe Pugliese, 32, Kenilworth.
“According to the charges unsealed today, organized crime still has a grip on the New Jersey waterfront,” NJ U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman said. “Workers should be free to pursue an honest living without being worried that their own union representatives will shake them down. … Paying tribute to the mob is not an acceptable cost of doing business in New Jersey.”
The men were among more than 120 charged Thursday in what Attorney General Eric Holder announced as the largest mob takedown in U.S. history. The charges include murder and racketeering.
Among those outside of New Jersey charged were Joseph Corozzo, 69, a reputed high-ranking member of the Gambino family; Andrew Russo, 79, who is reportedly the “street boss” of the Colombo family; Benjamin Castellazzo, 73, a reputed Colombo “underboss”; and Luigi Manocchio, 83, who authorities term as a former boss of the New England mob.
In all, 91 members and associates of seven organized crime families, including the New Jersey-based DeCavalcante family, have been charged in 16 indictments. Another 36 have been charged for their roles in alleged associated criminal activity, federal authorities said.
“It’s become almost cliché to link organized crime to New Jersey, with oft-repeated comments about the ‘Soprano State’ and bodies allegedly being buried in the Meadowlands,” said Michael B. Ward, Special Agent in charge of the Newark division of the FBI. “Today’s arrests will serve as a stark reminder that organized crime continues to operate in New Jersey through corruption, extortion, racketeering and violence.”
http://westfield.patch.com/articles/six-union-county-residents-charged-in-largest-mob-takedown-in-us-history
Of the 17 people arrested in New Jersey on Thursday (one was already in custody), only one is identified as a “made” member of an organized crime family. Federal authorities said Stephen Depiro of Kenilworth, a reputed Genovese soldier, is part of the crew formerly headed by Genovese capo Tino Fiumara and has run the crime family’s waterfront rackets since at least 2005. Depiro and reputed Genovese associates are charged with forcing port workers to hand over “tribute payments” each year around Christmas, when the workers receive an end-of-year bonus. Federal authorities said the extortion of the dockworkers has been going on for three decades.
Among those charged in the 53-count indictment were reputed Genovese associate Albert Cernades, 75, of Union, the former president of ILA 1235; and Nunzio LaGrasso, 60, of Florham Park, the vice president of ILA 1478.
Seven others were charged with extorting ILA members, including Thomas Leonardis, 53, of Glen Gardner, the current ILA 1235 president; Robert Ruiz, 52, of Watchung, the local’s delegate; and Vincent Aulisi, 78, of West Orange, a past local president.
Also charged were Richard Dehmer, 75, of Springfield; Edward Aulisi, 51, of Flemington; Michael Trueba, 75, of Kearny; Ramiro Quintans, 52, of Basking Ridge; Salvatore LaGrasso, 60, of Edison; Anthony Alfano, 76, of Union; Tonino Colantonio, 32, of Kenilworth; John Hartmann, 41, of Kenilworth; and Guiseppe Pugliese, 32, Kenilworth.
“According to the charges unsealed today, organized crime still has a grip on the New Jersey waterfront,” NJ U.S. Attorney Paul J. Fishman said. “Workers should be free to pursue an honest living without being worried that their own union representatives will shake them down. … Paying tribute to the mob is not an acceptable cost of doing business in New Jersey.”
The men were among more than 120 charged Thursday in what Attorney General Eric Holder announced as the largest mob takedown in U.S. history. The charges include murder and racketeering.
Among those outside of New Jersey charged were Joseph Corozzo, 69, a reputed high-ranking member of the Gambino family; Andrew Russo, 79, who is reportedly the “street boss” of the Colombo family; Benjamin Castellazzo, 73, a reputed Colombo “underboss”; and Luigi Manocchio, 83, who authorities term as a former boss of the New England mob.
In all, 91 members and associates of seven organized crime families, including the New Jersey-based DeCavalcante family, have been charged in 16 indictments. Another 36 have been charged for their roles in alleged associated criminal activity, federal authorities said.
“It’s become almost cliché to link organized crime to New Jersey, with oft-repeated comments about the ‘Soprano State’ and bodies allegedly being buried in the Meadowlands,” said Michael B. Ward, Special Agent in charge of the Newark division of the FBI. “Today’s arrests will serve as a stark reminder that organized crime continues to operate in New Jersey through corruption, extortion, racketeering and violence.”
http://westfield.patch.com/articles/six-union-county-residents-charged-in-largest-mob-takedown-in-us-history
Friday, December 10, 2010
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Genovese Family New Jersey Head And Next In Line To Become Boss Dies
His mob associates called him "Shark Eyes."
In a business filled with mean men, Tino Fiumara, a mobster with Hudson County roots, had a reputation for being a particularly scary one.
"He was a real murderer," said once source about Fiumara yesterday. "His eyes were black...He was very intimidating."
The boss for the Genovese crime family in New Jersey, and considered next in line to take control of the crime family, Fiumara died Thursday in New York from natural causes, authorities said yesterday. He was 71.
Also known as "The Greek" and "T," Fiumara controlled labor rackets on the New Jersey waterfront, as well as illegal gambling, loan-sharking, extortion and narcotics.
A powerful figure in New Jersey organized crime for three decades, Fiumara operated out of a Hoboken social club in his younger days, a source said.
Fiumara, who lived in Long Island before he died, was convicted of racketeering and extortion in Manhattan federal court in 1979 and convicted of extortion in Newark federal court in 1978.
He was linked by law enforcement to numerous murders, including the piano-wire strangulation of an associate and the shooting of a childhood friend during a dispute.
Fiumara was released on parole in 1999, but federal agents locked him up again for associating with known felons and he was finally released from prison in 2005.
Image via WikipediaUntil his conviction, authorities viewed Fiumara as next in line to head the Genovese family, the dominant mob organization in New Jersey and New York. In 1983, State Police Lt. Col. Justin Dintino called Fiumara "a callous killer who has resorted to violence with little provocation." In 2005, Genovese mobster Lawrence Ricci's decomposing body was found in the trunk of a car in New Jersey and it was said Fiumara approved the hit because Ricci refused to plead guilty in an ongoing racketeering trial.
"Nobody was more feared than Tino," the source said of Fiumara. "They all were feared, don't get me wrong, but you didn't want to get called in by Tino."
Fiumara's attorney, Salvatore Alfano of Bloomfield, said yesterday that Fiumara died from "a very fast-moving cancer."
"I've represented the man for over 10 years and he was always a gentleman with me," Alfano said. "I am deeply saddened by his loss."
http://www.nj.com/hudson/index.ssf/2010/09/a_top_new_jersey_mobster_with.html
Sunday, October 18, 2009
Genovese Crime Family Remains Mafia Powerhouse
Former Genovese Boss Vincent "The Chin" Gigante As he placed containers of takeout food in the back of his GMC Yukon, two hooded men pulled up beside him and demanded the precious stones they knew he always carried on him in two stuffed briefcases.
But instead of simply grabbing the bags, one of the flustered thugs, Charles Santiago, a 26-year-old hothead with a rap sheet a mile long, shot Antonelli, 43, twice in the chest, sources said.
As the jeweler collapsed to the ground in the Staten Island parking lot, the thugs sped off, leaving $260,000 in bling and cash in the jeweler's car.
Strangely, the man Antonelli had hired to protect him from exactly this scenario, retired NYPD Sgt. Jason Aiello, was still in the restaurant, seated at a table, unarmed.
Investigators have now revealed to The Post the motive for the killing, which was first believed to be a mob hit.
Antonelli had stopped paying protection money to the Genoveses, and the crime family wasn't pleased. They wanted their money, and robbing the wholesale jeweler was the easiest way to get it.
They didn't mean for Antonelli to die -- which he did, a few days later -- but in the end, he was just another casualty in the crime family's bloody history.
The FBI last week picked up a sixth man allegedly involved in the botched heist. John "Whiz" Delutro, 32, was charged as an accomplice to the shooting for acting as a lookout that day, and more arrests are expected soon, sources said.
The bloodshed did not end with Antonelli's murder. His trusted friend and sometimes-bodyguard, Aiello, 36, was killed a month later in a shootout with cops.
After being questioned by FBI agents about his involvement in the murder, Aiello had a breakdown and began quoting Scripture and behaving erratically. His family checked him into a psych ward, but he escaped hours later and returned to his Rosebank home.
Clutching a Bible and carrying two 9mm guns, Aiello ushered his wife and pajama-clad kids outside, hoping to get them out of the state.
"Follow me, I am the chosen one," he said, according to a neighbor.
But he was soon surrounded by cops.
"Do you believe in God?" he asked an officer before opening fire.
He died in a hail of bullets as his wife crouched next to him in a cousin's SUV, his children huddling in the family's minivan nearby.
Law-enforcement sources said that if he had lived, it's possible he would have been indicted in the jeweler's death.
While New York's four other crime families wallow in disarray -- the super-secretive Genovese family is still the biggest and the baddest of La Cosa Nostra, according to law-enforcement officials.
"They're the most efficient family because they're so secretive. People within the family don't even know who each other are, or who is in charge," said Dave Shafer, head of the FBI's Organized Crime program.
"They are very disciplined in their criminal plots, and they keep their hit teams small. Infiltration by law enforcement is very difficult," he said.
"They continue to use violence to ensure compliance."
The Gambinos took a major hit when they lost their acting boss, underboss and consigliere in a federal sweep in 2008. The Colombos' street boss, Tommy "Tommy Shots" Gioeli, was picked up on murder charges last year. The Bonannos' 38-year-old Sicilian street boss was deported earlier this year, and the small Luchese family, with only about 100 members, has never recovered from its trigger-happy underboss, Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso, who went on a paranoid killing spree within the family.
In contrast, the Genoveses are likely ruled by a panel of elder statesmen who divide power and keep low profiles. Investigators are never sure who wields power in the family, sources said.
Current wisdom holds that Liborio "Barney" Bellomo, Ernest "Ernie" Muscarella, Dominick "Quiet Dom" Cirillo, Tino Fiumara and Lawrence "Little Larry" Dentico are all in charge to some degree.
And while the other families are plagued by rats, the Genoveses have very few members who turn government witness. Bonanno boss Joe Massino flipped for the feds in a shocking move, as did his underboss Salvatore Vitale. Two of Gambino don John Gotti Sr.'s right-hand men, Sammy "Bull" Gravano and Michael "Mikey Scars" DiLeonardo, are trotted out to testify at mob trials on a rotating basis.
Each time a "made" man flips, a crime family takes a huge hit. Agents can take down whole crews and can learn how the family operates and where the power resides.
By remaining tight-lipped, the Genovese family -- the largest crime clan, with anywhere from 250 to 400 members, sources said -- are able to consolidate power, grow and rake in huge amounts of ill-gotten gains.
"We haven't had widespread disruption of the Genoveses like we had with the other families," said Shafer.
While John Gotti Sr. flaunted his status and his power and was seen all over town in flashy suits, legendary Genovese godfather Vincent "Chin" Gigante for decades pretended to be mentally ill -- walking around in a bathrobe, urinating in the street, muttering to himself and generally behaving like a mad man.
He was never picked up on a wiretap, and avoided prosecution for far longer than the other family bosses. In more than 30 years as head of the family, he was able to consolidate the family's power over labor unions, the Javits Convention Center, the Fulton Fish Market and the San Gennaro Festival, among other lucrative rackets.
Made guys who even uttered his name had a death warrant placed on their heads. Instead, they could only point to or rub their chins when they wanted to reference him, said Shafer.
"Gigante's secrecy permeated the ranks -- and it still exists," he said. "If someone in the Genovese family slips up, they're dead before you know it."
The Genovese family has its roots in the Italian criminal gangs run by gangster Joseph Masseria in the 1920s. Masseria started the famous "Castellammarese War" in 1928 but was killed by Charles "Lucky" Luciano, who became the first boss of the Genovese family and set up what is known as the "Commission," or ruling body of the five families.
In 1946, Luciano was deported to Italy and mobster Frank Costello led the family until its namesake, Vito Genovese, took control by sending then-soldier Gigante to murder Costello.
Costello survived the attempted hit but ceded control anyway. When Genovese died in his prison cell in 1969, Gigante became the secret boss of the family, a fact that stayed hidden from the other families and law enforcement for years.
In 1997, The Chin was convicted of racketeering and murder conspiracy and sentenced to 12 years, although he continued to run the family from prison. He died there in 2005.
The family known for its history of brutal efficiency still maintains an iron grip on its members.
In April, another longtime Genovese associate, William Romano, 71, was bludgeoned to death, along with his girlfriend, Elviza Aronova, 37, over a drug deal gone awry.
Romano had been running things on the street for his capo, Salvatore "Sally Dogs" Lombardo, who was cooling his heels in prison. Lombardo was a known heroin dealer who was in constant contact with Romano, even while in the can, sources said.
But Romano had recently borrowed $200,000 from the Bonanno crime family to negotiate a heroin deal, The Post has learned, and apparently didn't pay it back.
A few days later, he and his girlfriend became two more mob fatalities.
No arrests have been made in that case. Lombardo died in prison a few months later.
The Genoveses even reputedly had a family capo, Larry Ricci, killed while he was on trial for extortion in Brooklyn federal court in 2005.
He'd refused to take a plea, and the family was reportedly not happy that he was going to take the stand in his defense, opening up the clan to scrutiny from federal prosecutors.
One day, he didn't show up at the courthouse. The judge issued a warrant for his arrest. It wasn't necessary. A month later, he was found in the trunk of a car outside the Huck Finn Diner in Union, NJ.
The case remains unsolved.
http://www.nypost.com/f/print/news/local/staten_island/city_main_mob_power_CwQvpGPW4GVkV2FoY8fX5L
Thursday, September 24, 2009
NJ Gov Candidate has Family Links to Reputed Feared Genovese Boss
For Christopher J. Christie, it was inescapably an uncomfortable family connection. Tino Fiumara, the brother of his aunt’s husband, was a fearsome and ranking member of the Genovese crime family: twice convicted of racketeering, sentenced to 25 years in federal prison, and linked by investigators to several grisly murders, including one in which a victim was strangled with piano wire.
Tino Fiumara in 1979.
Mr. Christie, 47, who rose from a boyhood in Livingston to become a corporate lawyer, then United States attorney in New Jersey and now the Republican candidate for governor of New Jersey, does not appear to have talked much about Mr. Fiumara over the years.
He once acknowledged bumping into his uncle’s brother at a restaurant in the mid-1990s. And there was a 1991 visit Mr. Christie made to a Texas prison to see Mr. Fiumara — at the request, Mr. Christie said, of a relative.
But when Mr. Christie became New Jersey’s top federal prosecutor in January 2002, his distant tie became a potential problem. Mr. Fiumara was already under investigation by the federal prosecutor’s office for aiding the flight of a fugitive suspected of murder.
Mr. Christie recused himself from the case. Mr. Fiumara was arrested that April. Prosecutors and defense lawyers say Mr. Christie was never involved in any way.
But Mr. Christie, whose office issued news releases about a plea bargain and Mr. Fiumara’s eight-month prison sentence, never revealed his connection to the defendant or his sensitive decision to distance himself from the handling of the case.
“My view at the time was, I had had nothing to do with the case, I’d had no involvement with it, and I didn’t think it was of any import to anyone why I’d recused,” he said in an interview. “It was a personal matter; it was not a professional matter.”
Mr. Christie says his relationship to Mr. Fiumara never came up in his F.B.I. background check after his appointment as United States attorney, and he never raised it, though he says he assumed investigators were aware of it.
So as he runs for governor, the connection to one of the state’s more notorious and violent gangsters emerges as a somewhat startling footnote in the biography of a man who has built his campaign, and career, as a crime fighter.
Mr. Christie says that as United States attorney he was always tough on organized crime, though it did not rank as high among his priorities as public corruption, terrorism, violent street gangs or human trafficking did. And he says he stands by a 2007 remark that “the Mafia is much more prominent on HBO than in New Jersey.”
Mr. Fiumara’s older brother, John, who lived in Livingston, a mile from the Christie home, was the second husband of Mr. Christie’s aunt, Mr. Christie said. He said that he recalled seeing Tino Fiumara at large parties at his aunt’s home when he was a boy.
By then, Mr. Fiumara had built an extensive and violent résumé in the underworld. Jerry Capeci of GangLandNews.com, has reported that Mr. Fiumara cut his teeth in the late 1960’s working for Ruggiero Boiardo, a top Genovese crime family member in New Jersey, known as Richie the Boot, who lived in a sprawling Livingston estate that became a model for the suburban home of the fictional character Tony Soprano.
Mr. Christie said he was 15 when he found out about Mr. Fiumara’s involvement in organized crime, in 1977, reading about it on the front page of The Star-Ledger. Two years later, Mr. Fiumara was sentenced to 20 years for extorting a Parsippany restaurateur.
He was denied bail in that case, according to Mr. Capeci, after investigators linked him to the 1969 murder of a politically connected nightclub owner and bookmaker in Paterson, N.J. In 1980, he was convicted of charges that he controlled the New Jersey waterfront for the Genovese family, paying off union leaders and extorting shipping companies.
A United States Senate subcommittee investigating organized crime in the early 1980s attributed three murders to Mr. Fiumara, including the 1967 slayings of two brothers of one of his codefendants in the 1980 trial.
In 1983, Lt. Col. Justin Dintino of the New Jersey State Police called Mr. Fiumara “a callous killer who has resorted to violence with little provocation,” and said Mr. Fiumara had ordered the murder of the godfather of one of his own children.
Gerald Shargel, Mr. Fiumara’s lawyer, has called the murder accusations “an F.B.I. fantasy.”
Mr. Fiumara, 68, visited on Monday at his home in South Huntington, N.Y., referred reporters to another defense lawyer, Salvatore T. Alfano, who declined to comment.
Mr. Christie apparently has discussed Mr. Fiumara publicly only once before, in a brief item in The Star-Ledger in December 2001. He mentioned a chance encounter at a restaurant while Mr. Fiumara was out on parole several years earlier.
He did not mention having visited Mr. Fiumara behind bars.
In 1991, as a 29-year-old lawyer, Mr. Christie was planning a trip to Dallas to see a football game, he said, when his uncle asked him to visit Mr. Fiumara in the federal prison in Fort Worth.
He said that he remembered little of their conversation. “My best recollection is we updated each other on what was going on with the family,” he said. “It was not a very long visit.”
Mr. Fiumara was paroled from Fort Worth in February 1994. In 1999, he was returned to prison for associating with known criminals. A longtime associate, Michael Coppola, had fled murder charges in 1996, and Mr. Fiumara was caught on a wiretap speaking with him by phone while Mr. Coppola was a fugitive.
Mr. Fiumara was due to be released again in June 2002. But that April, he was indicted again, this time by Mr. Christie’s office on charges of helping Mr. Coppola avoid prosecution. Mr. Christie recused himself. Mr. Fiumara’s lawyers argued that he had already been punished through the parole violation. They sought house arrest, saying incarceration would jeopardize his chances of a kidney transplant. But prosecutors insisted on prison.
“The plea negotiations were very tough,” said Mr. Shargel. “No one was given any gift, that’s for sure.”
He said Mr. Christie had no involvement whatsoever.
Aidan O’Connor, who led the organized crime strike force for Mr. Christie at the time, agreed with Mr. Shargel.
Mr. Fiumara was released in January 2005. Last year he was named as a target of federal investigators who believe he ordered the slaying of an associate who was on trial for fraud in October 2005.
A senior law enforcement official said Mr. Fiumara now sits on a three-person ruling panel that oversees the Genovese family, which has not had an official boss since the death of Vincent Gigante in 2005.
Mr. Christie said that if he learned anything from his connection to Mr. Fiumara, it was at the moment he read about him in the newspaper as a 15-year-old.
“It just told me that you make bad decisions in life and you wind up paying a price,” he said. “Really, for most of my life, he spent his life in prison. That teaches you a lot.”
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Reputed Genovese hitman Michael (Mikey Cigars) Coppola did hit job 'with tears,' says mob rat
Reputed Genovese gangster Michael "Mikey Cigars" Coppola was a hit man with a soft spot for at least one gangland victim he gunned down, a government witness testified Tuesday.
Coppola admitted killing gangster John "Johnny Coca Cola" Lardiere outside the Red Bull Inn in New Jersey in 1977 - but wasn't proud of the deadly deed, mob rat Thomas Ricciardi recalled 
Genovese Family Capo Tino Fiumara via Wikipedia"Some you do with tears in your eyes," Coppola said, according to Ricciardi, who pleaded guilty to participating in 11 murders.
Ricciardi, a soldier with the Luchese crime family, said Coppola openly discussed how the rubout went down several years later while the two wiseguys were talking shop in a restaurant.
"What I got out of it was I don't think he agreed with the decision [to kill Lardiere]," Ricciardi, 57, told Assistant U.S. Attorney Jack Dennehy.
Coppola made it clear in their conversation that he was in no position to question the orders from Mafia superiors.
"Don't get me wrong ... you may not agree with what you gotta do, but you gotta do what you gotta do," Ricciardi quoted Coppola as saying.
Coppola praised the victim with being a tough guy who "'died like a man,'" Ricciardi said.
After Coppola hit Lardiere with one shot, his gun jammed and the victim cracked: "What are you going to do now, tough guy?"
Coppola drew a second handgun from an ankle holster and calmly finished off the hood.
Ricciardi implicated Genovese capo Tino Fiumara in the Lardiere killing. Fiumara, a Newark hood tied to waterfront rackets, has not been charged.
NY Daily News
Monday, July 6, 2009
North Jersey Genovese Enforcer on Trial
Genovese Captain Tino Fiumara via WikipediaMichael Coppola, who goes on trial this week in a racketeering-murder case, was part of a Mafia assassination squad that “performed murders ordered by the Genovese family administration” in the late 1970s and 1980s, prosecutors said in a motion filed last month.
One of those murders, the 1977 killing of mobster John “Johnny Coca Cola” Lardiere, is part of the pending racketeering case against Coppola, who fled New Jersey in 1996 as state authorities sought a DNA sample they hoped would link him to the long-unsolved gangland slaying.
Described in a second government motion as a seasoned Mafia enforcer, Coppola served as “the right-hand man to Tino Fiumara, a powerful and violent . . . crime family captain [and] part of the Genovese family administration,” even while living in hiding, prosecutors allege.
Fiumara was labeled an unindicted coconspirator in the pending case.
Coppola, 63, is facing racketeering and conspiracy charges that include the Lardiere murder and the systematic extortion of an International Longshoremen’s Association union that works the New Jersey waterfront.
The labor-racketeering charge stems from an ongoing federal investigation in which authorities allege that the Genovese and Gambino crime families have used violence, intimidation, and extortion to corrupt the ILA and control the docks in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and North Jersey.
A civil suit filed by the U.S. Justice Department alleges the mob generates millions of dollars through a labor-racketeering scheme that one law enforcement expert said echoes the 1954 movie classic On the Waterfront.
While not part of the current case, federal authorities also allege Coppola and Fiumara, the Genovese crime family’s reputed New Jersey boss, orchestrated the 2005 slaying of Lawrence Ricci, an ILA official then on trial for racketeering.
Jury selection in the Coppola case begins tomorrow in Brooklyn federal court. For security reasons, prosecutors have asked that the members of the panel be chosen anonymously.
The trial is expected to include hundreds of secretly recorded, wiretapped conversations that allegedly tie Coppola to the corruption of ILA Local 1235, based in Newark.
In one phone conversation Coppola is heard bragging about how the mob controlled a former union president.
“We were right next to him all the time during this whole thing,” Coppola is quoted as saying.
The indictment alleges that since 1974, the Genovese crime family has had its hooks into Local 1235. During that time, investigators say, the mob arranged no-show jobs for associates, extorted shipping companies by threatening labor slowdowns and work stoppages, and received hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in tribute payments from the union itself.
Two underworld informants, George Barone, a mob soldier and former ILA official, and Thomas Ricciardi, an admitted Lucchese crime-family hit man, have provided information about Coppola, according to court documents, and are expected to testify in the pending trial.
Identified only as “CW” (cooperating witness) in several pretrial motions, Ricciardi has told authorities that Coppola boasted about the Lardiere killing, which took place in the parking lot of a Somerset County motel on Easter Sunday 1977.
Lardiere was serving a sentence for contempt at the time, but had been granted a two-day prison furlough. Authorities said the Genovese crime family ordered him murdered because, while in prison, he had gotten into a fight with and shown disrespect to a high-ranking mobster who was also in jail.
Coppola became a “made” or formally initiated member of the Genovese organization after carrying out the hit, authorities say.
The shooting, which Ricciardi has said Coppola confirmed to him when they first met in 1983, has taken on folklore status in the New Jersey underworld.
Coppola allegedly approached Lardiere in the parking lot of the Red Bull Inn, pulled out a gun, and tried to open fire. But the gun jammed.
Lardiere laughed and said, “What are you going to do now, tough guy?”
With that, the story goes, Coppola reached for another gun he had in an ankle holster and shot Lardiere five times.
Prosecutors also had hoped to use testimony from Ricciardi to link Coppola to the 1988 slaying of Ray “The Barber” Barberio, who was killed in the Downeck section of Newark. Barberio was slain, authorities say, for failing to pay a loan-sharking debt he owed to the Genovese organization.
Ricciardi told authorities that while having drinks with Coppola a few nights before the murder, Coppola told him he was “on the road,” an underworld phrase that meant he was actively assigned to a murder. He said Coppola also showed him the gun he was carrying.
After Barberio was killed, Ricciardi said, two other mobsters told him Coppola was the hit man.
Prosecutors argued that the slaying and Coppola’s willingness to discuss his “work” with Ricciardi should be admitted because it demonstrates a pattern of criminality and demonstrated Coppola’s relationship with Ricciardi.
A federal judge, however, responding to a motion filed by Coppola’s lawyer, has barred any testimony about the Barberio hit, ruling that it might unduly prejudice the jury.
It was also Ricciardi who told authorities that Coppola, along with Fiumara and several others, comprised the Genovese hit team known as “The Fist.” He said the group was based in the Downeck section of Newark, a once predominantly Italian American neighborhood where, in the 1980s, several crime families maintained clubhouses.
Coppola spent more than 10 years on the run before he was arrested on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in March 2007. Authorities say he and his wife, using aliases and aided by the Genovese organization, lived in an apartment there and in another in San Francisco during the decade that New Jersey authorities searched for him.
The DNA test, which was administered after he was apprehended, proved inconclusive.
A murder charge against Coppola stemming from the Lardiere killing is still pending in Somerset County.
Coppola and Fiumara remain targets of an ongoing federal investigation into the Ricci murder, which, authorities allege, was carried out by Coppola on Fiumara’s orders.
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/local/20090706_Trial_for_accused_Mafia_hit_man.html
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