Alleged Mob Leaders Rounded Up in N.Y.

N E W  Y O R K, Sept. 6 -- Federal prosecutors today announced details of what is being called the largest organized crime bust since the 1980s.

Early this morning, law-enforcement officers began rounding up dozens of people, including reputed mob leaders, on allegations that the mob controlled construction contractors and paid off key construction unions. In total, 38 people and 11 companies were indicted on corruption charges.

Authorities say their case is based on thousands of hours of tapes from wiretaps — and on one key informant, a high-level mob associate named Sean Richards.

Richards would be comfortable in an episode of The Sopranos — in fact, he married the daughter of the boss of the real crime family that inspired the series. But when investigators began closing in, Richards secretly began working for the law, taping his conversations about construction rackets. It took a while for the mob bosses to figure out Richards had defected and was cooperating with prosecutors. When they did, a contract was taken out on his life.

Three-Year Investigation

At a secret hideout far from New York City, Richards spoke to ABCNEWS, telling us that he and other mobsters ran construction companies that could underbid any legitimate competitors by using nonunion labor and bribing union officials to look the other way. These schemes are said to violate wage laws, which require contractors on public works projects and some large private projects pay workers a set “prevailing” wage.

In a three-year effort dubbed “Operation Textbook,” federal authorities and New York Police Department investigators probed organized crime influence over construction projects around the city. The building boom of the ’90s in New York and New Jersey attracted contractors from as far away and Chicago and Texas, and today, prosecutors charged that almost all of them had to pay the mob.

Prosecutors say mob families, through such activities, were able to claim 5 to 10 percent of the billions of dollars pumped into construction projects across the city.