Alleged Mob Leaders Rounded Up in N.Y.
N E W Y O R K, Sept. 6, 2000 -- 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.
Earlier this year, New York City suspended $80 million in contracts with a construction company, Interstate Industrial Corp., over suspicions it had ties to organized crime. The company, among other things, was involved in closing a landfill on Staten Island. Last year, two successive companies hired by the city to supply concrete for the renovation of City Hall Park were fired over similar suspicions.
The indictment described mob influence over the construction of city schools in the Bronx and Queens and projects for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
Violence and Bribery
Richards says the mob controls contractors and corrupted bidding on dozens of construction jobs. Part of his mob involvement was to coordinate alliances between mob families and to dole out bribes to union officials. Usually, it was easy to convince the union officials to cooperate, but if they didn’t the threat of violence always loomed as an option.
“Listen, you always hoped they took the money, and violence was a last resort,” Richards says. “But there were times when you would say, ‘He’s either gonna take the money or he’s going to get a beating.’ Fortunately, most people were greedy enough to take the money.”
The investigation revealed evidence that even after mob-controlled unions were cleaned up and put in the hands of federally appointed trustees, the Mafia found its way back in.
“What happens is if you can’t get to the president of the local, you get to a delegate. If you can’t get to a delegate, you get to the shop steward on the job,” Richards says. “I corrupted them as easy as feeding the elephants in the zoo peanuts.”
Today’s 38 arrests may put a crimp in the mob’s influence, but as long as the money is there, investigators are sure, the mob will never be far behind.