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Judge Harshly Punished Murder Defendant

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Judge Harshly Punished Murder Defendant To Hide Own Corruption: Claim
Lawyers for a Chicago man convicted of a 1976 police killing say he was convicted and sentenced to 200-600 years to hide a judge's misdeeds.
By Injustice Watch, News Partner
CHICAGO — Attorneys for a Chicago man convicted of a 1976 police killing argued before a packed Illinois appellate courtroom Thursday that the prisoner was found guilty and given a sentence of several hundred years by a judge trying to conceal his own corruption.
The hearing marked the latest attempt by inmate Ronnie Carrasquillo to seek release from prison through the courts after finding no hope at being paroled during his more than four decades of incarceration. Carrasquillo has consistently faced stark opposition in his parole attempts by both the Cook County State's Attorney's Office and members of the Chicago Police Department.
In October 1976, Chicago police officer Terrence Loftus was on his way home from work and in plainclothes when he stopped to break up a gang fight that had erupted in the early morning hours on the city's Northwest Side. Carrasquillo, who had recently turned 18, fired a weapon, and Loftus was fatally wounded.
After a nonjury trial, Cook County Circuit Judge Frank Wilson found Carrasquillo guilty of murder in 1977, and sentenced him to serve 200 to 600 years in prison with parole eligibility. Carrasquillo was sentenced before the Illinois legislature amended the law in 1978 to largely curtail the use of parole.
Carrasquillo has long maintained that he was attempting to break up the melee by shooting above the crowd when he unintentionally struck the officer. Prosecutors contend that he aimed at Loftus.
Michael Deutsch, one of Carrasquillo's attorneys, called the sentence "draconian," noting Carrasquillo was 18 years old and had no criminal record. Deutsch told the three-judge Illinois Appellate Court panel that Wilson had not meaningfully considered Carrasquillo's rehabilitative potential, and said an unbiased judge could have easily found Carrasquillo guilty of manslaughter, not murder.
Deutsch also argued that Carrasquillo's sentence awards him no actual opportunity for parole, as the Illinois Prisoner Review Board — the state agency tasked with making release decisions for the small group of prisoners eligible for parole — repeatedly denies his client's request on the basis that granting release would undermine the seriousness of the offense in killing a police officer.
"In the name of justice, don't keep that man in prison," Deutsch said.
Several uniformed officers and members of the Fraternal Order of Police attended the hearing, and the union's local president, Kevin Graham, sat in the front row. Appellate Judge Bertina E. Lampkin offered an unusual admonishment at the close of the oral arguments, explaining her dismay at an undated photo included in the record showing several police officers surrounding members of the Illinois Prisoner Review Board as the board considered whether to grant Carrasquillo parole.
"I just don't think it's wise for policemen to stand behind the parole board in making their decision," Lampkin said. "That was disturbing to me."
The bulk of the arguments Thursday revolved around whether Wilson, the trial judge, was biased in his handling of the case because of his corrupt handling of a prior case.
About six months before Carrasquillo's trial, Wilson acquitted Chicago mob hitman Harry Aleman of murder charges, resulting in intense backlash from both the Cook County State's Attorney's office and the media. A decade later, after a federal probe coined "Operation Greylord" revealed widespread judicial corruption in Cook County, investigators learned that Wilson had accepted a $10,000 bribe in exchange for Aleman's acquittal.
As the investigation was underway, Wilson committed suicide. Aleman was later retried and convicted of murder after another Cook County judge found that the original trial was a sham.
Deutsch said Wilson used Carrasquillo's high profile case to win back favor with the state and to rehabilitate his reputation after acquitting Aleman.
But Appellate Judge Jesse G. Reyes questioned why Wilson would care about his reputation, as he declined to run for retention to keep his court seat following Aleman's and Carrasquillo's trial.
Deutsch said in response that the judge's pension and the potential FBI investigation that would later come to fruition would have influenced Wilson.
Cook County Assistant State's Attorney Hareena Meghani-Wakely said there was no evidence that the earlier bribe had any impact on Carrasquillo's trial or sentence, that the public criticism of Wilson had faded well before the judge presided over Carrasquillo's trial, and that the federal probe into Wilson's corruption only occurred a decade later.
Meghani-Wakely also noted that Wilson had in another case issued a 200-to-600 year sentence, showing that Carrasquillo's sentence was not unusual. She asked the appellate court to uphold Cook County Associate Judge Alfredo Maldonado's January 2018 decision declining to grant Carrasquillo a new trial.
One of the members of the panel, Appellate Court Judge Robert E. Gordon, was absent from arguments, but will help make the decision in the case.
Carrasquillo's case was highlighted in an Injustice Watch series which examined the arbitrary way that the Illinois Prisoner Review Board decides the fate of a group of aging inmates who have been locked away since committing crimes before 1978, when Illinois changed its sentencing laws. Carrasquillo also has a claim pending before the Illinois Torture and Relief Commission, contending he was beaten by police when he was questioned about Loftus's death.
From Injustice Watch


FBI files reveal powerful New York mob figure’s Chicago ties

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Meyer Lansky helped create a national crime ‘syndicate’ decades ago and he spent a lot of time in Chicago along the way, according to records in “The FBI Files” database by the Chicago Sun-Times.

By Sun-Times staff  Nov 30, 2019, 1:27pm CST

Meyer Lansky was a powerful New York underworld figure involved in the mob’s efforts to create a nationwide network of gangsters and control casino gambling in Las Vegas and, in the pre-Castro era, Cuba.
Sometimes called the “mob’s accountant,” he was associated with big-name hoods like Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and Charles “Lucky” Luciano.
And Lansky was said to be the inspiration for the Hyman Roth character in The Godfather Part II who, through actor Lee Strasberg, famously said of the mob: “We’re bigger than U.S. Steel.”
FBI records — now part of “The FBI Files” database by the Chicago Sun-Times — also reveal he had a lot of connections to Chicago, even supposedly living here for a time.
“Over the past twenty-five years the subject has resided in the major cities of the United States for short periods of time, especially in Miami Beach, Florida, Las Vegas, Nevada, Los Angeles, California, New Orleans, Louisiana, Chicago, Illinois, and Omaha, Nebraska,” reads one old but undated FBI record.
His grandson and namesake, Meyer Lansky II, disputes that, saying in a recent interview that Lansky “never lived in Chicago,” though he did go “there a lot because he was very good friends with Paul Ricca, who he named my dad after, actually.”
Ricca ran the Chicago mob after Al Capone and Frank Nitti, all of whose FBI files are also in the Sun-Times’ portal.
Chicago mob boss Paul Ricca, who Meyer Lansky named a son after. Sun-Times print collection
Lansky and Luciano were with Ricca in Chicago when they were rounded up by police in 1932 — during Prohibition when booze was outlawed and alcohol-selling mobsters flourished — and photographed, according to a Lansky biography called “Meyer Lansky: The Thinking Man’s Gangster.”
They were “probably on a bootlegging business trip” to Chicago when surprised “by an enterprising detective” and “lined up in front of the camera in their best hats and overcoats,” according to the book.
“Charlie managed a slight smile, but Meyer did not look amused one bit.”
An FBI record from 1954 says Lansky was “one of the group of top hoodlums, who controls the rackets, specifically the Eastern District . . . He also continues to act in an advisory manner for racketeers throughout the country.”
The same record said “Lansky still travels extensively on business to Chicago, Miami, Las Vegas and Hot Springs.”
Meyer and Siegel “had their first big start in the early 1920s at which time they were hired by Dutch Goldberg, Charlie Kramer and Bill Heisman as convoy guards for alcohol trucks running from New York City to Chicago, Illinois,” according to another federal record, from 1957.
Lansky died in 1983 an underworld icon.
“When FBI agents raided the New Jersey operations room of the Lucchese crime family . . . in the mid-1980s, they found two black-and-white icons on the wall: a photograph of Al Capone and, alongside it, a photograph of Meyer Lansky — the twin patron saints,” according to the book, by Robert Lacey.
“Capone stood for all the traditional violence and toughness of U.S. urban crime” while Lansky “stood for the brains, the sophistication . . . the sheer cleverness of it all.”




Authorities Arrest 11 Alleged Members Of 'Thriving' Gambino Crime Family

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BY JAKE OFFENHARTZ
DEC. 6, 2019 2:15 P.M.

Federal authorities have arrested eleven alleged members of the Gambino crime family on a stack of bribery, fraud and extortion charges—including ordering one victim to pay up or get his teeth knocked out.
Andrew Campos, the 50-year-old reputed captain of the crime family, was among those busted in the major mob crackdown, which went down in the Bronx and Westchester on Thursday. Court papers show how Campos, his partner Richard Martino, and a host of underlings allegedly dispensed bribes, kickbacks and violent threats while under FBI surveillance.
“The Gambino members arrested in this case ran the gamut of criminal activity," FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge William Sweeney said in a statement. "Everything from the usual thuggish behavior of beating people up, forcing people to take the fall for their crimes, all the way to defrauding the federal government."
Much of that alleged criminal activity has taken place at the Gambino's World Trade Center-adjacent construction company, CWC Contracting Corp., prosecutors claimed.
In one instance detailed in the indictment, Vincent Fiore, a loyal alleged Gambino foot soldier, was allegedly caught on wiretap threatening someone who owed Campos $100,000: "When you get punched in the face and your teeth get knocked out . . . you're not going to laugh no more, okay?"
The records also shed new light into how the infamous crime syndicate reacted to the slaying of Frank "Franky Boy" Cali, the Gambino boss who was gunned down on a residential street outside his Staten Island home this past March.
According to the indictment, the mob family organized a "clandestine meeting" at an undisclosed location in the borough to regroup days after the killing. Fiore allegedly called Cali's death "a good thing," since it meant that Campos, his direct supervisor, would rise in rank.
Prosecutors in that case have not linked the fatal shooting to Cali's mafia ties. The alleged killer is a QAnon conspiracy theorist and avowed Trump supporter, but does not appear to be involved in mafia dealings. Following the death, Fiore was allegedly heard speculating that the motive could be "relating to a woman."
Despite the death of their capo, the Gambino clan is believed to be "thriving." According to the criminal complaint, "this investigation makes clear that the Gambino family is thriving, earning millions of dollars through various forms of fraud, bribery, money laundering and extortion, particularly in the construction industry, and distributes these illicit proceeds to other members and associates of La Cosa Nostra."
In addition to Campos, Martino and Fiore, authorities also arrested Mark Kocaj (aka "Chippy"), Frank Tarul (aka "Bones"), John Simonlacaj (aka "Smiley"), Benito DiZenzo (aka "Benny"), James Ciaccia, George Campos, Renato Barca Jr., and Michael Tarul—all of them alleged Gambino family soldiers and associates.
They were arraigned in Brooklyn Federal Court on Thursday afternoon.

Genovese Crime Family Member From Long Island Convicted Of Racketeering, Extortion

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 Zak Failla

A longtime member of the Genovese Crime Family from Long Island has been convicted of conspiring to commit extortion and racketeering offenses following a six-day trial.
Frank Giovinco, 52, of Syosset, was convicted on Tuesday, Dec. 3, after being found responsible for acts involving extortion, honest services fraud, and unlawful kickback payments related to the Genovese Crime Family’s control of two local chapters of a labor union.
Giovinco was first inserted into the Genovese Crime Family in the 1990s as part of a scheme to control the waste carting industry throughout New York City, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District Geoffrey Berman said.
According to Berman, until 2017, Giovinco and other members of the Genovese Crime Family committed “a wide range of crimes to enrich themselves and the Genovese Crime Family, including multiple acts of extortion, honest services fraud, and bribery.”
 in schemes to manipulate and siphon money from the unions. As part of the scheme, Giovinco was found guilty of extorting a financial adviser and union official for a cut of commissions made on union investments.
According to Berman, audio recordings captured Giovinco planning to “rattle the cage” of a victim, and to have the other’s “feet held to the fire.” When the union official failed to pay a commission, his life was threatened by Giovinco and other members of the Genovese Crime Family. Giovinco also extorted “tribute payments” of more than $10,000 annually.
Giovinco was found guilty of one count each of racketeering conspiracy and conspiracy to commit extortion. When he is sentenced on March 11 next year, Giovinco will face up to 20 years in prison.
“For years, Frank Giovinco, as a member of the Genovese Crime Family, instilled fear in victims and propagated kickback schemes to tighten the Family’s stranglehold over two labor unions,” Berman said. “Now, a jury has held Giovinco accountable for his crimes.”

Lawyer for alleged mob-boss killer wants feds’ wiretaps of wise guys discussing slay

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Posted Jan 03, 2020

By Frank Donnelly | fdonnelly@siadvance.com

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. – Authorities weren’t the only ones interested in getting to the bottom of a mobster’s slaying last March outside his Staten Island home.

So were other wise guys.

Four days after Francesco Cali’s death, a group of Gambino organized-crime family members arranged a “clandestine meeting” on Staten Island, as they launched their own probe into the killing, allege documents filed last month in Brooklyn federal court in an unrelated racketeering, loansharking and fraud case.

And now, the attorney for Anthony Comello, the Eltingville resident accused in state court of gunning down Cali, 53, a Gambino honcho known as “Franky Boy,” wants the wiretaps of those mob conversations.

Lawyer Robert Gottlieb said at a conference Friday in state Supreme Court, St. George, he will file a motion seeking to obtain the details contained in those intercepted phone calls.

Gottlieb said there was an indication that mobsters “apparently” had gone to Cali’s home and were inside before police arrived.

That raises questions, he said, of whether the house, crime scene, the victim’s car or other evidence was tampered with.

According to a detention memo in the federal case, Andrew Campos, 50, who prosecutors identified as a captain in the Gambino family, and Vincent Fiore, 57, an alleged Gambino soldier, met on March 17 with multiple other high-level crime family members to discuss the then-unclear circumstances surrounding Cali’s death.

The memo does not detail where exactly on Staten Island the group convened.

Afterward, Campos and Fiore, of Scarsdale and Briarcliff Manor, respectively, in Westchester County, actively helped the Gambino family investigate the murder, the memo alleges.

The day after the mob gathering, on March 18, Fiore discussed the meeting and his investigation with his ex-wife, prosecutors wrote in the memo.

He told her he and Campos met with “a half dozen” people, said prosecutors.

Fiore also told her he had seen the surveillance video of Cali’s slaying and speculated on a possible motive “relating to a woman” who had been at the victim’s Hilltop Terrace home the day he was killed, the memo says.

Prosecutors do not specifically say who that woman could have been.

At Friday’s conference, Assistant District Attorney Wanda DeOliveira said Brooklyn federal prosecutors had provided her no details on the wiretaps.

She also said she believed the mobsters’ phone chats had “no bearing” on the state case.

DeOliveira said it would ultimately be the feds’ decision whether to turn over the wiretaps.

Justice William E. Garnett instructed Gottlieb to submit his motion by Jan. 17. Prosecutors must respond within two weeks.

Garnett ordered the parties to return on Feb. 7.

He said he plans to rule then on Gottlieb’s motion for the wiretaps, as well as a defense motion seeking a mental-competency exam of Comello.

The exam is to determine whether Comello understands the charges against him and can aid in his defense.

Comello, 25, was not produced for the conference.

The defendant is facing murder and other charges and is poised to present an insanity defense at trial.

In court papers, Gottlieb said Comello was “delusional” and didn’t intend to kill Cali.

Rather, the defendant drove to the victim’s house to affect a citizen’s arrest on the mob boss, maintains Comello’s court filings.

He believed Cali “held a significant status in a worldwide criminal cabal bent on the destruction of American values and the American way of life,” a defense motion contends.

That alleged criminal conspiracy group is commonly referred to as the “Deep State.”

According to the motion, Comello planned to handcuff Cali and deliver him to the military.

The two men began arguing, and Comello “shot Cali in self-defense” when the victim made a “furtive action” with his hand, allege the defendant’s court filings.

Garnett said he hopes to start the trial in late March or early April.

Gottlieb said early May might be more realistic considering the circumstances.

“I’m saying that with fingers crossed, Your Honor,” said Gottlieb.

Mob wars: An early history of Mafia in Hamilton

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Rum-running during the 1920s gave rise to three powerful Italian organized crime families in Hamilton — the Luppinos, Papalias and Musitanos.

Nicole O'Reilly  The Hamilton Spectator

There is evidence of Mafia-style crime in Hamilton as far back as 1906, when extortion letters signed with a black handprint were sent to a grocer.
The Black Hand (Mano Nera in Italian) was not a criminal organization, but a brand of extortion used to target Italian immigrants in North America.
It wasn't until a decade later when prohibition era gave rise to bootlegging that traditional organized crime began making real money here.
Hamilton's Rocco Perri soon became the self-described "king of the bootleggers," before his mysterious disappearance in 1944.
This early period of rum-running led to the rise of three powerful Italian organized crime families in Hamilton — the Luppinos, Papalias and Musitanos.
All are 'Ndrangheta (Calabrian Mafia), although they have worked with La Cosa Nostra (Sicilian Mafia) crime families in New York and Montreal, including representing the Buffalo crime family north of the border.
For a time, the three families peacefully coexisted. But peace never lasts long in the criminal underworld.
Over the decades there have been bombings, shootings and arsons that have touched all three families, including a recent resurgence of Mafia violence beginning in Hamilton with the 2017 murder of Angelo Musitano.
A notable distinction of the 'Ndrangheta is the fact that members of crime families are actual family members, as opposed to just being from the same region as is more common in La Cosa Nostra.
The tight family ties has made Calabrian Mafia traditionally harder for police to infiltrate, with perhaps the biggest exception being the recent RCMP-led, joint forces Project Otremens that saw a high-level turncoat become a paid police agent, bringing down Dom and Joey Violi.
There have been countless court cases on everything from murder, to extortion, to drug trafficking, to illegal gambling, all highlighting how the Mob makes money and what violence they are capable of. But the Mafia has also always been good at running a mix of illegal and legitimate businesses — a means to launder money, but also making it difficult for authorities to follow money trails.
Before the recent resurgence of violence, there were years of silence where the public could be forgiven for thinking the Mafia was gone or diminished. But that was never true.
When things are quiet that is usually a sign business is going well for traditional organized crime; there is a balance of power. But a disruption in the power, a vacuum left by a major player's death or incarceration, or a power play, can lead to full-out Mob wars.
The Mafia never forgets. Vengeance is rarely swift or careless, but rather carefully planned.
Here are the Mafia families and major players that have controlled, killed and been killed in Hamilton's long history of traditional organized crime.
 Nicole O'Reilly
Nicole O’Reilly is a reporter with The Hamilton Spectator and thespec.com, where she has worked since 2009, covering police, crime and the justice system. She has investigated human trafficking, organized crime and drug overdose deaths inside jails. She has been recognized by various awards for her work, including for an investigation into road safety on the Red Hill Valley Parkway, among other projects.
Email: noreilly@thespec.com Twitter

609-615 First St.,

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The Hoboken council will also vote on a resolution to award a contract to demolish an "unsafe structure" at 609-615 First St., in the southwesternmost corner of town. Councilman Ruben Ramos Jr. called the building an "eyesore" in August.
The structure has an interesting place in history. The building was once Casella's restaurant, known as a mob meeting spot, where Genovese crime family members were said to have discussed murdering Gambino crime family boss John Gotti. In fact, the restaurant's owner was convicted in 1989 of a related murder charge, according to the New York Times.


Switzerland to Prioritize Fight Against ‘Ndrangheta in 2020

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Switzerland to Prioritize Fight Against ‘Ndrangheta in 2020

WRITTEN BY MAYA PERRY

Switzerland’s Federal Police Office (Fedpol) deported two Italian citizens suspected of involvement in organized crime in 2019, marking the first time individuals have been forcibly expelled from the country on national security grounds because of their alleged ties to the mafia, according to German-language newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
Ticino, an Italian-speaking canton in southern Switzerland, is believed to be the center of the ‘Ndrangheta's network in the country.The move reflects follow-through on recent commitments made by public officials to prioritize the fight against organized crime in 2020, an issue whose urgency has been underscored by the significant inroads made by the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta — one of the world’s most powerful organized crime groups — in Switzerland in the last decade. 
Anne-Florence Débois, a spokeswoman for Fedpol, confirmed the deportations and added that “the fight against the Italian mafia is a recurring topic that Switzerland will continue to deal with in 2020.”
Fedpol director Nicoletta della Valle admitted in September that law enforcement had "unfortunately underestimated the mafia so far,” and in mid-November the Federal Council, Switzerland’s executive body, committed to making the fight against the Italian mafia one of the “pillars” of the country’s efforts to combat crime overall.
It noted that Swiss police barred a record 15 people from entering the country on mafia-related grounds in 2019, and processed 126 “communications” relating to organized crime — figures that indicate a growing mafia presence that it said Swiss criminal procedures are currently unequipped to handle.
“A revision of the Criminal Code, pending in Parliament, must remedy this,” the Council wrote.
The country’s anti-mafia efforts, it also announced, would be concentrated in the southern, Italian-speaking canton of Ticino.
Ticino’s role as a Swiss gateway for the ‘Ndrangheta became well known in 2010 when a former mafia boss came clean about his group’s operations on public television.
A report issued by Fedpol in 2011 confirmed that Italy’s crackdown on the mafia seemed to have pushed many operatives into neighboring countries and, in the case of Switzerland, had led to a rise in the use of Swiss financial services to launder the proceeds of organized crime. 
Since then, however, men linked with the ‘Ndrangheta have been caught and arrested in nearly every part of the country, from a pizzeria in Geneva’s Italian district to rural Thurgau in the north — where a cell had reportedly operated for 40 years — to the riverbanks of Zurich and the mountains of Valais.
Speaking to the French-language daily Le Temps in December, the mayor of an Italian municipality in Switzerland’s easternmost province, Graubunden, emphasized that efforts to combat the mafia needed to be implemented throughout the country.
“They cannot stop at the border between the two cantons,” he said. “[The measures] are absolutely necessary here too. Crime is worse here in Italian Graubunden since Ticino tightened the screw and the problem moved to our territory where the controls are weaker.”


Over €1.85 million in funding announced to promote Irish artists abroad in more than 40 countries

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The funding will help put Irish talent on ‘the world’s finest stages’ in the coming months.
ALMOST €2 MILLION euro in funding, which will go towards promoting Irish arts internationally, has been announced by the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.
Some €875,000 of that will be directed towards promoting up to 150 Irish artists and arts organisations who will present projects covering circus, dance, film, literature, opera, theatre and visual arts in 43 countries.
The remainder, around €980,000, will be made available for the promotion of Irish arts through partner organisations such as Literature Ireland, First Music Contact and Irish Film institute, and Ireland’s cultural centres in Paris and New York, who work with Culture Ireland to present Irish artists abroad.
Culture Minister Josepha Madigan said it will help populate “the world’d finest stages” with Irish talent.
“Working towards our aim to double Ireland’s global cultural footprint under Global Ireland 2025, my Department is focussed through Culture Ireland on supporting our artists to present their work to audiences worldwide,” she said.
Culture Minister Josepha Madigan earlier
“The talent of Irish artists is endorsed by their continued selection to present on the world’s finest stages from Australia across Asia and Europe to the US and South America.
“The bodies being funded in 2020 will continue to make great impact showcasing Irish bands in key marketplaces, screening Irish film worldwide and supporting the translation of the work of Irish writers so Irish literature can be read more widely.”
Some of the projects being funded include performances by Anne-Marie O’Farrell and Cormac De Barra in Hong Kong in March, showcasing the harp, our national instrument, at a time of year when there is a focus on Irish culture.
Following its success in Ireland, cultural ambassador, Paul Muldoon’s Incantata by Galway International Arts Festival and Jen Coppinger, will be have a month run at the Irish Repertory Theatre, New York from mid-February and Teac Damsa will present MÁM, in London, Perth and Wellington in Spring 2020.
Irish galleries will also present the work of Irish artists at key art fairs including Art Basel, Hong Kong, London and Dallas.


Fair game: Does the fair use doctrine apply to Andy Warhol’s pop art?
BY ELDON L. HAM

The acclaimed “Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again” exhibit of more than 400 of Andy Warhol’s works has been making the rounds from New York to San Francisco to Chicago. Even casual observers have a sense of Warhol’s groundbreaking pop-art style. Yet there is one surprising legal question of fair use and transformative value that begs consideration: Just what is a “Warhol”?
If Pablo Picasso or Warhol could do portraits of Lady Gaga, we can imagine the artistic transformations that might occur. If those innovations were sufficiently transformative, then such works, even when taken from other images, would likely be protected by the fair use doctrine. Yet the Picasso and Warhol examples are even much different from each other, and therein lies a nuanced distinction.
Whereas an abstract Picasso image might not bear much resemblance to its subject, Warhol’s style relies on recognition. Consider his famed portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Prince, Mao, Coke bottles and Campbell’s soup cans, among many others. His work is pop art, not abstract. Virtually all of his famous works are recognizable, yet they also have the distinctive look of a Warhol creation. Is that fair game—and, thus, does fair use apply?
What about a full-page grocery chain ad featuring NBA superstar Michael Jordan’s name while congratulating him on his NBA Hall of Fame induction? Refer to the case Jordan v. Jewel Food Stores Inc. (2014). Another example can be drawn from a noteworthy painting called “The Masters of Augusta” that featured three images of Tiger Woods to commemorate Woods’ historic first Masters win in 1997 in ETW Corp. v. Jireh Publishing Inc. (2003).
In the early 1980s, Vanity Fair magazine commissioned a Warhol work derived from a photograph of rock icon Prince. The photo was enhanced by Warhol in a manner associated with his visual artistic style. Warhol, in fact, did a series of 16 Prince images, and Vanity Fair published one of them in 1984. Years later, Vanity Fair honored Prince upon his death with an article that also used that Warhol work.
The photographer who had created the original Prince photo complained to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which owned the Warhol version. The foundation responded with a lawsuit to resolve whether publishing the Warhol version was fair use in The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Inc. v. Goldsmith (2019).
The Picasso question above is hypothetical. The other matters referenced herein are real. In one, the Jordan incident, the use was found to infringe on Jordan’s right of publicity, primarily because it involved commercial speech, which has a weaker free speech protection.
With the Warhol case, the federal court ruled last July that the Warhol image of Prince was a fair use based on the argument of transformative value. That begs the key question: When does a Warhol become a “Warhol”? For infringement purposes, this answer will do: when its transformative value overcomes an otherwise unfair use. Ergo, in the case of a famous artist with a famous style, does this mean that the work is sufficiently transformed just because that famous artist enhances it?
For the Tiger Woods prints, the court considered the alleged violation of Woods’ publicity rights. This also required an analysis of fair use. Artistic expression can be a valid use of another’s image, and art is given greater latitude than mere commercial speech—even though these prints were ultimately sold for profit. The artist won, but many experts criticized the decision.
What then puts the “transformation” into “transformative value”? If a local shoemaker takes a photo of NFL quarterback Tom Brady and uses it to sell a new line of shoes, there is more commercial exploitation than art involved. But if the shoemaker paints a picture of Brady from that same photo and then sells it, is that art? Probably. And if there is sufficient transformative value, his art might even be protected.
Warhol’s groundbreaking early diptych work of Monroe, created in the early 1960s, just after her death in 1962, comprised 50 likenesses of her taken from the star’s publicity photo for the feature film Niagara.
All the portraits had a black overlay applied with a silkscreen process, giving them a unique appearance. The left half of the work displays 25 color images to symbolize Monroe’s vibrant stardom, while 25 fading black on silver images on the right side represent her death.
Had the owner of that publicity photo complained, the transformative-value argument for this fledgling Warhol may not have been as compelling as it is today. But if the original Monroe art was not really a “Warhol” as we think of that term now, it quickly became a Warhol when his pop-art style swept the art world just as the Monroe image was becoming one of the most influential works of modern art.
If an unknown artist like the hypothetical shoemaker above, a random painter or a very young Warhol repaints an image of Monroe, Lada Gaga or Prince, then sells it, the transformative value would not be influenced by the artist’s unique reputation. But what happens when a famous Warhol creates a work in his own inimitable style? It is, by definition, a Warhol, and that may be a self-fulfilling transformation, as well.
In ruling on Prince, the district court judge found that, “The Prince Series works can reasonably be perceived to have transformed Prince from a vulnerable, uncomfortable person to an iconic, larger-than-life figure.” Counsel for the photographer argued that such reasoning erodes her rights in favor of famous artists who make cosmetic changes. Therefore, a Warhol becomes a Warhol, in no small part, because Warhol does it.
Transformative value seems to be a moving target. Too simplistic? Perhaps not, especially when Warhol turns it into a Warhol as a valid artistic expression. If Warhol does it, or Picasso or even Salvador Dali, then that says a lot—especially if they do it in their own recognized style. But what if someone else does a Warhol-like impression of a famous subject?
Consider the well-known Barack Obama “Hope” poster. An Associated Press photograph of Obama was converted by artist Shepard Fairey into an engaging image and then into a poster labeled “HOPE.” The original AP copyrighted photo was taken at a 2006 National Press Club event. Fairey removed a background flag, then enhanced the photo with a new background and contrasting color and added a lapel pin for Obama’s suit. Fairey made and sold the posters.
But was his use unfair under the law? The poster surely looked like Obama, and to the untrained eye, it looked much like the copyrighted photograph redone as a Warhol-like image. The AP claimed infringement and sued Fairey in Fairey v. the Associated Press (2010). The AP and the artist later agreed to collaborate on the poster and on additional AP photos, so the case settled without resolving the key copyright issue. Still, the pattern manages to evoke the “What is a Warhol?” type of question.
Even if the Obama poster was inspirational, a “Fairey” work apparently was not as compelling for an argument of protection as an established Warhol, even though the finished poster had Warhol-like traits. Thus, if Warhol does a Warhol, it’s transformative, but if a guy named Fairey does a Warhol impression, it is not? It almost seems more transformative to create an Obama poster transformed in a Warhol-like manner. One might also wonder whether it is a parody of a Warhol.
Meanwhile, an actual Warhol done like a Warhol seems to carry a lot of transformative value, leaving this paradoxical question: If an image of Prince looks like Prince and a Warhol at the same time, does the Warhol version win? Yes, at least for fair use. But wait: What about copying Prince’s music, not his image? This raises different questions about infringement and fair use parody. In other words, “When is a Weird Al Yankovic a Weird Al”?
 Eldon L. Ham.
MY BACKGROUND AND ADVICE
Much of my 43 years of legal experience has been in sports and entertainment law, including matters on endorsements, licensing, trade secrets, trademarks, copyrights, fair use and public domain issues, and infringement.
My suggestion to lawyers entering or engaging in the practice of sports, entertainment, music and related intellectual property matters is to be a lawyer first: View issues of fair use, public domain, parody, trade secrets and infringement outside the box and through the lens of legal analysis.
Above all, be able to distinguish facts and cases for and against your position. Keep asking why and raising questions about the intent and purpose of the proprietary matters behind trade secrets, parody, exploitation, trademarks and copyrights.
Be persistent, especially with the federal trademark office. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office pushes back a lot on trademark registrations, but it is staffed largely by competent lawyers who appreciate a well-grounded argument about categories of words, use and infringement.
Remember, the fundamental premise of a question or issue. When is a Warhol a “Warhol”—and why?

How New York’s Bagel Union Fought — and Beat — a Mafia Takeover

The mob saw an opportunity. Local 338 had other ideas.
By Jason Turbow

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
In 1944, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, some enterprising thief stole a truckload of more than 1,500 bagels slated for delivery from Fisher’s Bakery on Norfolk Street. It was a newsworthy event, and local papers covered it duly — especially the primary mystery confronting policemen on the scene. At question, reported the Associated Press: “They wanted to know what a bagel was.”
Even into the modern era, the presence of bagels in America was largely confined to Jewish enclaves, predominantly in New York City, the old-world bread still sufficiently exotic that every mention of it in the New York Times (usually brief items concerning labor issues) assumed no previous knowledge on the part of readers. “A bagel,” the newspaper of record explained in 1960, “is an unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis.”
Despite a decidedly limited reach through the first half of last century, demand kept dozens of bakeries in business throughout Manhattan and the eastern boroughs. They were miserable places to work, located in the basements of apartment houses and other large buildings with coal-fired furnaces that could be converted into ovens. Ambient temperatures in those rooms reached 120 degrees, with bakers frequently stripping down to their underwear, even in the dead of winter, while furiously sidestepping infestations of roaches and rats. “There appears to be no other industry, not even the making of clothes in sweatshops, which is carried on amid so much dirt and filth,” reported the state of New York in one of several scathing industry safety reviews. It was not uncommon for poor tradesmen to ply temporary homes in the corners of these rooms, sleeping on empty flour sacks in the handful of hours between shifts. So dire were conditions that they even inspired a Yiddish curse: Lig in der erd un bak beygl. “Lay in the ground and bake bagels.” (Alternatively translated: “Go to hell and bake bagels.”)
The excessive hours mandated in such environments were so brutal that in the late 1920s, bagel bakers, primarily immigrants from Eastern Europe, banded together in protest. The result — Union Local 338, under the umbrella of the Bakery and Confectionery Workers (B&C) International — offered a measure of professional leverage. Beginning in the 1930s, if one wanted to run a bagel shop in Manhattan, one had no choice but to employ union bakers. They were, after all, virtually the only men in town capable of making a proper bagel, not to mention exceedingly judicious when it came to imparting their wisdom. So comprehensive was this mandate that bakery owners were prohibited from manning their own ovens at the risk of costly and relentless picket lines outside their shops. (Picketing was the official response to virtually all major labor disputes. The union prevailed every time.)
Union Local 338 never grew much past 300 bakers, but the power it held was enduring. Membership was intentionally exclusive, based on the lineage-driven, old-world tradition of passing down a generationally honed craft from father to son. On this basis, acceptance was limited to the sons of existing 338 members (with the rare son-in-law and occasional nephew sliding quietly under the rope), a structure that retained an exclusively Jewish identity. Until American-born offspring began to turn over No. 338’s roster in the 1950s, the local communicated primarily in Yiddish, its correspondence and record-keeping entirely indecipherable to outsiders. The newspaper of record, the one read by bakers during their breaks, was the Yiddish-language daily Forverts — the Forward — which today publishes online in both English and Yiddish.
Under the union, bakers’ hours were soon strictly controlled, with wages rising to match those of high-end plumbers and electricians, plus paid vacations, life insurance, and pension plans. With a direct line between union members and their fathers who worked the benches before them, it was impossible to take such gains for granted. It also made concessions nearly impossible when it came to negotiating contracts.
Ultimately, it barely mattered to shop owners. In a thriving industry that by the mid-1960s was pumping out more than 2 million bagels per week to a market only just beginning to reach beyond New York City, they could afford it. With their industry grossing some $20 million per year, these men purchased homes on Long Island, drove fancy cars, and sent their children to prestigious colleges. It was a copacetic ecosystem, working out favorably for all involved.
Naturally, the Mafia wanted in.
By the time Johnny Dio — given name: Giovanni Ignazio Dioguardi — got involved with Manhattan’s bagel industry, he was 50 years old and, in the words of United States Attorney General Robert Kennedy, a “master labor racketeer.”
A capo in the Lucchese crime family, Dioguardi had already made a fortune skimming off the top (and frequently the middle) of fraudulent New York labor unions he’d formed for that very purpose. (Dio’s paper unions — bearing full voting rights despite no membership to speak of — were instrumental in electing his pal Jimmy Hoffa to the national presidency of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in 1957.) In 1963, Dioguardi — having just served three years of a four-year mob-related prison sentence for tax evasion — proclaimed himself a changed man. He portrayed the work he’d lined up upon his release, for a company called Consumer Kosher Provisions, Inc., as legitimate. He was a hardworking frankfurter salesman, he said, who left his home in Point Lookout at 4 o’clock each morning and drove some three hours to Sullivan County to make sales calls.
The business was aboveboard, but Dio’s description omitted significant details. Consumer was one of two kosher-products companies vying for supremacy in New York. Its rival, American Kosher Provisions, Inc., had recently raised industry eyebrows by employing a gangster named Max Block, whose Mafia connections provided him extraordinary sway with supermarket buyers, who were subsequently strong-armed into favoring American’s products over Consumer’s. Consumer owner Herman Rose was baffled about how to respond.
Enter Dio, who convinced Rose that the path to profits involved fighting fire with fire, namely bringing his own mob muscle — Dio himself — onboard. There was something to this. With the Teamsters in his pocket, Dio’s threats of labor discord were all too real, and grocers paid ready attention. The kosher tide quickly turned.
Dio accelerated the process after Rose died unexpectedly in 1964. Utilizing a dormant corporation that Rose had set up in the Bronx called First National Kosher Provisions, he transferred all of Consumer’s assets into it, then listed himself as the company’s primary officer, boosting his own salary from $250 per week to $250,000 per year in the process. Dio leaned on supermarket buyers across New York with threats, getting them to sell what were frequently substandard First National products while writing into the contract a refusal to accept returns. (At about this point, reports of green, sweaty meat under Dio’s new label began cropping up with regularity.)
Pertinently, the mob now had significant say in (and the ability to skim from) Manhattan’s two top kosher-meat companies, resulting in a spike in consumer prices. New Yorkers whose diet relied on these products were beside themselves.
Not content with his newfound riches, Dio forced a merger with American Kosher and set about distributing the assets of both outfits into a host of smaller companies he created for just this purpose, which were themselves acquired by a larger sham company. (Newspapers of the time called the organization “the Kosher Nostra.”) Bills went unpaid while Dio and his cronies suctioned as much money as they could, as quickly as possible, content to let the business burn. It was enough to get Dioguardi indicted for bankruptcy fraud, for which he was sentenced to five more years in prison. His attorneys, however, delayed the proceedings for nearly four years, time enough for him to shift his parasitic sights to another local Jewish industry: bagels.
In 1966, a man named Ben Willner started the W&S Baking Corporation in the Bronx. Not only was he determined to run a nonunion bagel shop, but he was among the first to embrace what would, over time, become 338’s most pressing issue: automation. Mechanical bagel rollers had come onto the scene in the 1950s, but early iterations were bulky and slow, and the bagels they produced were frequently ill-formed. The dough was too thick to extrude properly, and constantly clogged the gears. Daniel Thompson, a Canadian son and grandson of bagel bakers, fixed these flaws. With one of Thompson’s machines in his shop, Willner began pumping out more bagels in a shorter time with one unskilled worker than a traditional shop using a union-approved team of four, which allowed Willner to substantially undercut his competitors’ prices. With his bakery location sufficiently north of Local 338’s area of operations, he mostly flew under the union’s radar.
Willner’s product happened to be distributed by the same trucking company that serviced John Dioguardi’s Consumer Kosher Provisions. Knowing a good thing when he saw it, Dio soon showed up at the bakery to bandy about his wholesaling leverage — namely, the ability to get supermarket buyers to bend to his whim under threat of labor unrest. Before long, W&S bagels were being stocked on shelves around the city, and the nascent bakery prospered.
Except that Willner’s weren’t the only mobbed-up bagels in town. In 1964, a shop called Bagel Boys had opened in the center of Jewish New York, on King’s Highway in Brooklyn. Among its principals was Thomas Eboli, otherwise known as Tommy Ryan, a capo in the Genovese crime family and a direct counter to Dio. Eboli was so powerful, in fact, that when Vito Genovese died a few years later, Eboli reigned for a time as the family boss.
Dio may have been a capo, but his Lucchese-family backing was no match for the Genoveses. The industry inroads crafted by Willner’s bagel machine made W&S a nuisance to Bagel Boys, and Eboli wanted the shop gone. A sit-down was arranged between the mobsters, and Dio — savvy enough to avoid an unwinnable war with a more powerful rival family — submitted, ditching W&S altogether and using his grocery connections to assist Eboli. Inevitably, W&S went out of business, with Willner’s machines ending up at the Bagel Boys shop in clear violation of the union mandate. This was a problem. Eboli, with the Manhattan Mafia behind him, made the concerns about Dio seem puny by comparison. A fight was in the offing. The main question was whether — and how — to enjoin it.
Ultimately, the union handled the Mafia the same way that it handled nearly all extreme issues with management: full public confrontation. Nearly as soon as Bagel Boys opened its doors, Local 338 members showed up en masse to picket, distributing leaflets headlined, “PLEASE DON’T BUY,” with warnings that nonunion bagels “jeopardize the hard won standards of labor and inspection which the New York City public now enjoy.” Their most effective tactic in such situations was handing out free product in quantities sufficient to devastate business.
It worked. About a week later a member of the local’s executive board received a phone call from one of Eboli’s associates in Bagel Boys, a mobster named Sal Mauro (real name: Salvatore Passalaqua), in which imminent physical harm was intimated for not only the board member, but his wife and children as well. It was concerning enough that a meeting was arranged between union representatives and various Bagel Boys principals, including Mauro and a mobster named Harold Glantz.
Mauro’s group asked the union what kind of contracts might be available in order to get the picketing to stop. When they were told that Local 338 worked with a single, uniform contract, the mobsters recoiled. They were “special people,” they insisted, and merited special treatment. Glantz and Mauro made several propositions over the coming days, including one in which they’d sign the union’s contract with the stipulation that it never be enforced, and another that offered $10,000 to buy the union’s cooperation. It was all rejected. Local 338 wanted union bakers inside the Bagel Boys shop, and nothing less.
With that, Bagel Boys pivoted again. Soon, a sign appeared in the bakery window indicating that a labor contract had been signed … not with Local 338, but with District 5 — an outfit run by Benjamin Krakofsky (a.k.a. Benjamin “Benny the Bug” Ross), a labor racketeer with an extensive criminal record. When picketing continued unabated, another sign appeared, this one saying that the shop had signed with Local 348’s Bagel Bakers Division. The problem with that was that Local 348 was actually a dental mechanics’ union — with mob ties, of course — affiliated with the Jewelry Workers International. The sham affiliation did nothing to deter the sidewalk protests.
In the end, the mob-owned bakery proved no more resilient to union avoidance than its predecessors, finally recognizing that the only way to stop No. 338 picketers was to use No. 338 bakers. It would mean no gradual incursion into the industry, no slow takeover of management or distribution and, importantly, no labor grift.
Finally, Eboli did the only thing he could do. When the union presented him a contract, he signed it.
The showdown with Bagel Boys served to obscure another issue on the union’s docket — one with far more lasting repercussions. Lender’s bagels had been in operation since 1927 in New Haven, Connecticut. It was outside the purview of Local 338, so when, only months before Bagel Boys opened its doors, Lender’s leased a Thompson’s bagel machine of its own, the union paid it little mind. This was a mistake.
While the Bagel Boys wanted their machine to help circumvent the union and undercut prices, Lender’s had bigger plans. The company had only just initiated the frozen-bagel distribution chain that would come to define it, and sought more effective means of mass production. The product was not the same, of course — the dough was thinner, the flavor a pale reflection of the handmade version just down the turnpike — but the product resonated.
Soon, Lender’s moved into a 12,000-foot factory and immediately became the largest bagel producer in the world. Its new markets stretched far beyond the Jewish enclaves to which bagels were previously constrained, and served to further squeeze the bakeries where Local 338 bakers earned their livings. The development meshed precisely with the trend of families moving to the suburbs, where weekly visits to the supermarket replaced daily visits to the specialty shops of the old neighborhood.
Up and down New Jersey and throughout Connecticut, bakeries using Thompson’s machine began pumping out bagels at an astounding rate. Even for those that did not freeze their product, the advent of preservatives allowed for a massive increase in production. Once, bagels had a shelf life of only a few hours. Now it was days. In addition to baking their own bagels, bakeries shipped raw dough all over the country to be baked on-site by shops that otherwise had no hand in the process — including within No. 338’s own territory, New York City.
The incoming bagels were not only more accessible than the locally sourced version, but were 40 percent less expensive. At about this point, Sal Mauro showed up with another mob-backed proposition for the union: He could end dough deliveries into the city, he said, at a cost of $50,000, using the muscle of Joe Genovese, cousin of the former boss of all bosses, Vito Genovese. When union leaders inquired about the details therein, Mauro told them that the less they knew, the better off they’d be. They politely declined.
Instead, they focused on Lender’s, which, while only 80 miles north of Brooklyn, was effectively a world away. Lender’s was technically a union shop, but its union was Local 171, a division of the offshoot American Bakery and Confectionery Workers, with protections derided by No. 338 as substandard, and wages “below poverty level.” As the most prominent source of bagel incursions into New York City, Lender’s was a vital target for 338 leaders, who figured that their best bet to stem an unmistakable tide was direct influence. They wanted to represent Lender’s bakers.
The National Labor Relations Board handed No. 338 a victory by enforcing its right to woo the rival workforce, but despite an earnest effort, the plan to flip Lender’s employees fell apart when — possibly through strong-arming from management, which wanted nothing less than to open its doors to stout union positions — Lenders’ bakers voted to retain the status quo. No. 338’s expansion hopes were stifled, its ability to stymie the flow of bagel dough into Manhattan all but erased.
With no easy answers — become further entrenched? Accept the inevitability of machine-produced bagels? — Local 338 began to splinter. Muddling progress were the old-timers, whose long-lauded sweat and sacrifice in achieving the gains now appreciated by all union members served to steel them against any concession to management, even at the cost of 338’s viability. Union meetings became cauldrons of tension, with no consensus about how best to proceed.
The final strike waged by Local 338 came in 1967, in response to across-the-board contract cuts proposed by the 21 union bakeries remaining in New York. This time, though, the pickets that had worked so capably in the past came up short. Supermarkets’ stock remained strong thanks to frozen product, and with bagel dough flying in from outside the state, shops remained open. After months of ineffective picketing, many of No. 338’s bakers quietly went back to work. No longer constrained by the need to hire union labor, and with the advent of the stainless-steel rotating oven allowing storefront operations to flourish in neighborhoods across the city, the number of New York bagel bakeries soon exploded into the hundreds — nearly all of them nonunion shops.
By 1971, Local 338 had only 152 members, mostly as a hedge against the lingering unreliability of Thompson’s machines. Forget contact concessions; the union was by that point simply trying to retain as much of the status quo as possible. As it turned out, even that was a bridge too far.
Amid widespread contention among the ranks, it was decided that the best path to survival was a merger with the more prominent Local 3, a general bakers’ union. Bagels were more popular than ever — never mind that the supermarket version was softer than it should have been, in tone and texture both — found in far-flung locations that only a decade earlier would have been beyond imagination.
Most of the bakers who had carried the industry to that point were never afforded a chance to participate in the newfound riches. On July 1, 1971, by mutual agreement, Local 3 initiated a bagel division, and Local 338 was no longer.
Jason Turbow is the author, most recently, of They Bled Blue: Fernandomania, Strike-Season Mayhem, and the Weirdest Championship Baseball Had Ever Seen: The 1981 Los Angeles Dodgers, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. His grandfather was a member of Local 338, and his great-grandfather was one of the union’s founders. He tweets at @baseballcodes.

Mob Informant Michael 'Cookie' D'Urso Writes Open Letter to the Mafia

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Former mob guy turned informant Michael “Cookie” D’Urso wrote an open letter to members of the Genovese family, warning them against trying to get revenge against him. D’Urso’s testimony against the Genovese family reportedly helped the government convict over 70 mobsters and affiliates of the crime family.
The 49-year-old said, “While I still have some respect for the life I once lived and the life that some of my old friends and acquaintances still choose to live, rest assured I WILL NEVER GET CAUGHT SLEEPING AGAIN. I am ready, able and willing to defend my family and myself. Also, I have very capable ex-law enforcement friends with gun permits who are with me all the time. And don’t forget, there are cameras everywhere today that can track people to and from any location.”
Along with that, he said “I am ready, able and willing to defend my family and myself. A bat and a knife won’t help you so you will have to use a gun.”
This comes after the informant reportedly caught word about individuals speaking on trying to figure where he and his family were living today after assuming a new identity.



How a Mafia Mistress Caught Flack for Saving a Mob Bosses Life

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 STEPHANIE OFFICER
 Her name is Dr. Barbara Roberts, but she calls herself “The Doctor Broad.”
"I was the first female adult cardiologist in the state of Rhode Island. About three years after arriving in Rhode Island, I was asked by his son to take care of the head of the New England Mafia, whose name was Raymond Patriarca," Roberts told InsideEdition.com.
Roberts is telling her incredible story in her new book, “The Doctor Broad: A Mafia Love Story.”
“I never expected that I would fall in love with someone who would be sent to prison. I never expected that I would be taking care of a Mafia boss,” she said.
In the 1980s, the cardiologist saved a mafia bosses life, and that is where the story begins.
"The Patriarca crime family was always in the news. And Raymond Sr. had testified in front of the commission that Robert Kennedy had been investigating organized crime, and I was asked to take care of him on the night he was arrested and taken to the Scituate police barracks," she said.
Trouble was, Roberts deemed him too sick to go to jail, and had to convince authorities of the same.
"I thought I was just going to go in, introduce myself, check him over briefly, find someone who was okay and tell his son and his wife, "No, he's fine." But instead what I saw was a man who looked like he had one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel."
Raymond Patriarca Sr. was a mobster from Providence, Rhode Island and the syndicate boss of The Patriarca Crime Family.
Its tentacles stretched throughout New England for more than 30 years. At one time, Rhode Island's Board of Public Safety called him public enemy #1.
By the time Roberts began caring for him in 1980, Patriarca Sr. had already been a diabetic for 40 years and had an amputated toe.
He’d had severe heart disease since the 1960s.
"I was not a judge, I was not a lawyer, I was not a member of a jury. My job was to fight his severe disease with every tool in the medical armamentarium. I really didn't care whether he was innocent or guilty. My job was to keep him alive," Roberts said.
She did so, testifying numerous times that Patriarca was too frail to stand trial.
"And he had severe wasting from diabetic neuropathy, so he couldn't even cut his food, he couldn't button his shirt. He was utterly dependent on her for those activities of daily living. And he couldn't walk across a room this size without having angina."
Once the local media caught wind of the fact that Roberts was caring for Patriarca, she says it hurt her reputation and affected her personal life.
“I was arrested on a trumped up felony charge of breaking and entering. I was in the process of a very acrimonious custody battle with the father of my youngest child, whom I had never married. But he was still suing me for common law divorce, palimony and custody of our four year old daughter on the grounds that I was an unfit mother. "
Her time caring for Patriarca Sr. got a bit more complicated when a chance lunch meeting led her to fall in love with with Louis Manocchio.
"Within a few weeks, we were lovers. But it had to be very secret, and very clandestine, because the believability of my testimony on Raymond's health would have been impaired, if not destroyed, if it became public knowledge that I was having an affair with the alleged number three man in the Mafia at that time."
Known as "Baby Shacks" or “Baby Shanks," Luigi Manocchio had a criminal record dating back to the 1940s. In 1969, he was indicted for conspiracy in two murders.
After being on the run in Europe for most of the ‘70s, Manocchio surrendered to authorities and plead guilty to lesser charges. He was sentenced to 30 months in jail. His conviction was overturned.
“Well, he tried to make it clear to me that he was a different man than he was before he went away. He said, ‘I realized in those years I spent in France that the people I grew up thinking were heroes, were tough guys. They weren't heroes or tough guys, they were crazy.’”
One day while dating Manocchio, Roberts decided to take a walk at a cemetery in her neighborhood that would change her life.
“And a man jumped out from behind a gravestone wearing just a ski mask and sneakers and started beating me. I screamed and I was terrified and all I could think of was ‘My poor children, my poor children. I'm all they have and now I'm going to be killed.’”
Roberts fought back.  An elderly couple walking by heard her screams and the guy ran off.
It was the second time she says she would survive a sexual assault. The first, she says, happened in college.
"It was very traumatic and I think part of writing this book was a way to work through some of that trauma. It was very cathartic,” Roberts said.
"When I finished the first draft of this book many years ago now, I cried. I burst into tears and I don't cry easily. I think I survived because I made a conscious decision to survive. I said, "I'm going to survive. I'm not going to let any of this destroy me."
Roberts started writing the book in the year 2000. 17 years later, an invitation to the Crimetown podcast would snag her a literary agent.
"That was the first time I spoke publicly about my affair with Louis, and within the first 24 hours of my episode dropping, it was downloaded over 400,000 times. And since season one of Crimetown, that whole series, season one has been downloaded 50 million times around the world."
Now telling her story, the staunch feminist, activist, mother and grandmother who broke a barrier, isn't afraid of any backlash from the mafia.
“I told Raymond Jr, because his father was long dead, that this is what I wanted to do. And he said, ‘Barbara, I know how good you were to my father. I know how you loved him. I'm sure you're not going to write anything that is harmful to him.’ And I told Luis what I wanted to do and he's a very private person, but he said, ‘Whatever you want to do is fine with me.’”
Nowadays, Roberts is teaching and enjoying life with her husband, Joe, who she says was overwhelmed when he read the book.
"You know when he first started reading the book, he started to cry because he's an emotional Italian and it just hurt him so much to relive the things that I had told him about that I had experienced in the past. But he's very happy and the book actually ends when I meet him."
 As for how she came up with that title, "The Doctor Broad," it involved a guy she used to date, the press, and a simple phone call.
 "And Johnny said, 'Hey Vinny, remember that doctor broad you used to go out with, she's the old man doctor now.'" And I thought that was hilarious because to me a broad was a woman with large breasts and small frontal lobes and I had just the opposite. Well at least I'm sure about the breast part of the equation,” Roberts laughed.

‘Dirty dirt’ bill passes state Senate; awaits governor’s signature

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 By Eric Obernauer

Posted Jan 14, 2020 at 4:21 PM

A bill intended to crack down on the illegal dumping of tainted and contaminated soil awaits Gov. Phil Murphy’s signature after passing the state Senate on a 39-0 vote late Monday, just as the 2018-19 legislative session was about to expire.
The bill, S1683, follows the passage of the Assembly version, A4267, on a 75-0 vote in December.
The bill’s approval comes as the state is moving to freeze the assets and bank accounts of Joseph Wallace, of Vernon, to make him pay for the cleanup of his Silver Spruce Drive site, where tests last March detected elevated levels of volatile organic compounds, PCBs, and the pesticide chemical chlordane in a dump pile that grew to be over 75 feet high over a period of nearly a decade.
In October, Wallace was also given a 30-day jail sentence and fined $60,260 by a municipal judge; he currently is appealing that sentence.
The legislation approved by the state Senate on Monday was introduced in 2018 amid the ongoing effort to halt illegal dumping by the operators like Wallace, who previously had pleaded guilty in 2017 to dumping in New York state.
The bill’s introduction followed a 2016 state investigative report, titled “Dirty Dirt,” which documented the infiltration into New Jersey’s recycling industry of self-styled “dirt brokers,” some of whom were raking in large sums of money through dumping after having been banned from the state’s garbage industry because of ties to organized crime. A second state investigative report last June, titled “Dirty Dirt II,” detailed the continuation of illegal dumping at a site in Marlboro and the failure by the state to properly oversee elements of its recycling program.
New Jersey Sierra Club Director Jeff Tittel, in a statement late Monday, lauded the Senate’s passage of the bill — which would subject those working in “recycling” to the same regulatory standards as are applied to those working in solid waste — and urged the governor to sign it.
″(This) industry has ties to the mob, and there are serious pollution and health impacts,” he said.
Tittel accused the state Department of Environmental Protection of ignoring the problem for years and said the illegal dumping in Vernon and elsewhere should be “a wakeup call to our Legislature and the Murphy Administration that we need more enforcement power and inspections.”
“In Vernon, a judge did the DEP’s job for them,” Tittel said. “The DEP looked the other way and would not enforce the cleanup at this site for far too long.”
Vernon Councilman Harry Shortway — who, as mayor, sought action by the DEP to stop the dumping in Vernon — has suggested additional measures are needed to criminalize the activities it is aimed at stopping.
Eric Obernauer can also be contacted on Twitter: @EricObernNJH or by phone at 973-383-1

B.C. disbanded RCMP unit after report warned possible crime figure bought stake in casino

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A businessman “connected to Asian organized crime” was allowed by a British Columbia government employee to buy part of a B.C. Lottery Corp. casino, according to a confidential RCMP report obtained by Global News.

And the government employee was later hired in a B.C. casino.
The explosive accusation is just one example of organized crime’s alleged infiltration and corruption of B.C. government casinos, according to a January 2009 RCMP anti-illegal gaming unit report.
The report also contained jarring allegations of victimization, including that women with gambling debts in Asia were being trafficked to B.C. and forced into sex work, and that children in B.C. had been thrown in the trunk of a car and warned at gun-point that their father owed $300,000.
The report argued the RCMP anti-illegal gaming unit (IIGET) should target the drug cartels using B.C. Lottery Corp. casinos in combination with illegal casinos, to launder money.
But three months later, instead of following the report’s recommendations, B.C.’s government defunded and disbanded the illegal gaming unit.
Critics of B.C.’s casino industry have long questioned the decision to kill the RCMP unit.
In an interview, former Crown prosecutor Sandy Garossino said the confidential RCMP report — obtained through extensive freedom of information requests by Global News — “is shocking to the conscience” and points to “the appearance of corruption in the regulatory system.”
“I always believed in this report we would finally find this kind of detail, and it is so important it is finally coming to light,” Garossino said.
B.C. government documents claim the decision was based on funding pressures in the B.C. Lottery Corp. and that IIGET was ineffective.
The January 2009 RCMP report stressed that money laundering between legal and illegal casinos was an integrity concern for B.C.’s government.
It said that organized crime could make big money in underground casinos, and “through the infiltration of legitimate gaming venues” easily launder and transfer the criminal proceeds.
And B.C. government and criminal casinos had become intertwined in a dirty economic loop, the report said, even sometimes sharing the same card dealers and loan-shark networks.
“Illegal and legal gaming share the same issues, such as loan-sharking, extortions, assaults, kidnappings and murders,” the report says. “And illegal and legal gaming have been interlinked when, in some cases, casino staff have directed patrons to loan sharks or to common gaming houses.”
These links between government facilities and underground casinos suggested that “corruption undermines the integrity of gaming in British Columbia,” the report said.
But in the case of one B.C. casino that is not identified in the report obtained by Global News, the organized crime connection was more fundamental and damaging to the integrity of gaming.
“More specific connections to Asian Organized Crime is/was through a subject, connected to Asian organized crime, who was allowed to buy into a casino,” the report said, pointing to an unidentified investor whose “casino business associates also have Asian Organized Crime connections.”
“The regulatory investigator, involved in the share transfer process, is alleged to have known about these connections when this subject originally bought into a casino,” the report said. “The regulatory investigator is now retired from the provincial government. However, he still appears to be involved in the legitimate gaming industry.”
In an interview, Denis Meunier, former deputy director of Canada’s anti-money laundering watchdog Fintrac, said the allegations of criminal connections and ownership in B.C. Lottery casinos are “explosive.”
“For licensing, casinos are expected to conduct due diligence on the owners, the employees and any associates, to ensure criminals and their associates are nowhere near casino ownership or operations,” Meunier said. “In my view, if (the criminal casino ownership allegations) were reported to anyone (in B.C. government and RCMP) and they were not further investigated, there is a breach. Because there is a fiduciary or legal responsibility to the public. This is shocking.”
The report does not identify the B.C. government employee that it alleges knowingly allowed a person connected to organized crime to buy into a B.C. casino, before taking a job with an unidentified casino company.
In an interview, Garossino said that a “revolving door on turbocharge,” involving former government and police employees that have taken jobs in the B.C. casino industry, has created dangers of corruption.
“All of these (report allegations) are of a piece, of a mentality of turning a blind eye to criminality,” Garossino said. “Anyone connected to organized crime, it is a complete collapse of regulatory oversight that such an individual is allowed anywhere near a provincially-licensed gaming site, in terms of ownership or any stake.”
The minister responsible for reviewing the January 2009 RCMP report and the decision to disband IIGET, former B.C. solicitor general Rich Coleman, has stated the unit was ineffective.
But Garossino said she believes details in the report “shred the credibility” of the B.C. government’s explanation for shutting down IIGET.
“It is stunning to me that any government official would be provided this information, and the Solicitor General’s response was, rather than to grant police the resources they were seeking, to do the reverse, and disband this unit,” she said.
“You have every appearance of human trafficking and women forced into prostitution. It’s not just that they did nothing, but they actively disbanded this unit. So it is as if that is an intervention in making the police stop, from looking at the corruption they wanted to probe.”
Coleman, now a member of the B.C. Liberal opposition, was repeatedly asked to respond in an interview to the allegations in this story.
Instead, Coleman provided a statement.
“As you know, Justice Austin Cullen is expected to begin his inquiry into these matters this spring. I have full confidence that Justice Cullen will do his work thoroughly and as I’ve stated previously, I will cooperate with him should I be requested to. I will also say that as Minister, I carried out my fiduciary and legal duties and to insinuate otherwise would be incorrect.”
Chuck Keeling, chair of the B.C. Gaming Industry Association, said “we have no comment regarding the alleged report you have cited.”
B.C. Attorney General David Eby’s office was asked to identify the casino with possible Asian organized crime ownership, but the office said the RCMP should answer questions about its confidential report.
And the RCMP said it could not answer questions about whether the allegations involving possible Asian organized crime ownership of a Lottery Corp. casino, should have been criminally investigated.
Loan sharking, extortion and murders
The report says that “Asian organized crime figures are believed to be involved in operating common gaming houses and bookmaking, along with other gaming-related offences such as loan-sharking, extortion, and money laundering.”
There were at least seven major loan-sharking rings operating around Metro Vancouver casinos — with 47 known loan sharks — causing misery and perpetrating horrific violence at both underground and government casinos.
In one 12-block strip of Vancouver’s Kingsway Avenue there were at least nine underground casinos, the report said, and in one case, a 5-year-old was found wandering outside an underground casino while a parent gambled inside.
And in May 2006, “the eight-year-old daughter and the six-year-old son of a common gaming house operator were abducted at gun-point,” the report says. “The children were told by the kidnapper that their father owed $300,000. A neighbour saw the children climb out of the trunk of a stolen vehicle, and called police. They were recovered safely.”
Another victim was abducted outside his home and thrown into a car, according to the report. He had a mask thrown over his head, was pistol-whipped and stabbed repeatedly while his abductors demanded a $30,000 debt repayment, before dumping him alive, by the side of a forest road in Coquitlam.
The report also points to the May 2006 case of Richmond loan shark Rong Lilly Li, who was murdered outside Richmond’s River Rock Casino. She was a registered casino employee, and also a low-level loan shark allegedly inside the casino. She was last seen alive on security camera footage, exiting the casino, before she was lured into a van by two gamblers, who believed she would have up to $300,000 in her purse.
The convicted killers, Chu Ming Feng and his accomplice Guo Wei Liang, wrapped a black leather belt around her neck and strangled her.
In another case, a woman borrowed $500,000 to gamble at River Rock Casino.
“She was able to pay $200,000 back by using her house as collateral to borrow money from the bank, but she still owed $300,000,” the report says.
There was another murder, and an attempted murder, at two Vancouver underground casinos in 2007, the report says.
Also in 2007, the report said, the owner of a Richmond online gambling company, Po Ho Cheung, was shot dead.
Cheung had been charged in 2001 with laundering hundreds of thousands in drug money. Federal prosecutors dropped the charges because they didn’t consider money laundering to be a priority. But prosecutors knew Cheung was facilitating currency refining through high-rollers, the Vancouver Sun reported, and he was able to deliver stacks of $20s from drug traffickers to his many gambler associates, so that the high-rollers could use casinos to exchange the drug-money $20s for clean $1,000 bills.
The report provided B.C.’s government with a detailed explanation of how drug traffickers use casinos to refine currency, in such cases.
“A lot of criminal organizations have colossal amounts of cash, mostly small bills, in their possession,” the report says. “The purpose of refining is to decrease the bulk of large quantities of cash by exchanging small denominations for larger ones, in order to more easily introduce the illegally-gained funds into the financial system. This initial step also serves to distance the dirty money from its initial source by trading bills that are often filthy, torn and sometimes contaminated, for new ones.”
The social costs of casino money laundering are difficult to calculate, the report says, but believed to be significant. Garossino said she was struck by a section of the report that suggests human trafficking, prostitution, and gambling debts in Asia, are related to crime in B.C.
 “Our research surfaced one prostitution file which was directly related to illegal gaming,” the report says. “Eight Malaysian females were found to be working at a (bawdy house in South Vancouver.) One of the subjects indicated she had a gambling debt to pay off in Malaysia and was working in Canada to satisfy the debt.”
It’s commonly known among lawyers that handle bankruptcy cases “that many gambling addicts are forced into theft, drug-dealing and prostitution, to cover debts to loan sharks,” Garossino said.
Fintrac and FATF warnings ignored
The B.C. government’s decision to kill IIGET looks even more questionable, Meunier and Garossino said, in light of the January 2009 report’s numerous case examples provided by Fintrac of suspected money laundering in B.C. Lottery casinos.
In one case, in just one year a Vancouver bank employee bought chips with cash at four Metro Vancouver casinos, for a total of $4.9 million.
“In June 2007 alone, he purchased casino chips worth $3.287 million,” the report says.
Another man who frequented the River Rock Casino, the Starlight Casino in New Westminster, the Edgewater Casino in Vancouver, and the Gateway Casino in Burnaby, logged 285 large cash transaction reports, for a total of $8.7 million CAD and $62,000 USD.
The report said “many investigations across the country have shown that members of organized crime also use casinos for loan-sharking and money laundering, and that some of these criminal elements have successfully infiltrated the industry.”
And Fintrac had provided police with evidence of $40-million in suspected casino money laundering transactions, the report said, but “police managers have suggested that because of other priorities and lack of resources at this time, nothing is being done to investigate these situations.”
Meunier, the former Fintrac official, said the 2009 RCMP report should have been given added weight by B.C.’s government, because in 2008 the Financial Action Task Force — an intergovernmental financial watchdog — also pointed to similar money laundering concerns involving bulk currency refining, casino chip laundering, and foreign currency exchange laundering in B.C. casinos.
“You have to ask what actions the regulator, police and politicians were taking,” Meunier said. “And you have to wonder why you would disband a unit, or diminish your enforcement capacity?”
Pat Fogarty, a former deputy chief with B.C.’s Combined Forces anti-gang unit, who targeted the Big Circle Boys and Triad kingpins from Mainland China, Macau and Hong Kong that dominate casino money laundering in B.C., said “nothing in this report comes as a surprise to me.”
Fogarty said he believes that since the early 1990s, the governments of B.C. and Canada have turned a blind eye to massive casino money laundering and real estate money laundering in Vancouver, because the dirty money was boosting Canada’s economy, and many businesses were benefiting.
 “We were laughing at the hockey bags of cash coming in, asking ‘why isn’t the government doing something?’” Fogarty said. “In the grand scheme of things it was the police and the government that should have looked at the collective police information, the IIGET reports, the intelligence, to say this is a mega-ground for organized crime to launder their money, period. And how do we address that? But they just didn’t do that. And the same thing happened in real estate. As long as people were making money, they didn’t report it.”

FROM MOBSTERS TO SCAM ARTISTS: CASINO EXCLUSION LISTS HAVE 60-YEAR PRECEDENT IN US

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POSTED ON JANUARY 14, 2020
BY KEVIN SHELLY

You’d rather not end up on certain lists.
For casinos, lists of “excluded” patrons have historically served as an important method of security.
Nevada’s famous — or infamous — Black Book first circulated in 1960. A reflection of the times, the first list of 11 men were all members of the Mafia.
The Pennsylvania involuntary exclusion list follows in Nevada’s footsteps. Many other legal casino states have also created lists of banned persons, with varying degrees of attentiveness.

NEVADA SETS THE BLACK BOOK BAR
Officially known as the List of Excluded Persons, the Nevada list was not printed as a black book for long. Today, it is available online rather than in print.
Of the 11 men on the original list, one, Louis Tom Dragna, remained on the list for the longest. He was removed only in 2014, two years after he died.
Death is generally the only way to get off the list.
The current Nevada list holds 35 names, several of whom are presumed to be mobsters now in their 80s. Most of the newer entries are scammers, many of whom once worked in the casino industry.
While the list consists almost entirely of men, a certain Sandra Kay Vaccaro has the distinction of being the only woman ever to make Nevada’s Black Book. The alleged card cheat and slot cheat remains on the list after getting excluded in 1986.
A WIDE RANGE OF REASONS FOR EXCLUSION IN PA
In contrast to Nevada’s rather short list, Pennsylvania had 983 people on its list as of Dec. 18, 2019. The list appears only to have individuals charged with infractions at PA retail casinos, sportsbooks and poker rooms, not the newer online casinos or online sportsbooks.
Like most exclusion lists, it’s available online. The list includes a mugshot and a short description of what led to the exclusion.
Most exclusions stem from offenses such as pocketing chips or vouchers or showing fake identification. But there are more elaborate thefts, such as a $40,000 one by a casino credit manager.
One of the more outlandish reasons for being banned resulted when two years ago, a woman tipped her cocktail server with cash — and a bag of methamphetamine.
As far as criminal charges, the woman got just a year of probation. She also got herself a lifetime exclusion from casinos in the Keystone State.
Another barred individual may have tipped off security with his state parole number tattooed on his left arm. The man and several confederates attempted to falsely claim a slot jackpot valued at $400,000.
STATE LISTS CAN OVERLAP, ON OCCASION
It is rare to see individuals make multiple states’ exclusion lists, but not impossible.
Skinny Joey Merlino, a Philadelphia organized crime leader now in Florida, has the distinction of being on both the PA exclusion list and New Jersey exclusion list.
Authorities barred him in 1984 in NJ, but he didn’t make the PA list until 2016. At the Jersey Shore, he was a presence in Atlantic City and Margate, a nearby beach town.
The tiny state of Delaware adds names of many of those barred by New Jersey, according to Muck Rock, an investigative website. That is, in part, why DE, with fewer than 1 million citizens, has 248 individuals on its list.

VIGILANCE FOR EXCLUSION VARIES ACROSS STATES
The vigilance of states in adding to the exclusion lists appears to vary widely.
PA is clearly among the most vigilant, with nearly 1,000 on the involuntary exclusion list. NJ had 464 individuals listed as of October 2019.
Muck Rock reports New York state, which is supposed to have an exclusion list, currently has no one on a list. That, despite having a population of 19.5 million people.

OTHER WAYS TO LAND ON THE LIST
States, including PA, have begun adopting self-exclusion as an option for those struggling with an unchecked gambling habit.
Our sister site PAOnlineCasino in October showed how self-exclusion could, in some instances, lead to unintended exclusions. Overall though, it appears exclusion lists serve an essential purpose for states that have to take the bad with the good when it comes to land-based casino gambling.
It should be common sense on how to avoid landing on a mandatory exclusion list. But for those who want to play it safe, there’s always the option to play at PA online gambling sites from the comfort of home.

Genovese Mobster Sentenced for Brooklyn UFCW Racketeering, Another Convicted

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Posted on January 17, 2020 by Carl Horowitz

     New York City’s Genovese crime family is traveling a little lighter these days. And members of United Food and Commercial Workers Locals 1D and 2D are sleeping a little more easily. On November 15, Steven Arena, a longtime Genovese soldier, was sentenced in Manhattan federal court to one year in prison and three years of supervised release for his role in racketeering conspiracies involving two now-convicted Brooklyn UFCW officials, Frank Cognetta and Vincent D’Acunto. A few weeks later, on December 4, another Genovese made man, Frank Giovinco, was convicted by a trial jury in the same court of racketeering conspiracy related to the locals. These four persons along with another Genovese wiseguy, Vincent Esposito, had been indicted in January 2018 following a probe by the FBI, the Labor Department and the NYPD.
Union Corruption Update has covered this saga several times since the indictments of two years ago. United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1D and Local 2D, each based in Brooklyn, N.Y. and representing wine and distillery workers, had been mobbed-up for a long time. With respect to Local 2D, a pair of Genovese enforcers, Vincent Esposito and Steven “Mad Dog” Arena, did the dirty work. According to prosecutors, Arena and Esposito, along with four other reputed Genovese mobsters, participated with then-local secretary-treasurer Vincent D’Acunto in a scheme lasting during 2001-17 to extort money from an unnamed officer through threats of violence and loss of employment. Esposito pleaded guilty last April, and was sentenced in July to up to 30 months in prison and ordered to forfeit $3.8 million in assets. D’Acunto pleaded guilty in March, and was sentenced in August. Cognetta, former secretary-treasurer of UFCW Local 1D, steered nearly $500,000 to a local health plan managed by a favored benefits adviser, fleecing a large portion of those plan assets. He was sentenced in September after pleading guilty in March. As for Steven Arena, he pleaded to racketeering conspiracy last May.
Frank Giovinco, now 52, a resident of Syosset, N.Y., is perhaps the least-known of the defendants. But he was a piece work with a history. Back in 1997, he and several other persons pleaded guilty to state charges related to a violent trash-hauling cartel operated by the Genovese and Gambino crime families. Old habits proved hard to break. According to prosecutors, Giovinco engaged in a variety of schemes against UFCW Locals 1D and 2D to enrich the Genovese mob, including “multiple acts of extortion, honest services fraud, and bribery.” Based on evidence obtained through audio recordings, he extorted a union official and an associated financial adviser out of a portion of investment commissions. When one of the intended targets failed to pay up, Giovinco and other individuals threatened his life. In addition, he extorted annual tribute payments from a union president in sums exceeding $10,000. Moreover, he sought a job at the local so he could exert total control over its operations. He is scheduled for sentencing on March 11.


Saputo defends reputation following Radio-Canada report about his past ties to organized crime

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Quebec cheese mogul says Enquête report about past associations 'brought nothing new to light'
CBC News · Posted: Jan 21, 2020 5:31 PM ET | Last Updated: January 21
Montreal cheese magnate Lino Saputo, seen here in a 2007 picture, has a personal fortune estimated at $6.5 billion. (Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press)
Quebec cheese mogul Lino Saputo has warned his lawyers could take action against Radio-Canada and its investigative team, following an Enquête report last week about his past ties to mobsters in the Canada and the U.S.
In a statement released Tuesday morning, Saputo said the Enquête report "tried to make me guilty by association by reporting on so-called links between me and the Italian Mafia."
Saputo denied he's ever been "associated with organized crime." He said the Radio-Canada report dealt with events that "made headlines more than five decades ago" and "brought nothing new to light."
"I am a person of integrity and honesty and have always been," Saputo said in the statement.
"I no longer want to devote my efforts and energy to justifying myself or commenting on false and malicious statements made about me in public," he said.
Saputo said his lawyers will serve Radio-Canada and Enquête reporters with a demand letter.
The statement does not specify in detail what Saputo believes to be false in the Radio-Canada report, nor does it indicate what the demand letter will ask for.
"Radio-Canada reiterates that this report is investigative journalism that is based on facts. It was produced in compliance with the rigourous journalistic standards and practices of Radio-Canada," said Marc Pichette, a spokesperson for the public broadcaster.
CBC broadcast and published English versions of the Enquête report.
Saputo, now 82, took over his father's cheese-making business in 1969, turning it into a dairy industry giant. The company went public in 1997 and is now worth an estimated $15 billion.
Saputo's personal fortune is pegged at $6.5 billion, making him the richest person in Quebec and one of the 10 richest in Canada.
At several points in his career, Saputo has denied allegations that he had ties with Mafia figures. He reiterated his denials in a memoir published last year.
"We respected the law, kept our distance from criminal organizations and avoided crossing the wrong people," Saputo writes in Entrepreneur: Living our dreams.



Cryan, Lesniak Have Ties To Alleged Organized Crime Figures

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ELIZABETH – A reputed organized crime associate made political campaign contributions to Assemblyman Joe Cryan, whose legislative partner, state Sen. Ray Lesniak, wants to disband the commission created to drive the mob out of the waterfront in the Port of New York-New Jersey.
At least one alleged organized crime figure arrested by federal authorities as part of a nationwide round up was repeatedly among Cryan’s campaign contributors, Albert Cernadas Sr. of Union.

Cryan accepted $750 from Cernadas Sr. in 2004 and another $150 in 2005, according to the state Election Law Enforcement Commission (ELEC). Cernadas Sr. is a former president of International Longshoreman’s Association (ILA) Local 1235, which from 2001 to 2009, gave $18,725 to New Jersey politicians.

The alleged mobster’s son, Albert Cernadas Jr., is the first assistant to Union County Prosecutor Theodore J. Romankow and a friend of Jon Deutsch, who obtained a Waterfront Commission job through political influence and was later fired for inappropriate conduct.
As the agency’s General Counsel, Deutsch leaked information to Cernadas Jr. concerning an investigation and fashioned a scheme to allow a convicted felon to operate a business in violation of the Waterfront Commission Act.
After Deutsch was fired, Lesniak introduced a controversial bill to remove the docks from the oversight of the Waterfront Commission and give that authority instead to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Thomas Leonardis, the president of ILA Local 1235 and one of those indicted last week, testified in support of Lesniak’s bill last fall. Leonardis called the Waterfront Commission one of the biggest obstacles to growth in the port business and said it had “outdone its usefulness.”
On Jan. 10, three people were indicted on charges of loansharking and money laundering following a Waterfront Commission investigation into the shakedown of longshoremen on Newark and Elizabeth piers.
Then on Jan. 20, nearly 800 FBI and Secret Service agents and law enforcement officers pulled off the biggest one-day Mafia roundup in history, bringing in 127 suspected members and associates from all five of New York’s Mafia families as well as New Jersey’s DeCavalcante family pursuant to 16 indictments in four federal jurisdictions.
Among the 18 New Jerseyans arrested and indicted were six from the legislative district represented by Lesniak and Cryan: Cernadas Sr., 75; Anthony Alfano, 76, of Union; Stephen Depiro, 55, of Kenilworth; Tonino Colantonio, 32, of Kenilworth; John Hartmann, 41, of Kenilworth, and Guiseppe Pugliese, 32, of Kenilworth.
Five years ago Cernadas Sr. was sentenced to only two years probation after pleading guilty to funneling thousands of dollars in union funds to a pharmaceutical company controlled by organized crime.
In that case U.S. District Judge Leo Glasser received from the NJ political establishment “292 letters asking for leniency” as reported by Bob Ingle and Sandy McClure in their book The Soprano State: New Jersey’s Culture of Corruption.
“Our battle against organized crime enterprises is far from over,” said Attorney General Eric Holder. “Members and associates of La Cosa Nostra are among the most dangerous criminals in our country.”



I am releasing my mob writings and photos on a FaceBook page called "Mob History and Current Events"

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I am releasing my mob writings and photos on a FaceBook page called


 "Mob History and Current Events"

You have to request to join the page but I'll be sure and let you join. 

Looking forward to seeing you all there.  

                                                         JOHN


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