By Rico on 6 August 2016
(Q24N) With ties to sports gambling businesses based in Costa Rica, and arrests earlier this week of nearly four dozen people in New York, including four from New Jersey, U.S. law enforcement officials say it is a reminder that organized crime – wiseguys – remain a force to be reckoned with.
“Tony Soprano may have gone off the air, but the mob never did,” said Lee Seglem, acting executive director of the State Commission of Investigation in New Jersey. “In the real world these guys are still active and, as this indictment shows, they haven’t faded away—because there’s a lot of money to be made.”
According to the report by NJ.com, in the cases announced by federal prosecutors in New York on Thursday, the schemes ranged from old-style loan sharking to the move by organized crime into health care fraud. With aliases that included names like “Mustache Pat,” “Fish,” “Harpo” and “Tugboat,” the FBI’s New York assistant director, Diego Rodriguez, said the indictment read like an old school Mafia novel.
U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said the charges against members and associates of five different crime families demonstrated that the Mafia remained “fully diversified in its boundless search for illegal profits.”