LA COSA NOSTRA, LIMITED

Press, 13 January 1987, Page 21

LA COSA NOSTRA, LIMITED

—multinational for mob racketeers

The new breed of mobsters running the Mafia’s $lOO billion a year “businesses’* are smarter and more discreet, but no less ruthless, than the old school. WILLIAM SCOBIE, of the London “Observer,” reports from Las Vagas.

It wasn’t your average Mob murder. The bodies of the Las Vegas capo, Tony Spilotro, and his brother, Mike, were bloody, beaten, and naked but for their undershorts. The F. 8.1. investigators who exhumed them from a shallow grave in an Indiana cornfield said they had been garrotted, possibly buried alive. ‘‘The killers had a real vengeance grudge,” said William Roemer, a former F. 8.1. agent, now an adviser to the Chicago Crime Commission. “Usually the Mafia’s way is a hole, or two, in the back of the head, pointblank, with a .22. It’s quick — they don’t suffer. These guys were tortured.” To the men who run America’s $lOO billion-a-year organised crime business —one which operates in almost every major United States 'city, from New York to Kansas City to Los Angeles — the double slaying last June was a warning and a precursor of things to come within La Cosa Nostra. The old order changeth: many of the top Mafia bosses today are 70, 75, 80. The new men breathing down th?ir necks are younger, quite as ruthless, but often less dedicated to Mafia rules and smarter, more com-puter-wise in the ways of today’s business world.

They are behind a recent wave of savage East Coast gangland slayings. Spilotro — known as "Tony the Ant” because of his short, squat build — was barely 50, but a capo of the old school. He was loud, gross, a “wise-guy” 16-year veteran of casino skimming in Las Vegas, said to have carried out 25 executions personally in his younger days as a Chicago “foot-soldier.” His job as a Nevada strongman was to see that a proper share of gambling profits flowed quickly and quietly back to bosses of the Chicago mob. For the last decade, by an agreement with New York leaders, the Chicago Mafia has run the larger slice of the extremely lucrative Vegas operation, while the New York families hold authority in Atlantic City. Whether Spilotro was killed on orders from Chicago or New York, police did not know. They do know that he and his brother were killed on the eve of their trial in Las Vegas on charges of running a burglary, casinoskimming, extortion, arson, and prostitution ring in the gambling Mecca.

Tony the Ant had not been “controlling” his boys properly. Some had been “singing” to the F.BJ., with the result that nine major Mob figures from Chicago and Kansas City were convicted and jailed for long terms in January. Someone at the top ruled that even if Spilotro was not about to spill some beans as well, he was more trouble than he was worth. And the New York Mob is moving into the gap left by his death, Federal and State agents say. Roemer spent 20 years trying to nail Mafia leaders in the Windy City. He says that under a 1977 pact the New York mobsters kept control of what they already ran in Las Vegas but could not expand their operations. Part of Spilotro’s job was to enforce that accord. With Spilotro’s murder, undercover cops in Las Vegas are seeing a revival of “East Coast” activities.

To the victors the spoils — and the spoils are huge. The President’s Commission on Organised Crime estimates that this year gross income from traditional rackets — gambling, narcotics, prostitution, extortion, and so on — will exceed $lOO billion. Net income for the Mafia, after the usual business overheads (salaries, entertainment, transport) is put at $6O billion. The Mob thus does more business than the United States iron, steel, and copper industries combined. The figures offered by the Crime Commission do not include profits from Mafia diversification into legitimate fields: the film and record industry, trucking, the building industry, food

and drink marketing. The commission can only guess that these enterprises are “worth billions.” The crime families of Cosa Nostra — the Genoveses and Gambinos of New York, the Accardos of Chicago — bear a striking resemblance in management structure to the average major United States corporation. On top of the heap is a chief executive, a boss. Next come chief operating officers, the underbosses. Beneath them are the capos, like Spilotro, vicepresidents with specific spheres of control and command. Finally there are the rank-and-file "soldiers” who perform menial tasks, and from whose ranks are chosen the executioners. A readiness to kill can be a passport to promotion. Like all successful companies, the Mob relies to a great extent on consultants: a galaxy of well-paid lawyers, market experts, and high-powered political gobetweens who serve in the same capacity as for legitimate businesses. All this industry does not, of course, benefit the American economy. The Crime Commission estimates that organised crime, by siphoning off capital, stifling competition, and corrupting the unions, increases consumer prices nationally by 0.3 per cent, reduces national output by $35 billion, cuts per capita income by $l5O billion per annum and — because the Mob’s vast network pays only fraudulent, token tax bills — increases taxes for the honest taxpayer by $l3 billion a year. No-one can deny, however, that the Mob is a steady, major employer that pays good wages. Wharton Associates, a firm employed by the Crime Commission to make an economic study of how crime pays, estimated from F. 8.1. and other sources that more than 250,000 people work in businesses run, or partially controlled by, the racketeers. The F. 8.1. says that sworn Mafia members number about 1800. The upper echelon earn an average annual salary of more than $400,000 a year — roughly what a tried and true top executive in a major United States corporation could expect. The top 40-50 Mob bosses, such as “Fat” Tony Salerno, 75-year-old godfather of the Genovese family, or Anthony Accardo, 80-year-old, Palm Springs-based head of the Chicago outfit, are of course up there in “salary” with

the heads of United States multinationals, who can make $8 million to $lO million a year. According to the F. 8.1., each sworn Mafia member — one who has taken a secret oath and exchanged a ritual drop of blood — has an average of 10 trusted associates. Their average income, according to the indefatigable Wharton Associates, works out at $120,000 a year. Much of this income — derived from narcotics traffic, bribes, extortion, union kickbacks, and so on — is today reinvested in a variety of legitimate fields. It offers a cover for criminal enterprises and a defence against charges of income tax cheating — for decades the Government’s chief weapon against the Mob, and the cause of Al Capone’s downfall in the 19205.

“It’s very troubling,” says Bill Roemer, “the way the Mob is going semi-legit.” In Las Vegas, as in New York, the Mobsters’, capital, the line separating legal from illegal enterprises, has become ever more hazy. “Fat” Tony (“too fat to

flee” snicker his rivals) Salerno made his first millions skimming from the Nevada and Puerto Rico casinos. (Skimming is taking cash in small bills and large suitcases from the casinos before gambling income is reported to the Internal Revenue Service.) But Mafiosi as big as Salerno, described recently by the F. 8.1. as the Mob’s number one "chief

executive,” rarely make personal appearances in the gambling city, or out of it. The political .bosses of Nevada, from Presidential candidate and Reagan friend, Senator Paul Laxalt downwards, are sensitive about Las Vegas’s image. Of all Mob operations, Vegas is the coolest, most secretive, least visible.

“This is middle-America’s playground,’ 4 says a top showbiz agent, Mark Moreno. “That stuff scares customers away. It’s the kiss of death for an entertainer or anyone in the gaming industry to be associated, however, remotely, with an organised crime figure. You just cannot know people who know people who know people in touch with the Mob.” ■- - A case in point is Moreno’s star client, singer Wayne Newton, who for the last two months has fought a rancorous, costly defamation case against NBC-TV, after a series of broadcasts linked him to Mob figures. The case ended on December 17 with Newton — who had sought a hefty $12.6 million in damages — awarded a staggering $38.6 million by a Las Vegas jury: $lO million for loss of reputation, $15.8 million for loss of income, $2.3 million for loss of future income, and $250,000 for physical and mental suffering. The award was by far the largest in any United States libel suit involving news coverage. “The Vegas community was not willing to rule against Wayne Newton,” says the N.B.C. lawyer, inhibiting effect on the Press in this country. We’re confident we’ll prevail in a higher court” Another defence lawyer observed that the verdict was also an indication of how deeply the Vegas business community, from the humblest storekeeper to top casino-owners, abhor any mention of the Mob in their midst The entire United States entertainment industry — and the media — watched this drama closely. Newton may not be a

he is Boulevard. The city fathers have selected bis birthday for celebration as “Wayne Newton Day” Senators, governors, captains of industry, and stars often pay him court at his 52-acre ranch with « -GMe wia tu Wtojß Ees, the Rolls with licences plate“ Vegas 1 ” ££ Newton, who asks and receives claims he lost millions in job aptf show offers and developed an ulcer after N.B.C. reported that the Mob was involved in his slsu. million purchase in 1979 of the. Aladdin Casino, one of Las Vegas’s largest He also lost the casino, selling out after two years because N.B.C. “ruined his business reputation.” Plump, stately Newton, aged 44, who performs In the style of a kind of hybrid Elvis-Liberace-Sinatra, admitted in court meeting several times with the convicted mobster, Guido Penosi; but only, he claimed, in an effort to stop a series of mysterious death threats made in 1989 against himself and his four-year-old daughter. “I know nothing about organised crime,” Newton testified. In a city virtually founded by the Mob, he’s one of the few people who doesn’t ,'Z In the late 19305, President Roosevelt inaugurated Boulder Dam and sent water spilling into dry, depressed Nevada. In 1945, Bugsy Siegel created the Strip by pouring his Syndicate’s crime revenues into the Flamingo Hotel. Z It worked like a dream, for a few years, until the boys from Chicago came down and shot him, putting a couple of bullets through his blue eyes, to advise interested parties that this — .as with Spilotro — was a personal matter. Not much has changed. The gambling industry in Nevada posted total winnings of $6.6 billion last year, up 10 per cent over 1984. Underboss and accountant for the Kansas City Mafia, Carl ReLuna, had kept careful ledgers which an F. 8.1. agent fotgd hidden in a Mob house basement last year. Among much else the records showed that DeLuna (now serving a 10-year sentence) was sent on a mission to Vegaaln 1978 to force casino-owner Allen Glick to sell his Fremont and Stardust gambling hotels, or face the murder of his two yoitag children. ... The books also record how the Mob takes care of its own. Over the years DeLuna listed a variety of small payments — sums from $2OOO to $lO,OOO — made to needy, elderly Mafiosi, widows, and the wives of Mobsters in jail. c^““Ahd-j W’-S!ir'‘isres' 4 W”- says - 1 Ronald Goldstock, head of New York’s organised crime task force, who believes recent convictions of top Mafia bosses haye disrupted the Mob, but far from excised its tentacles from the American business world. m With the old bosses dying otTn jail, new faces, new rivalries are springing up. “We could be watching a return to the old days, when the Mob was less bold and truly a secret organisation,” says Goldstock. w