The face of organized crime is changing in America. For 65 years, Cosa Nostra, the American version of Italy's Mafia, had held undisputed sway over criminal enterprises across the U.S. While Cosa Nostra ("Our Thing") remains a dangerous force to be reckoned with, it no longer enjoys the unique dominance it once had. Just as Cosa Nostra asserted its supremacy over Jewish and Irish crime groups in the late 1920s and early '30s, today potent new criminal elements settling here -- principally Russian and Chinese -- loom ominously on the law-enforcement horizon.
In recognition of this threat, the FBI has formed special Russian and Chinese organized-crime squads similar to the ones it has successfully employed in recent years against Cosa Nostra. The Russians and Chinese have yet to achieve full flower in the underworld, and FBI Director Louis J. Freeh means to nip them in the bud.
For decades under the late J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI's official position was that the existence of Cosa Nostra was a myth. "We cannot allow the same kinds of mistakes to be made today," Freeh told Congress. "The failure of American law enforcement, including the FBI . . . permitted the development of a powerful, well-entrenched organized crime syndicate (that required) 35 years of concerted law-enforcement effort and the expenditure of incredible resources to address."
The downward turning point for Cosa Nostra began in the 1960s with the dramatic revelations of Joseph Valachi, a "soldier" in the secret brotherhood, who first described its oath of fealty -- complete with the drawing of blood and burning the image of a saint -- and how it was structured in paramilitary fashion into 25 crime "families" throughout the U.S. It came full cycle with the defection of the highest-ranking Cosa Nostra member ever to testify: Salvatore (Sammy the Bull) Gravano, the No. 2 man in the Gambino crime family. His 1992 testimony put the family boss, John Gotti -- known as "The Teflon Don" because of his ability to avoid prison -- behind bars for the rest of his life.
As a result -- according to James Moody, a deputy assistant director who formerly was chief of the FBI's organized-crime section -- the Gambino family, at the time the most powerful in the nation, has been reduced from 35 active "crews," or family units, to 10.
Of the remaining four families in the greater New York area, only the Genovese family has escaped relatively unscathed. Its reputed boss, Vincent (The Chin) Gigante, has thus far evaded prosecution on the grounds that he is mentally unfit to stand trial. He is often seen padding around the streets of Greenwich Village in a bathrobe and pajamas, muttering incoherently to himself. Federal authorities, convinced it's all a hoax, will attempt to try him again this year on multiple charges, including conspiracy to murder. "We've just got to get the courts to realize that he's crazy all right -- like a fox," Moody told me.
Moody ticked off the current status of Cosa Nostra families elsewhere, beset by broad-based federal statutes -- both criminal and civil -- under the innovative Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act that followed the Valachi revelations in 1963. "In the Boston region now, all we have active is one crew in Rhode Island," said Moody. In Philadelphia: "Almost everybody is in jail." In Cleveland: "Technically, there is no real family." In Detroit: "The family's still there, but I think good things may occur in the future."
In Milwaukee, St. Louis and Kansas City, he went on, the local families "have almost ceased to exist." In Chicago -- once a Cosa Nostra crown jewel, with such famous past bosses as Al Capone and Sam Giancana -- a new FBI approach of targeting one family crew at a time has proved effective. In Los Angeles and San Francisco, what's left of the families is small potatoes. In "open" Las Vegas, where all the families can operate, the casino business has gotten too big even for Cosa Nostra, although it still hovers on the fringe of things. In Buffalo, however, the family remains "pretty strong," especially with its alleged stranglehold over a local construction union.
While Cosa Nostra families generally are hanging on the ropes, the idea is to keep hammering them. Otherwise, "they'll come back fast," Moody noted. "Until we get to the point where a young man decides he doesn't want to be a member because it'll put him in jail for the rest of his life, we haven't won yet."
Still, the situation is well enough in hand to enable an undermanned FBI to divert agents from its Cosa Nostra squad and others from counterintelligence squads -- now that the Cold War is over -- to meet a new domestic menace: Russian organized crime.
Its rise has been startlingly swift. The initial influx of Russians -- about 300,000 -- occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when immigration barriers were temporarily lifted to allow persecuted Jews to leave the Soviet Union. A large number of these immigrants, however, turned out not to be Jewish at all and included "second-echelon" criminal elements. They settled primarily in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, which quickly was dubbed "Little Odessa." As with past ethnic waves of new arrivals, these hoodlums began by victimizing their own people. And at first, according to Moody, the FBI considered it a local police problem.
But that would not long be the case. In 1989, the number of visitors' visas to the U.S. from Russia was 3000. By 1994, just two years after the collapse of the Communist regime, 129,500 such visas had been issued in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kiev alone. Now came a flood of high-ranking, hardened, organized criminals -- "the first team," as Moody put it.
Moody got an inkling of what lay ahead when he attended a 1991 international crime conference. Its host was the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), which was trying to cope with a sudden onslaught of savage gang warfare in Moscow (one of the bitter fruits of democracy) that made the bloodletting of Chicago in the 1920s look like play school. "You don't understand what these people are like," Moody recalled being told. "They're very tough, very smart, very educated and very violent. They attack police officers. They don't care."
And soon the U.S. was awash with Russian-instigated gangland murders, complex tax and health-care fraud schemes, vicious extortions, money laundering, major drug trafficking and huge auto-theft rings with the cars being shipped back for sale in Russia (Jeep Cherokees are especially favored).
The FBI's Russian squad in New York, led by the supervisory agent Ray Kerr, was formed in May 1994. Due to the cooperation between the FBI and the MVD, Kerr's squad got an immediate break -- the kind that FBI Director Freeh was hoping for. The MVD warned the FBI that a man named Vyacheslav Ivankov, whom they believed to be a Russian version of a Cosa Nostra "godfather," had left Moscow for America, where he was to manage and control Russian gangland activities in the U.S. He was placed under immediate surveillance. Along with his residence in Brighton Beach, he took another one in Denver and was spotted meeting Russian organized-crime figures not only there but also in Miami, Los Angeles, Boston, suburban New Jersey and Toronto.
Then, the Justice Department says, Ivankov made a mistake while masterminding an extortion plot against two Russian emigres who owned a Wall Street investment advisory firm. Ivankov allegedly demanded separate payments of $5 million and $3.5 million, accompanied by threats of mayhem. Last April 26 -- presumably, the government says, to get the message across -- the father of one of the extortion targets was beaten to death in a Moscow train station.
Russian organized crime counts on fear to keep its victims silent, but the two targets had gone to the FBI. A tap was put on Ivankov's phone, and he was overheard discussing the plot, FBI officials say. In June he was awakened and arrested at the apartment of a girlfriend. At a press conference, the head of the FBI's New York office, Jim Kallstrom, dryly observed: "He muttered something to the agents in Russian. It didn't sound too nice." Then, after being fingerprinted and photographed, the handcuffed Ivankov spat and kicked at reporters and photographers.
As Ray Kerr pointed out, however, "We aren't there yet with the Russians the way we are with Cosa Nostra. We have to learn more about how they are structured, who answers to whom, how many different groups there are here. That's what we're looking at right now."
Then there are the Chinese mobsters. The Chinese population is exploding in the U.S., and with it comes China's own brand of organized crime. It arrives in three layers: First are the Hong Kong-based triads, secret criminal societies that predate even the Sicilian Mafia. Second are the Chinese-American tongs, ostensibly business and fraternal associations in America's various Chinatowns, which have been known to ape the criminal enterprises of the triads. Third are the violent Chinese street gangs -- with names like Ghost Shadows and White Tigers -- which, the FBI believes, both the triads and tongs use to enforce their rackets.
At the moment, the main trade of the triads in the U.S. is the importation of China White, the purest form of heroin yet developed, which has become the fastest-growing drug of choice throughout much of the country. The triads and tongs also organize the smuggling of tens of thousands of illegal Chinese immigrants into the U.S., who then receive slave wages in garment sweatshops, restaurants and brothels until they pay off fees ranging from $30,000 to $50,000.
In New York, for instance, three tong chieftains were accused by the Justice Department of carving up Chinatown into designated zones, using street gangs to oversee gambling, extortion and murder operations. They demand as much as $100,000 to open a restaurant and $20,000 a week to let gambling dens function. To make matters worse, two Chinese-American police detectives in New York pleaded guilty to feeding Chinese gangsters advance information about raids on gambling and prostitution houses.
A bright spot in the fight against organized crime is San Francisco. Long sensitive to Chinese crime, the FBI has two Chinese-American agents who gained Chinatown's confidence and quickly thwarted a Hong Kong triad's incursion into the Bay Area. According to Tom Fuentes, head of the FBI's organized-crime unit in San Francisco, a major investigation also is under way involving shipments of goods hijacked in Russia and sold legitimately in the U.S., the laundered cash then returned to Russia's gangland coffers.
Meanwhile, the Colombian cocaine cartels present a special problem. Unlike the Russians and Chinese, the drug overlords have no intention of settling here, preferring to remain in their native havens, where they reap many millions from the manufacture and delivery of their deadly product. Under intense U.S. pressure, the Colombian government recently arrested six cartel kingpins. Whether this was only window dressing remains to be seen.
The bottom line is that organized crime still represents an enormous peril to the well-being of this nation. The only difference is that today it has become multicultural.
And the expense of fighting it is significant. But, as Louis Freeh said, "Let us learn from the past and pay the price now, before it becomes too costly later on."
