Authorities stack evidence against Lucchese crime family in NJ gambling ring bust
During a status conference in Superior Court in Morristown, Deputy Attorney General Mark Eliades described his efforts in producing the pre-trial “discovery” evidence to the defendants, who were indicted in May.
Eliades said he and his colleagues in the Attorney General’s Office have been transferring all the information from computer hard drives onto CDs to be given to the defendants and their attorneys. The evidence includes 10,000 pages of affidavits and grand jury exhibits; 12,000 to 15,000 sheets of financial records and more than 100 hours of surveillance videos and wiretaps.
Eliades said he needs about seven days to go through 36 discs of information to make sure “everything is on there” before distributing them to the defendants.
Judge Thomas Manahan scheduled the next status conference in the case for Nov. 30 for all 34 defendants. “Hopefully, by that time we can make some progress and figure out where we are going,” he said.
Because the case is so big, it will need to proceed outside the regular track of Superior Court cases, Manahan said.
The defendants were expected to be separated into groups, but Manahan decided to keep all the cases together for the time being.
The group is accused of processing $2.2 billion in sports bets, routing them through a wire room in Costa Rica, during a 15-month period that ended in 2007. The charges include racketeering, weapons possession, tax evasion, bribery, money laundering and conspiracy.
The defendants include reputed mob leaders Joseph DiNapoli, 74, of Scarsdale, N.Y., and Matthew Madonna, 41, of Selden, N.Y., who allegedly control the crime family from New York, as well as Ralph Perna, 64, of East Hanover and Nicodemo Scarfo Jr., 44, of Egg Harbor, who have allegedly overseen Lucchese operations in New Jersey.
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/09/massive_evidence_is_produced_i.html
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