FBI disbands Boston organized crime squad
On an October afternoon in 1989, mobsters from Connecticut, Rhode
Island, and Massachusetts gathered at a modest home in Medford for a
secret ritual: the induction of four soldiers into the New England
Mafia, which marked a new beginning after their underboss was killed by a
renegade faction.
“It’s going to be the life of the heaven,” consigliere Joseph “J.R.”
Russo promised the new recruits, who pricked blood from their trigger
fingers, burned holy cards and promised to kill anyone — even their own
sons if necessary — to protect La Cosa Nostra, Italian for “This Thing
of Ours.” As an FBI bug recorded the infamous ceremony, a historic
moment for the law enforcement agency, Russo boasted that the secret
Sicilian-born organization had thrived for seven generations, spreading
to New York, Boston, Providence, Hartford, Chicago, and other cities
across the country.
Those days are gone, according to former law enforcement officials and organized crime experts.
So much so that the FBI’s Boston office, which oversees much of New
England, quietly disbanded its organized crime squad recently and
re-assigned agents to other priorities, according to several people
familiar with the move.
The agency will still monitor any organized crime groups, as needed. But
the disbandment of a unit that was largely built to target the Mafia
signaled a death notice of sorts — an end of a dark era — for what was
once one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the region, as
well as the storied unit that was built to combat it.
“I don’t think there’s much of anything left with traditional organized
crime,” said Fred Wyshak, a former federal prosecutor who won the
convictions of local Italian and Irish organized crime figures,
including the late former Mafia boss Francis “Cadillac Frank” Salemme,
notorious gangster Stephen Flemmi, and South Boston crime boss James
“Whitey” Bulger. “I think the leadership was destroyed and nobody really
has the strength to step in and fill that void. I don’t think there’s a
lot of desire to do so.”
The death earlier this month of 97-year-old Luigi “Louie” Manocchio, the
last don to lead the Mafia’s New England family from Providence’s
Federal Hill, recalled a bygone era when the Mafia was the region’s most
dominant criminal group. It has been on the decline for decades,
following waves of federal prosecutions dating to the 1980s that sent
eight bosses and underbosses and scores of underlings to prison for
crimes ranging from murder to shaking down strip clubs. Another
deterrent to recruitment was the revelation that some top-ranking
members broke “omerta,” the mob’s code of silence, to become informants
or cooperating witnesses.
“They’re just not at the threat level that they were years ago,” said
Steven O’Donnell, former superintendent of the Rhode Island State
Police. “We can’t sit back on our laurels, as organized crime still
exists and always will exist, but there are other entities that are a
greater threat in this country.”
He estimated there are currently only about 30 “made” members of the New
England Mafia, compared to hundreds during its heyday decades ago.
Kristen Setera, a spokesperson for the FBI, declined to discuss the
disbandment of the squad, but said the Boston office “continues to
dedicate significant resources to work and eradicate transnational and
regional organized criminal enterprises.”
In an email, she said “Every year, every field office across the FBI
takes a hard look at the threats in their respective area of
responsibility and adjusts resources assigned to mitigate those threats
to ensure each one is adequately being worked.”
Richard DesLauriers, who served as head of the FBI’s Boston office from
2010 to 2013, said the Mafia is no longer considered a serious threat
because the FBI’s organized crime unit, along with other federal, state
and local law enforcement agencies, has been so successful at
dismantling it. Now, he said, the FBI has greater concerns.
“I think they were significant back in the early 20th century,”
DesLauriers said. “Back then we did not have the threat of terrorism,
foreign spies stealing our secrets, and cyber crime.”
The bureau’s focus has shifted since 9/11 to those latter concerns, he said.
But in the 1960s the Mafia was one of the FBI’s top priorities, leading
to the creation of federal units to prosecute organized crime. The New
England Organized Crime Strike Force brought its first major case in
Boston against the local mob after the FBI planted a bug inside the
North End headquarters of underboss Gennaro “Jerry” Angiulo in 1981 and
captured him ordering murders and directing a lucrative gambling and
loansharking operation. He was convicted of racketeering, along with the
rest of the Mafia’s leadership in Boston, and sentenced to 45 years in
prison.
In 1989, the FBI’s organized crime squad captured the first-ever
recording of a Mafia induction ceremony, at the Medford home with the
baptism of new recruits, which served as the cornerstone of another
sweeping racketeering indictment that sent Mafia boss Raymond “Junior”
Patriarca and his underlings to prison.
Those high-profile successes were overshadowed in the late 1990s when it
was publicly revealed that the FBI used Bulger and Flemmi as informants
against their rivals in the Mafia and that corrupt agents took payoffs
from the pair and protected them from prosecution even as they were
committing murders and other crimes. Bulger fled to evade charges in
1995 and spent 16 years on the run. He was killed in prison in 2018
while serving a life sentence for 11 murders. Retired FBI agent John J.
Connolly Jr., Bulger’s handler, was convicted of murder.
Boston attorney Anthony Cardinale, who represented a number of Mafiosi,
including Angiulo and Salemme, and helped expose the FBI’s corrupt
relationship with Bulger and Flemmi, said the dismantling of the FBI’s
organized crime squad “came about 50 years too [expletive] late.”
Cardinale said that the FBI built exaggerated cases against the Mafia
and that the agency falsely portrayed a group of Italian Americans in
Boston as being part of a “multinational, worldwide criminal conspiracy
of vast proportions, when in fact it’s a few Italian guys running a
bookmaking operation and a barbut game in the North End.”
Yet, the FBI cases offer a chilling glimpse into violent exploits of the local mob.
In 2011, reputed New England Mafia boss Anthony DiNunzio was secretly
recorded during a meeting in Malden telling a mob associate that if
someone dared defy his rule, “I get to watch you die in the ground,”
according to wiretaps detailed in court filings.
The following year, he pleaded guilty in federal court in Rhode Island
to racketeering conspiracy and was sentenced to 6 1/2 years in prison.
DiNunzio had taken the lead as boss from his brother, Carmen “The
Cheeseman” DiNunzio, who served five years in prison for delivering a
$10,000 bribe to an undercover FBI agent posing as a state official,
part of a conspiracy to secure a $6 million Big Dig contract. Law
enforcement officials say Carmen DiNunzio resumed his leadership
position after his release from prison nine years ago.
But the New England Mafia is now “a shell of itself,” said Steve
Johnson, a retired Massachusetts State Police detective lieutenant and
longtime organized crime investigator.
“It’s mostly figurehead people and wannabes ... people pretending they
are doing their best Sopranos act,” he said. “It’s mostly just in name.
They are certainly not what they used to be.”
Former federal prosecutor, Brian T. Kelly, part of the team that
prosecuted Salemme, Bulger, and Flemmi, said the disbanding of the FBI’s
traditional organized crime squad is a good sign and “we shouldn’t
lament it” if it means organized crime in Boston is on the wane.
“It’s probably the one area of law enforcement where they’ve had a resounding success,” he said.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/12/22/metro/mafia-boston-organized-crime-fbi/#:~:text=So%20much%20so%20that%20the,organized%20crime%20groups%2C%20as%20needed
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