The Mob is being squeezed. From within, old age and illness are weakening its tired family bosses; impatient younger Mafiosi are killing each other in their brutal reach for power. From without, federal and state authorities seem to be putting aside old rivalries to gang up on the gangsters in a new drive to put their leaders behind bars and shatter their murderous ways of conducting business. There were no fewer than 3,118 indictments against organized-crime figures in the nation last year, and 2,194 convictions. Last week a rash of arrests and the preparation of new charges against the five Mafia families operating in New York City threatened to cripple even further the controlling structure of syndicate crime in the U.S.
No law-enforcement official is claiming that the Mafia is about to be knocked out of operation. But the Justice Department hopes that its attack on the Sicilian-bred traditions and cohesiveness of U.S. mobsters will have a demoralizing impact. "The vice of the Mafia that makes it worse than ordinary crime is its organized structure," contends Rudolph Giuliani, 40, the aggressive U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. "We're trying to indict and take out an entity, an organization, and not just the individuals."
The weapon brandished by Giuliani and other federal prosecutors is a 1970 law dubbed RICO, since it is aimed at "racketeer-influenced and corrupt organizations." Under the statute, the leaders of any organization can be prosecuted when the group's members commit crimes that show a pattern of racketeering. Prosecutors do not have to prove that the leader personally committed the illegal acts, only that he supported the specific crimes in some way, such as approving them or sharing in any illegal profits.
The RICO law had already been used to indict some Mafia clan leaders in New York (including Carmine Persico, 51, a Colombo family chieftain), Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Cleveland and Rochester. Charges of skimming $2 million in cash from casinos in Las Vegas have also been leveled against high Mafia figures in Chicago, Kansas City and Milwaukee.
Last week federal law enforcers turned their attention again to New York City, where most of the Mob's muscle is concentrated. After a five-year investigation, a Brooklyn-based federal organized- crime strike force headed by Edward McDonald brought indictments against the Lucchese family and two officers of Mafia-dominated Teamsters Union locals. The indictment charges that Salvatore Santoro, 69, a Lucchese underboss, other gang members and Teamster officials extorted more than $246,000 from companies handling air freight at John F. Kennedy International Airport. The gangsters allegedly bragged that "we rule the airport," and shook down the trucking firms in return for promises of peaceful labor relations.