(3 of 4)
The core of the federal case is expected to be its charge that the Mafia is governed by a national commission consisting of the five New York bosses and family leaders from Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Cleveland, Philadelphia and New England. Federal investigators contend that the Mob's most lucrative operations and major disciplinary acts, including the elimination of top figures who have disobeyed the rules, must be approved by the commission and that the New York bosses effectively control this ruling body. Investigators say that Corallo talked frequently about the commission in his conversations in the Jaguar. Thus the commission itself is expected to be cited in the indictment as a corrupt organization.
The existence of a top council coordinating organized crime has been known by federal agents and many police investigators since it was established in 1931 after a bloody gang war among the New York clans. The first taped evidence of the commission's makeup was acquired by the FBI in 1959 when bugs placed in a tailor shop on Chicago's North Michigan Avenue caught Tony Accardo, the city's boss, ticking off those members of the commission he thought would support his gang in a dispute with the Bonanno family.
Federal investigators in Boston claim to have collected a virtual 20-year history of Mob operations in that city in the form of 640 video and audio tapes. The FBI in 1981 planted bugs in the North End apartment and operating headquarters of a once rising Mafioso, Gennaro (Jerry) Angiulo, 65. Hidden FBI cameras also videotaped mobsters entering and leaving the apartment. Angiulo, four of his brothers and one of his sons have been charged with racketeering and will soon face trials in Boston. The city's respected First National Bank has been accused in an FBI affidavit of having failed to report huge cash transactions with firms controlled by the Angiulos, as required by law. William Brown, the bank's chairman, admitted last week that the Mob may have "used" the bank to launder more than $2 million in cash, but if so, he claimed that bank officials had helped "unwittingly."
It apparently was a coincidence, but mobsters worried about informants who might cooperate with prosecutors to lessen their own penalties could take no comfort from hearings conducted in Miami last week by the President's Commission on Organized Crime. That group paraded a number of former Mafiosi who publicly regretted their criminal past. Luigi Ronsisvalle, 44, told of growing up in Sicily, where he followed Mafia developments "like an American kid follows baseball." He said he spent 13 years in the syndicate, mostly as a hit man, after moving to New York City, and eventually killed 13 people. He also took part in armed robberies and carried heroin for the Bonanno and Gambino families. He had expected to become "a man of honor" in the Mafia, he explained, but he became ashamed of his own actions when he killed a woman in a $2,000 robbery. "In Sicily," he said, "you don't touch a lady even if there's a million dollars in her handbag."
The commissioners also heard from Leroy ("Nicky") Barnes, 52, a former Harlem gangster convicted of heroin dealing. Wearing a hood to hide features that have been altered by plastic surgery, Barnes said he had controlled drug sales of some $200,000 a day in Harlem, but insisted that he had done so without violence.