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A report that Coffey's unit recently prepared for New York City police commissioner Lee Brown describes the Genovese family as the "most stable," the "best counseled" and the most diversified business-crime group in the country. Leading the family's extortion list is the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the largest U.S. labor union (1.7 million members). Mostly through unions, the family also has major clout in such trades as construction, food distribution, textiles and garbage hauling. The Genovese clan dominates the ports of New York, New Jersey and Miami, as well as America's biggest fish market.
Many of these industries are vulnerable to racketeering because of their high labor costs. Payoffs to the Mob can assure businessmen of prompt deliveries, labor peace and the ability to use cheaper workers. Following indictments in June involving a painters' union, the Manhattan district attorney's office estimated that an average $15 million-a-year painting contractor saved $3.8 million in costs by paying gangsters. How? The payoff entitled the contractor to use low-wage painters without getting any flak from the mobbed-up union. But in the end, consumers often pay the price. Economists estimate that Cosa Nostra's penetration of industries in New York City alone costs citizens hundreds of millions of dollars annually from inflated prices for everything from fresh fish to new condominiums. The biggest beneficiary: the Genovese clan.
In the entertainment industry, Mob watchers say it is difficult to book an act in Las Vegas or Atlantic City without the Genovese brugad getting its slice. Law-enforcement officials point to superagent Lee Salomon of the William Morris Agency as being linked to a top Genovese captain named James (Jimmy Nap) Napoli. In the late 1960s, at a time when the government was bugging the talent agency's Manhattan office, Salomon was arranging for Napoli's wife Jeanne, an unknown singer, to get star billing for her nightclub act.
Since then, the agent has represented the likes of Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, Julio Iglesias, Tony Orlando and Jackie Mason. "The stars are victims more than co-conspirators," maintains a Mafia investigator. "In order to work, they have to cooperate." Salomon vehemently denies any Mob ties. Says he: "I'm the cleanest, purest person you'll ever meet in your life." Salomon admits knowing "Jimmy Nap" but wonders, "Doesn't everybody?"
While the Genovese family is New York based, its influence has few geographical boundaries. Smaller crime families from Cleveland to Pittsburgh to New England answer to the Genovese gang in various ways. So did Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa of Detroit, who vanished without a trace in 1975 after pledging to boot his Mob sponsors out of the union. At the time, the family was emerging as a global trader of sorts, in one case allegedly trying to pass $950 million in counterfeit and stolen securities to the Vatican's bank in Rome. In a recent operation, the family shipped counterfeit watches, wallets and clothing from Hong Kong to Florida.