Departments

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organized crime

  • SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
    10/4/2021

    Are Millennial Workers and Boomer Managers Destroying the Mafia, Too?

    Federal prosecutions in the 1980s and 1990s decimated experienced middle-management ranks in New York's organized crime families. Are they struggling today because their remaining workforce consists of boomers who can't quit and millennials who are on their phones too much? 

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    11/30/2020

    Why New York’s Mob Mythology Endures

    by Adam Gopnik

    "Generally, in Mob stories, the cute bits are not real, and the real bits are not cute. Given that grim truth, there’s something to be said for just shutting your eyes and repeating the cute bits." Some new books on the Mafia unfortunately follow the pattern. 

  • SOURCE: News 3 Las Vegas
    5/13/2020

    The Last Remnants of the 'Mob Era' in Las Vegas

    John Gotti allegedly maintained a low-profile skimming operation at an off-strip casino years after Nevada officials believed they had swept the mob out of the gaming business.

  • SOURCE: NYT
    8-13-13

    Bulger guilty in gangland crimes

    BOSTON — James (Whitey) Bulger, the mobster who terrorized South Boston in the 1970s and ‘80s, holding the city in his thrall even after he disappeared, was convicted Monday of a sweeping array of gangland crimes, including 11 murders. He faces the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.The verdict delivers long-delayed justice to Mr. Bulger, 83, who disappeared in the mid-1990s after a corrupt agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation told him he was about to be indicted. He left behind a city that wondered if he would ever be caught — and even if the F.B.I., which had been complicit in many of his crimes and had relied on him as an informer, was really looking for him.“This was the worst case of corruption in the history of the F.B.I.,” said Michael D. Kendall, a former federal prosecutor who investigated Mr. Bulger’s associates. “It was a multigenerational, systematic alliance with organized crime, where the F.B.I. was actively participating in the murders of government witnesses, or at least allowing them to occur.”...

  • SOURCE: WaPo
    6-12-13

    Whitey Bulger trial opens in Boston

    BOSTON — James “Whitey” Bul­ger is an old man now.He wears reading glasses. His hair is pure white, but not much remains. And when he stood up in a federal courtroom Wednesday morning to finally face the music, to stand trial for a lifetime of gangster crimes, he rose slowly, no longer the menacing Irish mob boss who allegedly scratched out 19 lives while the FBI looked the other way.Wearing a long-sleeved green shirt, jeans and sneakers, Bulger sat passively as a prosecutor described his younger, more sinister years as leader of the Winter Hill Gang, including the time he allegedly marched a safecracker named Arthur “Bucky” Barrett to a set of cellar stairs after torturing him in a chair in pursuit of $40,000 from a bank robbery....

  • How Did the IRS Get Investigatory Authority, Anyway?

    by Douglas M. Charles

    Mobster Frank Costello testifying in front of the Kefauver Committee. Credit: Wiki Commons.The IRS "scandal" involving the “targeting” of conservative Tea Party groups is metastasizing. Congressional Republicans are seeking to open a broader investigation into the agency, with which, according to the New York Times, they "hope to ensare the White House."But an understanding of the true history of IRS scandals -- as documented in the mid-1970s Church Committee reports -- might better inform our understanding of this contemporary story.