Lucchese Crime Family, News & Discussion

Yes, Steven Crea shifted the family's power center away from the Brooklyn crews and back to the Manhattan and Bronx crews who had historically controlled the family for decades.

what do you think of 'the wonder boy'. iv heard positive things about him, you think he can bring some power and respect back to the Lucchesses?

Yeah i think so he's very close to the Genovese family

Also from the Bronx faction Neil Migliore!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aniello_Migliore

FBI arrests 8 New York mafia men



Agence France-Presse
First Posted 08:51:00 11/25/2008


NEW YORK -- FBI agents arrested eight members of New York's Luchese organized crime family Monday on illegal gambling and narcotics charges, the federal prosecutor said.

An acting "capo" in the Luchese family and seven others were nabbed, US Attorney Michael Garcia said.

Anthony Croce, the man described as the capo, faces a maximum sentence of five years prison if convicted on the gambling charges.

Three others face heavier sentences of between five and 40 years if convicted on cocaine distribution charges, the prosecutor said.

New York's five mafia crime families -- the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Luchese -- have taken big hits in the last decade as veteran leaders died and turncoats helped the authorities make strings of arrests.

This August, New York police arrested the alleged former capo of the Gambinos, John "Junior" Gotti. He is due to be tried in Florida on racketeering charges.

I saw on a site that the cocaine charges are a conspiracy to distribute 500 grams. That's small time, they could have easily just said it in ounces, but I guess they figured 500 grams sounds better. It's so low level, if it were not Italian guys who can be mentioned as Lucchese associates it would not make news.

I saw on a site that the cocaine charges are a conspiracy to distribute 500 grams. That's small time, they could have easily just said it in ounces, but I guess they figured 500 grams sounds better. It's so low level, if it were not Italian guys who can be mentioned as Lucchese associates it would not make news.

It' sjust over a pound, after being cut, so that means they bought a half a pound, cut it, and tried to sell it, if charges are true. The gambling and drug charges should be seperate, IMO.

Anyone have any updates on the Lucchese gambling ringin Dec 07? more than a year since their arrest:-

3 reputed mobsters nabbed in $2.2B gambling ring
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2007/12/3..._nabbed_in.html

New trial sought in '84 murder
Lawyers' advice at issue in case
By Kathleen Hopkins • TOMS RIVER BUREAU • January 18, 2009

In an Ocean County case involving a decades-old mob hit, the state Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Tuesday about what the appropriate legal remedy is for defendants who are convicted of crimes at trial after they received poor legal advice during plea bargaining.

In agreeing to hear the appeal by the state Attorney General's Office in the 1984 extortion and racketeering case against Martin Taccetta, a reputed Lucchese crime family member, the state's highest court will weigh in on an issue that the U.S. Supreme Court has expressed an interest in but has not decided, said Steven B. Duke, a Yale University law professor who, along with Orange attorney Marco Laracca, is representing Taccetta in the appeal.

Taccetta, now 57, of East Hanover, stood trial in Ocean County in 1993 for the June 12, 1984, murder of Vincent J. "Jimmy Sinatra" Craparotta.

Craparotta, 56, was beaten to death by two men with golf clubs at his Ocean County Auto Sales business on Route 9 in Toms River.

Taccetta was acquitted of the murder, which authorities said was fueled by the refusal of the victim's nephews to pay tributes to the Lucchese family from the proceeds of their video poker machine business.

Taccetta, however, was convicted of racketeering, conspiracy and extortion and sentenced to life plus 10 years in prison. He was released from state prison on Dec. 7, 2005, when Superior Court Judge James N. Citta vacated his conviction and granted him a new trial because he was given ineffective legal advice from his trial attorney, David Ruhnke.

Ruhnke mistakenly told Taccetta during plea bargaining that he faced, at most, 20 years in prison if he was acquitted of the murder but convicted of the other charges. Based on that advice, Taccetta said he rejected an offer to plead guilty to killing Craparotta in exchange for a 20-year prison term.

Last year, the Appellate Division of Superior Court upheld Citta's decision. The appellate panel ordered the state to resume plea bargaining with Taccetta or retry him.

The Attorney General's Office instead filed an appeal that the state Supreme Court will hear on Tuesday.

Deputy Attorney General Robert Bonpietro argues in legal briefs filed in October that it would be unfair to force the state to retry Taccetta 15 years after his initial trial and more than 20 years after the events in the case took place.

Bonpietro claims Taccetta was motivated to reject the plea bargain offered to him not so much by his attorney's erroneous advice, but "far more by the idea of beating the rap once again. . . . In other words, defendant rolled the dice, but lost this time."

Bonpietro, in his brief, said that despite the faulty advice given him in the pretrial stage of the case, Taccetta still was given a fair trial, and the outcome of that trial should stand.

Duke said Bonpietro is relying on a 2007 case in which a Utah court expressed doubt that a defendant who rejected a plea bargain but received a fair trial had been prejudiced. Duke said the vast majority of courts throughout the nation have ruled that such defendants are entitled to new trials.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court instructed parties to file briefs in a case addressing exactly the issue of what remedy should be given to a defendant convicted after given bad advice during plea bargaining, Duke said. The case, however, was dismissed before the high court considered the question, he said.

"I guess the Supreme Court of New Jersey wants to weigh in on it and decide it," Duke said.

Duke and Laracca contend in their brief that denying defendants relief because they turn down plea bargains and go to trial would "wreak havoc on an already burdened system of criminal justice" by discouraging plea bargaining.

Taccetta's attorneys also reject the state's argument that their client received a fair trial, even though the state Appellate Division upheld his conviction in 1997, and the state Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal.

Photo

Attached Image (Click thumbnail to expand)

Mobster Makes Offer on French Connection Case
Patrick A. Burns/The New York Times
EVIDENCE LOST Hundreds of pounds of drugs disappeared from the property clerk’s office, shown in 1972, when the theft was discovered.
NY TIMES
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
Published: February 21, 2009
In prison, far from the Brooklyn haunts where his name was scrawled in blood, Anthony Casso stews. He stews over old vendettas. He stews over betrayals of the flesh — heart problems and prostate cancer.

And Mr. Casso, the once fearsome underboss of the Lucchese family who is now serving multiple life sentences amounting to 455 years for murder, stews over his secrets: unsolved crimes that, he says in an outpouring of letters, he is eager to help close if only he could show the authorities where the bodies are buried (especially if it entails a trip outside the gates).

“I would go out there in a heartbeat,” Mr. Casso said on Friday in a telephone call to a former detective seeking the mobster’s help in clearing his own name.

But as much as he hopes for a taste of freedom, or a reduction of his sentence, prosecutors question what his information may be worth and what perils may lie in reopening contact with an antagonist some compare to the fictional monster Hannibal Lecter.

Dangling as a prize is the answer to one of New York’s most scandalous mysteries: how 400 pounds of heroin and cocaine, much of it seized in the so-called French Connection drug bust in 1962, were spirited out of the police property vault for resale back on the street. By the time the record theft was discovered in December 1972, the drugs — then valued at $73 million — had been replaced with flour and cornstarch.

Who committed the deed? “There were four narcotics detectives,” Mr. Casso wrote the former detective, Pat Intrieri, in October, amplifying information he offered in his 2008 biography. “One worked inside the property clerk’s office.” One, he added, was later shot to death; Mr. Casso said he remembers where the gun was thrown.

But Mr. Casso, 66, whose mob nickname was Gaspipe, says he is having trouble with exact locations. So, naturally, he would like to get out, if only for a day, to be helpful. Or at least win some leniency along the lines of a plea deal he says the government reneged on: six and a half years in prison.

“Of course he’d like to get out — he’s serving 55 million years,” said Michael F. Vecchione, chief of the rackets division in the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. Like other prosecutors, Mr. Vecchione has little stomach for Mr. Casso. But without any promises, he has arranged to visit Mr. Casso on Tuesday at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, N.C., where he has been undergoing cancer treatment, although it would take corroboration far beyond the mobster’s word to make any case.

“I bet you when the state guys come, they don’t know half the things,” Mr. Casso said on Friday to Mr. Intrieri, who relayed his remarks to The New York Times.

There is little chance that Mr. Casso, now 15 years behind the stoutest walls America can contrive, will ever see his release — not after pleading guilty in 15 murders and being tied to some 22 others.

He has also been accused of plotting to kill a federal judge and prosecutors, and violating the terms of his agreement to turn informant as one of the highest-level mobsters ever to flip — becoming the only major Mafia defector to be thrown out of the federal witness protection program.

Mr. Casso has also waffled on whether he corrupted an F.B.I. agent and hired two New York City police detectives, Louis J. Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, as mob assassins. The former detectives are to be sentenced on March 6 on racketeering charges.

If, moreover, he still wonders why the authorities are leery of his offers, Mr. Casso may have provided the answer to his biographer, Philip Carlo. In his 2008 book, “Gaspipe: Confessions of a Mafia Boss,” Mr. Carlo, a longtime friend of the Casso family, outlined several of the mobster’s escape schemes, including the planned ambush of a van carrying him back from court after his capture in New Jersey in 1993.

“He’s where he should be,” said Gregory O’Connell, a former federal prosecutor in Brooklyn who initially interviewed Mr. Casso with his late partner, Charles Rose, and called him “the most treacherous sociopath we ever dealt with.”

But a man can dream, and for Mr. Casso, that means being back once again in the Brooklyn sunshine, pinpointing old Mafia execution grounds and the watery grave of a murder weapon. Not rising at 5 a.m. every day to meticulously clean his cell in a federal “supermax” prison in Florence, Colo., that also houses the likes of the Unabomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski; the Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols; and such fellow mobsters as Gregory Scarpa Jr. and Salvatore Gravano, known as Sammy the Bull.

“I think he got a raw deal,” said Joshua L. Dratel, the latest of Mr. Casso’s many lawyers. Mr. Dratel said Mr. Casso was “poor at playing the system” and threatened major cases by exposing Mr. Gravano and other government witnesses and federal agents as liars. Mr. Casso has long claimed that the records of his F.B.I. debriefings, never made public, would show that the government covered up his warnings of moles in its ranks and that to get out of their plea deal with him, prosecutors used other Mafia turncoats as witnesses instead.

Perhaps Mr. Casso’s staunchest pen pal is Mr. Intrieri, 79, a onetime decorated New York detective lieutenant who was convicted of tax evasion in 1976 in the aftermath of the French Connection drug thefts. Mr. Intrieri, who has drafted a memoir asserting his innocence, saw new information on the case in Mr. Carlo’s book and said he found Mr. Casso’s accounts of unsolved crimes credible.

Mr. Casso has served 15 years at a “supermax” prison in Colorado.
“He wants to get out a little bit, I guess; he’s going stir-crazy,” Mr. Intrieri said, after getting more than a dozen phone calls from Mr. Casso in recent weeks. “But his goal is a sentence reduction.”

The drugs at the core of the mystery — popularized as “The French Connection” in a 1969 book by Robin Moore and an Academy Award-winning film that followed two years later — were secreted in compartments in a 1960 Buick loaded aboard the liner United States sailing from Le Havre, France, to New York. The car and its 112 pounds of heroin were later claimed by a Lucchese family underling, Patsy Fuca, who, as it happened, was being tailed by a pair of dogged New York narcotics detectives, Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso.

The drug bust in January 1962 was widely hailed as a record. But the heroics proved short-lived. In six thefts between March 1969 and January 1972, someone signing the register as Detective Joseph Nunziata, a member of the narcotics bureau’s widely corrupt special investigations unit, and using fictitious badge numbers, removed the French Connection drugs along with another 300 pounds of heroin and cocaine from the police property vault at 400 Broome Street (now a New York University dorm).

Handwriting analysis and a discovered fingerprint never established that Detective Nunziata actually signed the police register. But eight months before the thefts were discovered, Detective Nunziata, charged with corruption in an unrelated case, was found shot to death in his car. It was ruled a suicide.

Mr. Moore, the author, wrote that as far back as 1967, he and Detectives Nunziata, Egan and Grosso joked about stealing the French Connection heroin.

Many suspects emerged, including Vincent Papa, a major drug dealer; Frank King, a retired narcotics detective and private eye working for Mr. Papa; and Mr. Intrieri, who upon his retirement had joined Mr. King as a bodyguard for one of Mr. Papa’s sons — “the biggest mistake of my life,” Mr. Intrieri now says. (Mr. Papa’s lawyer was overheard on a wiretap asking Mr. King, “Do we have anything to worry about the handwriting analysis?”) After providing what he thought was confidential information on four corrupt narcotics detectives, Mr. Papa was stabbed to death in prison.

Also under scrutiny was Vincent Albano, another former narcotics detective, who had served under Mr. Intrieri and had survived a mysterious hail of bullets in 1969, only to be slain in 1985.

Thomas P. Puccio, then a Brooklyn federal prosecutor, focused on Mr. King and Mr. Intrieri, but failed to tie them to the drug thefts. Mr. Puccio charged them instead with tax evasion for unexplained income, winning convictions and five-year sentences for both, along with three years for tax evasion by Mr. Albano. But the case remained a puzzle, Mr. Puccio conceded in an interview. “We never really conclusively solved it,” he said.

Still indignant over his conviction more than 30 years later, Mr. Intrieri — who held 15 police citations for bravery and valor — saw in Mr. Carlo’s book that Mr. Casso had named Mr. Albano and a mob associate as two of the French Connection thieves. The book related how Mr. Albano had been shot to death in Brooklyn in 1985, and how Mr. Casso had supplied the gun and helped dump the body on Staten Island.

Mr. Carlo, in an interview, said Mr. Casso had told him Mr. Albano had conceived the drug heist and asked Mr. Casso how to carry it out.

Mr. Intrieri, in his own manuscript, “The French Connection: The Aftermath,” told of running into Mr. Albano several times over the years — including in 1980 while Mr. Albano was casing a Queens bank — and said that Mr. Albano had laughed at hearing that Mr. Intrieri was a suspect in the drug thefts.

By opening an exchange of letters with Mr. Casso — a correspondence that grew to include this reporter — Mr. Intrieri elicited other details, and other crimes.

Mr. Casso offered details of the 1986 car bombing aimed at John Gotti that killed his Gambino family underboss, Frank DeCicco; the killing of a Russian mob associate, Michael Markowitz, in 1989; and the apparently unreported killing of a Jewish drug importer near Mr. Albano’s office around 1980, among other crimes.

Officials at the Federal Medical Center in North Carolina did not respond to repeated requests to interview Mr. Casso by phone.

“I’ll be here awhile receiving treatments for prostate cancer,” Mr. Casso wrote Mr. Intrieri in December. “Just my luck.”

As for the gun that killed Mr. Albano, Mr. Casso supplied a hand-drawn map with imperfect punctuation showing, he said, where it had been thrown: “Its in Sheepshead Bay.”

He also sketched a site where, he said, another mob victim was buried, calling it: “Drawing for the Colombians remains.”

Mr. Intrieri said that his follow-up inquiries gave credence to Mr. Casso’s information and that it was worth giving the old mob boss a chance to hand prosecutors new evidence. “I sincerely believe that until he goes to the site, he won’t remember,” Mr. Intrieri said.

Mobster Anthony 'Gaspipe' Casso may cough up answers on bodies
BY Scott Shifrel
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Monday, February 23rd 2009, 2:52 AM

Brooklyn prosecutors are hoping that a cancer-stricken 66-year-old former crime boss serving multiple life sentences for murder will tell them where to dig for bodies.

Anthony (Gaspipe) Casso, a former Luchese capo, wrote to Michael Vecchione, Brooklyn rackets chief - dangling an offer of information about several unsolved crime-family murders from decades ago.

"Gaspipe reached out and said he wanted to talk," said Jerry Schmetterer, Brooklyn district attorney's office spokesman, who acknowledged a bombshell revelation is unlikely.

"He could be a help on past Brooklyn murders. His hunting grounds were in Brooklyn."

Casso will meet with Vecchione tomorrow at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, N.C., where the once-feared killer is undergoing cancer treatment.

The rackets chief and Casso are acquaintances from the days when Vecchione was investigating two ex-New York City detectives - Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa - who secretly worked for the mob. Eppolito and Caracappa were convicted and will be sentenced next month.

Casso pleaded guilty to more than a dozen murders and is in prison for life. Vecchione wrote a book about the whole sordid mess that is due out in May.

The trip has nothing to do with the book, Schmetterer said, but it could prove useful in solving some of the 22 additional murders Casso is suspected of committing. It may even reveal what happened to Jimmy Hydell's body.

Investigators believe Hydell, a wiseguy wanna-be who disappeared from his Staten Island home in 1986, was stopped by Eppolito and Caracappa at the behest of Casso.

The mob cops' secret life began unraveling after Hydell's mother, who had spotted them hanging around her home, recognized Eppolito from a TV appearance promoting his book.

Betty Hydell testified at the cops' federal trial in Brooklyn, and investigators believe only Casso may know what happened to her son's body.

Bring me the head of Charlie Rose!

No, not the PBS talk-show host. The other one the legendary Mafia-busting prosecutor.

Unfortunately, bumbling mob cops Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa and the Mafia assassin they dispatched to Long Island didn't know the difference and nearly bumped off public television's dapper yapper.

So says "Friends of the Family," a new book about the mob cops by retired detective Tommy Dades and Brooklyn prosecutor Michael Vecchione, who cracked the case.

The authors write that the disgraced NYPD detectives gave bad information to their benefactor, Luchese underboss Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso, who dispatched a triggerman to the talk-show host's house, not knowing it wasn't the home of a Brooklyn federal prosecutor he wanted dead.

The killer never saw Rose and left, according to the book.

"It's a surprise it's all new to me," the TV host told The Post.

He confirmed that he's owned a home for years in Bellport, which is near the beach on eastern Long Island, about 20 miles west of Quogue.

Casso told FBI agents the house was in "the Hamptons," according to the book.

Casso was furious with Mafia-busting prosecutor Charles Rose, believing that Rose embarrassed him by leaking a story about Casso having killed his former architect for having an affair with the mobster's wife.

The bloodthirsty Casso did the unthinkable and put out a contract on the former assistant US attorney, who died of a brain tumor in 1998.

"Naturally, the only people Casso trusted to get Rose's address were the cops," the book says.

"Casso was captured before he could make his move against Rose, but supposedly he did get an address for the prosecutor in the Hamptons. One of his people waited at the house for the prosecutor to show up, but for whatever reason Rose never got there.

"That was truly fortunate it turned out to be the wrong Charlie Rose . . This was the home of the TV show host, not the prosecutor."

"It's a 'wow' revelation in the book," said Vecchione, who heads the investigation unit of the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office. "I mean, Charlie Rose!"

The 1992 incident wasn't the first goof by the corrupt former detectives, whom Casso paid $4,000 a month to help kill rival hoods and supply tips on turncoats and probes.

Caracappa and Eppolito, who were sentenced to life on March 6, were asked to find the address of Nicholas Guido, a conspirator who tried to knock off Casso in a botched hit.

The cops got the wrong information; this time, Casso's henchmen killed an innocent Brooklyn man also named Nicholas Guido.

The book says Casso told FBI agents that Eppolito, Caracappa and an unnamed uniform cop ripped off millions in heroin in a notorious heist of the French Connection evidence from the NYPD property office.

The book "Friends of the Family" comes out May 12.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/03222009/news/..._job_160794.htm

Stadium Work Done by Firms New York Shuns

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/11/nyregion...&pagewanted=all

Crea is a well known surename in Calabria, is Steven Crea of Calabrian descent?

Yes Hollander I think Steven Crea is of Calabrian descent

http://www.nypost.com/seven/07222009/news/...dead_180645.htm

CANARY WHO NAILED MOB COPS IS DEAD

Burton Kaplan, the star turncoat who played a key role in bringing down mob cops Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, died of prostate cancer earlier this month, sources told The Post.

The 75-year-old stool pigeon, whose daughter is Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Deborah Kaplan, spent the last three years of his life in an undisclosed location after a judge slashed his 27-year prison sentence for drug trafficking to 9 years as a reward for his testimony.

Sources said the family has kept the death secret since July 11 and his daughter declined comment yesterday.

Kaplan took the stand in 2006 to detail a life of crime, in which he acted as Luchese underboss Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso's go-between with the disgraced detectives.

Eppolito and Caracappa were long suspected of carrying out murders and feeding the mob information, but had managed to live above the law until Kaplan agreed to cooperate with the feds.

Relatives of the mob cops' victims have been trying to force Kaplan to testify in connection with their lawsuits against the disgraced detectives and the city.

Kaplan was piece of garbage. A heroin dealer, who had judge for daughter, which helped him in negotiations. He was made a hero by some, like Jimmy Breslin. He was just afraid of prison, nothing more.

N.J. Supreme Court orders reputed Lucchese family mobster back to jail
by Mary Fuchs/State House Bureau
Thursday July 30, 2009, 7:28 PM

TRENTON -- When a judge overturned Martin Taccetta's conviction on racketeering charges nearly five years ago, the reputed Lucchese crime family mobster celebrated his release from prison with a cigar.

Today, the state Supreme Court ordered that he be returned to prison to serve a life sentence.

In a unanimous decision, the justices said Taccetta's conviction could not be overturned because he confessed to a judge during his appeal that he would have lied on the witness stand in order to take a plea deal allegedly offered by the state.

"Though we recognize that sometimes an accused, unknown to the trial judge, will perjure himself to put through a plea agreement, a court cannot give official license to such a practice," Justice Barry Albin wrote for the court.

The case involved allegations Taccetta and fellow Lucchese crime family figures initiated the golf-club beating death of an Ocean County businessman, Vincent "Jimmy Sinatra" Craporatta, to intimidate the victim's nephews into sharing profits in a Jersey Shore boardwalk arcade operation.

Taccetta, 58, of East Hanover, repeatedly denied, both during and after his trial, any involvement in the 1984 murder.

He was convicted in 1993 of first-degree racketeering, second-degree conspiracy to commit racketeering, and two counts of second-degree theft by extortion.

He was later acquitted of the murder charge but sentenced to life in prison plus 10 years when the judge found the overall criminal conspiracy led to the killing.

Today's decision was cheered by Attorney General Anne Milgram.

"For decades Marty Taccetta was one of the most prolific members of organized crime, whose power and control over the Lucchese family threatened the residents of New Jersey and illegally impacted commercial activity," Milgram said.

But Taccetta's lawyer, Steven Duke, said his client was "completely innocent" on all of his charges.

"The Supreme Court of New Jersey knows all that as well. It has decided, however, that because Martin Taccetta had the temerity to assert his innocence, he should spend the rest of his life in prison," Duke said.

Authorities arrested Taccetta this evening and took him to the Morris County Jail, said Peter Aseltine, spokesman for the Attorney General's office. Aseltine said he will be turned over to state prison officials today.

Taccetta had been placed under house arrest with an electronic monitor last year because of his criminal history.

In 1998, Taccetta filed a petition for post-conviction relief, claiming David Ruhnke, his trial lawyer, did not tell him he would serve a life-term if he was acquitted of the murder charge. Taccetta alleges he was offered a plea deal by the state for a 20-year sentence -- but turned it down because he believed he would get off on the most severe charges and serve a lesser term.

In 2005, Superior Court Judge James Citta in Ocean County agreed Ruhnke had misinformed Taccetta by telling him to reject a plea deal that would have seen him paroled in as little as eight years.

Citta sent his case back for a new trial and Taccetta was released from prison.

But today, the justices voiced their overwhelming opposition to Citta's ruling.

Even if Taccetta received bad advice from Ruhnke, the justices said, he was not entitled to a new trial after his appeal because he said he would lie to the court to get out of a lengthy prison sentence.

"He would have perjured himself at the plea hearing, and an unwitting court would have accepted the plea offer," Albin wrote. "That result is antithetical to our court rules, case law, and the administration of justice and, therefore, we must reject it."

Updated: Wed., Sep. 9, 2009, 3:38 AM

Bloomy bulldozes bldg. inspectors
By MURRAY WEISS, DAVID SEIFMAN and LAURA ITALIANO

Last Updated: 3:38 AM, September 9, 2009

Posted: 2:35 AM, September 9, 2009

Buildings officials have been forced to re-inspect hundreds of construction sites after at least six inspectors were swept up in a mob-connected corruption probe that involved them taking bribes and dealing drugs, law-enforcement sources said yesterday.

The inspectors have yet to be charged, but have all quit, Mayor Bloomberg said -- the day after The Post broke the news of the scandal.

"They have resigned . . . You can rest assured we're not going to tolerate any of this," the mayor said.

"This is an industry that obviously for a long period of time has had problems with lawbreakers. We keep working at it and working at it, and hopefully, someday, we'll get rid of everybody in the construction industry that breaks the law."

Bloomberg's comments came a day after The Post revealed that building inspectors had been snared as part of an investigation into high-ranking Luchese crime-family figures. Red-faced city Buildings Department officials said they have been going over the suspect inspectors' work since June. The buildings involved are primarily in The Bronx.

Sources yesterday said that as many as 40 people would be arrested for bribery and bookmaking in as soon as a couple of weeks.

Investigators accidentally caught on to the inspectors' sleazy dealings when they picked up talk of bribes in wiretapped conversations among New Jersey mob bosses Joseph DiNapoli, Matthew Madonna and Aniello Migliore, as part of a bookmaking probe, sources said.

That led them to one man who worked as an "expediter" -- smoothing over code violations with the department -- who was monitored and caught taking bribes. When confronted, the man -- who had heavy gambling debts -- agreed to cooperate and helped investigators nail the others.

Among those implicated were brothers Charles and Frank Francomano of Yonkers -- who law-enforcement sources say were full-blown Luchese associates.

Additional reporting by Rich Calder

murray.weiss@nypost.com

49 indicted for bribery, racketeering schemes on a crazy Lucchese mob day

BY Jose Martinez and Brian Kates
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Friday, October 2nd 2009, 4:00 AM
Anthony Croce (top left), Matthew Madonna (top center), Joseph DiNapoli (top right), Carmine Francomano Sr. (bottom left), Frank Francomano (bottom center) and Carmine Francomano Jr. were among 49.
Anthony Croce (top left), Matthew Madonna (top center), Joseph DiNapoli (top right), Carmine Francomano Sr. (bottom left), Frank Francomano (bottom center) and Carmine Francomano Jr. were among 49.
Lucchese members Matthew Madonna and Joseph DiNapoli were key players.
Daily News
Lucchese members Matthew Madonna and Joseph DiNapoli were key players.

Forty-nine people, including top gangsters and three mobsters working as city building inspectors, were indicted Thursday in two separate bribery and racketeering schemes.

The Manhattan district attorney's office charged 29 people, including three ranking members of the Lucchese crime family and the mob-tied building inspectors, with soliciting bribes to overlook violations or speed up permits.

Prosecutors said acting Lucchese capo Anthony Croce, 76, and gangsters Joseph DiNapoli, 74, and Matthew Madonna, 73, were key players in a far-flung operation that pulled in some $400 million from gambling, loansharking, gun trafficking and extortion.

The ring passed around more than $120,000 in construction bribes, prosecutors said, adding that investigators tapped 64 telephones and bugged a restaurant in a two-year probe with the NYPD and the Department of Investigation.

"The threat of traditional organized crime is not a thing of the past," Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau said.

"Not content with activities like narcotics sales and gambling, the Lucchese family has actually sought to place associates in a government agency."

Morgenthau's probe began as an investigation of an Internet gambling operation in Costa Rica and led to corrupt building inspectors who took bribes to overlook code violations and approve permits.

The highest single bribe - $44,000 to win Buildings Department permits - went to reputed mob associate Carmine (Snappy) Francomano Sr., 71, prosecutors said.

Francomano's sons, Frank, 45, and Carmine Jr., 43, were building inspectors who extorted bribes from contractors and building owners, dealt drugs and trafficked in firearms, prosecutors said.

Other former building inspectors charged were mob associate Thomas Masucci, 59, and Earl Prentice, 54, Angel Luis Aviles, 56, and Exel Plass, 31.

All were charged with taking cash to void violations, lift stop-work orders and speed up inspections at more than a dozen sites across the city.

The indicted inspectors have resigned or been fired, Buildings Commissioner Robert LiMandri said.

"The department has visited all of the buildings associated with the investigation to ensure safety, and we expect to complete all reinspection work soon," he added.

In a separate indictment, the feds charged 12 more reputed Lucchese gangsters and seven others in a gambling, loansharking and extortion scheme. Prosecutors said the ring paid $222,000 in bribes to an NYPD detective and sergeant posing as crooked cops to protect city poker parlors.

Acting Lucchese capo Andrew DiSimone and crime family soldier Dominic (Nicky Pepsi) Capelli ran the ring, said Chief Brian Conroy of the NYPD vice division, who headed up the sting, dubbed Operation Open House.

bkates@nydailynews.com


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Mob suspect Wayne Schumer, president of Ucon Corp., is missing, being hunted in bribe case


BY Brian Kates
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER


The boss of a big New York construction firm disappeared before he could be arrested on charges of bribing mobbed-up building inspectors, the Daily News has learned.

Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau is hunting for Wayne Schumer, president of Ucon Corp., who is believed to have fled - possibly to Costa Rica, sources said.

Schumer is one of 29 reputed mobsters and associates charged in a wide-ranging bribery scheme that prosecutors say was led by two of the Luchese crime family's highest-ranking members, Joseph DiNapoli and Matthew Madonna.

Among those indicted are six former city building inspectors identified as Luchese associates, some of whom also are charged with drug dealing, loansharking and gun trafficking.

Schumer paid $44,000 to one corrupt inspector, the highest bribe uncovered in the two-year investigation, prosecutors said. He's accused of greasing palms to rig the inspection of Zorzi, an upscale Venetian restaurant and bar on E. 35th St., and to expedite a plumbing permit signoff at Salumeria Rosi, a gastro-pub on Amsterdam Ave.

Other high-end sites built by Ucon include Cipriani, the Rainbow Room, the Hudson and Paramount hotels, and the Campbell Apartment in Grand Central Terminal.

Grandson of Luchese crime capo - Joseph Cutaia - faces rap in robbery try

BY John Marzulli
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Thursday, December 24th 2009, 4:00 AM

A Mafia scion has been charged in the violent attempted robbery of a Brooklyn businessman and is a suspect in five other armed heists, officials said Wednesday.

Joseph Cutaia - grandson of Luchese crime capo Domenico Cutaia and son of reputed soldier Salavatore Cutaia - was remanded after a bail hearing in Brooklyn Federal Court yesterday.

"Every victim we have interviewed has expressed extreme fear of Mr. Cutaia. They're petrified," Assistant U.S. Attorney Rachel Nash said.

Cutaia, 30, was charged with taking part in a botched Nov. 11 stickup of a man who owns an appliance store on Nostrand Ave.

An accomplice, Nicholas Bernardo, is accused of taking several shots at the victim and his wife, who was standing at the front door of their Bensonhurst home, according to the complaint.

Prosecutors said Cutaia is a suspect in other robberies in the city and Putnam County, including one in which the victim was tied up for 40 hours.

Cutaia, who was married last month, faces up to 12 years in prison if convicted. He mouthed, "Love you" to his wife, Alicia, who wept on a courthouse bench after the hearing.

He showed no ill effects from being shot in the leg Dec. 1 in Staten Island under mysterious circumstances. Defense lawyer Seth Ginsberg declined comment on the shooting.

But in court papers, he said the bullet is still lodged in Cutaia's leg and he is looking for a surgeon to remove it.

Magistrate Robert Levy rejected a proposal to release Cutaia on a $1 million bond secured by the Staten Island home of his grandmother and his mother-in-law's home in New Jersey.

He concluded Cutaia is a danger to the community - even though Ginsberg argued the government's case is built on the word of an informer who admitted renting a van used in the robbery.

Meanwhile, Cutaia's grandfather Domenico Cutaia is scheduled to surrender next month to begin serving three years for bank fraud.

jmarzulli@nydailynews.com

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2...l#ixzz0b04iV8Dd

Joseph DeFede News: He's almost broke

An interview with Henry Hill, the basis for Goodfellas
Josh Wimmer on Friday 05/07/2010 8:18 am

It’s likely you know Henry Hill’s story, but you might not recognize his face -- the mug most people associate with Hill’s name is that of actor Ray Liotta, who played the mobster-turned-FBI informant in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas.

Hill -- whose rise and fall in the world of organized crime was chronicled in Nick Pileggi’s book Wiseguy, the basis for Goodfellas -- was in Madison on Thursday to host an invitation-only benefit for youth nonprofit Funz4Kidz at the Coliseum Bar. A more than willing interview subject, who got into trouble with the Mob for moving drugs and who’s battled addiction and a drinking problem (Hill was arrested in Illinois in December for an alcohol-related incident), the Topanga, Calif. resident was happy to sit down for a few minutes to speak with characteristic frankness about his art, cooking, whether he had fun in prison and why the hell none of his former associates have whacked him yet.

The Daily Page: So, you sell original artwork on eBay now. How’d you get into painting?
Henry Hill: Some treatment center I was in in Oregon -- that was part of our curriculum. I can’t paint two stick figures. But I do watercolors. I enjoy it; to me, it’s therapy. I just do it because I’m still on East Coast time. I live in California and wake up at three or four in the morning. So I knock out a few paintings. Cooking and painting is my therapy.

Yeah, you wrote a cookbook and cooked at an Italian restaurant in North Platte, Neb., for a while.
The Firefly -- it was in a hotel. I was doing a friend of mine a favor. This lady that owned the place, she was going tits up. I used to drink in the bar every day, and one day she walks in and said they were ready to put the padlock on the door. I said, “Why don’t you change your menu to Italian? I don’t want a job, but I’ll help you out.” I wound up there for a couple years.

You get around quite a bit. When I said I’d be talking to you, the first thing people wanted to know is how you can be in the public eye and not dead yet after informing on the Mob.
There’s a man above. And all the guys I pissed off are gone now. Now I got wiseguys come to me with fucking treatments and scripts -- “Henry, do me a favor, get this made.” It’s not like it was 30 years ago. No one’s after me; they buy me drinks.

It feels like the Mob isn’t as powerful as it used to be. Now you hear about, like, the Russian mafia or the Chinese. Are the original Mafia still around?
Oh yeah. They control the unions; they control gambling. But I’m so detached from that world today. I don’t bother nobody. The biggest trouble I get into is, I go to a park and I open a can of beer.

So what do you do with your time now?
I do a lot of charity work. I like to work with knuckleheads, I swear to God -- kids who don’t have their head on straight. If I could change one, that guy may find a cure for cancer. Knuckleheads, gangbangers -- whatever they’re calling them. They’re so intoxicated with that lifestyle, and it’s sad. And I do quite a bit of work for law enforcement. I go to Quantico and give lectures -- they transfer agents to organized-crime units, and I gotta meet with them. Thirty years ago, they were fucking shooting at me. Now they fucking clap.

The prison scenes from Goodfellas make it look like it wasn’t too bad, with all the cooking. How true to real life are those scenes?
One hundred percent true. Back in those days, you could get away with -- we had two hacks that used to bring us five pints of booze a day and charge of $100. We used to send them to New York to pick up caches of lobster for us. It was a joke -- you sit around and play pinochle all day. But it’s not like that today.

Do you still do a lot of cooking?
I haven’t done cocaine in seven years.

Oops! Not cocaine -- cooking.
Oh, yeah. Italian. I cook. I watch CNN. I go fishing. We’re working on a movie about Boston College. [Hill was involved in the point-shaving scandal the school’s basketball team was enmeshed in the late ’70s.] We got some producers interested in it. I’m doing an article for The Wall Street Journal, called “Agony in the Office.” It’s an advice column on what a mobster would do about these office problems. And it’s the 20th anniversary of Goodfellas this year, so we’re doing a thing in Vegas at New York New York.

You’ve had a pretty wild life. Any regrets?
After the Lufthansa robbery (the big heist that forms the climax of Goodfellas), the government clocked me for about $225 million, and I wish the fuck I had $225,000 of it back today. But I ain’t hurting. I live in a beautiful area. I don’t mind, I don’t mind.

N.J. authorities indict 34 in Lucchese crime family bust from 'Operation Heat'

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/05/a...34_members.html

From New Jersey.Com
May 28, 2010

Buffalo man is accused of running N.J. Lucchese crime family's online gambling operation

TRENTON — New Jersey prosecutors’ case against the Lucchese crime family continues to grow as officials yesterday announced charges against a New York man accused of running the organization’s online gaming operation.

Brian Cohen, 61, of Buffalo, N.Y., is charged with money laundering and gambling promotion. Officials said the gaming operation, which processed wagers of $2.2 billion in a 15-month period, routed bets through a "wire room" in Costa Rica, where Cohen also lives.

Detectives arrested Cohen at Buffalo Niagara International Airport as he got off a flight from the Central American country on May 16.

It’s the first time Cohen has faced charges in New Jersey for his alleged role in the Luccheses’ gambling operation, which was targeted in a series of arrests in 2007. In the 195-page affidavit from those arrests, Cohen was referred to only by first name as a person suspected of running the Costa Rica wire room. When people had questions about the gambling operation, they were told to "ask for Brian," according to officials and recorded conversations referenced in the affidavit.

Earlier this month, two days before Cohen was arrested, officials unveiled a 34-count indictment against 34 alleged Lucchese members and associates. Named in that indictment were the alleged current and former leaders of the organization’s New Jersey operations, as well as two top New York leaders.

"(Cohen’s) arrest represents another significant milestone in our major prosecution of this New York-based crime family," said Stephen Taylor, director of New Jersey’s Division of Criminal Justice. "We have indicted the top echelon of this criminal organization in both New York and New Jersey, and we continue to charge key players in their multibillion-dollar gambling operation."

Cohen was brought to New Jersey Wednesday night and made his first appearance in Superior Court in Morris County on Thursday. He posted $100,000 bail, and was ordered to surrender his passport, officials said.

Joseph (Big Joe) Lubrano, suspected mobster in Luchese crime family, nabbed by feds
By Alison Gendar and John Lauinger
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
Monday, September 13th 2010, 4:00 AM

The feds nabbed a young capo in the Luchese crime family at his girlfriend's Yonkers pad, law enforcement sources told the Daily News on Sunday.

Joseph (Big Joe) Lubrano, who was on the FBI's most wanted list, is 40, but is considered an up-and-coming wiseguy in the aging Luchese crew.

The hulking mobster, who stands 6-feet-2 and 230 pounds, is a convicted felon with close ties in the Arthur Ave. area of the Bronx, according to the FBI.

The FBI closed in on Lubrano after it got good leads from tipsters who spotted his mug shot on the agency's billboard in Times Square. Federal agents nabbed Lubrano about 6 p.m. on Saturday at his lover's Yonkers home, sources said.

Lubrano is due in Brooklyn Federal Court today, according to FBI Special Agent Richard Kolko. He's one of 11 wiseguys named in a 52-page indictment.

He is wanted for armed robberies in and around New York City, including a stickup of a Staten Island drug dealer and a heist of the proceeds from an illegal bookmaking operation, according to the indictment.

Surveillance video: Luchese capo's son caught on tape in hit attempt, before he's shot dead by cops
BY John Lauinger, DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER, New York Daily News, Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Dramatic surveillance footage released Tuesday shows the suicidal son of a Luchese mobster botching a rubout of a Brooklyn merchant with ties to the same crime family.

Peter Argentina, 49, who sources said is affiliated with the Luchese crew, narrowly survived Monday's wild assassination bid at his tire shop on Linden Blvd. in East New York.

Eleven minutes later, Argentina's would-be killer, Carl Lastorino, 45, was shot dead by cops as he tried to hail a livery cab a few blocks away from the tire shop.

Lastorino, 45, was the son of a capo and consigliere in the Luchese crew who was locked up by the feds in the 1990s, the sources said.

The video shows him walk into the tire shop about 4:40 p.m. armed with two .38-caliber pistols and a death wish as he confronted Argentina.

"Are you Pete?" he asked, according to NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne.

"Yeah, I'm Pete," Argentina responded.

"This is for you, Pete," Lastorino responded as he squeezed the trigger at least once.

Argentina held his right hand up in front of his body, and Lastorino's first shot hit his hand. He also suffered a second gunshot wound to his right shoulder, possibly from the same round, Browne said.

Lucky to be alive, Argentina darted into the next room.

"He is running for his life," Browne said.

The camera was still rolling as Argentina ran between two long racks of tires, Lastorino following behind with his pistol blazing.

Argentina later told detectives he did his best to elude the hapless gunman.

"I was trying to run serpentine, but I ran out of room," he said, according to Browne.

Lastorino had fled the tire shop and was already inside the livery cab when an NYPD sergeant and his partner spotted him while rushing to the shooting scene.

Witnesses also pointed him out, Browne said.

The officers did a quick U-turn and approached the livery cab from the rear, guns drawn. Browne said that Lastorino got out, aimed one of his pistols at them and yelled: "You are not going to take me alive."

Each cop fired a single round; both shots hit Lastorino in the chest. He later died at Brookdale University Hospital.

Lastorino's father, Frank Lastorino Sr., was sent to federal prison in 1993 for conspiracy to commit murder, the sources said.

Although his brother is also a Luchese wiseguy, Carl Lastorino was not a member of of the mob clan and polce do not believe the shooting was rooted in organized crime.

The gunman, who had been unemployed for the last three years, left suicide notes for his mother and sister, police said.

"The notes leave little doubt that he contemplated suicide," said NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne.

In the note to his sister, Lastorino wrote: "I can no longer live as a failure."

NJ Supreme Court to consider whether reputed mobster too rich for public defender
The Republic, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, October 27, 2011

MORRISTOWN, N.J. — After two courts found that a reputed mobster is too rich to qualify for a public defender, the state Supreme Court has decided to take up the matter.

Prosecutors say 69-year-old Alfonso Cataldo of Florham Park has enough money to pay for his own defense.

Cataldo is among 35 defendants charged in a $2.2 billion gambling ring allegedly operated by the Lucchese crime family.

He has been indicted on racketeering, gambling, money laundering and other charges.

The Star-Ledger of Newark reports that a criminal division manager in Superior Court in Morristown found Cataldo to be indigent after an interview. However, Deputy Attorney General Mark Eliades says Cataldo has $1.4 million in assets.

Thomas Vario, great nephew of 'Goodfellas' goombah Paul (Paulie) Vario, sues crane operators union for barring him from membership
BY John Marzulli, NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, Originally Published: Monday, December 5 2011, 4:00 AM

The great-nephew of a legendary gangster immortalized in “Goodfellas” is suing the crane operators union for barring him from membership because of his family ties.

Thomas Vario comes from a long line of mobsters in the Luchese crime family — most notably his great-uncle, the late capo Paul (Paulie) Vario, who was played by Paul Sorvino in the classic film expertly slicing garlic in prison while cellmates cooked the tomato sauce and grilled steaks.

His uncles Peter (Jocko) Vario and Peter (Rugsy) Vario and father Peter A. Vario were all arrested by the feds, which has created something of an image problem for Thomas

Vario, who describes himself as strictly blue collar, and not the snazzy starched-collar type prevalent among Mafia bosses.

He can’t even get an application to join Local 14-14B of the International Union of Operating Engineers because of his alleged “Italian connections,” his Brooklyn Federal Court suit says.

“It’s ridiculous,” Vario, 45, told the Daily News. “I’m not responsible for anyone’s sins but my own, and I don't have any.”

“Where does it end?” he continued. “This guy [Paul Vario] is dead 25 years already.”

“I want to know how do I fit into a category of these people?”

Vario is an experienced crane operator whose résumé includes the Verizon building in midtown, the JPMorgan Chase Tower, the reconstruction of the train trestle in the Rockaways and more than nine months working at Ground Zero after 9/11.

The suit names as a defendant former federal prosecutor George Stamboulidis, who serves as a court-appointed “ethical practices attorney” tasked with keeping the mob out of the union local.

Vario even had a sitdown with Stamboulidis about his ban.

“He told me himself, ‘Mr. Vario, I have a lot of respect for you. You could have chosen any route and you chose to work. If I give you a [union\] book I have to give John Gotti Jr. and Nicky Scarfo Jr. books tomorrow,’ ” Vario recalled of the conversation, which referred to the sons of the late Gambino boss John Gotti and Nicodemo Scarfo of the Philadelphia mob.

Mob son: Feds blew my cover
By Bruce Golding, NY Post
March 21, 2012

A dead mobster’s son sued the feds yesterday for $10 million and a new identity, claiming he was outed as a “confidential source” in a jury-tampering probe tied to infamous Mafia boss Vincent “Vinny Gorgeous” Basciano.

Anthony Bottone’s self-filed Manhattan federal court suit, which is riddled with misspellings, says he was put “in harms way” when his “constitutional right against outside intrusion of his privacy” was violated.

He demands “just compensation’’ for “irrepriable harm to his credibility’’ and “stress related health problems’’ that “have effected” his “marriageable duties.’’

Bottone — whose dad, Alfred “Fat Al” Bottone Sr., was a reputed Luchese crime family associate — cites a 2010 court filing that says he provided information about an alleged payoff to a juror in the notorious Blue Thunder brand heroin-trafficking case in the 1990s.

Bottone, his father and brother, Alfred Bottone Jr., were all defendants in that case. Basciano and Anthony Bottone were acquitted.

Bottone’s suit claims Manhattan federal prosecutor James Pastore Jr. quoted him in court papers as saying his father “told him that a juror had been paid to secure an acquittal during the Blue Thunder trial.”

Pastore, however, dismissed the “hearsay statement” as “bereft of basic details,” and noted that allegations of jury tampering were investigated during the trial and deemed “unfounded.”

The Manhattan US Attorney’s Office declined to comment.

Mob turncoat Henry Hill, immortalized in film 'Goodfellas,' dies at age 69, gossip site reports
By Tracy Connor, New York Daily News, Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Mob rat Henry Hill — who was immortalized in the movie “Goodfellas” and booted from the witness protection program — died Tuesday in Los Angeles after a long illness, TMZ reported. He was 69.

“His heart gave out,” his girlfriend told the gossip site.

Hill earned his place in gangland history by participating in the 1978 Lufthansa heist at Kennedy Airport, which netted a then-record $5 million. He became one of the most notorious Mafia canaries by turning FBI informant after being busted for pushing drugs. His turncoat testimony helped the feds nab dozens of wiseguys.

Hill spent several years in witness protection with his wife and kids, but was tossed out in the early 1990s because he couldn’t stay out of trouble.

In later years, he was a guest on Howard Stern’s radio show, opened a restaurant called Wiseguys, hosted mob-movie marathons, and hawked his own line of marinara sauce. In a 2008 interview, the one-time Lucchese crime family associate claimed to be reformed, telling the BBC, “I’m doing the right thing now.”

Hill was born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to an Irish father and Italian mother. He fell in with local mobsters as a teen and was inducted into capo Paul Vario’s crew.

Martin Scorsese’s 1990 movie “Goodfellas,” starring Ray Liotta as Hill, chronicled his blood-spattered rise in the underworld, the audacious airport ripoff, his descent into the world of drugs and his eventual arrest.

“The government said a couple of hundred million dollars went through my hands. But I just blew it on slow horses, women, drugs and rock ’n’ roll,” he told a London newspaper on the 20th anniversary of the release of “Goodfellas.”

“We partied five, six nights a week and I was making $15,000 to $40,000 a week. That was just my end. But I was a degenerate gambler. I could lose $40,000 in a week.”

He said he never killed anyone and turned snitch only because he believed he was going to be whacked.

Even after he got a new identity — which he protected by wearing a fake beard — Hill couldn’t leave his life of crime behind. By 1987, he had been busted on drug charges again.

In 2005, he served six months for possession of methamphetamines while working as a chef in Nebraska. By then, most of the old buddies he had betrayed were dead, but he said he still felt like a marked man.

“There’s always that chance that some young buck wants to make a name for themselves,” he told a reporter in 2010. “I never thought I’d reach this wonderful age. I’m just grateful for being alive.”

Neptune man admits participating in alleged mob scheme to smuggle drugs, cell phones to inmates
By Ben Horowitz, Newark Star-Ledger, Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Morristown - A 33-year-old Neptune man pleaded guilty today to participating in a scheme, allegedly orchestrated by the Lucchese crime family in cooperation with a gang leader and a corrections officer, to smuggle drugs and cell phones to inmates at East Jersey State Prison, officials said.

Dwayne Spears pleaded guilty in Superior Court in Morristown to a charge of second-degree racketeering, according to the state Attorney General’s Office.

Spears was among 34 people indicted in 2010 in connection with a $2.2 billion gambling, money laundering and prison smuggling operation allegedly run by the Lucchese family in 2007. Spears is the fourth defendant to plead guilty.

Spears worked with his brother, inmate Edwin Spears, 38, of Neptune, a reputed “five-star general” in the Nine Trey Gangsters, along with corrections officer Michael Bruinton, 48, of Ringoes, and Lucchese associates Joseph Perna, 42, and Michael Cetta, 45, both of Wyckoff, according to the attorney general.

Dwayne Spears admitted receiving money from Cetta to acquire contraband including heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and pre-paid cell phones, according to Peter Aseltine, a spokesman for Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa. Spears gave the contraband to Bruinton to smuggle into the jail to inmates who had placed orders through Edwin Spears, Aseltine said.

Under his plea agreement, Dwayne Spears would receive a five-year state prison sentence and must fully cooperate with the investigation, Aseltine said. He is to be sentenced on Aug. 3.

Edwin Spears, Perna, Cetta and Bruinton have all pleaded not guilty and the charges against them remain pending. The cases are being tried in Morris County because some of the defendants live there and some of the activity took place there.