RICO Laws Heading to Australia

Tough anti-racketeering laws used in America to defeat the Mafia are likely to be introduced in Australia to smash lawless Queensland bikie gangs.

This follows a warning from the Australian Crime Commission of increasing motorcycle gang involvement in the manufacture and trafficking of drugs, extortion, theft, identity fraud, illegal gambling, money laundering, prostitution, car rebirthing, arson and murder.

"Most Australians would be absolutely horrified if they knew what a deep hold the bikies have on all kinds of criminal activity in Australia," said Queensland senator Ian Macdonald. Senator Macdonald is chairman of a federal parliamentary committee investigating organised crime.

The committee has recommended the introduction of so-called RICO laws, based on the American Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act. The powerful Act gives US crime investigators wider powers to investigate and coerce associates of criminals and to treat gangs as single criminal enterprises.

"Because of the bikie gang stranglehold on organised crime, we need legislation similar to RICO, but updated to suit the times," Senator Macdonald said. He said legal advisers had also suggested a toughening of old laws to outlaw consorting over the internet or on mobile phones.

Senator Macdonald's joint parliamentary committee recently took evidence into organised crime and the Australian Crime Commission at hearings around Australia. He said some of the evidence, much of it given in secret, was "stunning".

Police told the inquiry that bikie gangs were now conducting joint ventures with ethnic gangs and had links to international crime syndicates. They had also established companies to launder drug money and they were recruiting children to fence stolen property.

Queensland police and the Crime and Misconduct Commission backed the introduction of RICO laws and again appealed to the State Government to pass phone-tapping laws.

Veteran investigative crime journalist Bob Bottom - who also gave evidence at the Brisbane hearings - also backed the introduction of RICO laws and telephone taps.

He said the Gold Coast was a crime centre in Australia in much the same way that US gangsters flocked to Florida from where they ran vast criminal networks.

Thanks to Des Houghton

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Curse of Al Capone's Gold

In North Dakota rogue cop Andy Larson supplements his income by stealing from criminals especially bootleggers. He and four of his friends plan to hijack a truckload filled with illegal booze, but to his dismay everything turns ugly as bullets fly. The four bootleggers and one of Larson’s allies are dead. When the dust settles, the four survivors look inside the truck to find a cache of gold coins.

Andy knows he needs to cover up the disaster from his work peers and elude the owner of the coins, mobster Al Capone. As he struggles with both, Andy tries to figure out how to dispose of bodies, alcohol, and coins without the cops or the Chicago mob knowing it was him.

Except for the illegal booze and names like Capone, this prohibition crime caper could take place in any twentieth century era as the action-packed story line lacks a distinct 1920s flavor to it. The story line is fast-paced and filled with gunfights that make the Valentine’s Day massacre look like a cozy. With the blood flowing and the audience wanting Andy to get his comeuppance as a bad cop, readers will be reminded of marihuana busts in the south and southwest in the 1960s as Mike Thompson provides a graphic shoot out.

Thanks to Harriet Klausner

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Mob Killer Crys on Witness Stand

A stone killer for the Mob, who testified casually about his homicidal jaunts through Brooklyn looking for people to shoot, started crying in court yesterday over his youthful wrong turn into a life of crime.

Tough guy Lawrence Mazza, 46, who was to testify about his gangster boss' ties to rogue FBI agent Lindley DeVecchio collapsed in tears in Brooklyn Supreme Court when he recounted that he spent a year at John Jay College of Criminal Justice studying police science.

"I was planning to follow my father" in civil service, Mazza said, choking up at the thought of his dad, a lieutenant in the Fire Department. "I'm sorry," Mazza told the judge, growing increasingly emotional.

A court officer handed him a tissue. The prosecutor got him a glass of water. But the handsome mobster continued to weep. Finally the judge called a break.

Seasoned court watchers said they'd never seen anything like it.

After recovering his composure, Mazza laid out his remarkable story: how he unwittingly romanced a Mafioso's girlfriend, was befriended by the gangster, shared the woman with him and gradually transformed into a feared killer.

Mazza called his mobster patron, Colombo capo Gregory (The Grim Reaper) Scarpa Sr., "vicious, violent" and a man who "told me he stopped counting at 50" when listing his murders. "He was unscrupulous and treacherous. He was a horrible human being," Mazza testified. "I was his right hand man, very, very close."

He described how, during the bloody Colombo family civil war of the early 1990s, they would cruise the streets of Brooklyn in a station wagon tricked out as a death car, loaded with shotguns, rifles and pistols, with special hidden compartments for the guns.

They wore bulletproof vests, carried rudimentary portable phones and looked for members of the rival Orena faction to blow away.

They rarely missed, he said. "Pretty much, we killed who we shot," Mazza testified.

Mazza, who pled guilty years ago to loansharking, racketeering, four murders and conspiracy to kill four other people, now lives in Florida after spending a decade in jail. He began cooperating soon after his 1993 arrest and has helped the feds with three trials so far.

Thanks to Scott Shifrel and Helen Kennedy

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The Mafia Chef: Anthony Bourdain

Dubbed "the bad boy of cuisine" for his rock-star look and blunt observations about the world of restaurants, chefs and cooking and the "Mafia Chef" because of his crime and cookery novels, Anthony Bourdain is not your typical celebrity chef. A 28-year veteran of professional kitchens, Bourdain is currently the executive chef at New York’s famed bistro, Les Halles.

Bourdain entertains and educates with his exotic tales of travel and lessons learned from the kitchen trenches. He shares his passion on topics ranging from "Great Cuisines: The Common Thread" to the celebrity chef phenomenon and the culture of cooking. He also imparts his drill-sergeant approach to running a kitchen, which he shared with the Harvard Business Review Magazine, in "Management by Fire: A Conversation With Chef Anthony Bourdain." "The fantastic mix of order and chaos," he says, "demands a rigid hierarchy and a sacrosanct code of conduct, where punctuality, loyalty, teamwork and discipline are key to producing consistently good food."

His exposé of New York restaurants, Don’t Eat Before Reading This, published in The New Yorker Magazinein 1999, attracted huge attention in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. It formed the basis of his critically acclaimed 2001 book, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, which described in lurid detail his experiences in kitchens and became a surprise international best-seller.

In late 2000, Bourdain set out to eat his way across the globe, looking for, as he puts it, kicks, thrills, epiphanies and the "perfect meal." The book, A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines, and its companion 22-part television series chronicle his adventures and misadventures on that voyage, during which he sampled the still-beating heart of a live cobra, dined with gangsters in Russia, and returned to his roots in the tiny fishing village of La Teste, France, where he first ate an oyster as a child.

Bourdain is a contributing authority for Food Arts Magazine. His novels include The Bobby Gold Stories: A Novel, Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo. His work has appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Gourmet Magazine and The New York Times. He describes his recent book Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook: Strategies, Recipes, and Techniques of Classic Bistro Cooking, as "Julia Child meets Full Metal Jacket."

His latest book, The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones, is a well-seasoned hellbroth of candid, often outrageous stories from his worldwide misadventures.

Anthony Bourdain was born in New York City in 1956. After two misspent years at Vassar College, he attended the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, followed by nearly three decades of working in professional kitchens. He lives — and will always live — in New York City.

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The Second Burial of John Gotti

Four girls in black ponytails and Sunday dresses are laughing and chatting in Spanish as they walk toward Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the orange brick church that towers over Ozone Park, Queens. They cross a famous intersection. Do they know it was here, 15 years ago, that mob henchmen gunned down Thomas and Rosemarie Uva, the daredevil couple who made a career of robbing Italian mafia social clubs? It seemed unlikely. Nowadays, Indian pop music blares from cars more often than gunshots, and West Indian grocery stores line the streets near the ex-headquarters of this neighborhood’s most famous denizen: late mafia boss John Gotti.

The notorious Gambino crime family honcho ran his affairs here, from behind two bright red metal doors of the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club. He died in prison in 2002. Now, new immigrants are moving in, the Italians are leaving and the neighborhood seems to be forgetting him.

“This whole place was Italian-American. But they just started moving,” said Angelique Kayani, 69, who was born in Panama and moved to Ozone Park from nearby Richmond Hill in 2006. “As a matter of fact, the house over, they moved away on Sunday. And a lot of Indians moved in.” Kayani says she doesn’t know much more about Gotti than what she’s read in the papers. This is a quiet place where neighbors look out for one another, and children play on their scooters in the street, she said.

Down the block, a woman in a bright pink sari tended to her garden.

“I don’t speak English,” she smiled, apologetically. “I speak Bengali.”

“John Gotti? No, I don’t know him,” said Luis Rivera, who emigrated from Mexico. Rivera said his Liberty Avenue block is mostly Indian.

An aura of omertá seems to prevail, even among the old-timers, and even now only seems to hasten the forgetting. Hardly anyone talks about the 20-plus years of extravagant Fourth of July block parties Gotti used to throw for the neighborhood, complete with Boar’s Head burgers, ice cream cones, and illegal firework displays. (In 1995, then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who made his prosecutorial reputation by cracking down on wiseguys, banned these bashes.)

“Oh, no, I don’t speak English. I only speak Italian,” said a gray-haired woman who was rocking in a chair in the front yard of her 97th Street home, beside a tomato plant and a statue of the Virgin Mary. “But talk to them,” she said, gesturing toward her Hispanic neighbors across the street. “They’ll talk to you.”

Larry Varano, 74, an Italian-American who has lived in Ozone Park for 50 years, admits to remembering the Gotti days. Gotti’s brother Frank once lived up the block (though the Dapper Don himself only worked here — he lived in nearby Howard Beach). “They were nice people,” he said. “What they did in their private life, I don’t know. I don’t care.”

He said the neighborhood had changed a lot in recent years. “When I first came out here — let’s put it this way — the block I lived on was 99 percent Italian. Now it’s 4 percent Italian,” Varano said. He explained that most of his current neighbors are Puerto Rican. “They’re nice,” he added. “In fact, the neighbor I have now is Puerto Rican, and he’s the best neighbor I’ve had.”

Developers carved Ozone Park out of farmland in the 1880s, when the Long Island Railroad began service through the area. Italian-Americans were early settlers. The neighborhood mostly consists of one- and two-family homes, with some condos and small apartment buildings, said Betty Braton, chairwoman of Queens Community Board 10. The 2000 U.S. Census lists 43 percent of residents as white, 40 percent as Hispanic or Latino and 14 percent as Asian.

Buried in an overgrown junk-strewn lot, behind the house where Christopher Tirado, 22, lives with his brother and nephews, are the bones of the mafia’s past. Police excavations here in 2004 uncovered two pelvic bones, a set of teeth, skull fragments, and shoes full of skeletal remains, later confirmed as belonging to Bonnano family capos Philip “Phil Lucky” Giaccone and Dominick “Big Trin” Trinchera. Also believed to be buried here are hit man Tommy DeSimone, portrayed by Joe Pesci in the movie “Goodfellas,” and John Favara, a Queens man who accidentally struck and killed Gotti’s son with his car, then disappeared months later while the Gottis were vacationing in Florida.

“I don’t know pretty much, other than they were digging our backyard,” Tirado said.

“I haven’t heard about it,” said Leon Kennedy, 67, who recently moved into a house close by.

This is the seedier part of town: some nearby homes are vacant, the windows boarded shut. Broken-down cars and piles of junk lay scattered in the weeds. “No dumping” and rodent bait warning signs hang on the fence.

Even Gotti’s old block has changed. Down the street from his former headquarters, the Sunrise Chinese Restaurant, El Viejo Yayo Restaurant, and Tiffany’s West Indian Deli have moved in. The Bergin Hunt and Fish Club is gone, the storefront has been taken over by a pet-grooming salon.

Varano plans to rent a car and travel Europe, starting in Rome. Will he be leaving Ozone Park, too? “Yeah,” he said, “When I die.”

Thanks to Gaetana Pipia

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