Top Mob Fighter Stepping Down from the Chicago Crime Commission

After less than three years as head of the Chicago Crime Commission, James Wagner is stepping down for unstated "personal reasons."

The surprise announcement from the nation's oldest, private crime-fighting organization was made without fanfare in a Thursday afternoon fax from CCC Chairman Robert M. Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald cited Mr. Wagner's efforts in the commissions opposition to a Chicago-owned gambling casino and to the strengthening of state gaming regulations.

Wagner is a lifetime lawman who spent most of his time on the job as an FBI agent. As a career special agent with the FBI here in Chicago, he toiled for years on Outfit cases, eventually becoming supervisor of the organized crime squad.

Wagner had trained many of the federal agents whose investigation resulted in last year's convictions of top hoodlums Frank "The Breeze" Calabrese Sr., Joey "The Clown" Lombardo, James "Little Jimmy" Marcello and more than a dozen other Chicago mob figures in connection with 18 unsolved gangland murders.

Considered an expert on Chicago organized crime lore, Wagner was called as the first prosecution witness in the federal case known as Operation Family Secrets. His testimony set the stage in the landmark trial.

Wagner came to the CCC in January 2006 after a run as chief investigator for the Illinois Gaming Board. During his tenure, Wagner rejuvenated the crime commission's focus on it roots: the Chicago Mob.

Organized crime was raging when the commission was founded in 1919, the same year that Al Capone moved to Chicago.

The announcement of Wagner's departure doesn't indicate if he will be taking a new position elsewhere and he was not immediately available for comment.

Several directors of the crime commission offered praise for Wagner, noting the "many accomplishments" that occurred under his leadership. "He was the personification of the Chicago Crime Commission," said commission chairman Fitzgerald. According to the CCC statement, a successor has not been named.

Thanks to Chuck Goudie

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Martin Scorsese to Direct Robert DeNiro as Mob Assassin Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran

Paramount Pictures is plotting a return to organized crime for Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. Studio has set Steve Zaillian to adapt "I Heard You Paint Houses," the book about the mob assassin who many believe was involved in the death of Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa.

Scorsese is attached to direct. De Niro will play Frank "the Irishman" Sheeran, who is reputed to have carried out more than 25 mob murders. Pic will be produced by Scorsese and Tribeca partners De Niro and Jane Rosenthal. Project landed at Paramount through the overall deal that the studio has with Scorsese’s Sikelia Prods.

Pic’s title refers to mob slang for contract killings, and the resulting blood splatter on walls and floors. Book was written by Charles Brandt, who befriended Sheeran shortly before the latter’s death in 2003. Among the crimes Sheeran confessed to Brandt, according to the 2004 book, was the killing and dismemberment of Hoffa, carried out on orders from mob boss Russell Bufalino.

Zaillian most recently scripted the Frank Lucas crime saga "American Gangster" and was a co-writer of the Scorsese-directed "Gangs of New York." Scorsese also brought in Zaillian to script "Schindler’s List," before turning over the project to Steven Spielberg and instead directing De Niro in "Cape Fear." Zaillian won an Oscar for his "Schindler’s List" script.

Scorsese just completed a screen adaptation of the Dennis Lehane novel "Shutter Island" for Paramount with Leonardo DiCaprio. He’s in the midst of settling on his next directing project, with "Silence," "The Wolf of Wall Street" and "The Long Play" at the top of his list.

De Niro has wrapped the Kirk Jones-directed "Everybody’s Fine" with Sam Rockwell, Kate Beckinsale and Drew Barrymore. He’s also plotting a re-team with "Heat" director Michael Mann on "Frankie Machine," an adaptation of the Don Winslow novel that is also at Paramount.

Thanks to Michael Flemming

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The (redacted) Museum: The Las Vegas Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement

Las Vegas hopes its newest museum will be a hit.

The city is opening The (redacted) Museum: The Las Vegas Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, which will showcase southern Nevada's colorful and storied past in organized crime.

The City Council unveiled the name Tuesday, along with logos resembling court documents with material blacked out. The first redaction obscures the word "mob."

"I don't think anybody is able to do tongue-in-cheek the way Las Vegas can do it," said Mayor Oscar Goodman, a former criminal defense lawyer who represented organized crime figures before representing residents in City Hall.

The museum is expected to open in spring 2010 in downtown Las Vegas at the site of the former federal courthouse where Goodman tried his first case.

As city officials unveiled the plans, council members tossed around T-shirts that said: "There is no such thing as a mob museum nor have I ever been there."

"Does this mean the mayor's going to be cleaning out his garage?" joked Councilwoman Lois Tarkanian.

Goodman joked of his possible contributions to the exhibits: "They've been in my backyard trying to dig up some of the old relics, but so far I've fended them off. We'll have a lot of Oscar-abilia in there."

Plans for the museum are supported by the FBI, which has pledged to locate organized crime artifacts in Washington and lend them for displays. The former head of the Las Vegas FBI office, Ellen Knowlton, is chairwoman of the museum's board.

Officials say the museum won't glorify organized crime, but instead will give a candid look at its influence on Las Vegas, how law enforcers worked to extract illegal influences from gambling, how mob operations in cities around the country were connected and famous hearings on organized crime.

The city believes the museum could draw as many as 800,000 visitors each year and is part of an attempt to revitalize downtown Las Vegas.

The mob theme was picked after a poll of 300 tourists showed more than 70 percent ranking the idea among its top three concepts. Other options included a behind-the-scenes look at gambling, a museum on magic or a museum dedicated to Las Vegas icons such as Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley.

Thanks to Oskar Garcia

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Shark Tales Return with an Update on the Family Secrets Mob Case, the Mitch Mars Golf Outing & a Job Offer for US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald

How is everyone out there? I have not written lately, with the birth of my son Rocco Joseph and my wife in law school, it's difficult to provide updates for The Chicago Syndicate.

First, I was featured in Gangland on The History channel last week in the Satan's Disciples episode. I represent many SDs who are from my hood on Taylor Street USA. I was named again in Who is Who in America by Marquis for 2008, the second time that I received this distinguished award.

Family Secrets is still alive. The post trial motions were denied and now its sentencing time. Frank (Calabrese Sr.) is set for December 11 2008 at 2pm. There is a lot of work to do on his sentencing and hopefully the world will learn the truth about the dirty rat son Frank Jr. and his friend at the press who helped spin the bullshit tale of he and his father.

On another somber note, the Mitch Mars golf outing was held. I played with two agents who testified in the case, one who found the infamous last supper photo which I said that the enterprise died with the last clam. The other agent was on the Sam Carlisi case when I went to trial with "The Hatchet". I drove the ball well and my short game was on at times.

Afterward, a lot of US Attorneys and media personalities arrived, as well as the Grand Pupa himself, Patrick Fitzgerald. I asked him if he would like a job after Obama wins! Just kidding folks.

I was one of three defense lawyers golfing, but others showed up for the dinner. I missed dinner as I was in clubhouse taking a shower and drinking at the bar. I needed a break from all those agents! The outing was fun and Marsha Mclellan had to give me a bag of balls! After dinner, I returned to be bothered by the media with questions about Frank and others. I remained mum much to the chagrin of others. I wanted to talk about the White Sox not law and clients.

Judging from the turnout, it's obvious that Mitch had a lot of fans. Like I have written before, he was ok with me, but he had his enemies. It was the second golf outing of the year I attended which honored a dead attorney. It was a bit eerie. There was lot of rumor about an upcoming indictment which is neither confirmed or denied, but will probably happen. The feds always have a trick up their sleeve. So, I eventually left and returned home in an elevated state.

The books are being written right now, at least 2 that I know of and maybe one more. It will be interesting to see the final copies.

Stay tuned for more developments regarding sentencing and the double jeopardy appeal. Frank still has a lot of fight in him and a chance to reverse this mess. We are still trying to figure out how you can call 3 eyewitnesses to a murder who described the scene and testified it was not Frank that killed Ortiz and Morowski. None of the witnesses knew who frank was at the time, but described the car and shooter to a degree which was not Frank.

Stay tuned!

Joseph "The Shark" Lopez

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Junior Gotti Awakens Mob Ghosts in Tampa

The ghosts of Tampa's old-time wiseguys awakened this summer when Mafia scion John "Junior" Gotti came to town in handcuffs, accused of pulling the strings in a bunch of classic mobster crimes.

The federal indictment against him reads like a plot summary for "The Sopranos." The 44-year-old Gotti — son of the late "Dapper Don" of the notorious Gambino crime family — allegedly had his fingers in everything: whacking rivals, trafficking cocaine, bribery, kidnapping and money-laundering. Earlier convictions show Gambino crews have worked for years to get a foothold in the Tampa area's criminal underworld.

If the charges against Gotti are true, then he was a Johnny-come-lately to organized crime around here.

The fabric of the Tampa region's history is richly woven with stories of ruthless gangsters who first grabbed control of illegal gambling and liquor distribution during Prohibition, executed rivals with point-blank shotgun blasts, bribed public officials, controlled the narcotics trade and eventually broadened their influence across the Sunshine State and pre-Castro Cuba.

They were menacing, old-school mobsters who went by nicknames like "The Hammer," "Scarface," "Cowboy," "The Fat Man," "The Colonel," "Big Joe" and "Silent Sam."

Infamous in the city's lore is the "Era of Blood," when 25 gangsters were gunned down on the streets as Italian, Cuban and Anglo underworld factions battled for power from the 1920s to the '50s. And a Godfather-like legend surrounds Tampa-born crime boss Santo Trafficante Jr., who took over the Sicilian Mafia in Florida from his father in 1954 and built a criminal empire that was the envy of mob families across the country.

"Trafficante was the boss of Florida," says Joseph D. Pistone, a former FBI agent whose six years undercover with the mob were chronicled in the 1997 Johnny Depp movie "Donnie Brasco." "Miami was an open city, like Las Vegas. But if you operated in Tampa or other parts of the state, you had to go through Trafficante."

During his last two years with Dominick "Sonny Black" Napolitano's Bonanno family crew, Pistone came to Florida often to help broker an alliance with Trafficante, whose blessing was needed for the Brooklyn crew to operate an illegal gambling joint northwest of Tampa. The eventual FBI takedown of the Kings Court club in 1981 is depicted in "Donnie Brasco."

In another movie, "Goodfellas" (1990), New York gangsters played by Ray Liotta and Robert De Niro come to Tampa in 1970 and put the screws to a guy who won't pay his gambling debts. He finally agrees to pay up after they take him to the city zoo and threaten to feed him to the lions.

That all really happened — except for the lion part. Lucchese family soldiers Henry Hill and Jimmy Burke just gave the welcher an old-fashioned beating, ending up at a dingy north Tampa bar that still stands across the street from the Busch Gardens amusement park. But it's true that the beaten bettor had a sister who worked in the Tampa FBI office, which led to arrests and prison terms for the two wiseguys.

That's trivia that few but Scott Deitche remember. He literally wrote the book on Tampa's organized crime history — called "Cigar City Mafia: A Complete History of the Tampa Underworld" — and followed it up last year with a Trafficante biography.

Miami might be more associated with mob activity, but Deitche says organized crime in Florida is firmly rooted in Tampa, where Cuban, Spanish and Italian immigrants established communities in the city's cigar-making center of Ybor City in the early 20th century. One of the early rackets was bolita, a popular, low-stakes lottery game.

"You had drugs, prostitution, rum-running, bootlegging during Prohibition, some alien smuggling, but bolita was the main moneymaker," says Deitche over lunch recently at Ybor City's historic Columbia restaurant — a favorite dining spot of Trafficante and a host of mobsters over the years.

"Through bolita you got into corruption of the local government, corruption of the sheriff's department," he says. "So from there you really saw the emergence of the Italian Mafia, and the Italian Mafia eventually eclipsed all the other ones."

Howard Abadinsky, an organized-crime expert who teaches a class on the subject at St. John's University, says the growth of organized crime in Florida mirrored what was happening in society at-large. There was opportunity and money to be made in Florida, attracting not only aboveboard entrepreneurs but mobsters from the five New York Mafia families as well. Many bought houses and lived here for part of the year.

"The mob moved to Florida just like legitimate people," Abadinsky says. "There was plenty of money for everyone."

But it was the soft-spoken, even-tempered Trafficante — known as the "Silent Don" — who put the mob on the map in Florida. He also became the most influential Mafia figure in Cuba, running hotels and casinos, buying up property and laundering money through the island before Fidel Castro came to power in 1959 and kicked him out.

Trafficante, in public hearings, acknowledged cooperating with secret U.S. government efforts to kill Castro. And his name is often mentioned in a conspiracy theory surrounding President John F. Kennedy's assassination, but he vehemently denied having anything to do with it. He never spent a night in an American jail.

Trafficante's death after heart surgery in 1987 ended the Mafia's heyday in Florida, but the experts say it hasn't been snuffed out. A 2006 federal trial in Tampa exposed the activities of a Gambino crew led by capo Ronald Trucchio, who because of a deformed limb was known by the nickname "Ronnie One-Arm."

His crew was accused of a slew of wiseguy crimes, including trying to control the lucrative valet parking business in Tampa. He and three other Gambino associates were convicted of racketeering and conspiracy to commit extortion, with Trucchio getting life in prison.

Now comes Junior Gotti, who was arrested at his Long Island home in August and hauled to Tampa. His attorney scoffs at the charges, saying the feds have mounted an "epic quest" to take Gotti down after failing to convict him in three federal trials in New York. Gotti says he retired years ago from the criminal life and has pleaded not guilty to the Tampa charges. He remains jailed without bond pending a trial, which could happen sometime next year.

Abadinsky says the mob is still around, in Florida, New York and elsewhere, but it's a shadow of its former self. Gangsters today don't wield the power, control the unions or have the political connections of their predecessors.

While the "The Sopranos," the wildly popular HBO TV series about a New Jersey mob family, was a great recruiting tool for the Mafia, there are fewer young men willing to take up the life these days, Abadinsky says.

"The new guys," he says, "are whole lot less interesting."

Thanks to Mitch Stacy

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