Mafia Families Hit by Growing Distrust, Federal Attacks : Mob Seen Losing Its Power in U.S.

For Nick Chiarkas, it was like old times a few weeks ago, when he dropped in for a bite at Vincent’s on New York’s Lower East Side. A couple of suspected “wise guys,” or Mafiosi, sent over a steaming bowl of scungilli and a bottle of beer as a salute to the neighborhood kid who had followed a radically different career path--by joining the New York Police Department.

Chiarkas, 42, promptly gave the food and drink to a delighted patron at a neighboring table, explaining that it was compliments of the house. His rejected benefactors shouted across the room, “We’ll get you someday, Nick!”

If Chiarkas’ roots in New York’s “Little Italy” have helped him to engage in good-natured ribbing with suspected mobsters, they also have served a more serious purpose. Chiarkas, now research director and deputy chief counsel of the President’s Commission on Organized Crime, thinks his background has advanced his career and afforded him insights unavailable to other law enforcement officials.

Crippling Effects Seen

With the commission now putting together its final report, due on President Reagan’s desk April 1, he felt free to discuss in interviews what he has learned.

Chiarkas is convinced that the concerted federal law-enforcement attack on the Mafia, coupled with a breakdown of trust within the criminal organization, signal that the underworld families are losing their grip nationally and will be reduced, by 1990, to smaller collectives--”rat packs,” he calls them.

If there still is a major organized-crime group with national clout by the turn of the decade, Chiarkas thinks it will be one of the Asian organizations whose existence and activities the commission sketched in one of its first reports. Chiarkas said that the Asian groups, unlike the Mafia, can still command their members’ unswerving loyalty.

The young men recruited into the Mafia at the time Chiarkas left Little Italy--first to become a paratrooper and later to join the Police Department--are the key to the mob’s decline, he believes.

“By and large, they were kids who never grew up, bullies who liked to push their weight around,” Chiarkas said. “They talked tough and they went into the (Mafia) for the show. That’s why we’re getting more informants, and they’re destroying the power of organized crime. They’ll give anybody up, and they won’t do their (prison) time. They just don’t have the sense of loyalty to the system.”

Damaging Testimony Cited

Chiarkas cited the case of Martin Light, an imprisoned lawyer for reputed Mafia figures who testified in an open commission session in January that mob attorneys regularly concoct false testimony, intimidate witnesses, bribe public officials and take fees in cash to evade income taxes.

Years ago, open testimony about Mafia dealings was rare. But Light, apparently unhappy over serving a 15-year sentence for heroin possession at the federal correctional institution in Texarkana, Tex., went public in the hope of winning a transfer to a federal prison closer to New York.

Chiarkas said that the fear of informants inside the Mafia today reminds him of the way New York police officers felt during the Knapp Commission investigation of police corruption in the late 1960s: “Cops used to say that when there were more than three policemen in a room at the same time, one of them was wired (equipped with a hidden recording device),” Chiarkas said.

“There was a sense of not being able to trust your colleagues, people that, earlier, you would have trusted absolutely. I think the same thing is happening in organized crime. With . . . lieutenants and even captains becoming informants, organized crime is finding it cannot rely on its membership.”

With the shield of silence being broken, Chiarkas said, corrupt “judges, politicians and union leaders will be afraid to deal with them.”

Mob Associations Hit

The presidential commission, citing examples such as the Reagan Administration’s close political ties with Teamsters Union President Jackie Presser, has criticized public officials for associating with people linked with organized crime. Such contacts can erode public confidence and “dampen the desire to end racketeering,” the commission said in a report on labor union corruption.

Chiarkas, recalling his own childhood, said that such associations can be particularly damaging to the young. “When I was a kid, I saw policemen sit down and eat with crime figures in the neighborhood and call them ‘Mr. so-and-so.’ I would think to myself, ‘That (Mafia) guy is a very powerful, influential guy.’ ”

With such experiences in his background, what kept Chiarkas from following some of his neighborhood contemporaries into the Mafia? Chiarkas gives some credit to his personal distaste for “bullies--guys who enjoy intimidating the weak.” Beyond that, he said, his father joined the New York Police Department after working as a longshoreman, and he had two uncles on the force as well.

The commission’s work and Chiarkas’ own experiences have convinced him that a widespread “mythology” still shapes the Mafia’s image in the public mind.

Meaning of ‘Honor’

“Too often, the public assumes that Mafia members share our system of values,” he said. When Mafia members “talk about being ‘men of honor’ or ‘doing the right thing,’ they mean something 180 degrees different than what a non-Mafia person would mean.”

He cited the willingness of Mafia soldiers to “stick a gun in somebody’s mouth and pull the trigger while looking into his eyes. If that act furthers the family’s interest, then it’s honorable and you’ve done the right thing. Now, that’s a different value system.”