Mafia Hierarchy Crippled, Congress Told

Using new investigative techniques, the federal government has convicted and jailed more than 1,000 organized crime members and associates since 1981, disrupting leadership of the Mafia and causing an increase in defections, officials of the FBI and the Justice Department told Congress Monday.

FBI Director William S. Sessions and Acting Assistant Atty. Gen. John C. Keeney expressed cautious optimism about their war on the mob as a Senate investigations subcommittee reviewed the status of organized crime 25 years after mobster Joseph Valachi, appearing before the same panel, dramatically ripped the veil from the inner workings of the Mafia.

Keeney, acting chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division, boasted that “the mob leadership in our major cities has been crippled . . . the mob is on the defensive.” But he and Sessions acknowledged that organized crime has not yet been broken.

‘Not Eradicated’

The Mafia is “weakened . . . but not eradicated,” Sessions said.

Sessions, who last fall succeeded William H. Webster as head of the FBI, told the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee’s permanent subcommittee on investigations that a special racketeering statute has become the government’s biggest weapon against organized crime.

Under provisions of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the government has been prosecuting big-city Mafia families and winning convictions on the premise that they are “criminal enterprises” whose assets can be seized and whose leaders can be jailed for directing the enterprises, Sessions said. The act was passed in 1970 but it was not used extensively until a decade later.

Under the RICO prosecutions, “the criminal enterprise itself became the investigative focus,” Sessions said, rather than individual crimes by Mafia members. As a result, FBI agents are successfully penetrating “the hierarchy of organized crime” by using undercover agents and court-approved electronic surveillance, he said.

“The hierarchies of the five New York LCN (La Cosa Nostra) families have been prosecuted and similar prosecutions have crippled the LCN hierarchies in Boston, Cleveland, Denver, Kansas City, Milwaukee, New Jersey and St. Louis,” Sessions told the subcommittee.

Los Angeles Cases

In a city-by-city summary provided to the subcommittee, FBI officials said that major convictions of reputed Mafia leaders in Los Angeles have included Dominic Brooklier, Sam Sciortino, Jack LoCicero, Mike Rizzitello and Louis Dragna.

In addition, seven alleged Southern California mobsters, including reputed Mafia boss Peter J. Milano, pleaded guilty two weeks ago to racketeering charges. Mafia infiltration into pornography and labor union pension plans “are primary criminal activities of the Los Angeles LCN family, and both of these activities are on the increase,” the summary said.

In a separate assessment of the government’s war on organized crime, the General Accounting Office told the subcommittee that because the Mafia is so secretive, “the size of the LCN and the scope of its activities are difficult to determine.

“The effects of the government’s efforts directed against it are difficult to judge as well,” said the report, written by David C. Williams, director of the GAO’s Office of Special Investigations. Williams added that, nonetheless, “it is clear the government has had recent successes against the LCN” as evidenced by the numerous convictions in recent years.

The subcommittee, which is headed by Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), also heard testimony from a Mafia “defector,” Tommaso Buscetta, a Sicilian-born Mafioso who has testified for the government in conspiracy cases.

Buscetta, 60, who has been given a new identity for his protection, testified from behind a screen to prevent his being photographed. Speaking through an interpreter, he told senators that “I have seen our organization change from within. I have seen money, drugs and greed corrupt and destroy the Cosa Nostra code of honor and loyalty to the families.”