The Everything Mafia Book (45 page)
War in Macau
Macau is a former Portuguese colony in China that has become the Las Vegas of the Far East. Home to dozens of high-class casinos and resorts, Macau is trying to break from its past, a past that includes a vicious gangland war between rival triads. The main group was the 14K, still the largest triad gang in the world. The gangs were fighting over the usual—money, turf, and power. But the government had too much riding on Macau’s reputation as a tourist mecca, handing out death sentences to some of the gangsters in the hopes of getting rid of triad influence.
The Triads in America
America has long been a magnet for Chinese immigration. Since the late 1800s Chinese have settled in major metropolitan areas around the country. Because they were often the victims of prejudice, the gangster set out to help each other. They formed mutual aid societies to provide business and financial support to newly arrived immigrants. These societies were named
tongs
, which literally means “hall.” In these storefront social clubs, the Chinese gangsters established themselves. The tongs themselves were not criminal, but they attracted an element that used the tong’s influence in the neighborhood to gain control of extortion, prostitution, and especially gambling, a particularly lucrative vice in the Asian ethnic communities.
Just like Apalachin brought the Mafia to the attention of mainstream America, it was the Golden Dragon massacre that brought Asian crime to the news. One early morning in September 1977 members of the Joe Boys street gang went into the restaurant with guns blazing, attempting to take out members of the rival Wah Ching gang. No gang members were shot, but five people, including two tourists, were.
By the late twentieth century, street gangs affiliated with tongs were operating in the Chinatowns of Boston, New York, and San Francisco. The street gangs were the low-level soldiers who strong-armed the local storekeepers, the ones who dealt the drugs on the street corners and the ones who did the dirty work for the higher-ups. The street guys were also the first that the triads started to recruit when they began arriving in greater numbers from Hong Kong and settling across the United States and Canada. While these gangs have stayed mainly in their respective communities, they are beginning to spread out, teaming with other Asian crime groups (Korean, Vietnamese, Cambodian) to commit ever-more sophisticated crime from credit card fraud to identity theft.
African Organized Crime
Africa is often in the news for the civil wars and humanitarian crises that plague many of the countries. Other countries, though, are in the news as hotbeds of organized crime activities. Some rackets are run by corrupt governments; others run in direct contrast to progressive governments. The criminal operations are as varied as the continent itself—from drug trafficking through the north to e-mail scams and diamond smuggling in the central and south. And it’s not all homegrown. Russian, Israeli, and Chinese crime groups have gained a foothold in local crime.
E-mail Scams
Have you ever received an e-mail from an African prince promising millions of dollars for help in getting his money out of Africa? Of course, you may have been drawn in by the proposition that for only a few thousand of your dollars, to help grease the wheels, the prince would repay you ten times for your effort. After all, you are exactly the kind of person a prince would look for to help with complicated monetary transactions. Unfortunately many people fell for the ruse and put money in the pockets of African organized crime
The FBI estimates that Americans fall for Nigerian-based scams to the tune of $1 billion a year. In addition to the now-well-known e-mail scams, Nigerian crime groups engage in health care fraud, insurance scams, auto accident scams, and life insurance fraud. The FBI set up a task force specifically to look into these rackets, and not a moment too soon.
Many state and local police departments have begun outreach events to teach the public about how to identify potential scams, including those operated by African crime groups. But everyone has to be on alert, because there are as many scams as ever being tried out every day to unsuspecting marks, just ripe to have their money taken from them.
Traffick
Drug trafficking is not as widespread an issue historically in Africa, but those wily gangsters have turned Nigeria and South Africa into the two biggest entry points for drugs into the continent. Heroin is the drug of choice.
Many of the gangsters also set up operations in Europe to pad their wallets even further. In addition to trafficking, the crime organizations have made deals with corrupt dictators, stolen money meant for humanitarian needs, and turned the major cities into war zones.
Mafia, Mafia Everywhere
After the fall of communism and the formation of the European Union, the continent has become a playground for dozens of organized crime groups. Many are transplants from other regions of the world, but a number are homegrown. From Irish drug lords to the Albanian mob, the European underworld scene has become a patchwork of overlapping territories, personal vendettas, and unparalleled cooperation between ethnic groups that have never been particularly friendly. And their infiltration of Europe has brought them untold riches from a continent ripe for the picking.
The Celtic Tiger
On June 26, 1996, Irish journalist Veronica Guerin was sitting in her car at an intersection when a gunman on a motorcycle pumped her car full of bullets. Guerin had been investigating the upsurge in Irish gangland activities, specifically the drug scene. Her focus was on John Gilligan, one of the most feared gangsters in Ireland. Once the protégé of the famed General, Martin Cahill, Gilligan rose out of the ashes of Cahill’s death to be the number one man in the Dublin underworld.
But taking out Guerin was not the smartest move. The resulting uproar brought the police down on him full force. Though he was found not guilty of her murder, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison for drug trafficking.
The Albanians
Albanian organized crime gangs operated under the radar for years before they had the spotlight shined on them as a result of the war in Kosovo. There were reports that tied the smuggling of heroin through the Balkan region to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an American-backed freedom fighter group battling the Serbian army. It was reported that the Albanian mob families were funding the KLA. As the war heated up and Albanians began emigrating throughout Europe, many of the crime figures followed suit. Albanian crime groups set up shop in Belgium, Germany, Austria, and even Italy, where they partnered with the Camorra, ‘ndrangheta, and Sicilian Mafia.
One of the world’s major drug dealers, Israeli crime boss Ze’ev Rosen-stein was extradited to the United States in 2006 to face charges of ecstasy trafficking. It was one of the first times that Israel extradited someone to face criminal charges in another country. Rosenstein pled guilty and was sentenced to twelve years in an Israeli prison, another interesting twist.
The Albanian mob was into the usual rackets—drugs, loansharking, infiltrating legitimate business, and various scams. But like the Russians, they sometimes took it a step further, delving into human smuggling and arms trafficking. Not the nicest bunch of guys around.
The influence of this crime group even extended to New York City, where an Albanian crew out-muscled the Lucchese Mafia family from its former stronghold in Astoria. Known as the Rudaj Corporation, the group operated out of a social club, echoing the popular image of the espresso-sipping mobster. There were even some Italian associates in the group. But the Rudaj boys had little time to enjoy the spotlight as the feds quickly moved in and arrested the crew.
The Italian Scene
The Sicilian Mafia has always been the archetypical organized crime group. They gave rise to the crime lords of America and have carved out a significant niche for themselves across Sicily, Europe, and the rest of the world. However, with the increasing focus from law enforcement, internal warfare, and scores of mobsters turning against their former brothers in arms, the Italian criminal landscape has made some room for the other mobs to expand their operations: the Calabrian ‘ndrangheta, the Neapolitan Camorra, and the Pugliese Sacra Corona Unita.
Italian journalist Roberto Saviano’s 2007 book Gomorrah, an exposé of the Neapolitan Camorra, so angered the region’s crime bosses that they put out a contract on him. He has a constant police escort to protect him.
The influence of these other mob groups has eclipsed the Sicilian Mafia. In 2007, the streets of Naples were piled with trash, after the Camorra-dominated trash industry stopped picking up refuse to flex their muscle. Then in short order was a report that the ‘ndrangheta controlled a vast amount of Europe and Australia’s drug market, and in fact have become the most powerful Italian crime organization in the world. And the Corona Unita are little-known outside the “boot” of Italy, avoiding the police attention afforded the other groups.
Appendix A
The Hit List
Big Jim Colosimo—May 11, 1920
Colosimo was gunned down on orders from Johnny Torrio. This event set in motion the rise of Al Capone.
The Chicago Irish crime boss was killed in his flower shop by Al Capone’s gunmen as a result of an ongoing war over bootlegging profits. His funeral was the biggest in Chicago history.