For nearly four years, detectives using 38 laptop
computers tracked thousands of telephone calls between reputed
mob figures, the union officials they are accused of bribing and
contractors charged with helping them siphon millions of dollars
from construction projects around New York City.
The investigators said they also collected tens of thousands
of financial records, conducted hundreds of surveillances,
downloaded the hard drives of 276 computers and subpoenaed so
many documents that at one point they had to store them in a
40-foot tractor-trailer.
Last week, their efforts led to what they called New York
City's most significant construction racketeering indictment
focusing on the mob in a decade. The indictments, obtained by
Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, were the
result of an unusual amount of resourcefulness, payroll hours
and technology-based work.
Detectives from the Police Department's Organized Crime
Investigative Division executed 59 search warrants; followed
hundreds of union officials, contractors and reputed mobsters;
and photographed hundreds of surreptitious meetings. In addition
to wiretaps on 38 cellular telephones, they monitored 24
pagers.
That work, coupled with long hours poring over financial
records, helped build the case, which charges mob figures with
bribing union officials to allow contractors to pay workers less
than the union wage and forgo expensive benefits. Extensive and
detailed as the investigators' work has been, the legal process
is still at an early stage. Most of the 38 defendants pleaded
not guilty to charges including enterprise corruption and
restraint of trade, beginning what will probably be a long
series of hearings before any of the men go to trial.
"I think a lot of people don't really understand how much
work goes into an extensive investigation like this," said
Daniel J. Castleman, the chief of Mr. Morgenthau's
Investigations Division, who oversaw much of the case.
At times, there were simultaneous court- authorized taps on
18 different phones. A detective monitoring each tapped line sat
in front of a laptop as it displayed the numbers of incoming and
outgoing calls. Sitting side by side, the detectives listened to
the tapped lines over headphones as cassette decks recorded the
conversations. At the same time, teams of investigators were
ready to move quickly to observe meetings arranged in the same
conversations, often in language they had to decode.
The indictment, which charged union officials, contractors
and men the authorities identified as mob figures, was the
result of the work of more than a dozen detectives, as well as
several prosecutors in Mr. Morgenthau's office. Most of those
who worked on the investigation acknowledge that the driving
force was a soft-spoken detective who, like many organized-crime
figures, traces his roots in part to the neighborhood around
Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem.
The investigator, Robert Callus, had spent years kicking down
doors as a narcotics detective before he was transferred into
the organized-crime unit in 1992 and began schooling himself on
the mob and the construction industry.
A muscular and tattooed 40-year-old whose formal education
ended when he graduated from John Bowne High School in Flushing,
Queens, he said that soon after he was assigned to investigate
mobsters, he read labor racketeering's great works, including
cases from the 1980's targeting the concrete and
window-replacement industries.
Detective Callus, who was the primary investigator on the
case, known as Operation Textbook, also learned at the shoulder
of Anthony Carro, a forensic financial analyst in the district
attorney's office whom Detective Callus called "a wizard." Mr.
Carro showed him how to use the payroll records of construction
companies and union financial records to gather evidence about
how some racketeering schemes siphoned off millions.
He spent most of his days in a dreary rented office in Queens
where the detectives monitored the wiretaps. There, tiers of
cassette decks tied to the Toshiba laptops ringed a room about
25 by 35 feet. Above each computer, taped to the dingy white
walls, were instructions about each tapped phone.
During the summer of 1997, Detective Callus spent much of his
time on the roof of a six-story building near the site of a
high- rise apartment building under construction.
He said he and his colleagues watched and photographed
organized-crime figures meeting with union officials at the
construction site, and were amused to see a 79-year- old man,
whom the authorities described as a Lucchese family soldier,
working as a flagman.
Detective Callus said that after a lot of work the rooftop
observations yielded information that helped obtain wiretaps on
the phones of union officials and organized- crime figures.
While he often saw those targets using cell phones at the job
site, conducting what he believed was mob business, the phones
were not listed in the users' names. To obtain a judge's
permission to wiretap those phones, Detective Callus reviewed
calls made to and from the suspects' homes around dinner time.
"Married men, when they're out past dinner time, will call
home," he said. "I thought, `When do I call my wife?' "
Once he determined the numbers of the cell phones used in
those dinner-time calls, and from that the names of the phones'
owners, he could work to establish a connection between the cell
phone owner and the union official or reputed mob figure who was
using that phone.
And while much of the work was dull, slow and plodding, there
were moments of excitement, he said. One arose when
investigators had to make sure that a reputed mob figure sat at
the right table in a fast-food restaurant — the one they had
bugged.
Steven L. Crea, one of the defendants in the case, whom
prosecutors have identified as the acting boss of the Lucchese
crime family, was regularly meeting union officials and mobsters
at a Roy Rogers restaurant on Bruckner Boulevard in the Bronx,
and the investigators wanted to place a bug there to pick up his
conversations. But a judge was reluctant to authorize the
listening device because he believed that the investigators
could not guarantee that it would be placed where Mr. Crea would
sit.
But Detective Callus was able to convince the judge that he
could direct his target to the bugged table with a series of
careful chesslike moves, occupying and vacating certain tables
and making others unappealing by spilling soda on them.
As a result, Mr. Crea ended up at the table over and over
again and had about a dozen conversations that were secretly
recorded and may be used as evidence. Sometimes, the music
played in the restaurant was so loud that it threatened to
obscure the whispered conversations, so an undercover
investigator complained angrily to an employee, and the volume
was turned down.
The Roy Rogers conversations were the first the police
obtained recording unguarded participants.
Detective Callus is no stranger to Mr. Crea, since he
participated in investigations involving Mr. Crea, at least
peripherally, since 1992. But the two men apparently reached an
unusual peace earlier this year.
When the detective and other investigators came to Mr. Crea's
office at 645 Bronx River Road in the Bronx to execute a search
warrant, he and Mr. Crea talked briefly, according to court
papers filed last week.
Mr. Crea seemed concerned that the police were focusing on
his son, who is in business with him, and told the detective so.
"Steve, I assure you I am not targeting your son," the detective
said. "If there is nothing there, nothing will happen. Did I
ever come after you when there was nothing there?"
Mr. Crea, whose son was not charged in the case, responded,
"No, and I always respected you for that."
