he
Manhattan district attorney charged 38 union officials,
contractors and reputed mobsters today with bribery, bid-rigging
or other racketeering schemes that siphoned millions of dollars
from public and private building projects throughout the city
over the last two years.
It is the most significant case in a decade to target
organized crime's role in the construction industry, the
authorities said.
Among those named in a 57-count indictment unsealed today was
the acting boss of the Lucchese crime family, Steven D. Crea,
53, who has played a role in construction racketeering schemes
for decades; two of his senior aides, identified as captains in
the crime family; and the president of Local 608 of the United
Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, a union long tainted by
mob influence.
Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, said
the racketeering systematically siphoned millions of dollars
from construction projects and diverted it to the Lucchese
family and its illegal partners, corrupt union officials and
contractors.
The victims were many, Mr. Morgenthau said. They included
union trade workers who were deprived of jobs by the leaders of
their own unions, the nonunion workers who replaced them and
were paid far below union wage and received no benefits and the
honest contractors who were frozen out of the bidding process by
the mob's corrupt alliance, which allowed their chosen companies
to underbid other firms.
Because the Lucchese family also managed to insinuate itself
in the construction of three schools and several road and bridge
repair projects, city taxpayers fell victim to the schemes as
well, which effectively levied a 5 percent "mob tax" on
construction, prosecutors said. One prosecutor said that the
money siphoned from the $32 million in modular classroom
construction in Queens and the Bronx could have paid for
additional classroom seats.
"Under the arrangement here, there was no competition," Mr.
Morgenthau said, speaking of the racketeering schemes that
involved three organized crime families named in the indictment.
"Not only does it inflate the cost of the job directly, these
expenses, but it keeps the honest people out."
The indictment, which was the result of a three-year
investigation by detectives from the New York Police
Department's Organized Crime Investigative Division and Mr.
Morgenthau's office, was announced at a news conference with Mr.
Morgenthau and Bernard B. Kerik, the city's new police
commissioner.
The defendants, most of whom are in custody, are charged with
enterprise corruption, and could face up to 25 years in
prison.
The indictment outlines organized crime's involvement in the
construction of city schools in the Bronx and Queens and in
projects built for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and
the city's Department of Transportation.
In addition to Mr. Crea and his reputed captains, Dominick
Truscello and Joseph Tangorra, five reputed Lucchese soldiers
were charged, along with several union officials.
Also among those charged was Lawrence Wecker, whom
prosecutors identified as a longtime reputed Lucchese family
associate and construction industry racketeer. Mr. Wecker was an
unindicted co-conspirator in the 1986 case that targeted the
mob's role in the concrete industry. by one mob boss. He is
among the defendants in the case who have yet to be arrested,
and prosecutors said they believed he was in
Malta.
