Murder Mobile Tied to Old Mafia Family
Carlos Marcello died in 1993.
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A 1998 Ford pulled over for a traffic stop one night in early May in Old Metairie, a major part of the New Orleans Metropolitan Area, may have opened a can of worms for law enforcement officials in the region.
That is because it seems to indicate a Mafia family, considered long dead, may in fact be quite active.The van, which had stolen license plates, was driven by two men, one of whom was the son of the former underboss of the Carlos Marcello family.
When Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office deputies pulled the van over, they quickly discovered a disturbing scene in back. They had stumbled upon a virtual killing machine.
The vehicle had been retrofitted with custom sliding windows in the rear and side panels, as if to provide vantage points, maybe for a gunman. Two legless dining room chairs were mounted inside the cargo area of the van. A loaded .22-caliber rifle with scope was stashed under a carpet, an unregistered silencer was concealed in a side compartment, and an 8-inch cannon fuse — a wire capable of detonating an explosive device — was tucked under a sandbag behind the driver’s seat, reported the New Orleans Advocate.
The Marcello organized crime family was said to have "ostensibly fizzl[ed] out in the mid-1990s," according to the Advocate.
The two men in the van -- Dominick Gullo, 72, and Joseph F. Gagliano, 55 -- were both indicted last month on federal weapons charges.
"The two suspects, who are being held without bail, have disavowed knowledge of the van’s contents," the paper reported, noting that Gagliano had served time in federal prison for racketeering and is the son of Frank Gagliano Sr., reputed “underboss” of the organization until his 2006 death.
This was Gullo's first known run-in with law enforcement.
Inside the back of the retrofitted van, called "sinister" by police in that it resembles a jury-rigged killing machine. |
As for the van, the Advocated further noted:
Authorities were alerted to the retrofitted van’s stolen license plate on May 7 by an automatic license-plate reader. A Jefferson Parish sheriff’s deputy followed the vehicle down East William David Parkway and turned on his flashing lights about 11 p.m.
Gullo, who was driving the vehicle, pulled into his driveway.
After running a search of the van’s vehicle identification number, Deputy Lamar Hooks learned it was registered to South Coast Gas Co., a business based in Raceland. Michael St. Romain, the company’s vice president, said the van had been traded in to Terrebonne Ford about two years ago, adding that the company previously used the van as a service vehicle.
The license plate affixed to the van had been swiped Feb. 4 from a woman’s car in the parking lot of an unidentified hospital, according to a Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office report.
It wasn’t until the deputy prepared the vehicle to be towed from Gullo’s home, however, that he discovered its startling contents, including the rifle, silencer and cannon fuse.
Gullo claimed he had purchased the van earlier in the day at CC’s Coffee Shop in the 800 block of Metairie Road, according to the report. He said a woman had entered the business inquiring whether anyone wanted to buy the vehicle for $300. Gullo told Hooks he took the woman up on the deal, adding that the woman promised to meet him the next day to provide more documents.
Gullo and Gagliano denied having any knowledge of the van’s contents, according to the report, but investigators remain skeptical.
“The sophistication and the preparation that goes into preparing a vehicle like this would lead a logical person to the conclusion that there’s maybe more to this than they just happened to be driving around in a van,” said Selleck, the FBI agent, alluding to the custom windows and mounted dining room chairs.
Deputies arrested Gullo on one count of possession of stolen property and booked him into the Jefferson Parish Correctional Facility, where he later posted bail. Gagliano was not detained at that time.
A month later, a federal grand jury indicted both men. Gagliano was charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm and also with possession of the unregistered silencer. Under federal firearm regulations, silencers are “treated the same as a fully automatic machine gun, a sawed-off shotgun, a short-barreled rifle and other destructive devices,” said Moran, the ATF spokesman.
Gullo was charged only with possession of the silencer, though law enforcement officials said their investigation continues.
“This isn’t just a trip back from buying some ammunition or running to the grocery store,” said Goyeneche, of the Metropolitan Crime Commission. “This is something very, very ominous and sinister.”
However, “to say that Italian organized crime is making a comeback here in New Orleans is a quantum leap,” said Jim Bernazzani, a former FBI agent who was head of the bureau’s New Orleans field office for three years, until 2008. “I think we have a couple of guys who may have been affiliated — associates, not ‘made members.’ ”
“The whole van thing, if in fact it was organized crime and not individual retaliation, is an anomaly,” Bernazzani added. “It’s something we haven’t seen in a long, long time.”
A Long, Long Time Ago...
New Orleans has a colorful history of reputed mob activity, dating back to 1890 and the assassination of the city’s police chief, David C. Hennessy -- and the lynching of 11 Italian men, all of whom were deemed "Mafia" before America knew what the term meant. The men had been indicted for the assassination, but had been found not guilty at trial.
"But those enterprises have diminished greatly in recent decades, giving way to drug-peddling street gangs and the likes of Central City crime lord Telly Hankton, perhaps the most notorious criminal of his generation," the Advocate noted.
“It’s no longer the overriding, omnipresent, powerful, tightly organized criminal operation that it was 50 years ago,” Rafael Goyeneche, president of the watchdog Metropolitan Crime Commission, said of local crime families. “But there are some remnants of it, and this (van) may be a manifestation of the remnants.”
John Selleck, a local FBI agent, said the bureau still receives “allegations about La Cosa Nostra here in the Greater New Orleans area” from time to time, referring to the American Mafia organization. “We don’t dismiss that information,” he said, “and we look at it thoroughly against what our other threat priorities are.”
Moran said he believes the Mafia still has a local presence. “It may have gone underground a little bit,” he said, “and I think, in today’s culture, there are a lot more different criminal elements out there.”
The article continued:
Joseph Gagliano’s ties to organized crime are well documented. In 1995, Joseph Gagliano, his father, who was known as “Fat Frank,” and several others — including Anthony Carollo, considered the boss of the organization at the time — pleaded guilty to racketeering in a conspiracy that defrauded Bally Gaming, a supplier of video poker machines, using companies federal prosecutors said were Mafia fronts.
Joseph Gagliano, who was 36 at the time, was sentenced to 3½ years in federal prison for his role in the scheme, which involved a partnership among the Gambino and Genovese crime families of New York and the Marcello family of New Orleans to infiltrate Louisiana’s then-nascent video poker industry.
That sentence ran concurrently with a 2½-year prison term Joseph Gagliano received for his role in a card-marking scandal that swindled more than half a million dollars from a casino in Biloxi, Mississippi.
Joseph Gagliano and his associates had been on the radar of federal prosecutors even before they were charged in the video poker case, having been the targets of an federal inquiry into illegal gambling in 1989. In the sprawling video poker prosecution, more than two dozen people were convicted in a scheme to distribute poker machines and skim profits from Bally Gaming, the supplier.
In building their case, federal agents bugged Frank’s Restaurant in the French Quarter — a deli owned at the time by Joseph Gagliano’s father and now run by his brother, Frank Gagliano Jr. — in a probe that came to be known as Operation Hardcrust after investigators complained about the staleness of the French bread at the eatery. Through hidden cameras and tapped phones, authorities enjoyed what then-federal prosecutor Jim Letten described as a “window into the internal resurgence of a previously dormant organized-crime family.”
The video poker racket marked a renaissance of sorts for the Marcello family, whose influence had increasingly come into question in the years after Carlos Marcello, the reputed New Orleans mob boss, went to prison in an earlier racketeering case. Marcello, who was eventually released after the U.S. Supreme Court threw out his conviction, died in 1993 at the age of 83.
Bernazzani, who said much of the New Orleans Mafia had been eliminated before his tenure, noted the lasting impact of sweeping racketeering cases, which he said served to decimate the ranks of Italian crime families around the country.
“Through attrition, we kept picking off the upper echelon, and everybody who came in to take their place had lesser and lesser sophistication and made more and more mistakes,” he said. “A lot of these offspring saw their uncles and fathers and grandfathers die in prison, and they decided to open restaurants.”
Even as its power has faded, the legacy of the Marcello crime family has endured. As recently as 2012, the Louisiana Gaming Control Board denied an application for a video gaming license for Frank’s Restaurant, calling the business “the site of illegal gaming activity” and referring to co-owner Frank Gagliano Jr.’s 1997 conviction in an illegal bookmaking scheme. “Mr. Gagliano’s brother and father, Frank Gagliano Sr., were reportedly members of New Orleans organized crime,” the board’s order said.
When Joseph Gagliano left federal prison in 1999, he did so with substantial debt. As part of his plea agreement, he had been ordered to pay $250,000 in restitution to Bally Gaming, the company he and his co-conspirators defrauded.
It’s unclear what type of work he’s been engaged in since his release. Neither his wife, Hetty Gagliano, nor his brother, Frank Gagliano Jr., responded to requests for comment.
Public records list Joseph Gagliano as the director or registered agent of several companies, most of which appear to be related to grocery distribution and gaming. He has paid back $4,000 of his debt, and in 2013, prosecutors attempted to garnish the wages of his wife from her job as an instructor at Delgado Community College.
According to court records, Hetty Gagliano was being paid slightly less than $1,300 on a biweekly basis, after the deduction of taxes.
Hetty Gagliano owns the house where the couple live in the 1000 block of Sena Drive in Metairie, according to the Jefferson Parish Assessor’s Office. The imposing, multistory brick residence has a neatly trimmed yard, a two-car garage and an assessed value of $495,000.
A neighbor described the couple as quiet but said news of Joseph Gagliano’s recent arrest, first reported this month by WVUE-TV, had rippled through the block. “They pretty much stuck to themselves,” said the neighbor, who declined to give his name. “I guess maybe they had a reason.”
About 1½ miles away, in the 200 block of East William David Parkway, a man who lived near Gullo said he’d seen him only a handful of times. “He always seemed like a nice guy,” said the man, who also would not give his name. “At least until we heard that he was trying to kill people.”
It’s unclear exactly how long Gullo, who previously lived in Las Vegas and Chicago, had lived at the home, though the neighbor estimated about two years. Patricia Guggenheimer, who owns the house but apparently lives in St. Tammany Parish, declined to answer questions about how she knew Gullo. “I’m not going to talk about that,” she said before hanging up.
I was thinking that. First story I've seen in a while about the Outfit, which I have heard is more a loosely organized confederation of crews rather than the huge well-managed machine. In Accardo's day they'd be stealing cash instead of drugs. These guys must've realized it'd be worth more to be wholesalers, maybe the cartels weren't cutting the drugs enough. Slicing off ears must be speaking the carlels' language.
ReplyDeleteCartels get robbed, its just a fact of life in that business especially at that level. A lot of different groups do it. Another example from chicago would be the gangster disciples members that went to rob their money back after purchasing drugs. They got caught by the police, but nothings happened to them. Also just because the drugs come from mexico doesn't mean that every stash house they robbed was cartel connected. Also its not like they wanted the dealers to know who they are or affiliated with as shown by them posing as cops in the first place. If any of them were like "yeh we're with the outfit, grand avenue bitches!", they probably would have faced retaliation for the robberies.
ReplyDeleteTheir is no honor among thieves....
ReplyDeleteCome on guy, do you really think they didn't know who was doing the robberies because they posed as cops, the Outfit is very under the radar these days and still very active and powerful no matter what the newspapers say
ReplyDeleteWhy would they know. Some mexican nationals guarding a stash house aren't what the outfit is and i doubt there are many gang members in that city that know what the outfit is other than say al capone or casino.Again your making them out to be powerful and feared for engaging in a crime that almost every street gang and a lot of independent and foreign groups have engaged in at one point or another.
ReplyDeleteI saw a TV show with some DEA agent saying the mob in Chicago is practically finished and the Cartels would eat them for lunch. Obviously, he was wrong or just playing stupid. I don't know much about the Outfit, but they're always a very interesting read, and definitely highly sophisticated to this day. I wonder if they still secretly own Bally's.
ReplyDeleteWhoever turns state first will end up in witness protection. Seems sloppy that Koroluk's wife would have cocaine on her. He's been busted repeatedly before... how is the wife only now getting caught up in it?
ReplyDeleteEd, I enjoyed this Chicago interlude. I think they are definitely underestimated in this present day and their obituary has been written too soon. They are probably the closet thing to the Genovese family there is.
ReplyDeleteThis situation calls to mind that Jew kid in the DeMeo crew who pulled a fast one on the Cubans down in Florida. If Chi-town was a border town, then it could turn into an all out war. I wonder if the Mexicans will start calling the Outfit their Poppi. This Vena guy might have to have the leader of this gang whacked out.
Ch
ReplyDeleteBut how structured are they I wonder. From what I've been told, not very....
ReplyDelete