Organizing Crime -- `Foreign' Mobs Picking Up Where Mafia Leaves Off
NEW YORK - The Mafia's Old World code of silence is withering, and a dangerous new underworld of organized crime here stands only to gain.
In New York's Little Italy, where mob social clubs dotted almost every corner, a crush of Asian immigrants has shrunk the Italian enclave to a five-block tourist strip where Chinese gangs and heroin rings operate.
In the Sunset Park area of Brooklyn, where the Mafia-run unions controlled waterfront hiring, Vietnamese gangs such as Born to Kill run robbery rings.
In the Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn, once a summer playground to mobsters who controlled the boardwalk, Russian gangsters have carved out a niche in a complicated gas-tax scam that nets them millions.
In the Brownsville area of Brooklyn, where Albert "the Mad Hatter" Anastasia reigned over Murder Inc., Jamaican posses - who take the name "Gulleymen" from their native shantytown - peddle crack and marijuana.
In Washington Heights, immigrants from the Dominican Republic control hundreds of crack and heroin dealers.
In one sense, these emerging syndicates, as law-enforcement officials call them, are no different than the early days of the Italian Mafia - growing out of ethnic enclaves with swells of new immigrants trying to survive.
But each of the New World gangs is a different chapter of the tale of the immigrant and the gangster.
For some gangs, the battering of La Cosa Nostra could mean new opportunities.
Asian organized crime in the last 25 years has come to dominate the heroin trade from the poppy-rich Golden Triangle region of Southeast Asia, controlling 80 percent of a multibillion-dollar-a-year enterprise.
Disarray in the Mafia means the Asians can tighten their grip.
And the Russian mob may now have the chance to cut the Mafia out of the gas-tax scheme.
The changing face of organized crime also means new challenges to city, state and federal law-enforcement authorities that so far have not been met, high-ranking officials said.
"We've been focusing on Italian organized crime for 30 years" and need to improve investigative abilities for a range of new criminals, particularly Asian organized crime, said Catherine Palmer, a Brooklyn assistant U.S. attorney specializing in Asian crime.
ASIANS: OMERTA WORKS
Asian organized crime poses the major threat because of numbers and discipline, law-enforcement officials said.
It works on two levels. The Chinese tongs, ancient organizations with a strict hierarchy, have long been involved in gambling and protection rackets. They also are involved in the garment industry and restaurants. Like the Mafia's omerta, their code of silence is based on fear and enforced by street gangs such as the Ghost Shadows, Flying Dragons and Born to Kill.
More ominous is the loosely arranged and sprawling Asian organized-crime network that includes the more recent arrivals, such as the Fujianese and Thais, and that collectively forms an elusive multibillion-dollar heroin-importing industry.
The heroin profits have fueled an empire of restaurants and garment factories in Chinatown.
JAMAICANS: 40 `POSSES'
The Jamaican posses, which do not have the discipline of the Mafia or the Chinese gangs, pose a different danger.
With a flare for violence akin to the Prohibition-era mob, the posses exploded in the streets of New York in the mid-1980s, waging a deadly struggle to control a billion-dollar illegal drug empire.
An estimated 40 posses, with some 20,000 members, operate in the U.S., authorities said. Their stock in trade is drugs, with a major sideline in gun-running.
Astronomical profits from the crack trade have stoked an empire that recruits illegal immigrants - who buy their passage by transporting drugs into the country - and signs up locals as couriers and salesmen.
The largest two posses, the Spanglers and Showers - at one time said to have 3,500 members each in New York - have been whittled away by successful prosecutions here and in Florida.
Still, their New York street operations have quickly been taken over by new groups with thousands of members.
Ansley Hamid, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the posses are years from imitating the more sophisticated tactics of organized crime.
But in Brooklyn, investigators report that some posse chiefs have turned their profits into legal investments: video shops, sneaker stores and restaurants.
COLOMBIANS: KING IN QUEENS
The Colombian community in Jackson Heights, Queens, is a nerve center for the multibillion-dollar import network of the Medellin and Cali cocaine cartels. These Colombian immigrants are not street dealers, but serve mostly as "mules" who bring cocaine into the U.S. or transport cash to Colombia.
The cartel representatives here also cut deals as wholesale cocaine importers. They don't have a problem getting the drug here but have major difficulties laundering the profits.
RUSSIANS: `SYSTEM' TOUGH
The Russian mob are pros who learned their trade in the rough school of a police state, said Detective Peter Grinenko of the Brooklyn district attorney's office.
They operate out of Brighton Beach, Borough Park and other emigre areas in Brooklyn, home to some of the 60,000 Soviets who emigrated to the U.S. this year.
Grinenko pointed to an elaborate $1 billion health-insurance scam uncovered this summer in Los Angeles and the gas-tax fraud in New York as evidence of the Russian gang's sophistication.
"They might not be organized (on the Italian model), but they are here to stay, they know what they're doing and they have made a lot of money," Grinenko said.
"You're talking about a confederacy of gangs the same way it exists in the Soviet Union," he said. "These guys have got more brains than any Italian mob."
------------------------------------ NEW YORK CITY'S BRAVE NEW UNDERWORLD ------------------------------------
1. Dominicans
- Control hundreds of street-level crack and heroin dealers .
2. Jamaican posses
- Coke and crack
- Guns
- Murder .
3. Chinese tongs
- Gambling
- Loan-sharking
- Prostitution .
4. Asian street gangs
(A loose-knit confederacy)
- Extortion
- Robbery . 5. Russian mob
- Gas excise-tax fraud
- Insurance, credit scams
- Jewelry swindles
- Prostitution .
6. 7. Cosa Nostra
- Gambino family, headed by John Gotti, is the country's largest Mafia faction.
8. Colombians
- Money laundering
- Middlemen who keep the cocaine network running smoothly .