Mob's Demise `A Fantasy' -- It's Easier To Get Rid Of Racketeers Than To Clean Up The Rackets, Some Say

NEW YORK - In the 10 years since President Reagan declared war on the mob - "this dark, evil enemy within" - the government has imprisoned organized-crime chieftains of every kind, by the hundreds.

The lineup runs the gamut from "Fat Tony" Salerno to "Little Nicky" Scarfo, from creaky septuagenarian Louis Gatto of Fair Lawn, N.J., to "Crazy Phil" Leonetti, a handsome young killer from south Philadelphia.

The government has bugged mob kitchens and bedrooms, clubs and cars. It has taken over union halls, nightclubs and restaurants. It has forced the first fair national Teamsters union elections and cut off the Mafia's cash skim from Las Vegas.

And last week law enforcers collected the biggest scalp of all.

John Gotti - the boss of the nation's largest crime family, the most notorious gangster since Al Capone - was convicted of crimes that probably will send him to prison for the rest of his life.

STILL GOING STRONG

But for all its convictions and its seizures, its bugs and its informers, the government has not been able to reduce organized crime. Across the urban Northeast and Midwest, the foot soldiers - bookies, loan sharks, truck hijackers and auto thieves, some with the Mafia, some not - haven't skipped a beat, says criminologist Howard Abadinsky. "You wonder if they ever will."

In interviews, dozens of law enforcers and organized-crime experts agreed that eliminating the racketeers has not eliminated the rackets. Not even in New York, where most top mob leaders are in jail, on trial, or both. Some examples:

-- In 1984, investigators secretly recorded Luchese family boss "Tony Ducks" Corallo acknowledging the mob's monopoly of garbage carting on Long Island. Today, Corallo is serving an unrelated 100-year prison term, but the mob still collects Long Island's garbage.

-- In 1985, 13 members of the Colombo family, including its entire hierarchy, were convicted in the first case to target an entire crime family. Investigators created fictional lives for two undercover agents and set up dummy households and businesses. It all took five years and cost the FBI alone $4.8 million in salaries and court costs. Today, the Colombos remain sufficiently viable to wage a major intramural war that has killed a half-dozen mobsters.

-- In 1986, the "Pizza Connection" trial resulted in the conviction of 17 men who imported $1.6 billion in heroin. U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani said the trial, the longest in federal history, would "break the control of the Mafia over international drug trafficking." Today, heroin is being smuggled into the country by Asians, Mexicans, West Africans and many others. The Drug Enforcement Administration is discovering record shipments, and drug treatment centers say heroin use is increasing.

In all three cases, mobsters were put away, but organized crime went on.

Even the Mafia, troubled as it is by prosecution, old age and a shortage of capable young recruits, shows no sign of disappearing. The best estimate of its national membership, 1,700, is the same as eight years ago. And it is still active in about two dozen cities, the same as 20 years ago.

"This notion that the mob is dying is a fantasy," says Fred Martens, a former New Jersey state investigator who now directs the Pennsylvania Crime Commission.

"We jump to conclusions because we look at the body count," he says, referring to mob convictions. "The body count didn't end the Vietnam War, and it won't end organized crime."

Law enforcers have been predicting the end of the Mafia for almost as long as they've known about it. In 1963, after Joe Valachi became the first member to testify publicly, Attorney General Robert Kennedy said the mob had been struck "a blow from which it will never recover."

In the early 1980s, however, Reagan ordered "a sustained, long-term war" designed "to break the power of the mob," and this time there was reason for optimism. More agents were hired, more electronic surveillance approved, more witnesses placed in a special protection program.

The feds' most potent new weapon has been the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) law, passed in 1970 but not used consistently until 10 years later. Instead of a hunt-and-peck attack on the mob - a soldier here, a boss there - RICO allows prosecutors to put whole groups of mobsters away for long sentences and seize their ill-gotten assets.

RICO also affords civil remedies designed to free "captive organizations," such as labor unions and businesses, that impose a mob tax on consumers. In New York, it adds about 10 percent to the price of a paint job, 3 percent to the wholesale cost of a garment and 1 cent to the cost of a hot dog at the Bronx Zoo.

Meanwhile, the Mafia has other problems. The streets of the city are no longer the fertile recruiting grounds for new members they once were as the population shifts to the suburbs. Mob life looks less appealing from the perspective of quiet, tree-lined streets.

This has come to the attention of the nation's most notorious mobster, Gotti, boss of New York's Gambino crime family. On FBI tapes played this year at his racketeering trial, Gotti groused that recruitment "is gettin' tougher, not easier! . . . We got the only few pockets of good kids left." He meant, of course, bad kids.

The mob's plight seems so dire, in fact, that the myth of its invincibility has been replaced by the myth of its demise.

Law enforcers and journalists have trumpeted each conviction - sometimes each indictment - as a lasting blow against the mob and its rackets.

`WORST DAY'

When the bosses who sat on the New York mob's ruling "commission" were convicted in 1986, Giuliani called it "the Mafia's worst day." Several years later, Attorney General Dick Thornburgh called the bugging of a Mafia induction ceremony "the final ignominy," and said the government was ready "to put out a final contract on the mob."

But the millennium has not arrived, and the mob's demise remains on the horizon.

In Philadelphia, despite the incarceration of virtually every big Mafioso, "we're seeing the reorganizing of the family businesses," says Martens of the state crime commission. "And Pittsburgh has the smoothest run family you'll see."

In Chicago, The Outfit has survived a wave of convictions. "We may have dented it in the '80s, but it's in the repair shop," says Robert Fuesel of the Chicago Crime Commission.

Meanwhile, the mob tax has not been reduced, much less repealed. The liberation of the mob's "captive institutions" via RICO civil suits is lagging on several key fronts:

-- Teamsters Local 560 in northern New Jersey, where a trustee was appointed in 1986 to end what a federal judge called "an orgy of criminal activity," including the murder of two dissident members. Members have elected mob-linked candidates in two federally supervised elections. When the judge ousted Michael Sciarra, imprisoned gangster Tony Provenzano's designated successor, from the local presidency, members elected his brother - who then appointed Sciarra business agent.

-- New York's Fulton Fish Market, the nation's largest seafood market, where a federal administrator was appointed in 1988 to clean up a gangland bazaar that has been controlled by the mob since Herbert Hoover was in The White House. With his term up for renewal in May, the federal administrator admits that a mob-enforced monopoly still unloads every crate of fish, thus increasing seafood prices across the region and preserving mob control of the market.

-- Roofers Local 30 in Philadelphia, which a federal judge began supervising in 1988 following the racketeering convictions of 13 mob-linked officers. The leader of a reform faction has lost two elections since the convictions and complains that the hiring hall is starving out his followers.

Why won't the mob die? Because the Mafia is more than an organization. It's a process that has endured for centuries by exploiting man's vices and weaknesses, by emphasizing criminal cooperation rather than competition, and by bending rather than breaking when challenged by the law.

As long as people want to gamble without paying taxes, borrow money on poor credit or take illegal drugs, there will be bookies to be "protected," loans to be collected, narcotics to be smuggled. There's always a thief looking for a fence, an official looking for a payoff.

Reagan described organized crime as a social parasite, but the Mafia relies no more on victims than co-conspirators: the labor leader who needs muscle to keep dissidents in line, the businessman eager to buy stolen goods at a discount.

The incarceration of one mobster or 1,000 changes none of this. The Mafia is a relatively flexible, loose-knit federation in which various criminal entrepreneurs - some Mafiosi, some not - run their own rackets and pass up some proceeds.

A boss's death or imprisonment merely creates a vacuum. Despite the Mafia's recruiting problems, the new boss need not be the second coming of Lucky Luciano to succeed. He only has to be more powerful or influential than anyone else in his corner of the underworld.

The racketeering blueprint is there for anyone to use. Underboss succeeds boss, soldier moves up to capo. And the streets are filled with "wannabes" eager to shoot someone in the head for the family and thereby join its ranks.

The real problem, however, is not the mob, but society's susceptibility to organized crime.