Gambinos and Other NYC Mob Families Are Still in Business

In New York City, it seems, the mob’s five families still have a few cards to play.

That was on full display Thursday when federal and local officials announced charges against a grab bag of gangsters from four of the families, including leaders, made men and associates, saying they oversaw a complex scheme to rig illegal poker games that raked in millions of dollars. The victims were lured to the high-stakes tables by the presence of current and former N.B.A. luminaries, officials said.

While the mob’s outright stranglehold on a host of industries, from construction and trucking to control of the waterfront and garment center, is a thing of the past, organized crime remains alive and well, if less visible, according to current and former investigators. Its presence is perhaps most vibrant in the New York City metropolitan area.

This stubborn resilience continues, they said, despite more than four decades of aggressive investigations and prosecutions that have decimated the leadership of the five families and secured thousands of convictions — and the recruitment of an army of chatty informants.

Over the years, the mob’s savvier operators have learned that violence — not to mention the antics of strutting crime family peacocks like the Gambino boss John Gotti — attracts law enforcement attention, which can land them in prison, where moneymaking opportunities are decidedly fewer and farther between.

The Italian Mafia, known as La Cosa Nostra, “is still alive and well in the New York City area, they just changed some of their methods in the way they operate,” said F.B.I. supervisor Mike Mullahy, a veteran mob investigator who oversaw the agents who made the poker case.

“Being brazen and up front in how they operate has not always worked out well for them,” he added, “so they have changed their methods and modes of operation, and we have changed our method of investigating them.”

The poker indictment was unsealed on Thursday along with an unrelated case with no mob involvement that accused three current and former N.B.A. players and coaches and three other men of defrauding gamblers and online betting firms out of millions of dollars.

In the poker case, prosecutors charged 32 men, accusing 11 of them of being leaders, members or associates of the Genovese, Gambino, Bonanno and Lucchese families, including one Bonanno figure, Ernest Aiello, who was reputed to be the family’s acting street boss. The charges include wire fraud conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, operating an illegal gambling enterprise and conspiracies to commit extortion and robbery.

Both indictments were brought by prosecutors from the office of the Brooklyn U.S. attorney, Joseph Nocella Jr., after separate investigations by his office and several other agencies. In the poker inquiry, they included the F.B.I., the Police Department and the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor, which, like the U.S. attorney’s office, has long been among the agencies at the forefront of investigating the mob.

The two cases were not directly related. But three men — none of them accused mob figures — were charged in both indictments, so the inquiries were coordinated and conducted in parallel and the cases were announced together.

Illegal gambling has long been a lucrative mob staple, with its attendant crimes of loan-sharking and extortion, and it continues to be a big moneymaker for all five families, investigators said. But the scheme outlined in the poker indictment took it to another level, leaving nothing to chance.

High rollers were lured to the tables at the mob-sanctioned games in Manhattan, the Hamptons and elsewhere, where, unbeknown to them, the players were interspersed with members of what the indictment said defendants referred to as “cheating teams.” Shuffling machines were altered with chips that could read all the cards in the deck so each player’s hand could be determined in real time and communicated to one of the scheme’s participants at the table, referred to as the “quarterback” or “driver.”

While the indictment said the victims thought they were playing in a “straight” illegal card game “gambling against other participants on equal footing,” in reality, they were facing the cheating team, a lineup of the defendants and their co-conspirators.

At the end of the day, the sophistication of the scheme, and the involvement of four of New York’s five families, strongly indicate that the mob is still thriving. It has hummed along in the background as law enforcement’s priorities have shifted elsewhere — to terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks and, more recently, immigration enforcement under the Trump administration.

“Having worked these families firsthand for 15 years, I can tell you they never really disappear,” said Seamus McElearney, a retired F.B.I. agent who supervised cases against three crime families and has written a book about his time investigating the mob. “They adjust and find ways to cash in.”