The Mob was the City's Watchdog During Giuliani Cleanup

Newspaper article

By: Tom Robbins

Date: March 28, 2003

Source: Robbins, Tom. "The Mob was the City's Watchdog During Giuliani Cleanup." The Village Voice (March 28, 2003).

About the Author: Tom Robbins is a staff reporter for The Village Voice. He writes about politics and local government in New York City.

INTRODUCTION

During the time he served as mayor of New York City, Rudolph Giuliani (1944–) set himself the task of eliminating organized crime from a number of the city's businesses that had been traditionally under the control of the mob. These included the Fulton Fish Market, the San Gennaro Festival, the garbage disposal industry, and those responsible for unloading trucks across the city. Giuliani included these goals as a major point in his campaign when he was running for office, and once elected, he was vocal about following through with his plans. However, even as Giuliani had members of these businesses questioned regarding their activities in an effort to root out anyone with ties to organized crime, the Department of Finance hired a private security firm to insure the safety of their offices—a security firm with connections to an organized crime family in the Bronx.

PRIMARY SOURCE

In 1996, then mayor Rudy Giuliani was in the midst of a fervent drive to rid the city's private carting and wholesale fish industries of mob influence. Garbagemen, seafood workers, and truck unloaders were interviewed, fingerprinted, and confronted with any evidence of unsavory associations.

"We're sending the clear and unequivocal message," the prosecutor-turned-politician said in a speech, "that we do not tolerate organized crime in the Fulton Fish Market, the carting industry, the San Gennaro festival, or anywhere."

That same year, the Department of Finance quietly signed a three-year contract with a private security firm to provide guards for its offices. The $3 million deal went to the Explorer Investigation Agency, a state-licensed company based in a small, two-story brick building at 601 West 51st Street on the far West Side. The company's chief executive is a white-haired 67-year-old man named Anthony Negri Sr. His contract called for Explorer to provide more than 40 guards at 15 locations around the city, including the finance department's main offices in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. The company did well enough to win a renewal of its contract in 1999, this time for $4 million.

At the same time that Negri's firm was being paid to watchdog the offices where much of the city's $23 billion in tax revenue is handled, however, city police detectives assigned to an organized-crime investigation were watching Negri. On three separate occasions over the summer and fall of 1998, they watched Negri pull up in his white Mercury SUV to Joe & Joe's Restaurant on Castle Hill Avenue in the north Bronx, where he met with organized-crime figures. Among them was the then acting boss of the Genovese crime family, Dominick "Quiet Dom" Cirillo.

Detectives were impressed to see Cirillo sit down with Negri and others for several reasons. For one thing, Cirillo, whose nickname reflects his soft-spoken manner, is notoriously careful about whom he meets with. Such caution has helped the 73-year-old gangster, whose only conviction is a 1952 heroin sales rap, stay out of trouble. For another, the acting boss had suffered a recent heart attack, and police weren't sure he was up to managing mob business.

Also sitting with Cirillo and Negri was Michael Crimi, a 66-year-old labor consultant who was the immediate target of the investigation by the office of Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau and the School Construction Authority. Crimi, although never charged in the probe, was believed to be serving as the mob's "middleman" for a group of corrupt roofing contractors and union officials (see "The Man Who Got Away," March 12-18).

Detectives overheard the trio discuss construction deadlines and the cost of union labor, according to court affidavits filed in conjunction with the case. They caught only intriguing snatches of conversation, among them this comment by Crimi to Negri: "The broad owes him $20,000. He wants to kill her."

The cops weren't the only ones in Joe & Joe's who knew these weren't ordinary businessmen. When Cirillo walked out of the restaurant after a July meeting, one patron was overheard to say, "He is walking alone. He is lucky no one has shot him yet."

Like Crimi, Negri was never charged in the case. But detectives learned through wiretaps and surveillance that the two men were close friends who spoke often about business. Crimi was a regular visitor to Negri's offices on West 51st Street and even used the security firm owner to help arbitrate disputes with business associates. An analysis of Crimi's phone records showed that he called Negri constantly, at work and at his Rockland County home.

Indeed, the men were such good pals, court records show, that Crimi arranged for Negri's son-in-law to get a job with Princeton Restoration, a major roofing contractor that was allegedly secretly paying Crimi $500 a week to arrange favorable union deals.

Detectives also took note that Negri's security firm shares offices in the small building on the corner of Eleventh Avenue and 51st Street with a tiny, 85-member local of the mob-ridden International Longshoremen's Association. There were dozens of calls between Crimi and the offices of ILA Local 976, which represents production and warehouse workers. Inside the same small office, the ILA officials also preside over a much larger union, not affiliated with the AFL-CIO, called the United Construction Trades & Industrial Employees. That union has been accused by other labor organizations of signing low-cost, sweetheart contracts with employers facing legitimate employee organizing drives.

None of those troublesome associations, however, hindered Negri's work for the city. His company was paid a total of $7.5 million for its six years of service to the finance department, records show. It hit just one bad patch, when one of its security guards was caught last August submitting phony time sheets with the help of a finance agency clerk. The city's investigations department nailed that one, and the two men later pled guilty. But even that was considered an isolated incident, and the only reason Explorer Investigation lost a second contract renewal last fall, city officials said, was because another company underbid it. Explorer had a little more trouble with a separate contract, this one with the Port Authority, to guard some piers in Red Hook, Brooklyn. A three-year contract signed in 2001 was canceled last year after a dispute over wage rates. Explorer also holds two other contracts with the Port Authority worth more than $2 million. Negri, as well as his son Anthony Negri Jr., who handles day-to-day affairs for the security firm, failed to return repeated calls.

As long as its investigation into construction corruption was under way, the D.A.'s office had good reason not to tell the city about any shadowy vendors that turned up during its probe. To do so could have jeopardized the secrecy of ongoing, fruitful wiretaps. But the construction probe ended in July 2000 with indictments of 13 people, including top contractors in the roofing business and union officials. All of the D.A.'s secret wiretap information was turned over to defendants and their lawyers. Even Negri would have been notified that he had been overheard on them. But no one remembers doing anything about the fact that a Genovese crime family associate was guarding the city's revenue offices. "There is no cut and-dried policy on this," said one official in Morgenthau's office. "You don't disclose things during an investigation unless there is imminent harm. Whether you do later is decided on an ad hoc basis." In this case, the official added, "we saw no crimes relating to the guard company."

Negri's mob ties, however, are well known to other law enforcement authorities as well. After federal prosecutors in Brooklyn indicted a group of high-level Genovese gangsters last year, they put Negri's name on a list of mob-tied people the defendants were prohibited from contacting. Nor does law enforcement have any doubts about the security firm owner's mob pedigree. "We believed Negri had more juice than Crimi," said one prosecutor. "It's our understanding that if they ever open the [mob membership] books again, he will be one of the first ones inducted." That level of law enforcement intelligence provided the basis for many of the decisions made by city licensing officials during the Giuliani administration's push to chase wiseguys out of the Fulton Fish Market, the private carting business, and later, the San Gennaro festival. Giuliani's aides, many of them ex-prosecutors themselves, confronted license seekers with city, state, and federal evidence of any contacts with organized crime, often in the form of wiretaps and surveillance photos.

"God forbid anyone in the fish market should have shown up in a social club somewhere," said Gerald McMahon, an attorney who represented more than two dozen fish wholesalers and loading firms that were denied licenses under the system. "That was it for their license." Let alone having been spotted meeting regularly with the acting boss of the Genovese crime family.

SIGNIFICANCE

Prior to becoming the mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani built a solid reputation as someone who was tough on crime, particularly anything having to do with the trafficking of drugs. As a lawyer with the U.S. Attorney's office, he served as chief of the Narcotics Unit. Later, as Associate Attorney General, he was responsible for all of the U.S. Attorney's federal law enforcement agencies—the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Bureau of Corrections, and the U.S. Marshals. Once he became mayor, Giuliani turned his attention to improving the safety of New York City, which included taking a stand against organized crime. He wanted to eliminate the tax imposed on numerous businesses by the mob, thereby improving the economy of the city by restoring a fair-market system and allowing business owners to profit from their hard work without having to turn a share of those profits over to organized crime families. As a result, Giuliani was ultimately responsible for the conviction of numerous crime bosses. He succeeded in lowering both the overall crime rate and the incidents of murder by more than half, and New York's methods of crime prevention became an example for other cities across the nation.

Giuliani passed Local Law 50, which changed the way the Fulton Fish Market ran, despite various threats and set backs, including an arson fire that damaged the oldest building in the market. As a result, more fish was delivered to the market, and the cost of unloading that fish was reduced by twenty percent. The price of loading was reduced even further, by seventy percent. Giuliani ended the organized crime monopoly on the carting of refuse by having the city set the maximum rate that any company can charge for garbage removal services. He put an end to illegal gambling and extortion during the annual San Gennaro Festival by requiring the city to grant a new permit each year, one that is withheld until festival promoters agree to a city-appointed monitor who is in charge of making sure the festival operates within legal guidelines. As a result, the amount of money the festival earns each year for charity has risen substantially.

However, even with his ambitious goals and determination, Giuliani was unable to completely control the spread of organized crime in the city. When the Department of Finance hired the Explorer Investigation Agency to handle their security, they awarded a multi-million dollar contract to an organization run by Anthony Negri Sr., a man who was under investigation by New York City police detectives due to his regular association with Dominick "Quiet Dom" Cirillo of the Genovese crime family. Michael Crimi, a labor consultant under suspicion by the Manhattan District Attorney, also met with Negri and Cirillo. Conversations were taped regularly, making it unlikely that the Department of Finance remained ignorant of Negri's ties, even if they were unaware of them in the beginning. However, Negri continued to provide security services, and the contract with Explorer Investigation was renewed once before they were eventually underbid by another firm. The strict attention directed toward those areas of New York targeted by Giuliani's agenda was not applied equally to all areas of business.

This raises the question as to whether certain levels of organized crime were considered acceptable, or whether it was simply a case of an institution being so widespread that it was impossible to eliminate it entirely. In the case of Negri, the Explorer Investigation Agency appeared to be performing the job they were paid for, and at no time was there any indication that illegal activities were taking place in or around the offices of the Department of Finance. If that is the case, then the elimination of organized crime in the areas specifically targeted by Giuliani had a higher priority, given that they were directly affecting the economy and ongoing prosperity of New York City.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Giuliani, Rudolph W., and Kevin Kurson. Leadership. New York: Miramax Books, 2004.

Web sites

New York City web site. "Biography of Rudolph Giuliani." 〈http://www.nyc.gov/html/records/rwg/html/bio.html〉 (accessed January 12, 2006).

New York City web site. "Freeing the Economy from Organized Crime and Restoring Open, Competitive Markets." 〈http://www.nyc.gov/html/rwg/html/97/orgcrime.html〉 (accessed January 12, 2006).