Mob Connected New York City Building Officials Taking Bribes at Construction Sites, Dealing Drugs
September 8th, 2009Fuggetaboutit.
Via: New York Post:
AT LEAST six city building inspectors — some with ties to a powerful crime family — were videotaped taking bribes at construction sites, and some were seen dealing cocaine and prescription pills while on duty, The Post has learned.
The corrupt Department of Buildings workers — who lined their pockets by ignoring violations or expediting construction and building work permits — will be arrested later this month, along with about two dozen Luchese crime-family captains, soldiers and associates, sources said.
“This is going to be big,” a well-placed source said.
Among the other startling revelations:
* Two of the crooked city employees are known by law enforcement as full-blown Luchese associates.
* The investigation included several landlords who own buildings in Manhattan and The Bronx — with at least one facing certain arrest, sources say.
* About 50 search warrants were executed in city offices, mob-run social clubs, wire rooms and wiseguys’ homes.
The nearly two-year probe grew out of a 2007 New Jersey case involving a Luchese faction that ran a staggering $2 billion-a-year gambling operation and supplied drugs and cellphones to Bloods gang members in state prisons.
That probe — which netted 32 wiseguys — soon spread across the Hudson River into the family’s Big Apple hierarchy, prompting surveillance and wiretapping by the NYPD and Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s office, the sources said.
The probers, who made hundreds of hours of recordings, quickly found mobsters taking bets and conducting loan-sharking operations worth tens of millions of dollars.
