Carmine “Papa Smurf” Franco faces up to 80 years in prison if convicted of racketeering, fraud and extortion. (Dan Brinzac)
TAKING OUT THE ‘TRASH’: FBI agents herd a Mafia suspect into Manhattan federal court yesterday in a massive crackdown on the garbage-hauling industry. (AP)
‘PAPA SMURF’
Outside court yesterday.
TAKING OUT THE ‘TRASH’: FBI agents herd a Mafia suspect into Manhattan federal court yesterday in a massive crackdown on the garbage-hauling industry. (
)
It’s a dirty business.
Thirty people — including a mobbed-up ringleader nicknamed “Papa Smurf” and a recently retired state trooper — were busted yesterday in a massive crackdown on gangland efforts to control the lucrative garbage-carting industry in New York City and its suburbs.
A Manhattan federal court indictment charges that competing Mafia families schemed with each other to circumvent official efforts to clean up the trash business, and used strong-arm tactics to shake down the owners of legitimate companies and secretly assume ownership of their operations.
Reputed members and associates of the Gambino, Genovese and Luchese organized-crime families allegedly put aside their differences to run a “property-rights” system in which they divvied up customers and companies under their control.
Participants in the racket held “sit-downs” to resolve disputes when “competing [Mafia] factions wanted to assert their control over a particular waste-disposal company,” and to “set the financial terms upon which the previous ‘owner’ of the company could be bought out,” according to the indictment.
Investigators described it as a fresh twist on the mob’s age-old love affair with the private trash companies that haul waste and run transfer stations where tonnage equals money and the totals can be padded with ease.
Five of the 30 suspects were identified as made men: four with the Genovese family, and one with the Gambino family.
At the heart of the case is the “operator” of a Westchester trash hauler, M&C Waste Services, sources said, who was getting squeezed by the mob and then turned the tables.
He became an informant and was wired by agents who conducted thousands of hours of surveillance that detailed how different families — and different crews within the same family — would fight for control of M&C and other companies.
At first, the feds said, M&C was controlled by Carmine “Papa Smurf” Franco, a Genovese associate who was barred from the trash business in New Jersey because of past criminal convictions.
After that, a crew in The Bronx made a play for M&C.
Franco was charged with racketeering, fraud and extortion, and faces 80 years in prison if convicted.
Also arrested was former state trooper Mario Velez, who was charged with using “actual and threatened force, violence and fear” to extort the owner of a trash company and take over the business. He was released on $75,000 bail.
A source said Velez was forced to retire two months ago, after the FBI notified officials in Albany that he was a target in its probe.
Additional reporting by Larry Celona