Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers, Page 3

  The case presents one more irony of homicide investigation. The effort to save Johnnie Eddines had been valiant, but in the end unsuccessful. And, as in most cases where such efforts are made, the crime scene has basically been destroyed, left unpreserved because of rescue efforts inside Eddines’ car to save him. It means the effort to save someone may hurt the effort to charge those responsible for his death.

  What it also means is that there is no need for the homicide detectives to gather at the scene. Melwid goes by the hospital to gather information on Eddines. Mundy makes a cursory stop at the scene and then goes on to the detective bureau. Hurt heads there as well.

  Patrol officers and a midnight shift detective have corralled witnesses to the shooting and are shuttling them to the police station. The victim’s car is put on the back of a tow truck and pulled to the police station, too. By midnight, the investigation has begun.

  ALL DAYS SHOULD be like Friday. All weeks should end like this.

  By 2 a.m., Mundy, Melwid and Hurt are wrapping up the Eddines murder, the first of the week’s cases to be closed.

  From the witnesses they had learned that they had what was basically a “smoking gun” case; open and shut. Eddines had stolen jewelry from his sister and the man who had given it to her came after him—with two friends and a gun. The detectives spent the morning hours taking statements from the witnesses and preparing warrants for the three suspects. It will just be a matter of catching them. They go home with the case, for the most part, cleared.

  The good luck doesn’t end with the Eddines case. Vicki Russo comes in to work and gets a little bit of the wish she made outside Walter Moody’s apartment four days earlier. The wish for a “gimme.”

  A friend of the long-sought-after Troy is on the phone saying that Troy wants to come in and talk about Moody. Russo says that’s fine, she’ll be waiting. A break is a break, even if it comes after a week of chasing dead ends.

  When Troy comes in, Russo and Allen sit him down in one of the squad’s interview rooms. It is just big enough for a suspect and two interviewers to sit around a table with fluorescent lighting above. The only window, small, square and mirrored, is in the door.

  The suspect, whose full name is Troy Tetreault, age 18, begins by saying he was there when Moody was murdered but he didn’t do it. He ends by admitting he did it, but only because he was defending himself. Moody was attacking me, he says.

  But all of the explanations Troy offers do not explain how someone defending himself would stab his attacker between the shoulder blades and then ransack and rob his home. Troy is charged with first-degree murder, and case number 38 is now counted as cleared.

  WHAT HAS BEEN a bad week has turned out well for the homicide squad. Two out of three cases cleared. Moody’s murder is the 31st cleared so far this year, a better than 75 percent rate.

  In future weeks, Walley and Ciani would continue to work the Connable slaying but it would remain unsolved. The detectives would get no closer to the three men of Group Two than they were the night one of them opened fire on Group One. In mid-August, Ciani would leave the police department to join a private investigation firm. The file on Connable would remain open on Walley’s desk, the detective waiting for a break, a name or a clue that would lead to the shooter. But it wouldn’t come, and he would have other cases to follow.

  The murder pace would continue in Fort Lauderdale, with the city surpassing the previous year’s murder toll of 42 by the end of July and steadily heading toward the all-time high of 53. Two detectives would be temporarily assigned to the squad to help handle the case flow.

  Sitting at his desk one day not long after the last week of June, George Hurt would ponder whether the pace was here to stay, whether three murders a week would no longer stand out as an aberration in Fort Lauderdale.

  “Believe me, I’ve been giving it a lot of thought,” he says. “But you can’t really predict what will happen. I’ve been hoping that this is just an oddball year. It used to be that four or five homicides a month meant a very heavy month. Now that doesn’t look so bad to me.”

  Whatever happens, Hurt says, the homicide squad is ready.

  “Whether there are 45 or 75 homicides, we are here,” he says. “I could say that old saying about it being a dirty job but somebody has to do it, but I don’t look at it that way. I see it as being a dirty job but somebody has to know how to do it. We know how. We do good work here.”

  THE OPEN TERRITORY

  THE MOB SQUAD

  They are the most covert of cops, working in the shadows and watching the underworld. They’re closing in on the Open Territory.

  SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL

  March 29, 1987

  LITTLE NICKY was driving his white Rolls-Royce on Commercial Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale, heading for some dinner, when he saw the blue light in the rearview mirror. He pulled over.

  Nicky immediately recognized the cop walking up to his window. It was one of the local detectives who stopped him from time to time to tell him to watch himself down here.

  “Mr. Drago, howya doin’?” Nicky said after rolling down the window.

  “Fine, Nicky,” the detective said. “You got your license with you?”

  “I better have that, right Mr. Drago?”

  “Yeah, Nicky, you better.”

  Nicodemo Scarfo, reputed overlord of mob activities in Philadelphia and Atlantic City, and frequent Fort Lauderdale resident, handed Detective Chuck Drago his license. Everything was in order—not like the time Little Nicky’s 300-pound driver and bodyguard had handed Drago a counterfeit license and gotten himself arrested.

  This time Drago and Scarfo talked almost like old acquaintances. Scarfo said he was leaving town that night, taking a charter up to Pomona Airport near Atlantic City. He’d had enough Florida sun for a while.

  “I like your style,” Scarfo said. “You’re not sneaking around, watching me, trying to sit near me in restaurants, following all the time. You come up to me, man to man. I like that.”

  Drago smiled. Nicky Scarfo had just paid him the highest possible compliment, without knowing the reason why.

  The fact is, Drago and members of the secret police unit he belongs to did sneak around and follow Nicky, go to the track with him and eat at the same restaurants—sometimes at the tables right next to him. They followed his yacht down the Intracoastal, even went to the barbershop with him. They were closer than Scarfo could have guessed, as his compliment to Drago had just confirmed.

  THIS IS A TALE from the Open Territory: Broward County, a location unclaimed by any single mob yet a place worked and sometimes called home by members of many of the nation’s organized crime families.

  It used to be that South Florida was tolerant of the mobsters. But the nature of the territory is changing—and Nicky Scarfo is a sign of the times. After Scarfo had rolled his car window up and gone on his way, Detective Drago went to a phone and made a long-distance call. And that night, when Scarfo stepped off the plane in New Jersey, he was met by FBI agents and the police. He left the airport in handcuffs, facing his second indictment on mob-related charges in as many months.

  Drago had done more than just tip his northern counterparts that Little Nicky was on his way. He and his partners’ work down here had helped put Scarfo in jail up there. They, too, are a sign of the times, a reason why the Open Territory is changing. They are covert cops, part of a new cult of police intelligence.

  THE SIGN BY THE office’s front door changes every so often from one business name to another. But it doesn’t really matter what it’s called because the name will always be phony and the business will never have any real customers.

  The actual name is MIU, short for Metropolitan Organized Crime Intelligence Unit. Plain old MIU goes better with a nondescript operation in a nondescript location.

  The detectives assigned to MIU work undercover. They are watchers and gatherers. They move through the streets in cars with windows tinted smoky black, comb through the rec
ord stacks at the county courthouse, and access the networks of law enforcement computers.

  They watch through telephoto lenses and listen through electronic bugs. They tell their friends never to acknowledge them at the supermarket, the mall, even sitting out by the pool at a waterfront bar. They might be on the job.

  MIU’s 25 or so detectives come from Broward’s major law enforcement agencies. Their business, in simple terms, is raw intelligence. They are experts in the art of surveillance.

  For three years they have led a quiet war on organized crime in Broward. Their major weapon is cooperation, the welcome mat they put out for other law enforcement agencies, both near and far.

  MIU Detective Steve Raabe likes to tell a story about the time he went down to Miami two years ago to sit in on a hearing held by the Presidential Commission on Organized Crime. The witness that day had once been a major narcotics supplier to New York City. He sat with a black hood over his head and testified about the inner workings of organized crime.

  When the witness was finished, one of the commissioners leaned toward his microphone and asked the man what he thought law enforcement was doing wrong. How come organized crime still flourished, despite all the task forces, the commissions, the police agencies, the money spent to combat it?

  The witness didn’t hesitate. You people have to start communicating, he told the commission. Police have to cooperate with each other. It’s the only way.

  “Now that sounds kind of strange coming from the mouth of a criminal,” says Raabe. “But he hit it right on the head. Crime doesn’t stop at the county or city line. There are no boundaries. So the only real hope of law enforcement on any level is cooperation.

  “Networking. And that’s what MIU is all about.”

  By quietly documenting the activities of mobsters in Broward County, MIU has become a clearinghouse of intelligence on organized crime activities for federal, state and local authorities. Nicky Scarfo was only one of MIU’s targets. Other tales from the Open Territory read like movie scripts.

  Even so, MIU remains one of Broward’s best-kept secrets. It doesn’t seek headlines. “It’s not a glamour group going out to make arrests,” says Fort Lauderdale Police Chief Ron Cochran, a member of MIU’s board of directors. “It has always been behind-the-scenes work. The arrests go to other agencies.”

  “We’re bricklayers,” explains Detective Raabe. MIU’s operatives help build the cases, put the foundations in place. But they usually aren’t around when the building is finished.

  IT GOES BACK to the days of Capone and Lansky. For half a century, mobsters have come to South Florida to vacation, to retire, or to stay out of reach of the northern police agencies that watched their every move.

  “South Florida,” says Raabe, “has always been seen by these people as a place where they could be at their leisure, and not worry about being watched by that Philly or New York detective who has been on their back for 20 years.”

  And Broward County has always been one of the mob’s favorite hideaways. By the end of 1985, law enforcement agencies had identified over 600 members and associates of traditional organized crime mobs as residents, full- and part-time, in Broward. They ranged from soldiers to dons. Paul Castellano, head of New York’s Gambino organization until his murder in front of a steakhouse in 1985, had a home in Pompano Beach. Gus Alex, an aging, reputed leader of the Chicago mob known as The Outfit, has a Fort Lauderdale address. So did Chicago mob boss Jackie Cerrone until he was imprisoned recently. And so on.

  “Organized crime is a growth industry and there is money to be made in Broward County,” explains MIU Detective Curt Stuart. “It is safe to say we have seen the interest of all 28 of the nation’s organized crime families here.”

  What that means is that the Open Territory is like few other places where traditional organized crime is found.

  “In a city up north, law enforcement has to know the members of maybe one or two crime families,” says Sgt. Ken Staab, an MIU supervisor. “Down here we have to know all the families because we’ve got them all.”

  And that’s why there is an MIU.

  Twice in the early 1980s, grand juries evaluating efforts to stop organized crime in Broward concluded that the law enforcement structure seemed ideally suited for the expansion of organized crime.

  Investigations were undermanned, efforts fragmented along lines of departmental jurisdictions and jealousies. MIU was established in 1983 after two other task forces had been formed and dismantled because of the same problems.

  MIU has a $2 million budget, with each member agency paying the salaries of participants and sharing the overhead. Investigators currently come from police departments in Fort Lauderdale, Pompano Beach, Hollywood and Plantation, along with the Sheriff’s Office, the State Attorney’s Office and the state Division of Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco. The head of each agency sits on MIU’s board of directors.

  “A frequent criticism of law enforcement is that it is too parochial,” says Cochran. “While a parochial approach may be adequate in some areas, we feel the best way to go against organized crime is consolidation of expertise. We began with the ambition of creating a first-rate intelligence unit. And I’m satisfied it is one of the best in the country.”

  MIU directors and detectives often point to the Scarfo case as an example of what the unit can accomplish.

  INVESTIGATORS SAY that Nicodemo Scarfo’s interest in Broward County coincided with his release from prison in 1984 and rise to the top of the Philadelphia/Atlantic City mob. The diminutive, 57-year-old Scarfo has a criminal record that includes manslaughter and illegal possession of a firearm.

  The Philly-South Jersey organization had been run by the “Docile Don,” Angelo Bruno, until he was gunned down outside his home in 1980. Nicky took over after Bruno’s successor, Phil Testa, was killed by a nail bomb. Investigators say at least 17 mob-related murders occurred in the City of Brotherly Love during Scarfo’s rise to the top of the rackets.

  That rise brought Scarfo billing on Fortune magazine’s list of the most powerful and richest mobsters in the country, his money allegedly coming from unions, numbers, loan-sharking, extortion and gambling.

  The indications are that Scarfo was looking to move up the Fortune list. He started routinely making lengthy visits to Fort Lauderdale. In 1985, he set up his southern operations on Northeast 47th Street near the Intracoastal Waterway, in a two-story, Spanish-style house with an iron gate out front. He put up a sign on the front wall that named the place Casablanca South. The yacht docked out back was also called Casablanca, but there was a smaller postscript painted below the name. Usual Suspects, it said, a wry reference to the police inspector’s instruction in the famed Bogart movie: “Round up all the usual suspects.”

  It’s a funny thing about the house and boat, Detective Drago says: Scarfo didn’t own them. Investigators are still trying to learn how he came to control them.

  “Nicky liked the house and the boat,” Drago says. “So he took them. When Little Nicky wants something, he just takes it. You don’t argue.”

  By all estimates of law enforcement authorities, Scarfo wanted to take Broward County, or at least part of it. Florida had an upcoming referendum on casino gambling, and investigators believe that Scarfo was preparing to direct organized crime’s interests if casinos came to pass.

  A decade earlier, Scarfo had done the same thing in Atlantic City. The President’s Commission on Organized Crime named him as the chief figure behind the mob’s influence in the casino construction industry there. Coincidentally, MIU investigators say, contractors who bid against the mob companies had a tendency to get killed.

  Shortly after Scarfo arrived in Fort Lauderdale, the FBI initiated what was called the Southern Summit, a law enforcement conference on organized crime influences in the South. They named Nicodemo Scarfo as their primary target and directed MIU, a relatively unknown agency less than two years old, to work in concert with investigators building cases in New Jersey
and Philadelphia against the reputed mob lord.

  MIU would turn out to be a major conduit of raw intelligence on Scarfo, the reason being that Scarfo believed he had a free rein in the Open Territory.

  “He was a priority up here, but I’m sure he thought he wouldn’t be much of a priority down there,” says Sgt. Bill Coblantz of the New Jersey State Police mob intelligence unit. “They’ve got a lot of other organized people to watch down there. So he went to South Florida without the same kind of police paranoia he had up here. He relaxed. That’s what Fort Lauderdale is for, right?”

  But Nicky was wrong.

  The mansion he had chosen for his Casablanca South was on a remote, dead-end street, but it faced an empty lot that bordered a canal. And across that canal was a five-story condominium complex.

  While Nicky and his associates met at Casablanca South, their cars lined up and down the street, Chuck Drago and other detectives from MIU, the FBI, even Philadelphia and New Jersey, would be watching from behind the darkened windows of one of the upstairs condos across the canal. The view was good and the FBI kept the lease on the place for a year. The cameras were always rolling.

  The detectives looked out on a world not previously documented in the Open Territory. While law enforcement pressure in northern cities had made the big meetings of crime families largely things of the past, Scarfo was in Fort Lauderdale hosting meetings so large that he needed a caterer. Sometimes, he’d take 15 or 20 people, documented by police as crime associates, out for rides on his yacht.

  “It was amazing what we were seeing,” recalls Staab, the MIU supervisor. “These other agents would come here from up north and they couldn’t believe how open this guy was being.”