Oklahoma Criminal Defense Blog

Federal authorities have documented many links between most of the major U.S. prison gangs and Mexican drug trafficking organizations.      The most recent National Drug Threat Assessment from the Justice Department reported prison gangs were operating in all 50 U.S. states are increasing their influence over drug trafficking along the U.S.-Mexican b order.

Federal prosecutors in San Diego charged 36 defendants of racketeering for their activities between the Arellano Felix drug trafficking network and California’s Mexican Mafia prison gang, the gang members allegedly working in drug trafficking, kidnapping, and murder attempts for the Mexican cartel.

Baldemar Rivera for years ran a Texas prison gang named Raza Unida while he was in isolation. Reportedly, this is common for gang members for the organization to be run from someone in solitary confinement.  Rivera says he used sign language to discuss gang business with one of his minions who visited him.  Rivera communicated with gang members in other Texas prisons through his captains in prison, who wrote to the soldiers, also in prison.  Within 3 or 4 days, the word had been passed, the word was out.  Rivera, now 50, and now serving a 60-year sentence for murder, says he left the gang life 10 years ago after completing the state’s gang-renouncement program.

Rivera was running Raza Unida in the 1990s, when prisoners used mail to communicate with each other and the outside world.  Now they use cell phones.  Texas prisons seized 1200 cell phones from prisoners last year.  And Texas prisons do not allow prisoners to mail letters to other inmates, so they mail to third parties, who then pass on their letters to the prisoner intended.

Prisoners also hold conference calls provided by friends on the outside.  Mail censors watch their mail, so some prisoners communicate in Nahuatl, language of the Aztecs.  It is an ancient language, but it’s still spoken by about a million and a half people in Mexico.  The gang members learn Nahuatl from books, and some of them adopt Aztec names.  They claim they are honoring their heritage, but they are just concealing their communications.

The gangs sometimes get their hooks into prison employees or even court employees.  One woman who worked in the federal defender’s office in El Paso was convicted of acting as liaison between gang members behind the walls and their confederates outside.

Gang members have testified in at least two federal cases about how money from the gang’s outside businesses of extortion, drug sales, and other illegal undertakings, ultimately found its way into the gang members’ commissary accounts in prison.

An FBI agent testified last year in a prosecution against Texas’ Mexican Mafia prison gang that the gang collected at least $8,000 a week, sometimes $40,000 a week, in San Antonio alone.  The proceeds were sent to gang members in prison, where they spent the money on food, personal items, or they could send money to their family members on the outside. Drugs were available to gang members and visitations from girls.

Contraband is smuggled in by guards, lawyers, and visitors.  Revenue from drug sales on the street pays for it.      A cell phone cost $2,000. Contraband is dropped off at pre-arranged locations accessible to prisoners on work detail.  Sixty phones were discovered on one occasion in an air compressor delivered to a prison workshop.

When gang members are released from prison, they are expected to report to gang leaders on the outside, attend gang meetings and make their contribution to making money for the gang. That usually means selling drugs or enforcing on the street dealers.

The number of active gang members nationally is estimated at about 1 million.  Prison gangs like the Mexican Mafia, the Texas Syndicate, Hermandad de Pistoleros Latinos (the Brotherhood of Latino Gunmen), Raza Unida, and Mexikanemi comprise only about 45,000 members.  However, they control most of the local street gangs as well, especially in southern California and south Texas.

Joe DeFede is a retired gangster. He oversaw the garment district in New York during the 1990’s.   He was the acting boss of  the Luchese family.  He had a Cadillac, a driver, three horses stabled at Aqueduct and a home entertainment center with Greek columns like those in ancient Greece.  He walked around with thousands of dollars in his pocket.

Now he has lost everything.  At 76, he wears therapeutic sneakers and a Hawaiian shirt.  He spent five years in prison, paid staggering legal fees, and entered the witness protection program, which he then left.

Now he is practically broke.  He lives with his second wife, Nancy, on an annual income of about $30,000 from Social Security, her pension from working at a bank, and an annuity.  He has to make payments for his home, his car and a recent hip replacement, and he sometimes falls  behind on his payments.

He is not the only gangster to struggle.  Frank Lucas, who earned and then lost millions as a heroin dealer, was living in a public housing project in New Jersey.  The film “American Gangster” gave his checking account new life.  Now he is starting his own fashion line.  Henry Hill is another retired gangster who was down on his luck.  He was a Luchese family associate whose life formed the basis of the movie “Goodfellas.” He sells cookbooks, his memoirs, and signed posters online at his Web site.  These are all resourceful people, hustlers from an early age, who must and do come up with different schemes to survive without a 401(k).

This describes DeFede and his wife.  They have no friends, no job, no certainty about their future.  They live by their wits.  Mrs. DeFede has sold jewelry and last year she worked as a cashier at a clothing store for $7.50 an hour.   Her job included cleaning the toilets, and she lasted 3 days.  She has written a book entitled, “Life with Little Joe.”  The book is a biography of their journey from the riches to life in the witness protection program.  The book has not sold, but the DeFede’s still hope it will give them some security in their old age, even though their agent spent a year trying unsuccessfully to sell the manuscript.

They are filled with rage and bitterness at their situation.  Mr. DeFede is so anxious about his future, mainly his financial future, that he not only sleepwalks but, while sleepwalking, punches walls with his fist.  He has punched his wife during some of these episodes.

DeFede was 70 when he got of prison.  He was told a contract had been taken out on his life because he was suspected of stealing a million dollars from the Luchese family.  He denies he stole, of course.  He and his wife live in a community in New York for those 55-and-older.  They have grandchildren who live in San Diego but cannot afford to travel there.  Holidays are painful because of this.   Mrs. DeFede’s oldest friend from Brooklyn moved into the neighborhood to be with her.  But after a while, they quit talking, in part because the friend started dating a retired cop.
DeFede and his wife don’t have much money, but they have each other.  She makes suggestions for him to order from the menu.  They watch television together.  He drives her to the beauty parlor as she back-seat drives from the front seat.  They go to the flea market together, even though they don’t have the money to buy much.

Stephen Caracappa and Louis Eppolito were convicted three years before of acting as assassins for the Mafia while they were employed by New York Police Department.    Finally, [in March, 2009] they were sentenced in Brooklyn by U.S. District Court by Judge Jack Weinstein, Eppolito to life plus 100 years with a fine of $4.75 million, Caracappa to life plus 80 years and a fine of $4.25 million.

The judge said the two defendants likely had hidden assets to pay the fines.  One asset that will not be seized, however, is their police pensions.  Both men have been drawing tax-free disability pensions from the City of New York since they left the police department.  Caracappa retired in 1992 as a first-grade detective.  He receives $5,313 a month.  Eppolito retired in 1990 as a second-grade detective and receives a $3,896 per month in pension.

Both detectives, who joined the police force in 1969, retired before they were charged with anything, so their convictions do not interrupt their pensions from the city.  Although first reports of the detective’s corruption surfaced in 1979, they continued to receive promotions in the police department.  Implicated a  number of times, they were never charged until in this prosecution.  The pensions are not subject to seizure for the fines due the federal government.

Under New York law, pensions due former public employees are treated as property in trust for the employee. Efforts to exact forfeiture of such pensions as penalty for those convicted of corruption have failed in the past.  In 2009, 450 corrupt former officials, judges and police officers were reportedly still receiving pensions despite their convictions.

Caracappa, now 68 years old, is gaunt, with little color in his face.  Eppolito is 61 and doing better but still a wreck.   They will have little opportunity to spend their pensions in prison, but their families can.  The testimony of the families of some of their victims at the sentencing hearing did not prompt either of the men to give up their pensions.

Caracappa’s and Eppolito’s trial [in 2006?] lasted 3 weeks.  It was built around the testimony of Burton Kaplan, a wholesale garment dealer who was involved in a number of schemes with people in organized crime.  Jimmy Breslin wrote a book about Kaplan, entitled “The Good Rat, ” which describes how Caracappa, using a police computer, helped track down a man named Nicholas Guido for the Mafia.  Caracappa made a mistake, however, and gave a wrong address with the same name, who was soon shot to death.

Caracappa’s and Eppolito were charged with accepting $4,000 a month payments from the mob for spying, plus tens of thousands extra for the occasional kidnapping or murder.  They disclosed the identities of witnesses and leaked information, compromising investigations.  In their first mob killing in 1986, they used the siren on their unmarked car to pull over a jeweler on a Long Island road.  They told Israel Greenwald they needed him to stand in a lineup to investigate a traffic accident.  Then they drove him to a garage, where he was shot to death.

At their trial, the detectives were convicted of murdering a capo in the Gambino family capo in his Mercedes-Benz on the Belt Parkway in New York.  The jury also found them guilty of kidnaping a man, putting him in the trunk of their car, and delivering him to a mobster, who then tortured the man for hours before killing him.

Following the trial in which they were convicted of racketeering conspiracy, the trial judge issued but did not impose a life sentence for each detective.  The judge stated he believed the five-year statute of limitations had run on the crimes the defendants had committed and therefore overturned the convictions.  The most serious crimes of which the two detectives were accused occurred in Brooklyn, including murders, in the 1980s and 1990s, prosecutors used more recent and less serious crimes, such as money-laundering and dope distribution in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2004-2005, to bring the earlier acts into the conspiracy net as an ongoing criminal enterprise.  The judge did not believe the conspiracy could include the earlier acts, but the United States Court of Appeals differed and reinstated the convictions.

William Jefferson, former Congressman from New Orleans, was sentenced to 13 years in federal prison for using his office to enrich himself and his family.  His sentence was less than the 27 years recommended by the U.S. Attorney.  He was convicted by a jury last August for bribery, racketeering and money laundering.  Some of his schemes involved business ventures in Africa.

Since Jefferson is 62 years old, his sentence could be a life sentence, since there is no parole in the federal prison system, although he could get 15 per cent of his sentence off for good behavior.

Jefferson was convicted after a six-week trial in Alexandria, Virginia. He was found guilty of 11 of 16 counts after he was indicted in June, 2007.  But his indictment followed highly publicized activity in the case.  Jefferson was videotaped by the FBI in July, 2005, receiving $100,000 of $100 bills in a briefcase in Arlington, Virginia.  Captured by a wire on one of the participants, Jefferson allegedly advised an informant to give Nigerian Vice President Atiku Abubakar $500,000 to make sure their business interests obtained contracts for their companies in Nigeria.

A few days later the FBI raided Jefferson’s home in Washington, D.C. and claimed to have found $90,000 of the cash in the freezer in $10,000 increments, wrapped in aluminum foil and stuffed inside frozen-food containers.”  The FBI claimed the serial numbers found on the bills in Jefferson’s home matched serial numbers of the money the FBI had given to their informant.

It was nine months later that the really big raid took place.  FBI agents executed a search warrant on Jefferson’s office in the House of Representatives, the Rayburn House Office Building.  Jefferson was a sitting Congressman at the time, and the FBI raid is believed to be the first time a raid was ever conducted on the office of member of Congress.

The separation of powers implications raised great concerns.  Members of Congress feared the precedent of law enforcement officers raiding legislators’ offices.   If legislators’ offices could be raided whenever agents of the executive branch claimed they were on the trail of criminal evidence, the legislative branch of government could be at the mercy of the executive branch.  These are the kinds of raids Russia’s Premier Putin has conducted to crush the formerly free press and private businessmen who challenged Putin.  These are the kinds of raids governments around the world have used as a pretext to force legislators to follow the command of the executive.

Congressional leaders immediately demanded the FBI return documents seized from the raid of Congressman Jefferson’s House office.  House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi spoke out together.  Reportedly Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI Director Robert Mueller threatened to quit if the Justice Department had to return the documents.  Meanwhile, the House of Representatives was threatening to axe the Justice Department’s budget.  President Bush ultimately directed the Justice Department to seal all seized evidence for 45 days.

At the time, an ABC News poll in June, 2006 found 86% in the United States supported the FBI’s right to search congressional offices when they obtain a warrant.  This should be no surprise. The public’s support of law enforcement always outweighs support of Constitutional restraints.  At least the poll dealt with a search warrant.

As any criminal defense lawyer will tell you, members of the general public for the most part always will see the justification of unconstitutional actions in the results.  If the police acted without probable cause or a trumped up justification, the public does not often question the action.  There are significant exceptions, but for the most part, the safeguards of the Constitution are not appreciated by the general public when weighed against the value of “getting bad guys.”.

The public wants crimes solved, and the restraints on government placed by the Constitution are seen as speed bumps to be ignored only “a case at a time.”  The “case at a time,” of course, becomes the rule rather than the exception because in every case there is a “good reason” to go ahead with ignoring the restraints, to go ahead and get this guy because “this guy really needs getting” or “this crime really needs solving.”  The Constitution remains on the sidelines from little use until that member of the public or this person has an experience when they are surprised at how easy the rules have made it to convict someone innocent of a crime.

William Jefferson challenged the raid on his office to the District Court of the District of Columbia.  The Court held that the broad protections of the Speech or Debate Clause, which give absolute immunity from prosecution for legislative acts does not shield members of Congress from the execution of valid search warrants.  For those who fear executive overreach, it is noteworthy that search warrants would necessarily require approval from the judicial branch of government.  Oddly, Chief Hogan, who made this finding was the one who had approved the original search.

The decision of the District Court was appealed to a three-judge panel held that Department of Justice could not review Jefferson’s filed until Jefferson had seen what files had been taken from his office and which pertained to his legislative duties.

Thereafter the House of Representatives stripped Jefferson of his committee assignment in the House.  Jefferson was reelected in 2006, but after being indicted in 2007, he lost election in 2008, upset by a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic district.  Jefferson went to trial as an ex-Congressman.