Published: January 21, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/nyregion/22mob.html

Given that hundreds of local, state and federal law-enforcement officers fanned across the region this week, arresting 125 reputed mobsters on a buffet table’s worth of charges that included money laundering, extortion and murder, the events of Feb. 7, 2008, seem, in retrospect, uncannily familiar.

Then, hundreds of local, state and federal law-enforcement officers fanned across the region arresting almost 100 reputed mobsters on a buffet table’s worth of charges that included money laundering, extortion and murder.

No two mob busts — like no two snowflakes — are exactly alike; nor, as corporate lawyers tell their clients to say, do past results guarantee future outcomes. Still, in a spirit of criminal accountancy, it seemed to make sense to analyze the numbers and determine what actually happened the last time the government undertook what was described, in both instances, as the biggest Mafia sweep in recent memory.

It has been three years since the arrests in Operation Pathfinder, as the 2008 case was called, yet only 17 of the 62 men charged in federal court remain behind bars. Eighteen have finished their prison terms — some less than a year in length. Five received time served and periods of supervised release, and 21 were sentenced to probation or community service.

The results were similar among those charged in state court in Queens; 18 of the 26 defendants never saw prison, having received either time served in jail or a conditional discharge, in which charges are dropped if the defendants’ proverbial noses remain clean.

Both cases, new and old, featured previously unsolved killings (this week, of the two owners of an Irish bar in Richmond Hill, Queens; in 2008, of a court officer preparing to testify at a gangster’s trial). Both involved labor unions (now: Local 6A of the Cement & Concrete Workers Union; then: Local 731 of the Building, Concrete, Excavating & Common Laborers Union of Greater New York). And both were announced at news conferences at which (different) chiefs of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s New York office dismissed as a myth the notion that La Cosa Nostra was a thing of the past.

Operation Pathfinder was an indisputable success in winning convictions. All but 2 of the 62 federal defendants pleaded guilty, one was convicted after a trial and the charges against the last one (interference with commerce by threat or violence) were dropped by the government. The suspects in the state system shared an even-more-uniform fate: all pleaded guilty.

Even though few served hard time, the most serious cases — those involving murder (Charles Carneglia), kidnapping (Angelo Ruggiero, Jr.) and racketeering (Joseph Corozzo, who, though still in prison, was charged anew in the roundup on Thursday) — ended in relatively stiff sentences that ranged from eight years to life. Moreover, the majority of those who never went to prison, or are already out, were charged with what, at least in the violent world of the mob, are essentially peccadilloes: embezzlement of assets, frauds and swindles, illegal gambling.

“There were a lot of relatively minor crimes in the case — basically nonviolent crimes,” a federal official involved with Operation Pathfinder said. “Still, it was a blow to organized crime.”