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Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Federal prosecutors are ready to have another go at proving links between organized crime and the International Longshoremen's Association.
The venue will be federal court in Brooklyn, where reputed Genovese mobster Michael Coppola goes on trial next week for racketeering and conspiracy. Coppola’s alleged offenses include a 1977 mob murder, conspiracy to possess false identification during 11 years as a fugitive from that crime, and the use of extortion to control ILA Local 1235 in Newark from 1974 to 2007.
Most of the indictment against Coppola is devoted to the ILA racketeering charges. Prosecutors allege Coppola and his mob cohorts controlled three past presidents of Local 1235 and extorted money and favors, including jobs and contracts with mobbed-up firms.
Coppola was arrested in early 2007 after 11 years in hiding. The feds say that three days before his arrest, an FBI wiretap caught him apparently discussing payoffs with Eddie Aulisi, son of Local 1235's then-president, Vincent Aulisi. The elder Aulisi disavowed knowledge of the phone conversation but after the wiretap became public he was removed from office and his son was expelled from the ILA.
Aulisi’s two predecessors also left office under a cloud – Vincent Colucci in 1980 after being convicted of racketeering conspiracy along with Coppola and others, and Al Cernadas after pleading no contest to racketeering conspiracy in 2005.
Cernadas’s co-defendants in the 2005 case -- ILA officials Harold Daggett and Arthur Coffey and Genovese mobster Larry Ricci – were acquitted. Ricci, however, wasn’t around to celebrate the verdict. He vanished in mid-trial and his body was found weeks later in the trunk of a car parked outside a New Jersey diner. In court documents, prosecutors state that their informants say Ricci was murdered on mob orders to ensure his silence and that Coppola was involved.
In pretrial discovery motions, prosecutors have cast a wide net for wiretaps, financial records, testimony in past trials, and even invitations to years-ago testimonial dinners for Cernadas and Colucci.
But prosecutors may face the same problems they encountered in the 2005 ILA-mob trial – the complexity of the case and the checkered pasts of key witnesses. Defense lawyers said in pretrial filings that the government’s case is based on contradictory allegations and “historical lore” from government witnesses who “have a much longer history of violence and mass murders than is alleged against Mr. Coppola.”
Indeed, prosecutors have said one likely witness is octogenarian labor racketeer George Barone, who testified for the government in the 2005 case. Barone, a onetime ILA vice president, was convicted in 1979 for shaking down Miami port businesses and testified that he committed several mob murders during his younger days but couldn’t recall how many.
Prosecutors undoubtedly hope that success in the Coppola case will bolster the Justice Department's civil racketeering lawsuit, which seeks to place the ILA and its benefit programs under government supervision. That lawsuit, refilled after being dismissed in 2007, has been dormant for months.
Asian port throughput figures these days need to be taken with even more than the usual grain of salt. One well-placed source last week said, and another confirmed, that a number of Asian ports are artificially inflating their numbers by luring container lines to unload and store at their facilities large numbers empties at exceptionally low rates.
Since Asian ports generally report their container numbers as an aggregate of all moves -- empties, domestic, laden, transshipments - in other words, anything that hits the gantry crane -- such large scale empty moves will inflate the port's numbers. And that appears to be the general idea as some Asian ports, highly competitive when it comes to port rankings, grow distressed at the hits their numbers have taken as trade has tanked this year.
Empty containers, which exist in large numbers due to the slowdown and need a place to be stored, are a tempting target.
Due to freight rate weakness in east-west trade lanes, terminals are already under pressure from their carrier customers to lower their fees and offering good deals on empty moves and storage is a convenient way to help the carrier in hard times. The degree of number inflation due to empty moves is hard to estimate, but it's fair to say that with trade down and empties up, the mix of containers at Asian ports will be heavily skewed towards empties this year. This makes analyzing Asian port figures even more difficult than normal, because aggregate numbers are far from apple-to-apple.
Singapore's longtime No. 1 ranking among container ports is based on its huge transshipment volume, while the moves at No. 4 Shenzhen are overwhelmingly from the hinterland to export markets. No. 2 Shanghai is a mix of hinterland throughput and transshipment from the Yangtze River.
Contact Peter Tirschwell at ptirschwell@joc.com.
Glyn Richards wasn't in the same league as Bernie Madoff, but the Ponzi scheme he ran under the cover of All Freight Logistics did as much damage to its victims as Madoff's much larger scam.
Richards is the Haddon Heights, N.J., man sentenced to 30 years imprisonment without parole June 30 by a federal judge for defrauding more than 60 people, including close family members, of nearly $6 million. He'd solicit a $25,000 "investment" promising payments of $36,000 within 120 days.
Some investors received a portion of the promised returns — enough to convince them to invest more — but most got nothing but excuses.
The money supposedly was to pay steamship companies and agents to move U.S. military equipment overseas. According to prosecutors, it really went to support Richards' "lavish lifestyle." His company had no contract with the Department of Defense, and no goods were shipped.
Several local papers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Courier Post, covered the sentencing hearing. Here are comments from the hearing as reported by the Courier Post Online. You can download the charges filed by the U.S. District Attorney for New Jersey against Richards. Here's a press release from the Federal Bureau of Investigation on his guilty plea last June.
And yes, there is a blog about this scam, with victims' stories and details on how Richards conned them.
People like Richards and Madoff prey on people's ignorance — in this case, their lack of knowledge about shipping — and their desire to make money, which is not a crime. Let's hope it's a long time before we see a scam like this one again.
