Junior Gotti Busted -- Again

Junior Gotti in happier days

Junior Gotti, the now-middle-aged child star of the Gambino family, has been arrested yet again, this time in Tampa, on murder-conspiracy charges. Junior has been arrested and tried several other times, as noted in the New York Times article linked, but nothing has really stuck so far.

Here's the indictment. What's interesting to me is how the list of charges against Junior are scummy, low-level, violent and crude -- a far cry from the sophisticated scams, and the high-level union and Las Vegas skimming, that used to dominate Mafia law enforcement until a few years ago. What we have here are street-level offenses like shaking down drug dealers, home-invasion robberies and the usual murders.

Not a whiff of securities fraud either. Junior was charged with that only once, and he beat the rap. The Gambino family was very heavily into pump-and-dump schemes back in the 1990s, and were behind several of the small "chop houses" in lower Manhattan. No more. Now they're back to stickups and you don't even see the kind of sophisticated tax scams the Russian mob is noted for. (Speaking of which, it's been quite a while since we've heard of any prosecutions in t hat area, and they're certainly not going anywhere.)

The mob is certainly not gone and will be around forever, but they sure are getting grungy, almost pathetic.

© 2008 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.