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.”
“When you see them go into a restaurant and the chefs and the waitresses all walk out and stand around while the doors are locked for the meeting inside, you really get an idea of what is going on down here,” says Raabe.
Little Nicky’s associations were not only with members of his own crew. The covert cops watched him meet in Fort Lauderdale with high-ranking representatives from many of the country’s major mobs—Colombo, Lucchese, Buffalino and so on.
“The nature of intelligence work is to take raw information and hypothesize, come up with theories of what is happening,” says Raabe. “So we see Nicky meeting all these people. Business is obviously being discussed. We can’t say for sure what was happening, but we have a good idea.”
And these meetings came with all the clichés of movies like The Godfather. There was the reverential treatment of Mafia leaders, the ceremonial kissing of cheeks and hands.
“Sometimes it got to be funny,” Drago says. “We’d see the cars pull up with 10 or 15 guys getting out for a meeting and they’d be circling all over the front yard trying to make sure they kissed or hugged everybody.”
J UST LIKE THE MOBSTERS , police don’t like offending their own. Law enforcement agencies are territorial, careful not to encroach on others’ turf without invitation. It is the axiom of parochialism that Chief Cochran of Fort Lauderdale speaks of.
And that axiom flies in the face of MIU’s all-for-one, one-for-all concept of sharing intelligence among law enforcement agencies. After years of working cases, MIU has neither been joined by all the police agencies in Broward County nor has it replaced the organized crime or intelligence units of its member agencies. Instead, it continues to work with them and, as always, remains quietly in the background.
“It would be my hope that MIU would one day be the organized crime investigative enterprise in this county,” says Cochran. But in the meantime, investigators in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and maybe even people like Nicky Scarfo, probably have a better understanding of what MIU is all about than the Broward citizens who help pay for it.
“MIU is becoming a highly respected information bank on what these types of OC characters are doing down there,” says Coblantz of the New Jersey police. “Put it this way—on the Scarfo case, MIU has given us leads that we are still tracking down.”
W HILE NICKY SCARFO was under the eye of MIU in Fort Lauderdale, two high-ranking members of his
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.”
“When you see them go into a restaurant and the chefs and the waitresses all walk out and stand around while the doors are locked for the meeting inside, you really get an idea of what is going on down here,” says Raabe.
Little Nicky’s associations were not only with members of his own crew. The covert cops watched him meet in Fort Lauderdale with high-ranking representatives from many of the country’s major mobs—Colombo, Lucchese, Buffalino and so on.
“The nature of intelligence work is to take raw information and hypothesize, come up with theories of what is happening,” says Raabe. “So we see Nicky meeting all these people. Business is obviously being discussed. We can’t say for sure what was happening, but we have a good idea.”
And these meetings came with all the clichés of movies like The Godfather. There was the reverential treatment of Mafia leaders, the ceremonial kissing of cheeks and hands.
“Sometimes it got to be funny,” Drago says. “We’d see the cars pull up with 10 or 15 guys getting out for a meeting and they’d be circling all over the front yard trying to make sure they kissed or hugged everybody.”
J UST LIKE THE MOBSTERS , police don’t like offending their own. Law enforcement agencies are territorial, careful not to encroach on others’ turf without invitation. It is the axiom of parochialism that Chief Cochran of Fort Lauderdale speaks of.
And that axiom flies in the face of MIU’s all-for-one, one-for-all concept of sharing intelligence among law enforcement agencies. After years of working cases, MIU has neither been joined by all the police agencies in Broward County nor has it replaced the organized crime or intelligence units of its member agencies. Instead, it continues to work with them and, as always, remains quietly in the background.
“It would be my hope that MIU would one day be the organized crime investigative enterprise in this county,” says Cochran. But in the meantime, investigators in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and maybe even people like Nicky Scarfo, probably have a better understanding of what MIU is all about than the Broward citizens who help pay for it.
“MIU is becoming a highly respected information bank on what these types of OC characters are doing down there,” says Coblantz of the New Jersey police. “Put it this way—on the Scarfo case, MIU has given us leads that we are still tracking down.”
W HILE NICKY SCARFO was under the eye of MIU in Fort Lauderdale, two high-ranking members of his
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