In New York, it seems that the five mafia families still have a few cards to play.
That was on full display Thursday when federal and local officials announced charges against a group of gangsters belonging to four of the families, including executives, henchmen and associates, saying they oversaw an elaborate scheme to rig illegal poker games that grossed millions of dollars. Victims were lured to the high-stakes tables by the presence of current and former NBA luminaries, officials said.
Although mob control of a host of industries, from construction and trucking to waterfront and garment center control, is a thing of the past, organized crime remains alive, if less visible, according to current and former investigators. Its presence is perhaps most vibrant in the New York metropolitan area.
That stubborn resilience endures, they said, despite more than four decades of aggressive investigations and prosecutions that have decimated the leaders of the five families and secured thousands of convictions — and the recruitment of an army of talkative informants.
Over the years, the Mafia's savviest agents have learned that violence — not to mention the antics of crime family peacocks like Gambino boss John Gotti — attracts the attention of law enforcement, which can land them in prison, where opportunities to make money are decidedly increasingly rare.
The Italian Mafia, known as La Cosa Nostra, “is still alive and well in the New York area, it's just changed some of its methods in the way it operates,” said FBI Supervisor Mike Mullahy, a veteran Mafia investigator who supervised the agents who set up the poker sting.
“Being brazen and direct in the way they did things didn't always work for them,” he added, “so they changed their methods and the way they operated, and we changed the way we investigated them.”
The poker indictment was unsealed Thursday, along with an unrelated case with any mob involvement, charging three current and former NBA players and coaches and three other men with defrauding players and online betting companies out of millions of dollars.
In the poker case, prosecutors indicted 32 men, accusing 11 of them of being officers, members or associates of the Genovese, Gambino, Bonanno and Lucchese families, including a Bonanno figure, Ernest Aiello, who was reputed to be the family's acting street boss. The charges include wire fraud conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, operating an illegal gaming business, and conspiracies to commit extortion and theft.
Both indictments were filed by prosecutors in Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr.'s office after separate investigations by his office and several other agencies. In the poker investigation, they included the FBI, the Police Department and the New York Harbor Waterfront Commission, which, like the U.S. Attorney's Office, has long been among the agencies at the forefront of investigating the mob.
The two cases were not directly linked. But three men — none of whom were accused as mob figures — were charged in both indictments, so the investigations were coordinated and conducted in parallel and the cases were announced together.
Illegal gambling has long been a lucrative part of the mafia, with its crimes of loan sharking and extortion, and it continues to be a significant source of income for the five families, investigators said. But the plan outlined in the poker indictment took it to another level, leaving nothing to chance.
High rollers were lured to the tables during crowd-sanctioned matches in Manhattan, the Hamptons and elsewhere, where, unbeknownst to them, players were interspersed with members of what the indictment, defendants said, called “cheating teams.” The shuffling machines were modified with tokens capable of reading all cards in the deck so that each player's hand could be determined in real time and communicated to one of the program participants at the table, called a “quarterback” or “driver”.
While the indictment says the victims thought they were playing an illegal “straight” card game “playing against other participants on an equal footing,” in reality they were facing the cheating team, a row of defendants and their co-conspirators.
Ultimately, the sophistication of the project and the involvement of four of New York's five families make it clear that the crowd is still thriving. It has buzzed in the background as law enforcement priorities have shifted elsewhere — to terrorism after the 9/11 attacks and, more recently, to fighting immigration under the Trump administration.
“Having worked directly with these families for 15 years, I can tell you they never really go away,” said Seamus McElearney, a retired FBI agent who oversaw cases against three crime families and wrote a book about his investigation of the mob. “They adapt and find ways to cope.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/nyregion/nba-gambling-mafia-gambino-genovese-bonanno-luchese.html
