Abscam (Contd.)

Mafiosi call off a summit

And now, another FBI sting. The public sequel to Operation Abscam and Operation Brilab was Operation Miporn, an abbreviation of Miami pornography. This time, the FBI opened a little pornography business in Miami called Golde Coaste Specialties, Inc., and began buying sex books, movies, video tapes. After 2 1/2 years of investigation, the FBI last week got indictments against 45 alleged pornography merchants in ten states. Said one official: "This wiped out the whole top echelon of the pornography business."

The results of such sweeps--and the FBI now has 50 sting operations under way--are not necessarily that permanent. In the Abscam probe that rocked Congress the previous week, there was little new action except a probe of who had leaked the story. In the Brilab investigation that disclosed official corruption in Louisiana and Texas, high state officials paraded before a grand jury and professed their innocence of all wrongdoings.

Some of the most interesting aspects of Brilab, however, have not yet been made public. These involve the dealings of pudgy, graying Carlos ("Little Man") Marcello, 70, long the reputed king of organized crime in New Orleans, who has been outmaneuvering U.S. deportation proceedings ever since 1953.

"We own the Teamsters," Marcello allegedly claimed at one point, while two FBI agents posing as California insurance salesmen kept their secret tape recorders turning. Marcello had told his new-found friends that certain officeholders in Texas and Louisiana could be persuaded to help them land insurance contracts covering state and municipal employees--for fat personal fees. But that, Marcello suggested, was nothing compared with the millions of dollars that could be drawn from the huge health and welfare insurance funds of the Teamsters Union. Marcello claimed that Teamster President Frank Fitzsimmons was too ill to block a change. Allen Dorfman, a Chicago insurance broker and former Teamster consultant who had long held great influence over the union's pension funds, was about to be removed, Marcello said.

The FBI taped the deal offered by Marcello: he would use his influence within the Teamsters to get them a big cut of the union's insurance; in return, they had to deposit $2 million in a safe deposit box rented under a fictitious name.

The deal was to have been sealed at a gathering in New Orleans this week --during Mardi Gras--of the Mafia's nationwide controlling commission. It would have been the most important meeting of the mob bosses since their celebrated conclave in Apalachin, N.Y., in 1957. The Chicago and New Orleans families were to have pinned down just how to cut the $2 million payoff for switching the Teamster insurance. Another topic was to have been how to recover Mafia dominance of the narcotics traffic. The FBI had hoped that much of the discussion would have been picked up by FBI microphones planted around the hangouts of Marcello, who was to have been host for the meeting. But when Abscam blew into the headlines, the wary Mafia called the whole thing off.

The Abscam leaks also caused a premature closing of the Brilab sting. By then, though, the Brilab investigators had tapped the Washington telephones of I. Irving Davidson, a longtime capital public relations man who admits being a friend of Marcello's. The FBI taps overheard Davidson regularly calling some low-level assistants to various presidential aides to discuss his clients' problems.

But why would anyone in the Justice Department leak news of the Abscam sting if it imperiled the simultaneous Brilab scam? One possible answer, according to some Justice Department sources, was that one or more of Abscam's key directors in the New York-New Jersey area were angry at what they considered a premature termination of the Abscam operation. Abscam was shut down, these New York officials apparently believed, just as it was about to reach more members of Congress than the eight already involved. Fearing a high-level coverup, the advocates of this theory claim, the lower-level officials decided to make sure that Abscam's results to date were spread on the public record.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.