Mobsters in the News

Arthur Mondella’s alternate
life was buried behind a roll-down gate, behind a fleet of fancy cars, behind a
pair of closet doors, behind a set of button-controlled steel shelves, behind a
fake wall and down a ladder in a hole in a bare concrete floor.

Here, in a weathered basement
below the Red Hook, Brooklyn, maraschino cherry factory he had inherited from
his father and his grandfather, he nurtured a marijuana farm that could hold as
many as 1,200 plants at a time. Here, below the office where he served as chief
of Dell’s Maraschino Cherries Company, he kept a small, dusty library and a
corkboard pinned with notes. Most of the books dealt with plant propagation
methods. One did not: the “World Encyclopedia of Organized Crime.”

Much about the hidden
operations of Mr. Mondella, 57, who shot and killed himself on Tuesday as
investigators found his marijuana plants, remains frustratingly out of reach
for his family and friends. Investigators do not know how he distributed the
marijuana, how long he had grown it or who helped him. Most baffling of all are
Mr. Mondella’s reasons for hiding his operation under a business that was, by
all accounts, healthy and growing — and for taking his life so suddenly when he
was caught.

On Thursday, the day of Mr.
Mondella’s private wake, the company said the cherry business would go on.
Major restaurant chains that bought Dell’s cherries, including Red Lobster and
T.G.I. Friday’s, said their menus would be unaffected. But at the offices of
the Brooklyn district attorney, Kenneth P. Thompson, the focus was on
untangling what part of the business was cherries, and what part was marijuana,
at the red-brick factory on Dikeman Street.

“We’re looking at the actual
connections between marijuana and the factory and whether or not some portion
of the cherry business there really was an effort to mask the marijuana
operation,” said a law enforcement official close to the investigation, who
asked not to be identified because the inquiry is continuing.

Given the thick scent of cherry
processing and the large amount of electricity the factory would naturally
consume, the official said, “it’s a very convenient place to be” to mask both
the odor and the power needed to cultivate the marijuana plants.

Yet because the basement
labyrinth was so well concealed, it seemed plausible that the cherry factory’s
regular employees were unaware of their boss’s secret. Mr. Mondella may have
been the only person with access to the garage where he kept several luxury
vehicles and the entrance to the basement, the official said.

Still, the scope of the
operation made it unlikely that Mr. Mondella was the only person involved.
Spanning about 2,500 square feet, the underground complex included an office, a
large grow room, a storage area, a freezer for the harvested plants and an
elevator. A network of 120 high-end growing lamps shined on the plants with
intensities that varied depending on each plant’s size; an irrigation system
watered them. Investigators recovered about 60 types of marijuana seeds.

The investigators had never
seen a larger operation in New York City, the official said.

“The way you have to set that
up, there’s got to be plumbers and electricians working off the books who are
very sophisticated,” he said, “and it wasn’t Arthur Mondella, as far as we
know, that had that kind of skills.”

Investigators first received a
tip about Mr. Mondella and illegal drugs about five years ago, he said, but
nothing came of it then.

As part of a separate
investigation into allegations that Dell’s was polluting Red Hook’s water
supply, the district attorney and the city’s Department of Environmental
Protection decided to search the factory for files on environmental
infractions. It was during that search on Tuesday that they stumbled on the
marijuana operation. (The pollution investigation is still active.)

The drug inquiry is still in
its early stages. But the official said investigators were looking closely at
whether the operation had ties to organized crime. Mr. Mondella would have
required help to maintain the farm and distribute his product, the thinking
goes, and an organized crime syndicate could have provided it.

To Mr. Mondella’s family and
friends, the revelations about his hidden operations have been “aberrant and
shocking,” Michael Farkas, the lawyer representing the Mondella family and the
management of Dell’s, said in an interview.

The company was considered
among the largest producers of the cherries in the country. Although many
cherry suppliers were disappearing around the time that Mr. Mondella took over
the business in 1983, the market appears stable now, thanks in part to maraschino
cherries’ popularity abroad, said Robert McGorrin, the chairman of the food
science department at Oregon State University, where the current method of
processing the cherries in brine, rather than alcohol, was developed in the
1920s.

Law enforcement officials are
just as perplexed about Mr. Mondella’s motives. Though investigators are
sorting through a substantial bounty of evidence, they have no hope of gaining
access to the data on Mr. Mondella’s iPhone 6, which, like other new-model
iPhones, is encrypted with a user-created code that even Apple says it cannot
unlock.

“No one seems to have had any
clue that this was going on, and there certainly didn’t seem to be any strange
or traumatic circumstances that would’ve explained this,” Mr. Farkas said. “The
business was not doing poorly; the business was doing very well. We were
unaware of any major problems in Arthur’s life. Somebody knows — but we’re all
waiting for answers here.”

‘Why else would you shoot
yourself over 100 pounds of weed? It was the multi-million operation he lost.’

Investigators reportedly came
across suspicious shelving in a storage unit - then behind a door found a false
wall with the smell of weed seeping through.

The entrance to a dug-out
basement was then found, with three bags of marijuana inside.

According to the NY Post,
generators were found inside the factory along with a high-tech security outfit
of dozens of cameras, barbed wire and motion-detector lights.

Mondella then excused himself
to go to his private bathroom, locked the door and shot himself at 1.30pm, a
law enforcement source told Daily Mail Online.

Before committing suicide, the
third-generation cherry tycoon told his sister who was present, Joanne Capece,
'Take care of my kids'.

Those present heard a single
gunshot, according to CBS New York.
Mondella later died at a local hospital from the .357 magnum gunshot
wound.

The paper reported Wednesday that the cherry
tycoon was hiding a .357 handgun strapped to his ankle. He had another gun in
his office safe.

The DA's office and
environmental regulators discovered 80-100lbs of pot in three large black bags
and hundreds of thousands of dollars concealed in the secret room.

Shelves operated by magnets had
been used to conceal the 50-by-50 feet drug lab, which has been described as an
'extremely professional' and very expensive operation.

A row of luxury vintage
vehicles, including a Porsche, Rolls-Royce, a Harley-Davidson and a Mercedes,
were also found covered in tarp in a back lot of the factory in the industrial
area of Red Hook.

Calls to the business went
unanswered Wednesday.

Investigators had been looking
into the company over allegations it was dumping hazardous material into the
sewage system and waterways - but had suspected that the facility was also
being used as a grow lab.

Hundreds of thousands of
dollars along with 80lbs of marijuana were reportedly discovered in the secret
room behind the factory walls in Brooklyn, New York

One official told the New York
Daily News: 'It appears there was another activity going on, that's for sure. I
don't think you kill yourself over a bag of weed. There has to be more to it.'

Brooklyn District Attorney's
office had received a tip-off about the marijuana operation in 2013, the New
York Post reported.

Despite watching comings and
goings at the factory for six months, the DA's office was unable to work out if
there was a marijuana business operating inside.

An anonymous source told the
paper that the environmental offense warrants were simply used to get into the
building.

The DA's office said 'no
further information about this tragedy is available at this time'.

Officers consult paper work
during the investigation of the cherry factory on Tuesday. The Brooklyn
district attorney's office had a tip-off in 2013 that the firm was fronting a
marijuana operation

Dell's Maraschino Cherries,
which has been in business for 76 years, supplies to Red Lobster, Buffalo Wild
Wings, Chick-fil-A and TGI Fridays for use in cocktails and desserts.

Arthur Mondella's grandfather,
Arthur Mondella Sr, started the business as a Brooklyn storefront in 1948.

The Brooklyn factory now turns
out 400,000 bottles of cherries each week - and 19 million pounds of cherries a
year.

The company recently underwent
a $5million overhaul and redesigned their bottles with a retro label last year
after the company suffered following the financial crash in 2008.

At the time Mr Mondella told
The Wall Street Journal: 'At this point, the maraschino cherry is just another
commodity. We’re trying to change that.'

Some 25 investigators arrived
at the facility at 8am on Tuesday with search warrants to inspect its
operations.

Mondella is survived by his
ex-wife Yevgeniya and their five-year-old daughter Antoinette.

The shadowy Calabrian crime
syndicate ’Ndrangheta has beaten the Sicilian Mafia for control of organised
crime in northern Italy, the country’s most senior anti-Mafia prosecutor Franco
Roberti has said.

The Calabrian Mafia, which has risen to
prominence through its control of Europe’s cocaine trade, is now laundering its
millions and integrating successfully into northern Italy’s economy. It is
aided by the country’s ambiguous attitude to corruption, Mr Roberti said at the
launch of the annual report of the National Anti-Mafia Directorate.

He said the dominance of the
’Ndrangheta in Milan and Lombardy, Italy’s richest city and region
respectively, had “come at the expense of Cosa Nostra”. He added that
’Ndrangheta members living in the north for many generations had gradually
acquired a full knowledge of the area by “cementing relations with local communities
and prioritising contacts with local politicians and institutions”. Victims of
’Ndrangheta rackets in northern Italy were often too afraid to talk to police
or magistrates.

But Milan, Italy’s finance
capital, is not the only northern city to be heavily infiltrated by the
Calabrian mob. Mr Roberti noted that in Bologna ’Ndrangheta had established “a
criminal power network whose expansion has exceeded the worst predictions”.

Last month, more than 100
people were arrested in the region of Emilia Romagna, of which Bologna is the
capital, including six suspected ’Ndrangheta bosses, serving police officers, a
prominent local politician and several businessmen. ’Ndrangheta had spent
decades infiltrating Emilia Romagna, Bologna’s chief prosecutor Roberto Alfonso
told reporters.

Italian organised crime is also
spreading abroad. In November last year, Paola Severino, the former Justice
Minister, said mob clans originally from Sicily, Naples and Calabria were
infiltrating the north of Italy and other EU economies – as ’Ndrangheta already
had in Germany. Figures detailing Mafia activity around Europe, presented to
the European Commission last year by the Italian government, showed that
’Ndrangheta was also active in France and Spain.

But the UK is not immune. The figures
suggested that outside Italy, only Spain and Holland had experienced more
activity by the Camorra, the Naples-based Mafia. There were up to 20
Camorra-related incidents in Britain cited by Italian police between 2000 and
2011. But Mr Roberti said one of the keys to ’Ndrangheta’s power and wealth
remained its “all-encompassing control” of the port of Gioia Tauro, which had
become “the true gateway for cocaine in Italy”.

The prosecutor also warned that
Cosa Nostra had not been mortally wounded despite a series of high-profile
arrests. He said the crime organisation was making strenuous efforts to rebuild
its central command in Palermo.

A lax attitude to financial
crime is helping them. “Corruption, including tax evasion, has never been
fought effectively, it was tacitly accepted and was not considered a serious
crime,” Mr Roberti said.

Rosy Bindi, the head of the
parliamentary anti-Mafia commission, agreed.

“The fight against corruption
is also the fight against the Mafia and we’re paying the price for a system
that’s too relaxed,” she said.

(Reuters) - The Calabrian mafia's role as one
of Europe's biggest importers of South American cocaine has made it the most
powerful economic force in its poor home region in southern Italy, a report
released on Tuesday said.

Direct ties to Mexican and
Colombian cocaine cartels, with which it has built trust over the years, have
made the 'Ndrangheta a financial powerhouse, said Italy's national anti-mafia
prosecutors' office in its annual report.

Both within Italy and in
countries like Germany and Holland, "the 'Ndrangheta has no rivals and,
for this reason ... because of its hegemony in drugs trafficking, it has
become, against a depressed economic backdrop, the only financially significant
player in Calabria and beyond," the report said.

Though the network has a
well-earned reputation for brutality and violence, the 'Ndrangheta's real power
is economic, said the report, based on mafia investigations and trials
conducted between mid-2013 and mid-2014.

During the current economic
slump, which began halfway through 2011, the Calabrian mafia has spread its
influence north to cities including Rome, Milan and Bologna, often using its
wealth to buy political influence.

"The 'Ndrangheta has not
only been able to penetrate the north's construction sector ... but it has
become one of the most important operators in the whole sector," the
report said.

Companies "capitalized by
the 'Ndrangheta" over time became "front runners in the different
sectors where they operate", which include legal gambling, trucking, and
the restaurant and hotel trade.

The 'Ndrangheta, Sicily's Cosa
Nostra and the Camorra around Naples have long plagued Italy's south, but
recent investigations have shown their influence spreading, which is terrible
news for the economy, the euro zone's third biggest.

Calabria, in the southern toe
of Italy, is one of Europe's poorest regions, with an unemployment rate of more
than 20 percent, and the oppressive presence of organized crime is one of the
reasons for its decrepit state.

A 2012 Bank of Italy study
shows that the economies of two southern regions, Puglia and Basilicata, where
there was virtually no organized crime until about four decades ago, were
crippled when mafia groups moved in.

The mob's growing presence
hacked an estimated 16 percentage points off per capita GDP in those regions
over three decades, the study said.

A convicted Mafia boss who
lived in London for more than 20 years must be extradited to Italy, a judge has
ruled.

Domenico Rancadore was arrested
in August 2013 after he was found living in Uxbridge, west London, under the
alias of Marc Skinner.

He was convicted in his absence
in 1999 of being a member of a criminal organisation and sentenced to seven
years in jail.

The 65-year-old had launched an
18-month battle against his extradition.

At Westminster Magistrates'
Court, Judge Howard Riddle ruled there was no abuse of process and that
Rancadore's Article 3 rights, regarding inhuman and degrading treatment, would
not be breached by extradition to Italy.

Rancadore, who is known as The
Professor, can now appeal to the High Court.

BBC legal affairs correspondent
Clive Coleman, who was in court, said: "His extradition was sought under
the European Arrest Warrant scheme and the grounds for opposing extradition
under that scheme are very limited, and we are waiting to hear from his lawyers
as to whether they intend to make this last ditch appeal.

"At the moment his
extradition has been ordered here at court today and in the normal run of
things that would mean him being returned under the extradition to Italy in the
next 10 days."

Following the ruling, a
spokesman from the Italian Embassy said: "We are pleased that a British
judge has recognised that there is no longer a problem with the Italian prison
system which prevents extradition to Italy in general."

Rancadore moved to London from
his native Sicily in 1993 with his wife and two children after he was acquitted
at the end of a three-year court case over Mafia allegations.

But in a second trial in 1999,
the former teacher was convicted in his absence of being part of a criminal
organisation between 1987 and 1995.

While in Britain, he had run a
travel agency.

Since his arrest in 2013, he
has fought a legal battle to prevent his extradition.

In March 2014 he defeated a bid
to extradite him on grounds that prison conditions in Italy would breach his
human rights.

Days later he was told he would
not face an appeal because the Crown Prosecution Service had missed a deadline
to lodge the appeal.

But he was rearrested in April
after a fresh European Arrest Warrant was received from the Italian
authorities.