David Grann - The Devil and Sherlock Holmes

What happened next at the F.B.I. meeting with Traficant is in dispute. According to sworn court testimony from Kroner and other agents present, Kroner asked the sheriff if he was conducting an investigation into organized crime in the valley. Traficant said he wasn’t. Kroner then asked him if he knew Charlie the Crab or Orlie the Crab. Traficant said he’d only heard of them.

You never met them? Kroner asked.

No, Traficant said.

You never received money from them?

No, he said again.

Then Kroner popped in the tape:

TRAFICANT: “They have given sixty thousand dollars.”

ORLIE THE CRAB: “They gave sixty. What’d we give?”

TRAFICANT: “O.K., a hundred and three.”

After a few seconds, Traficant slumped in his seat. “I don’t want to hear any more,” he said, according to Kroner. “I’ve heard enough.”

In the F.B.I.’s version of events, Traficant acknowledged that he’d taken the money, and he agreed to cooperate in exchange for immunity. In front of two witnesses, he signed a confession that read: “During the period of time that I campaigned for sheriff of Mahoning County, Ohio, I accepted money… with the understanding that certain illegal activities would be allowed to take place in Mahoning County after my election and that as sheriff I would not interfere with those activities.” But several weeks later, the F.B.I. says, when Traficant realized that he would have to resign as sheriff and that the reason for his resignation would become public, he recanted his confession. “Do what you have to do,” he told Kroner, “and I’ll do what I have to do.” Or, as Traficant later told a local television reporter, “All those people trying to put me in jail should go fuck themselves.”

Kroner and the F.B.I. arrested Traficant for allegedly taking a hundred and sixty-three thousand dollars in bribes from the Mob. The indictment charged that he “did knowingly and willfully combine, conspire, confederate, and agree” with racketeers to commit crimes against the United States. He faced up to twenty-three years in jail. To everyone’s astonishment, Traficant decided to represent himself in court, even though he wasn’t a lawyer and even though the judge warned him that “almost no one in his right mind” would do so.

On the day of the trial, in the spring of 1983, Traficant paced the courtroom, wearing a short-sleeved shirt and slacks. He told the jury what he vowed on the Carabbia tapes he would say: that he was conducting “the most unorthodox sting in the history of Ohio politics.” In a role that he said deserved an “Academy Award,” Traficant told the rapt jury and gallery that he had been acting all along as an undercover agent, trying to convince the Carabbia brothers he was on their side so that he could then use them to shut down the more powerful Pittsburgh faction. “What I did, and what I set out to do very carefully,” he said, “was to design a plan whereby I would destroy and disrupt the political influence and the Mob control over in Mahoning County.”

He admitted taking money from the Mob, but said he did so only because he wanted to prevent his opponent in the campaign from getting it. Though he agreed that he had signed “a statement” in front of the F.B.I., he said it was different from the “confession” introduced into evidence. He insisted that he lied to the F.B.I. about the sting because he couldn’t trust its agents, and that if Kroner and the F.B.I. hadn’t intervened he would have cleansed the most corrupt county in the country. “The point of the matter I want to make is this,” he said. “I got inside of the Mob.” He added, “I fucked the Mob.”

When Kroner took the stand, testifying that he had seen Traficant sign the confession, the sheriff leaped to his feet and yelled, “That’s a Goddamned lie!” During cross-examination, he taunted his F.B.I. adversary, saying, “Oh, I see” and “No, Bob.” Traficant referred to himself as “my client” and asked reporters, “How am I doin’?” In a region embedded with corruption and wary of federal authorities, he became, by the end of his defense, an emblem of the valley, a folk hero. There were parties held in his honor, and residents wore T-shirts championing his legal struggle. It didn’t matter that the I.R.S. would later find Traficant liable for taking bribes and evading taxes, in a civil trial in which he invoked the Fifth Amendment. Or that the money he had allegedly taken as evidence for the sting was never turned over. Or that one of his deputies claimed on the stand that Traficant had repeatedly asked him to shoot Traficant in order to make it look like an attempted Mob hit and delay the trial. (“He wanted me to wound him, but not to maim him,” the deputy said.)

Traficant understood his community better than anyone else. It took a jury four days to decide to acquit him of all charges. Charlie the Crab was wrong about one thing: Traficant wouldn’t become governor-he would become a United States congressman.

By the time Traficant went to Washington, D.C., in 1985, the economy in the Mahoning Valley was already disintegrating. The worldwide demand for steel had plummeted, leaving the area in a near-permanent recession. Mills were shuttered; department stores were boarded up. By the end of the decade, the population in Youngstown had fallen by more than twenty-eight thousand, while the sky, leaden for half a century, turned almost blue.

Traficant, who would be repeatedly reelected to Congress by overwhelming margins, railed against the closings. When one of the last steel mills in the region filed for bankruptcy, in the late nineteen-eighties, Traficant sounded like Charlie the Crab. “I think this is beyond all this talking phase,” he warned, adding that if the owner ripped off a local industrial facility then someone should “grab him by the throat and stretch him a couple of inches.”

Though prosperity had once brought the Mob to the valley, depression now cemented its rule. The professional classes that did so much to break the culture of the Mafia in Chicago and Buffalo and New York in the nineteen-seventies and eighties practically ceased to exist in Youngstown. Much of the valley’s middle class either left or stopped being middle class. And so Youngstown experienced a version of what sociologists have described in the inner city. The city lost its civic backbone-its doctors and lawyers and accountants. The few upstanding civic leaders who remained were marginalized or cowed. Hierarchies of status and success and moral value became inverted. The result was a generation of Batchos, who worshipped the dons the way other children worshipped Mickey Mantle or Joe DiMaggio. (Batcho had a tattoo of a Mob boss on his left arm, and told people proudly that he’d “take a bullet for him.”)

Meanwhile, Lenny Strollo and his partners, in need of players for their cash-strapped casinos, began catering to the local drug dealers and criminals, who were the only people left with money to spend. The Mob, which had once competed with the valley’s civil society, now all but displaced it. As late as 1997, in the small city of Campbell, Strollo controlled at least ninety per cent of the appointments to the police department. He fixed the civil-service exam so that he could pick the chief of police and nearly all the patrolmen. The city law director brought the list of candidates for promotion to Strollo’s house, and the don would pore over it, making his choices. An attorney familiar with the city told me that Strollo could “determine which murderers went to jail and which ones went free.”

In 1996, three Mob hit men, including Mo Man Harris, were on their way to kill their latest target when the Campbell police pulled them over for speeding, according to people in the car. In the vehicle, the cops found an AK-47 rifle, a.357 Magnum revolver, and a 9-mm. pistol. One of the assassins used his cell phone to call Jeff Riddle, who rushed to the scene and told the police that the men were running an errand for Bernie the Jew. The cops let them go.