Michael Connelly: Crime Beat: A Decade Of Covering Cops And Killers

And that’s why there is an MIU.

Twice in the early 1980s, grand juries evaluating efforts to stop organized crime in Broward concluded that the law enforcement structure seemed ideally suited for the expansion of organized crime.

Investigations were undermanned, efforts fragmented along lines of departmental jurisdictions and jealousies. MIU was established in 1983 after two other task forces had been formed and dismantled because of the same problems.

MIU has a $2 million budget, with each member agency paying the salaries of participants and sharing the overhead. Investigators currently come from police departments in Fort Lauderdale, Pompano Beach, Hollywood and Plantation, along with the Sheriff’s Office, the State Attorney’s Office and the state Division of Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco. The head of each agency sits on MIU’s board of directors.

“A frequent criticism of law enforcement is that it is too parochial,” says Cochran. “While a parochial approach may be adequate in some areas, we feel the best way to go against organized crime is consolidation of expertise. We began with the ambition of creating a first-rate intelligence unit. And I’m satisfied it is one of the best in the country.”

MIU directors and detectives often point to the Scarfo case as an example of what the unit can accomplish.

Investigators say that Nicodemo Scarfo’s interest in Broward County coincided with his release from prison in 1984 and rise to the top of the Philadelphia/Atlantic City mob. The diminutive, 57-year-old Scarfo has a criminal record that includes manslaughter and illegal possession of a firearm.

The Philly-South Jersey organization had been run by the “Docile Don,” Angelo Bruno, until he was gunned down outside his home in 1980. Nicky took over after Bruno’s successor, Phil Testa, was killed by a nail bomb.

Investigators say at least 17mob-related murders occurred in the City of Brotherly Love during Scarfo’s rise to the top of the rackets.

That rise brought Scarfo billing on Fortune magazine’s list of the most powerful and richest mobsters in the country, his money allegedly coming from unions, numbers, loan-sharking, extortion and gambling.

The indications are that Scarfo was looking to move up the Fortune list. He started routinely making lengthy visits to Fort Lauderdale. In 1985, he set up his southern operations on Northeast 47th Street near the Intracoastal Waterway, in a two-story, Spanish-style house with an iron gate out front. He put up a sign on the front wall that named the place Casablanca South. The yacht docked out back was also called Casablanca, but there was a smaller postscript painted below the name. Usual Suspects, it said, a wry reference to the police inspector’s instruction in the famed Bogart movie: “Round up all the usual suspects.”

It’s a funny thing about the house and boat, Detective Drago says: Scarfo didn’t own them. Investigators are still trying to learn how he came to control them.

“Nicky liked the house and the boat,” Drago says. “So he took them. When Little Nicky wants something, he just takes it. You don’t argue.”

By all estimates of law enforcement authorities, Scarfo wanted to take Broward County, or at least part of it.

Florida had an upcoming referendum on casino gambling, and investigators believe that Scarfo was preparing to direct organized crime’s interests if casinos came to pass.

A decade earlier, Scarfo had done the same thing in Atlantic City. The President’s Commission on Organized Crime named him as the chief figure behind the mob’s influence in the casino construction industry there. Coincidentally, MIU investigators say, contractors who bid against the mob companies had a tendency to get killed.

Shortly after Scarfo arrived in Fort Lauderdale, the FBI initiated what was called the Southern Summit, a law enforcement conference on organized crime influences in the South. They named Nicodemo Scarfo as their primary target and directed MIU, a relatively unknown agency less than two years old, to work in concert with investigators building cases in New Jersey and Philadelphia against the reputed mob lord.

MIU would turn out to be a major conduit of raw intelligence on Scarfo, the reason being that Scarfo believed he had a free rein in the Open Territory.

“He was a priority up here, but I’m sure he thought he wouldn’t be much of a priority down there,” says Sgt. Bill Coblantz of the 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.”

Just 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.