The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (40 page)

—February, 2004

The case against the Aryan Brotherhood produced nearly thirty convictions. The gang’s two most feared and powerful leaders, Barry Mills and T. D. Bingham, were found guilty of murder, conspiracy, and racketeering. The jury, however, deadlocked on whether they should receive the death penalty, and they were sentenced to life without parole. David Sahakian, whose initial trial in Benton led to a hung jury on the count of ordering the murder of Terry Walker, was later retried and found guilty. He was sentenced to twenty years. After failing to obtain the death penalty against other leaders of the gang, the prosecution dropped charges against Michael McElhiney; he is not expected to be released from prison until 2035, when he will be seventy-eight years old.

Crimetown, U.S.A.

THE CITY
THAT FELL IN LOVE
WITH THE MOB

There was a certain tidiness to the killings in Youngstown, Ohio. Usually they happened late at night when there were no witnesses and only the lights from the steel furnaces still burned. Everyone suspected who the killers were—they lived in the neighborhood, often just down the street—but no one could ever prove anything. Sometimes their methods were simple: a bullet to the back of the head or a bomb strapped under the hood of a car. Or sometimes, as when they got John Magda, they went for something more dramatic, tranquillizing their victim with a stun gun and wrapping his head in tape until he could no longer breathe.

Then there were those who just disappeared. Police found their cars on the side of the road, empty, or food still warm on dinner tables where they had been eating. The victims had, in the most classic sense, been “rubbed out.” The only sign of the killers was an artistic flourish: a dozen long-stemmed white roses that the victims typically received before they vanished.

So, when Lenny Strollo ordered the hit that summer night in 1996, there was no reason to believe it would go down any differently. Strollo was the Mafia don in Mahoning County—a stretch of land in a valley in northeastern Ohio that encompasses Youngstown and smaller cities like Canfield and Campbell, and that is home to more than two hundred and fifty thousand people. From his farm in Canfield, where he tended his gardens, Strollo ran a criminal network that comprised extortion rackets, illegal gambling, and money laundering. He also oversaw many of the killings in the region. Only weeks earlier, Strollo had had his main Mob rival gunned down in broad daylight. This time, Strollo’s choice of target was more brazen: the newly elected county prosecutor, Paul Gains.

The Mafia didn’t ordinarily “take out” public officials, but the prosecutor, who was forty-five years old, had resisted the customary bribes and campaign contributions. What’s more, Strollo had heard that Gains intended to hire as his chief investigator the man the don most loathed, an F.B.I. agent named Bob Kroner, who had spent two decades pursuing organized crime in the region.

As usual, Strollo employed layers of authority, so that nothing could be traced back to him. First, he gave the order to Bernie the Jew, on whom he relied for muscle. Bernie, in turn, hired Jeffrey Riddle, a black drug dealer turned assassin who boasted that he would become “the first nigger ever inducted into the family.” Riddle then brought in his own two-man team: Mark Batcho, a fastidious criminal who ran one of the most sophisticated burglary crews in the country, and Antwan “Mo Man” Harris, a crack dealer and murderer who still lived with his mother.

That Christmas Eve, as Batcho and Harris later recounted, the three men packed up everything they needed: walkie-talkies, ski masks, gloves, a police scanner, a .38 revolver, and a bag of cocaine to plant at the scene in order to make it look like a drug-related killing. After sundown, the men drove out to the prosecutor’s house, in a Youngstown suburb. Gains was not yet home—his house was dark inside—and Batcho got out of the car and waited behind a lamppost near the garage. He attached a speed loader to the revolver to enable him to shoot faster. Then he tested the voice-activated walkie-talkie, but there was no response. He tried again—nothing. Incredulous, he ran back to the car and said he couldn’t kill anyone without “communication.”

The three men drove to a nearby parking lot, where they programmed their cell phones so that they could dial one another at the touch of a button. When they returned to Gains’s home, they noticed that a car was in the driveway, and the lights in the house were on. “O.K.,” Riddle said. “Get out and go do this.”

Batcho exited the car, carrying the gun and the bag of cocaine. He crept up to the house, his heart racing. The garage door was open, and he said, “Hey, mister,” but no one answered, and he kept walking. A door leading into the house was also ajar, and he decided to go in. As he made his way down a corridor, he could hear Gains talking on the phone in the kitchen, only a few feet away. Batcho hesitated, as if contemplating what he was about to do. Then he rushed forward, bursting into the kitchen, pointing the gun at the prosecutor’s midsection. He pulled the trigger, then fired again. Gains collapsed to the floor, blood seeping from his forearm and side. Batcho stepped closer, and Gains put up his hands to ward him off. Batcho aimed near Gains’s heart and pulled the trigger, but the gun kicked back, jamming.

Batcho ran out of the house, stumbling into the darkness. He fell and, getting back up, hit the button on the cell phone, screaming, It’s done! Come pick me up. He saw the car approaching from down the street and darted toward it. As the car slowed, he jumped into the back seat, crouching down.

“Did you kill him?” Riddle asked.

“I think so,” Batcho said uncertainly.

“You don’t know?” Riddle said.

“The gun jammed.”

Harris looked at him coolly. “Why didn’t you go in the drawer and get a steak knife and stab him to death?” he asked.

Riddle said that they had to go back and finish the job, but just then the police scanner crackled with news of the shooting. Riddle hit the gas and sped along the back roads. Fearing that the police might pull them over, Harris tossed the gun out the window. The men realized that the speed loader was missing, and started screaming at each other. Then from the scanner came the news that Gains was still alive.

It was a remarkably inept professional hit. Police found the speed loader outside Gains’s house, along with a clean footprint. Within days, a sketch of the shooter appeared in the local newspaper, the Vindicator. Yet the crime scene was so messy that investigators concluded that Strollo’s men could not have been behind it. Gains told friends that if the Mob had done it he’d be dead. Batcho, who had taken to wearing disguises, gradually emerged from hiding. Once more, it looked as if the murderers would escape punishment.

Then several months later, in the spring of 1997, the prosecutor received a telephone call at his home. “Are you Paul Gains?” a woman asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Who’s this?”

“I know who shot you,” she said.

When the woman disclosed details about the crime that few could have known, Gains summoned Kroner and other F.B.I. agents, who were in the midst of a three-year sting operation against organized crime in the Mahoning Valley. The next day, Kroner and his men visited the woman, who was an ex-girlfriend of an associate of the hit men. “I know everything,” she said. “I know other people they shot.”

Her information would lead authorities to the three assassins and help solve a Mob hit for the first time in the county’s history. Meanwhile, Kroner and the F.B.I. had begun to break apart what was believed to be the most crooked county in America—a place where the Mafia had ruled with impunity for nearly a hundred years and where it still controlled virtually every element of society. The don’s influence extended to a chief of police, the outgoing prosecutor, the sheriff, the county engineer, policemen, a city law director, defense attorneys, politicians, judges, and a former assistant U.S. attorney. By July of 2000, the F.B.I. probe had produced more than seventy convictions. Now Kroner and his colleagues were closing in on the most powerful politician in the region, a man whom they’d caught on tape scheming with the Mob nearly twenty years earlier but who had eluded them ever since: United States Congressman James Traficant.

  The Mahoning Valley is today one of the most depressed areas of America, but it was an economic boom that first gave rise to the local Mob. During the first half of the twentieth century, the valley was at the center of the burgeoning steel industry. Mills churned around the clock, blackening the sky. Thousands of immigrants—Poles and Greeks and Italians and Slovaks—descended on the area, believing they had found the Ruhr Valley of America; meanwhile, racketeers thought they had discovered their own Little Chicago. The streets were lined with after-hours joints, where steel-workers drank and played barbut, a Turkish dice game, and where capos, dressed in white-brimmed hats and armed with stilettos, ran the numbers, or “bug,” as the locals called it. Like Chicago, Buffalo, and Detroit, Youngstown had all the elements the Mob needed to flourish: a teeming immigrant population accustomed to arbitrary and violent authority, a prosperous economy, and pliable local politicians and police.

Yet Youngstown was too small to have a Mob family of its own, and by 1950, as the rackets grew into a multimillion-dollar industry, the Pittsburgh and Cleveland Mafia families began fighting for control of the region. Cars and stores were bombed—warnings to anyone who allied himself with the wrong side. A local radio station ran public-service ads featuring an earsplitting bang and the slogan “Stop the bomb!” In 1963, the Saturday Evening Post reported that local “officials hobnob openly with criminals. Arrests of racketeers are rare, convictions rarer still, and tough sentences almost unheard of.” The newspaper dubbed the area Crime-town, U.S.A.

By 1977, the Mob war had become even more violent. On one side was Joey Naples and Lenny Strollo’s faction, which was controlled by the Pittsburgh Mafia; on the other were the Carabbia brothers—known as Charlie the Crab and Orlie the Crab—who were aligned with Cleveland. “It seemed like you’d get up every morning and get in your car and hear someone else had been murdered,” the F.B.I. agent Bob Kroner told me.

First, there were Spider and Peeps—two petty cons hit within a few weeks of each other. Then came one of Naples’s drivers, shot as he changed a tire in his driveway, and a crony of Peeps’s, who was gunned down outside his apartment. Then John Magda, who was discovered, his head wrapped in tape, at the dump in Struthers, and, next, a small-time bookie who refused to go easily—he was first bombed and later shot through his living-room window as he watched television with his wife. Then Joey DeRose, Sr., killed by accident when he was mistaken for his son, Joey DeRose, Jr., a Carabbia assassin; and, finally, a few months later, the son, too. “Oh my God, they got Joey,” his girlfriend screamed when police told her they had found the car he was driving burning on a country road between Cleveland and Akron.

In 1976, Kroner arrived in Youngstown and descended into this violent underworld. He was a former high-school math teacher who turned in his books for a badge in 1971, and who could be seen around town, in his neatly pressed suit and tie, trailing reputed hit men and banging on the doors of the All-American Club and other Mafia hangouts. Though he came from a family of cops, which included his father, Kroner didn’t look like one: he was too tall and slender, almost delicate, and he lacked the easy manner of the police who played craps in the shadow of the courthouse. He wore penny loafers in a city where most people wore boots, and spoke with a certain formality.

His F.B.I. predecessor, according to the agency’s own affidavit and informants, had allegedly consorted with gangsters, and was later appointed Youngstown’s chief of police at the Mafia’s behest. But Kroner was hostile to the local dons. Prickly and shy, he spent hours alone in his small office, smoking cigarettes and listening to intercepted conversations between the different factions. Like a cartographer filling in the blanks on a map, he made little diagrams of each family, to which he added further details whenever he received a tip from an informant. He did everything he could to bring down the Mafia’s enterprise: tapping its members’ phones, tailing their spotless Cadillacs, subpoenaing their friends. Before long, Strollo and his cronies gave him the ultimate epithet: “motherfucker.”

In December of 1980, Charlie the Crab, the head of the Cleveland faction, disappeared without a trace, and, soon after, Kroner searched the apartment of one of the city’s most notorious assassins. The apartment was cluttered with knickknacks, and Kroner and his partner went through each room carefully. In a cabinet, Kroner noticed a breadbox and opened it. Inside, tucked amid the stale bread, was an audiotape. When he played it, he heard male voices, saying, “He’s a scared motherfucker” and “You either play our fucking game or you[’re] going to be put in a fucking box.” Two of the voices, Kroner was sure, belonged to Charlie and his brother, Orlie the Crab. There was also another voice, one Kroner thought he recognized from television and radio. Then it dawned on him: it was James Traficant, a former college football star, who had recently been elected sheriff of Youngstown.