The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (41 page)

Later, Kroner and his partner, acting on a tip, drilled open the Carabbias’ sister’s safe-deposit box, where they found a similar tape with a handwritten note. It said, “If I die these tapes go to the F.B.I. in Washington. I feel I have more people after me because of these tapes and . . . I pray and ask God to guide and protect my family.”

Back at headquarters, Kroner and his colleagues listened to a jumble of voices on the tape arguing about which public officials they thought were allegedly being paid off by the rival Pittsburgh Mob.

“You believe they got all them fuckin’ people?” Orlie said.

“I know they got” him, Traficant said, referring to one prominent politician.

“Oh, they definitely got” him, Charlie said.

Traficant paused, as if running through other names in his mind. “I don’t know all of them,” he finally said. “But I know it’s a fuckin’ fistful.”

With its Pittsburgh rival controlling many of the valley’s politicians, the Cleveland faction knew it needed some powerful representatives of its own. And the tapes, apparently made by Charlie the Crab at two meetings during the 1980 sheriff’s campaign, appeared to show them buying Traficant. “I am a loyal fucker,” Traficant informed the Carabbia brothers, “and my loyalty is here, and now we’ve gotta set up the business that they’ve run for all these fuckin’ years and swing that business over to you, and that’s what your concern is. That’s why you financed me, and I understand that.”

The arrangement appeared to be an old-fashioned one: Traficant acknowledged receiving more than a hundred thousand dollars from the Cleveland faction for his campaign; in exchange, he indicated that he would use the sheriff’s office to protect the Carabbias’ rackets while shutting down their rivals.

Charlie told Traficant, “Your uncle Tony was my goombah . . . and we feel that you’re like a brother to us. We don’t want you to make any fuckin’ mistakes.” Traficant assured his benefactors that he was solid, and that if any of his deputies betrayed them “they’ll fuckin’ come up swimming in [the] Mahoning River.”

But, according to the tapes, Traficant was not worried primarily about his deputies; he was worried about the Pittsburgh Mob. As Charlie knew, Traficant had accepted money from Pittsburgh, too—some sixty thousand dollars. (The first installment had come with the message “I want you to be my friend.”) The young candidate for sheriff was now double-crossing the Pittsburgh family: he had just given over at least some of its money to Charlie the Crab in order to prove his loyalty, and he knew that when the Pittsburgh family found out it would retaliate. “Look, I don’t wanna fuckin’ die in six months, Charlie,” Traficant said.

Kroner and his colleagues could hear Traficant hatching a plan to protect himself from the Pittsburgh Mafia and the officials they controlled. “Let’s look at it this way, O.K.?” he said. “They can get to the judges and get what they need done. . . . What they don’t have is the sheriff, and . . . I’m one step ahead.” On the day he was sworn into office, Traficant said he’d take some of the money the Pittsburgh family had given him and use it as evidence to arrest them for bribery. What’s more, Traficant rehearsed what he and the Crabs would say if their secret dealings were ever uncovered by the authorities: “I was so fucking pissed off at this crooked government, I came to you and asked you guys if you would assist me to break it up, and you said, ‘Fuck it . . . we’ll do it.’ O.K.? That’s gonna be what you’re gonna say in court.”

“Orlie, too?” Charlie asked. “He’s got a bad heart—”

“Look . . . I’m not talking fucking daydreams,” Traficant said. “If they’re gonna fuck with me, I’m gonna nail them.” Traficant was taken with the audacity of his plan. “If you think about it,” he mused, “if I fuckin’ did that—”

“You can run for governor,” Charlie said.

They all broke into laughter.

After Kroner and his superiors reviewed the tapes, they called Traficant down to headquarters. Kroner had never met the sheriff before, and he watched as he settled into the chair across from him. Traficant, who was forty-one years old and had once worked in the mills, was an imposing figure, with wide shoulders and a flamboyant, brown toupee that stuck up on top. Kroner told Traficant that he had watched him play quarterback at the University of Pittsburgh. (An N.F.L. scout once said that Traficant, “at the most critical point in a game,” would “keep the ball himself and run with it,” bowling over anyone in his path.)

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.

In the rare instances when the police arrested a reputed mobster, Strollo and his associates paid off the judges. Once, a judge refused to fix an assault case, and so Strollo dispatched Batcho with a walkie-talkie and a silencer to wound the defense attorney, Gary Van Brocklin, in order to force a mistrial. As Batcho later recalled, “I said, ‘Are you attorney Gary Van Brocklin?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I am.’ . . . And I shot him right in the knee.” Andy Arena, who was Kroner’s boss at the F.B.I., told me, “I don’t know how an honest defense attorney could make a living in this town.”

Strollo’s influence extended to the valley’s representative in Congress as well. Traficant’s top aide in the district, Charles O’Nesti, served as the “bagman” between Strollo and the city’s corrupt public officials, as O’Nesti himself later admitted. (Traficant had hired O’Nesti in 1984, despite his claims on the infamous tapes that O’Nesti was a Mob crony whom he would arrest as part of his so-called sting to clean up the valley.) While working for Traficant, O’Nesti would meet Strollo at the don’s farm or scheme with him on the phone. The two even conspired to steal a stretch of city pavement as it was being laid down.

The F.B.I. sting that would start unravelling this web of corruption began in 1994. By then, Kroner was married and had two daughters; and he had given up smoking through hypnotism and put several pounds on his slender frame. One morning, as he met with other agents in their cramped local office, he was despairing. He had recently witnessed the disintegration of one of his few triumphs: fourteen months after he had secured a conviction against Strollo for gambling, his nemesis had reemerged from prison and reasserted his power. Even when we bust them, Kroner thought, they just come back.

So Kroner and his colleagues opted for a new approach. Rather than attack the Mob from the top, as they had in the past, they’d start at the bottom, with the numbers runners and the stick handlers at the barbut games. The investigation was based on the theory of carpenter ants—if you don’t eliminate all of them, they simply multiply again. Kroner says, “We set forth right in the beginning that we were not going to stop until we got to the nest, and if it meant having to work deals with people we had lots of evidence against, that’s what we were going to do.”