A mobbed-up ringleader nicknamed “Papa Smurf” and a fellow Genovese crime family associate copped pleas on Friday to being part of a massive gangland effort to control the lucrative garbage-carting industry in the Big Apple and its suburbs.
Carmine Franco — who got his colorful nickname from fellow wiseguys who couldn’t help but think of the 1980s mushroom-dwelling cartoon character when they saw him – will face 27 to 33 months behind bars when sentenced on March 19 under his plea deal with feds. He pleaded guilty to charges of racketeering, mail and wire fraud, and interstate transportation of stolen cargo.
The 78-year-old Franco, who admitted being “nervous,” confided to Manhattan federal Judge Kevin Castel that he might need a good dictionary because he didn’t know what “racketeering” means.
“I really did not know what racketeering is, but my lawyer tried to explain it to me,” said Franco, of Ramsey, NJ, minutes before copping his plea.
Franco and another longtime Genovese soldier, Anthony Pucciarello, admitted being key players between 2009 and 2012 in a scheme where rival Mafia families banded together to circumvent official efforts to clean up the trash business — and used strong-arm tactics to shake down the owners of legitimate companies and secretly assume ownership of their operations.
Reputed members and associates of the Gambino, Genovese and Luchese organized-crime families allegedly put aside their differences to run a “property-rights” system in which they divvied up customers and companies under their control.
Heading the effort was Franco, who had been barred from the trash business in New Jersey because of past criminal convictions. He admitted running his piece of the operation out of Rockland County, NY. He had faced 80 years in prison, if convicted, before cutting his deal with the feds.
Participants in the racket held “sit-downs” to resolve disputes when “competing [Mafia] factions wanted to assert their control over a particular waste-disposal company,” and to “set the financial terms upon which the previous ‘owner’ of the company could be bought out,” according to the indictment.
Investigators have described it as a fresh twist on the mob’s age-old love affair with the private trash companies that haul waste and run transfer stations where tonnage equals money and the totals can be padded with ease.
Pucciarello, 78, of Clifton, NJ, faces up to six months in prison when he’s sentenced March 21 after pleading guilty to extortion charges.
He admitted to the judge that he helped muscle the owner of a rival waste-disposal business into “retiring” and then secretly turn over ownership of the business to him and other associates or “face economic hardship.”
“I agreed that my name would be concealed as an owner of the business,” he told the judge.
At the heart of the government’s case is the “operator” of a Westchester trash hauler, M&C Waste Services, who was getting squeezed by the mob and then turned the tables.
He became an informant and was wired by agents who conducted thousands of hours of surveillance that detailed how different families — and different crews within the same family — would fight for control of M&C and other companies.
At first, the feds said, M&C was controlled Franco. After that, a crew in The Bronx made a play for M&C.
Also arrested was a former state trooper, Mario Velez, who was charged with using “actual and threatened force, violence and fear” to extort the owner of a trash company and take over the business.