How The Mafia Stole $20 Million From One Building – ht
December 16th, 1985. 5:47 p.m. The corner of East 46th Street and 3rd Avenue, Manhattan. Snow falling. Christmas lights glowing in store windows. Paul Castellano, 70, boss of the Gambino Crime family, stepped out his Black Lincoln Town Car, wearing a long cashmere coat and his signature white fedora.
His under boss, Thomas Botti, walked beside him. They had 11 seconds left to live. The bullets came from behind. Six shots. Castellano dropped on the sidewalk outside Spark Steakhouse. Blood pooling under his white hat. The most powerful mafia boss in America executed in rush hour traffic. The hit made headlines worldwide.
But here’s what nobody understood at the time. This wasn’t just about a power struggle inside the Gambino family. Paul Castellano died because of concrete, specifically because he’d been caught on tape rigging bids, fixing prices, and extorting millions from New York’s construction industry through an organization called the Concrete Club and the government building that exposed the whole thing.
The Jacob K Javis Convention Center, a single construction project that became the most expensive government building in American history. This is how the mafia turned concrete into gold. how they controlled every cubic yard poured in Manhattan and how one building’s construction cost revealed a criminal conspiracy that reached the highest levels of organized crime.
This is a story of the Javit Center concrete scam. How the five families stole $20 million from one building and how concrete became the weapon that finally brought down the commission. You need to understand something about New York City in the 1970s and early 80s. The mob didn’t just run gambling and drugs. They owned entire industries.
Construction was a crown jewel. And concrete was their gold mine. Here’s why. Every skyscraper, every bridge, every major building project in Manhattan required concrete, millions of cubic yards. And concrete doesn’t wait. You pour it or it hardens in the truck. That timing gave whoever controlled concrete delivery absolute leverage.
The mob understood this better than anyone. They didn’t need to own every construction company. They just needed to control the material and the men who poured it. By 1980, four to five families had created what federal prosecutors would later called a concrete club. An illegal cartel that rigged every major construction project in New York City.
The rules were simple, brutal, effective. any concrete contract over $2 million had to go through the club. Only six contractors were allowed to bid. All six were mob controlled or mob connected. The families divided the work among themselves. And every contractor paid 2% of the total contract value directly to the commission, not as a one-time payment, as tribute, as tax, as the price of doing business in New York City.
If you want to build in Manhattan, you paid the mob. If you refused, your project stopped, trucks didn’t show up, workers didn’t come to the site, permits got delayed, accident happened. The system was elegant in its simplicity, and it generated hundreds of millions of dollars. The concrete cartel wasn’t run by soldiers or street thugs.
It was controlled at the very top. Paul Castellano, boss of the Gambino family, ran the operation. Big Paul, as everyone called him, was 68 years old in 1982, tall white-haired with the bearing of a banker. He lived in a mansion on Staten Island with a swimming pool and tennis courts. He wore $3,000 suits.
He didn’t look like a gangster. He looked like a CEO because that’s what he was. Big Paul had moved the Gambino family away from traditional rackets into white collar crime. He understood that real money wasn’t armed robberies or hijackings. It was in construction unions and city contracts. Castellano controlled Teamster’s local 282, the concrete and cement drivers union.
With one phone call, he could shut down every concrete delivery in Manhattan. His partner was Anthony Solerno, 75, boss of the Genov’s family. Fat Tony, as he was known, weighed over 300 lb and ran the day-to-day operations of the concrete club. Solerno control the supply side. He owned SNA concrete company through frontman.
SNA supplied concrete for virtually every major project in Manhattan. The company charged 10 to 15% more than market rates. Every major developer knew it. Most paid anyway because there was no alternative. You used SNA or your project didn’t get built. The third power in the concrete club was Jaro Langella, 49. Acting boss of the Columbbo family. Jerry Lang.
They called him. Quiet, sharp, ruthless. Langela controlled another piece of the puzzle. Windows. The Columbbo family ran the window insulation racket through mob connected companies. It sounds minor. It wasn’t. High-rise buildings need thousands of windows. Window contracts ran into millions.
The Coloss got a cut of everyone. The fourth family in the club was a Lucazi organization led by Anthony Coralo 71. Tony ducks because he ducks so many indictments. Corella was old school, careful, paranoid. He rarely used phones. He conducted meetings in moving cars. His driver was Sal Aalino, a trusted soldier who chauffeer Coral around the city in a Jaguar while they discussed business.
Coralo controlled another union, the Mason Tenders. More leverage over construction sites. Four families, different specialties, one system. The concrete club divided projects like mob territory. Jobs worth 2 to 5 million went a club contractors on a rotating basis. Projects over 5 million went to SNA concrete always. And every contractor, every developer, every construction manager understood the rules. Pay 2%. Keep your mouth shut.
Build your building. The system had been running smoothly for years. And then the government decided to build the Javit Center. In 1979, New York State announced plans to build the Jacob K. Javitz Convention Center on Manhattan’s west side. The project was massive. 1.8 million square ft, five city blocks, glass and steel, a convention center designed to put New York back on the map for major trade shows.
The estimated budget was $220 million. That estimate wouldn’t hold. The Javit Center would eventually cost 375 million, the single most expensive government building constructed in America up to that point. Part of that cost was legitimate. Design changes, labor issues, delays, but a significant chunk, at least 12 to$20 million according to federal prosecutors, went directly into mafia pockets.
The concrete contract alone was worth over 30 million and the mob wanted every dollar. The project broke ground in 1980. Immediately the concrete club moved in. The general contractor for the Javit Center was HR Construction. Legitimate company, but they needed concrete, mountains of it, tens of thousands of cubic yards. The foundation, the superructure, the floors.
They put the concrete subcontract out for bid. That’s when Ralph Scopo made his move. Ralph Scopo was 52 years old in 1980. A soldier in the Columbbo crime family. Little Ralphie, they called him, though there was nothing little about his power. Scopo held the most important union position in the concrete racket. He was president of the cement and concrete workers district council, representing 4,000 union members across New York.
Scopo didn’t look like a labor leader. He looked like what he was, a lifelong criminal with dead eyes and a voice like gravel. He’d been arrested 12 times. He’d served time for extortion. He had direct access to the bosses of four families. And he control which workers showed up to which job sites.
If Scopo said a site was union, it was union. If he said concrete got poured, it got poured. If he wanted a project stopped, it stopped. That power made him indispensable to the concrete club. And in 1980, Scopo had instructions from the commission. The Javit sent a concrete work belongs to us. Make it happen. Scopo didn’t need to threaten anyone directly. The system did that for him.
He met with contractors bidding on the Javit’s concrete work. He explained how things worked. This job was already allocated. The winning bid would be a joint venture between Julius Nasso Concrete Company and SNA Concrete. Both mile connected. The bid would be high. Nobody else should bid lower. And if they tried, there [clears throat] would be problems.
Labor problems, delivery problems, problems that would cost far more than 2%. Most contractors got the message immediately. One didn’t. Or at least he tried to fight back. Edward Howerin was one of the few contractors in New York who tried to resist the concrete club. Howerin owned certified concrete company and transit mix concrete corporation legitimate businesses.
He supplied readymix concrete to construction sites across Manhattan. In theory, he could compete. In reality, he couldn’t because Howerin quickly learned what happened to people who didn’t cooperate. The mob control the unions. If Howerin’s trucks tried to deliver to a non-approved site, the union wouldn’t let them pour. The concrete hardened in the trucks.
Tens of thousands of dollars of ruined product. Howerin tried anyway for a while. Then he made his choice. He became part of the club. Federal prosecutors would later charge at Howerin, working under mob orders, control the delivery of readymix concrete to construction projects in Manhattan. He enforced a bid rigging scheme by threatening developers with delays and work stoppages.
Howerin later claimed he had no choice, that he was a victim of extortion himself. Maybe that’s true, but by 1980 he was delivering concrete to the Javit Center at inflated prices on a rigged contract and the money flowed up to Scopo, to the families, to the commission. The Javit Center concrete contract was awarded to the NASOS in a joint venture in 1981.
The price was $30 million, 12% higher than engineers estimated the work should cost. State Attorney General Robert Abrams would later call it one of the most blatant examples of bid rigging he’d ever seen. But in 1981, nobody stopped it. The concrete got poured, the building went up, and the mob collected their 2% $600,000.
Split four ways among the Gambino, Genovese, Columbbo, and Lucesy families. That’s just a kickback. SNA Concrete controlled by Castellano and Serno made millions more in profit from the inflated contract price. Other mob connected firms got subcontracts, window installation, carpentry, electrical. The Javit Center became a mafia ATM.
Every cubic yard of concrete, every window frame, every union worker. The mob took a cut. And for a while, it looked like they’d gotten away with it, but the FBI was watching. Here’s what the mafia didn’t know. In 1983, the FBI had declared war on the commission. for decades. Jay Edgar Hoover had denied that the mafia even existed.
He claimed it was a myth created by the media, that stands crippled organized crime investigations for 40 years. But Hoover died in 1972 and a new generation of FBI agents armed with new technology and new laws started hunting the five families. The key was RICO. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act passed in 1970.
RICO allowed prosecutors to charge mob bosses for crimes they ordered, even if they didn’t personally commit them. For the first time, the government could attack the entire structure of organized crime. Not just soldiers, not just enforcers, the bosses, the commission itself. In 1983, the FBI’s organized crime unit in New York had three goals.
Prove the commission existed. Prove it functioned as a criminal organization. Bring RICO charges against every boss. The concrete club gave them the perfect case. Because concrete was everywhere. Every major construction project, every skyscraper, every government building. If the FBI could prove the mob control concrete, they could prove the commission controlled New York.
The surveillance started in 1982. The FBI needed hard evidence, wiretaps, surveillance photos, recorded conversations. They needed to catch the bosses discussing concrete, dividing money, rigging bids. That meant getting close, very close. They started with cars. Tony Ducks Coralo, the Lucazi boss, conducted most of his business from the backseat of Sal Aalino’s Jaguar. Coralo was paranoid about bugs.
He avoided phones. He didn’t meet in restaurants or social clubs. The car was his mobile office. In early 1983, New York State organized crime task force investigators found a Jaguar parked on a Queen Street. They broke in, planted a microphone, got out. For the next 6 months, every conversation Coral had in that car was recorded.
The tapes were devastating. Coralo and his under boss, Tom Mixanto, discussed the concrete club openly. They talked about which families control which contractors. They talked about splitting money. They talked about the Javit Center. On one tape, Coralo complained that the Javit job wasn’t generating enough payoff.
He wanted a bigger cut. The tapes proved everything, but the FBI needed more. They needed to catch the commission meeting. Together, planning crimes. In June 1983, they got their chance. June 13th, 1983. The Bari Restaurant Supply Company, 234 Bowery Manhattan, the FBI, NYPD Organized Crime Unit, and the New York State Task Force all received intelligence.
The commission was meeting today at Bari. This was the moment they’d been waiting for. The bosses together, if they could photograph the meeting, if they could prove these men sat in the same room discussing business, it would cement the RICO case. Surveillance teams mobilized over 50 agents. Unmarked cars, a helicopter.
They converge on the Bowerery. Bari was a commercial kitchen equipment store. Pizza ovens, industrial mixers, stainless steel counters. The owner, Salvatore Reel, was connected. He let the commission use the back room for meetings. Secure, private, off the radar, or so they thought. Around 200 p.m. the bosses started arriving.
Paul Castellano, Fat Tony Solerno, Tony Ducks, Coralo, Jerry Lang Langella, Vincent Gigani, the Genov’s underboss who pretended to be insane. Ralph Scopo. They gathered among the pizza ovens to discuss the most important item on the agenda, the concrete club. Which contractors got which jobs? How much money each family made? what to do about the Javit Center overruns.
But outside things were going wrong. Multiple law enforcement agencies running simultaneous surveillance is a recipe for chaos. And that’s what happened at Bari. FBI agents in unmarked cars. NYPD detectives on foot. State task force investigators trying to coordinate. A helicopter circling overhead. It was too much, too obvious.
Inside Bari, Paul Castellano looked out the plate glass window. He saw Joseph O’Brien, a 6’5 FBI agent, standing across the street staring directly at the building. O’Brien had been tailing Castellano for months. Babe Paul recognized him instantly. He turned to the other bosses. Feds outside right now. The meeting exploded into panic.
Fat Tony Serno, weighing over 300 lb, tried to squeeze through a back window. He got stuck. Two soldiers had to push him through. Castellano walked out the front door, calm, stonefaced. He got into his car and drove away. Tony Ducks Coralo slipped out a side exit. The boss is scattered. The FBI got photos, but they didn’t get arrests. Not that day.
But the photos were enough because now they could prove it. The commission met. The commission discussed criminal activity. The commission existed. And 18 months later, on February 25th, 1985, federal prosecutors would use those photos in an indictment that changed everything. February 25th, 1985, federal prosecutors in New York, led by US attorney Rudolph Giuliani, announced indictments against nine leaders of the New York Mafia.
The charges were conspiracy, extortion, labor racketeering, and bidrigging. Under RICO, the defendants were the most powerful mob bosses in America. Paul Castellano, Gambino, boss, Anthony Serno, Geneov’s boss, Anthony Coralo, Lucesy, boss, Jaro Langella, Columbbo, acting boss, Ralph Scopo, Columbbo soldier and union president, and four others.
The indictment laid out the entire structure of the concrete club. How contracts were rigged, how money was divided, how unions were controlled, and the Javit Center was exhibit A. The government alleged that the Javit’s concrete contract was rigged from the start. That Castellano, Serno, Scopo, and others conspired to award the job to mob control contractors.
that the inflated costs, the bid manipulation, the union control, all of it violated federal law, and they had proof. The Jaguar tapes, the Bari surveillance photos, testimony from contractors who’d been threatened, financial records showing payments. The case was airtight. Giuliani called it the most important organized crime prosecution in American history.
He was right, because this wasn’t just about the Javit Center. It was about destroying the commission. The trial was set for September 1986. But in December 1985, something happened that changed the case forever. Paul Castellano was murdered outside Spark Steakhouse. And the man who ordered the hit was about to become the most famous mobster in America.
John Gotti didn’t kill Paul Castalano because of the concrete club. He killed him for power. Gotti was 45, a capo in the Gambino family, ambitious, violent, media savvy. He hated Castalano, thought Big Paul was weak, out of touch, too focused on white collar rackets, not enough on traditional mob activities. Gotti wanted the throne.
But there was another reason. Castellano was facing life in prison. The commission case was a death sentence. Even if Big Paul beat the charges, which seemed unlikely, his legal problems made him vulnerable. Gotti saw an opening. On December 16th, 1985, he took it. The Sparks hit was bold, public, arrogant. It violated every rule of mob protocol.
You don’t kill a boss without commission approval. Gotti didn’t ask. He just did it. And within days, he declared himself the new boss of the Gambino family. The FBI was furious. They had spent years building a commission case. Castellano was supposed to go to trial. Now he was dead, but the case didn’t die with him because they still had Solerno, Coralo, Langella, and Scopo.
And in September 1986, the trial began. It would last 10 weeks and it would destroy the commission. The Mafia Commission trial began on September 8th, 1986 in federal court in Manhattan. Judge Richard Owen presiding. The prosecution team included Michael Chertoff, later Secretary of Homeland Security. The defense brought the best lawyers mob money could buy.
The trial was a media sensation. Every day the courtroom packed with reporters, sketch artists, family members. The defendant sat in a row. Fat Tony Solerno looking old and tired. Tony ducks Coralo expressionless. Jerry Lang Langella calm Ralph Scopo staring straight ahead. The prosecution’s case was methodical.
They started with a structure of La Kosa Nostra. The five families, the commission, how it worked, who sat on it, then they moved to the criminal activity. The concrete club, labor racketeering, bid rigging, murder, and the Javit Center. The government called contractors who’d been threatened. union officials who’ taken orders from Scopo, concrete suppliers who’d been forced to pay kickbacks.
Each witness added another layer to the story. The Concrete Club wasn’t a theory. It was a functioning criminal organization with rules, territories, and enforcement. One of the most important witnesses was a contractor named Fred Dematize. His company, Deatize Construction, was one of the largest in New York. He testified that he’d been told directly by mob connected figures that the Javit Center concrete work was allocated, that he couldn’t bid, that if he tried, there would be consequences.
Dematize was a legitimate businessman. He had no criminal record, but he paid because everyone paid. The Jaguar tapes were played in court. Jurors heard Tony Ducks Coralo discussing the concrete club talking about dividing money assigning contracts. At one point, Corell talk about a contractor who wasn’t cooperating.
He said the guy needed to be straightened out. The jury understood what that meant. The defense tried to argue that the commission was a myth, that these men didn’t work together, that they were rivals, not partners. But the Bari surveillance photos destroyed that argument. There they were, the bosses of four families in the same room at the same time.
The prosecutor asked the jury a simple question. If these men weren’t working together, why were they meeting? The defense had no good answer. Ralph Scopo’s role was particularly damning. As union president, he controlled labor at the Javit Center. Witnesses testified that he’d threatened work stoppages, that he demanded payoffs, that he told contractors which companies to use.
Scopo barely reacted during the trial. He sat stonefaced even as witness after witness described his crimes. His lawyer argued that Scopo was just a union official doing his job. The jury didn’t buy it. On November 19th, 1986, after 5 days of deliberation, the jury returned guilty. On all counts, all eight defendants convicted.
The courtroom erupted. Family members sobbed. Defendants sat motionless. Fat Tony Serno closed his eyes. On January 13th, 1987, Judge Owen handed down sentences. 100 years in prison. For Serno, Coralo, Langella, and Scopo, the maximum under RICO law. They would die in prison. All of them. Serno died in 1992. Coralo in 2000.
Langella got out in 2013. Served 27 years. Scopo died in 1993. Still locked up. The commission was shattered. The concrete club was broken. Within 5 years, the mob’s control over New York construction was gone. Not completely. Organized crime still exists. But the strangle hold, the absolute power they held in 1985 that ended with a commission trial.
And the Javit Center was the key piece of evidence that made it happen. So what actually happened at the Javit Center? How much did the mob really steal? The final construction cost was $375 million. The original estimate was $220 million. That’s 155 million in overruns. Not all of that was mob related. There were legitimate design changes, delays due to weather, labor disputes, but federal prosecutors estimated that bid rigging on the concrete contract alone added 12 million to the cost.
State Attorney General Robert Abrams put the total mob tax higher, maybe 20 million across all contracts. Concrete, windows, carpentry, electrical. Here’s how it worked. The concrete contract was 30 million. Fair market value according to engineers should have been 26 to 27 million. The mob markup was 3 to4 million right there.
Then add the 2% tribute another 600,000. Then factor an inflated cost from SNA concrete which charged 10 to 15% above market rate for the actual material another million. The windows contract controlled by the Columbos was similarly inflated. So, we’re electrical and carpentry subcontracts. Every piece of the project had a mob tax.
2% here, 5% there, 10% somewhere else. It added up. And the taxpayers in New York paid every penny because this was a government project. State funded public money. The mob didn’t steal from developers or private companies on the Javit Center. They stole from the public. But here’s the larger story. The Javitz Center wasn’t unique.
It was just the most visible example of something that had been happening for decades across New York, across the country. The Concrete Club operated the same way on dozens of projects. Trump Tower built with SNA concrete at inflated prices. The Trump Plaza, same thing. The Lincoln West development. The Museum of Modern Art expansion.
The Javit Center just happened to be the one that prosecutors could prove because it was a government project. There were more records, more oversight, more whistleblowers. But the system was the same everywhere. And it wasn’t just concrete. The mob controlled other construction trades, drywall, painting, trucking. According to estimates by the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, the mobs construction rackets generated between two and four billion dollars in the 1980s.
Not revenue, profit, stolen money, added costs, mob tax. Every building in Manhattan paid it. Every developer knew it. And most of them considered it just another cost of doing business. The convictions in the commission trial didn’t end mob involvement in construction immediately. It took years. Federal prosecutors filed civil reco suits to take over corrupt unions. They installed monitors.
They audited contractors. They investigated bid rigging complaints. Slowly, the mob’s grip loosened. Ralph Scopo’s sons, Ralph Jr. and Joseph, tried to take over their father’s union position. Both were indicted in the 2000s. Both went to prison. The cement and concrete workers union was put under federal oversight.
It stayed that way for 20 years. SNA concrete went out of business. Other malconnected contractors were blacklisted from city and state projects. By the mid 1990s, the concrete club was finished. Today, construction in New York is cleaner. Not clean. Cleaner. Corruption still exists. But the absolute control, the cartel, the system wherefore families divided every major job, that’s gone.
The Javit Center played a direct role in that because it was the evidence that couldn’t be explained away. A government building massively over budget with mob fingerprints on every contract. It was a perfect symbol of how organized crime had infiltrated the most basic functions of city government. There’s an irony here worth noting.
The Javit Center was supposed to be a symbol of New York’s resurgence. In the 1970s, the city was bankrupt, crimeridden, falling apart. The Javit Center was going to bring conventions, tourism, jobs. It was going to show the world that New York was back. Instead, it became a symbol of corruption, the most expensive government building in America.
built with mob concrete, poured by mobc controlled unions at prices inflated by mob extortion. When it finally opened in 1986, the year of the commission trial, it was already infamous, not for its architecture, for its cost. For decades, the Javit Center was cited as an example of government waste, of how public projects spiral out of control.
But that wasn’t the whole story. The real story was organized crime. The mob didn’t just skim money off the top. They built the inflation into every contract. They made the entire project more expensive by design. And they got away with it until federal prosecutors connected the dots. Let’s talk about the human cost.
Because this wasn’t a victimless crime. Every dollar the mob stole was a dollar that didn’t go to schools, hospitals, infrastructure. The 20 million stolen from the Javit Center could have built schools, could have hired teachers, could have fixed roads. Instead, it went into the pockets of men like Fat Tony Serno and Paul Castellano.
Men who lived in mansions who wore $3,000 suits who control politicians, judges, and union leaders and contractors who cooperated. Some of them were victims of extortion, forced to pay or lose their businesses. But others were willing participants. They’d paid the mob tax because it guaranteed work. It eliminated competition. It made them rich.
Those contractors, the ones who played along, they were part of the system, too. And when the commission trial happened, some of them flipped, testified for the prosecution, tried to save themselves. Others stayed silent, took the fifth amendment, hoped the statute of limitations would protect them. Most of them got away with it because the government was focused on the bosses, on the commission, on destroying the structure of organized crime.
The contractors were just means to an end. Ralph Scopo is the figure in the story who fascinates me most. Because he wasn’t a boss. He was a soldier, a working level criminal with a union card. But he wielded enormous power, more power in some ways than Capos or even under bosses because he controlled labor. He controlled access.
If Scopo said yes, concrete got poured. If he said no, the job stopped. That made him indispensable and it made him a target. When the indictments came down, Scopo could have flipped, could have cooperated, could have given up the bosses in exchange for a lighter sentence. He didn’t. He went to trial, got convicted, got sentenced to 100 years, and died in prison in 1993 at age 65.
Why didn’t he cooperate? Loyalty, fear, pride, maybe all three. In the mob, there’s a code. Youth don’t rat. You take your time. You die with honor. Scope followed that code, even when it meant dying in a federal prison in North Carolina, 1,000 miles from his family, even when it meant never seeing freedom again.
That’s the tragedy of organized crime. Men like Scopo spent their entire lives serving the mob. And when the mob needed them to take the fall, they did because that was the deal. That was the life they chose. Paul Castellano’s murder changed the Gambino family forever. John Gotti took over, made himself into a media celebrity, the Dapperdon, the Teflon Dawn.
He beat three criminal trials in the late 1980s. The press loved him. He loved the press. He wore $2,000 suits, held court outside his social club in Queens, gave quotes to reporters. It was everything Castellano had tried to avoid. Bade Paul wanted the Gambinos to operate like a corporation.
Quiet, professional, no headlines. Gotti wanted headlines. He wanted fame. He got it and it destroyed him. In 1992, Gotti was convicted on murder and racketeering charges. He died in prison in 2002. The Gambino family never recovered. But here’s the point. Castalano’s approach, the white collar focus, the construction rackets, the concrete club that made real money, billions of dollars.
Gotti’s approach, the flashy style, the media attention that brought federal heat. The FBI focused everything on Gotti. They wiretapped his headquarters. They flipped his underboss, Sammy Graano. They destroyed the Gambinos. If Castellano had lived, if he’d beaten the commission case somehow, the Gambinos might still be a major power today.
But he didn’t. He got killed and the family went down with him. The Javit Center itself finally opened in April 1986, 6 years behind schedule, 155 million over budget. It was a beautiful building, glass and steel, designed by impe. ion square ft of exhibition space. It immediately became one of the busiest convention centers in America.
Auto shows, boat shows, trade conventions. Over the next 30 years, millions of people walk through the Javit Center. Most of them had no idea about the concrete, about the mob, about the trial. But the building stands as a monument to something important. It represents the moment when the government finally fought back.
When prosecutors armed with RICO and wiretaps and courage took on the commission and won. The concrete club was broken. The five families lost their grip on construction and New York started to change slowly, painfully, but change happened. Today, the mob still exists. The Gambinos, Genovese, Columbbo, Luces, and Banano families are still active, but they’re shadows of what they were in 1985. They run smaller rackets.
Gambling, lone sharking, some drug trafficking, but the days of controlling entire industries, gone. The days of the commission meeting to divide billions in construction contracts, gone. The Javit Center helped end that. So, what’s the lesson here? What does a Javit Center concrete scam teach us? First, corruption thrives in complexity.
Construction projects are complicated. Hundreds of contractors, thousands of workers, millions of transactions. That complexity creates opportunities for criminals. The mob didn’t need to control everything. They just needed to control key choke points, concrete delivery, union labor, a few critical contracts. That was enough.
Second, silence enables corruption. Everyone knew the concrete club existed. Contractors knew. Developers knew. City officials knew. But nobody talked because talking meant retaliation. It meant losing contracts. It meant career suicide or actual suicide. The system protected itself through fear. Third, ending corruption requires political will.
The Javitz case happened because prosecutors decided to fight. Giuliani Chertoff, the FBI agents, the state investigators, they could have gone after low-level mobsters, easy cases, quick wins. Instead, they went after commission, the hardest target, the most dangerous target, and they won. That took courage. Fourth, Rico changed everything.
Before RICO, prosecutors couldn’t touch mob bosses. They could arrest soldiers, enforcers, hitmen, but the bosses insulated themselves, gave orders verbally, used buffers. Rico allowed prosecutors to charge the entire organization to hold bosses responsible for crimes committed by subordinates. That was revolutionary and it worked.
Here’s what happened to the other major figures in this story. Fat Tony Solerno died in federal prison in Springfield, Missouri in 1992. He was 80 years old. He’d served 5 years of his 100year sentence. Tony Ducks Coralo died in 2000, also in federal prison. He was 87, served 13 years.
Jaro Langela got out in 2013 after serving 27 years. He was 82 years old when released. He lived another few years in Brooklyn, then died quietly. Ralph Scopo died in federal prison in Butner, North Carolina in 1993. He was 65, never saw freedom. Vincent Gigani, the Genov’s boss, who wasn’t indicted in the commission case because he pretended to be insane, was finally convicted in 1997.
He died in prison in 2005. John Gotti, who took over the Gambinos after killing Castellano, died in prison in 2002. Rudolph Giuliani used his success in a commission trial to launch a political career. He became mayor of New York in 1994, served two terms, became famous for cleaning up the city. Later, his reputation collapsed for unrelated reasons. But in 1987, he was a hero.
The man who broke the mob, Michael Chertoff, the lead prosecutor in the commission trial, became a federal judge, then secretary of homeland security under George W. Bush. The FBI agents who worked the case, Joseph O’Brien, Jules Bonavalana, and others wrote books about their experiences. Some stayed with the bureau.
Some retired and became consultants. The contractors who cooperated with the concrete club mostly escaped prosecution. The government gave them immunity in exchange for testimony. Some of them continued working in construction. Others left industry. Edward Howerin, the concrete supplier who claimed he was forced participate, was indicted in 1987 on bid rigging charges related to the Javit Center.
He pleaded guilty, received probation. His companies went out of business. SNA Concrete, the mob control firm that supplied the Javit Center, shut down in the early 1990s. The owners were never charged. They walked away. That’s how it often works. The bosses go to prison. The soldiers go to prison.
The frontmen, the business owners who facilitated everything. They sometimes get away with it because proving they knew about the mob involvement is hard. They claim ignorance. They claimed they were just businessmen trying to survive. Some of them were telling the truth. Others weren’t. The cement and concrete workers union that scopo control was put under federal oversight in 1994.
A courtappointed monitor investigated corruption, removed malconnected officials, reformed hiring practices. The oversight lasted until 2010, 16 years. Today, the union is considered clean. Mostly, there’s a broader question here. Could this happen again? Could the mob or some other criminal organization regain control of a major industry in New York? Probably not in the same way.
Federal oversight is stronger now. RICO prosecutions are routine. Unions are monitored, but corruption never disappears. It just evolves. In the 2000s, prosecutors discovered that the mob had moved into new areas. illegal gambling, prescription drug fraud, healthc care scams, waste management, Wall Street fraud.
They’re not pouring concrete anymore, but they’re still finding ways to steal. And construction, despite all the reforms, still has issues. In 2023, federal prosecutors charged several contractors and union officials with running a bid rigging scheme in New York. Not as big as a concrete club, not as organized, but the impulse is the same.
Rig the game, inflate the costs, divide the money. The Javit Center case showed that organized crime can be beaten. But it also showed that eternal vigilance is required because the criminals never stopped trying. Let me tell you what strikes me most about this story. The Javit Center was supposed to be a symbol of progress, of government investment, of New York’s comeback.
Instead, it became a symbol of corruption. But here’s the thing. The building still stands. It still functions. It still brings conventions and jobs and economic activity to New York. Despite everything the mob did, despite the stolen money, despite the inflated costs, the Javit Center exists and it does what it was designed to do.
That’s a metaphor for something important. Corruption damages institutions. It makes things more expensive. It undermines trust, but it doesn’t have to be permanent. The commission was broken. The concrete club was destroyed. The mob lost its grip. That didn’t happen by accident. It happened because people fought back.
Prosecutors, FBI agents, investigators, judges, even contractors who finally testified. They fought back and they won. Not completely, not forever, but for a while, long enough to make a difference. The Javit Center concrete scam cost taxpayers at least $20 million. That’s the conservative estimate. It might have been more.
That money is gone. It’s not coming back. But the legacy of a commission trial lives on because the trial proved something important. The mob wasn’t invincible. The commission could be indicted. The bosses could be convicted. The system could be broken. That lesson matters today because corruption still exists. In construction, in unions, in politics, in business, the methods change, the faces change.
But the underlying dynamic, powerful people exploiting systems for personal gain, that’s constant. The Javit Center reminds us that fighting corruption is possible, difficult, dangerous, expensive, but possible, and sometimes, just sometimes, the good guys win. Paul Castellano poured concrete his entire life. Metaphorically and literally, he built an empire on cement, on union control, on the systematic exploitation of New York’s construction boom.
He made hundreds of millions of dollars. He lived in a mansion. He wielded power that rivaled elected officials. And he died on a sidewalk in Manhattan with six bullets in his back because that’s how it always ends. The mob promises wealth and power. It delivers prison or death. Fat Tony Solerno died in a prison hospital.
Tony ducks Coralo died in prison. Ralph Scopo died in prison. John Gotti died in prison. That’s the real cause of the concrete club. Not the money they stole, the lives they destroyed, including their own. The Javit Center still stands. The mobsters are all dead. And the concrete they poured, the building they corrupted, outlasted every one of them.
That’s the final irony. The mob thought they controlled New York. They thought concrete made them invincible. But in the end, the concrete they tried to own became the evidence that buried them. If you found this story fascinating, hit subscribe. We drop a new mob documentary every week. Drop a comment. What mafia figure or case should we cover next.
And remember, this isn’t just history. The lessons from the Javit Center, the commission trial, the concrete club, they matter today because power unchecked always corrupts. And the only thing that stops corruption is people willing to fight it. Thanks for watching. This is mafia talks.