Crime & Safety

Jersey Trash Tycoon Pleads Guilty to Racketeering

Longtime Bergen County garbage fixture Carmine Franco could spend the rest of his life in prison after pleading guilty to secretly controlling the trash industry in North Jersey and parts of New York.

Carmine Franco, a Bergen County garbage magnet who for decades controlled the trash hauling industry in North Jersey and beyond, pleaded guilty Friday to federal racketeering charges that could send him to prison for the rest of his life.

Plagued for decades by alleged ties to the Genovese Crime Family, Franco, 78, of Ramsey, admitted in federal court to a Sopranos-like scheme to exert control over the commercial waste-hauling industry in the greater New York City metropolitan area, US Attorney Preet Bharara announced.

Franco, who for years called Washington Township home and owned a controversial garbage transfer station in Hillsdale, was the lead defendant in a January indictment charging 32 people in a racketeering scheme that had ties to the Genovese, Gambino and Luchese families.

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The man known as “Papa Smurf” pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy, mail and wire fraud, and conspiracy to transport stolen goods across state lines. He faces 45 years in prison and will forfeit $2.5 million.

Also pleading guilty in the case Friday was Anthony Pucciarello, 78, of Bloomfield, a reputed “made man” in the Genovese Crime Family. He faces three years in prison after pleading guilty to misprison of extortion -- that he failed to report the extortion to authorities.

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“With today’s guilty pleas, Carmine Franco and Anthony Pucciarello become the latest defendants to be held to account for their roles in a criminal racketeering enterprise that encircled the waste-hauling industry in the New York City area and parts of New Jersey,” Bharara said.

Sixteen of the 32 people indicted in January have pleaded guilty in the case.

Admitting his role in the criminal enterprise, Franco, who had been barred from the waste hauling industry by the state of New Jersey, acknowledged that he secretly controlled and extorted haulers in Bergen and Passaic counties in New Jersey and in Nassau, Rockland and Westchester counties in New York.

He admitted that he overbilled customers of a waste transfer station he owned in West Nyack, NY, and that he and associates “transported large volumes of stolen cardboard across state lines,” the US Attorney’s Office said.

The three mob families connected to the case controlled the haulers by enforcing “property rights” and carved up territory and ill-gotten gains during sit-downs, according to the January indictment.

In doing so, they made sure that no competitors could enter a market and offer lower rates, it alleged.

Franco had long been alleged to be under the control of Tino Fiumara, the longtime New Jersey street boss of the Genovese Crime Family who controlled the Greater New York Trade Waste Association in the 1970s for Vincent “The Chin” Gigante’s family, the New Jersey Commission on Investigation wrote in a landmark 1989 report on waste hauling in the Garden State.

Fiumara died in 2010.

Franco pleaded guilty in the early 1980s in a case brought against the Trade Waste Association and received six months of work release and a fine.

He received nine months in jail -- again on a work release program -- in 1998 and paid $11.5 million in fines and restitution after pleading guilty to corporate misconduct. He and other Franco family members had been charged with racketeering in the case for allegedly defrauding the state and Bergen County out of millions of dollars by shipping trash to out-of-state landfills.

Franco and his two sons were barred from the trash hauling business as a result of the case, forced to -- at least on paper -- relegate control of what authorities deemed a $100 million empire.

Legendary Philadelphia Inquirer reporter George Anastasia wrote of tape-recorded conversations in the 1995 prosecution of Philadelphia-South Jersey mob boss John Stanfa:

The conversations focused in part on a legal dispute between Franco and Camden lawyer Salvatore J. Avena, who were partners in a Philadelphia-based trash company at the time. In 1992, Avena sued Franco in federal court in Philadelphia, alleging that Franco was defrauding the company. Franco countersued.

In the conversations recorded by the FBI, New York mobster Salvatore Profaci, who said he was sent by other mob leaders to settle the issue, tried to persuade Avena to drop the lawsuit, contending that it would bring attention to the mob's involvement in the lucrative trash business.

On the tapes, Profaci described Franco as a Genovese crime-family front in the trash business, though Franco has never been charged with that. Profaci also said that leaders of that organization wanted the lawsuit settled "in the court of honor'' rather than "the court of law.''

"By blowing Carmine out of the water, we are destroying their number-one earner in the whole organization,'' Profaci said in one conversation.

In another conversation, after listening to Avena protest that he had a right to file suit in order to protect his financial interests, Profaci responded: "Goodfellas don't sue goodfellas, goodfellas kill goodfellas.''

Avena and Franco eventually agreed to an out-of-court settlement.


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