Cops moonlighting for gangsters is nothing new. In September 1952, I was at a post-fight gathering at a bar in Cicero, Illinois after Rocky Graziano’s fight with Chuck Davey. A number of mobsters from the Capone syndicate were present. So was Frankie Carbo, the leading mobster in the fight game, and Eddie Coco, who like Carbo was a former member of Murder Incorporated.
We were all seated around a very large table in the bar’s cellar. I was sitting next to a guy who asked what I did. I told him I was a college student and friend of Rocky. He told me he was an off-duty Chicago cop bodyguarding some of the mobsters. He pointed out four other Chicago cops at the table that were doing the same thing.
As far as I could tell, unlike the Miami police lieutenant’s work for drug traffickers, the Chicago cops were not doing anything illegal by moonlighting as bodyguards at a bar run and patronized by mobsters. But if I had been Chicago's police chief, I would not have allowed them to do that.
MIAMI COP CHARGED WITH PLOTTING TO SUPPLY ASSASSINS TO COCAINE RING
By Sharon Churcher
Newsmax
April 8, 2014
A Miami police official has been charged with masterminding a scheme to supply assassins to an international cocaine trafficking ring.
Federal authorities announced that Ralph Mata, 45, was arrested Tuesday after allegedly conspiring with drug traffickers running cocaine from the Dominican Republic to New Jersey.
The Miami Herald reports that the arrest of Mata, an internal affairs lieutenant, “reads like a plot from an action movie.”
According to the FBI’s Newark division, Mata went by an alias, “the Milk Man.”
He told the drug trafficking organization that he would use hit men dressed up as police officers to rub out rival dealers for a fee of $150,000 per assassination.
The phony cops would pull the targets over and then shoot them.
The ring “decided not to move forward with the murder plot, but Mata still received a payment for setting up the meetings,” the FBI said in a press release.
The lieutenant allegedly also helped move drugs for the group in “exchange for thousands of dollars in cash and a Rolex watch.”
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