Ties to Organized Crime

Clients sometimes ask us if there's a list we can check to see if someone is involved with organized crime. While there are lists of the “made members” of major crime families, those individuals rarely turn up in normal business situations.

Determining whether an individual or company is mob-influenced is complicated, since organized crime has allegedly infiltrated a wide range of white-collar businesses from stock brokerage to prepaid phone-card companies.

There are several ways to determine whether an individual or a business has unsavory connections. First, we check court records and news coverage. Then we'll make discreet calls to regulatory agencies that monitor such historically mob-connected businesses as trash hauling, casino gambling and construction.

In one instance, when our initial search proved fruitless in checking a bank's suspicions that a prospective customer had organized-crime ties, we called a former government investigator we know. He steered us to the archives of a weekly newspaper that had an old article linking the businessman to a well-known mob figure.