Feds charge 10 in Gambino crew in sex trade with minors

Manhattan federal prosecutors Tuesday charged that the mob has sunk to a new low, accusing Gambino family boss Daniel Marino and nine others of a wide array of racketeering acts that included interstate sex trafficking with minors.

A Gambino crew run by Thomas Orefice recruited teenage girls - including one who was just 15 - and pimped them out as prostitutes in strip clubs or through Craigslist on the Internet, driving them to hookups and taking half their pay, prosecutors said.

They also allegedly made the girls available to patrons at their illegal poker games. Law enforcement authorities said the sex ring - added to old staples like murder, extortion and witness-tampering - was a novel new line of business for the mob.

"This is the first case we're aware of where we have alleged that a crew has set up and operated an interstate prostitution service," said U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.

The indictment named Marino, 69, identified as a member of the Gambino family's ruling council, reputed mob soldiers Orefice and Onofrio "Noel" Modica, and seven associates as participants in a Gambino racketeering conspiracy stretching back more than 20 years. Four other individuals were charged with separate crimes, but not racketeering.

In addition to sex trafficking, prosecutors said the racketeering conspiracy also was responsible for four murders, construction and heating oil industry extortion, fraud in the meatpacking industry, OxyContin trafficking, gambling and witness-tampering in a 1992 trial of the late Gambino boss John J. Gotti.

The murder victims included two men who were cooperating with the government - Frank Hydell, Marino's nephew, killed in 1998, and Thomas Spinelli, killed in 1989 - as well as Richard Sbarra, a bystander killed in a 1987 hit on another mobster, James DiGuglielmo.

Officials said all of the defendants had been out on the street, active in criminal activity, until they were rounded up beginning Friday. They described them as a new generation of Gambino family members - mostly under 35, with some of them not even born at the time Gotti took over from assassinated boss Paul Castellano.

"The bad old days aren't all in the past," said George Venizelos, head of the FBI's New York office. "There is no sign the mob is waving a white flag."

Thirteen of the 14 defendants were apprehended in a roundup that began late Friday. Eight of those - including Marino, Modica and Orefice - were detained at the government's request and five were released on bail. All 13 have pleaded not guilty; one man remains at large.