Reputed mob boss, trash hauler among 29 arrested in federal sweep

NEW HAVEN, Conn. --Trash haulers in southern Connecticut have used the Mafia as their silent partner for more than a decade, federal prosecutors said Friday after arresting 29 people including a reputed mob boss, a former Waterbury mayor and the region's largest garbage hauler.

"Organized crime's stranglehold on the citizens of Connecticut through its control of the trash industry has been broken," said Kimberly Mertz, Connecticut's top FBI agent.

Companies owned by James Galante paid a quarterly $30,000 "mob tax" to alleged Genovese crime family boss Matthew "Matty the Horse" Ianniello, prosecutors said. In exchange, Ianniello provided mob muscle to stifle competition.

That's how Connecticut's garbage industry has operated since the mid-1980s, and companies that challenged it had their drivers assaulted and trucks vandalized, prosecutors said.

Federal authorities took over operations Friday at Galante's trash hauling businesses, which handle garbage pickup for thousands of residents and businesses in about 20 towns in southwest Connecticut.

With the end of the so-called property-rights scheme, U.S. Attorney Kevin O'Connor predicted that garbage bills for businesses, municipalities and residents would go down.

Ianniello, 85, was arrested at his Long Island, N.Y., home. He was released on $1 million bond Friday and will return home, where he was already under house arrest in an unrelated case.

"What can I say, right? Nothing," said Ianniello, who smiled broadly and shook hands with the marshals and agents as he left court.

Former Waterbury Mayor Joseph Santopietro, who worked as a consultant, helped Galante get business in the Waterbury area and perpetuate the property-rights scheme, prosecutors said. Santopietro was released on $200,000 bond Friday after being charged with racketeering in the indictment.

Santopietro served more than six years in prison following his 1991 arrest on corruption charges. While serving time, Santopietro met Galante, who had been convicted in a tax case, the FBI said.

Others named in the indictment include Connecticut Trooper Paul Galietti and Louis Angioletti, a federal drug agent from New Jersey, who were accused of misusing government computers to run criminal background checks for the organization. Galietti has been suspended since the allegations surfaced in November.

Galante was held without bail after prosecutors played secretly recorded phone conversations of what they called a war between Galante and a rival company over trash business at a local hotel.

"He is a manipulating, controlling, hands-on bully," Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Gustafson said.

Galante made one of the threatening, expletive-laced calls to his operations manager, Ciro Viento, after spotting a rival's trash container on what he believed to be his turf. Viento then telephoned the rival company and ordered them to back off.

"Otherwise you're going to be in a world, world of hurt," he says on the call.

Another associate threatened to gouge out the competitor's eyes.

"It sounds like a bunch of high school seniors talking tough and no one actually acting out on it, except for flattening some tires," Galante's attorney, Hugh Keefe, said in court.

Prosecutors allege in the indictment that Galante paid Ianniello $200,000 in 2001, as well as $30,000 every three months until 2005.

The case hinged on an undercover FBI agent who infiltrated Galante's company for three weeks and worked in other trash companies for more than a year, authorities said. That gave the FBI probable cause to tap several phones and intercept more than 100,000 phone calls.

"He's an undercover agent involved in an organized crime case. He was involved in danger every day," said William Reiner, the FBI agent who supervised the case.

Galante owns or has ties to at least 25 of about 60 companies under scrutiny in the case. His attorneys say he is an honest businessman known for his civic work in Danbury. He also owns the Danbury Trashers, a minor league hockey team in the United Hockey League that is named as a defendant in the case.

Authorities were moving Friday to seize Galante's fleet of race cars.

Ianniello, who was named but not charged in a 1995 New York property rights indictment, is free on bail while awaiting trial on unrelated charges in New York, where prosecutors say that under Ianniello's leadership, the Genovese family infiltrated a bus driver's union. He has pleaded not guilty and denied allegations that he is a mob boss.