Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. In this episode, Gary shares a captivating story about the Gambino family’s best earner, Sal LoCascio. He highlights the family’s significance as big moneymakers, like Family boss Paul Castellano, a major earner. Jenkins shares intriguing details about a surveillance video he came across showing mob members at the Ravenite, sparking his interest in a moneymaker named Salvatore “Sal” LoCascio.
Locasio’s frequent visits to the Ravenite drew attention to the Gambino family’s activities, leading to an investigation that uncovered a high-tech scheme in the late 90s involving internet and telephone services. Jenkins tells how LoCascio and Richie Martino orchestrated elaborate scams, including creating deceptive porn websites that charged visitors through hidden fees. The interview explores the intricate web of fraud, spanning from porn sites to phone cramming operations, all orchestrated by members of the Gambino family.
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Transcript
[0:00]
Introduction to Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police detective
[0:00]Hey, all you wiretappers out there, Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective and sergeant by the time I got done, by the time I retired. Anyhow, I’m back here in the studio with another story about the Gambino family. You know, Gambino families were really a hell of a family. They were big moneymakers, you know, and Castellano was one of the bigger moneymakers. I don’t know what God he was thinking of. He wanted the power, but Castellano, under him, they really made the money. I’m going to tell you about one of the bigger moneymakers that I just stumbled across.
[0:39]A lot of you guys may already know about it, but I was watching some video on YouTube, and I saw this surveillance video. It was really good. It was like they were right there on the street of some cars and people coming
[0:53]
Introduction to Sal “Tor” Locasio at the Ravenite
[0:52]and going from the Ravenite. And this was after a guy he had taken over as you know if he’s going in and out of the ravenite and it showed a guy pulling up in a big black lincoln and looked like a mafia staff car and going in so i made a little short on it and i threw it out on my youtube channel and i said who are these guys and so they named this was sal salvator or tor locasio was going into the ravenite and actually that’s what brought all the gambino family into this conspiracy because he was in and out of the ravenite so much he had dumb ass john god he made everybody come in there all the time and you know say hey there’s a mob guy now let’s go see what he’s doing i’ve done that you see a guy coming and going and he’s talking with with you know real deal mafia members and he may or he may be a relative and then in this case his dad was frank locascio who was uh.
[1:51]Longtime Capo and longtime Gambino family member and became Gotti’s consigliere. Locasio kind of, you know, he hadn’t really been that high profile during his time. Sal, or Tor, as they called him, Tor Locasio, had not been that high profile.
[2:07]That was one of the reasons that the Gambino family ended up going down. Because, you know, what you do is you see that guy and then let’s go take a look at him. Let’s go get his trash. Let’s go follow him around a little bit. but let’s go see where he’s going when he’s not here. And then you see him at, you know, certain business, and you start looking at that business, and it just keeps, you know, the blocks just keep building and building and building. And, you know, in the end, many of these Gambino guys, and especially in Bonanno guys, even more broke ranks and became government witnesses. And Gambino, most importantly, it was, you know, the guy with the podcast out there, he who shall not be named, you know, Sammy the Bull, I don’t mind naming him, and the government went after him on some of these more complicated, sophisticated things, not just the gambling, which is easy. Throw some wires out there and you know some bookies and you kind of run the string out and take off some gamblers. And then all of a sudden that’s done when they go in and come back out in a few years. Just this ongoing battle, kind of a cat and mouse game, which I used to love. To me, it was just a game. But it has been extremely profitable for a lot of
[3:24]
High-tech scams involving internet and telephone services
[3:17]these guys. And here’s a high-tech scheme that came out in the late 90s on into the early 2000s. Salvatore “Tore” Locascio and a guy named Richie or Richard Martino, he used to call him Richie from the Bronx, orchestrated some elaborate scams involving the internet and telephone services.
[3:37]And these guys, they exploited unsuspecting telephone users, cell phone users, and web surfers out there. There are people who like porn sites in particular, and they took in over $400 million over about five years’ time. Now, what they did is they created several porn websites.
[4:01]Now, these sites lured visitors with the promise of free tours around the porn site to see if you wanted to sign up, but you had to give your credit card information. How many times have you like gotten a free thing, you know, a trial version of something, but you had to put in your credit card information. You’ll think, well, I’ll go, you know, I’ll go watch the movie for free and with my trial version, but then you leave your credit, you’re now you’re signed up. So they get the credit card information and what the, the sites did, they disabled their browsers back button and trapped them on the website as they’re running out of charges. as they navigated through the different content. They think they’re just on this free viewing platform, tour of a porn site and they’re not, they’re getting charged like crazy.
[4:51]This has been other websites have done this where they make it really difficult to exit the website and they want to keep that credit card in there. You know, what’s funny is Locasio was under house arrest from another case, an old case, when they started working on this, him and this Richard Martino or Richie from the Bronx, became the largest consumer fraud at the time in American history. They found a guy named Norman Chains who was a direct marketer and they developed this network of porn sites and they had to get an age verification check so you could get a free preview of the sexual content. Now, that’s like they spread out this banquet and you have to jump through a suit. Okay, I’m of age. I can get this free preview. you. I mean, it’s, it’s scamming at its best, put your credit card in there. And then they hit each one of these people from anywhere from 25 to $75, you know, later on, they get this charge a month or two months later. And, and, you know, that’s, you know, that’s it. So they also started a phone scam thing as known as cramming. I don’t know if you remember cramming and this actually ended up in Overland Park, Kansas, right here in Kansas City. I remember getting some leads for us to go out and look at some buildings and write down some license numbers in connection with this back then.
[6:17]What they did is they had 800 numbers. Now, you remember the 800 numbers, and they would charge you a lot of money, but they’d make it look like it was free.
[6:30]
Deceptive 800 numbers and phone cramming scheme
[6:27]It was like for sex talk, sex lines. Uh, I know somebody that got their parents got a huge charge for a sex line thing, psychics, horoscopes from these 800 numbers instead of free services, which are promised, uh, whoever the, uh, has the phone gets this huge bill and it’s a recurring bill. Many times they’ll put it on there. And then if I have a hard time getting it all, and then they’d have shell companies out there and those profits would be go through the shell companies and then come back into the mob. Of course, um.
[7:01]They did this all over the Midwest primarily and charged people for services that they didn’t request, didn’t want. And like I said, the billing came back through something called USPNC in Overland Park, Kansas. I thought Michael Franchise, or not actually, the father had some piece of this action. It probably was maybe more than the Gambino family. These guys, they worked with advertising people and sophisticated publishing executives to execute their plan. They had all these peckerwoods, these scorejohn-looking people on the surface, and everybody was making a lot of money.
[7:39]And, you know, they, this Locasio, he really had, you know, he’d been a gambler before, but he grossed millions and millions of dollars on this. The company, his telecommunications companies that created several companies, were in a converted carriage house in Manhattan in the Murray Hill area on East 39th Street. They had a two-car garage, and they converted that into offices. And they say this Richie from the Bronx would drive around in a white Rolls Royce or had a black Mercedes. And we know we saw, and you see, if you’re on YouTube, I’m playing some of this video of him and his, uh, of, uh, tour Locasio and his black Lincoln coming in. It looks like I called a mafia staff car. And I tell you what,
