The Long Island Case Behind the 2011 FBI Mafia Takedown.

Cocaine, gambling, and a business that connected the two.

The federal court identified Robert Spatafora as an associate of the Colombo and Lucchese crime families. He had operated a towing company from 1993 to 2006 and an auto-repair business from 2001 until his 2010 arrest. That repair business became a physical center of the conduct later described at sentencing.1

From July 2009 through February 2010, the court found, Spatafora used the business to receive cocaine deliveries and broker purchases by telephone for friends, employees, and acquaintances. Some purchases were worth as little as $100; on another occasion, he loaned a coconspirator $5,000 to buy cocaine. The same business supported an illegal sports book that accepted wagers by telephone and through a website registered in Costa Rica.1

For investigators, the location mattered because it gave calls a physical setting. A discussion about price or quantity could be compared with a delivery, a meeting, a vehicle, or activity at the shop. Gambling conversations could be separated from drug transactions, even when the same people or location appeared in both.

Rizzi worked as the lead investigator in the local investigation and as the wiretap coordinator for the Spatafora wire. His responsibility was not simply to accumulate calls. The intercept had to be organized around speakers, targets, pertinent conversations, corroborating surveillance, known events, and the evidence required for each alleged offense.

Voice, identity, context, and sequence.

A wiretap can create volume faster than it creates understanding. Calls arrive in fragments. People use nicknames, indirect language, borrowed phones, and shared knowledge that is never explained aloud. One call may sound unimportant until surveillance documents a meeting minutes later. Another may become relevant only after a speaker is reliably identified or a later event explains what the participants meant.

As the wiretap coordinator for the Spatafora wire, Rizzi helped organize that flow: minimization, dissemination, speaker attribution, pertinent-call review, and the connection between intercepted words, surveillance, meetings, transactions, vehicles, and known locations. Each useful communication needed a place in the chronology and a defensible reason for being linked to a person or event.

The lead investigator role required a second level of control. The broader case could contain narcotics, gambling, witness conduct, and organized-crime relationships, but the proof still had to remain person-specific. A family association could supply investigative context; it could not replace evidence that a particular subject joined a particular act.

An illegal gambling operation hidden inside ordinary routines.

The court found that the gambling business operated from July 2009 through May 2010, involved five or more people, continued for more than 30 days, and earned at least $2,000 on a single day. Bets were placed by telephone and on a Costa Rica-registered website that described itself as being for entertainment while allowing registered users to wager money on sports.1

The online screen did not eliminate the street-level work. Accounts had to be managed, losses settled, and debts collected. The court found that Spatafora used acquaintances to collect from bettors. Those acts gave investigators events outside the phone traffic that could be compared with the communications.

The wider Long Island enforcement picture was larger still. Contemporaneous reporting described at least 16 people accused of extorting businesses and operating underground gambling clubs. Nine alleged card-game locations were identified: one in Hauppauge, one in South Farmingdale, an auto-body shop in Westbury, two locations in Ronkonkoma, and four in Bohemia.5

That local reporting also described claims that businesses were pressed for kickbacks under threats of violence. Those were arrest-stage allegations, not findings. They nevertheless show why the case could not be understood from betting records alone: the inquiry extended to locations, collectors, business relationships, and the methods allegedly used to enforce payment.

The investigation became a question of safety and evidence integrity.

The sequence began on March 30, 2010, when a woman associated with Spatafora was arrested on an unrelated bench warrant. According to the sentencing opinion, Spatafora told his wife that he believed police had questioned the woman about the 2003 killing of Peter Ghattas, an employee who had been murdered in the parking lot of Spatafora’s auto-repair shop.1

On May 11, a series of government-recorded wiretap calls captured Spatafora accusing the woman of cooperating and threatening to kill her. Count Four charged that the threats were intended to hinder, delay, or prevent communication with FBI agents. He later pleaded guilty to that count.1

At sentencing, Spatafora characterized the threats as words spoken hastily and passionately. The judge rejected that view, concluding that the words had consequences for both the person threatened and the investigative and judicial processes they were meant to disrupt.

The opinion also recorded the government’s position that Spatafora remained a suspect in the Ghattas homicide and Spatafora’s emphatic denial. It made no homicide finding. The distinction matters: the witness-intimidation conviction is established; the homicide issue remained unresolved.

Three counts resolved while the national plan was still taking shape.

On October 1, 2010, Spatafora pleaded guilty to three counts of a five-count superseding indictment. Count Three covered cocaine conspiracy from July 2009 through February 2010. Count Four covered witness intimidation from March through May 2010. Count Five covered the gambling business from July 2009 through May 2010.1

The plea fixed those three forms of conduct in the public record before the nationally coordinated arrests. It also preserved an important distinction: the cocaine activity, witness threat, and gambling business were connected by people and evidence, but each count had its own time period and legal elements.

At roughly the same time, the Justice Department and FBI were preparing the national operation. The FBI later said formal planning began months before January 20, while the underlying investigations had been underway for years. The Long Island work entered that process as developed evidence—not as a case invented for the sweep.

Arrest teams, searches, evidence recovery, and operational security.

National coordination did not erase the local case. It made precision more important. Warrants, arrest teams, target locations, surveillance coverage, evidence priorities, and defendant processing all had to align with the broader operation while remaining accurate for each local subject.

The FBI’s New York account shows the operational layers: close to 800 Bureau personnel and roughly 130 partner officers, two command posts, tactical units, evidence teams, imaging specialists, and a centralized processing site at Fort Hamilton. The partner list extended from Suffolk detectives and federal prosecutors to the NYPD, state police agencies, federal inspectors, marshals, the DEA, the Waterfront Commission, and the Italian National Police.3

The Long Island component also carried insider-risk concerns. The Justice Department said one indictment charged former Suffolk County officer Robert Dito with obstructing a state gambling investigation by warning a business about upcoming raids. Long Island Press reported that he pleaded not guilty and separately faced a state official-misconduct charge alleging discounted auto repairs in exchange for tips. The same report said former Nassau officer Franklin Camarano pleaded not guilty to charges that he helped a Mafia crew extort local businesses.45

Those were allegations at the time of arrest, not findings. Operationally, however, the possibility that subjects knew police methods or had access to sensitive information affected how targets, sources, communications, and enforcement plans were protected.

The local court record supplied its own ending.

The court calculated an offense level of 20 and a criminal-history category of I, producing an advisory imprisonment range of 33 to 41 months. On May 27, 2011, the judge imposed the top of that range: 41 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release.1

The financial judgment was also specific. The court imposed a $25,000 fine, a $300 special assessment, and forfeiture of $187,167. The opinion stated that proceeds from the government sale of an automobile held by the Suffolk County Police Department would satisfy the fine.1

The judge emphasized the witness tampering, deliberate illegal conduct, and need for deterrence. The sentence reflected three different forms of admitted conduct: cocaine conspiracy, witness intimidation, and illegal gambling. The national takedown supplied the scale and public image. The Spatafora opinion supplied the smaller, exact record of what one local defendant admitted and how the court treated it.