United States v. Salerno (1987) saw the Supreme Court uphold the Bail Reform Act of 1984 as not in violation of the 5th Amendment. The Bail Reform Act allowed Federal courts to imprison a detainee prior to trial if he was a demonstrable danger to society. Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno of the New York City-based Genovese crime family was born in the Big Apple in 1911. He had risen through the ranks of the Mafia over the years and by the 1960s controlled the city's largest numbers racket operation, earning $50 million a year. The RICO Act in the 1970s allowed the FBI to begin a wholesale war on organized crime in the United States, and in 1977 Federal prosecutors filed tax evasion and illegal gambling charges against Salerno. He was found guilty and in April 1978 sentenced to three years in prison.
Salerno served his sentence and was paroled February 1981. At age 69, he was not a young man anymore and the stress of his incarceration caused him to have a mild stroke shortly after his release. He went home to his estate in Rhinebeck to rest and recuperate. Genovese front-boss Frank Tieri died that March 31 and Salerno succeeded him as head of the organization, but his health continued to be poor and he had several more strokes in the following years. Contrary to law enforcement assumptions, Salerno was merely a figurehead with the real boss of the Genovese being Vincent "Chin" Gigante. Alphonse "Little Al" D'Arco, later acting boss of the Lucchese crime family before becoming a snitch, told the FBI that he'd heard Gigante was the real Genovese boss and since Vito Genovese had died back in 1969, the real family leader was Philip "Benny Squint" Lombardo. Over the years, Lombardo had used several frontmen to conceal his real status from law enforcement, a practice continued after Gigante took over from Lombardo's retirement in 1981.On February 25, 1985, Salerno and eight other New York mob bosses were indicted in the Mafia Commission Trial. He was ranked by Fortune Magazine as America's top gangster in wealth, power, and influence, and so he was nominally the lead defendant in the trial. Some Mafia experts disagreed with that claim and felt that law enforcement inflated his importance to draw attention to their legal case against him. After a US district judge denied Salerno bail under the Bail Reform Act, he appealed directly to the Supreme Court. Salerno and his co-defendants plead not guilty on July 1.
He was found guilty in November 1986 and two months later the seven defendants were each sentenced to up to 90 years in prison and a $240,000 fine. Federal prosecutors also filed separate RICO charges against Salerno and he was indicted March 21, 1986 after being accused of hiding controlling interests in S&A Concrete Co. and Transit-Mix Concrete Co., which had aided in the construction of Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and the Trump Tower. Salerno was also accused of illegally aiding the election of Roy Williams to national president of the Teamsters Union. He plead not guilty to all charges. Salerno was found guilty in October 1988 and sentenced to 70 years in prison, a $376,000 fine, and ordered to forfeit half the racketeering proceeds, approximately $30 million.Also in 1986, his long-time lieutenant Vincent "The Fish" Cafaro told the the FBI that he was just a frontman for Gigante, and that the Genovese had been pulling this ruse for the last 17 years. An FBI wiretap operation captured a conversation between Salerno and capo Matthew "Matty the Horse" Ianniello as they reviewed a list of potential candidates to be made in another family. Upset that the nicknames of the candidates weren't listed, Salerno said "I'll leave this up to the boss", proving he was just a figurehead. Selwyn Raab, the New York Times's organized crime reporter, wrote that although the Feds had mistakenly assumed Salerno to be the real head of the Genovese, none of that would have affected his ultimate fate in the RICO trial since he was convicted for specific criminal acts, not his position in the Genovese hierarchy.
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the Bail Reform Act was constitutional. Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote the majority opinion for the case. He stated that the Bail Reform Act served a legitimate state purpose in preventing potentially dangerous offenders to go free while awaiting trial and detaining them was not a cruel or excessive punishment, especially as the act had a carefully limited set of circumstances under which it could be used, that the Speedy Trial Act limited how long detainees could be held, and that they were kept housed separately from convicts.Justice Marshall dissented. He wrote that this was the first time Congress had declared a person not found guilty of a crime to be allowed to be detained indefinitely and that it was an unjust and tyrannous act of the sort the Framers sought to prevent. In a separate dissent, Justice Stevens noted that the state may at times need to detain a dangerous suspect prior to a trial, but he agreed with Marshall that the Bail Reform Act was unconstitutional. "If the evidence of imminent danger is strong enough to warrant emergency detention, it should support that preventive measure regardless of whether the person has been charged, convicted, or acquitted of some other offense. In this case, for example, it is unrealistic to assume that the danger to the community that was present when respondents were at large did not justify their detention before they were indicted, but did require that measure the moment that the grand jury found probable cause to believe they had committed crimes in the past. It is equally unrealistic to assume that the danger will vanish if a jury happens to acquit them."
Anthony Salerno, by now well into his 70s, saw his health continue to deteriorate after his incarceration. Suffering from diabetes and prostate cancer, he was moved to the US Medical Center For Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri where he died of a stroke on July 27, 1992.
>>18542952>>18542950Ellis Island was a horrible mistake.
>>18542955>>18542954yeah the elderly diabetic who'd already had a bunch of strokes was a flight risk and we have to lock him up before he skips town
>>18542967Are you also going to bulldoze the cancer hospital because some Mafia-produced cement went into building it?
I get the fundamental idea of detaining a high risk suspect pre-trial, but at the same time anon is right and this particular suspect was probably not a risk for the aforementioned reasons.
>>18542952Rudy Guiliani was the head DA in this case iirc and it was one of the things that helped put his name on the map.
>>18542975>I get the fundamental idea of detaining a high risk suspect pre-trial, but at the same time anon is right and this particular suspect was probably not a risk for the aforementioned reasonsgranted, if so then he used the wrong line of appeal. he could have argued that he was not a flight risk in of himself instead of challenging the constitutionality of the act as a whole.
>>18542967All building companies in NYC back then used Mafia seed money, it was unavoidable.
>>18542959^This.
>>18542979Half of downtown Miami was built with cocaine money, including hospitals, housing, and sports stadiums.
Jay Leno said it was better in the old days. The Mafia-owned comedy clubs at least sometimes gave you free drinks.
>>18543003Really?
>>18542952How come this happened to jews? How was it illegal for the Italians to own Las Vegas but it isn't for the Jews?
>>18542950>and in 1977 Federal prosecutors filed tax evasion and illegal gambling charges against SalernoThe USSC later tossed that (it was a Federal prohibition on gambling outside Las Vegas) on 10th Amendment grounds.
>>18542950Were port salerno named after anthony salerno
>>18544777No, it was named after the Italian city of Salerno.
>>18544024I don't remember the case but it was a fairly recent one and definitely too recent for /his/.
