Ed Shanahan

“Do you work for the Muslim Brotherhood?” Patrick W. Carlineo Jr. asked a member of Omar’s staff on that call, according to a criminal complaint. “Why are you working for her, she’s a (expletive) terrorist. Somebody ought to put a bullet in her skull. Back in the day, our forefathers would have put a bullet in her (expletive).”

“I’ll put a bullet in her (expletive) skull,” the staff member also recalled Carlineo, 55, saying, according to the complaint.

On Monday, Carlineo, of Addison, New York, outside Buffalo, pleaded guilty to threatening to kill Omar, a Minnesota Democrat and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, and to possessing guns illegally.

Omar responded to Carlineo’s guilty plea in Federal District Court in Buffalo by urging leniency when he is sentenced. In a letter she posted on Twitter on Tuesday, Omar addressed the judge who will sentence him, asking “for a system of compassion to be applied.”

“Threatening assassination of a public official in our country is dangerous to both the individual and our republic,” Omar wrote, describing the crimes that Carlineo admitted to as “grave” and adding that “threats of political violence and hate speech” were “not unique” to him.

“They are an increasing feature in our public sphere,” Omar, a Somali refugee whose family received asylum in the United States when she was a teenager, added. “We will not defeat it with anger and exclusion. We will defeat it with compassion.”

A member of her party’s progressive wing, Omar — the first woman to wear a hijab on the House floor — has been denounced in some quarters, including by some Democrats, for embracing the boycott-Israel movement and criticizing supporters of the Jewish state.

She has also emerged as a frequent foil for President Donald Trump. She was among four female freshman lawmakers who Trump said in July should “go back” to the countries they came from.

In an interview with the FBI at his home about a week after he called Omar’s office, Carlineo described himself as a patriot who loved Trump and hated “radical Muslims in our government,” the criminal complaint says. He also told an FBI agent that he believed Omar supported Islamic militant groups, such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and that her election to Congress was illegitimate.

In the interview, the complaint says, he acknowledged calling Omar’s office and said that he knew why the FBI, which investigated the matter with the U.S. Capitol Police, was interested in talking to him.

Shown an email containing the text of the call, he initially denied that the words were his, but later “went on to say that he may have said something” similar, the complaint says. (He had left his name and contact information with Omar’s staff, the complaint says.)

About a week later, authorities found a loaded .45-caliber handgun, three rifles, two shotguns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition at Carlineo’s home, prosecutors said. Because of a 1998 felony conviction, he is prohibited from owning a firearm.

Carlineo is scheduled to be sentenced on Feb. 14. He faces up to 10 years in prison. He remains free until sentencing under conditions that include a curfew and a restriction against traveling outside western New York.

Barbara Burns, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Buffalo, declined to comment on Omar’s sentencing request.

This article originally appeared in

Man Who Threatened to 'Put a Bullet' in Rep. Omar Pleads Guilty

It began with a hate-filled call to Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington office in March, officials said.

His father was a Gambino family soldier known as Fat the Gangster. An uncle known as Jimmy the Clam, a grandfather and a cousin were made men, too. By age 10, Louis was joining his father on his bookmaking rounds.

A life in organized crime seemed preordained, but Louis’ interest faded after several relatives were killed by rival gangsters. So after graduating from high school, Louis went in a different direction: he joined the New York Police Department.

It was an unlikely career that earned him many medals and headlines. But Eppolito would end up at the center of one of the biggest scandals in department history.

He and a fellow detective, Stephen Caracappa, were convicted in 2006 of moonlighting as mob assassins, involved in eight gangland slayings while on the payroll of Anthony Casso, a Luchese crime family underboss known as Gaspipe.

Eppolito, 71, died on Nov. 3 at a hospital in Tucson, Arizona, his wife, Frances Ann Eppolito, confirmed this week, without providing a cause. He had been serving a life sentence at the high-security U.S. penitentiary nearby.

After their arrest, Eppolito and Caracappa, who died at a medical detention facility in 2017 at 75, became widely known as the “Mafia Cops.” The nickname came easily: Eppolito had already written a memoir, “Mafia Cop: The Story of an Honest Cop Whose Family Was the Mob” (1992), in which he recounted his mob pedigree.

Louis John Eppolito was born on July 22, 1948, in Brooklyn and grew up in East Flatbush, according to the memoir. His father, Ralph, was a professional criminal. His mother, Theresa, was a registered nurse.

Eppolito knew by the time he was 12 that his father killed people for pay, he acknowledged on Sally Jessy Raphael’s talk show in 1992 while promoting his book. But he did not know details. The following exchange, he said, was typical.

“If I said to him, ‘What happened to this guy?’ He’d say ‘He had to go.’”

“Go where, Dad? Where did he go? To St. Louis?”

According to “Mafia Cop,” Ralph Eppolito beat his son often, but also instilled in him a lifelong respect for “honor and loyalty.”

Louis Eppolito attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, where he played several sports and graduated in 1966. He got into bodybuilding, and was crowned Mr. New York City in 1967.

Eppolito’s father died before his son entered the Police Academy. It was good timing.

“He hated cops with a passion,” Eppolito told Raphael.

But Louis Eppolito saw similarities between police officers and gangsters: Both lived by a strict code. And both, he believed, could deliver justice as they saw fit.

Eppolito joined the police force in 1969, the same year as Caracappa. They rose through the ranks and first worked together a decade later.

Eppolito came under suspicion in April 1984 when authorities raided the New Jersey home of Rosario Gambino, a mobster and heroin trafficker.

There, investigators found copies of dozens of confidential intelligence reports on organized crime figures, according to court records. The copies had been made at the precinct where Eppolito was assigned at the time, and his fingerprints were on them, court filings showed.

Eppolito was suspended and hit with internal charges, but he was cleared after a departmental trial. He claimed in his book that he had been totally vindicated, saying the case was an effort by his enemies to set him up.

A federal judge later took the opposite view, criticizing police officials in a harsh ruling for what he called their “inexplicable failure to discipline” Eppolito in 1985 “after he was caught red-handed passing confidential police documents” to Gambino.

Eppolito stayed on the job for nearly five more years, receiving a promotion and, as a jury would find, cementing his ties to organized crime.

Also in 1985, Eppolito and Caracappa began their relationship with Casso’s circle. A career criminal with ties to Casso hired them that year to kill a Long Island jeweler to keep him from testifying in an FBI inquiry.

The detectives used a confidential police database to find the jeweler’s home address, the type of car he drove and his license plate number. They pulled him over and asked him to come to the precinct station house.

Instead, they took him to a building in Brooklyn, where Caracappa and another man killed him. Eppolito acted as a lookout.

It was the first of the eight killings they would participate in over the next several years on Casso’s orders. They received $4,000 a month and up to $65,000 for individual murders, prosecutors said.

The other victims included a Brooklyn man gunned down mistakenly because he had the same name as a rival of Casso’s; a Luchese gangster; two Gambino soldiers; and two FBI informers.

The city of New York ultimately paid $18.4 million to settle wrongful death lawsuits filed by the relatives of seven of the eight men killed by Eppolito and Caracappa.

Another $9.9 million — a record payout at the time for the city — went to a man who spent 19 years of a 20-year sentence in prison before his murder conviction was overturned, after evidence emerged that Eppolito had framed him.

Along with his wife, Eppolito’s survivors include three children, Andrea, Deanna and Anthony; four grandchildren; and a sister. A son from his first marriage, Louis Jr., had long been estranged from his father but was a regular presence at his trial.

Eppolito and Caracappa also fed Casso the names of people who were cooperating with the government, as well as information about active investigations and pending indictments.

Casso, hoping to enter the witness protection program, first identified Eppolito and Caracappa as working for him after he was arrested in 1993. But he was deemed an unreliable witness, and no charges were filed against the detectives.

By then, though, there was a cloud over them. Eppolito retired to a gated community in Las Vegas on a police pension, published his book and started a movie career that included bit parts in “Goodfellas,” “Predator 2” and “Lost Highway.”

It all came to a halt when he and Caracappa, who had moved in across the street from Eppolito, were arrested in Las Vegas in 2005.

The two men maintained their innocence until their deaths. Eppolito did the same on her husband’s behalf on Wednesday, although she acknowledged, “There is nothing I’m going to say that is going to change public opinion.”

Louis Eppolito, Police Officer Turned Mob Hit Man, Dies at 71

Louis Eppolito was practically born into the Mafia.

In 1991, the year Shea joined the department as an officer in the 46th Precinct in the Bronx, the city recorded more than 2,000 murders. Last year, there were 289.

The sharp drop in murders, and in crime generally, in those 28 years has coincided with the department’s use of the data-driven, anti-crime Compstat management program.

Shea’s career is in some ways closely linked to Compstat. The system was introduced roughly around the time he began patrolling a beat. He was a protégé of its original champion, Commissioner William J. Bratton. And he oversaw the program in the job he held for four years before he was named chief of detectives in April 2018.

In announcing the new commissioner, Mayor Bill de Blasio cited the breadth of Shea’s experience as the reason he was “uniquely qualified” to push New York’s already historically low crime rate down even further.

Shea, the mayor said, was “a proven change agent, using precision policing to fight crime and build trust between police and communities.”

In addition to his time on patrol in the Bronx, Shea, 50, commanded two precincts in the borough and did tours in Manhattan and Queens, working at various times in narcotics, investigations and plainclothes units.

He took on responsibility for Compstat in 2014 when he was named chief of crime-control strategies and deputy commissioner for operations. He was then installed in his current job, overseeing all criminal investigations.

At a news conference Monday, Shea, a son of working-class Irish immigrants who grew up in a cramped apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, recalled his early days as an officer in the 46th Precinct fondly. He had joined the department along with his brother and cousin.

“There was nothing better than walking out and just talking to people as you would interact with them day in and day out,” he said.

Shea pledged to build on the work of his predecessor, Commissioner James P. O’Neill, when he takes over the top job Dec. 1. He also said he would prioritize taking down gangs and getting guns off the streets.

Patrick J. Lynch, the president of the Police Benevolent Association, a union, welcomed Shea’s appointment, describing it as a hopeful sign for rank-and-file officers, who Lynch says are in need of support from the top.

“We look forward to working with Commissioner Shea to combat the current anti-police atmosphere and make positive changes that will improve the lives of our police officers and every New Yorker we protect,” Lynch said.

Critics of the department were less enthusiastic.

Councilman Donovan Richards, a Queens Democrat who leads the Council’s Committee on Public Safety, described the incoming commissioner as a “personable individual whose heart is in the right place.”

But Richards said that Shea’s appointment was a “missed opportunity to really diversify the top office” of the Police Department.

Richards also said that Shea had seemed unwilling to seriously consider complaints about contentious issues like the department’s gang database, where, critics say, names can land too easily and stay for too long.

“At this moment, I’m not convinced he’s going to be more aggressive in pushing reforms,” Richards said.

NYPD's Next Police Commissioner: What to Know About Dermot Shea

Dermot F. Shea, the Police Department’s chief of detectives and next commissioner, began his career with America’s largest police force in an era when New York was much more violent than it is today.

If successful, the move, first reported by The Washington Post, would be a financially damaging blow to the club, in Colts Neck, depriving it of the ability to meet the needs of thirsty golfers coming off the course and wedding parties eager to celebrate into the night.

The potential punishment is described in an Oct. 21 letter sent to the golf club by the office of the New Jersey attorney general, Gurbir Grewal, who was appointed to the position last year by Gov. Philip D. Murphy, a Democrat.

The letter gives the golf club 30 days to contest the move. If the license is ultimately revoked by the state, the decision could be challenged in court or the club could seek to have it reinstated in two years.

A representative of the Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment.

The club in Colts Neck, near the Jersey Shore, is one of three in New Jersey that Trump owns. The ability of the others, in Bedminster and Pine Hill, to sell alcohol could also be threatened by the state’s action. Under New Jersey law, the holder of a liquor license that is revoked must relinquish any others it controls for two years.

Liquor sales are a crucial revenue source for many golf clubs, said Jay Karen, the chief executive of the National Golf Course Owners Association.

“Golf is a combination of sport and leisure,” Karen said. “And alcohol finds itself at the crossroads of that.”

“Just the golf itself is not a high-profit-margin business,” he added. That, he said, means alcohol sales become “pretty important to the whole operation from a profit standpoint.”

Though he did not refer specifically to the Colts Neck club, which bills itself as a premier destination for weddings and other events, Karen said that clubs like it could be hit especially hard by the loss of a liquor license.

A notice of charges attached to Grewal’s letter says the action was prompted by two infractions committed by the club on Aug. 30, 2015: serving liquor other than beer from carts out on the course — in violation of the club’s license — and by serving liquor to the man, Andrew Halder, who already appeared to be intoxicated.

The two infractions together might typically result in a 25-day suspension of the club’s license, says the notice, from the Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control.

“However, due to the aggravating circumstances in this case, the division will seek revocation of the license based upon the total circumstances,” the notice says. It does not elaborate on those circumstances, and a spokeswoman for Grewal declined further comment.

Shortly after leaving “a local golf club” on that date, Halder, of Woodcliff Lake, NewJersey, flipped his car on a highway ramp several miles from the Trump club, according to local news reports.

The car rolled over, and Halder’s father, Gary, a passenger, was tossed out. The elder Halder later died at a hospital, news reports said.

Law enforcement authorities said at the time that Halder’s blood-alcohol level was over the legal limit when the accident happened, according to news reports. He was charged with vehicular homicide and driving while intoxicated.

Halder pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide in January 2018, according to a court document. He was sentenced to three years’ probation in April 2018. Mitchell Ansell, the lawyer who represented him at the sentencing, did not return a call seeking comment.

Trump bought the Colts Neck club, previously known as Shadow Isles, in 2008 for a reported $28 million. According to his most recent financial disclosure, he took out a mortgage from Amboy Bank, which is based in Old Bridge, New Jersey, that he is still paying off.

Trump’s latest financial disclosure shows that the club had about $6.76 million in revenue last year, about 5% less than it took in the previous year.

Trump Golf Club May Lose Liquor License Over Fatal Car Crash

New Jersey officials are moving to revoke the liquor license at one of President Donald Trump’s golf clubs, which they say continued to serve a man who was already intoxicated and got into a fatal car crash shortly after leaving the club in 2015.

One person whose name did not pop up: President Donald Trump, who relied on Cohn as a lawyer, mentor and more for 13 years starting in the early 1970s, embracing his pugnacious adviser’s hit-back-harder style along the way.

The format of the release made a definitive digital search nearly impossible, but a close reading of the 748 heavily redacted pages revealed no obvious sign of Trump.

Still, the letters, memos and other papers were a reminder of the unusual realm inhabited by Cohn — friend to J. Edgar Hoover, the first director of the FBI and a regular at once-legendary nightspots, the Desert Inn in Las Vegas and El Morocco in Manhattan.

Adding to the documents’ relevance was their emergence on the heels of a new documentary, “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” which returns Cohn to the spotlight with a title quoting the president’s quest for someone to fight for him as fiercely as Cohn once did.

Cohn was a singular celebrity by the time he died of AIDS in 1986, weeks after being disbarred for ethical misconduct.

He had made his name prosecuting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage — and pressing for their execution — and acting as Sen. Joe McCarthy’s Communist-hunting right hand in the 1950s.

Later he became a feared, and fearsome, advocate for mafia boss Anthony Salerno, former New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and Trump, among others.

The two men first joined forces when Trump was a young real estate developer being sued by the Justice Department, with his father, for refusing to rent apartments to black tenants.

Cohn urged against settling the case, as Trump was considering.

“‘Tell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court,’” Trump later recalled Cohn telling him. The Trumps ultimately did settle, but not before filing a $100 million countersuit against the government.

It was the start of a relationship during which Cohn helped Trump close signature construction deals, sued the NFL for conspiring against his client and prepared an onerous prenuptial agreement for Trump’s first wife.

Like Trump, most of Cohn’s best-known clients do not appear in the just-released documents. Salerno, known as Fat Tony, is an exception.

The context is Cohn’s complaint to William Webster, the FBI director at the time, that the bureau had “planted” a 1985 article in the New York Post about the bureau’s efforts to try to wiretap Cohn’s office to obtain information about the Mafia boss.

Webster denies in a letter to Cohn that the FBI fed information to reporters, but a separate memo by a different official acknowledged that agents had conducted surveillance of Cohn’s office “to ascertain the feasibility of installing a monitoring device to intercept the conversations of Genovese boss Anthony Salerno” and a Teamsters contact.

The vast majority of the documents — around 600 pages — cover a period from 1962 to 1964 when Cohn was being prosecuted over accusations that he had fixed a grand jury to head off indictments in a stock-fraud scheme.

Documents show investigators exhaustively tracing Cohn’s movements around the United States to determine where and when he might have received a piece of the $50,000 payoff at the center of the case.

One 1962 memo tied to the case noted that “a source of our Las Vegas office has advised that Las Vegas gamblers are greatly concerned over the extreme pressure being applied by the federal government on the Nevada gambling industry.”

A high-ranking Justice Department official, document notes, had been approached “to determine whether he would ‘trade Las Vegas’ for ‘Roy Cohn’” — an overture that was “flatly rejected.”

The offer, the memo continues, “appears to be a clear indication that the hoodlum element would trade Roy Cohn” if doing so “would relieve the investigative pressure presently being applied to the Nevada gambling industry.”

Cohn was ultimately acquitted in the case he considered a result of a vendetta against him by Robert Kennedy, the attorney general, carried out by Robert Morgenthau, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan at the time.

Once the case ended, Cohn was quick to praise the FBI’s work on it, according to a 1964 memo detailing a phone call he made to a top bureau official.

“The purpose of his call was to let the FBI know of his opinion that our agents, who had testified for both the prosecution and the defense, had handled themselves in complete fairness and candor,” the official, Cartha DeLoach, wrote.

The FBI files suggest that Cohn and Hoover shared a special bond.

“You are such a great institution up and down this nation,” Cohn wrote in a 1969 letter to the bureau’s longtime director, “that I hate to see you diverted or annoyed for even a minute.”

Hoover was similarly complimentary in his reply.

“Your generous comments regarding me are indeed gratifying,” he wrote in a letter that begins, “Dear Roy.”

Cohn’s praise for the FBI notwithstanding, it is clear from the files that he was a consistent target of scrutiny.

A memo recounting an “often-hostile, sometimes-shouting” appearance he made on a radio show in 1975 to debate the merits of the Rosenberg case notes his involvement in “two pending cases.”

One case involved the possible insurance-fraud loss of Cohn’s yacht, Defiance, in 1973 off the coast of Florida. The second was related to an extortion investigation of a pornographic film theater in New Jersey in which Cohn held a stake.

Asked why the file had been made public, the bureau’s press office said the release was in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Details about the request were not immediately available.

Inside the FBI File of Trump's Mentor, Roy Cohn

When the FBI released a fat stack of documents about notorious New York lawyer Roy Cohn on Friday, there were mentions of Ed Sullivan, Jimmy Hoffa, Detroit Lions fullback Nick Pietrosante, W. Mark Felt (the FBI agent better known as Deep Throat) and Morris Barney Dalitz, a Prohibition Era bootlegger known as Moe who helped turn Las Vegas into a gambling mecca.

The man, Alexei Saab, 42, of Morristown, was charged with various terrorism-related crimes in a nine-count indictment unsealed in Manhattan. A U.S. citizen since 2008, he was also charged with participating in a sham marriage to help an unnamed co-conspirator obtain citizenship.

In announcing the indictment, Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said that despite Saab’s citizenship status, “his true allegiance was to Hezbollah.”

Saab, who was arrested in July, is being held in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, according to federal prison records. An arraignment had not yet been scheduled, and he has not entered a plea. His lawyer did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Saab joined Hezbollah — a political movement based in Lebanon, supported by Iran and considered a terrorist group by the United States — in 1996 when he was recruited by a fellow student at the University of Lebanon, according to the indictment.

His early activities with the group involved observing and reporting on movements by Israeli and Southern Lebanese Army troops in Lebanon, the indictment said.

Three years later, the indictment said, he began firearms training with the group and then shifted to the Islamic Jihad Organization, a Hezbollah unit responsible for external operations. There, he received “extensive training” in, among other things, how to build and detonate bombs and other explosive devices, according to the indictment.

Saab, who is also known as Ali Hassan Saab, entered the United States legally in 2000 with a Lebanese passport and applied for citizenship five years later, the indictment said. One of the counts he now faces involves his false declaration at the time that he had never been a member of, or associated with, “a terrorist organization.”

Saab became a U.S. citizen in 2008, according to the indictment, which noted that he had begun gathering intelligence on potential attack targets in New York and elsewhere five years earlier.

The dozens of “hot spots” he focused on included the United Nations headquarters, the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, the New York Stock Exchange and local airports, bridges and tunnels, the indictment said.

Saab’s goal, according to the indictment, was to determine the “structural weaknesses of the locations he surveilled to determine how a future attack could cause the most destruction.”

He “understood that the information he provided” would be used “to calculate the size of a bomb needed to target a particular structure and the ideal location in which to place the explosive devices to maximize damage.”

A former Islamic Jihad Organization member cited in the indictment as a cooperating witness said Saab had told him that as part of his mission, “he would often take photographs that had a ‘dual purpose,’ both as a tourist interested in certain landmarks and to provide the photographs and information back” to his handlers.

The FBI recovered photographs of some prominent New York sites from Saab’s electronic devices, citing them as evidence of his surveillance activities, prosecutors said.

The top count in the indictment, providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, carries a maximum prison sentence of 20 years.

Man Trained by Hezbollah Scouted Times Square as Target, Prosecutors Say

NEW YORK — A New Jersey man trained in bomb-making and intelligence-gathering by Hezbollah spent years scouting sites like Times Square and New York’s airports, tunnels and bridges for how to do the most harm in an attack, federal prosecutors said Thursday.

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