Organized Crime

LOS ANGELES -- Death Row Records, the most successful rap label in the country since its founding in 1992, is under investigation by the federal government, which is trying to determine whether Death Row is being run as a criminal enterprise.Sources said that authorities suspect the rap label is tied somehow to organized crime in New York and Chicago.It is increasingly apparent that the company faces even more serious problems than the recent jailing of company founder and owner Marion "Suge" Knight.

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico -- The top police officer in this unhinged border city has 300 openings on a 600-member police force, and his fearful greeting gave a big clue about why. "Please, please don't use my name or take a photograph," the interim chief begged. One police chief was killed last year, a second quit in the spring, and no one else appears brave, or foolhardy, enough to work this side of the law in Nuevo Laredo. Mexican President Vicente Fox quietly withdrew the federal police that he had dispatched here with great fanfare last year, leaving the city virtually unprotected in a smuggling war that has claimed 170 lives since January.

The new chief of the FBI's Baltimore office is a 23-year veteran who worked on cases including the infamous shoe-bomber incident and organized crime and is coming from the agency's Albany, N.Y., office, officials confirmed yesterday. William D. Chase, 49, will oversee a FBI office of some 180 agents in Woodlawn, and about 200 administrative personnel in Maryland and Delaware. In an interview yesterday, Chase, who will be special agent in charge, described the move as a natural progression from one of the FBI's smaller offices to one of its largest.

WASHINGTON -- A group of the nation's largest health insurers sued the tobacco industry yesterday, seeking to recover billions of dollars they paid to treat smoking-related illnesses.Blue Cross-Blue Shield plans from more than 35 states -- including Maryland -- alleged that the tobacco industry violated a law that has long been used against the Mafia.They also accused the industry of hiding information about nicotine's addictive properties and of marketing to children.The health plans may seek as much as $10 billion in damages for every year that they had to bear the costs of smoking-related illnesses, which could be decades.

For more than a decade, Louis W. Colvin and James E. Gross Sr. have been linked by crime. They were arrested together in 1990, each carrying a loaded handgun as they climbed into a new, white Lincoln Continental where police found dozens of tiny bags of heroin stuffed into a Pepperidge Farm cookie bag. They were convicted together on drug and gun charges. They served nearly identical prison terms. And when they got out, court records filed by U.S. prosecutors last spring alleged that Gross and Colvin soon were reunited, running a violent Baltimore crime ring that reached well beyond routine drug dealing into arson, insurance fraud, witness intimidation and attempted murder.

*TC Advice to budding playwrights struggling to make that first sell: Give 'em something they've never seen before.That's what Donald Dankwa Brooks did, and it won him first place in WMAR's 14th annual Drama Competition in celebration of Black History Month."

In the latest example of federal authorities moving to prosecute Baltimore's worst crimes, seven area men have been charged under rarely used racketeering laws with running a crime ring that reached well beyond routine drug-dealing into arson, witness tampering and attempted murder, U.S. Attorney Thomas M. DiBiagio said yesterday. A federal indictment made public yesterday said the group was responsible for arsons that destroyed two nightclubs - one as part of an insurance fraud scheme at the group's former operations base, Strawberry's 5000 in Baltimore County; the other allegedly to thwart competition at the now-defunct Club Fahrenheit in Southeast Baltimore.

"Bound by Honor, A Mafioso's Story," by Bill Bonanno. St. Martin's. 279 pages. $24.95.Mafia buffs and Kennedy conspiracy theorists should be lining up for the latest "inside" story on the American mob, Bill Bonanno's intriguing, entertaining and factually titillating memoir "Bound by Honor."This is not a mob tell-all, but rather a treatise on the demise of the American Mafia told from the perspective of someone, a mobster and the son of a major Mafia don, who witnessed and experienced it firsthand.

NEW YORK -- Italian and Russian crime families have introduced an element of violence to some small companies and Wall Street brokerages, a federal prosecutor said yesterday."

The Justice Department has signed an agreement to end five years of intensive oversight of the nation's largest union of hotel workers. Justice Department officials signed the agreement Friday after a court-appointed federal monitor found that the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union had been largely purged of its ties to organized crime. In the agreement, Justice Department officials and a federal judge in New Jersey praised the cleanup and said they would look to the union's internal ethical practices board to play a strong watchdog role.