Credit Union With Suspected Mob Ties Shut Down

Banking regulators this week shut down the South End Mutual Benefit Association, a credit union in Hartford, CT which the FBI suspected of providing "instant credit" during the 1980s to gamblers who played in games run by the Patriarca crime family.

When the mafia in Connecticut was at its peak two decades ago, the mob made the “Oxy” as it was known locally a 'piggy bank' of sorts, using it to underwrite a multimillion-dollar, illegal gambling business. Mobsters who ran illegal casino games at social clubs in Meriden, New Britain and Hartford had access to stacks of pre-approved credit union loan applications and used them to extend instant money to tapped out players.

When FBI agents raided a mob game at the Meriden Independent Club in June 1988, they seized $42,000 in cash, gambling records, gambling paraphernalia and, according to an FBI affidavit, "numerous loan applications for the South End Mutual Benefit Association (a state chartered and federally insured credit union)." The club attracted gamblers from across southern New England and allegedly was run by Salvatore "Butch" D'Aquila, who federal prosecutors said oversaw the Patriarca crime family's gambling operations in Connecticut in the 1980s. Many of the loan applications seized were blank "with the exception of the loan guarantor sections which had been pre-signed with the name Salvatore D'Aquila," the affidavit says.

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Tags: Cosa Nostra, New England, Organized Crime, Patriarca