They are the most covert of cops, working in the shadows and watching the underworld. They’re closing in on the Open Territory.

SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL

March 29, 1987

Little Nicky was driving his white Rolls-Royce on Commercial Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale, heading for some dinner, when he saw the blue light in the rearview mirror. He pulled over.

Nicky immediately recognized the cop walking up to his window. It was one of the local detectives who stopped him from time to time to tell him to watch himself down here.

“Mr. Drago, howya doin’?” Nicky said after rolling down the window.

“Fine, Nicky,” the detective said. “You got your license with you?”

“I better have that, right Mr. Drago?”

“Yeah, Nicky, you better.”

Nicodemo Scarfo, reputed overlord of mob activities in Philadelphia and Atlantic City, and frequent Fort Lauderdale resident, handed Detective Chuck Drago his license. Everything was in order – not like the time Little Nicky’s 300-pound driver and bodyguard had handed Drago a counterfeit license and gotten himself arrested.

This time Drago and Scarfo talked almost like old acquaintances. Scarfo said he was leaving town that night, taking a charter up to Pomona Airport near Atlantic City. He’d had enough Florida sun for a while.

“I like your style,” Scarfo said. “You’re not sneaking around, watching me, trying to sit near me in restaurants, following all the time. You come up to me, man to man. I like that.”

Drago smiled. Nicky Scarfo had just paid him the highest possible compliment, without knowing the reason why.

The fact is, Drago and members of the secret police unit he belongs to did sneak around and follow Nicky, go to the track with him and eat at the same restaurants – sometimes at the tables right next to him. They followed his yacht down the Intracoastal, even went to the barbershop with him. They were closer than Scarfo could have guessed, as his compliment to Drago had just confirmed.

This is a tale from the Open Territory: Broward County, a location unclaimed by any single mob yet a place worked and sometimes called home by members of many of the nation’s organized crime families.

It used to be that South Florida was tolerant of the mobsters. But the nature of the territory is changing – and Nicky Scarfo is a sign of the times. After Scarfo had rolled his car window up and gone on his way, Detective Drago went to a phone and made a long-distance call. And that night, when Scarfo stepped off the plane in New Jersey, he was met by FBI agents and the police. He left the airport in handcuffs, facing his second indictment on mob-related charges in as many months.

Drago had done more than just tip his northern counterparts that Little Nicky was on his way. He and his partners’ work down here had helped put Scarfo in jail up there. They, too, are a sign of the times, a reason why the Open Territory is changing. They are covert cops, part of a new cult of police intelligence.

The sign by the office’s front door changes every so often from one business name to another. But it doesn’t really matter what it’s called because the name will always be phony and the business will never have any real customers.

The actual name is MIU, short for Metropolitan Organized Crime Intelligence Unit. Plain old MIU goes better with a nondescript operation in a nondescript location.

The detectives assigned to MIU work undercover. They are watchers and gatherers. They move through the streets in cars with windows tinted smoky black, comb through the record stacks at the county courthouse, and access the networks of law enforcement computers.

They watch through telephoto lenses and listen through electronic bugs. They tell their friends never to acknowledge them at the supermarket, the mall, even sitting out by the pool at a waterfront bar. They might be on the job.

MIU’s 25or so detectives come from Broward’s major law enforcement agencies. Their business, in simple terms, is raw intelligence. They are experts in the art of surveillance.

For three years they have led a quiet war on organized crime in Broward. Their major weapon is cooperation, the welcome mat they put out for other law enforcement agencies, both near and far.

MIU Detective Steve Raabe likes to tell a story about the time he went down to Miami two years ago to sit in on a hearing held by the Presidential Commission on Organized Crime. The witness that day had once been a major narcotics supplier to New York City. He sat with a black hood over his head and testified about the inner workings of organized crime.

When the witness was finished, one of the commissioners leaned toward his microphone and asked the man what he thought law enforcement was doing wrong. How come organized crime still flourished, despite all the task forces, the commissions, the police agencies, the money spent to combat it?

The witness didn’t hesitate. You people have to start communicating, he told the commission. Police have to cooperate with each other. It’s the only way.

“Now that sounds kind of strange coming from the mouth of a criminal,” says Raabe. “But he hit it right on the head. Crime doesn’t stop at the county or city line. There are no boundaries. So the only real hope of law enforcement on any level is cooperation.

“Networking. And that’s what MIU is all about.”

By quietly documenting the activities of mobsters in Broward County, MIU has become a clearinghouse of intelligence on organized crime activities for federal, state and local authorities. Nicky Scarfo was only one of MIU’s targets. Other tales from the Open Territory read like movie scripts.

Even so, MIU remains one of Broward’s best-kept secrets. It doesn’t seek headlines. “It’s not a glamour group going out to make arrests,” says Fort Lauderdale Police Chief Ron Cochran, a member of MIU’s board of directors. “It has always been behind-the-scenes work. The arrests go to other agencies.”

“We’re bricklayers,” explains Detective Raabe. MIU’s operatives help build the cases, put the foundations in place. But they usually aren’t around when the building is finished.

It goes back to the days of Capone and Lansky. For half a century, mobsters have come to South Florida to vacation, to retire, or to stay out of reach of the northern police agencies that watched their every move.

“South Florida,” says Raabe, “has always been seen by these people as a place where they could be at their leisure, and not worry about being watched by that Philly or New York detective who has been on their back for 20 years.”

And Broward County has always been one of the mob’s favorite hideaways. By the end of 1985, law enforcement agencies had identified over 600 members and associates of traditional organized crime mobs as residents, full- and part-time, in Broward. They ranged from soldiers to dons. Paul Castellano, head of New York ’s Gambino organization until his murder in front of a steakhouse in 1985, had a home in Pompano Beach. Gus Alex, an aging, reputed leader of the Chicago mob known as The Outfit, has a Fort Lauderdale address. So did Chicago mob boss Jackie Cerrone until he was imprisoned recently. And so on.

“Organized crime is a growth industry and there is money to be made in Broward County,” explains MIU Detective Curt Stuart. “It is safe to say we have seen the interest of all 28 of the nation’s organized crime families here.”

What that means is that the Open Territory is like few other places where traditional organized crime is found.

“In a city up north, law enforcement has to know the members of maybe one or two crime families,” says Sgt. Ken Staab, an MIU supervisor. “Down here we have to know all the families because we’ve got them all.”