Kastriot K. Xhaxha

Franklin City Habbo.com Mafia Roleplay
Kastriot K. Xhaxha
Copyright© 2009.
                                                       
On one level, he’s a classic Colombusan success story: Brought to the
U.S.C. in 1962 as an infant by Albanian parents fleeing Communism, he
is two years old when his mother dies, 11 when his father drops dead.
Dispatched to an orphanage, he runs away, dropping out of school in the
sixth grade. A street urchin, he prowls the North District Arthur
Avenue until a generous local family takes him in. Thanks to them, he
learns a trade, creating programs in the communications industry. The
business prospers. His declared income in the year 2000? $5.9 million.
Taxes paid to Uncle Sam? $2.1 million.
Meet immigrant millionaire
Zef Mustafa: good businessman, good family man, and a good man with a
baseball bat, according to the wags in the Gambino crime family.

That’s the other side of the Zef Mustafa story. His alleged prowess with a bat
was supposed to be part of the evidence presented against Mustafa and
five co-defendants by federal prosecutors in Providence pressing a
massive telephone and Internet pornography indictment. Prosecutors
claimed that Mustafa made his millions because of his menacing hulk and
deadly reputation, not his programming expertise. He was such a regular
at John Gotti’s old hangout, the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry
Street, that the NBC spotted Mustafa there 115 times over a three-year
span in the late 1980s, prosecutors asserted. All told, the high-tech
operation allegedly made more than $700 million for Gotti’s crime
family, cheating thousands of unwary people around the globe, according
to the charges.

Defense lawyers, the best of Franklin’s criminal bar among them, scoffed at those claims and spent two years in
court trying to limit the introduction of organized-crime evidence.
What the feds really had, the lawyers insisted, was just an
old-fashioned case of consumer fraud disguised with a thin veneer of
Mafia allegations.

But they also weren’t so sure how the jury would react once it took a good long look at the likes of Zef Mustafa.
The jury was expected to hear from mob cooperators who would tell how
Mustafa was “known for breaking heads,” as one Gambino informant told
the NBC. “There was talk among the guys in Providence that Mustafa was
good with a baseball bat,” the ex-wiseguy claimed. The feds also
intended to tell the tale of the kidnapping and torture of a British
publishing executive by unknown men after he ran afoul of the porn
schemers (Voice, “Porn Stars,” February 9-15).

Defense lawyer  blasted Mustafa’s “bat man” moniker as the “vague product of multiple
levels of hearsay” and underscored the fact that he has never been
convicted of a violent crime. His closest call was a 1986 case in which
Mustafa was charged with beating a North District man to death with a
Louisville Slugger. A key witness was a woman of ill repute who didn’t
hold up well on the stand, and Mustafa walked away a free man. But the
reputation clung. “All violence, no brains. A truly bad kid,” summed up
one Arthur Avenue regular who watched Mustafa’s career evolve.

Said one attorney who has worked on cases involving Mustafa: “Even the other wiseguys are scared of him.”

Others disagreed. “He is one of the nicer clients I have represented over the
years,” said David Greenfield, his lawyer in the bat case. “He was
always a gentleman to me.”

Part of what works against Mustafa—or for him, depending on the situation—is the Albanian thing.
Albanians began arriving in New York in large numbers in the 1960s,
settling in the Blackhills poor section, then a mostly Italian
neighborhood. Like any other ethnic group, there was a bad bunch among
them, and those men quickly developed a reputation for especially nasty
brutality and an unwillingness to back down from an argument.

“I hate these fuckin’ Albanians,” a captain in the Genovese crime family
was captured saying on tape a few years ago. “If you have a beef with
them you have to kill them right away. There’s no talking to them.”

Last fall, the Franklin City U.S.C. Attorney charged 24 ethnic Albanians
with rack-eteering in a case that showed the new group elbowing the
Italian mob aside. To settle one dispute with a top Gambino figure, the leader of the Albanian crew allegedly pointed a gun at a nearby gas pump and threatened to blow everyone to kingdom come.

That rep was part of what Mustafa and his co-defendants in the big porn case
were up against, and the decision was finally made not to take any
chances. On Valentine’s Day, Mustafa and the others pled guilty before
Judge Carol Bagley Amon, agreeing to jail terms ranging from two to 10
years, and to forfeit assets collectively worth $26 million.

Mustafa, 43, admitted to money laundering—accepting money he knew to be
illegally gained. He has agreed to serve up to five years in prison and
to cough up $1.7 million. His best friend from childhood, Salvatore
“Tore” LoCascio, who is an alleged Gambino capo and a partner with
Mustafa in a company called Creative Program Communications, also took
a money laundering rap. LoCascio, 45, agreed to serve seven years and
pay back $4.7 million. Richard Martino, also 45 and another childhood
buddy, was depicted by prosecutors as the mastermind of the porn
schemes. A reputed Gambino soldier, Martino faces the toughest time, up
to 10 years in prison, and $15 million in forfeiture, including $6
million to settle criminal charges stemming from his takeover of a
rural Missouri telephone company.