The feds arrested a little-known but powerful New Jersey mob capo last week and added him to a labor racketeering indictment that clearly illustrates why the Genovese family is often referred to as the Ivy League of Organized Crime.

Lawrence Ricci, who ostensibly earns his living as a dairy salesman, is a co-defendant along with three of the nation’s highest-paid union officials – longtime top executives of the International Longshoreman’s Association and reputed associates of the crime family.

The prosecution is a follow-up to the 2003 waterfront racketeering case that sent Genovese boss Vincent “Chin” Gigante, his son Andrew, and six cohorts to prison for two to seven years. Andrew, who is scheduled for release July 1, also forfeited $2 million in restitution.

According to an extortion and wire fraud indictment, Ricci, 59, controls an ILA vice president who doubles as president of Local 1235 in Newark, Albert Cernadas, and both were involved with other ILA officials in an eight-year fraud scheme.

Ricci and three ILA executives – Mr. Cernadas, 69, Harold Daggett, 58, and Arthur Coffey, 62 – are charged with diverting hundreds of thousands of dollars from workers’ health and welfare funds to the Genovese crime family from 1996 through October 2004.

According to FBI documents obtained by Gang Land, Ricci has been a major Genovese family force on the waterfront for decades and was a key player in a medical-fund fraud in which Genovese and Gambino gangsters shared a $400,000 payoff. During this scheme, the documents state, Ricci and Gambino capo Anthony “Sonny” Ciccone ironed out details of the fraud and Ricci received $70,000 as his end.

Messrs. Daggett and Coffey are also charged with extorting millions of dollars from union workers they are paid to represent and from businesses operating on the docks in New York, New Jersey, and Florida from 1997 through October 2004.

In 2003, Mr. Cernadas earned $508,755. He received $341,103 in salary as an ILA vice president and $167,652 as Local 1235 president, according to the latest union forms on file with the U.S. Department of Labor. Mr. Daggett made $480,607. He earned $270,887 as ILA assistant general organizer and $209,720 as president of ILA Local 1804-1.

Mr. Coffey is the piker of the trio. He earned a mere $378,265 working hard at five full-time posts. He received a $127,509 salary as an ILA vice president, $237,556 as president of three ILA locals in Miami -1922, 1922-1, and 2062 – and $13,200 from the South Atlantic District in Galveston, Texas.

The indicted union officials owe their huge salaries and power as labor racketeers to a group of Irish- and Italian-American gangsters who plied their trade on the docks in the 1960s, according to two assistant U.S. attorneys, Paul Weinstein and Taryn Merkl. These early waterfront gangsters, the prosecutors wrote, foresaw the huge role that large containers would eventually play in the shipping industry and teamed up to capitalize on it.

“The Genovese family understood that containerized shipping would decrease the need for longshoremen and increase the need for mechanics and container repair workers [and] created new ILA locals to control the new labor needed for containerized shipping,” Mr. Weinstein and Ms. Merkl wrote.

The racketeers with foresight included Irish hoodlums Harry Cashin, Mickey Bowers, and George Daggett and Genovese mobsters George Barone, Douglas Rago, and Gerard Catena, according to the prosecutors and FBI documents. Catena reputedly succeeded Vito Genovese as family boss in the 1970s.

In many ways, the waterfront rackets are a family affair.

Gigante’s sons Andrew and Salvatore, his nephew Ralph Gigante Jr., and his son-in-law Robert Fyfe have all had various union jobs, including lucrative shop steward positions, at companies that have also been controlled by the crime family for decades, the prosecutors state.

Harold Daggett is a nephew of the late George Dagget. Coffey is Rago’s nephew. John Bowers, the current ILA president and reputed Genovese associate, is a son of the late Mickey Bowers. James Cashin, a onetime officer of Local 1804-1 and alleged participant in the benefits-fund fraud scheme charged in the indictment, is a son of the late Harry Cashin.

The new locals the wiseguys formed were Daggett’s Local 1804-1 in North Bergin and Coffey’s Local 1922 in Miami (later 1922-1 and 2062), the prosecutors wrote. Those locals now represent 2,055 mechanics and repairmen who work on the piers in New Jersey and Florida. Some traditional longshoremen were needed, so Cernadas’s Local 1235, which now has 930 members, also survived.

Throughout their tenures, the prosecutors wrote, Messrs. Daggett, Coffey, and Cernadas enriched themselves and the Genovese family at the workers’ expense by obeying whatever orders they were given by the various mobsters who controlled them over the years.

Mr. Coffey, for example, allegedly was instructed to relocate to Florida by Barone and his uncle and was made a union officer by the gangsters, who were Local 1922’s president and vice president. When Barone was convicted of racketeering and jailed in 1983, “Coffey was made president by Rago and Barone,” the prosecutors wrote.

Among the “myriad” of tasks that Mr. Daggett performed, the prosecutors wrote, was “securing and protecting the employment of scores of organized crime relatives at the New Jersey piers, with some of the highest paying jobs reserved for the relatives of Chin Gigante.”

Mr. Cernadas, stated the prosecutors, had been “close to Barone” and wanted to remain “on record” with him, but in the 1970s quickly agreed to be placed with a crew headed by Ricci’s predecessor, capo Tino Fiumara, an oft-convicted labor racketeer who was released from federal prison last month.

To prove their case, the prosecutors plan to call several mob turncoats and play audio and videotapes the FBI made during an undercover probe a few years ago. But their key witness at trial, which had been set to start in Brooklyn federal court next month but last week was put off until May, will be Barone, who became a turncoat after he was hit with extortion charges in 2001.

Barone is an aging, ailing, battle weary Hell’s Kitchen gangster with lots of bodies on his mob resume and a keen memory, except perhaps when it comes to the exact number of his murder victims.

“I didn’t keep a scorecard, but it was probably 10 or 12,” he testified two years ago at the Peter Gotti labor racketeering trial.

Lawyers for Messrs. Daggett and Coffey did not return calls for comment.

Through his attorney, Ricci strenuously denied the fraud charges against him. About a 1979 waterfront-related extortion conviction, lawyer Jeffrey Garrigan told Gang Land: “That was 25 years ago. Since that time he has led a completely law-abiding life.”

“Al Cernadas has been an upstanding ILA union member for 53 years,” his attorney, Jack Arseneault, said. “He is universally respected by the membership and by management for his integrity. The case is founded on the ramblings of one 81-year-old admitted wiseguy killer, George Barone. Mr. Cernadas will most assuredly be acquitted.”