Cleveland police were tipped off when the department’s brass noticed a string of stolen cars that were never recovered, which is uncommon.
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Cleveland police Deputy Chief Ed Tomba said at a news conference on Wednesday that Agnello married a woman from the Cleveland area after prison and lives in the village of Bentleyville, about 20 miles southeast of Cleveland. Steroids, guns, computers, and $45,000 in cash have also been found in his Bentlyville residence and auto yards, sources say. Because he’s a convicted felon, Agnello is not allowed to own firearms.
He was also charged with drugging race horses before competition, animal cruelty and “corrupting” sports following an investigation by Cleveland police and the Cuyahoga County prosecutors’ office, authorities said.
The exact charges were not immediately available. A detective from the New York Police Department’s organized crime division assisted Cleveland police with the 18-month investigation. “Cleveland has been traditionally organized crime free for a while”, Tomba said, adding, “We think he was running unencumbered”.
In 2000, Agnello was arrested by New York City police on charges of operating a racketeering enterprise that dominated the scrap metal industry in Willets Point, Queens.
Carmine Agnello was arrested at his Cleveland scrap yard. He would then take the cars to a scrap metal processing facility, where authorities said he bribed employees to ignore the sand-filled vehicles. He was reportedly paying teenagers $20-$25 per vehicle for them to steal the cars and bring them back to his business where he would fill them with dirt to weigh them down, then sell them to an unsuspecting local scrap metal processor.
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Various members of the Gambino crime family have previously been accused of drug trafficking, extortion, murder, robbery and other crimes, according to the FBI.
