Much of the drywall industry in and around New York City has been under the thumb of an unholy alliance between the Genovese crime family and various contractors and labor unions crooked or desperate enough to business with them. One of those contractors was Fred Nisall, among more than 20 persons indicted back in April 2004 on charges related to a mob-connected construction hiring scheme. This September, standing before a judge in Manhattan federal court, he received 33 months in prison to be followed by three years of supervised release. He already had agreed to forfeit $1.5 million, jointly and severally, with two other contractors, brothers James and Joseph Delio, as part of his guilty plea in April 2006.
The FBI, the IRS, the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York, and the New York City School Construction Authority had conducted a four-year undercover probe of labor payoffs in public-works and apartment projects. Nisall was a signatory to a collective-bargaining agreement with the New York District Council of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. He made money under the table by paying workers off the books, employing nonunion workers, paying less than union-scale wages, and misrepresenting the number of workers on reports submitted to the union and related benefit funds. Instrumental to the scam was Genovese crime soldier Robert Carbone, who eventually pleaded guilty to extorting officers of Local 530 of the Operative Plasterers and Cement Masons International Union. Aside from asset forfeiture, Nisall was ordered to pay about $2.12 million in restitution, of which $1 million would go to the Carpenters union, and the remainder would go to the IRS. (United States v. Muscatiello, et al., Southern District of New York; U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Inspector General, April 1-September 30, 2007).