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family of New York City.

The federal government’s most recent effort directed against the Mafia in Dallas was in 1978, when the Justice Department opened an organized crime strike force here. The Dallas office was run by Douglas McMillan, a curt prosecutor who had participated in a number of controversial federal probes ranging from the activities of Mafia dons to domestic spying by the CIA. McMillan is a gutsy, no-nonsense prosecutor who gained fame as the only man to convict the late Meyer Lansky, long reputed to be the mob’s money laundering genius.

But by 1981, after McMillan had won a handful of convictions, federal officials decided to close the Dallas office for budgetary reasons, intimating that there wasn’t sufficient organized crime activity in Dallas to justify a full-time prosecutor.

“I’m sure mob families have people in the Dallas area-perhaps all of them,” says McMillan, now a Dallas attorney. “But | I don’t think organized crime is a major problem in Dallas. There’s no real monolithic group working in any area of Texas. The mob operates on money and muscle and Texans don’t fold all that easily. Texans can’t be intimidated like people are in South Philadelphia or Miami.”

“Did he really say that?” asked one federal agent who has worked with McMillan. “He knows different. The Mafia is here in Dallas, and we do know a lot about it. We know about many visits to Dallas by [Carlos] Marcello from New Orleans in the past, and we know who he sees when he comes here.” The agent also says that Dallas police are aware of continuing contacts between Dallas crime figures and Mafia members in other cities. “We know about out-of-town and out-of-country trips by local Mafia figures-and I mean recent trips.”