Colorado Springs, CO — A specialist assigned to the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Carson is facing federal racketeering charges after the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado launched a RICO investigation into an organization operating on the installation known as the E-4 Mafia, which is not a mafia, has never been a mafia, and is instead a time-honored informal designation for the grade of E-4 in the United States Army that every soldier who has ever been one understands implicitly and apparently no one else does.
“We received credible intelligence about a structured criminal organization operating inside a federal military installation,” said a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office. “The organization has a name. It has a hierarchy. It has an initiation process. It has a code.”
The name is E-4 Mafia.
The hierarchy is anyone with a specialist rank who has been in long enough to know how things actually work.
The initiation process is surviving your first year without getting chaptered out.
The code is don’t volunteer for anything and always know where the good hiding spots are.
“This is not a criminal enterprise,” said the JAG officer assigned to the case, a major who has been in the Army for sixteen years and spent the first forty minutes of his initial meeting with federal investigators explaining what an E-4 is before giving up and asking if any of them had ever been in the military.
None of them had been in the military.
The investigation began in November after an FBI field agent embedded at a Colorado Springs Buffalo Wild Wings overheard four specialists discussing what he reported as “organizational operations, resource allocation, and methods for avoiding detection by leadership.” The specialists were, phone records later confirmed, deciding which barracks room to play Xbox in and how to get out of a detail the following morning.
The federal government has 340 pages of surveillance notes on this conversation.
Page 12 contains a detailed breakdown of what the agent believed was a money laundering discussion and was actually an argument about who owed whom $7 from a Domino’s order placed in September.
The specialist at the center of the charges, a 22-year-old from Pueblo who has been in the Army for two years, was informed of the indictment during what he was told was a routine meeting with his company commander.
Federal agents were there.
“They had a chart,” he said. “With my name on it. And lines going to other names. And at the top it said E-4 Mafia Leadership Structure.”
He was asked who was listed at the top of the chart.
“A specialist from Bravo Company,” he said. “He’s been in for four years. He knows everything. He knows how to get out of anything. He once got a four-day pass approved in 48 hours and nobody knows how.”
He paused.
“He’s not a crime boss. He’s just been an E-4 for a really long time.”
The U.S. Attorney’s office obtained financial records as part of the investigation. The records show a pattern of small cash transactions between E-4s across the installation that prosecutors described as “consistent with tribute payments within an organized criminal structure.”
The transactions are consistent with soldiers lending each other twenty dollars until payday.
Payday is twice a month.
The transactions happen twice a month.
The federal government has a spreadsheet.
The charges are expected to be dismissed.
In the meantime the specialist has been advised by his attorney not to refer to himself or any other soldier as a member of the E-4 Mafia in any context, written or verbal, for the duration of the proceedings.
He agreed.
He used the term four times in the parking lot after the meeting.
His attorney heard him.
His attorney is charging by the hour.
At press time the FBI field agent who initiated the investigation had submitted a request to embed at a second Buffalo Wild Wings location in Colorado Springs after receiving intelligence that a second E-4 Mafia cell was operating in the area.
The intelligence was a Yelp review that mentioned the restaurant was popular with soldiers from Fort Carson.
The request was approved.
The agent starts Tuesday.
The specialists will not notice him.
They never notice anyone who doesn’t outrank them.
That’s the whole system.
That’s always been the whole system.
