By Allan Lengel

WASHINGTON — The FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group is leasing part of the former Air National Guard base at Richmond International Airport for aviation operations, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported.

“We’re very excited to have the FBI as a tenant of the Richmond International Airport,” Jon Mathiasen, the airport’s president and CEO, told the paper. “They’ll bring commerce to the field by buying fuel and other services.”

The Capital Region Airport Commission signed a five-year lease with the FBI for the 8-acre site, with options to extend for up to another 15 years, the paper reported. The cost of the lease is $1 million a year.

By Allan Lengel

WASHINGTON — NBC’s Pete Williams is reporting that the four men arrested Monday for tampering with Sen. Mary Landrieu’s phones in her downtown New Orleans office were not trying to wiretap the phones, but “wanted to see how her local office staff would respond if the phones were inoperative.”

Williams’ attributed the information to a law enforcement official. The group of men were led by  conservative  videomaker James O’Keefe, who once duped the organization ACORN by posing as a pimp.

Authorities charged that O’Keefe, using his cellphone, videotaped two other men who entered the office posing as phone repairmen, who were trying to tamper with the phones.

The U.S. Marshals office arrested them.

Williams wrote that “they were apparently motivated, the official says, by criticism that when Sen. Landrieu became a big player in the health care debate, people in Louisiana were having a hard time getting through on the phones to register their views.”

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The acting head of the Genovese organized crime family, Daniel Leo, aka “The Lion,” and his nephew Joseph Leo, a lieutenant, pleaded guilty Wednesday in Manhattan federal court to racketeering charges related to loan sharking, extortion and illegal gambling.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office alleged that Daniel Leo became the acting boss of the Genovese organized crime family in 2005, rising from the family’s ruling council to run the show. The Genovese family is one of New York’s five legendary Mafia families.

Today’s guilty pleas were considered significant, part of the ongoing crackdown in recent years on the infamous New York mob, which has often been glamorized in films and TV. But the FBI asserts that Genovese and Gambino crime families in particular continue to thrive.

“They certainly have taken hits with the RICO statute (Racketeer Influenced And Corrupt Organizations Act), but organized crime in the New York City area is alive and well,” said David Shafer, assistant special agent in charge of the New York Office of the organized crime branch. “The Genovese family is a very, very strong family.”

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Rep. Mollohan/gov photo

WASHINGTON — Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-W. Va.) got the word anyone sweating through a federal investigation loves to hear: No charges are going to be filed against you.

Reporter Paul Kane of the Washington Post reports that the Justice Department has shut down its criminal probe into the 14-term Congressman after nearly four years. It will not take any criminal action.

The Post reported that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. and the FBI had been looking into Mollohan, a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, “for steering roughly $250 million in line-item expenditures to several nonprofit organizations run by close friends, who also were real estate partners with him.”

“We’re not going to get into any details, but I can confirm we’ve closed the investigation into Alan Mollohan,” U.S. Attorney spokesman Ben Friedman told the Post.

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