Here is the thread where we are researching Lautenberg. Feel free to help!
I started whistling the Godfather theme, and thought Lautenberg-NY-mobsters, and set Google on "Lautenberg Mafia" and here's a post linking the Russian mob to enactment of the Lautenberg Amendment in 1989, which allowed up to 50,000 Soviet refugees to enter the US each year.
http://www.americanmafia.com/Feature_Articles_35.html
Here's an excerpt:
From about 1966 through the early 1980s, the Soviets jailed some 35 million people in prisons. An estimated 30 million inmates were tattooed. The inmates wore the tattoos only after they had committed a crime. The more convictions received, the more tattoos a convict would have. These tattoos give a picture of the inmate's criminal history. A prisoner wearing an unauthorized tattoo could be punished or killed by fellow inmates.
And how did we end up with such desperate characters in our midst? Many State Department experts believe that the former Soviet Secret Police, the KGB, dumped them on us by emptying their prisons of hard-core criminals, and supplying them with Visa's to America after the US Congress enacted the Lautenberg Amendment in 1989, which allowed up to 50,000 Soviet refugees to enter the US each year.