Family Business

‘Ohana means family. Perhaps one of the sweetest, truest sentiments to come out of this place we call home.

Even Disney concurs; they made it a franchise tag line. It’s one of those concepts everyone from Hawai‘i agrees with, at least tacitly. Sure, family everywhere is important, but here, it’s in a different stratosphere. ‘Ohana. It’s almost a hard and fast rule here for everyone.

Including our criminals.

We live in a place where compliance with societal norms is not enforced by legal obligation alone. We’re culturally beholden to not only deal with one another with deference and respect, but to not screw each other over. It’s bad manners, and it’s worse if you do it to family. Who can you trust, if not your family?

In a world bereft of the rule of law, often success and security are dependent solely on trust.

Alas, though, as with all high concepts, the reality of family relationships will often fall short of the optimum. Anyone who has a family knows that absolute loyalty and support from “the house” is an idealization that must be taken with a shakerful of salt. Criminals know this better than most, and some have learned it the hardest way. Ask anyone doing a long maximum term because his brother flipped and coughed up testimony to avoid doing the same thing.

Organized crime is full of family-based operations. Nepotism in the leadership of such organizations has the appearance of being more prevalent than nepotism in legitimate enterprises because it is more blatant. In Hawai‘i, they wear it on their sleeve with pride. But there are ways to grieve this in the criminal world: you can’t bring an Equal Employment Office complaint or a lawsuit against a capo or a don, but you can gun down father and son as they sip their coffee at a sidewalk café. 

Sometimes, it’s other family members who have a bone to pick with succession decisions who resolve their complaints in that fashion. Such are the hazards of working with your folks.

In Hawai‘i, we believe that the ties that bind are bound tighter than they are anywhere else. Sometimes tight bonds create tension. Throw criminal activity into the mix, and you have the perfect conditions for dysfunction. Most people here are familiar with the high-profile cases. Michael Miske’s enterprise included his half-brother, John Stancil, and his daughter-in-law, Delia Fabro Miske. Both have made plea deals with the U.S. Attorney’s Office. And there were the Kealohas, a textbook show of criminal family dysfunction, public corruption aside.

Going back in history, the example of a Hawai‘i criminal family organization is that of the Joseph Family, whose head, Charlie “Old Man” Stevens, controlled drug trafficking on the Waianae Coast for the better part of two decades from the 1970s to the early 1990s. A 2004 piece in the then-Honolulu Star Bulletin by Sally Apgar summed up the Josephs’ history and attempted to untangle, to some extent, the tangled branches of their family tree. 

Apgar wrote her piece when Rodney V. Joseph was arrested and tried for the infamous Pali Golf Course murders. Rodney Joseph’s uncle was Charlie Stevens, who was married to his aunt, Aletha “None” Stevens. Apgar goes on to mention that per affidavits, Rodney Joseph was part of Stevens’ organization, along with two of Rodney’s uncles, Terrance “Anthony” Joseph and Jeffrey Joseph. She then wrote that Terrance Josph was at one point married to Aletha Stevens, and had a daughter with her, who was raised in the Stevens household.

Really? I had to read that over three times. Maybe Apgar got it wrong, but most likely she did not. Terrance Joseph’s daughter with Aletha was raised in Stevens’ house after Stevens had married Aletha, while Terrance worked for Stevens. Or maybe he was married to Aletha after she was married to Stevens, and their daughter was raised in Stevens’ house anyway. Either way, this is the kind of thing that happens in families from time to time, but given those circumstances, it’s perhaps surprising that Stevens died of a cardiac arrest in a federal prison in Pennsylvania, not because of something intentional.

Scandal, though, is only for the famous and infamous.

The inner workings of local criminal families less well known and far more numerous may be less bizarre but are no less dramatic, with stakes no less high. We don’t have specific examples to detail here about those more pedestrian family operations because most never receive any media attention, but we have a portrait beautifully captured in recent literature which rings with authenticity.

Donald A. Carreira Ching’s collection Blood Work and Other Stories (Bamboo Ridge Press 2025) is filled with tales of contemporary Hawai‘i and the problematic shifts in its social landscape (full disclosure: I had the opportunity to read Blood Work and Other Stories prior to release and provided an endorsement in a blurb). While all the stories are excellent, as a crime fiction writer my favorite is “Who You Know.”

“Who You Know” is dark and riveting and full of noir sensibility. It makes you feel the rising angst and paranoia of its protagonist, Junior, who is dealing with the aftermath of a screw-up in his father’s drug trafficking operation. The opening could be right out of the summary of an interview transcript after waiver of Miranda rights:

Junior knew what he’d have to do ever since Ka’eo had pulled a pistol on him. As far as tweakers go, it wasn’t much of a surprise. Only loyal to da rock, his father always said. But Ka’eo had been rolling with him for over a year. Friends since high school. When Ka’eo was getting by, Junior gave him a roof over his head and a hit when he needed it, and in return Ka’eo pulled muscle. Brothers over time, but betrayal wasn’t tolerated, and Junior knew how his dad was. He had already barred him from visiting the shop and didn’t let him near any of the product. Dumped Ka’eo’s truck too. He had two of his guys drive it out to Wahiawa and light it up on an abandoned strip of state land. Didn’t ask Junior to do it. Didn’t even tell him it was being done.

The dynamic of a local family criminal operation is detailed with its attendant emotions in “Who You Know”. It also contains the philosophy of such operations in a nutshell, especially who you can hang the ‘ohana tag on:

Power stay about who you know, especially in Hawai‘i. It was one of his father’s first lessons when he brought Junior on. You get people you can trust, people you can lose, and people you keep in your pocket just in case. Once, his father pulled him out of school early and took him out to Kalihi to meet Uncle Terry, a police sergeant. Junior never had an Uncle Terry. He never had any uncles, but the people his father trusted were family, so they embraced and talked story like money was blood.

People you could lose never had names. They were for someone else to remember, for someone else to bury, and you used them because you could. No give two shits about any of dem, his father emphasized. 

Such distinctions are important in any operation where there are no legal guardrails to ensure that the things that need to get done get done. Furthermore, they need to get done with discretion. Junior’s father’s advice is, in a sense, a set of regulations for ensuring productivity and avoiding liability. Trust is the contract that makes it all work, and family means trust. Until it doesn’t. Then the consequences are naturally dire.

Things go south often in family operations and betrayal is usually the beginning of the end, if not the actual cause. Personal gain is usually the motive for selling out kin, but a more altruistic reason is often fronted, more in line with the whole ‘ohana ball of wax: make a deal, I’ll take the hit. Because I love you.

Maybe our correctional facilities are filled with husbands, fathers, brothers and cousins because they encouraged their loved ones to deliver testimony against them. Save yourself, I’m already done. Maybe. Though it’s a romantic notion, it may be true in many cases.

But often the truth is a lot more complicated.

Just like in families who aren’t criminals.

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Image by Jack Finnigan.