Howard Famiglia

Howard Famiglia
Affiliation	Adoption Lawyer
Status	Deceased, shot down by Gina Calabrese in hospital
Episode Appeared In	"Baby Blues"
Played By	Tommy Koenig

Howard Famiglia is an adoption lawyer, specializing in foreign adoptions, specifically from Colombia. In 1986 he was running a sophisticated illegal adoption ring, starting out by sending goons to Colombia, kidnapping babies from impoverished mothers (rejecting "ugly" babies) and flying them back to the United States to unsupervised airports. Some of the babies die in the trip (which Famiglia considers a "spoilage factor"), but the survivors are placed with anxious adoptive parents in the United States, for $50,000 per child (though the recorded price is $20,000). Famiglia's web includes the Colombian Vice Consul Eduardo Vasquez, who clears the illegal adoptions through the Consulate, Angela Mitchell, who tracks the adoptions through Social Services and issues the birth certificates, Hector, Famiglia's chauffeur who monitors all activities, and the hundreds of adoptive parents who let Famiglia know of any potential problems. Late in 1986 a planeload of Colombian babies was found by Metro-Dade Vice (looking for drugs) and through investigations found Famiglia had arranged for over 100 adoptions and others pending (word was he was not taking any new clients without a financial statement), but when the Vice investigations got too close, Famiglia took drastic measures--threatening the parents with losing their children if they testified to the grand jury over the case, killing Mitchell, Vasquez, and Hector to cut off all loose ends, and then trying to kill Maria Escobar, a mother who stowed away on the plane trying to find her son, Jose Daniel (now Alex Kaplan), who was illegally adopted by Famiglia, who planned to go public with her story, but was a ruse setup by Vice, who shot Famiglia down while trying to get to Maria's room through the air conditioning vent.