Courtroom Tapes of Mob Boss Claim Cook County Undersherriff Accepted Payoffs to Protect Chicago Outfit

Three years after Cook County Republicans were giddily riding an unprecedented wave of popularity and political opportunity generated by President Ronald Reagan and an ex-cop named James O`Grady, the whole movement has spectacularly collapsed.

The Cook County sheriff, once the toast of the White House, a popular politician who happily fended off talk of a future in the mayor`s office or the governor`s mansion, faces the growing likelihood that his political career might be near an end.

The latest and most significant blow came on Friday when federal prosecutors in a court hearing played a tape of a reputed Chicago mob leader`s allegations that O`Grady`s former undersheriff, James Dvorak, chairman of the Cook County GOP, was taking payoffs to protect organized crime activities from the law.

The allegations are the unsubstantiated talk of a crime syndicate figure, and political leaders quickly rallied in support of O`Grady. But they hit him at a time that his political star has already been tarnished by previous incidents that raised questions about corruption in his office and political meddling by Dvorak.

Republican leaders, including Gov. James Thompson and Secretary of State Jim Edgar, remained publicly loyal to O`Grady. They suggested that the allegations by reputed gambling boss Ernest Rocco Infelice weren`t true, but should be investigated.

Sources close to O`Grady said that the allegations haven`t shaken the sheriff`s resolve to seek re-election. O`Grady huddled with advisers Friday afternoon-Dvorak was noticeably absent-and the subject of stepping down reportedly never was broached. But O`Grady allies anticipate that the allegations might force the sheriff to finally cut his ties to Dvorak, a longtime friend and business partner. They anticipate that Dvorak, who resigned only recently as undersheriff, would have to step down as party chairman, at least while an investigation of the matter is pending.

Even at that, some of O`Grady`s friends despaired that the unconfirmed allegations have killed his political fortunes. ''This is the final nail in the coffin,'' one O`Grady loyalist said.

As recently as six months ago, O`Grady was still the brightest light in local GOP politics. Although his political apparatus, led by Dvorak, had suffered a string of campaign losses after O`Grady`s election in 1986, he was still considered a strong favorite to win a second term. But O`Grady has spent the last few months fending off charges of corruption and political interference in his office that many local Republicans say have undermined his popularity. For O`Grady, the deluge seemed to be over, and the time to start repairing the damage had arrived. Then came Rocco Infelice.

The recording of Infelice`s remarks was played by government prosecutors as they sought to convince a federal magistrate that their racketeering case against him and four others is so strong that they should not be freed on bond.

The five co-defendants are among 20 people who were indicted Wednesday on charges they used murder, extortion and bribery to build bookmaking and casino-style gambling operations in the Chicago area.

In the tape, Infelice told William Jahoda, a bookmaker working as a federal informant, that his organization paid $35,000-a-month to law enforcement officials and imprisoned mobsters.

''Between you and I, 10 goes to the sheriff,'' Infelice told Jahoda.

''Yeah, with the Bohemian?'' Jahoda replied, in what a federal agent testified was a reference to Dvorak.

''Yeah,'' Infelice responded, ''five goes to another guy.''

Later in the discussion, Jahoda said, ''I got no right to ask you the question, what . . . do you get for 10 thousand a month.''

Infelice replied: ''Sheriff never bothers us, then we got a guy at the state`s attorney`s office. We got another guy downtown.''

Later on the tape, Infelice suggested that Chicago Police Supt. LeRoy Martin would consider transferring officers out of the vice crimes unit at his request and that organized crime figures aided the mayoral campaign of Richard M. Daley by scuttling former Ald. Edward R. Vrdolyak`s mayoral campaign in 1989.

O`Grady, Daley, Dvorak and Martin each flatly denied that Infelice had any influence in their agencies. O`Grady called on Chief Judge Harry Comerford to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the charges. ''I am troubled and incensed by the allegations spread so broadly from the mayor`s office to the office of the superintendent of police and from the sheriff of Cook County to the state`s attorney of Cook County and all the way over to the federal building,'' O`Grady said. ''I take these allegations seriously because they definitely undermine the confidence of the people of this county and the confidence they should have and expect in their government officials.''

Dvorak, at a separate press conference, said: ''I have made countless arrests of major gambling operations, major call girl operations and prostitution and obscene matter investigations. There has never been a hint of impropriety in my 25-year work record as a Chicago police officer or as undersheriff.''

Gov. James Thompson, who launched his political career by investigating official corruption as U.S. attorney, also called for an investigation. ''To rock my faith in O`Grady`s office, it would have to also rock my faith in LeRoy Martin and Rich Daley, and I certainly don`t believe that about the three of them,'' Thompson said.

There has long been speculation about how pervasive the influence of organized crime is in the Democratic organization that has long ruled Chicago politics. Mayor Richard J. Daley, the present mayor`s father, once told reporters that his own telephones were tapped, although he suggested the eavesdroppers would only hear his conversations with his children and grandchildren.

And talk of the mob`s demise has surfaced almost routinely. It`s been nearly 20 years since Justice Department officials claimed that the mob had been nearly snuffed out in Chicago. And Richard J. Daley, as well, claimed the mob was dead, at least within the city limits. ''It isn`t here anymore,'' he said in 1976. ''It`s all out in the suburbs.''

Of course, it wasn`t gone from the city, and, in recent years, organized crime has publicly surfaced in political waters like the tell-tale fin of a predator.

The 1987 campaign for mayor was rocked by allegations that Vrdolyak had met with the late mob chief Joseph Ferriola, a charge that brought an angry denunciation from Vrdolyak.

In the tapes revealed Friday, Infelice says that Vrdolyak had ''good taste'' in his 1987 campaign, but when he ran again in 1989, Infelice boasted, the mob shut down his political fortunes by forcing a major contributor to abandon him.

For weeks, attention has been drawn to a federal investigation of corruption that has focused on several Democratic political figures, including Ald. Fred Roti (1st).

Ironically, after years of Democratic domination of Chicago politics-and corruption investigations spurred by Republican-appointed prosecutors-the most sensational charges are now leveled at two Republicans.

Although the Infelice tape also raises the names of Mayor Daley and Martin, suggesting that crime figures boosted Daley`s election chances and had a conduit to Martin, neither has been in the position of having to fend off such allegations in the past, as O`Grady has.

The immediate reaction from O`Grady`s political adversaries within his own party was that, at the least, Dvorak would have to resign. Some believe O`Grady, too, won`t survive until the November general election.

''The talk in the party right now is we need a couple of replacements,'' said Donald Totten, the former county GOP chairman who was ousted by Dvorak.

''The decision on a chairman is probably going to have to come from Jim Edgar.''

Edgar, a Republican candidate for governor, said through a spokesman that the allegations should ''be thoroughly investigated and resolved quickly, because there is nothing more important for a public official or party leader than to maintain their integrity and the public trust.''

Although O`Grady`s adversaries might consider pressing for him to step aside, the political reality is that the party almost certainly couldn`t elect anybody else as Cook County sheriff. O`Grady was the first Republican to win a countywide office in a decade, and he narrowly won in 1986 largely because Democratic Sheriff Richard Elrod was dogged by repeated instances of corruption in his department.

But several allies of O`Grady noted that his consultations with top aides Friday afternoon did not include Dvorak, and some speculated that the sheriff wants to put even more distance between himself and the party chairman, who has been the focus of charges that he has heavily politicized the sheriff`s office.

Republican leaders quickly floated three possible replacements for Dvorak as party chairman: Totten, 42nd Ward Committeeman Ron Gidwitz, and Northfield Township Committeeman Richard Siebel. But after the weeks of political battering that O`Grady and county Republicans have taken, culminating with the Infelice tapes, it`s not clear that anyone will be clamoring for the job.

Thanks to R. Bruce Dold.

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Jury Hears of Payoffs to the Mob

For 14 years, until he disappeared in 1988 and was feared slain, the owner of an Old Town pornographic video store allegedly paid thousands of dollars in protection money, or ``street taxes,`` to the Chicago mob. On Tuesday, William ``Red`` Wemette, reappeared in public for the first time. From a witness stand in U.S. District Court, he recounted how he gave the money and dealt with six mob money collectors or their bosses. Four of them are dead or in prison. The other two, reputed mob figures Frank Schweihs, 59, formerly of Lombard, and Anthony Daddino, 60, a Rosemont building inspector, are on trial before Judge Ann Williams on charges of attempted extortion. The conspiracy in which they are charged does not include actual extortion, despite Wemette`s contention that he paid Schweihs and Daddino a total of $19,800. That`s because the 40-year-old Wemette was a paid informant for the FBI, and the money he paid was not his but that of the FBI.

A jury hearing the case was told in opening statements Tuesday that beginning in the 1970s, Wemette led two seemingly contradictory lives-one as a merchant of pornography, the other as a government mole. During the two years ending last September, when he dropped from sight by plan, Wemette recorded the alleged Schweihs-Daddino payoffs with FBI cameras and audio equipment hidden in his apartment above his X-rated video shop at 1345 N. Wells St.

``Since 1971, I provided information to the FBI and got some monetary gain, about $10,000,`` Wemette acknowledged under questioning by special attorney Thomas Knight of the Justice Department`s Organized Crime Strike Force. Knight told the jury that the evidence includes video and audio recordings made on 23 dates from May 1, 1987, until Sept. 15, 1988. Wemette testified that he began making extortion payoffs to various mobsters in 1974, when he opened his Old Town porn shop, then known as ``The Peeping Tom, and that the initial payoff sum of $250 a week was set by mob street boss Joseph Lombardo, now in prison. Others who figured in the shakedowns, he said, included Marshall Caifano, also now in prison, and two now-dead individuals, Louis Eboli and Albert ``Obbie`` Frabotta. He said Daddino and Schweihs increased the sum to ``a nice round`` figure of $1,100 a month in 1985. The increase, he explained, came after he complained to Schweihs that another collector wanted to start taxing the video porn dealer on a hot dog stand he also owned in Old Town. That collector never bothered him again, Wemette said.

He said Daddino, whom he knew as ``Jeeps,`` once sought his help to bribe police officers, saying that too many bookmakers whom Daddino collected protection money from were being arrested. Defense attorneys Allan Ackerman and John L. Sullivan contend that Wemette suffered no economic loss because of the use of FBI funds and that the FBI recordings show nothing but friendship between the three men.

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Mobster's Cooperation Revealed

The Chicago crime syndicate suffered a potentially devastating blow Thursday with the disclosure that jailed mob rackets figure Gerald Scarpelli apparently has defected and become a government informant. The information, in a nine-page government report filed in U.S. District Court by prosecutors, said that Scarpelli has admitted having a role in mob killings and knowledge of at least one other murder. Some mob observers speculated Thursday that if Scarpelli is admitting his involvement in crimes, he probably is implicating others as well to improve his chances of making a deal with authorities. Prosecutors and Scarpelli`s defense lawyers have declined to discuss the contents of the document with the news media. In the past, however, defense lawyers have scoffed at suggestions Scarpelli had turned informant to help himself.

Scarpelli, 51, is believed to be one of the mob`s top killers. He was a close associate of several top mob figures, including Joseph Ferriola, until recently the Chicago syndicate`s operating chief. A burglar by trade, Scarpelli was not only a top hit man during Ferriola`s 1985-88 reign as boss, but became Ferriola`s chief gambling and juice loan collector on the Southwest Side and in the southwest suburbs, according to sources familiar with the Scarpelli case. Thus, they said, Scarpelli was familiar with the inner workings of the mob`s day-to-day activities under Ferriola and Ferriola`s chief henchman, Ernest Rocco Infelice.

Ironically, if Scarpelli turned informant, he did so after being arrested last summer on evidence provided by another gangland informant. Federal authorities haven`t named that informant, but he is believed to be Scarpelli`s longtime associate, James Basile, who is now in federal protective custody. In secretly taped conversations between Scarpelli and the informant, Scarpelli is heard talking about ``sitting down with`` bosses he identified as ``Joe, Rocky and Sam.`` The FBI said the three are Ferriola, Infelice and Sam Carlisi, who is believed to have succeeded the ailing Ferriola as the mob`s operating boss last fall.

The court document gave no hint that Scarpelli told secrets about them, limiting its revelations to the charges against Scarpelli that resulted in his arrest. In that regard, the document said Scarpelli had admitted taking part in the 1979 slaying of North Chicago nightclub operator George Christofalos, and the 1980 killing of mob assassin William Dauber, 45, and Dauber`s wife, Charlotte, 37. It said Scarpelli also provided information about the killing of mob associate Michael Oliver, whose body was found buried last spring in a field south of suburban Darien.

According to the document, all of the information allegedly given by Scarpelli was told to the FBI on July 16 and 17-the day of his arrest and the following day. The information is in a report filed by John L. Burley, a lawyer with the U.S. Justice Department`s Chicago Organized Crime Strike Force concerning a meeting with Jeffrey Steinback, one of Scarpelli`s defense lawyers, to discuss the prosecution`s evidence.

Until now Scarpelli hadn`t been linked to the death of Christofalos, operator of a far-north suburban strip joint. But he has long been suspected by authorities of taking part in the slayings of the Daubers near Crete. Sources said Dauber was informing on Scarpelli to a variety of federal and state agencies. Dauber was an underling of Albert Tocco, the fugitive south suburban rackets boss who was captured by federal agents in Europe Thursday. Oliver is believed to have been buried in the Darien field by accomplices after he was slain during a botched attempt to rob a suburban pornography shop that competed with another porn shop.

Thanks to John O'Brien and Ronald Koziol

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Obit for Anthony Provenzano, Reputed Organzied Crime Leader and Ex-Teamster Chief #TheIrishman

Anthony Provenzano, a reported organized-crime leader who was ousted a decade ago as the teamsters' boss of northern New Jersey, died of a heart attack yesterday in a hospital near a prison in Lompoc, Calif., where he was serving 20 years for racketeering. He was 71 years old.

Mr. Provenzano, a convicted murderer and extortionist and a key figure in the 1975 disappearance of the teamster president, James R. Hoffa, died at Lompoc District Hospital, near the Federal Penitentiary 140 miles northwest of Los Angeles.

He had been in the hospital a month with congestive heart failure, the warden's executive assistant, Chuck LaRoe, said. Mr. Provenzano began his term in 1980. Poor health and advanced age had left him unable to perform his work assignments as a janitor for two years, Mr. LaRoe added.

Mr. Provenzano would have been eligible for release in 1992. Although eligible for parole in 1985, he waived consideration. On his release from Federal prison, he would have faced 25 years to life in New York for the murder of a union rival in 1961, and he apparently preferred to spend his last days in California.

Muscle and Maneuvers

A short, stocky and ham-fisted man who bore the scars of his young years as an amateur boxer, Mr. Provenzano - known to friend and foe alike as Tony Pro - joined the teamsters as a Depression-era truck driver and, through muscle and shrewd maneuvers, fought his way into the top ranks of the crime-riddled union.

His way was strewn with violent election campaigns, Federal and state investigations, the disappearances and mysterious deaths of union opponents, free homes and Cadillacs, salaries that dwarfed corporate largesse, the enmity of rackets-busters and the homage of union men.

Behind his rise and fall lay a shadowy world of associates whose talents lay in beating other men with hammers, in selling labor peace to the trucking industry, in garrotes and guns and the clever use of garbage grinders and incinerators to make enemies disappear.

A reported capo in the Mafia family of Vito Genovese, Mr. Provenzano spent years in courts and prisons. A conviction in 1963 for extortion sent him to prison for seven years. In 1978, he was convicted of murdering Anthony Castellito, a union foe who had vanished 17 years earlier in Ulster County, N.Y. Two racketeering convictions, in New York in 1978 and New Jersey in 1979, sent him to prison for the last time eight years ago.

Tribulations of Local 560

Although he became a vice president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and a top associate of Mr. Hoffa in the 70's, his longtime base of power was the 13,000-member Local 560, with headquarters in Union City, N.J.

While Mr. Provenzano was barred by his last convictions from any union role, his brothers Nunzio and Salvatore were officers of the local, as was his daughter Josephine. In 1984, the local was found guilty of intimidating its members by murders, threats and economic reprisals, and it was placed under a trustee in 1986.

Last Wednesday, in the first contested election at the local in 25 years, the rank and file voted to return the management to a ticket of Provenzano associates. The leaders denied wrongdoing, and observers noted that marriages of necessity, such as that born in the Depression when the teamsters needed the muscle of the mob, were rarely annulled.

Anthony Provenzano was born May 7, 1917, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one of six sons of immigrant Sicilians, Rosario and Josephine Dispensa Provenzano. He was 17 when he quit school for a $10-a-week job driving a truck out of a terminal in Hackensack, N.J.

Slaying in Kerhonkson

By 1941, Mr. Provenzano was a shop steward, and by 1958 he had taken the reins of Local 560 from the man who had founded it. A year later, he cited the Fifth Amendment 44 times in testimony before a Senate rackets committee for which Robert F. Kennedy was counsel.

In 1961, testimony at his murder trial showed that Mr. Provenzano had paid a mob enforcer, Harold Konigsberg, $15,000 to kill Mr. Castellito. Mr. Konigsberg and three other men had lured the rival to his summer home in Kerhonkson, N.Y., in Ulster County, hit him with a lead truncheon and garroted him with piano wire. The body was never found.

Another rival of Mr. Provenzano, Walter Glockner, was shot to death in 1963 in Hoboken, N.J., just as Mr. Provenzano went on trial for extorting payoffs for labor peace. He was convicted and sent to the Federal prison in Lewisburg, Pa., where Mr. Hoffa was also being held. Bad blood between the two former friends was said to have developed there.

On July 30, 1975, Mr. Hoffa vanished from a parking lot in a Detroit suburb and was never seen again. He was on his way that night to what he thought was a meeting with Mr. Provenzano. Mr. Provenzano was not in Detroit then, but he became a key figure in the disappearance, which was never solved.

Series of Sentences

A book by Steven Brill in 1978 quoted a Federal Bureau of Investigation memo as saying that three of Mr. Provenzano's associates had kidnapped Mr. Hoffa, put him in a garbage shredder and cremated the remains in an incinerator.

A month after being sentenced in Kingston, N.Y., to 25 years to life in prison for Mr. Castellito's murder, Mr. Provenzano was sentenced in Federal District Court in Manhattan in 1978 to four years for arranging kickbacks on a $2.3 million pension-fund loan. A year later, a Federal judge in New Jersey imposed a 20-year prison term for labor racketeering.

The Allwood Funeral Home in Clifton, N.J., listed the survivors as his wife, Marie-Paule Migneron Provenzano; four daughters, Josephine, Marie Maita, Doreen Rucinski and Charlotte Polile; three brothers, Louis, Salvatore and Nunzio, and two grandchildren. The funeral will be Saturday at 9:30 A.M. in St. Andrew's Roman Catholic Church in Clifton. Burial will be in St. Joseph's Cemetery in Hackensack.

Thanks to Robert D. McFadden.

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Suspected Mob Porn Boss Dies in His Apartment

Michael Glitta, 68, known to law enforcement officials as local overseer of pornography rackets, has died in his apartment at 1221 N. Dearborn St., his attorney, Adam Bourgeois, said Thursday. Glitta, who had a history of heart ailments, suffered a fatal heart attack Wednesday night, according to Bourgeois. Glitta, who operated a magazine sales firm at 1112 N. Milwaukee Ave., had syndicate ties going back nearly 30 years, according to Chicago and federal law enforcement officials.

In 1982, the Chicago Crime Commission said he supervised pornography operations for the mob in an area that ranged from the Near North Side to the Wisconsin state line. Crime Commission records say he got his start in vice rackets by running B-girl strip joints in Chicago and later branched out to embrace X-rated films and cassette tapes. Mob watchers said Glitta reported directly to Vincent Solano, a labor union leader and reputed rackets boss for the North Side and the northern suburbs.

Police and federal officials speculated Thursday that the list of likely successors to Glitta`s porn interests includes Johnny Matassa, a Solano protege, as well as Orlando Catanese and Leo Weintraub, two men described as manufacturers and sellers of books, magazines, films and sexual paraphernalia, and business associates of mob figures. Matassa, 37, recently has been observed regularly accompanying Glitta to meetings with Solano, according to federal investigators. Solano oversees Local 1 of the Laborers Union, and Matassa is a $75,000-a-year executive with Laborers Union Local 2, whose members include sewer and tunnel workers.

Although Glitta was regarded by authorities as the mob`s top man in the distribution of pornography, there have been recent indications his power was waning. A recently disclosed FBI investigation, described in a court affidavit, contended that reputed mob terrorist Frankie Schweihs had moved in on one North Wells Street pornography shop and was planning to take over another. Both would normally have been in Glitta`s territory, police said.

With federal court approval, the FBI secretly taped conversations between Schweihs and a former porn dealer from whom he was collecting protection money on behalf of the mob, the affidavit said. On one tape, the dealer, concerned about being caught in a mob territorial dispute, asked Schweihs to talk to Glitta. Schweihs told him that he didn`t talk to Glitta, but to Glitta`s boss, who was not named in the conversation. As a result of the tapes, Schweihs was charged with extortion.

At the time of his death, Glitta was awaiting trial in Chicago on federal charges of illegally possessing two .38 caliber revolvers. Glitta`s family said a funeral was planned for Monday.

Reported by John O'Brien

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