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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Marco Glitta, Brother of Reputed Chicago Porn King, Gets 8 Years On Bomb Charge

Marco Glitta, brother of reputed crime syndicate pornography kingpin Michael Glitta, was sentenced to eight years in prison for purchasing remote-control bombs that investigators suspect were intended for competitors in the pornography business.

U.S. District Judge Milton Shadur branded Marco Glitta, a former Metropolitan Sanitary District employee, as a ``potential bomber-assassin`` who sought to purchase the bombs for a crime that was ``life-threatening and deliberate.``

Michael Mullen, an assistant U.S. attorney, disclosed at the sentencing hearing that federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms suspect that Michael Glitta ordered the bombs to kill Paula Lawrence, another reputed pornography business mogul and a rival of his, or to blow up a building housing Lawrence`s business.

Mullen noted that two of Lawrence`s buildings, in Aurora and Palatine, were damaged by fire last August, about the same time that Marco Glitta began seeking the bombs.

Mullen also said that during a government-administered lie-detector test, Marco Glitta had denied that the bombs were intended to harm anyone and denied that his brother had requested the devices. Both denials registered ``the strongest level of deception,`` Mullen said.

Glitta, 56, of 7926 Courtland St., Elmwood Park, contended that he intended to ``tinker`` with the bombs and never planned to use them for destructive purposes. He also denied that he was obtaining the devices for his brother.

In a plea for leniency, Glitta told Shadur, ``I have the highest regard for the law,`` and he contended that he was just kidding when he indicated to a member of the sanitary district police force that he wanted to use the devices for evil purposes.

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Prior to Mob Hit, Allen Dorfman Built Financial Empire through Teamsters #Solidarity

Allen M. Dorfman, the Chicago insurance executive who was slain yesterday in a hotel parking lot near Chicago, built a huge financial empire through close associations with leaders of the teamster's union that began more than 30 years ago.

Mr. Dorfman, who was 59 years old, went into the insurance business in 1949 to handle the health and welfare funds of one of the major branches of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Over the years he received millions in fees and commissions from the union.

His empire included insurance companies, condominium developments, resorts and other projects, and he had homes in suburban Chicago and Wisconsin, Florida and California.

Mr. Dorfman was convicted last month, along with the president of the teamsters' union, Roy L. Williams, and three others on Federal charges of conspiring to bribe Senator Howard W. Cannon, Democrat of Nevada, to delay or defeat a bill to deregulate rates for trucking freight. The measure eventually passed. Senator Cannon was not indicted in the case.

Mr. Dorfman had been free, pending sentencing, on a $5 million bond. He faced a maximum sentence of 55 years and a fine of $29,000. Forty Federal agents worked on the case for 14 months and recorded more than 2,000 reels of conversations. The operation was described by Federal investigators as the most elaborate in the history of electronic surveillance.

The Federal authorities named the multimillion-dollar effort Operation Pendorf, for Penetrate Dorfman, and said they hoped to prove links between Mr. Dorfman, the teamsters' pension fund and crime figures in Chicago and Las Vegas, Nev.

Mr. Dorfman had been a subject of extensive scrutiny by Federal agencies for at least 10 years. In 1972 he was convicted on a Federal charge of conspiring to facilitate a loan from the teamsters' Central States Pension Fund in return for a kickback of $55,000 and served nine months in jail.

Mr. Dorfman was indicted in three other cases, including one involving organized crime figures and a loan from the pension fund, but he was acquitted in each.

After his conviction in 1972, Mr. Dorfman was forced to relinquish his official relationship with the pension fund. However, through insurance companies that he controlled in Chicago, he continued to insure some of the fund's borrowers and also to process claims for the union's related health and welfare fund.

Mr. Dorfman was introduced in 1949 to James R. Hoffa, who later became the teamster president and subsequently disappeared in 1975. The introduction was made by Mr. Dorfman's stepfather, Paul (Red) Dorfman, a former prizefighter, associate of Al Capone and the head of Waste Handlers Union Local 20467 in Chicago.

At that time Mr. Hoffa was attempting to expand his base from Detroit. He reportedly turned to Paul Dorfman and his crime connections for assistance in Chicago.

In return, Mr. Hoffa saw to it that the teamsters' insurance business that he controlled went to a company that had been newly set up by Allen Dorfman and his mother, Rose.

Mr. Hoffa developed a close relationship with Paul and Allen Dorfman. Eventually, Mr. Hoffa and Allen Dorfman became partners in several businesses, including an oil property in North Dakota, a Wisconsin resort, an Ohio race track and a New York real-estate concern.

In the 1950's alone, according to Robert F. Kennedy, who later became United States Attorney General, Mr. Dorfman's insurance agency handled the premiums on nearly $100 million in teamsters' business. By 1978 Mr. Dorfman was getting $6.1 million a year for handling health and welfare alone.

Over the decade Mr. Hoffa ran the union, ending in 1967, when he went to prison for jury tampering and stealing union funds, Mr. Dorfman was regarded as the second most powerful man associated with the teamsters; he was said to have maintained that position when Frank E. Fitzsimmons took over from Mr. Hoffa in 1967.

When Mr. Hoffa went to prison, he was quoted as saying, ''When Dorfman speaks, he speaks for me.'' Mr. Dorfman graduated from Marshall High School on the West Side of Chicago. He attended the University of Illinois, but dropped out to enlist in the Marines and won a silver star at the battle of Iwo Jima.

Immediately before he started his first insurance company with his mother, he had been teaching physical education at the university. Five years later the teamsters' insurance business had made him a millionaire.

In addition his mother, Mr. Dorfman's survivors include his wife, Lynn;, three sons, James, Michael and David, and a daughter, Kim.

Thanks to Joseph B. Treaster

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