Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano was born in 1917 on New York City's Lower East Side, one of six sons in a Sicilian family. He migrated early to New Jersey, where he operated for the rest of his life. By the early 1950s, he had been identified as a top labor racketeer and New Jersey hoodlum.
Mob lore holds that Anthony "Tony Bender" Strollo gave Provenzano his big break, taking a liking to the young hood and placing him into Teamsters Local 560. Two of Tony Pro's brothers, Salvatore "Sammy Pro" and Nunzio "Nunzi Pro," also became Teamsters officials and lifelong partners in his activities. Sammy was said to have been an inducted soldier, while Nunzio was an associate.
Provenzano's criminal activities included labor union racketeering, extortion, embezzlement, loansharking, strongarm enforcement, murder, gambling, truck hijacking, and counterfeiting. He earned a notorious reputation for savagery and viciousness and was well known to authorities. Although some sources list him as a captain at times, Button Guys reports he was never more than a formally inducted soldier. Even so, Tony was a top figure in the mob, a highly feared and respected top earner, and a loyal member.
Strollo was initially said to have been Provenzano's rabbi. In later years he was close with Jerry Catena, and by the mid-1970s he was said to be under captain Matthew "The Horse" Ianiello.
Tony Pro joined the Teamsters as a Depression-era truck driver. Through muscle and shrewd maneuvers, he fought his way into the top ranks of the crime-riddled union. His path was strewn with violent election campaigns, federal and state investigations, the disappearances and mysterious deaths of union opponents, free homes and Cadillacs, large salaries, the animosity of racket busters, and the respect of union men.
Over the years, Tony and his loyal minions infiltrated and corrupted several key locals of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to their very core. Teamsters Local 560 was always the primary base of operations, and the local the Provenzano family treated as its own private dynasty. Tony held various union posts there, including organizer, business agent, vice president, and secretary-treasurer, until he was expelled from the union and barred from holding any position because of a federal labor racketeering conviction.
In his absence, Tony Provenzano ensured that Local 560 employed several members of his own blood family, either as labor officials or as an office manager. Behind his rise and fall lay a shadowy world of associates whose talents included beating other men with hammers, selling labor peace to the trucking industry, and using graft, guns, garbage grinders, and incinerators to make enemies disappear.
During his rise on the local and later national labor scene, Tony Pro ran into resistance several times. He usually had his henchmen mercilessly beat opponents into submission, or, as happened in one case, made an opposition leader permanently disappear, until he had ironclad control of all Teamsters operations in northern New Jersey.
The massive 13,000-member Local 560, based in Union City, was the premier trucking local in New Jersey and the largest truckers local in the New York area as well. It was a powerhouse, and whoever controlled it was a powerhouse. Tony Pro eventually became head of the Teamsters Joint Council of New Jersey, giving him pivotal control of Teamsters operations in the Northeast.
He became an intimate of International Brotherhood of Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa in Detroit, the home base of the international union. Provenzano could and did ensure that votes always swung Hoffa's way in order to keep secure his coveted post as president. This also gave the mob control over that position, as well as the puppeteers who pulled Hoffa's strings behind the scenes.
Several Mafia families worked in unison toward this effort. The Detroit borgata had the official claim to Hoffa, as he was their boy, but his position was far from a sure thing without key votes from heavily populated districts like the New York and New Jersey region and other states. Hence Hoffa's request and plea for help from his friends' friends, men with names like Johnny Dio, Tony Ducks, and Tony Pro.
These men kept Hoffa in power. He provided them with multiple charters during the late 1940s to early 1950s to form paper locals. This gave mafiosi authority to create and run their own unions as they wished. In actuality, paper locals had no members and a phantom rank and file, but they allowed the union hierarchy to cast votes Hoffa's way when national union elections came up. It made it seem as though the bulk of the rank and file, several million votes, wanted Hoffa, and it always ensured that Hoffa and the mob stayed at the helm of union power.
As a side note, the vast majority of the union's real rank and file did indeed love Hoffa. He was a great president and leader and did more positive things for the men than anyone expected a leader could achieve. But federal authorities hated him, most notably Attorney General Bobby Kennedy.
Soon the five families and the Mafia across the country had ironclad control of union locals that organized many major industries, including trucking, warehousing, manufacturing, garbage carting, garment, machinery, and jewelry, to name but a few. Local 560 was a major piece of this nationwide Mafia mosaic, and Tony and his brother Sammy Pro were entrusted by the Genovese hierarchy to watch the candy store for their borgata.
Tony Provenzano would spend years in various courts and prisons, starting with a 1963 conviction for extortion that sent him to prison for seven years. Over the years he had a small but dedicated crew of henchmen that included his two brothers, Salvatore and Nunzio; Salvatore "Sally Bugs" Briguglio; Stephen and Thomas Andretta; Armand "Cookie" Falgno; Ralph "Little Ralphie" Picardo; Philip "Brother" Moscato; and Harold "K.O." Konigsberg.
In 1975, after the disappearance and presumed gangland murder of Jimmy Hoffa, Tony Provenzano almost immediately became the prime suspect, along with Detroit capo Anthony "Tony Jack" Giacalone. One of the most intensive FBI investigations in U.S. history failed to unearth Hoffa or uncover the mysteries surrounding the suspected killing. Federal authorities did their best to pursue Tony Pro and his close associates in every possible way, trying either to turn a cooperating witness or to punish those suspected in Hoffa's death.
In the coming weeks and months, Provenzano was indicted repeatedly. In 1975, he and mob figures Lawrence "Fat Larry" Paladino and Anthony "Tony Bender" Bentro were indicted for attempting to influence, by bribe, a trustee of the Teamsters pension fund to approve a $2.3 million loan for the Woodstock Hotel in New York City. They would have received a huge kickback had it gone through. Tony Pro was convicted of these charges after trial and sentenced to four years in prison.
In 1977, Tony was charged in the 1961 kidnapping and murder of Anthony "Three Fingers" Castellito, another hoodlum figure vying for a leadership position in Local 560. At the time, Castellito was challenging Provenzano for the presidency of the local. Provenzano would eventually be convicted of this murder along with his associate Harold Konigsberg and sentenced to 25 years to life in state prison, to be served consecutively to his federal racketeering conspiracy conviction.
The story goes, at least according to trial testimony, that back in 1961 Provenzano had paid Konigsberg, a freelance mob enforcer and convicted loanshark, $15,000 to kill Castellito. Konigsberg, Salvatore Briguglio, who himself was murdered just a year before this case went to trial, and three other men allegedly lured Castellito to his own summer home in upstate New York, hit him with a lead pipe, and strangled him to death with piano wire. His body was never found.
As a side note, back in 1963 another rival of Tony Pro named Walter Glockner was shot to death in Hoboken, New Jersey, just two days into Provenzano's trial for extorting cash for labor peace. Glockner had worked for the Dorne Transportation Company, the same company Provenzano had been accused of extorting.
In 1979, he was convicted a second time on extortion and federal racketeering counts and received an additional 10 years in federal prison. He began this jail term in 1980.
In 1984, a federal judge effectively fired the entire executive board of Tony Pro's Local 560 after finding the corruption-ridden union guilty of intimidating its members through murders, threats, and economic reprisals. It was the first time the government used the RICO Act to remove corrupt union officials. In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Harold Ackerman wrote that the group of gangsters, aided and abetted by relatives and sycophants, engaged in a multi-faceted orgy of criminal activity. Ackerman replaced the executive board with a court-appointed trustee, marking the end of the house that Tony Provenzano built.
Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano died of a heart attack on December 12, 1988, at a local hospital near Lompoc federal prison, where he had been serving his sentence for his extortion conviction. He was 71 years old.