In June 1978 a jury in Kingston, New York, found Anthony Provenzano guilty of murder. The death at issue was seventeen years old. Anthony Castellito had been a rival inside Teamsters Local 560, the New Jersey local that Provenzano had run for most of two decades, and he was killed in the Catskills region of New York on June 6, 1961. The prosecution's case rested on a man who said he had taken part, and on that witness's account of a meeting afterward at which an envelope holding $15,000 changed hands. Provenzano and his co-defendant, Harold Konigsberg, were both convicted. On June 21, 1978, Provenzano was sentenced to life imprisonment.
By then he had already served one federal prison term and was facing two more federal cases. His career in the union is a long run of courtrooms: a Hobbs Act extortion conviction in New Jersey in 1963, a kickback conspiracy conviction in Manhattan in March 1978, the murder verdict in Kingston three months later, and a racketeering conviction in New Jersey in 1979 that brought a 20-year federal sentence. A New York appeals court set the murder verdict aside in 1979 and ordered a new trial, but the federal courts that reviewed his later cases treated the murder conviction and the life sentence as standing. In 1984 a federal judge in New Jersey found that the 1961 killing had been one of the acts by which Provenzano and the men around him held Local 560, and in 1985 the federal appeals court in Philadelphia agreed. He died in federal custody in California in December 1988, at the age of 71.
Provenzano was born about 1917; he was 46 when a federal jury convicted him in June 1963, 61 at the Kingston verdict and 71 at his death. His working life belonged to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and above all to Local 560, a trucking local based first in Hoboken and later in Union City, New Jersey. In 1963 the local had about 14,000 members. By the late 1980s it counted some 13,000 and ranked as the third-largest Teamsters local in the country.
He was already an officer of the local in the early 1950s, when he and another officer of the local called on trucking companies with union contracts bearing his signature. He sat on its executive board, and in 1962 the members re-elected him president. The local's affairs drew federal attention well before any charge was filed. In 1959 the chief counsel of the Senate Rackets Committee questioned him in public about payments that trucking executives had made in exchange for labor peace. Court-appointed federal monitors later ordered the international union to remove Provenzano and two other officials. The union's president did the opposite and made Provenzano a vice-president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
The local paid him well, and it paid him on his own terms. In December 1962 the executive board raised his salary from $20,800 to $45,800, and in February 1963 it raised it again to $95,000, although he had told the members he would not accept the increases. A federal court later held that those raises, and the payments that followed, were taken from the members by extortion.
The first case that reached a verdict concerned Dorn's Transportation Company, a trucking firm based in Rensselaer, New York, with a terminal in Secaucus, New Jersey. A federal grand jury in New Jersey indicted Provenzano on November 15, 1960, in a single count under the Hobbs Act, the federal law against extortion affecting interstate commerce. The indictment charged that from January 1, 1952, to June 1, 1959, he had extorted $17,100 from the company and its vice-president.
The evidence at trial described a slowdown and a price. In 1952, drivers at the Secaucus terminal refused to back trucks into the loading bays, and the congestion lasted from four to nine weeks. When the company complained, it was told that "the men don't have to do this." The vice-president began paying Provenzano cash, $350 to $400 at a time, from the middle of 1952, and by the middle of 1953 the payments had settled at about $100 a month.
In 1953 Provenzano gave the vice-president the name of a lawyer who was then an assistant prosecutor in Hudson County. From June 1, 1953, to June 1, 1959, the company paid the lawyer $200 a month, booked as legal expenses. The vice-president never met him. At trial, the vice-president testified that most of the money had gone to that lawyer, and the lawyer, by then dismissed from his prosecutor's post, testified that he had received it and had done no legal work for the company. The appeals court later called the arrangement a "palpable cover-up device for successful extortion."
The trial opened in the federal court in New Jersey on May 23, 1963. The jury was sequestered, and the defense's motions for a mistrial were denied. Provenzano looked bored through most of the testimony. When he took the stand he was so evasive that his own lawyer asked the judge to direct him to answer the questions. The jury found him guilty in June 1963, on an offense that carried up to 20 years and a $10,000 fine, and he was sentenced on July 12, 1963. He filed his notice of appeal five minutes after the sentence was imposed.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit heard the appeal on March 12, 1964, and affirmed the conviction on June 30, 1964. It rejected each of his arguments in turn. The payments were one continuous scheme, so the five-year limitations period ran from the last of them, and the charge was not too late. It did not matter that most of the money had gone to the lawyer rather than to Provenzano: "It is enough that payments were made at the extortioner's direction to a person named by him," the court wrote, and "the gravamen of the offense is loss to the victim." The jury had been entitled to find that the company paid out of fear, because Provenzano had "held himself out to be in a position to slow down Dorn Company's business and did in fact do so." Against the claim that the monthly checks had simply run on by themselves, the court answered that his argument "seems to imply that a checkwriting machine has an animus of its own." Rehearing was denied on July 28, 1964.
A motion for a new trial followed. The district judge in New Jersey denied it in 1965, and on December 22, 1965, the Third Circuit affirmed that order in a short opinion that found no error in the record. Rehearing was denied on January 25, 1966.
Provenzano entered federal prison in the middle of 1966 and served his term at the federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania. The conviction carried a five-year bar on holding union office. The local did not let go of him. From 1969 to 1976, while he was in prison, members of the executive board paid him about $25,000 a year, roughly $197,850 in all. A federal court later found that those payments served no interest of the union.
He was released in the 1970s and returned to Local 560 as its secretary-treasurer. In 1976 the board voted him a pension of half his salary, which the local paid from 1979 to 1981, while he was again in custody.
The second federal conviction grew out of an undercover operation. Under the name Operation Cleveland, federal agents and New York City investigators set up a front trucking company in Manhattan's garment district, with a paid FBI informant as its president. In 1974 the operation was offered a $2.5 million mortgage for the Woodstock Hotel in Manhattan, to be funded by a union pension and welfare fund, at 1 percent monthly interest plus a "bonus" of 13 points, about $325,000. Part of the bonus was to go as a kickback to a trustee of the pension fund. Provenzano was present at a meeting on July 11, 1974, at which the kickback was discussed, and he was to share in the proceeds. The loan was never made, and the operation shut down in October 1974.
A federal grand jury in Manhattan indicted Provenzano on December 9, 1975, and returned a superseding indictment on September 21, 1977. On November 11, 1977, the district judge dismissed both indictments without prejudice after the informant gave equivocal testimony. The government went back to the grand jury, which returned a new indictment on December 19, 1977. The charge was conspiracy, under 18 U.S.C. section 371, to violate 18 U.S.C. section 1954, the law that forbids pension and welfare plan trustees to accept kickbacks and forbids anyone to offer or promise them.
The trial lasted seven days. It began on March 17, 1978, and the jury convicted Provenzano on March 25, 1978. A co-defendant was convicted with him and sentenced to 18 months, but that man later agreed to cooperate with the government and his conviction was ordered vacated. On July 11, 1978, Provenzano was sentenced to four years in prison, to run concurrently with the life sentence that the state of New York had imposed three weeks earlier.
The victim was a rival inside Local 560 and, in the federal court's later finding, a threat to Provenzano's control of the local. He died on June 6, 1961, and the case did not come to court for most of two decades. It was tried in Kingston, the seat of Ulster County, New York, in June 1978, with Provenzano and Konigsberg as co-defendants. A third man, S.B., had been charged with them. He had been appointed a business agent of Local 560 in September 1961, three months after the death. He died in Manhattan in March 1978, before the trial, while under indictment for the murder.
The prosecution's chief witness was S.S., who testified that he had been one of the men Provenzano recruited in 1961, along with Konigsberg and S.B. He told the jury that after the death Konigsberg met Provenzano, that the two men embraced, and that Konigsberg was handed an envelope holding $15,000. S.S. said he was present at that meeting. He testified that he later came to fear for his own safety, and that he fled to the Midwest and lived under several names. During the trial the FBI kept him under close protection, and police guarded the courthouse.
The jury convicted both defendants of murder. Provenzano was sentenced on June 21, 1978, to life imprisonment, and he was sent from Kingston to jail upstate.
Provenzano appealed to the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court, Third Department. In 1979 that court reversed the murder conviction and remanded the case for a new trial, in People v. Provenzano, 70 A.D.2d 960. The reversal did not end the matter. When the federal appeals courts reviewed his later convictions in 1980, they listed the murder conviction among his prior convictions, and in 1985 the Third Circuit described him as having been sentenced to life imprisonment for his part in the murder. When he died in 1988 he was in federal custody.
The third federal case was brought in New Jersey under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO. It concerned Interocean Services, Inc., and its successor, Di-Jub Leasing Corporation, the in-house trucking companies of Seatrain Lines, Inc., a large shipping concern. The scheme, as the government proved it, ran on what the court called labor peace. A front company supplied Interocean with trucks and drivers so that the shipper could avoid unionizing its own workforce. The front company billed Interocean for drivers who never worked, and the money went to Provenzano's group. Local 560's influence was used to send drivers to the front company, where they worked for low wages and no benefits. The proceeds were divided four ways, with one share to Provenzano.
The scheme came to light when one of the group's members agreed to cooperate with the government, and he became its chief witness. A jury at a joint trial in New Jersey convicted Provenzano and his co-defendants of conspiracy to violate RICO, under 18 U.S.C. section 1962, and of substantive RICO violations. On July 10, 1979, Provenzano was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison and fined, and he was denied bail. Two co-defendants received 20 years and 10 years.
The Third Circuit heard the appeals on March 25, 1980, and affirmed every conviction on May 8, 1980. It held that a group associated for purely illegal ends could be an "enterprise" under RICO, declining "to construe the RICO statute so as to allow the appellants a defense." On Provenzano's own appeal it found the evidence sufficient, though it remarked that the proof against him "is not overwhelming": the witness's account, if believed, showed that he knew of the scheme, approved it and shared in its profits. The court also upheld the trial judge's ruling on his record. The jury had been allowed to hear of his Hobbs Act conviction and his kickback conspiracy conviction when weighing his credibility, while the murder conviction had been kept from them.
The Second Circuit heard Provenzano's appeal from the kickback conviction on September 17, 1979, and affirmed it on January 16, 1980. The government did not have to prove that the pension trustee ever received or was even offered a kickback; it was enough that Provenzano knowingly joined the agreement. The court described conspiracy as "concert in criminal purposes, rather than concert in crime." It rejected his complaints about the jury charge, including the claim that the jurors should have been specially cautioned about the informant. On his main claim, that the government had withheld material he could have used against a witness who identified his voice, the court found no reasonable likelihood that the material would have changed the outcome, because his lawyers would not have cross-examined that witness under any circumstances. Questioning him risked opening the door to damaging testimony. The panel said its decision on that point turned "on the unique facts of this case," and it closed: "Appellant was convicted after a fair trial on the basis of substantial evidence of a serious crime."
With Provenzano in prison on the federal sentences, the government turned to the local itself. It sued Local 560, its executive board and the group of men around Provenzano under the civil provisions of RICO. Before trial Provenzano entered a consent order with the government, which barred him from union and related activity, and he was dropped as a defendant. The case against the others went to a bench trial in the federal court in New Jersey, with 51 days of testimony in 1983.
The district court's findings put the 1961 death at the center of the local's history. It found that Provenzano had recruited Konigsberg and S.B. to kill the victim, who threatened his control of the union, and that in September 1961 Provenzano and other board members had appointed S.B. a business agent knowing what he had done. It found that the salary increases of 1962 and 1963, the payments of 1969 to 1976 and the pension voted in 1976 had been extortion of the members' rights under federal labor law. The defendants argued that the 1961 murder was too old to count as one of the predicate acts of racketeering; the court rejected that argument. In its order of March 16, 1984, the court removed the executive board and directed that a temporary trustee run the local until free elections could be held. It stayed that order pending appeal.
The Third Circuit heard argument on February 12, 1985, and on December 26, 1985, it affirmed the order "in all respects." It held that the Hobbs Act reaches the intangible rights of union members, that the salary and pension payments to Provenzano had been properly found to be extortion, and that a trustee was within the district court's equitable powers. The membership, the court said, was not being punished: "By appointing a temporary trustee, the district court was therefore protecting rather than forfeiting the members' rights." The court dissolved the stay and sent the case back for the trustee to be appointed.
The murder conviction rested in large part on the testimony of a man who described himself as one of the men recruited for the killing. The Appellate Division reversed the conviction in 1979 and ordered a new trial. The federal courts that later referred to the case, in 1980 and 1985, treated the conviction and the life sentence as standing.
The federal courts that tried Provenzano's later cases were cautious about the strength of some of the evidence. In the Seatrain appeal the Third Circuit called the proof against him "not overwhelming," while finding it sufficient for the jury's verdict. In the Manhattan case the first two indictments were dismissed after the informant's testimony wavered, and the conviction came only on a third indictment.
The victim's death was never the subject of any other conviction against Provenzano. The civil court's finding in 1984 that he recruited the killers was made in a case to which he was no longer a party, after he had consented to the order barring him from union activity.
Provenzano died in federal custody in California in December 1988, at the age of 71. He was serving the 20-year federal sentence for the two racketeering conspiracy offenses in the Seatrain case.
1952 to 1959: Dorn's Transportation Company makes the payments later charged as Hobbs Act extortion.
1959: The chief counsel of the Senate Rackets Committee questions Provenzano in public about payments from trucking executives.
November 15, 1960: A federal grand jury in New Jersey indicts him on one Hobbs Act count.
June 6, 1961: The victim is killed in the Catskills region of New York.
September 1961: S.B. is appointed a business agent of Local 560.
1962: Provenzano is re-elected president of Local 560.
December 1962 and February 1963: The board raises his salary to $45,800 and then to $95,000.
May 23, 1963: The Hobbs Act trial opens in federal court in New Jersey.
June 1963: The jury convicts him.
July 12, 1963: He is sentenced and files notice of appeal.
June 30, 1964: The Third Circuit affirms; rehearing is denied July 28, 1964.
December 22, 1965: The Third Circuit affirms the denial of a new trial; rehearing is denied January 25, 1966.
Mid-1966: He enters federal prison in Pennsylvania.
1969 to 1976: Board members pay him about $197,850 while he is in prison.
July 11, 1974: He attends a meeting at which a pension-fund kickback is discussed.
October 1974: Operation Cleveland shuts down.
December 9, 1975: First Manhattan indictment.
November 11, 1977: Both Manhattan indictments are dismissed without prejudice.
December 19, 1977: New Manhattan indictment.
March 1978: S.B. dies in Manhattan, under indictment for the murder.
March 25, 1978: A Manhattan jury convicts him of conspiracy to violate 18 U.S.C. 1954.
June 1978: A Kingston jury convicts him and Harold Konigsberg of murder.
June 21, 1978: He is sentenced to life imprisonment.
July 11, 1978: He is sentenced to four years in the Manhattan case, concurrent with the life term.
1979: The Appellate Division reverses the murder conviction and orders a new trial.
July 10, 1979: He is sentenced to 20 years in the Seatrain RICO case.
January 16, 1980: The Second Circuit affirms the kickback conviction.
May 8, 1980: The Third Circuit affirms the RICO convictions.
1983: Bench trial of the civil RICO case against Local 560.
March 16, 1984: The district court removes the board and orders a trustee.
December 26, 1985: The Third Circuit affirms the order in all respects.
December 1988: Provenzano dies in federal custody in California, aged 71.