National Affairs: Pushcart Upsetter

As a boy on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, John Dioguardi used to extort his spending money by tipping over pushcarts until harried street peddlers paid him to lay off. Payoffs got bigger later on, but essentially Johnny Dio remained a pushcart upsetter. Many a New York City ‘trucking firm decided that it would be cheaper to slip a Dio mobster a few grand than to get stink bombs hurled into trucks or emery powder sneaked into motor oil. In recent years, armed with “paper local” labor-union charters obtained with the friendly conspiracy of Teamster Big Wheel Jimmy Hoffa, Dio collected wads of cash from employers in return for promising freedom from strikes, picket lines and other union nuisances.

When he showed his baggy-eyed cine-mobster’s face on TV (TIME, Aug. 19) as a 140-time Fifth Amendment pleader before the Senate labor rackets investigating committee, arrogant, carefully tailored Johnny Dio, 43, seemed to have made crime pay pretty well: society had not managed to pin a hard rap on him since he served three years in Sing Sing for extortion back in 1937-40. Last week the law pushed over Johnny Dio’s well-stocked applecart. In Manhattan, a General Sessions Court judge sentenced Dio and two of his henchmen, Max Chester and Samuel Goldstein, to two years’ imprisonment and a $1,000 fine apiece. Their offense: conspiracy and bribery in taking $10,000, plus a promise of $20,000 more, from the proprietors of two electroplating firms in 1955 and 1956 as the price of a worthless guarantee to stop the “labor trouble,” i.e., collective-bargaining demands, the firms were having with a United Electrical Workers local. Ahead of Dio loomed further trials on charges of 1) extorting $11,500 from two New York City merchants,, 2) evading federal income taxes, and 3) plotting the 1956 acid-blinding of Manhattan Labor Columnist Victor Riesel.

There was one thing that Johnny Dio did not have to worry about. James Riddle Hoffa, who is about to be elected president of the most powerful labor union in the U.S., the 1,400,000-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters, had promised to help out Dio’s family while he is in prison.