Labor: Tony Pro Takes a Tumble

Next to Jimmy Hoffa, there is no terrible Teamster whom Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department would rather put away than Anthony (“Tony Pro”) Provenzano, 46, the chunky, highly paid boss of Local 560 in Hoboken, N.J. As counsel for the Senate Rackets Committee in 1959, Bobby himself first put the national finger on Tony by quizzing him about payoffs from trucking officials in return for labor peace. When court-appointed federal monitors supervised the Teamsters for a time, Provenzano was one of three officials they ordered Hoffa to fire. Instead, Hoffa elevated Tony to a vice-presidency of the International.

Boastfully parading Hoffa’s friendship Tony Pro beat back every challenge by Hoboken Teamsters who objected to his terrorizing rule of the local. When the dissidents met, bullets whizzed warningly past their meeting place. Tony’s more outspoken critics were battered by thugs. With less than half of his 14,000 members turning out for elections, Tony kept winning. But last week he lost in a place where it really hurt: a federal courtroom.

Tony was charged with extorting $17,100 between 1952 and 1959 from Walter A. Dorn, president of Dorn Transportation Co., in Rensselaer, N.Y. At the trial, Dorn testified to the payments. Most of them were made, he said, to Michael G. Communale, a dismissed Hudson County assistant prosecutor who was placed on the Dorn payroll at Provenzano’s insistence. Communale testified that he received the money, even though he performed no legal services for Dorn. Tony, outwardly confident of acquittal, acted bored during most of the testimony, coddled his chin with a well-manicured hand, his little finger aglitter with a huge diamond. On the stand, Tony was so evasively garrulous that his own lawyer asked the judge: “Please make that man answer the questions. All he’s doing now is prolonging this business.” The jury ended it by finding Provenzano guilty. He can be sentenced to 20 years, fined up to $10,000.

Carefully kept from the locked-up jury was an even more unsavory aspect of life—and death—in Tony’s union. During the trial, Walter Glockner, 27, a Dorn driver, Teamster steward, and a Pro foe, got into an argument with one of Tony’s relatives at a union meeting, knocked him to the floor. Next morning Glockner was shot to death as he left his Hoboken home for work. He died just a week before he was to have kept an appointment with Justice Department officials to tell what he knew about the local.

Asked about the slaying, Provenzano protested to newsmen: “I loved the guy. He looked just like my son. Those dimples. That smile. I practically raised him. I saved his job I don’t know how many times. He was accident-prone.”