Jail for the Pro

Caught by a voice from the past

New Jersey Teamster boss. Ruler of the Newark docks. Feared Mafia avenger. Anthony ("Tony Pro") Provenzano, 61, is all of these and more. In fact, his underworld influence is so vast that some Justice Department officials regard him as the nation's most powerful racketeer.

Last week, however, Tony Pro was convicted of murder by a jury in Kingston, N.Y., and sent to languish among the other losers in an upstate jail. Found guilty of murder with him was Harold ("Kayo") Konigsberg, 56, a New Jersey loan shark and extortionist.

According to testimony at the trial, Provenzano in 1961 tapped Konigsberg, Salvatore ("Sally Bugs") Briguglio and Salvatore ("Big Sal") Sinno to kill a union rival, Anthony Castellito. They lured the victim to his own summer home in the Catskills, knocked him out with a lead-filled hose and strangled him with a rope. His body has never been found.

When Konigsberg next met his boss, they hugged and kissed, and Konigsberg received an envelope stuffed with $15,000. Sinno also attended the friendly gathering. But within a few months, he became convinced that Provenzano was out to get him, too; he thereupon fled to the Midwest, where he hid under several aliases.

The investigation into the case soon stalled. But when Provenzano went to Lewisburg Penitentiary in 1966 for shaking down a trucking firm executive, he became embroiled in a vendetta with a fellow inmate, former Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa, who had enraged Tony Pro by denying him a union pension. Both were eventually set free, and mob leaders summoned Hoffa to a peacemaking conference with Provenzano in a Detroit parking lot on July 30, 1975. Hoffa has not been seen since.

In the course of hunting for Hoffa, Justice Department officials picked up a tip that Big Sal Sinno, who was then living in Wisconsin, might be willing to implicate Provenzano in the murder of Castellito. Investigators also tried to induce Briguglio to turn state's evidence; he was shot to death last March in Manhattan. But the FBI guarded Sinno carefully, and last week, as police marksmen patrolled the courthouse, he was the prosecution's star witness.

Justice Department officials think that the conviction may mark the end of the line for Tony Pro. They plan to ask the courts in New Jersey to keep him from regaining his union power, if he manages to leave prison, where he could spend the rest of his life. Moreover, Tony Pro may encounter the vengeance of Mafia leaders. But FBI officials believe that even the threat of death would not persuade Tony Pro to tell them about the Hoffa case. Said one investigator: "Pro has many faults --but talking isn't one of them."

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