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News and Features about Organized Crime, Mafia and La Cosa Nostra taken from National and Local News Sources. In an attempt to get you this type of coverage in a timely manner we can not be responsible for the content of the following material. |
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2-23-01 Detroit mafia figure dies, leaves Hoffa mystery unanswered. Friday, February 23, 2001
BY JOE SWICKARD Detroit mob captain Anthony (Tony Jack) Giacalone died at St. John Hospital in Detroit Friday
Giacalone, 82, died under indictment on federal racketeering charges for a longtime role as a Mafia capo - a fearsome captain running street soldiers who shook down bookies and ran an array of shady schemes. With his younger brother, Vito (Billy Jack), he was often the menacing public face of the Detroit Outfit. Impeccably dressed and icy-eyed, Giacalone was a familiar figure striding through reporters and photographers who gathered to record his court appearances. ``He was the most dignified man I ever met,'' said Detroit lawyer N.C. Deday LaRene. Deteriorating health forced repeated postponements of Giacalone's trial, and recurring heart problems combined with failing kidneys forced him into the hospital in mid-February. Giacalone, of Clinton Township, rallied several times, but his body finally failed him. His family tried to shield his final days. Acting on family wishes, the hospital would only confirm that he was a patient, but withheld all other information. ``He was a great family man, a great father and grandfather,'' said lawyer William Bufalino II, who has participated in cases involving the Giacalone brothers. ``He was a fine gentleman and a fighter.'' Giacalone went from local strong-arm expert to national figure because of a date he didn't keep. Jimmy Hoffa - the former Teamsters leader hoping to make a comeback - was scheduled to meet with Giacalone when he vanished in 1975 from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Township. Giacalone never showed up and Hoffa was never seen again. Instead of going to the restaurant, Giacalone was instead seen uncharacteristically glad-handing his way around the Southfield Athletic Club. When a mutual friend called Giacalone with concerns about the missing Hoffa, Giacalone shrugged it off. ``Maybe he took a little trip,'' Giacalone said. Later, authorities seized his son Joey's Mercury as part of the Hoffa investigation. The discovery of blood inside the car raised investigators' hopes - until they learned the stains were fish blood. Giacalone kept frigid silence about Hoffa in the face of grand jurors, federal agents and bothersome reporters. ``The FBI's going have to get into heaven if they want to ask him any more questions,'' Bufalino said. Keith Corbett, chief prosecutor for the federal Organized Crime Strike Force in Detroit, said Giacalone is ``a figure who's certainly been mentioned in numerous reports about Jimmy Hoffa, but technically speaking, that's still an open investigation, so it would be inappropriate to say anything.'' Investigators say they believe Hoffa was lured to the restaurant for a peace-making meeting with New Jersey Teamsters leader Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano, also a member of the Genovese Mafia family. Instead, Hoffa was whisked away, according to a scenario laid out in secret FBI reports written soon after the disappearance, quickly murdered and his body disposed of the same day in a Detroit-area refuse processing plant. Giacalone kept up his usual routine after the disappearance, saying, according to the files, that he was ``not about to hide my head in a hole because of some lousy news stories.'' gfsubhedSometimes in custody Although he emerged unindicted from the Hoffa investigation, Giacalone was convicted in 1976 of income tax evasion after a seven-month trial that featured more than 250 witness, 3,900 exhibits and testimony about his 300 custom-made suits. He went to prison on a 10-year sentence. It was his first serious conviction despite a reputation as a career scoundrel. In the mid-1950s he served eight months in the Detroit House of Correction for trying to bribe a police officer and seven days for refusing to answer questions posed by a one-man state grand jury. He also served time for a 1979 extortion conviction. At the time of his death, he was facing 14 charges, including racketeering, conspiracy and extortion, laid out in a massive 1996 federal indictment spanning 30 years of Mafia activity in the Detroit area. FBI organizational charts of the Detroit mob placed him as a capo, a high-ranking position with duties to enforce orders and oversee control of street-level enterprises. His brother and fellow capo, Vito, facing similar charges from the indictment, pleaded guilty in 1998 to a single conspiracy count of collecting unlawful debts from sports gambling and racketeering. In his efforts to delay trial, Anthony Giacalone drew not only on Detroit's impressive array of criminal lawyers, he also reached out to Bruce Cutler from New York City. Cutler had won repeated acquittals for New York crime chief John Gotti. Even as an old man battling various ailments, Giacalone would fix photographers with a cold stare and march straight ahead, almost daring them to hold their ground to get his picture. It wasn't an act, said one person who declined to be named because of Giacalone's associations. ``He and his brother were very serious people,'' he said. ``They lived by their wits and loyalty - it's them and nobody else. They were men who got what they wanted.'' He said that while Vito Giacalone often masked his temper and capacity for violence behind a howya-doin' demeanor, Anthony Giacalone glowered for all to see. gfsubhedA humble beginning Anthony Giacalone learned his way around the streets of Detroit in an almost quaint fashion - perched on his father's horse-drawn vegetable wagon, selling produce door-to-door in fashionable Indian Village during the 1920s. He got down off the wagon and moved up in the world. The wagon gave way to Cadillacs, and the one-time pedlar moved to exclusive addresses in eastern suburbs. His improved addresses and transportation were carefully noted in FBI surveillance logs, along with his visitors and whispered coffee-shop conversations. The FBI also catalogued when he stopped his car to curse a television crew that was tailing him during the Hoffa investigation. When agents went to seize evidence, they came calling at his home at a gated condominium complex on Lake St. Clair. The Southfield Athletic Club was a favorite hangout, where he kept in shape with squash and handball games. He also took pride in his Tennessee walking horses, and neighbors around the Clinton Township condo where he lived in 1996 said that he loved tending his yard, calling it ``the most beautiful lawn in the complex.'' But federal agents said years of secret wiretaps showed that he wasn't just a horseman and flower hobbyist. Starting in the 1960s, bugs were planted in a Detroit office shared by the Giacalone brothers. Agents heard detailed discussions about mob leadership succession, bribes and plots, according to people familiar with tapes from the hidden microphones. Agents heard gambling losers trying desperately to avoid a beating, or even death, for an unpaid debt. The wiretap laws changed by the late 1960s, making the tapes technically illegal and inadmissible in court. Nevertheless, their contents were a guide to the Detroit mob. More recent FBI tapes - from bugs in associates' cars - showed younger gangsters chafing under the Giacalone brothers' rule. By the 1990s, according to the tapes, the youngbloods saw Anthony Giacalone, who once was the muscles behind the mob, as somebody set in his ways and unwilling to accept youth and change. The younger thugs may have mocked him - but never to his face.
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