So these guys were major players who controlled one portion of Chicago's hauling industry during that particular decade, but the thing is that none of them lasted for more then 5 or 6 years in the business.
Still, there were some smaller hauling Outfit-connected firms who knew how to exploit their Mafia connections in taking over the business, and to dominate on that same field for several decades. One of those "small" players was Tony Barbara who was connected to the Chinatown crew.
Anthony Bruno Barbara was born in 1927 in Chicago, and in 1949 he married to Josephine Roti and through the years, they received two sons Fred and Bruno. Josephine was the daughter of Bruno Roti Sr, the old time boss of Chinatown and the whole South Side.
This was one quite interesting family, meaning most of the family members were in the Mob, starting from Roti Sr and his brother Sam, followed by Sr's son Fred Roti, and also two sons-in-law Frank Caruso and Tony Barbara. When Roti Sr died in 1957, Caruso became head of the Chinatown clan.
In 1964, Barbara bought his first hauling truck and quickly began receiving deals all around Chinatown and the Near South Side, obviously with the help of his family connections. In no time, Barbara switched to a different business and bought 4 towing trucks and opened up his own leasing firm at 22nd and Canal St.
Everything went smooth until 1966, when the goverment blamed Barbara for licensing violations but the biggest problem was that Barabara had a big mouth, meaning when Tribune reporters visited him, the guy constantly talked about his political connections in the First Ward such as Fred Roti, and also about his close relationship with Caruso.
This was a huge "no, no" for Barbara and theres not much info out there on how the whole situation ended up, but its quite possible that his license was revoked.
It is interesting to note that while the reporters made several trips to Barbara's firm, and during one of those visits they noticed a new 1967 model maroon sports car parked in the truck yard, and in it was Barbara's son Fred.
After almost 10 years, or in 1975, Fred Barbara started working as a simple garbage truck driver. After two years, Barbara bought two more garbage trucks and formed his first company known as A. Barbara Trucking Co.
His uncle Fred Roti was already the First Ward Alderman at the time, and so he decided to help his nephew by pulling few strings here and there, thus giving him few city deals just to get him started.
From that point on, Fred Barbara had no problems in getting city deals for garbage hauling and the reality was that some of those deals may have been highly lucrative, meaning millions of dollars. Proof for that is when only a year later Barbara opened up another hauling firm known as the F. Barbara Trucking Co. at 3260 South Damen Avenue.
It was a time when many Democratic leaders and friends or associates of the Roti crime family became owners of hauling firms and divided the contracts between themselves. When Chicago’s Democratic Machine was at its highest level, politicians and other corrupted government people gave the ward controlled distribution of city services to give priority to those loyal to the party.
For example, John P. Touhy was the chairman of the State Central Democratic Committee and at the same time was owner of the McKay Contractors hauling firm. During the winter of 1979, the city of Chicago was struck by a huge snowy blizzard and all of the streets were blocked because of the huge amounts of snow.
Now the city’s Acting Comptroller was Anthony Fratto, also long time associate and protégé of the Roti crime family, who ordered payments totalling $200,000 to 10 firms that allegedly did snow-removal work after the paralyzing blizzard.
But someone informed the Justice Department that the city deals were in fact fraudulent and so all of the payments had been held up. The investigators also learned that larger part of the payments were planned for four firms including Fred Barbara’s two hauling companies, John Touhy’s company and D & B Trucking, whose owner Edward Norton, was fired for refusing to cooperate with a police investigation of the frauds.
According to government reports, all of these firms were under federal investigation but the thing was that if a person was cynical about politics, such as the average Chicagoan, than he or she would assume that the government reports were based more on clout than on performance.
The main difficulty or problem for the government was that not all of hauling firms were under federal investigation and with that, it was hardly fair to withhold payment from all 10 firms on the chance that the Justice Department might get around to charging some of them with fraud.
So two years later, in 1981, Fratto made a classic Chicago-style scandal and ordered all of the payments to be paid to the hauling firms. As for the snow, it mostly melted by itself.
Back in 1979, the Capo of Chinatown Frank Caruso was already gone from the scene and was replaced by Angelo LaPietra. Now Barbara and LaPietra also knew each other since the old days, and my personal belief is that during next few years Barbara has tightened his Outfit connections in the garbage business more than ever and according to some accounts, by 1983 he was considered as close associate of the Outfit by LE.
During this period, together with his cousin Frank Caruso Jr, the son of Frank Caruso Sr, Barbara also got involved in the loan sharking business or as the Chicago slang goes, the juice racket. Since he had a lot of cash, he only gave large loans with high interest mostly to truck companies that needed large amounts of fast cash and politicians with bad habits such as gambling.
After awhile Barbara was arrested together with Caruso on charges for trying to collect an illegal high-interest loan from an undercover FBI agent. They were arrested at the bar in Lake Point Tower on December 6, 1982, together with another Outfit guy such as Joseph LaMantia, “servant” to Outfit boss Angelo LaPietra, and LaMantia's son, Aldo Piscitelli Jr.
The plan was for them to meet the undercover agent at the bar, who was posing as someone refusing to repay an illegal, high-interest $20,000 juice loan. Allegedly LaMantia had threatened the agent to "cut his heart out'' and to "stick his head with an icepick'' if the loan wasn't repaid.
When the cops questioned Barbara, he had no identification and told the feds that his name was "Frank Bruno Russo,'' but later one of the officers found a gun in Barbara’s vehicle and took him to the station. During the trial, Barbara's lawyer argued that his client never made a threat' to the agent and that he was just enjoying a video game at that bar'. Prosecutors later added that Barbara’s firm was deeply involved in illegal gambling with the Outfit's Chinatown or 26th Street Crew.
Barbara told the prosecutors "Show me my connection to organized crime. Did I turn the corner? You show me anything in the last 24 years that reflects to that nature." I believe that this time Barbara was in a tough spot because he was probably the prime money maker for the organization through the garbage business but he got lucky when some of his friends in the political world such as the Mayor of Chicago reacted and Barbara together with his cousin and the Outfit friend were found not guilty.
According to this, Barbara had gangster qualities and also sense for violence. In one accident, one of Barbara's truck drivers accused his boss of hitting him with a big piece of wood while they were at Barbara's trucking offices in July 1988.
Another proof for Barbara’s deep involvement with the Outfit was his presence together with LaPietra, James DiForti and other Outfit hoodlums in a car while watching the bombing of a certain restaurant in the Elmwood Park area. According to some reports, Barbara was in fact a “self-made man”, whatever that means.
During the late 1980’s, while the Outfit’s top administration suffered terrible losses, Barbara’s lucky star in the garbage business shined like never before. In 1988, the city of Chicago has decided to award Barbara with a multimillion-dollar ash hauling contract, or in other words, 10 million dollars depending on the amount of waste which was planned to be hauled.
With this Barbara became the number one garbage hauler in the “Windy city” but with the glory came huge enviousness from the low bidder minority company that was unfairly overlooked because of Barbara’s connections to Outfit member Fred Roti. The first question which was asked was on why the contract was awarded to the highest bidder when there was a legitimate minority owned firm?
The opposition also added that the Barbara Trucking had controversial history involving its hauling contracts with the city because of Barbra’s close association with Alderman Roti. Suddenly Barbara’s close associates came on the scene such as Streets and Sanitation Commissioner John Halpin, who defended the awarding of the contract to Barbara by saying that even though the bid was higher, Barbara was the person who more closely fulfilled the requirements of the contract and when it came to garbage, he was the man to find the dumps.
Even Fred Barbara himself defended the awarding of the contract to his company by saying that he had nothing against the Big '0' Movers firm but the problem was that they were trying to perform job where they had no experience or capability.
But one little “dirt” that came out of the problem was his already known associations to Roti and also some records showed that Barbara was one of Washington's highest political contributors. Many people at the time weren’t aware of the fact that guys like Roti, and possibly Barbara, were members of the Mob, but some knew that at least they were acquainted with the underworld.
This became a huge scandal when some West Side activists declared open war on City Hall following the decision by Mayor Eugene Sawyer's administration to award the multi-million ash hauling contract to Barbara.
"We are not stupid," said Nancy Jefferson, chairman of the Midwest Community Council. "We are not asleep, and we’re able to go to open war if that’s what City Hall wants and if that’s what it takes to get what’s rightfully ours. Big '0' Movers is by people from this community, Big '0' Movers was legally, openly and fairly the low bidder for this contract, and Big '0' movers is going to get this contract" Jefferson said at a press conference attended by about 50 West Side activists and businessmen.
Joseph Banks, executive director of the Midwest Community Council, said "This is a time when we want to see contractors from our community get contracts." But in the end nothing ever changed and the money stayed with Barbara, while the Outfit was laughing far from the shadows.
While everyone in Chicago’s underworld was enjoying the taste of Barbara’s sweet cash from the garbage business, the FBI was preparing for a plan to strike the Outfit straight in the “heart of corruption” which was Fred Roti himself. In 1990, Barbara’s main connection to his multi-million dollar business 1st Ward Alderman and Chicago Outfit member Fred Roti and four other Chicago Democrats were indicted for numerous acts of corruption, including racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, bribery, and extortion.
On January 15, 1993, Roti was found guilty and was sentenced to four years incarceration and served three years in a minimum-security prison in Oxford, Wisconsin followed by six months in a work-release program with the Salvation Army.
From that point on, Barbara “unexpectedly” slowly started seeing the bottom of his garbage firm which seemed to drop out in 1996. Barbara allegedly lost 30 percent of his city business that year, which was about 14 million dollars. This happened when City Hall gave a competitor, Waste Management Inc., a contract to run a recycling program in which Chicago homeowners put glass, bottles and paper into blue plastic bags.
A year later, Barbara sold his garbage hauling companies, the Fred Barbara Trucking, Shred-All Recycling garbage transfer station, Envirotech landfill in Downstate Morris and American Disposal Services, Inc. According to some reports, the sale was widely reported to be $58.5 million but the deal may have been far richer because some government reports say that in reality it was over 100 million dollars.
By 2017, Barbara was still involved in the garbage business with the help of his son, Anthony Jr who ran/runs City Wide Disposal Inc., a private garbage collector. These days, it seems that Fred Barbara runs a company called Fred Barbara Investments, and has a industrial park in Kankakee and other real estate investments in Florida and Texas.
Fred Barbara's father Anthony died back in 2015, at the age of 88, followed by his wife Josephine (nee Roti) in 2016.
Heres some photos...
Bruno Roti Sr
Frank Caruso
Fred Roti
Frank Caruso Jr
Fred Barbara
Fred Barbara on the left
"Recent" pic of Barbara
