Chicago Outfit Places of Origin

[PolackTony]

About Fischettis. Were they really related to Capone?

I have never found any evidence to support that there was a relation, whether by blood or marriage.

Capone’s parents, Gabriele Capone and Teresa Raiola, were natives of Angri, Salerno. The Fischettis’ parents, Nicola Fuschetto and Maria Lemmo, were natives of Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi and Lioni, Avellino. Presumably, the two families had known each other for some years, however, as they lived on opposite sides of the same block of buildings in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. It is likely that they called each other “cugini” in the way that many Italians do as a type of fictive kinship.

To underscore how close to each other they lived, with the Capones at 21 Garfield and the Fischettis at 584 Carroll (between 4th & 5th Aves):

[Eline2015]

About Fischettis. Were they really related to Capone?

I have never found any evidence to support that there was a relation, whether by blood or marriage.

Capone’s parents, Gabriele Capone and Teresa Raiola, were natives of Angri, Salerno. The Fischettis’ parents, Nicola Fuschetto and Maria Lemmo, were natives of Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi and Lioni, Avellino. Presumably, the two families had known each other for some years, however, as they lived on opposite sides of the same block of buildings in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. It is likely that they called each other “cugini” in the way that many Italians do as a type of fictive kinship.

To underscore how close to each other they lived, with the Capones at 21 Garfield and the Fischettis at 584 Carroll (between 4th & 5th Aves):

Thanks, Tony. And what about Nitto?

[Antiliar]

Nitto's family and the Capones both came from Angri in Salerno. While I didn't see an Nitto's in the Capone family tree and vice versa, it's possible there's a connection through marriage or going back multiple generations. According to a Capone relative they two families knew each other in Angri and were some sort of cousins, but nothing definitive. Of course it's also possible that they were simply compaesani who referred to each other as cugini.

[Eline2015]

Guys, and what about Gioe? Is it really that he attended same school with Accardo and was his friend from childhood?

[Antiliar]

Guys, and what about Gioe? Is it really that he attended same school with Accardo and was his friend from childhood?

I'm not aware of their yearbooks being online, so I can't verify if they attended the same school. Gioe was around four years older, so they weren't in the same class. As for them being childhood friends, that's what Gioe testified before the Kefauver Committee. We'll have to take his word on that one since there's no one alive to corroborate it.

[JoelTurner]

Anthony Perella may have lived in Chicago in 1930

In an Apr 1930 article about his BIL’s funeral, he’s mentioned as a resident of that city.

He was known to have lived in the nearby Gary, IN from ~Jan 1928 to Jul 1935. His wife Bianca “Blanche” DiFelice’s family lived there. He owned a liquor store there at 3737 Broadway Ave, Gary, IN

————

Perella wasn’t made into the Philadelphia Family until 1950 but was already a criminal by the time he moved to the Midwest. Also, literally his entire family was mobbed up so he could have been tapped into the mafia network.

In the early ‘60s, following a dispute, Angelo Bruno warned him not to complain to Chicago or NYC. So he may have had (or was perceived as having) ties to the area.

Does anyone know when the Gary Family got absorbed or who was in it? I’ve only heard of Frank Alo & Paul Palazzolo

[PolackTony]

We discussed Perella’s ties to the Chicago area in relation to the issue with Bruno in the ‘60s a couple years back in a Philly thread: viewtopic.php?p=230406#p230406

Given that his parents were from Misilmeri, I’ve suspected that he likely had familial/compaesani ties to Chicago, which likely were part of the background of why he wound up marrying a girl from Gary and moving there.

With respect to the Gary Family, not much is known, really, beyond Palazzolo. We know even less about it than we do the Chicago Heights Family. It’s not even clear to me that Alo/Agrusa/Abbate was *necessarily* a Gary member. He was also in Cal City and STL at various times, so it’s hard to say exactly what his affiliation was as of the time of the Statler meeting (Palazzolo also had ties to STL, and we can presume to paesani from Cinisi in Chicago proper, with Joe Giunta probably having occupied some position of importance in the Chicago Family prior to his 1930 murder). We sort of assume that Gary was formally absorbed into Chicago around the time of Palazzolo’s murder in 1935, but this isn’t known for a fact and we know no details about what exactly happened and how it played out from an organizational perspective anyway. We don’t really know how the mafia in Gary fit into the Chicago Family in later decades either. The mob in Gary was dominated following the 1930s by guys who relocated from the City of Chicago: Tony Pinelli, Gaetano Morgano, Johnny Formusa, Ernesto Sansone. I think that it was a formal decina, perhaps up to the early 60s, when Pinelli transferred his membership to the LA outfit in his later years, but beyond this it’s hard to say anything with surety. Following the 60s, remaining LCN activity in Lake County IN seems to have been under the control of the LaPorte/Pilotto crew until Snooky Morgano was busted in the early 90s.

[PolackTony]

On the other Chicago thread, I referenced the late 90s ouster of Chicago member Johnny Matassa from his position as President of LIUNA Local 2, when Matassa's status as a made guy was publicly revealed. As noted, former Chicago FBI agent John J O'Rourke presented an affidavit for the LIUNA Inspector General's Office that laid out the evidence for Matassa's status (this was, of course, several years before Nick Calabrese flipped and subsequently testified that he was inducted into the Chicago outfit along with Matassa in 1983).

One of the sources who O'Rourke had previously interviewed concerning Matassa was Umberto Filippi, an Italian native who had immigrated to Chicago in 1978 (I was not able to confirm Filippi's origins, but there were a number of people with that surname in Chicago from Trapani province). Filippi had been the driver and close personal assistant/confidant for Salvatore "Sal Mango" Termini, who LIUNA investigators had deemed a longtime "member of the Chicago outfit" (this doesn't necessarily mean that he was made, as the LIUNA hearings used this to denote both made guys and formally-affiliated associates). Sal Termini was an affluent businessman who acted as an important clout broker in the crooked nexus between business, City government, and organized labor in Chicago during the '70s-'90s.

Sal Termini was born in 1935 in Chicago to Domenico "Joe Mango" Termini (a native of Trabia, though his mother was originally from nearby Bagheria), and Mildred Lombardi (born in Hillsville, PA, -- near Youngstown -- to parents from Muro Lucano, Potenza). Muro Lucano was, of course, the hometown of the Cerone and Capezio families. Like Mildred Lombardi, Tony Capezio was also born in Hillsville before both families relocated to Chicago's Grand Ave around the same time; it's safe to presume that the two families were thus personally close, and likely related in some way.

Hillsville had earned a certain notoriety in the early 1900s, as the rock quarries in this largely rural area had attracted a strong concentration of immigrants from Southern Italy and with them, the presence of serious Camorra activity, serving as the HQ of Calabrian Camorra boss Rocco Racco. In this light, it's worth noting that both the Capezio and Lombardi families seem to have pulled up and left Hillsville for Chicago at the same time that authorities began targeting the Camorra in Hillsville in 1907.

By the 1930s, when Sal Termini was born, parents Domenico and Mildred had moved to Grand and Damen, where they remained for several decades, while Domenico worked as a mechanic in a confectionary factory.

By the late 60s, Sal Termini owned a nightclub on Rush St. In 1968, he pled guilty to Federal charges of aiding the interstate traffic of forged insurance securities (I haven't yet been successful in identifying Termini's co-defendants in that case). In 1970, he pled guilty to assaulting a CPD officer outside of his Rush St club.

By the early 1980s, Termini was living large as the Chairman of the Board for National Consolidated Industries, a company founded in 1971 that provided optometry and optician services at multiple Chicago sites. Termini was known for rolling around the Near Northside in his Rolls Royce and lived in fashionable Lake Point Tower, where the head office of NCI was also located (recall that Lake Point Tower -- then the tallest residential building in the world, had previously been Phil Alderisio's homebase, where he held court out of the lavish penthouse that on paper was owned by the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund).

In 1983, the Chicago press began reporting that NCI was being targeted by Federal investigators for close links to organized crime. Harold Washington had defeated incumbent Mayor Jane Byrne earlier that year in the Democratic primary (Chicago's real mayoral race) and then won the general election. The incoming Washington administration had reportedly become concerned that NCI was alleged to have been employing a number of convicted felons, despite having been awarded a multi-million dollar contract to provide vision insurance services for City of Chicago employees under the prior Byrne administration (which itself was dogged by allegations of mob influence).

In this light, Termini's lavish lifestyle and past as a "securities swindler" came to the attention of the press. As did the mob connections of NCI Chief Executive Charles Greller, a convicted thief and insurance fraudster identified by investigators as a close associate and "errand boy" for Chicago LCN figure Lou Rosanova. In 1973, Greller had been surveilled accompanying Rosanova at a Palm Springs meeting with Tony Accardo and Tony Spilotro. Federal investigators believed that NIC was an important cog in broader plans involving Chicago and other LCN Families in the 1970s to obtain health, dental, and vision insurance contracts from labor unions for mobbed-up companies in return for kickbacks. NCI executive vice president Don Ross had previously been tied to Chicago LCN member Giuseppe "Joey Glimco" Primavera, while convicted gambler Angelo Kokas had also served as an employee of NIC and was cited as the conduit who acquired the contract for NCI to provide vision services to LCN associate Allen Dorfman's company, Amalgamated Insurance Agency Services (Dorfman had, of course, been murdered in a suburban parking lot earlier in 1983). Kokas -- who investigators said answered directly to Termini via one of the several shell/front companies set up around NCI to complicate their paper trails -- had also been convicted of perjury for having lied in Federal court in 1970 to protect Jack Cerone; Cerone and Dorfman had both been surveilled frequenting NCI's offices (recall also that the Cerones were paesani of Termini's mother and we can presume that their families had long been close to each other on Grand Ave).

Despite the above coming to light, no indictments were ever brought against anyone at NCI and the company managed to retain its cushy contract with the City of Chicago. It was later revealed that NCI, and/or Termini-controlled spinoff companies such as Health Marketing, Inc., had also secured contracts to provide health and vision services to locals affiliated with LIUNA and the IBT.

Sal Termini died of cancer in 1994, at which point his personal lackey Umberto Filippi returned to Italy, where he was interviewed on multiple occasions by John O'Rourke. Filippi indicated that Termini was "highly involved with the Chicago Outfit" and a close personal friend of Johnny Matassa and his cousin, Tommy Matassa. Filippis related that he had accompanied Termini on many occasions over the years preceding Termini's death to the NCI offices, where Termini would write checks from NCI's business accounts, have them cashed by company employees, and then relay the cash as kickbacks to the Matassas, as well as to outfit-affiliated labor leader John Serpico, then head of the Central States Joint Board, a Chicagoland amalgam of locals representing tens of thousands of manufacturing workers.

It seems clear that Sal Termini was an important outfit associate, possibly "with" Cerone and then subsequently "with" the Solano/Matassa crew.

[B.]

Fascinating stuff, especially the Hillsville connection. Interesting too his father was from Trabia given Trabia had a strong presence in Western PA.

[PolackTony]

Fascinating stuff, especially the Hillsville connection. Interesting too his father was from Trabia given Trabia had a strong presence in Western PA.

Yup. In addition, after immigrating from Trabia, the Terminis lived at Grand Ave and Green, near the barbershop of Pasquale "Charles Calta" Caltabellota, a seemingly important mafioso from Trabia who was a close partner of Tony D'Andrea.