Senate subcommittee hearing, 1988: testimony of Angelo Lonardo

Printed pages 83 to 95 of the hearing “Organized Crime: 25 Years After Valachi” (S. Hrg. 100-906; the volume is filed separately), the second day, Friday, April 15, 1988, in room SH-216 of the Hart Senate Office Building, Senator Sam Nunn presiding. Nunn said Lonardo had been relocated under an assumed name and would testify behind a screen. He placed the cooperation agreement in the record as exhibit 27 and read the immunity order signed on April 6, 1988 by Judge Thomas P. Jackson of the District of Columbia. Nunn’s introduction says Lonardo was convicted “On April 7, 1988”; the Justice Department’s 1983 report and the Sixth Circuit date the sentencing and appeal to 1983 and 1985, so the 1988 in the transcript appears to be a slip for 1983.

Lonardo began: “My name is Angelo Lonardo. I am 77 years old, and I am a member of the La Cosa Nostra. I am the former underboss of the Cleveland organized crime family. I became a member of La Cosa Nostra in the late 1940’s, but have been associated with the organization since the late 1920’s.” He said “my father was murdered by Salvatore Todaro in 1927,” and that he and a cousin killed Todaro in revenge. He testified that “John Scalish became boss of the Cleveland family around 1949. He took over for Al Polizzi, who tired of Cleveland and retired in Florida,” and that “the Cleveland family became involved in Las Vegas casinos through their association with the ‘Jewish Boys,’ Maurice Kleinmann, Moe Dalitz, Sammy Tucker, Tommy McGinney, who is dead, and Lou Rothkopf, also dead.”

He said that in the 1970s the family received “about $40,000 a month from Vegas” and a share of the Pittsburgh family’s Youngstown rackets, that after Scalish died in 1976 Jack Licavoli became boss, and that “I became underboss after Moceri’s death.” He described the Teamsters pension loan to Allen Glick and the skim as Milton (Maishe) Rockman explained it to him, and said that in 1976 he and Licavoli asked Anthony Salerno in New York for help in killing Danny Greene and John Nardi, which, he said, New York never gave. He described trips to Chicago and New York over the Teamsters presidency. Asked why he broke his silence: “I was convicted and got life with no parole, plus 103 years.” He said he was innocent of the narcotics conviction.

Everything Lonardo says about other people is his own sworn account, given under a cooperation agreement. It is testimony, not a finding, and this archive does not move his statements onto family charts.