I believe that Tocco and Pilotto found Catuara’s so-called “soft spot” which was narcotics. Even though the younger generation within the Outfit was slowly coming up the ladder and were making the big buck for their bosses, the problem was that some of the old guys, who were still around, sometimes forgot about the cash and became disgusted with some of the members’ wrong choices. During this period this so-called chop shop crew operated one of the most lucrative illegal operations in the Chicago area but there were few “small” problems. I don’t know if you noticed but most of these crew members that I previously mentioned such as Annerino or Ferraro were involved in the narcotics business, including everyday usage of heroin and cocaine. Also, according to the previous examples, some of these guys were forming a narcotics smuggling network around the country with the help of the car theft business. With the transportation of stolen cars, they also smuggled narcotics. I’m not sure if Catuara knew or approved the dealing in narcotics but I’m sure that he didn’t do a damn thing about.


Since they were closely connected to the Outfit, by this time crime leaders such as Tony Accardo, Joey Aiuppa and Gus Alex were against the selling of narcotics, especially about everyday usage. The old guys didn’t understand the fact that this was a new era of disco music, narcotics and sex, but they understood the idea that the feds had constant view over the Outfit’s operations. The so-called “base” of most of these murders was the paranoia created by informants and drug peddlers. The Outfit was a murder machine and it didn’t take long for the bosses to order a murder spree such as this one. The old guys didn’t do drugs and back in the days they might’ve taken more than few envelopes from the racket but now that deal was over. And again the other so-called territory boss who supported the “clean-up” was the leader of the Grand Avenue crew Joey Lombardo. These guys sticked to the old ways such as gambling, extortion, loan sharking and labor racketeering. You see, in the mind of a gangster such as Lombardo, the old guys were right. I mean, the usage and selling of narcotics made these guys unstable and unsecure to be involved in the Outfit’s everyday affairs and to be involved in everyday action like that, you need to be a very cold or emotionless individual with clear mind and lots of blind loyalty. So now the murder contracts were passed from Aiuppa, who previously consulted with Accardo, to Jack Cerone, who in turn gave them to Lombardo and Tocco’s boss Al Pilotto, who in turn gave some of the contracts to William Dauber, who was freshly released from prison in 1976, or some went to the Grand Avenue crew or the newly formed “Wild Bunch” group from the Cicero area, who also supported the takeover.


By “coincidence” the cleanup began with few of Sam Annerino’s associates in the car theft business, who probably had involvement in narcotics, such as 47 year old Norman Lang of Munster, Indiana, who was an operator of a Hammond used car agency and was one of Annerino’s key players in the car theft business in that area, and on January 13, 1977, Lang was shot to death several times in Calumet City. Next on the “hit list” was 36 years old Richard Ferraro who disappeared on June 13, 1977, and it was believed to be murdered. Police found Ferraro's 1977 Lincoln, with the keys in the ignition, parked outside his Statewide Auto Wrecking Co. Later it was learned that his body was stuffed into a junked car that was then crushed into scrap by a metal compactor. Ferraro apparently had taken over as Catuara's stolen-auto supervisor from Steven Ostrowsky, but sadly it didn’t last long. Two days later, on June 15, 1977, one of Ferraro’s close associates in the car theft business John Theo was found with two shotgun wounds to the head in the back seat of a car parked at 1700 N. Cleveland Ave. Theo’s arrest record dated since 1961 when he was arrested for being involved in a burglary ring, in which he often used disguises but his demise obviously came from his partnership with Ferraro.


Another of Annerino’s closest associates in the car theft and narcotics businesses 27 year old John Schneider, whose partially decomposed body was found on July 3, 1977, shot once in the head with a .25 caliber, wrapped in plastic and thrown in the trunk of a rented Chevrolet Caprice which was parked at O'Hare Airport. Another nude and decomposed body popped up at the same location 9 days later, on July 12, 1977, and this time it was 34 years old Earl Abercrombie Jr., a convicted auto thief who was known as another Annerino associate. Abercrombie’s mother said that her son disappeared on July 7, on his way to work, meaning his body stayed in the trunk for a week until some of the attendants felt the “funny” smell. Abercrombie had also a very rich arrest record, mostly for peddling stolen cars but it was also believed that he was deeply involved in the narcotics business, probably with Catuara’s or in this case, Annerino’s crew, which I believe was the main reason for his demise.


The next missing figure became another Annerino and Ferraro “involved in god knows what” associate, 46 year old James Palaggi. This guy moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, but came back to Illinois for another reason which was some unfinished business to take care of for Catuara and Annerino. But few days before the discovery of his body, his wife reported him missing. When the cops found him, he was wrapped in green furniture pads in the back of a pickup truck parked on a north side street. He had been shot once in the center of the forehead and three shell casings from a .32-caliber automatic handgun were found near the body. It was impossible to tell if the other two bullets had entered Palaggi because the body was too badly decomposed. The names of murdered victims seemingly dropped on daily basis, but they were the only things that always changed, and the exact details too, but it was always the same story: A man was found in a trunk, or an alley, or a car somewhere, always several days after disappearing, always very dead. In some of the previous examples we can see that car trunks became quite popular among the Outfit’s hitmen, and became a style know as “trunk music”.


So now the next in line was Catuara’s last “right-hand man” Sam Annerino. On July 25, 1977, 31 year old Annerino was slain by a masked gunman who fired five shotgun blasts into him at 4:20 p.m., seconds after he had left a furniture store at 10550 S. Cicero Av., in Oak Lawn. Later an informant told the police that the late Annerino recently bought a 40-foot cabin cruiser, the Honey Bear, which moored at Burnham Harbor. The informant said that two hours after Annerino's slaying someone entered the boat "and cleaned it out." Investigators said that it was possible Annerino was either keeping cash, narcotics, papers or ledgers there relating to the auto theft racket. Police said that one early lead that did not develop was the license number on the car used by Annerino's killers, which had been supplied by witnesses due to the daytime killing but the license number was traced to a fictitious person at a South Side address.


The situation went out of control because in the last 6 or 7 years, more than a dozen murder “contracts” were given out by the Outfit’s top administration, including the contract on Charles Nicoletti in March 29, 1977, who I also suspect was killed for supporting the narcotics business. Why would they kill all of their best extortionists and operators? It’s because of street tax? Well that’s a little bit too many examples just to prove a point and to remind the chop shop owners to pay their “debt” to the Outfit. That is why my theory is that some of these Outfit sanctioned murders during this time period were pushed by the allegedly forbidden narcotics racket and the fear of becoming informants.


According to one story, Catuara was allegedly once kidnapped right of the street or in a gangster’s slang, he was taken for a ride by people sent by the bosses, who in turn, with a gun pointed to his head, just gave a warning to the aging gangster to stay out of the whole dirty business and that maybe it was time to retire to Arizona since he had a criminal career of more than 50 years and plus he was in his 70’s. There’s also another story regarding Catuara’s demise and that was the attempted bombing at the home of the head of the secretary of state’s stolen auto detail Vladimir Ivkovich. Since this guy was quite troublesome for Catuara’s car theft and narcotics operations, the old gangster allegedly ordered the bombing. Ivkovich awaken by the barking of his dog during the early morning hours back in July 8, went to the porch of his home and in the dark, he knocked over something which turned out to be a bomb. In fact, the accidental kick defused the bomb and didn’t go off. I really don’t have a clue if Catuara respected the alleged warning or allegedly ordered the bombing, but all I know is that on July 28, 1978, during the morning hours, the old gangster sat in his red Cadillac at the corner of Ogden Avenue and Hubbard Street, which was his old stomping ground, and allegedly waited for an associate. At exactly at 7 a.m. two assassins ran up to his car and fired at him from both front windows, thus filling the gangster with a huge amount of hot led. Even though fatally wounded with blood squirting from both sides of the neck, Catuara still managed to open his door, get out of the car and sprawled face down on the street. Suddenly one of the assailants walked over to Catuara and pumped one last shot into the mobster’s back.


What ever was the reason for Catuara’s murder, everybody thought that this was the end of a quite large saga of murders regarding the car theft racket or allegedly regarding the narcotics business. All I know is that from this point on, Albert Tocco became the undisputed king of the auto-theft racket in the southern part of the Chicago area and northern Indiana. But as always, all of these murders brought the attention of the media and government and became quite a difficult situation for the Mob. For example, the Chicago Crime Commission in 1978 reported over 40.000 car thefts which meant that a large portion of these thefts went to the chop shops and the operators generated millions of dollars through the years. There have been reports that junk dealers have been forced to pay up to $3,000 a month in tribute, thus making the chop shop hoods a profit of $20 to $30 million a year business only in the Chicago area. That is why some of the younger operators became greedy and thought that if they mixed this huge lucrative operation with the narcotics business, it would’ve been a “great deal”. Also because of all of these killings, the Secretary of State Alan Dixon’s office has realized that they were playing with fire and in the last moment they cut off all of their connections with the chop shop business, thus Dixon himself ordered a crackdown on all junkyards that were suspected of harbouring cars stolen by chop-shop thieves, thus closing down 40 salvage yards around the Chicago area in the process. It was a normal trick, made of turning backs, which was done by every allegedly corrupt politician, during so-called hard times.


The government even organized a senate probe regarding the car theft racket in which they planned to question two main witnesses and a huge number of junkyard dealers in southern Cook County, Will and Kankakee counties, and Lake County in Indiana. However, it was learned during the hearing that one of the witnesses scheduled for questioning was to be the late Jimmy Catuara, who was already forever “silenced” by his peers in the Outfit. But the committee had another far more sensitive witness who agreed to testify while under the witness protection program and that individual was Alex Jaroszewski, again. He again explained his start and involvement in the chop shop business and also explained the specifics of the racket in details. During his testimony he admitted that he never saw the use of guns as prevalent in the car theft business because being a car thief, he felt it was a non-violent crime and allegedly it didn’t hurt anybody except the insurance companies. But later he realized that his whole image of the business went down the toilet because of all of the murders which occurred during his career as a car thief.


Even though the heat was on, the murders continued during the next few years. In 1979, Timothy O'Brien was considered by law enforcement a reputed top figure in the Outfit’s stolen auto parts racket. He had a record of arrests for auto theft going back to 1957 when he was 16, and later he was arrested at his junkyard back in 1977 during a visit there by a Tribune reporter and state and police investigators. Even though he tried to be violent during his arrest and proclaimed his innocence, the investigators managed to find a 1976 Lincoln, which they said had been stolen in Broadview and was cut up in a garage there. After that he was arrested on charges of receiving stolen property. O’Brien was the owner of one of the largest salvage auto parts places known to accept stolen auto parts and had been a prime suspect for many years in the chop shop racket in the Blue Island area. O'Brien was the operator of the Irish Keystone Auto Parts, a junkyard at Clair and Sacramento avenues in Robbins and of another parts storage yard with the same name in Blue Island. Now maybe this guy was also involved in narcotics, which I highly doubt, but because of his jail term the Outfit obviously couldn’t get to him.


I say this because O’Brien used to be a close associate in the car theft and narcotics rackets of the late Richard Ferraro and when he got out of prison, he immediately took Ferraro’s son, Jerry under his auspices. Jerry Ferraro operated a chop shop garage, one block south of O'Brien's junkyard, known as J & A Auto Parts. Also few of O’Brien’s best car thieves were David O’Malley, Tommy Bahrs and the Neviles brothers, Harold and Phillip. The so-called crew leader was O’Malley who in turn was O’Brien’s right-hand man. Usually O’Malley met with O’Brien and received a “steal list” with cars which were ordered by people from the Outfit, who in turn received the orders from famous sport players, musicians, businessmen or even politicians. This was a quite professional auto-theft crew which was mainly involved in stealing luxury cars such as Lincoln Continental, Ford Thunderbird or Mercury Cougars, and each model worth over $10,000.


Even though the boys didn’t want any further narcotics “infections” within the organization, I also believe that O’Brien was killed over another reason which was the street tax racket, because by now the Outfit had bumped off most of their prime operators and since the government heat was on, the street tax became much more precious. It was a very tough period for O’Brien since the Outfit was telling him he had to pay more tax, the government was after him for not paying enough tax, his girlfriend was fooling around with somebody else, and the state was trying to put him out of business. He was under investigation for income tax evasion and was on the brink of indictment by a federal grand jury in Chicago, because on May 18, the police intercepted a truck containing 230 stolen car doors as it left O’Brien’s junkyard. He also faced criminal charges for shooting and critically wounding a man romantically involved with an employee of his Irish Keystone Auto Parts junkyard and on top of that the secretary of states office had initiated action to revoke the licenses for his car parts yards in Robbins and Blue Island. The Outfit also increased the monthly tribute from chop shop operators and story goes that O'Brien balked and threatened to quit. Told he could not quit, O'Brien retaliated by ordering a labor slowdown-stealing fewer cars and thus reducing production. Obviously O’Brien was car thief going mad.


Another problem which occurred just few months before his demise was the arrest of his car theft crew in a federal operation in February, 1979. The crew was arrested in a stakeout while transporting four stolen luxury cars with prices over $13,000, and the feds also found an order list with 120 high-priced cars, many of them had been crossed off. All of the recovered cars were also on the list. The cops also discovered a huge stash of burglary tools and licence plates. Now the investigators immediately connected O’Brien to the case because of his close connection to O’Malley and the boys in the Outfit might’ve seen the potential danger. On top of that, some reports say that O'Brien fancied himself as an "Irish Mobster" who could stand up to the Outfit, such as the infamous Cleveland gangster saga between the Italian Mafia and Irish mobster Danny Greene.


So in a shot time period he received info that a contract was put out on his life and so on May 21, at 1:30 p.m., O’Brien phoned Terry Delaney, chief investigator for the secretary of state, asking for a one-on-one meeting at a "neutral" location. Later that night, around 8 p.m. O’Brien left his house and told his wife that he was going to visit some friend, to whom he complained "I'm being tailed" and from that point on he was not seen alive again. On May 23, an employee of O'Brien's Robbins junkyard reported him missing and later on June 1, 1979, the Blue Island police received an anonymous phone call at 12:30 p.m. saying that a suspicious car was parked on Old Western Avenue in the suburbs. When cops arrived, they found O’Brien’s car and when they opened the trunk, O'Brien's body was lying on its right side and clad in black trousers and a black sports shirt which had been pulled up around his neck. The body was identified through a driver s license which was found in his pocket and a characteristic snake and cross tattoo on his right arm. O’Brien became the 16th victim of the so-called Chicago’s “chop shop wars”, a murder spree which lasted for over a decade.


By now the Chicago Crime Commission reported that a substantial part of the chop shop racket has shifted into northwest Indiana from bases in southern Cook and eastern Will counties because of the government pressure. More than 100 auto chop shop operators, controlled by the Chicago crime syndicate, were thriving in neighbouring Lake County, Indiana, after being pressured out of Illinois by tough state regulations and although the shops were moving to Indiana, still most of the stolen cars come from Illinois. The operators have restricted themselves to barns and other out-of-the-way places south of U. S. Highway 30 and their safest thing was the protection which was given by the local authorities in Lake County via pay offs. Besides in Indiana, many salvage yard owners who previously obtained their chop shop expertise in Chicago, also operated stolen parts operations in Michigan, Iowa and also way down in Florida.


Many Indiana lawmen attempted and sometimes succeeded in curbing many chop shop investigations which were made by the anti-chop task force. The office of Lake County Sheriff Jose Arredondo was very suspicious because of the staff’s history. For example, a woman clerk who worked at the sheriff’s office in the sensitive bureau of identification where the reports were filled, was a known associate of a convicted auto thief. Also the sheriff's brother, Miguel, who headed the sheriff's police force, also had shady connections and history. The feud went on and both government teams accused each other of trying to meddle in their own operations, thus giving the opportunity for the car thieves to operate freely. And as the chop shops moved into northern Indiana, so did the racket-related killings.


Evidence for that was the slaying of Robert Kurowski, a Hammond junk dealer mainly involved in the chop shop business. He was an ex-convict who had served time for burglary and auto theft, and had been under constant surveillance by state and federal agents. Besides stealing and stripping cars out of their parts, Kurowski and one of his associates Robert Hardin worked as enforcers directly under Albert Tocco and William Dauber. The two enforcers had once torched a vice den known as Johnny O's Supper Club, near suburban Lynwood because its owner refused to pay street tax to Tocco. And so a similar mistake was made by Kurowski for not reporting his whole income from the street tax racket to Tocco and the Outfit. On May 24, 1980, Kurowski was walking his horse along a wooded trail near the main highway in Schneider, Indiana, while a hit squad was in waiting for him in a car, and then he suddenly felt six slugs from a 30 caliber rifle entering his body. It was a “bushwacking” right out of the Old West. Three days later, on May 27, 1980, another Kurowski associate in the car theft business and alleged Outfit enforcer in the same area Edelmyro DeJesus was also shot to death by few shotgun blasts in an alley in East Chicago. After the slaying, the cops acknowledged that DeJesus was the main suspect in the murder of Steve Ostrowsky back in 1977.


But soon that hideous bloody circle was about to be completed with this one last hit. By now Outfit enforcer William Dauber was highly regarded within the organization but not within government circles. As any other wild criminal he faced several federal indictments at the time, including concealing cocaine and 11 weapons in their suburban residence in Crete. Another interesting thing was the existence of what investigators dubbed "Dauber's Den", a small hideaway in the basement of the Crete home, where authorities found a reclining chair, a radio device to monitor police calls, and a 9 mm. automatic pistol. Even tough Dauber did a lot of dirty work for the Mob, by the end of the day he was considered expendable by his crime associates because in their eyes, he was a suspect of being an informant. He was suspected of being informant mainly because he had a drinking and narcotics problem and he was a known loudmouth, meaning he bragged about everything. He had been observed drinking heavily in taverns known to be frequented by other mob chop-shop figures, who usually sat at the same table where Dauber told his stories. Albert Tocco respected and protected him but to a certain point because it was reported that on several occasions Tocco have warned Dauber "Stop drinking and running off at the mouth." But the Mob was right because Dauber had been approached by government officials many times seeking his cooperation, and after the cocaine and weapons bust, he agreed to meet with them more than several times. Dauber was playing a dangerous game which made him suspicious in some dangerous circles or in other words, the hunter became the hunted.


Word got out that a vengeance soon would be turned on him, and so Dauber started living in constant fear of retaliation thus leading him to sleep under a bullet-proof blanket, which was made of a tough nylon fiber, and always started his van each morning only by remote control. While riding in his van, he was usually in the company of his chauffeur and last loyal associate Peter Bresinelli with Dauber next to him often carrying a sawed-off shotgun in his lap. Dauber even quietly sold his Crete home and made a huge mistake by selling his late-model van with armour plating on its right side and bullet proof glass. In May, 1980, Dauber had been the intended victim of a hit attempt but had escaped by ducking bullets as he ran into a cornfield near his former home in south suburban Crete. But the Outfit gunmen already devised a plan to hit Dauber on the day of his court appearance after correctly concluding that he would not be armed or travelling in his armour-plated van. So despite his precautions, his luck ran out when on July 2, 1980, a highly skilled, heavily armed hit team from the “Wild Bunch” crew, caught up with Dauber and his wife Charlotte, thus cutting them down with rifle and shotgun fire in a high-speed auto chase on a rural Will County road. The pair was shot with numerous shotgun pellets and approximately 30-caliber rifle bullets, mostly in their heads and upper bodies while in their late-model Oldsmobile Regency. Volunteer firemen had received an anonymous call about a burning van, about 40 minutes after the attack on the Daubers and later the cops found the stolen and burned-out van, about 22 miles east of the scene of the slayings along the Monee-Manhattan Road, which was believed it was used by the hit team.



Dauber