by Jeff Coen
Also on the interview list were two of Martha’s friends, who described a troubled relationship between her and Rocky. One of them was a girl named Sandra Parrilli, who told police she spoke with Martha several times a week. On Sunday, May 6, Martha was supposed to call after going to see her grandmother and then going to Rocky’s house; it was a call Parrilli would never get.
“She stated that on Saturday, May 5, she had spoken with Martha and she had stated that Kirk had said he met LaMantia in Garibaldi’s lounge and LaMantia had told Kirk that he if ever caught her cheating he would kill her and the guy she was with,” police wrote in a report. “He had also told Kirk that he was going with several other girls, and at this time Perrilli asked Martha why she did not confront LaMantia with this and Martha stated that she was afraid of what he would do. Sandra Parrilli also related that last summer LaMantia had shown her a gun and it had a brown square handle.”
Another friend was Patricia Cavalier, who told police she had been present when Rocky hit Martha. She had also once seen Rocky drag Martha by the hair into an alley and rip a chain from her neck. She had spoken to Martha the week before the shooting. “Martha had told her that LaMantia had threatened her with a gun by pulling it out and pointing it at her and stating, ‘I will shoot you,’” police noted.
Officers stamped their case CLEARED BY ARREST and CLOSED. LaMantia was charged with first-degree murder and later indicted. Prosecutors would go ahead with a trial on the theory that an enraged Rocky LaMantia had shot his girlfriend in a lovers’ quarrel. Rocky, still represented by Onesto, pleaded not guilty.
Martha’s family was left to struggle with what had happened. Their dark-haired girl with a bright smile had wound up in the morgue, with a medical examiner removing a spent lead bullet from her head and noting findings about her injuries on a form. They took out a small personal ad in the Chicago Sun-Times in July 1979, on what would have been Martha’s twentieth birthday.
Sad and sudden was the call of one so dearly loved by all.
A bitter grief, a shock so severe, it was to part with one so dear.
The tears keep flowing every day, it seems the pain won’t go away.
You can’t come back, we know it’s true, but just remember we’ll always love you.
Mom and Dad
Throughout 1980 and into 1981, Rocky would appear at the Criminal Court Building at Twenty-Sixth and California, along with his lawyer, as his case wound through repeated status dates.
Police were appearing there too. They filled out numerous court attendance reports as they worked with prosecutors to make sure the evidence they had collected was ready to go.
“Had a pretrial conference with Assistant State’s Atty. Michael Goggin in regards to the above case,” a typical report read. “The [officer] went over his actions both at the scene of this incident and at the Area 1 headquarters. Also the [officer] went over the tape recording of the defendant calling police.”
And another: “On today’s date … had a pretrial conference with some of the witnesses that will appear in this matter.” Those witnesses included Paul and Charles DiCaro, the victim’s brothers, and her friend Patricia Cavalier, to whom Martha had spoken about Rocky pointing a gun at her. “Also, tendered to the ASAs on this date was a copy of the tape message recorded at the police communication center on the night of the incident. Also, four handwritten love letters from the defendant to the deceased were turned over to the state.”
It is not unusual for attorneys to file what is known as a “substitution of judge,” or SOJ motion as their cases progress, sometimes alleging a judge has a conflict of interest. Often it’s really a bid to find a more sympathetic ear, a practice known as judge-shopping. They will sometimes find success, and a trial will be held before a jurist who didn’t have the case initially. But even for criminal court in Chicago, where defense lawyers can judge-shop with the best of them as they try to avoid those with pro-police reputations, it would have taken a scorecard to follow the LaMantia case.
Judge Daniel Ryan had it first, and held a number of pretrial hearings. LaMantia would appear, with paperwork noting he had been released on $60,000 bond. Then in March 1981, with the case moving forward, Onesto, Rocky’s lawyer, SOJ’d him. The motion and the case appeared headed toward Judge James Schreier, but Onesto argued both Schreier and another judge in the building, Arthur Cieslik, would be biased against his client.
Once again, the case was moved, this time to a judge Earl Strayhorn. But it would not stay there, either. Just before trial that spring, Strayhorn suddenly recused himself, with court records stating the case had been sent to him “in error.” Another judge would handle the trial. That was Thomas J. Maloney. Apparently the fact that Maloney had represented Shorty LaMantia in some matters as a lawyer before he made it to the bench was no obstacle to the case landing in his courtroom.
On April 1, 1981, Rocky LaMantia waived his right to have a jury hear his case. Maloney would hear the evidence in a bench trial, and decide whether Rocky was guilty.
There were several days of testimony as prosecutors presented evidence that Rocky and Martha DiCaro had a turbulent history and that Rocky had threatened her. They had begun dating when the DiCaro family lived in the Bridgeport area, but they eventually moved to Cicero. The couple had grown more estranged, and Martha showed up at Rocky’s house on May 6, 1979, to break off their relationship once and for all.
It hadn’t gone well. At some point, Martha had ended up with the barrel of a gun pointed in her face—and in fact touching it—near her mouth. The trigger had been pulled, and the bullet ricocheted inside her head, up and through her brain, killing her.
Neighbors testified they had seen Joseph “Shorty” LaMantia before any police, telling the court how they saw Shorty park outside and run into the house. Responding officers testified about the changing story they got. Rocky had initially told the 911 dispatcher Martha was killed in a mistake. Then it was a killing by masked invaders, and finally it was a struggle for a gun.
Evidence had gone missing from the crime scene, including the bloody sweater Rocky was wearing, a purse Martha had carried, and of course the revolver from which the fatal shot was fired.
The defense case was limited, and Rocky LaMantia didn’t testify to explain himself. But ultimately it didn’t matter. Judge Maloney said he was unconvinced by the state’s evidence, and acquitted Rocky on April 10, 1981.
The trial and its outcome was another crushing blow to DiCaro’s family. They believed their daughter’s killer had walked out of court a free man. Chicago Tribune reporter Bonita Brodt covered the case and reported how the DiCaro family embraced as Judge Maloney explained his decision.
“There is little to contradict the defendant’s statements. There is nothing to support it and there is a reluctance to accept it,” Brodt quoted Maloney as saying, in an apparent reference to the final version of events LaMantia had given investigators through his lawyer. The judge said he found a “void” in the evidence that left him unable to convict LaMantia beyond a reasonable doubt, Brodt wrote.
The possible real motivation behind Maloney’s decision would remain secret for years. The DiCaro family had a hard enough time accepting it as it was. Brodt continued to follow the case, and quoted Mavis DiCaro, Martha’s mother, for a later story headlined KILLING UNEXPLAINED; FAMILY ASKS, “WHY?”
“Our lives have been destroyed. Ruined. There is nothing for us to look forward to,” DiCaro told the reporter. “Something is missing out of our lives that cannot be replaced, and the bad thing is, we have two other kids that now we can’t enjoy.”
Who knows whether Judge Maloney picked up the paper that day and read the quote from a grieving mother. Maybe he folded the paper at his kitchen table that morning over his corn flakes and felt a twinge of guilt as he looked down at the text. Or maybe he just set the paper down and enjoyed his breakfast. Maybe to him, if something nefarious had happened, it was just business, albeit the worst kind of business for someone
in his profession. He had been a judge for just two years and was building a reputation for being tough on criminals. He would remain on the bench for another ten, handing out tough sentences to many who appeared before him, maybe just for appearances.
Rocky LaMantia wouldn’t have to worry about that.
9
THE SOUTH SIDE GROUP
Six years after his son was acquitted of shooting a nineteen-year-old girl in the face in his house, Joseph “Shorty” LaMantia had a new problem, though he didn’t know it yet.
It was 1986 and the federal government had taken aim at something that sometimes went by the harmless-sounding name of “the South Side Group.”
But it wasn’t an association of local businessmen or a singing company. It was the Chicago Outfit street crew under the authority of Angelo “the Hook” LaPietra, a feared mob boss who had picked up the moniker for his use of a meat hook while torturing enemies of his organized crime ring. The group went by other names as well, including the Twenty-Sixth Street crew, or the Chinatown crew, which better described their geographic Outfit territory. It was a swath of the city south of the Eisenhower Expressway, including Bridgeport and the Chinese neighborhood growing along Wentworth Avenue. The crew, one of six controlled by the leaders of the Outfit, held sway over gambling and high-interest juice loans, collected street taxes from businesses, and tapped into the area’s generous supply of truck and train yards.
The South Side Group was also the willing knife of the Outfit. When other crews weren’t able to pull off a murder they had been tasked with, leaders knew they could count on the Chinatown crew. It wasn’t uncommon for its soldiers to carry out killings well outside of its territory for mob leaders.
The FBI and federal prosecutors were out to build a racketeering case, and were targeting Angelo and his brother James LaPietra. Also on the radar were members of Skids Caruso’s old crew and Shorty LaMantia, who was known to the feds to be a manager of sorts for the group’s lucrative gambling operations. Some of the crew’s moneymaking schemes fed off each other. When gamblers on LaMantia’s end got behind on horses or sports wagers, they could take out a high-interest juice loan from another LaPietra assistant, Frank Calabrese Sr. In 1986, Calabrese was known mostly as a guy who put money on the street for the group. It was only later, when his brother Nick flipped in the landmark Family Secrets conspiracy case, that Frank Calabrese would become known as a multiple murderer, taking lives usually by surprising his victims and strangling them with a length of rope.
To make their 1986 racketeering case, prosecutors got permission from a judge to intercept calls between the men and other members of their organization. They began making recordings at an Italian American club that LaPietra had cofounded on Twenty-Sixth Street. The location had been the site of Garibaldi’s, where LaMantia took the phone call from his son after Martha DiCaro was shot. LaPietra’s club was the first of two he was credited with, the second opening several blocks west a few years later.
The club and LaMantia would come up years later during the Family Secrets trial, with Nick Calabrese recounting years of Chicago Outfit activity and killings. He pleaded guilty and described how a suburban enforcer named Sam Annerino was targeted for death after running afoul of Outfit bosses. Their plan had been for someone to bring Annerino to the new club as it was being renovated, to show him the site. Lying in wait would be Nick and Frank Calabrese Sr., along with Ronnie Jarrett and another Outfit hit man. They had gone to the empty building several times during the evening hours and waited. The someone who was supposed to bring Annerino by, according to Nick, was Shorty LaMantia.
LaMantia hadn’t been successful in snaring their target, and Nick described a time Shorty went by the location of the new club, still without Annerino but with LaPietra, while the hit squad was still sitting there biding its time. “And when Angelo walked in and [Shorty] seen us standing there, he got scared,” Calabrese had told the jury during the trial. “He turned white because he thought that he was going to be killed.”
LaMantia would have had good reason to be afraid, as such Outfit double-crosses were common ways to lure unsuspecting victims. It was a regular ruse to bring someone along as part of a hit team when they in fact were the target. As it turned out, LaMantia had no issue, and he was spared. Nick never said whether they had to calm him down. Members of the crew left to go wait at Jarrett’s mother-in-law’s house, where Frank Sr. took a call that another crew that had been slow to take care of Annerino had actually come through in the end. No one got whacked at the construction site of LaPietra’s Italian American club that day.
The feds captured none of that drama for their 1986 case, however, as their taping effort began years after the club first opened. They also tapped phones at a local tavern and a business known as Sea Hoy Seafoods, where bets were taken. But the Italian American club especially remained a hotbed of criminal activity, the feds said, acting as a headquarters of sorts. Mob business would be conducted there, with cash coming and going and LaPietra controlling things, according to the feds.
They were hoping to gather evidence on it all. The gambling, the street tax, the threats and intimidation. To get permission for the operation, investigators had filed an affidavit that included the results of surveillance operations and information from twenty-two people, including fourteen confidential informants, according to a document that outlined the targets’ roles in the organization.
Sherlock didn’t have all the details on that particular case, but had heard enough of the local folklore to know who Shorty LaMantia and his cohorts were. Finnigan, his old police teammate who had gotten into his own trouble, was from Bridgeport. Finnigan knew all the tales, very many of them true.
In court filings, including one government response to LaMantia’s attempts to suppress what the government had collected, federal authorities outlined the history of each man. Angelo LaPietra had an arrest record that dated to 1938, and his background included a conviction for skimming Las Vegas casinos along with Outfit heavyweights Joseph “Doves” Aiuppa and colorful mobster Joey “the Clown” Lombardo, who would die in 2019 after a long stint in the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, reserved for terrorists and gang leaders.
LaMantia “had an arrest record dating back to 1951,” prosecutors wrote in one filing. “Over the years he had been arrested for tampering with an automobile, burglary, robbery, larceny, theft from interstate shipment, cartage theft, shoplifting, and in 1982 for gambling.”
Court documents outlined the intelligence the government had built up in their racketeering investigation, even before they started taping. They included summaries from informants who had turned against the Outfit. One informant who had connected undercover FBI agents to Outfit members in the past had told investigators how the organization was structured, with its various crews dividing up the city.
He stated that “his personal association with Angelo LaPietra extended back ‘many years’ and that he once helped get LaPietra to the hospital for a gunshot wound LaPietra received after they had participated in a ‘score,’” the feds wrote in one filing. LaPietra’s crew had once forced a juice competitor out of business by beating him and making him come up with $20,000. The competitor eventually wound up very out of business, as he was later found dead. The informant knew Angelo LaPietra was running lots of rackets, and money that was collected for him went to the club.
Some of the most pertinent information on Shorty himself came from Ken Eto, famous to mob-watchers of a certain age in Chicago as “Tokyo Joe.” Eto has a hall-of-fame spot on the list of Outfit turncoats, mostly because he survived an attempted hit by two men that included three shots to the head. If he was on the fence before about becoming a government informant, that incident sealed the deal. And the two men who had tried to kill him wound up in a car trunk themselves for messing it up. Eto knew LaMantia as well, and the feds also used information from him as they built their case. Eto had been involved in illegal gambling for decades and knew that L
aMantia was in LaPietra’s organization, which he often had to deal with. LaMantia would take bets at a local horse track, he told the government.
Guy Bills also pointed a finger at LaMantia. Bills was a juice loan collector for the Outfit who did work for the LaPietra crew. After he was arrested for stealing from a jewelry store in the 1980s, he rolled for the government and testified against mob boss Alberto Tocco. Investigators noted in court filings that he had been asked about the structure of the Twenty-Sixth Street crew and had named LaMantia as a bookmaker, running gambling operations.
“Mr. Bills stated that 20-25 years ago he was personally present when ‘Shorty’ LaMantia received a street tax payoff from a ‘Chinaman named Wok,’” prosecutors wrote.
The Outfit using Chinatown—and specifically the Cermak Road corridor—as a gambling base was nothing new. It had been doing so for years. The Chicago Crime Commission noted one spectacular episode in its “Report on Chicago Crime for 1962,” describing how the chief investigators for the Cook County state’s attorney and nearly two dozen cops raided a “big floating crap game” in the 200 block of West Cermak, near the intersection at the heart of Chinatown.
“The first floor of the three-story building at this address houses the G. Consentino bail bond firm and a barbershop. Attached to the building is a one-story structure which contains the First Ward Bureau of Sanitation office,” the commission reported. “Eighteen persons were arrested by the raiding officers. Of this number, ten persons attempted to escape through a long tunnel extending beneath a parking lot and leading to the basement of the Chinese Woman’s Club at 224 West Cermak Road.”
The commission said Skids Caruso was among those who were picked up.
“The officers found three poker tables in the basement and four safes containing $3,000,” according to the report. “Of particular interest was a false wall in which the officers located a sawed-off shotgun, a stocking mask, dynamite caps and electrical blasting wire. A cache of burglar tools was discovered including lock pullers, an acetylene torch, an electrical drill, sledge hammers, chisels and various crowbars.”