Robert “Lonnie” DeGeorge

Robert “Lonnie” DeGeorge is identified in Frank Sheeran’s recollection of the 1967 struggle over Teamsters Local 107 as a member of Joey McGreal’s muscle crew and the person Sheeran was accused of shooting during a street battle outside the Philadelphia union hall. DeGeorge’s importance in the episode rests on that disputed allegation: the violence was real, but the account repeatedly stresses that no one could determine who fired at whom or who started shooting.

Place in the Local 107 conflict

The confrontation grew out of a contest for control of Local 107. After a series of firings, McGreal and his associates sought to take over the local, secure its union jobs for themselves, and use those positions to extract money from trucking companies. DeGeorge was among the muscle assembled for that campaign, alongside Charles Amoroso. Sheeran distinguishes their group from the Italian muscle associated with Angelo Bruno: DeGeorge belonged to McGreal’s downtown contingent, not Bruno’s faction.

The first public show of force came on a September night in 1967, when McGreal’s side held a rally outside the hall on Spring Garden Street. The crowd included about 3,000 people from competing factions. People shouted in the street, fistfights broke out, and mounted police struggled to manage the scene. The rally was intended to intimidate the local’s organizers, business agents, and officers into stepping down. DeGeorge’s place in McGreal’s crew connected him to that effort to seize the union’s local power, though the account does not assign him a particular role in the rally itself.

The shooting and disputed accusation

Sheeran says he was not present at the rally. Afterward, Fitz called him at home and told him to come to the hall the following morning because the confrontation might escalate. Sheeran responded by bringing in Italian muscle associated with Angelo Bruno. He positioned men inside the hall and others on the street. With his back to the building, he watched two groups approach one another from opposite ends of Spring Garden Street: McGreal’s people on one side and Local 107 loyalists on the other.

Gunfire suddenly erupted. Sheeran says the first shot came from behind him and passed close to his head. In the aftermath, people alleged that he had signaled for the shooting to begin and pointed at DeGeorge, after which someone on Sheeran’s side shot him. The same recollection undercuts any certainty about that version: so many people were firing that witnesses could not establish who shot at whom or who opened fire. The police mounted officers who had been present the previous night had not yet arrived. DeGeorge is thus identified as the alleged target, not as someone whose shooting is conclusively reconstructed.

The murder case and its limits

The district attorney’s office issued an arrest warrant for Sheeran in connection with the violence. The book later specifies that Arlen Specter tried to persuade his chief prosecutor, Dick Sprague, to bring Sheeran to trial for first-degree murder in DeGeorge’s case. Sprague refused, saying the evidence did not even support a manslaughter case. That exchange records a sharp difference between the political push to prosecute and the prosecutor’s assessment of the available proof; it does not establish what happened to DeGeorge or identify a shooter.

The charges against Sheeran remained in the system from 1967 until 1972. When the case finally came before a judge for jury selection, Sheeran testified that the Commonwealth had sought sixty-eight postponements and that he had requested none. The judge condemned the delay as a disgrace and said a motion was appropriate. Sheeran’s new lawyer obtained dismissal on a speedy-trial motion, the first such motion to succeed in Pennsylvania, according to the account. The Commonwealth had offered a nolle prosequi, but Sheeran rejected it because, as he explained, charges dropped that way could be brought again. The judge’s dismissal ended the prosecution described here; it did not resolve the underlying question of who shot DeGeorge.

Narrative role

DeGeorge enters the narrative through other people’s claims about a chaotic event, rather than through a personal history or a direct account of his actions. The sequence first places him within McGreal’s attempt to take over Local 107, then brings him into the center of the shooting through the accusation that Sheeran pointed him out. But the narrator’s account also supplies the limits of that accusation: an immense crowd, competing armed groups, gunfire from multiple directions, no identified guns, and no reliable determination of who began the shooting.

That unresolved gap shapes DeGeorge’s function in the episode. His name anchors the first-degree murder allegation, while the competing accounts and prosecutorial refusal to pursue even manslaughter keep the accusation from becoming a settled explanation. The legal case against Sheeran ended through delay and a speedy-trial ruling, not through a trial that tested the allegation. DeGeorge remains central to the stakes of the confrontation, but the text leaves both the circumstances of his shooting and the identity of the shooter uncertain.