Teamsters Local 560

Teamsters Local 560 is portrayed through the people who held or sought power within it, and through money taken from its reserve. Its secretary-treasurer, Anthony “Three Fingers” Castellito, was murdered in 1961; years later, the killing and a loan funded from the local’s cash reserve drew federal scrutiny. The local’s story shows how a union office and its finances could become instruments in organized crime’s struggles for control.

Office, Succession, and Murder

Castellito had grown up with Anthony Provenzano on New York’s Lower East Side. According to the account, Provenzano ordered his murder, which was carried out by Salvatore Briguglio, Salvatore Sinno, and former boxer K. O. Konigsberg. The day after the killing, Provenzano married his second wife at a wedding chapel in Florida.

The murder was not presented as an attack without a union consequence. Sinno later said that Briguglio was rewarded with Castellito’s job at Local 560, tying the killing directly to succession within the local. The post thus appears not merely as a title but as a prize in a violent contest over union authority.

Funds and the Kickback Case

Local 560’s cash reserve also became the source of money in a separate federal case. Provenzano stood trial over a $300,000 kickback on a $2.3 million loan to the Woodstock Hotel in New York’s theater district; the loan proceeds came from the local’s reserve. New York Post reporter Murray Kempton captured the local’s financial significance by calling it “a cash register.” The account describes the loan and the trial, but does not state the outcome of that kickback case.

The local’s funds therefore figure in the narrative in two distinct ways: as a resource allegedly used to generate a kickback, and as part of the broader contest for union power. These matters should not be conflated with Provenzano’s later conviction for Castellito’s murder.

Investigation and Wider Consequences

After Jimmy Hoffa disappeared in 1975, the FBI investigation created strong incentives for people with knowledge of older crimes to cooperate. The account says that, as a direct result of the Hoffa investigation, Sinno admitted his role in Castellito’s fifteen-year-old murder and implicated his accomplices. His statement brought the local’s succession history into the same investigative frame as the search for Hoffa.

Provenzano was convicted of Castellito’s murder in 1978 and sent to Attica. The case thus established a consequential link between a local union office, the killing of the man who held it, and the wider federal investigation: pressure generated by one notorious disappearance helped expose a separate murder tied to control of Local 560.