Tony Pro

Tony Pro was a made member and captain in the Genovese crime family, a former Hoffa ally who became a leading opponent of Jimmy Hoffa’s attempt to regain control of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. In Frank Sheeran’s recollection, Pro’s rivalry with Hoffa moved from a dispute over prison pensions to threats of violence, a contemplated murder, and, years later, a proposed meeting whose outcome the passage does not disclose.

Position and Changing Allegiance

Pro had once been a Hoffa man. He later led the Teamsters faction opposing Hoffa’s effort to take back the union, making their personal enmity part of a wider struggle over union power. Pro also ran a Teamsters local in north Jersey. His status as a made man and a captain mattered within the underworld’s rules: Sheeran understood that an attack on him required approval from Russell Bufalino.

The Prison Dispute

The animosity began in prison, where Pro and Hoffa nearly came to blows in the dining hall. At the center of their disagreement was Pro’s effort to obtain his $1.2 million pension despite federal law. Hoffa refused to help him get around that law, while Hoffa himself received a $1.7 million pension despite also having gone to prison. The contrast gave the dispute a pointed personal edge: Hoffa had benefited from a pension arrangement he would not help Pro secure.

A couple of years after both men were released, they met at a Teamsters convention in Miami to try to settle the quarrel. Instead, Pro threatened to kill Hoffa and his grandchildren, according to Sheeran. The attempt at reconciliation thus made the depth of their hostility explicit rather than resolving it.

A Murder Considered, Then Set Aside

After the convention, Hoffa told Sheeran that he intended to ask Bufalino for permission to have Pro killed. Sheeran says he never heard anything further and took the remark as a passing expression of Hoffa’s temper. In the practice he describes, an assignment would ordinarily be communicated about a day before it was to be carried out; no such notice arrived. The account distinguishes Hoffa’s stated intention from an authorized order: Pro’s rank meant that Hoffa could not simply send Sheeran after him on his own.

The later exchange in which Hoffa said he had arranged a Wednesday-afternoon meeting with the little guy brings Pro back into the narrative after the earlier threats. Sheeran’s question about which man Hoffa meant, followed by Hoffa’s confirmation, identifies the proposed meeting as one with Pro. The passage establishes that it was arranged, but does not say whether it took place or what followed.

Violence and Imprisonment

Sheeran portrays Pro as capable of lethal violence beyond his feud with Hoffa. He recounts that Pro had a fellow candidate strangled with nylon rope after the man, running on the same ticket for a lesser local office, drew more votes than Pro. Sheeran identifies Salvatore Briguglio and K.O. Konigsberg as the killers and describes the murder as a bad hit. In his account, investigators seeking charges against men suspected of supporting Hoffa obtained an informant’s testimony against Pro for that killing. Pro received a life sentence and died in prison. These details come through Sheeran’s retrospective narration, which presents Pro both as a dangerous union rival and as a figure whose violence eventually led to imprisonment.