The murder of Anthony Castellito was an act of union power as well as a killing: the book presents it as the removal of a popular reform-minded member of Teamsters Local 560, ordered by Anthony Provenzano as Provenzano rose through the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The case resurfaced years later during the investigation into Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance, when a participant came forward and helped expose the violence beneath the union’s internal politics.

Background and the Killing

Castellito had grown up with Provenzano on New York’s Lower East Side and was known as a popular, reform-minded member of Local 560. Their shared background makes the account’s political contrast especially stark: Castellito’s popularity did not protect him when Provenzano’s position and ambitions were at stake. The book identifies Provenzano as the person who ordered the killing, rather than as one of its direct perpetrators.

The murder took place in 1961, amid Provenzano’s growing authority in the union. After Jimmy Hoffa became president in 1957, he rewarded Provenzano, then president of Local 560, with another paid post as president of New Jersey’s Joint Council 73, which had one hundred thousand members. In 1959, a government-appointed Board of Monitors ordered Hoffa to purge Provenzano from the union. Hoffa instead made him an International vice president in 1961, adding a third paycheck and greater power to the alliance. In the book’s account, Castellito was killed that same year: a warning about the risks of challenging a union power structure able to override outside demands for reform.

Execution and the Delayed Case

The account names three men as the direct perpetrators: Salvatore Briguglio, Salvatore Sinno, and K. O. Konigsberg. Castellito was strangled and buried on a farm in upstate New York. Provenzano, who had grown up with him, was identified as the person who ordered the murder; the killing thus joined personal history to a struggle over union power, with the order and the physical act carried out by different men.

For fifteen years, the crime remained unresolved in the account’s chronology. In 1976, a year after Jimmy Hoffa disappeared, Provenzano and Briguglio were indicted for Castellito’s murder. The renewed attention to the Hoffa case helped bring the older killing into view: as investigators pursued the disappearance, prison inmates knew that information about the short list of suspects could earn leniency. Sinno came forward, admitted his part in Castellito’s murder, and turned on his accomplices. He said Briguglio had been rewarded with Castellito’s union job and that Konigsberg had received $15,000. The murder’s aftermath disclosed how violence could serve not only to remove an opponent but also to redistribute the position and money attached to his place in the union.

Political Motive and the Case’s Afterlife

The book later places Castellito’s killing within a broader pattern of Provenzano using Briguglio to remove rivals who stood in the way of power. In 1976, labor reporter Victor Riesel reported that Provenzano planned to seek the International presidency when Fitzsimmons retired in 1981 and needed the popular Jimmy Hoffa out of the way. Riesel drew a parallel with 1961: in both cases, he said, Provenzano needed a popular figure removed and used Briguglio. This is presented as a reported interpretation of Provenzano’s ambitions, not as a finding established by the Castellito prosecution; it nevertheless makes the earlier murder more than a buried local crime in the book’s account, connecting union office, personal influence, and violence across fifteen years.

The legal consequences arrived after the Hoffa investigation had made information about the nine named suspects valuable to inmates seeking leniency. Sinno’s account gave investigators a route into the older case, and Provenzano was convicted of Castellito’s murder in 1978 and sent to Attica. The investigation thus produced a concrete consequence beyond the unresolved search for Hoffa: it reopened a separate killing and secured a conviction for the man identified as its orderer.

That outcome did not make the case’s network fully legible. Briguglio had been indicted alongside Provenzano, but the account distinguishes the conviction from the wider claims about who ordered and carried out the crime. Provenzano, despite the pressure of prison and the Hoffa investigation, said nothing; he died in Attica ten years after his conviction, at seventy-two. The silence at the end contrasts with Sinno’s decision to cooperate, while underscoring how the older murder remained bound to the same code of secrecy and shifting incentives that shaped the later investigation.

Evidence, Networks, and the Limits of the Account

The episode is told within a history built from Frank Sheeran’s interviews, not from a courtroom record of every act described. The author first interviewed Sheeran in 1991, but Sheeran stopped the questioning after admitting more than he had intended. After reconnecting in 1999, he agreed to four years of further interviews; the author says the process was conducted to protect Sheeran’s rights so his statements would not become legally admissible confessions. Sheeran read and approved each chapter and the completed manuscript. That history establishes how the account was assembled, but it does not turn every remembered detail about Castellito’s murder into independent corroboration.

The book also situates the episode within relationships that crossed union and criminal networks. Sheeran describes regularly driving Russell Bufalino to meetings, including journeys to Hollywood, Florida, where figures from around the country gathered at Joe Sonken’s Gold Coast Lounge. In the later Hoffa investigation, an FBI memo listed Sheeran, Bufalino, Provenzano, and Briguglio among its suspects. The shared names show how the narrative connects a Local 560 killing to a wider web of power; they do not by themselves establish that the later gathering or investigation proved the particulars of Castellito’s death.

That distinction matters to the event’s place in the book. The murder is presented with a specified orderer, perpetrators, and consequences, while the means by which readers encounter those claims remain entangled with Sheeran’s retrospective testimony and the author’s prolonged questioning. The case’s afterlife supplies a documented legal endpoint—Provenzano’s conviction—but the account’s broader significance rests on the pattern it draws between union authority, the removal of rivals, and the delayed emergence of testimony.