Prosecution Portraying Lombardo as Top Level Mobster

Friends of ours: Joseph Aiuppa, Joseph "Joey the Clown" Lombardo
Friends of mine: Alan Dorfman

Chicago’s top mob boss Joseph Aiuppa wasn’t happy.

He was at a meeting in a suburban restaurant in April 1979 with another reputed top mobster, Joseph “Joey the Clown” Lombardo, and Alan Dorfman, an insurance executive who was the middleman between the mob and the Teamsters pension fund.

Aiuppa was jamming his finger and hands into the table to accentuate his points, according to retired FBI Agent Art Pfizenmayer, who testified today on the meeting he did surveillance on. “Dorfman kind of sat there with his hands in his lap,” Pfizenmayer said.

Pfizenmayer was sitting at the bar and could only hear a few snatches of conversation over the tinkle of glasses as the bartender cleaned up from the lunch crowd and the piped-in music.

Pfizenmayer’s testimony was part of the prosecution’s effort to establish that Lombardo was a mobster involved in the very top level of mob communications. Lombardo is charged with four other men as part of the historic Family Secrets mob case in federal court in Chicago.

Dorfman would later be killed in 1983 after he was convicted with Lombardo of conspiring to bribe U.S. Sen. Howard Cannon. Federal authorities have said Aiuppa approved Dorfman’s murder.

Earlier in the day at trial, former Old Town porn shop owner William “Red” Wemette underwent vigorous questioning by Lombardo’s attorney, Rick Halprin.

Wemette had earlier testified that he paid street tax payments to men he believed were Lombardo’s underlings. But under questioning by Halprin, Wemette testified he had never personally given Lombardo a dime.

Wemette also admitted he signed a false affidavit in the 1970s with IRS agents in which he described payments he made to an alleged Lombardo associate as being part of a business deal, rather than street tax payments.

Wemette, though, testified he had a separate, secret source relationship with the FBI, to whom he told the truth about the street tax payments.

Thanks to Steve Warmbir