Chicago mob lieutenant Rudy (The Chin) Fratto will be in court this week disputing the amount of restitution he owes Uncle Sam due to his convictions for federal tax evasion and forklift contract bid-rigging earlier in the decade. Windy City television reporter and Outfit expert Chuck Goudie from Chicago’s ABC affiliate was the first to break the news of Fratto’s financial feud with the U.S. Government 10 days ago. He’ll see his judge Wednesday morning.
The 73-year old Fratto has only paid off roughly $10,000 of the $140,000 he owes since his release from federal prison in late 2013, where he had spent 10 months cooling his heels. In 2016, Fratto discontinued all payments, according to Goudie’s reporting, because he believes that the feds were taking too much of his monthly earnings. The government wants a 25 percent take of his paycheck, while Fratto thinks he should just be forced to forfeit 10 percent of his gross income instead.
Per sources, Fratto is considered an elder statesman out of the Outfit’s Elmwood Park crew. Officially, he works as an electrician for an electrical contracting firm in suburban Darien, Illinois. Most of his day-to-day work is back at his old stomping grounds, the long notoriously mobbed-up McCormack Place convention center on the city’s far eastside. Fratto was convicted of rigging $2,000,000 worth of forklift contracts at McCormack Place in 2012, declaring on an FBI wire, “I’m the boss of this area around here… everything goes through me.”
Although never being charged for any acts of violence, the FBI considers Fratto a dangerous individual. His name appeared on a 2002 list of potential physical threats to Chicago Southside crew hit man-turned-star witness-for-the-government Nick (Nicky Slim) Calabrese compiled by the U.S. Department of Justice and circulated around Illinois law enforcement. A Windy City wiseguy once drove directly to the FBI to turn himself into and seek protection from authorities in the wake of catching Fratto and another seasoned Outfit killer lurking behind him in traffic. According to multiple sources in law enforcement and on the street, he’s a suspect in at least two infamous gangland homicides from the 1980s.
Two sources claim Fratto “made his bones” with the 1985 murder of mob soldier Charles (Chuckie English) Inglese. Two additional sources link him to the 1983 bump-off of high-ranking Outfit associate and labor union powerbroker Allen Dorfman, one of those sources tagging him as a “crash car” driver near the scene. One of the sources that connects him to the Chuckie English hit say he was one of the shooters in that particular slaying.
Inglese had angered his mafia superiors by returning to the Windy City from retirement in Florida. Dorfman, who looked after the crooked Teamsters union pension fund, was headed to prison on racketeering and pension fund fraud, and mob bosses in the Midwest worried he could be tempted to flip.
The FBI believes Fratto was inducted into the Outfit alongside fellow current mob bigwigs Salvatore (Solly D) DeLaurentis and John (Pudgy) Matassa at a 1988 Father’s Day button ceremony hosted in the basement of The Como Inn Italian restaurant on Milwaukee Avenue on the city’s near Northwest side. DeLaurentis, 78, is alleged to be the acting boss of the Chicago mafia in 2017. Matassa is a reputed top advisor for DeLaurentis and other modern-day Outfit leaders.
Fratto allegedly acts as a liaison for Outfit administrators to organized crime factions in Ohio and Iowa. Fratto’s two uncles, Frank (Frankie One Ear) Fratto and Lou (Cockeyed Louie) Fratto, were the Chicago mob’s crew bosses in Des Moines, Iowa in the mid-to-late Twentieth Century.
The post Paying The Piper: Chicago Outfit Figure Rudy Fratto Fights Feds Over How Much Restitution He Owes appeared first on The Gangster Report.