The Chicago Tribune once described Joey Glimco as a “darkly handsome man with a touch of silver at the temples, a natty dresser with a predilection for carefully matched ensembles in shades of blue, and a lavish night club spender.”
They went on to describe an incident in 1928 when Glimco was only 19 years old and owned his own newsstand. Details are sketchy, but Glimco was arrested and charged with murdering a man named Joseph Elias. During a coroner’s inquest, he told the jury that Elias had stolen $73 from his pants pockets which he claimed was all the money he had. He said the theft left him “with nothing, not even carfare.”
He was eventually acquitted of the charge, but as we’ll learn in this racketeer snapshot, Joey Glimco’s days as a “newsboy” would be short-lived as he moved onward and upward to become “the biggest fish” in Chicago’s labor rackets.
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Giuseppe Paolo (Joey Glimco) Glielmi – aka “Joseph Paul Glielmo,” “Giuseppe Primavera,” “Tough Joey,” and “John Murray” – was born on January 14, 1909, in Puglietta, Italy, a hamlet of the town of Campagna in the Province of Salerno, Campania. He was one of seven children, six sons and a daughter, born to Vito Glielmi and Paolina (nee’ Primavera). His siblings were named Anthony, Frank, Carlo, James, John, and Rose.
After immigrating to the United States in 1913, the Glielmi family settled in the city of Chicago, Illinois. This is where Joey Glimco would live and operate for the rest of his life. After making three applications, he was finally accepted and naturalized on June 23, 1943.
Many years later, the Federal Immigration & Naturalization Service repeatedly attempted to deport him back to his native Italy for falsifying his naturalization application and his police record. But all attempts at deportation would prove unsuccessful.
Glimco was related by marriage to Gus Alex, the Chicago Outfit’s longtime gambling rackets boss. His brother Frank had married Alex’s sister Dorothy.
FBI #233623
Joey Glimco stood 5-feet 6-inches tall and weighed a stocky 175 pounds. He had dark brown eyes and a full head of dark brown hair that turned grey as he aged.
He met and married a local Italian girl named Lena (nee’ Pierini,) and together they had two children, a boy they named Joseph Paul Jr., after his father, and a daughter they named Joan. Glimco eventually bought a modest home for his wife and children at 629 Selborne Road in Riverside, IL, a suburb of Chicago.
As he better established himself in the underworld, he was known to have taken at least one girlfriend or “comare.” One of these women was an American girl named Laverne Murray, who was the secretary of the Teamsters Local 777 health and welfare fund where he was the president. According to reports, Glimco and Murray built a two-story house together at 1215 N. Oak Park Ave. in Oak Park, another suburb of Chicago. Officials accused them of using Teamsters funds to build the home. They were also accused of using Teamsters funds to take trips to Los Angeles.
“Little Al”
Joey’s known haunts and hangouts included the Esquire Lounge in Melrose Park and the Fulton Street Market area in Chicago’s West Loop. During the mid-1960s, FBI agents on surveillance detail also documented Glimco visiting a nondescript second-floor tailor shop at 620 N. Michigan Ave., every morning, without fail, at 9 a.m. sharp. Agents later determined that Celano’s Tailor Shop was actually the “headquarters” of Outfit underboss Frank (Strongy) Ferraro.
After surveilling the location for several weeks with the bug they hid behind a radiator and nicknamed “Little Al,” the FBI realized that Glimco was actually attending high-level meetings with other members of the Chicago mob. Top bosses such as Sam (Mooney) Giancana, Anthony (Joe Batters) Accardo, Murray (The Camel) Humphreys, Gus Alex, Ross Prio, and others representing the “creme-de-la-creme” of Chicago’s underworld were regular visitors. We think it speaks to the status and respect to which his fellow racketeers held him.
Here’s an interesting side note that further shows just how well “plugged-in” Glimco was and what kind of power he wielded. On April 4, 1959, FBI agents watched speechless as the proud mafioso married off his son Joseph Jr. to the niece of a prominent Chicago police captain named Thomas Kelly. Such was the cozy state of affairs between “cops and robbers” in old Chicago.
But just to make it a little more interesting, Sam Giancana’s daughter Antoinette also was married that day, albeit to a local bartender. Still, it had to be quite a busy day for the FBI agents as newspapers reported that Giancana’s $10,000 wedding was expected to draw more than 800 guests, including underworld figures from across the country. And the two weddings were spaced out perfectly, too. Glimco’s reception was at 1 p.m. at the Edgewater Beach Hotel while Giancana’s was held only a hop, skip, and a jump away at the La Salle Hotel, with a cocktail hour set to begin at 6 p.m. Both hotels, by the way, have since been torn down.
Joey Glimco – A Notorious Presence
During his fledgling criminal career, and all through his active years as a top man in the Chicago rackets, Joey Glimco was a notorious presence. During his rise to prominence, Glimco racked up no less than 34 arrests for such offenses as larceny, assault, auto theft, disorderly conduct, vagrancy, murder, bribery, extortion, violations of the Taft-Hartley Act (labor racketeering), and income tax evasion.
But despite his very lengthy and serious arrest record, he barely spent any time in jail (some reports state he only spent 20 days in jail throughout his career,) and he was never convicted of a felony. His first arrest happened in 1923 when he was only 14 years old. He was charged and convicted of disorderly conduct and was sentenced to 6 months probation. In 1924, he was convicted of larceny and sentenced to a year’s probation. And in 1925, he was again convicted of disorderly conduct and received 6 months probation.
In 1969, he pled guilty to violating the Taft-Hartley Act after accepting “gifts,” including a $5,000 Jaguar Roadster, $110 in turkeys he used for a union dinner, and repairs on his home sprinkling system, from two Chicago businessmen who were indicted with him in a labor union “sweetheart contract” case back in 1964. That case had been continued more than 30 times before the three had finally pled guilty. Glimco was fined $40,000.
Other than those four convictions, Glimco was either acquitted of the charges for which he was arrested or the charges were outright dismissed. An interesting side note is that Glimco’s police record was destroyed on July 5, 1949, after he asked a state legislator to do so. After the police commissioner approved the request, the Chicago Police Bureau of Identification pulled Glimco’s records, which included detailed documents and photographs of all of his prior arrests, and wiped them off the face of the earth. Apparently, Glimco wasn’t the only mobster in Chicago who was afforded that courtesy, but it was a short-lived perk that disappeared after the U.S. Senate began its intense investigation of labor racketeering in the city.
Judging from his extensive criminal record, Glimco was a very diversified hoodlum. But his specialty was always in the lucrative field of labor racketeering and union corruption. He was a major power in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Union, and an intimate of infamous Teamsters President James R. Hoffa.
In fact, Glimco served for many years as the “assistant business agent,” later rising to the position of “president,” of Teamsters Local 777, Taxicab Drivers Union of Chicago. It was a local with over 5,000 dues-paying members, at the time. A top Teamsters official once said about Glimco, “He is the mob. When he opens his mouth, it’s the Syndicate talking.”
Glimco also later became a major behind-the-scenes power in the Automatic Phonograph Distributing Company located at 806 Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago. This was a major jukebox and coin-machine vending company.
He used his union posts to leverage labor shakedowns and extortions of company employers and pension fund embezzlements and utilized his underworld power and Mafia status to control and monopolize Chicago’s jukebox and vending machine racketeering for himself and his Mafia superiors.
Through Glimco’s efforts, the Outfit consolidated its ironclad control over the coin machine industry. He worked in tandem with Charles (Chuck English) Inglesia who was Chicago’s westside gambling chief, Eddie Vogel, a former Capone gang slot machine czar, and jukebox racketeer Fred (Jukebox) Smith. They opened Lormar Distributors, a record-supply house for jukeboxes to facilitate this control.
A Top Labor Racketeer
His underworld exploits and success as a mafioso reportedly led to him later being elevated to the lofty position of a “capo di decina” within the overall Chicago Outfit. The FBI considered him to be the top labor racketeer in The Windy City!
In addition to his labor union rackets, Glimco was also active in shylocking, extortion, strong-arm tactics, and contract murder!
The FBI repeatedly documented Joey Glimco as an important member of the former Al Capone Gang. Over the years, he testified before several U.S. Senate committee hearings investigating organized crime.
He was the featured “star” before the famed McClellan Hearings, which highlighted Glimco and his notorious career as a gunman and labor racketeer extraordinaire. The U.S. Senate Committee claimed, and put into their official record, that Glimco “ran the nation’s most corrupt union.” Senate investigators tagged him as the “preeminent labor union racketeer in Chicago.”
Federal and local authorities described Glimco as a “formal” member, or soldier, of the Chicago Outfit, the euphemism most often used to describe what essentially was the Anthony Accardo/Paul Ricca Family of Cosa Nostra.
For his part, Glimco repeatedly pled the Fifth Amendment before these types of hearings, refusing to answer any questions put to him by the panel of Senators. But the newspapers and television cameramen had a field day. “Tough Joey” Glimco looked like he came straight out of central casting. He looked like a gangster, dressed like a gangster, and conducted himself like a gangster.
He numbered among his closest associates the most important and notorious mafiosi and “Outfit” leaders in Chicago. These included such underworld luminaries as Charlie and Rocco Fischetti, Louis (Little New York) Campagna, Gus Alex, Edward Vogel, Frank La Porte, Jake (Greasy Thumb) Guzik, William (Willy Potatoes) Daddano, Joseph Fusco, front bosses Samuel (Momo) Giancana and Joseph (Joey Doves) Aiuppa, and the two top “behind-the-scenes bosses themselves, Felice (Paul the Waiter Ricca) DeLucia and Anthony (Joe Batters) Accardo.
Giuseppe (Joey Glimco) Glielmi died on April 28, 1991. He was 82 years old.
Until next time…The Button Guys Team
