Albert ”Caesar” Tocco, a reputed Mob boss who was sentenced to 200 years after his wife took the unusual step of testifying against him, has died in an Indiana prison. He was 77.
Tocco died on Wednesday in a federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, after suffering a stroke, said Mike Truman, spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. He was 15 years into his prison sentence for racketeering, conspiracy, extortion and tax fraud.
He allegedly oversaw organised-crime operations in many of Chicago’s southern suburbs.
”Just the way he looked at you, just the way he talked to you was scary,” said retired FBI agent Bob Pecoraro.
Tocco was arrested in Greece in 1989 and brought back to Chicago, where he was convicted in federal court.
His wife, Betty, testified that in 1986 she drove him from an Indiana cornfield where he told her he had just buried Tony ”The Ant” Spilotro, the Mob’s man in Las Vegas for two decades, and his brother Michael. The Spilotro case was portrayed in the 1995 Martin Scorsese movie Casino.
In an interview published in the Chicago Sun-Times just after he was sentenced in 1990, she called her husband a ruthless thug who abused his family, broke the Mob’s code of ethics and even cheated his daughter at tic-tac-toe.
She was believed to be the first wife of an organised-crime leader to testify against her spouse, the newspaper said. She later went into the federal witness-protection programme, it said.
Describing what led her to testify, Betty said until 1986 she believed Tocco’s story that he was not a Mob boss. She said she learned otherwise when she drove to the Indiana cornfield to pick him up and he told her what he had done.
”I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” she said. ”I was shocked, nauseated, disgusted. It was Father’s Day. His sister and mother were coming over for a barbecue.
”What was I supposed to say? ‘Albert just buried the Spilotros last night, so we can’t barbecue today.”’
Tocco was arrested after his wife told FBI agents that he was trying to get her son out of the country, the newspaper said. — Sapa-AP