◆ SpookStack

Didn't Moo their tape recorder. It seemed that the Mafia, for whom the,butchers' union Iocal was merely a branch office, had sized up the situation along with wit- liams-McWilliams, and apparently had decided to put a man of its own choos. ing into Merkel. For all of its profitability problems, MerkeI still had,tremen- dous cash flow, selling millions:of dollars of meat to supermarkets, butcher shops; delicatessans, and government institutions. For a mobster, the bottom line on aprofit-and-loss statement comes a lot higher than it does for legitimate businessmen. To a mobster, many of the costs of doing business can simply be dispensed with by not paying bills, so that cash flow becomes,the paramount consideration. The particular gentleman who intervened in the Merkel case was Anthony Tinot De.Angelis, who was riding high on Wall Street and whose name was about to become a household word. He was the architect of what has become known as The Great Salad Oil Swindle, one of the biggest frauds in history.. In the press reports, books, and legal cases concerning the salad oil swindle, numerous attempts were.made to substantiate rumors that Tino-as lie is known to all---was in the Mahia. Associations were established, but the conclu- sions were all tenuous. He has.never appeared on the lists of Mafia members has flatly denied being a "front" for others in the salad oil swindle, and in its. investigations the Government never established that he passed loot from the swindle on up any chain-of-command, such as to Mafia bosses. On the other hand, New York Police Department experts'on the Mafia suspect that this is exactly what happened. They say they.think Tino De Angelis is close to, or part of, the Mafia family headed by Joseph Bonanno. The precise answer, of course, will probably never.be known to the public, but the eavesdropping tapes made by Detectives Nicholson and Montello in the Merkel case clearly add a whole new dimension to the De Angelis story. Until a few years before, Tino had run a hog-butchering operation in New York's Fourteenth Street meat market, where he had done business off and on since the 1930s. What a lot of people still don't know is that Tino really is an expert pork butcher. Some say he's the best,there is, a master judge of how.. to get ihe greatest amount of usable meat from an animal. To watch him in action in a boning room, you can easily believe it. If Tino had stuck to running. a hog-cutting operation for a company that was completely owned' and con- trolled by honest businessmen, he could have made the world a better place. But it wasn't in his nature, :. By 1963, he'had forsaken butchering and taken a corner on the interna- tional market for salad oil--or what the world thought was salad oil. Starting slowly, cleverly conning one Wall Street commodities house after another, Tino began trading in futures contracts and IOUs in ever increasing amounts. He completely outfoxed the American Express Company, which, in exchange for his storage fees, practically turned over to him its huge warehousing facility in Bayonne, New Jersey. Soon Tino had sold literally hundreds of millions of.