Tony Pro’s Great Nephew Nabbed In Midtown Manhattan On Assault Allegations

A great nephew of a former legendary power in the Genovese crime family was arrested Tuesday morning for allegedly assaulting a lady friend in a Midtown Manhattan apartment last November.

Tony Pro will be a major character in The Irishman. He was known to make enemies vanish forever.


Danny Provenzano, 55, an actor/indie film director, was in custody awaiting arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court after surrendering to authorities. Danny is a great-nephew of the late Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano, a reputed capo for Vito Genovese.

Danny was arrested over allegations that he got into a dispute with Pamela O’Neil, 51, over money he owed her. On November 26, she alleged that he shoved her to the floor inside a W. 31st St. apartment, according to the NYPD. He also slammed her arm in a doorway, causing bruising and back pain, cops said.

O’Neil, who is disabled, had won a disability settlement that she also alleges Provenzano stole from her. She also alleges that he has been harassing her on social media.







“The comments on his post sharing my name publicly are quite scary,” she said. “People are posting incomprehensibly demoralizing and intimidating threats to my person.”

In an interview with the Daily News, Provenzano’s attorney said O’Neil was a scorned woman seeking revenge over a breakup.

Provenzano directed and co-starred in the 2003 film This Thing of Ours featuring Godfather star James Caan (who was in the film for about two seconds, in the very beginning.)

Lewisburg is where Hoffa and Provenzano had their huge falling out.


Anthony (Tony Pro) Provenzano, who will be a major character in Martin Scorsese’s upcoming The Irishman, was a short, stocky man with a face full of scars from his amateur boxing days. He was a major mob figure in the 1970s due to his rise in the Teamsters and his stormy relationship with James Hoffa. Tony Pro became vice president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. His historical base of power was the 13,000-member Local 560, headquartered in Union City, N.J.

Tony Pro had a solid reputation for violence. He used hammers, garrots, and guns to dispatch enemies. Many rivals allegedly vanished forever via grinders and incinerators.

Provenzano was a key figure in Hoffa’s 1975 disappearance. The two were initially allies -- then they were imprisoned at the same time at Lewisburg, where they had a major falling out. The cause was Hoffa's inability to secure a Teamsters loan for Tony Pro’s restaurant.

Then Hoffa insulted Provenzano by telling him “It’s because of people like you that I got into trouble in the first place.”

After their release, they allegedly got into a violent confrontation during a chance meeting at an airport.

In Desperate Bargain: Why Jimmy Hoffa Had to Die, Lester Velie wrote that “Hoffa and Provenzano went at it with their fists, and Hoffa broke a bottle over Provenzano’s head.”

Provenzano vowed he would retaliate against Hoffa’s grandchildren, saying “I’ll tear your heart out!”

Provenzano died at 71 in December 1988 of a heart attack in a hospital near a prison in Lompoc, Calif., where he was serving 20 years for racketeering. Had he lived, he had a second prison sentence (a 25-year stretch) waiting for him in New York for murdering a union rival in 1961. Anthony Castellito, from Ulster County, N.Y., had vanished off the face of the earth.

Anthony Provenzano was born May 7, 1917, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one of six sons of immigrant Sicilians, Rosario and Josephine Dispensa Provenzano. He was 17 when he quit school for a $10-a-week job driving a truck out of a terminal in Hackensack, N.J.

By 1941, Provenzano was a shop steward...

The actor who played Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire will play Tony Pro in The Irishman.


In 1961, testimony at his murder trial revealed that Provenzano had paid a mob enforcer, Harold Konigsberg, $15,000 to kill Castellito. Konigsberg and three others had lured the rival to his summer home in Kerhonkson, N.Y., in Ulster County, hit him with a lead truncheon and garroted him with piano wire. The body was never found.

Another Provenzano rival, Walter Glockner, was shot to death in 1963 in Hoboken, N.J., just as Provenzano went on trial for extorting payoffs for labor peace. He was convicted and sent to the Federal prison in Lewisburg, Pa., where Hoffa was also being held. Bad blood developed between the two former friends.

On July 30, 1975, Hoffa vanished from a parking lot in a Detroit suburb and was never seen again. He was on his way that night to what he thought was a meeting with Provenzano, who was not even in Detroit at the time. Tony Pro became a key figure in the disappearance, which was never solved.

A 1978 book quoted an FBI memo as saying that three of Provenzano’s associates had kidnapped Hoffa, put him in a garbage shredder, and cremated the remains in an incinerator. (We hope they shot him to death first.)






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