◆ SpookStack

The Thai Didn't Moo / 13 matched the average man's preconception of what a Mafia member ought to Iook like. In the 1960s Dio had gone heavily into the kosher meat business, writing, his anderlings are stil behind some of the biggest kosher meat firms in the country, with distribution coast to coast (details are in Part Nine). Then there was the name of Charles "Charlie Callahan" Anselmo, a Ioan shark with an arrest record for bookmaking and a close friend of Tino De Angelis's. Anselmo, then thirty-eight, had moved in on the meat business through a trucking operationihe started- something mobsters can do easily because the Syndicate controls the Teamsters' union. Meat deaiers who ac- cepted Anselmo's generous offers of credit soon found that it wasn't like taking Out a charge card at Sears. At least one dealer, Seymour Ehrlich, was forced to turn over contro! of his business to Anselmo. Now, operating as Triangle Meats, a brokerage concern, Anselmo was supplying Lokietz with a lot of the meat that went into Merkel producis. Perhaps these purchases from Anselmo were some kind of quid pro quo to the Mob. Tino had put Lokietz into Merkel to start with, and the deal may have specified where the meat was to come from. At any rate, Anselmo's name was mentioned a lot more reverently than Dio's was around Lokietz's office. A separate detective crew was sent out to tap Anselmo's phone.:! "Charlie Anselmo," Lokietz was saying over his own phone November 23, as Nicholson and Montello listened to one side of the conversation through picked it up. It so happens that the company it went to found dirty meat. So fourteen boxes were left behind. It seems that--you know--fucking Anseimo's got people taking all over." "I wantcd to grab the meat," Lokietz went'on. "I understand he had the [unintelligible].on 'em. I got the whole information, and as long as I know, [then] I'm guilty of that, don't you understand? ... . I had to send back a 1: trailerload of meat. He's got to pay for it, he knows that. ... We had to open the mcat up, put it into tanks, get rid of the boxes. I still got meat downstairs, twenty thousand pounds. Somebody coming up tomorrow to open:them up. : ... I taiked to Mr. Callahan, I said, *Look, Charlie .. . little by little, we're going to try to get rid of it. Little by little... Chock Full O' Nuts :.. Shop. Rite... Dirty meat? What was going on? Moments later, Lokietz was on the phone with Herman Jukofsky, Merkel's plant manager and the son-in-law of Loki- : asked Jukofsky. There was a pause, as if for an answer. "Eighty pounds meat : and twenty pounds of that stinger meat?" he asked. "Seventy-five meat and twenty-five.... On the frankfurters, twenty-thrce.... What's his formula on the patties?"