Still ruling East St. Louis at age 63, Buster Wortman died August 3, 1968. He was in intensive care, suffering complications after larynx surgery; but some said his death was due to a liver ailment from heavy drinking. After Buster died, his son subdivided the land around the moat; last I knew the Art Moderne castle was standing, still surrounded by water but also suburban homes.
Attorney Morris Shenker, who represented both Vitale and Wortman, came also to represent Jimmy Hoffa and the $700 million Central States Teamster’s pension fund. He borrowed two million personally from the Outfit and bought the Dunes Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas, promising a kickback he never delivered. He died of natural causes, as mob lawyers often do, in 1989.
John J. Vitale took over the St. Louis branch of the Outfit after the death of Anthony “Tony Lap” Lopiparo. He was “manager” of heavyweight champ Sonny Liston, and likely arranged Liston taking that famous dive in the championship rematch with Mohammed Ali. He dabbled in coin-machine rackets, firearms trafficking, and informing the FBI. The St. Louis mob boss died in his sleep in 1982.
Wes Grapp became head of the L.A. office of the FBI, but left the Bureau under a cloud. He had borrowed from the Beverly Hills Fidelity Bank headed by Stanley M. Stafford, whose young son in 1968 was kidnapped and rescued by Grapp and his agents in a highly publicized $250,000 ransom case. He subsequently joined the budding Federal Express as their world security director until retiring in 1982. (EDITOR’S NOTE: Grapp died in 2011 at the age of 93.)
Barney Baker, having clowned past Bobby Kennedy with dialogue out of Guys and Dolls, gained notice in the press as a comically corpulent thug who somehow managed to attract good-looking women. He next came to national attention as a connected Teamsters guy who’d been on the phone several times with Jack Ruby in the days before the Kennedy assassination (and Ruby’s killing of Lee Harvey Oswald). He claimed not to know Ruby and that these lengthy calls had come out of the blue (“We just had mutual friends”). He served time on labor racketeering charges and wound up in a small office at the Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund building in Chicago, sitting at an empty desk usually reading a racing form. In later days when I saw him, he looked unkempt and disoriented, though he was driving a new Cadillac with a clergy sticker on the back bumper. He died November 1995.
Robert Kennedy and James Hoffa would come into my life again.
Bobby Greenlease’s parents sought counsel from a Jesuit professor of philosophy and theology at Rockhurst College, where they funded a library and art gallery, as well as donating land for a high school to be added to the college campus. Robert Greenlease died at home in Mission Hills in September 1969, near the sixteenth anniversary of his son’s kidnapping and murder. Virginia, 91, died in 2001, leaving one million dollars each to the Rockhurst college and high school in her son’s and husband’s names.
The Greenlease daughter, Sue, haunted by her little brother’s death, developed an adult drug problem, dying in 1984. Paul Greenlease, whose success with his own Cadillac dealership made his father proud, lived only to 47. Yet both fared better than the children of several other of the tragedy’s principals.
Dolan’s son Brian, following in his father’s footsteps, joined the St. Louis Police Department. In 1998, he was one of three officers charged with misdemeanor assault of a man who had taken them on a high-speed chase. Brian resigned and signed on with another department and soon faced similar charges, looking on while another cop beat up an informant. He seemed always to be quietly complicit in the crimes of other officers — like father...? He wound up a security consultant in the Middle East, dying at 53.
In 1972, St. Louis hoodlum Louis D. Shoulders, 41, was blown up in his new Cadillac in the Missouri Ozarks in apparent retaliation for the murder of a Pipefitters Union official. Deep in the Tribune coverage was something I hadn’t known but probably should have: in 1955, at just 26, the son of the notorious late disgraced police lieutenant of the Greenlease case had been a prime suspect in the vicious murder of Jack Carr’s son, Bobby.
And now, as a man well beyond middle age, taking stock of my life, I realize how big and yet so very small my cast of characters is... and I know how vital it is to look both ways when I cross the street.
You never know when the next Cadillac or cab might be coming.