"Johnny Dio operates like an iceberg," says one rackets expert. "You never know how much is going on below the surface, but you know it spells trouble."
A precocious teen-age pupil of Murder Inc.'s Louis ("Lepke") Buchalter, urbane, well-tailored Iceberg Johnny Dio, 43 (real name: Dioguardi), was belatedly packed off for a three-year stretch at Sing Sing by Racket Buster Tom Dewey in 1937. The charge: extorting protection money from garment district truckers and cloak-and-suiters. Long out of stir and prospering by 1950, Dio became a smoother thug, refined his old muscle technique to set up "paper locals"...
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