After exploring other genres for over a decade, Martin Scorsese went back to mob films with The Irishman, which introduced viewers to a different group of gangsters, among those Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano (played by Stephen Graham) – but who was Tony Pro? Like with every film based on true events, The Irishman took some liberties for the sake of storytelling, and it had an extra dash of creativity as it’s based on Charles Brandt’s book I Heard You Paint Houses, which chronicles the life of Frank Sheeran.
Because of that, a lot of the events depicted in The Irishman have been questioned, more so as Sheeran’s confessions have been disputed over the years. The Irishman follows truck driver Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) who gets involved with Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and his crime family. Sheeran becomes their top hit man and goes to work for Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), a powerful Teamster tied to organized crime. Hoffa had an enemy of his own: fellow rising Teamster Anthony Provenzano, a.k.a. Tony Pro.
The Irishman showed the power and influence that people like Bufalino, Hoffa, and Provenzano had back in the 1960s and 1970s, but things didn’t exactly happen as portrayed in the film. Tony Pro was indeed a member of a crime family, but how true is the rest of Provenzano’s story in The Irishman?
The Irishman: The True Story of Tony Pro
Anthony Provenzano was the head of the Genovese crime family New Jersey faction. He became employed by Local 560 as a business agent between 1948 and 1958, was the president between 1958 and 1966, and secretary treasurer between 1975 and 1978. The Irishman portrayed Hoffa and Provenzano as rivals from the very beginning, but in reality, they were once friends, and their relationships broke beyond repair after a reported feud when they were in federal prison at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania – just like in the film. Provenzano was indicted for extortion twice (in 1960 and 1963), but that was nothing compared to what he did next.
In 1961, Local 560 Secretary-Treasurer Anthony Castellitto met with mob-associated loan shark Salvatore Briguglio. According to federal government reports, Briguglio and Harold Konigsberg murdered Castellitto, and two months later Castellitto’s position was occupied by Provenzano’s brother, with Briguglio and Provenzano's other brother also getting new positions. Years later, in 1975, the day Hoffa disappeared he was supposed to meet with Provenzano and Anthony Giacalone, as seen in the film, but he was never convicted on anything related to Hoffa’s disappearance. Later that year, Provenzano was indicted for conspiracy to violate the anti-kickback statute. In 1976, he was indicted for conspiracy and murder in connection to Castellitto’s death, and in 1979 he was indicted for racketeering.
Tony Pro spent the rest of his life in jail and died of a heart attack at Lompoc Federal Penitentiary in California, in 1988. Although Provenzano was more of a supporting character in The Irishman, the film covered the biggest moments of his life, especially those connected to Hoffa, though it (understandably) focused more on their enmity and the fact that he was supposed to meet him the day he disappeared. Of course, whether he had something to do with Hoffa’s disappearance/murder or not continues to be a mystery, no matter what Frank Sheeran said.