Obituaries : Paul Vario; Alleged Mafia Captain, Counselor

NEW YORK — Paul Vario, alleged consigliere (counselor) and captain to high-ranking Mafia families who figured prominently in the book “Wiseguy,” has died in a Texas prison, authorities said late last week. He was 73.

Vario died Tuesday at a minimum security federal prison in Ft. Worth, where he was serving a six-year sentence for extorting air freight companies at Kennedy International Airport, said Edward McDonald, a Brooklyn-based federal organized crime prosecutor.

Charlotte Barron, executive assistant to the warden, attributed Vario’s death to respiratory arrest due to chronic obstructive lung disease.

A reputed capo, or captain, in the crime organization once headed by Thomas Lucchese and counselor to the Carmine Tramunti family, Vario allegedly controlled many of the lucrative illegal activities at the airport.

In interviews for Nicholas Pileggi’s book, “Wiseguy,” federal informant Henry Hill implied that Vario was the major unapprehended beneficiary of the $5.8-million Lufthansa airline robbery in 1978, one of the largest in U.S. history.

Before starting his sentence in the airport case, Vario--whose police record dates from 1924 when he served jail time as “an incorrigible truant”--served a four-year term for conspiring to defraud the government in connection with attempts to secure Hill’s early release from prison.

In “Wiseguy,” Pileggi describes Vario as “a large man, standing 6 feet tall and weighing over 240 pounds (who) appeared even larger than he was. He had the thick arms and chest of a sumo wrestler and moved in the lumbering manner of a big man who knew that people and events would wait for him.”

Hill, formerly Vario’s protege, said he once saw Vario grab a sawed-off baseball bat from his car and chase a nimbler man up five flights of stairs to collect a loan-shark debt.