D&P Construction Co., Inc. — a waste-hauling business the FBI said nearly 20 years ago was secretly controlled by mob figures — has been hired to provide “refuse and debris removal services” on two taxiway construction projects at O’Hare Airport for a consortium led by F.H. Paschen and Turner Construction, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned.
D&P has been paid just under $20,000, according to Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago Department of Aviation, which oversees O’Hare and Midway Airport.
Work on one of the airfield projects was done from May 2020 to August 2021, and the other began in May 2021 and “will reach substantial completion in late 2024,” city officials say.
The projects, which together total around $250 million, involve “the construction of two parallel, east-west taxiways located to the southwest of the terminal core. The project also includes utility installation, power and communication cable rerouting.”
Other than these two airport projects, Department of Aviation records show D&P hasn’t done any other work “as a contractor, subcontractor or vendor” at O’Hare or Midway since at least Jan. 1, 2011 — a period that dates to the tail end of Mayor Richard M. Daley’s tenure and includes Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s time in office and the time since Lightfoot was elected in 2019.
And Lightfoot’s Department of Procurement Services, which handles contracts for the rest of city government, says it doesn’t have any record of the company doing work for the city in that period.
D&P is considered a business in good standing by City Hall, but why it decided to seek city work now isn’t clear.
Lightfoot’s aviation commissioner, Jamie Rhee, who used to run the procurement department, declined to comment.
In a written statement, the Paschen-Turner partnership says: “D&P responded to a request for proposals for dumpster waste services on the project. All responses were reviewed, and D&P was lowest, responsive and responsible proposer for the services requested. We were not aware of past allegations against D&P.”
A once-secret 2003 FBI memo said that D&P Construction — which has offices in Melrose Park and Chicago — was “controlled by Peter and John DiFronzo,” reputed mob figures who died in the past few years.
Corporate filings list D&P’s president as Josephine DiFronzo, who was married to Peter DiFronzo until his death in December 2020 at 87 from complications of COVID-19.
Peter DiFronzo has been described by law enforcement sources in the past as having been the chief lieutenant to his brother and, for a time, the leader of the Chicago Outfit’s Elmwood Park street crew.
His brother John “No Nose” DiFronzo was believed to long have headed the Chicago mob, until his death in 2018 at 89.
The 2003 FBI memo also said the business had “obtained contracts through illegal payoffs or intimidation.”
The memo came to light two years later as then-Rosemont Mayor Donald E. Stephens Sr., who since has died, was trying to bring a casino to his community and as gaming regulators were looking into possible mob ties to Stephens, his town and some investors backing the proposed casino.
D&P, founded in the 1970s, had given money to a Stephens campaign fund, done work for the village of Rosemont and also hauled trash from the proposed casino site.
Rosemont ended up losing out on the casino. Instead, it was built in Des Plaines — across the street from Rosemont.
John DiFronzo was convicted in 1993 in a scheme to infiltrate an Indian casino.
During the landmark 2007 Operation Family Secrets mob trial in Chicago, hit man-turned-prosecution witness Nicholas Calabrese testified that John DiFronzo was among those involved in the 1986 murders of mobbed-up brothers Anthony Spilotro and Michael Spilotro. The brothers were pummeled in a Bensenville-area home, then driven to and buried in an Indiana cornfield.
John DiFronzo was never charged in the killings nor in the massive Family Secrets federal prosecution that gutted much of the rest of the Chicago mob’s leadership.
Peter DiFronzo did time in Leavenworth in the 1960s for a warehouse heist.
In 1998, an anti-corruption body called the Independent Review Board tried to kick Peter DiFronzo out of the Teamsters union “for being a member of the Chicago La Cosa Nostra . . . and knowingly associating with other organized crime members,” records show.
D&P officials declined to comment.
