In 1944, outfit guy Frank Quattrochi was fooling around with a married woman named Sonya Yario, the wife of a tavern owner, Frank Yario.

She, Sonya, said she had been out with Quattrochi, a former bodyguard for Potatoes Kaufman, several times in the last two weeks, but insisted that her mother always was along on the dates.

On the night he was killed, Quattrochi was in Frank Yario’s bar drinking with Paul Labriola, who was then 29 years old. With them was Izzy Lazznrus, former fight promoter and gunman for Al Capone.

Prior to this incident, Labriola and Martin The Ox Ochs, had murdered Maurice Barad, a gangster. Suspected in that killing was Jackie Cerone, who the newspapers called “Skippy” Cerone and William Smokes Aloisio. Cerone and Aloisio were under indictment at the time for trying to avoid the draft.

Ochs had served in action in Italy and was wounded in battle. He was cited for heroism in several field reports. When he returned to Chicago, he went AWOL.

Ochs would die at age 36, in a hospital bed, of a kidney infection and coronary sclerosis. He had been arrested 30 times in his short life usually for burglary and two slayings. However, he was never convicted of anything worse than disorderly conduct.

Maurice Barad was an armed robber on parole. According to police Labriola and Ochs drove to Barad’s house and convinced him to go out for a drink. He was found dead, shot twice in the head, on the grounds of the Mohawk Country club, outside of Chicago city limits.

Labriola was convicted of armed robbery and sent to Joliet prison in 1934. He was paroled 18 months later and had been questioned by the police in several murders and holdups in the short time he had been free. One crime he was involved in was organizing a robbery crew operating around the city of Evanston Illinois.

Barad may have been part of that crew.

The robbery team had been active in the area for a while. They had robbed seven homes in the area in the past, taking a total of about twenty-eight thousand dollars in jewelry, furs, and paintings.

On October 22, 1942, they broke into the home of the Galvin family at 3038 Normandy Place, in Evanston Illinois.

The robbers tied up Mrs. Lillian Galvin and her maid, Edna Sibilski, put them on their knees, and killed them with a shot in the back of the head.

The robbers got jewelry valued at $28,000 and furs costing $3,000, in 1944 value.

Barad, who was a long-time police informant, may have been blackmailing Labriola and Ochs over the murder, and so they killed him.

Barad had been questioned in the killing of Lawrence Mangano, west side gambler and racketeer who was Labriola’s stepfather, which gave Labriola another reason to kill him.

After her husband’s murder, Mrs. Barad told police that on the night that a Jewel thief named Eddie Ross, alias English, died, that Labriola came to her home wearing a bloodstained shirt and said: "I just killed English Eddie; you'll read about it In the papers."

Labriola was arrested as a suspect in the Ross murder but was released after a lie test failed to implicate him.

Edward Bruce Ross, 23 years old was a car thief and petty burglar with a long arrest record.

The story was that Ross had tried to break into a second-floor apartment at 526 South Western avenue. Frank Zizzo, then only 29 years old, a gangster who would stay with the outfit for decades lived in the apartment. He also owned the saloon on the ground floor. Zizzo said that Ross broke into the apartment at 6:30 in the morning, Zizzo said he ran to the window where Ross was trying to enter and, as he said "I yelled at him to get away and then I ran and got my shotgun. When I returned he was still there. I said 'you cut that out' and when he paid no attention to me I fired. My place has been burglarized twice.”

The shotgun blast hit Ross In the left side. He stumbled down the stairs and across to the northeast corner of Harrison street and Western avenue, where he fell dead.

Frank "Cease" Zizzo succeeded Gaetano "Tommy" Morgano as the mob chief of Northwest Indiana in the mid-1960s.

Police suspected that Labriola and Zizzo killed Ross inside Rizzo’s bar, dragged him out to the corner, and then Zizzo made up the story about the burglary.

Mrs. Barad, who was under indictment for being part of the Mangano’s stolen cigarette scam, also told police that Labriola shot Peter Gallichio, a bookie, and former 42 gang member because Labriola wanted the three-thousand-dollar diamond ring that Gallichio was wearing. Gallichio lived but refused to tell the police who shot him. Labriola was also questioned in the murder of Jens D. Larrison inside Matt Capone’s Hall of Fame saloon in Cicero.