Sal Pullia, who had ties to politics and the Chicago Outfit, was last seen at a Melrose Park restaurant in ‘81

When a politician disappears, the police usually have some good ideas about where to look for him or his bullet-ridden body. They ask bartenders if he has been showing up with a woman who isn’t his wife, or with another guy’s girlfriend. Was he in hock to a shady character for services rendered? Had he thwarted a rival’s hopes for elective office?

But in Sal P. Pullia’s case the cast of characters was so large, it was hard to know where to begin. Vanishing in 1981, he’s never been heard from since. A Melrose Park resident and Democratic committeeman, his story is regularly rehashed in a sidebar when newspapers report another puzzling disappearance.

It is the gold standard of missing persons sagas.

Pullia’s last public sightings were described by the Tribune’s John O’Brien and Edward Baumann. As a longtime crime-reporting team, they were privy to police station gossip. Mafiosi might give them a tip on an underworld rival.

On June 3, 1981, Pullia, then 33, had dinner with Sam Scott, a Chicago banker, at Vic Giannotti’s, a Forest Park restaurant.

Pullia had left his $30,000-a-year job in the Cook County clerk’s office a month earlier. He managed the department that approved or rejected applications for tax deferments. He rebranded himself as a business consultant and wanted a tutorial from Scott on how to attract clients.

Perhaps that also prompted him to circulate a letter from the U.S. attorney’s office thanking him for being a witness in its investigation of the Cook County board of tax appeals.

‘I think what sunk his ship was the letter,” a former investigator told the Tribune. “It made him look like he was proud to be stool pigeon.”

At 11 p.m. on that fateful day in 1981, Pullia arrived at Rocky’s Drive Inn, 2212 North Ave., two blocks from his home. A Melrose Park police officer on routine patrol saw Pullia driving east on North Avenue in his distinctive silver Volvo sedan shortly before midnight. About 2:30 a.m., he left Rocky’s.

Authorities believed that John “Jackie the Lackey” Cerone, No. 3 in the Chicago mob’s hierarchy, owned Rocky’s, O’Brien and Baumann noted.

O’Brien and Baumann reported that investigators learned Pullia had been told not to run for reelection by Chicago’s 1st Ward Committeeman John D’Arco, reportedly the mob’s ambassador to the Democratic machine. Pullia’s committeeman position was considered a mafia fiefdom. His predecessor, Ralph “Babe” Serpico, had been sentenced to prison for bribery and tax evasion.

Pullia refused to step down and said so publicly.

“I do not believe in smoke-filled-room politics,” he said in campaign rallies. “I’m not a part of those people (the mob). My reputation is the only thing I value.”

But he couldn’t deny his financial debt to a mobster. He had borrowed $10,000 from the son of the late Joseph “Joe Gags” Gagliano, a well-known loan shark. Not only did Pullia stiff the mobster’s son, a second-generation juice merchant, he claimed it was a campaign donation, not a loan.

With that cover story, he might well have acquired the unforgiving enmity of both the Outfit and the Internal Revenue System.

Besides favoring mobbed-up joints, Pullia had a mobster pedigree. His father, Frank Pullia, was, in law-enforcement lingo, “known to be an associate of Fiore Buccieri,” a top-ranking mobster.

In their generation, Melrose Park and Forest Park gave birth to cops-and–robbers friendships. They began in childhood. One buddy goes straight. The other is crooked. But they are bonded for life. In the elder Pullia’s day, the Armory Lounge in Forest Park was the headquarters of Sam “Momo” Giancana, the mafia’s boss of bosses.

Sal Pullia was drawn to politics. He was a member of the Democratic National Committee, and during President Jimmy Carter’s administration was a “frequent recipient of phone calls from the White House,” the Tribune reported.

Following his disappearance, Pullia’s wife and brother-in-law, John Carpino, a DuPage County police detective, began their own search, at one point walking the parking lots of the city’s airports, looking for the missing man’s silver Volvo.

Chicago police officers also checked every car in O’Hare International Airport’s sprawling parking lot and prowled Rush Street, the nightlife district Pullia was known to frequent.

“All leads have been exhausted,” said Detective Cmdr. Robert Banks, after six months of searching.

“We all want Sal back, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen,” said Gary Marinaro, Pullia’s interim replacement as committeeman.

A grand jury convened by Cook County State’s Attorney Richard M. Daley came to a similar dead end. It issued more than 30 subpoenas, creating a veritable Venn diagram of Chicago’s overlapping political and mobster circles.

Among those summoned was 1st Ward Ald. Fred Roti, who reported to D’Arco, the committeeman who advised Pullia to get out of politics. A process server couldn’t find retired mob boss Joey Aiuppa. “Investigators said that with Aiuppa’s connections to mob families throughout the nation, he could hide out indefinitely, if he wishes,” the Tribune reported.

The FBI suggested checking an Oak Park hospital. Aiuppa had respiratory problems. “The investigators went to the hospital to question employees there. When they saw Aiuppa leaving the building, they handed him the subpoena,” the Tribune reported.

The mayor of Melrose Park, a childhood friend of Pullia’s, was granted immunity from prosecution but nonetheless refused to testify. Others, including Aiuppa, reportedly pleaded the Fifth Amendment. The investigation produced nary a lead and was headed to the cold-case files.

But it was resuscitated in 1988.

A burial ground of syndicate victims was uncovered in DuPage County. Parts of several bodies were found in a grave dug in a field near Argonne National Laboratory. Lime had been poured over them to quicken their decomposition.

The first remains were initially thought to be those of of Richard Ferraro. The owner of a Calumet City junkyard, he had gone missing in 1977.

Investigators eventually determined the body was not Ferraro’s. But “sources said the burial ground could hold the remains of a number of mob targets who vanished without a trace during the last 20 years,” the Tribune reported.

Pullia matched that description. He’d stiffed a loan shark and ratted on patronage employees. Of course, he might be alive. But he didn’t fit the profile of a runaway.

Those who disappear of their own accord generally leave a money trail. To restart their lives elsewhere they will close a savings account, sell an asset, pawn jewelry.

Yet nothing was missing from Pullia’s safety deposit box. His estate wasn’t much: a heavily mortgaged home and some stock in a Wheaton bowling alley.

And FBI agents didn’t find his remains in the mafia victims’ burial grounds.

So there the story ends, its mystery unresolved. That is, until perhaps some detective is intrigued by a dusty old file and proceeds to find a clue his or her predecessors overlooked. Or, an enterprising reporter going through old newspaper clips stumbles upon a yarn just too good to be forgotten, and starts digging.

An earlier version of this story incorrectly indicated that a body found in DuPage County in 1988 was that of Richard Ferraro. Investigators initially suspected the body was Ferraro’s, but later determined that not to be the case.

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