Henry Zebrowski

Dante, therefore, supposedly hooked up with a mobster named Luigi Defonso sometime in 1973 or 1974.

This is when the story gets a little murky.

There's a lot of hearsay.

Now, Luigi Defonso was a young con man and gangster who'd made his first million at the age of 21 in the late 1960s through a bogus investment scheme.

His taste for the high life eventually led people to refer to Defonso as the Sicilian Gatsby.

When DeFonzo met Dante, DeFonzo had also fled Chicago to Fall River.

But DeFonzo had fled because he'd been accused of swindling some 2,000 investors in a commodities trading scam.

DeFonzo's relocation, however, is what links Count Dante to one of the largest heists in American history, the Peralator Heist of 1974.

Oh.

So one day in the fall of 1974, Count Dante showed up to the office of his lawyer, Bob Cooley, who had, of course, previously represented the Count during the trial that followed the so-called Dojo War.

Dante, however, was gacked out on coke, utterly bloated, and completely disheveled.

Dante was even conspicuously missing the trademark cape and leotard.

But after some small talk, Dante asked Bob if he wanted in on a scheme that was sure to, quote, win Cooley $1 million.

By this point, though, Cooley didn't want anything to do with further Dante shenanigans because this was not the first time that Dante had offered Cooley, a former cop, by the way, action on something that was highly illegal.

Such Cooley luckily missed out on what could have been the early planning stages of the Perlator heist.

Now, as far as what the Perlator heist was, around the time that Dante was offering a cut to Cooley, the Illinois Bureau of Investigation got a tip that a big score was being planned by the so-called Chicago Outfit.

That was the Bureau's name for Chicago's most active Italian mafia crime family.

So the Bureau put tails on such organized crime figures as Pete Gooshy, Jimmy the Bama Catawara.

And who else but Count Dante's new neighbor in Fall River, Luigi Defonso.

The Bureau saw these three men meet in a hotel room for about two hours in September of 1974, but it was not noted if Count Dante was amongst their group.