Fred Albin Ossanna was a Minnesota

Minnesota

Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state...

 lawyer

Lawyer

A lawyer, according to Black's Law Dictionary, is "a person learned in the law; as an attorney, counsel or solicitor; a person who is practicing law." Law is the system of rules of conduct established by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs, maintain the stability of political...

 who oversaw the dismantling of the Minneapolis-St. Paul streetcar system as head of Twin City Rapid Transit Company in the 1950s. Ossanna had been hired by Charles Green, a Wall Street

Wall Street

Wall Street refers to the financial district of New York City, named after and centered on the eight-block-long street running from Broadway to South Street on the East River in Lower Manhattan. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, or...

 speculator who had purchased a large number of TCRT stock shares and ousted D.J. Strouse as head of the company soon after. When it was discovered that Green had connections to organized crime

Organized crime

Organized crime or criminal organizations are transnational, national, or local groupings of highly centralized enterprises run by criminals for the purpose of engaging in illegal activity, most commonly for monetary profit. Some criminal organizations, such as terrorist organizations, are...

, Ossanna took control. In a period of 22 months ending in June 1954, rails were removed from city streets where trolleys once traveled to be replaced by General Motors bus

Bus

A bus is a road vehicle designed to carry passengers. Buses can have a capacity as high as 300 passengers. The most common type of bus is the single-decker bus, with larger loads carried by double-decker buses and articulated buses, and smaller loads carried by midibuses and minibuses; coaches are...

es. Ossanna and associate Barney Larrick were both convicted of fraud

Fraud

In criminal law, a fraud is an intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual; the related adjective is fraudulent. The specific legal definition varies by legal jurisdiction. Fraud is a crime, and also a civil law violation...

 on August 6, 1960 for activities that had taken place during the conversion from streetcars to buses.
Ossanna had been a prominent local attorney, and left marks in various places. He helped found the Sunset Memorial Park and Funeral Chapel in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1922 by providing funding. In 1938, he had acted as counsel in a debacle known as the "Bemidji

Bemidji, Minnesota

Bemidji is a city in Beltrami County, Minnesota, United States. Its population was at 13,431 at the 2010 census. It is the county seat of Beltrami County. Bemidji is the most major city in North Central Minnesota and the largest commercial center between Grand Forks, North Dakota and Duluth,...

 Affair" where bidding irregularities had appeared on a project for the Bemidji State Teacher's College. At some point, Ossanna had done some work for National City Lines

National City Lines

National City Lines, Inc. , was a controversial company founded in Minnesota, United States in 1920 as a modest local transport company operating two buses which was reorganized into a holding company in 1936 with equity funding from General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California and...

, a company that became infamous for buying up streetcar lines and converting them to bus systems.