The Outfit
Authors: Gus Russo
’Russo has provided the in-depth coverage that reporters working during the heyday of the mob would have liked to have done . . . an informative, tireless read. It is for followers of mob lore or the beginner who wants to jump with both feet into a subject that has often been only superficially reported.’
—
Chicago Tribune
’A fascinating tale.’
—
New York Post
’An impressive in-depth history of Chicago’s elusive crime syndicate . . . Russo humanizes the shadowy gangsters without denying their violent proclivities . . . this is the book to beat in examining this midcentury criminal empire.’
—
Publishers Weekly
’This is the most in-depth, dispassionate study of organized crime and big business to date. Russo located most of the skeletons in this masterful probe.
—
Jack Clarke, Special Investigator for Chicago Mayors Kennelly through Daley, and Illinois Governors Stevenson through Kerner
’A serious and entertaining read.’
—
Baltimore Magazine
’Nothing is left out.’
—
Chicago Sun-Times
’Absolutely captivating! For a “wiseguy” like me it was like going back to the neighborhood for an education. I couldn’t put it down.’
—
Henry Hill, the inspiration for the film
Goodfellas
and the bestselling book
Wiseguys
’The Outfit
is an outstanding work of investigative reporting about a crucial juncture in American parapolitics. The index alone is worth the price of admission. Congratulations, then, to Gus Russo for digging so deep and writing so well about a very mysterious place in time, and the murderous characters who gave it so much glamour.’
— Jim Hougan, former Washington editor of
Harper’s
and a ward-winning investigative author of
Spooks: The Haunting of America
-
The Private Use of Secret Agents and Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA
The Outfit
The Role of Chicago’s Underworld
in the Shaping of Modern America
Gus Russo
BLOOMSBURY
Copyright © 2001 by Gus Russo
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
Published by Bloomsbury, New York and London
Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Russo, Gus, 1949-
The Outfit : the role of Chicago’s underworld in the shaping of modern America / Gus Russo.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Outfit (Gang) -- History. 2. Mafia -- Illinois -- Chicago -- History.
3. Chicago (Ill.) -- History. 4. Chicago (Ill.) -- Politics and government.
I. Title
HV6452.132 0877 2002
364.1’06’0977311 -- dc21
2001056637
eISBN: 978-1-59691-897-9
This paperback edition published 2003
10 9 8 7 6
Typeset by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound in the United States of America by
R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company, Harrisonburg, Virginia
For Anthony and Sadie Russo, my parents.
And for
Augustino & Rosina Russo and Anthony & Rose Cascio,
my grandparents,
with love and gratitude.
Contents
2 Curly’s Racket: The Union Takeovers
4 Joe’s Racket: Running the Games (The New Booze)
6 “Hollywood, Here We Come” (The New Booze II)
7 Waking Up in the Dream Factory
8 The Outfit: Back from the Brink
Part Three: Scandals and Investigations
10 Playing Politics II: The Truman Connection
12 “Senator Cow Fever” Hits Chicago
Part Four: Vegas (The New Booze III)
15 The Game’s Afoot: The G Gets Involved
16 Courted by Old Joe Kennedy: The Outfit Arrives
18 The Kennedy Double Cross: The Beginning of the End
Afterword: The Outfit, and Organized Crime, in Perspective
I
n the New Cabaret Artistes, an illegal strip joint in Liverpool, a buxom stripper named Janice gyrated to the rhythms of twenty-year-old John Lennon and his even younger mates, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. In Cuba, youthful new prime minister Fidel Castro nationalized the formerly American-owned oil refineries. Meanwhile, the first ten U.S.-supported volunteers arrived at a secret Panama Canal Zone facility to begin training to retake their Cuban homeland back from Castro. The results of these and other events would be well documented in history books yet to be written. But the momentous conference under way in the mansion at 915 Franklin Avenue would, by mutual decree of the participants, never be chronicled.
It was June 1960, and in far-removed corners of the world unseen events were unfolding that would define a revolutionary era to follow. In fact, multiple revolutions - cultural, political, and sociological - were in their embryonic stages. This was the interregnum - the transition between the misnamed “happy days” of the Eisenhower years, and the terrifying brinksmanship of the Cold War sixties.
The palatial estates on Franklin, in the tony Chicago suburb of River Forest, were the setting on this otherwise unexceptional Thursday evening. Lawns were being tended by caretakers; Mercedes sedans were having their wax jobs refined. Young couples ambled off to the movies, perhaps to see
Spartacus,
or
Psycho.
The typical residents, stockbrokers, lawyers, and the like, were going about their lives.
In a much different manner, an atypical neighborhood denizen, a son of Sicilian immigrants named Antonino Leonardo Accardo, was also going about business as usual; with his lifelong friend Murray Humphreys and two other associates, he would, after a sumptuous lasagna dinner, decide who would become the next president of the United States.
For decades, these Thursday-night meetings were convened at the manse owned by “Joe” Accardo, as he was known to friends. Decisions made at these soirees ran the gamut: from who to “whack” for an indiscretion; to which national labor union to take over this week; to whether they should answer the White House‘s call to murder Castro; to the creation of a gambling paradise in the Nevada desert; or, as in this case, to go along with Joe Kennedy‘s request to guarantee his son Jack‘s “appointment” to the U.S. presidency.
The participants prided themselves on the relatively obscure manner in which they were able conduct their business. “We start appearing on the front page and it’s all over,” one was heard to say. The phrase became a mantra of sorts. Of course this enterprise
was
known, especially to law enforcement agents, but was so smoothly run that proof of the organizational links were unobtainable - at least for the first fifty years or so.
The colleagues in question were, in fact, the heirs apparent to the empire of bootlegging kingpin Scarface Al Capone. Capone’s downfall in 1931 provided an important lesson for the Accardo-Humphreys generation: exaggerated violence and a high media profile were the kiss of death and were to be avoided at all costs. Hundreds of millions were at stake, an amount not worth gambling for the luxury of being seen with movie stars. That was for amateurs.
Be assured, this was not “The Mafia” of the East Coast gangsters, laden with elaborate ritual and internecine rivalry; nor was it “La Cosa Nostra” as described by Joe Valachi when he sang to the feds. This band of brothers had shed the more objectionable traits of “Big Al’s” 1925-31 “Syndicate.” The new regime’s capos shared as much commonality with Capone as modern man does with Cro-Magnon cave dwellers. Perhaps as a nod to their enlightened, modernized dominion, a new name quickly emerged for the Chicago crime organization: The Outfit.
“Booze"
“What hath God wrought?” Although the query posed by Samuel Morse related to the unforeseeable consequences of his “Morse code” telegraphic breakthrough, it could just as easily have been directed at the topic of the religious pilgrimage to America. For it was a God-fearing Pilgrim sect called the Puritans who inadvertently set the wheels in motion for a vast criminal reign that would rule the New World two centuries hence.
Espousing a dogmatic, Bible-ruling theocracy, these seventeenth-century settlers to colonial America set the stage for a hedonistic backlash that reverberates to this day. Their humanity-denying canon in fact helped contribute the most unsightly fabric to the patchwork of the soon-to-be-named United States of America. The “law of unintended consequences” was never more aptly applied.
The late-nineteenth-century immigration wave deposited an assemblage of new citizens on America’s shores, many from places far less “enlightened” than the England of Oliver Cromwell. These recent emigres quickly sussed out that their forerunners were enduring a lifestyle of denial and joyless deprivation. Arriving from Ireland, Sicily, or Wales, the newcomers were more than happy to prosper by supplying a few creature comforts. From gambling to girls, they were the providers, while the corrupt authorities looked the other way.
By the early twentieth-century the shadow economy was already savoring a bull market when an ill-conceived constitutional amendment to ban beer and alcohol created a quick and easy route to extravagant wealth. This disastrous federal legislation, which had been percolating for over a century, was the last stand for the Puritan dream of a theocracy. But the insanity of a national ban on beer and alcohol had a perverse effect: instead of installing God’s will in government, it bestowed on Chicago’s gangs a foothold on America’s infrastructure. And the gangsters in Chicago who would call themselves the Outfit have cherished their gift ever since.
Prohibition: From a Bad Idea to a National Nightmare
Although Puritanical codes forbade drunkenness, they did not exclude mild drinking, especially in the form of beer. In fact, the
Mayflower’s
ship’s log notes that the reason for the landing at Plymouth Rock was the need to restock their dwindling beer supplies, making America’s first permanent colony nothing more than a “beer run.”
Beer was one thing, but hard liquor was something else again, for alcohol was seen to lead inevitably to rowdiness and lewd behavior. Introduced in London around 1720, cheap gin had additionally created an epidemic of addicts. In “the colonies,” temperance societies sprang up in a futile attempt to keep the plague at bay in the New World.
The rising tide of hard liquor in America was, however, inexorable. Nowhere was this plague expressed more vividly than among the tribes of the Native American “Indians,” who happily exchanged fur pelts for liquor. The effects left entire tribes decimated. By the 1820s, there were thousands of temperance societies, spearheaded from the pulpit by still more thousands of Protestant clergy. But no group raised the temperance banner higher than the nation’s distaff side. It was, after all, the women who had to deal with the effects liquor had on their saloon-frequenting husbands. Thus, in 1874, seizing the forefront of the antibooze movement, these crusading women formed the national Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).
This first antibooze wave is best remembered for the fanaticism of its most fervored adherents, especially one Kansas native (and WCTU member) named Carry Nation. The rejected daughter of a woman herself committed to an insane asylum, Nation suffered two failed marriages, one to a hard drinker, before becoming a frenzied evangelist in the “Women’s War” against alcohol consumption. (She fantasized that her name was a sign from God that she had a calling to “Carry a Nation.") A large, powerfully built woman who decided that her God-given physical attributes were her best weapons in the Women’s War, Nation went from attacking the
idea
of saloons to literally attacking the saloons themselves. Graduating from sledgehammers to thrown billiard balls to hatchets, Nation and her tiny band of followers went on a rampage of saloon destruction throughout the Midwest. She called it hatchetizing.
Although Nation’s efforts were both public and private failures (like her mother, she died in a mental institution), she kept the prohibition idea in the public consciousness until more capable advocates seized the baton.
New World Disorder
After the American West was “tamed,” the new country was swarmed by a massive wave of European immigrants seeking a better life. Dominated in numbers by the Irish, Italians, and Germans, more than twenty-five million new Americans arrived between 1885 and 1924 alone. In a virtual eyeblink, America was awash in immigrants, and with them, potent German beers, Irish whiskeys, and Italian wines, all served in thousands of saloons owned by the Euro-Americans.
Suddenly, a culture that was founded and defined by white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) was being threatened by hedonistic hordes. It was too much for the overwhelmed WASPs, who refused to stand by and watch their theocratic paradise crumble. The booze business was the only enterprise not dominated by WASPs, and just as it had since the first prehistoric tribes appeared, xenophobia reared its head.
The battle to prohibit booze was thus transformed into a nascent form of ethnic cleansing, a WASP attempt to tighten the yoke on the newer ethnic arrivals. Adding to the mix was the anti-German hysteria in place during World War I. The paranoia manifested itself in the withdrawal of German-language courses from school curricula and the removal of German books from libraries. Whereas the religious argument made for interesting parlor chat, prejudice, jingoism, and racism provided potent fuels for the prohibitionists.
The prohibitionist movement finally coalesced in the person of Wayne Wheeler. A brilliant debater from Ohio’s Oberlin College, Wheeler was recruited as the political lobbyist for the most businesslike antibooze organization yet, the Anti-Saloon League. Wheeler set the standard for all future lobbyists. Upon relocating to the nation’s capital in 1913, Wheeler aimed his powers of propaganda and rhetoric at a bold target: the total banning of alcohol consumption in America. His tireless efforts on Capitol Hill softened up the opposition until Wheeler was able to brilliantly parlay anti-German fanaticism into legislation. The word
prohibition
was transmogrified into a code word for “patriotism."
Incredible as it now seems, Wheeler was able, with absolutely no evidence, to persuade legislators that German-American breweries were in league with America’s wartime enemy, the German government. He also decried the waste of raw materials used in the brewing process, materials that could be better utilized to support the war effort. This led to the wholesale ban of grain sales and the closure of hard-liquor distilleries.
For prohibition to become the law of the land, Wheeler needed to effect one of the most difficult tasks in American politics: the passage of a constitutional amendment. In the nation’s first 150 years, only seventeen amendments had been enacted. Wheeler’s strategy thus included massive support for “dry” congressional candidates. Soon, robber barons and amoral industrialists fell in line behind the prohibition movement. New converts included the Rockefellers and Du Ponts, who helped bankroll Wheeler’s crusade. Auto tycoon, and temperance fanatic, Henry Ford was persuaded that his employees’ purchase of booze effectively diverted their meager income from the purchase of his cars.
By 1917, with his strategies aligned, Wheeler made his final push towards codified alcohol prohibition. Using his Congressional clout, Wheeler rewrote a proposed constitutional amendment on prohibition that had been languishing in subcommittees since 1913. Wheeler’s Eighteenth Amendment read: “No person shall manufacture, sell, barter, transport, import, export, deliver, furnish or possess any intoxicating liquor except as authorized in this act.” The exemptions granted were for industrial, sacramental, and medicinal uses only. After securing a relatively swift two-thirds majority in both houses, the bill wound its way through the nation’s statehouses in quest of the needed approval by three-quarters, or thirty-six, of the states.
Finally, on January 16, 1919, after a century of proselytizing, the Eighteenth Amendment was enacted, and Americans were given until midnight, January 17, 1920, to close the saloons. When Wheeler and his “drys” concluded that more legislation would be required to enforce national prohibition, Wheeler persuaded Minnesota Republican congressman Andrew J. Volstead to introduce another bill, again ghostwritten by Wheeler. Congressman Volstead was merely the facilitator of the proposal, which placed the Internal Revenue Service in charge of investigating and charging those in violation of the new amendment. Although the Volstead Act was passed in October 1919, it was summarily vetoed by President Woodrow Wilson, who saw his veto quickly overridden. In time, many would come to refer to the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act collectively as “Volstead.” Wheeler’s Herculean effort is still considered one of the greatest lobbying successes in history.
The Fly in the Ointment
The suffocating restrictions of Volstead seemed all-inclusive, but they were not. Although selling booze was by and large illegal,
drinking
alcohol was just fine. Added to the fact that the Eighteenth Amendment had absolutely no effect on America’s unquenchable thirst, it was only a matter of time before the largest underground economy in history was launched. It was known as bootlegging.
Since the earliest days of the New World’s western expansion, when cowboys had illegally smuggled alcohol in their knee-high boots to their Native American victims, “bootlegging” had been an integral part of the American fabric. With the advent of twentieth-century prohibition, the lure of the underground booze business became almost irresistible: astronomical profits combined with virtually no risk made a powerful fusion. It cost $5 to produce one barrel of beer that retailed for
$55
minimum. The profit in hard liquor was higher still. George Remus, the powerful lawyer-turned-bootlegger from Ohio, earned $40 million in three years, a staggering amount for the time.
Increasing the temptation to bootleg was that in 1923 the federal government employed merely fifteen hundred prohibition agents nationwide. Making matters worse, the agents were grossly underpaid (earning less than garbage collectors) and were thus easily corrupted by the big-spending bootleggers. In some instances the agents moonlighted as chauffeurs for their supposed targets. On the rare occasions when a “collar” was made, the feds imposed the relatively microscopic fine of $1,000.
Underpaid prohibition agents and thirsty soldiers returning from World War I made certain that drinking would remain America’s favorite pastime. The
federates
had nowhere to turn for support, since corrupted officials were ensconced at every level of government, up to and including the White House. President Harding, rendered vulnerable as a result of an affair with a twenty-year-old who had given birth to his love child, was under the control of his pro-booze advisers. His attorney general, Harry Daugherty, was later found to have been on the payroll of one of the nation’s most powerful bootleggers, George Remus. Remus had been paying Daugherty the astronomical sum of $350,000 per year to allow the booze to flow.
No locale was better positioned to take advantage of bootlegging’s riches than the city on Lake Michigan’s west bank. And nowhere was this obvious rags-to-riches path more adroitly perceived than in America’s “second city.” Named for the Ojibwa Indian word for the foul-smelling, river-clogging “wild onion”
(checagou),
it had already elevated political corruption to an art form. Chicago, the future home of The Outfit, embraced prohibition with open arms.
“That Toddlin’ Town"
Geography and geology play pivotal roles in the character of any city. Chicago’s placement on the map dictated that eastern urbanity come face-to- face with the take-the-law-into-your-own-hands mentality of the recently opened Wild West. After its incorporation in 1837, Chicago became the gateway to this new frontier and as such was guaranteed a steady stream of tourist business. Literally hundreds of wagons, overflowing with anxious homesteaders, transited Chicago every day.
1
Chicago soon amassed a glut of discretionary money, its coffers bulging with profits from manufacturing, commodities auctions, and huge stockyards that “rendered” seventeen million head of Western cattle a year. The party was on, and with the swiftness of a barroom pickpocket, Chicago became transformed into “That Toddlin’ Town.” Hotels and saloons were jammed with a mostly male clientele who had set out from the East in advance of the womenfolk. And these adventurers saw Chicago as their last chance for a little TLC before their trek into the harsh Western frontier. What transpired next was inevitable: Where there are unsupervised males there are saloons; where there are saloons, there are gambling and girls. The gamblers’ haunts acquired their own colorful nicknames, such as Hair-Trigger Block, Thieves Corner, and Gambler’s Row.
Not far behind the saloon owners came the con men and swindlers. On some occasions, the con men
were
the saloon owners. One such character was Mickey Finn, who operated two establishments on Whiskey Row. Finn’s now infamous concoction, The Mickey Finn Special, was a drink tainted with a secret powder that rendered the drinker unconscious. While touring the twilight zone, the unfortunate reveler had his pockets emptied by the unscrupulous Finn. As they had throughout time, the criminal element found refuge in a district that seemed to be earmarked just for them. And it was one of the most bizarre vice districts imaginable.
