The Outfit (25 page)

“But it’s a conspiracy charge,” countered Nitti. “We all have to hang together.” Nitti had had such a rough time in his previous incarceration that he was determined not to go away again without a fight. Tempers flared as the combatants rose to scream at one another. “Frank, you’re asking for it,” threatened a panting Ricca. One boss’ threatening another brought the room to an uneasy silence. In a daring breach of traditional etiquette, Nitti walked to the door, opened it, and indicated that his former friends had to leave. Walking out into the fittingly chilly March night, the Outfit executive board members knew that, in one way or another, they had seen the last of their old compadre Frank Nitti.

The following day brought a freezing rain to Chicagoland. As the 2 P.M. train crawled down the tracks of the Illinois Central Railroad, its crew was startled to see a clearly drunk man stumbling toward them on the tracks. He was holding a whiskey bottle in one hand and a .32-caliber pistol in the other. The train ground to a halt after the well-dressed, smallish man made threatening gestures in its direction. In fact, he just wanted the workers to keep their distance. With the railroad men watching in horror, the despondent man aimed his gun at his head and fired two shots, but he was so drunk that he missed, putting the bullets instead through the crown of his fedora. On his third attempt, Frank Nitti’s gun found its mark, blowing his brains out in full view of the onlookers. His death remains to this day the only suicide of a high-ranking gang leader. Gang historians surmise that the Outfit gave Nitti the choice of going to prison or facing the business end of a Chicago typewriter. Nitti chose neither.

Seemingly unfazed, the Outfit bosses moved on to new business, the most pressing of which was the need to post bail of $500,000. The money was raised in much the same way that the gang had produced much of its alcohol during prohibition: the Unione Siciliana was recruited into the effort. Soon, thousands of small checks began arriving at the Outfit’s headquarters, sent by the tightly knit community of Italian immigrant families, formerly the gang’s alky cookers. Contributing to the effort was a mixed assortment of crooked bookies and legitimate small-business men, all of whom felt they owed something to “the boys.” The FBI later identified some eighteen individuals who appeared at the Chicago offices of the American Casualty Company, the enlisted bail-bond company, toting tens of thousands of dollars each. They arrived bearing personal checks, money orders, cashier’s checks, and boxfuls of cash. One married couple, Jack and Betty Sussman, arrived with $50,000 in cash. The organizer of the fund drive was the mysterious “supreme president” of the Italian-American Union (formerly the Unione Siciliana), and the former twenty-one-year-old mayor of suburban Melrose Park, attorney Joseph I. Bulger (Imburgio).
⁶
Bulger, now in his early fifties, was born in New Orleans, from where he was rescued by a Cajun woman after his father was lynched by the local xenophobes. The woman brought the youngster to Chicago, where he prospered, eventually graduating at age twenty from the John Marshall School of Law7. After becoming one of the youngest presidents of the Unione Siciliana, Bulger assumed the role of consigliere for the Outfit, and lawyer of record for the gang’s bosses, having personally handled a lawsuit for Ricca involving a fire at his Berrien Springs farm years earlier. Some believe Bulger was the hidden “ultimate leader” of the Outfit, working from his 139 North Clark Street office to link the organization back to the old country, which in turn siphoned off a percentage of the ill-gotten profits from the Windy City. This belief, though widespread in Chicago’s Italian ghettos, is virtually impossible to prove.

After a summer of predictable stalling maneuvers, the trial of the original “Chicago Seven” commenced on October 5, 1943. One by one, studio heads testified about the extent of the shakedown. In contrast to the reluctant witness George Browne, Willie Bioff gave unrestrained, detailed testimony that left the courtroom stunned. Of course, by the time of his testimony, Bioff had secured a deal with the prosecutors for a shortened jail term, protection, and a new identity upon his release. All he had to do was finger the Outfit leaders, and Bioff more than held up his end of the bargain. The former pimp readily admitted that his prior testimony
in
the 1941 trial, denying the extortion, was a total fabrication: “I lied, and lied, and lied.” In fact, Bioff said, “We had about twenty percent of Hollywood when we got in trouble.” The Outfit would have taken over 50 percent, Bioff added, if they hadn’t “loused up.” Summing up his tawdry life, Bioff said, “I am just a low, uncouth person. I’m a low-type sort of man. People of my caliber don’t do nice things.” This particular colloquy concluded with Bioff’s introspective no-brainer: “Oh, yes, I am a very despicable man.”

But the extortion admission was just one of Bioff’s bombshells. He also recounted how studio heads such as the Schencks were stealing from their stockholders; how Nick Schenck had paid a federal investigator $200,000 not to investigate him; and in a statement that sent ripples of fear through the members of the Outfit’s New York-based Commission partners, Bioff named Sidney Korshak as “our man in Hollywood.” However, Willie “the Canary” stopped just short of naming Curly Humphreys or Joe Accardo, whom he had never met face-to-face. Keeping these key figures insulated from Bioff and Browne was a key strategy that allowed the Outfit to continue to function despite the monumental setback.

The defendants’ legal team decided against putting their clients on the stand. Instead they chose to cross-examine the studio heads and Bioff in a futile attempt to to prove that the extortion was in fact bribery by venal businessmen who desired to control labor. Of course there was some truth to that defense. When a federal court investigated the estate of Frank Nitti six years later, the presiding judge noted, “The monies were extracted [from the studio heads] with full knowledge on their part as to Browne’s and Bioff’s activities and assurances; and no effort was made to secure the assistance of law enforcement authorities.” But Kostelanetz’s prosecution team was also correct about the Outfit’s master plan, and the Outfit was charged in this trial, not the studio heads. In the end, the jury heard vastly more testimony about the gang’s connivances than it did about the movie industry’s own expedience.

On New Year’s Eve, 1943, after a seventy-three-day trial, the jury delivered their guilty verdict, which carried a maximum ten-year sentence, at the discretion of the judge. In two weeks’ time, the litigants returned to debate the imposition of punishment. Prosecutor Kostelanetz gave a blistering synopsis of the gang’s criminal past and alleged violent associations, even arguing that the judge might see fit to extend the requisite ten-year sentence “by one or two years, as Your Honor may feel appropriate.” One of the Outfit’s attorneys, A. Bradley Eben, in asking for a light sentence, called attention to the obvious when he reasoned, “There is not one chance in a thousand that they will be pardoned when they first become eligible for it.” Another member of the legal team added, “Your Honor may know that they will probably serve nearly every day of the sentence that Your Honor imposes.” After hearing the opposing pleas, the judge pronounced punishment: Ricca, Campagna, Rosselli, D’Andrea, Maritote, and Gioe were sentenced to ten years in prison plus $10,000 fines. Louis Kaufman, the New Jersey union strong-arm, was given seven years. After three months of futile appeal motions, during which the convicts languished in New York City’s dreaded Tombs prison, the gang packed its toothbrushes for what their pursuers assumed would be a decade “in college.” Although Nick Circella had been sent to Leavenworth federal prison in Kansas, a day’s drive from the gang’s Chicago headquarters, the new convictees were remanded to the notoriously strict, 60 percent overpopulated, and hideously unsanitary Atlanta federal facility, 720 miles from the Windy City.

In Atlanta, Warden Joseph Sanford made a preemptive gesture, aimed at informing the gang bosses that they should not expect special treatment while under his watch. When Phil D’Andrea feigned illness, Sanford personally entered his cell and beat the fifty-two-year-old father of three unmercifully. When word got back to the rest, they lay low, with Rosselli even earning a job as prison library clerk, where he pursued an interest in the Bible. Rosselli also maintained his liaisons with Hollywood. During his prison stay, he received hundreds of letters from friends such as talent agent Danny Winkler and actress Beatrice Ann Frank. But for the forty-five- year-old Paul Ricca, the man who by rights should have assumed Nitti’s leadership post, the ignominy was unbearable. He had paid off too many pols in his life to suffer such an outrage. But Ricca and the Outfit soon learned a valuable lesson: It was one thing to own high-placed politicians and judges, but pressure exerted by energetic scribes such as Westbrook Pegler could render all the bribes in the world moot. This epiphany caused a knee-jerk reaction in the humiliated Ricca, who instructed his lawyer that he wanted the crusading Pegler killed. Ricca was quickly disabused of this notion, however, and was counseled to go back to being “the Waiter.” The Chicago contingent settled in as best they could, but Paul Ricca never believed for a moment that he could not pull off the impossible and get sprung on the first day he was eligible for parole in three years. Were he a betting man, he could have gotten great odds, since virtually no one else believed it possible.

In Chicago, enough of the brain trust survived to keep the enterprise not only afloat, but prosperous. With the Welshman Curly Humphreys as consigliere, the baton of leadership passed from the deceased Frank Nitti, leapfrogging over the imprisoned Paul Ricca, directly into the hands of Joe Accardo. Reenergized by the input from a recently sprung, tough-as-nails wheelman named Mooney Giancana, the Accardo regime would go on to achieve prosperity unmatched in America’s criminal history.

1
. It is believed that the first gangland use of the Fifth Amendment shield was devised by attorneys for legendary New York bootleg kingpin Arnold Rothstein.

2
. Among those pinched in related inquiries were Tom Mix ($100,000), Marion Davies ($1 million, which publisher W. Randolph Hearst paid off), and Charlie Chaplin ($1 million). Chaplin eventually left the country to avoid paying the balance of his penalty.

3
. When he was a congressman from the Bluegrass State in the 1920s, Barkley had fought hard against the political influence of the upperworld’s Kentucky Jockey Club, which by virtue of its agenda to monopolize horse betting was also a natural enemy of Korshak and the Outfit’s.

4
. When Torrio had devised the national Commission in New York, he had had Lansky bring Korshak aboard to oversee the New Yorkers’ Western business interests.

5
. In 26, an attractive girl holds a cup of ten dice at a three-foot-square board. For a quarter, a customer gets a roll; if he gets 26, he wins a drink (legal). Many clubs had a backroom version where bettors played for money (illegal). According to Chicago Code 191, Section 1, “All gambling is illegal.”

6
. Bulger also held the position of chief of the West Side Park District until his death decades later.

8.

The Outfit:
Back from the Brink

J
oe Accardo’s reign commenced without missing a beat. Despite the temporary loss of such key players as Ricca, Campagna, and Rosselli, the tenacious Outfit licked its wounds and moved forward at full speed. At this time, the gang was meeting regularly in a backroom of the Morrison Hotel, Capone’s old haunt, on Madison Street in the heart of the Loop, using the phone in the hotel barbershop to receive cryptic messages. During one of their confabs, they were approached by a recently released ex-con from the slum area known as the Patch. This wiry, ill-mannered roughneck had owed the G some time for illegal alcohol manufacturing. Although his personal style conflicted with the corporate-like sophistication of Accardo, Ricca, and Humphreys, what he had to say blinded the dapper bosses to the man’s total lack of refinement. While “in school,” the hood had learned of a lucrative scam, called policy, that he believed might be of interest to the Outfit. The man who was championing it, and who would go on to dramatically affect the Outfit’s future, was known in his environs as Mooney.

Mooney’s Story

The pitchman was born, according to the Bureau of Vital Statistics, Gilormo Giangona on May 24, 1908, in Chicago. However, baptismal records disclose that he entered the world as Momo Salvatore Giancana on June 15 of that year. In any event, his name somehow transmogrified into Salvatore “Sam” Giancana. Sam’s parents, Antonino and Antonia, or Lena, had arrived in America from Sicily in 1905, at the ages of twenty-four and nineteen respectively. As a youth, Sam frequented the streets of the Chicago ghetto known as the Patch, which the Italian immigrant community had transformed into a replica of the Old Country: Street vendors, such as Antonino, sold fruit in the open-air marketplace, while wine and song flowed in countless clusters of friendly gatherings. Outsiders came to refer to the Patch as the Spaghetti Belt.

When Sam was but two years old, he was met with unspeakable tragedy: the tragic death of his young mother at age twenty-four due to internal hemorrhaging. Thus as a child, the callow Sam was largely unmonitored and free to succumb to the temptations of the street. It was said that boys from his enclave either became hoods or saints, and those like Sam who took to the streets were the hoods. Life for street kids in the Patch consisted of daily turf battles with the numerous ethnic groups that occupied the various districts encircling the Spaghetti Belt, predominantly the Irish, French, Jews, Greeks, and Bohemians. When not defending their territory, the youngsters stole whatever was not nailed down, delivering their plunder to the vendors in the Patch street bazaar. The other chief preoccupation was more primal: The boys used abandoned buildings for “gang shags,” or gang rapes, perpetrated against the neighborhood’s young female population. This distasteful rite of passage went largely unpunished, save for the rampant and often deadly cases of venereal disease that plagued the Patch’s young male population.

When they were old enough to drive, the boys adopted street racing as a favorite pastime and show of machismo. By now, many had sided up with gangs that took measure of their virility in intergang drag racing. Coursing dangerously through crowded streets at all hours, the boys honed their skills at moves such as “whipping,” the taking of turns at high speeds, often on two wheels. Young Sam became known as one of the best wheelmen in the Patch, commandeering souped-up muscle cars that would remain a trademark throughout his life. Sam’s wild, unrestrained talent as a wheelman (among other things) earned him the nickname that would stick with him for the rest of his life: Mooney, or crazy. The danger implicit in such high-velocity antics often led to tragedy, and in at least one case, irony. In October 1926, a pedestrian named Mary ran after her four-year-old son, Charley, who had scampered into a Patch street just as a member of Mooney’s gang screeched toward him in his Cadillac. Shielding her child, the terrified woman took the full brunt of the impact, which killed her but spared the child. The woman was Mary Giancana, Mooney’s stepmother, and Charley was his stepbrother.

The gang that recruited Mooney’s talents was the most notorious in the Patch. As noted previously, the 42 Gang harbored terrorists deemed indispensable to the union organizers and politicians, as well as drivers for the bootleggers. The gang had been organized around 1925 by Joey “Babe Ruth” Colaro, a suave, smooth-talking delinquent who specialized in tire snatching, auto theft, and police bribes. Colaro was one of the prescient gang leaders who determined that the local police force was largely composed of ravenous immigrants like himself, anxious to have their palms greased. One 42 member later recalled, “When we were making so much, we thought the police were scums, shysters. They could be bought for so little; they were money hungry.”

By the time Mooney worked the streets with the 42s, Volstead had been enacted, opening up a wider variety of criminal choices for young hoodlums. While many of their parents made ends meet as alky cookers, the boys performed liquor runs for the bootleggers or assisted them in election “slugging.” These jobs were considered noble since the bootleggers were respected by most immigrants as businessmen, heroes who provided a service and gave lucrative jobs to the otherwise unemployed. Mooney quickly rose to a leadership role in the same 42 Gang that provided the muscle in the infamous 1927 Pineapple Primary and assisted Curly Humphreys and Red Barker in their tire-slashing putsch against the Midwest Garage Owners Association.

Mooney Giancana did not emerge unscathed from his illicit adolescence. The hyperactive gang member was arrested numerous times for auto theft, burglary, and attempted burglary. In 1926, the eighteen-year- old was indicted for murder, only to have the charges dropped for lack of evidence. His constant need of bail money, combined with the fines that often accompanied his convictions, kept his father in permanent impoverishment.

By the midthirties, Mooney Giancana had married and fathered two daughters. During this period Mooney and his driving prowess came to the attention of a genuine Patch big shot, Outfit boss Paul Ricca. The revered Waiter honored young Sam with the offer to become his personal driver. Although this association would open doors for Mooney in the future, Giancana had to survive in the present, and squiring the dapper mob boss did not get him any closer to the end of the rainbow in the short term. With a growing family to feed, Giancana continued to cast about for more lucrative opportunities, while still chauffeuring Ricca. He believed he had found his pot of gold when he met another Patch entrepreneur named Guido “Joe Greco” Gentile. Although Volstead had been repealed, operators such as Gentile were keenly aware that there was still a fortune to be made in illegal alcohol. During the thirteen-year era of prohibition, spoiled alcohol wholesalers had grown accustomed to buying cheap, untaxed spirits and thus continued to purchase moonshine whenever it became available. Gentile would become one of the suppliers.

After locating a suitable facility, a farm in suburban Grand Prairie, Gentile enlisted his crew from the Patch gangs. Mooney Giancana was one who answered the call, giving his name to Gentile as “Albert Mancuso.” Once set up, Gentile’s still churned out thousands of gallons of illegal alcohol per day for more than sixteen months before the IRS uncovered the operation. After the farm was successfully raided on January 17, 1939, Gentile’s crew, including Mooney, were charged with nine counts of alcohol law violations. By this time, Sam’s father was nearly insolvent, and thus it fell to the hood’s father-in-law to put up the $5,000 bail. The following spring, however, Mooney was dealt a four-year prison sentence, to be served, after an initial two months at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, in the Terre Haute, Indiana, lockup. And like so many other convicts, Mooney Giancana used his time in school to study criminality at the feet of more experienced fellow classmates. One from whom he learned the most was an African-American policy kingpin, Eddie Jones, assigned to Mooney’s cellblock. As youngsters, Jones and his two brothers had prospered in one of the few rackets that had not been preempted by the Outfit: numbers.

Numbers

The game goes by numerous names: bolita, lottery, numbers, polizza, and policy. But they are essentially all variants of one of the cheapest and simplest forms of gambling that exists. Taking a chance on a drawing of numbers has been a staple, both legal and illicit, of American culture, the concept extending at least as far back as the seventeenth century, when King James I utilized the lottery to finance the growth of the colony of Virginia. Historian Henry Chafetz has written: “The American colonies were floated on lotteries.” The proof of his statement is everywhere, given that state-controlled lotteries financed institutions such as the British Museum; universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Brown; Boston’s Faneuil Hall; and the development of the Cumberland Pass. The games were ongoing until the 1890s, when, due to widespread corruption, they were discontinued. However, the game only went underground. And like bootlegging and horse wagering, it did not need to go very deep below the surface.

The underground variant first took hold in the poor African-American communities in the South, then, much like jazz music, migrated to the North, where it took root in the European immigrant population. The African-Americans used to refer to the Italian gangs who came to control the game as “spigoosh.” In addition to being cheap (typically a 1940s bettor wagered five cents on a three-digit number combination), the outlawed version was wonderfully convenient and accessible. In most Chicago immigrant neighborhoods, young boys earned money as runners, picking up the gambler’s bets at his home or place of business. From there, the runners deposited their booty to one of Chicago’s two thousand collectors, known as drops, and from there it went to the gang that controlled the action. The most common numbers wager consisted of placing a nickel bet on a number from 000 to 999, with the winning combination being drawn from a can, or “wheel.” Each ethnic cluster maintained its own version of numbers: the Italian barrios called it
polizza,
Italian for “lottery ticket.” Every Friday night, the
polizza
winning number was supposedly drawn from a wheel in Italy by a blind boy. The winning number was then cabled to America, where it was distributed via sundry handouts and publications.

Although there were differing methods of determining the winner (such as using the last three digits in the day’s closing stock market volume or U.S. Treasury balance), the wheel variety was the most popular. The wheel, or can, consisted of a large, crank-turned tin can about half the size of an oil drum. The wheels were produced by a Chicago factory specifically for the numbers operators, who secreted the machines in remote locales where the drawings were made.

The wheel operations acquired colorful, if meaningless, names and vernacular. There were the Erie-Buffalo, the Rome-Silver, the Calcutta Green Dragon, the Whirlaway, and the Beans-Ham Gravy wheels. A player did not have a three-number choice, he had a “gig”; a winning number was not chosen, it had “come out.” Although the odds against winning were 1,000 to 1, the group controlling the action typically paid off at 600 to 1, at best. With the games often rigged, the house was estimated to keep eight of every ten dollars wagered, the rare winner seeing a payoff of about $25 for each nickel bet. Players in the black communities were further abused when they were hoodwinked into buying useless “dream books,” which assigned a number to a specific dream subject that a person may have just experienced. Black preachers were often ordered by the policy operators to give certain numbers to the faithful from the pulpit. The numbers were rarely correct, but the seeming imprimatur of the church built excitement for the game.

For years, Capone’s Syndicate had little interest in the operation, which they dismissed as “nigger pool.” With the vast riches derived from bootlegging, the nickel-per-bet policy game hardly seemed worth the time. On one occasion, when a Syndicate underling tried to muscle in on a black policy ring, Capone had the rogue offender run out of town. The Big Guy himself apologized to the threatened policy directors, saying, “That’s your racket, boys. I don’t want no part of it.” This indifference had given the Joneses free reign build their empire. Capone’s philosophy remained intact until Mooney Giancana convinced the Outfit to reconsider.

After his release from Terre Haute in December 1942, Giancana took a legit job as a salesman in his brother-in-law’s envelope company. During the height of the World War II troop mobilization, Mooney was ordered to report to the draft board, where he lived up to his moniker and then some. In a high-volume tirade, Mooney recounted to his examiner the criminal exploits of his 42 Gang in minute detail. When he was asked what he did for a living, Giancana gave a now infamous response: “I steal.” In bestowing the street thug a 4-H exemption, the draft board labeled him psychopathic. (During the same troop buildup, Jake Guzik received his notice. He informed the board that his fifteen-year record of friction with the law should render him ineligible for the draft. He further noted that if they insisted on drafting him, the board would have to come and get him.)

In short time, Mooney Giancana became restive in the straight life. After his third daughter was born, he began to consider ways to break into big-time gangsterism. Recalling the friendships he had formed in Terre Haute, Mooney Giancana decided it was time to seek out Eddie Jones. Soon, Giancana located the policy king, and together they struck a partnership, wherein Jones staked Giancana to the tune of $100,000 to oversee still another of the Jones’ rackets: jukebox distribution.