The Outfit (68 page)

Among the more unsettling news the duo was receiving was that from Mexico, where Mooney Giancana, ever the survivor, was making a fortune. Since his settling in a walled estate called San Cristobal in Cuernavaca, Mooney had been constantly in transit, using contacts he had made over the years to set up gambling cruise ships and casinos throughout the Caribbean and Central and South America. The former boss’ passport was stamped by the customs agents of Lebanon, Iran, Spain, Peru, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Greece, and every major European destination.

Mooney’s gambling ventures were not only legal, but wildly successful, netting him untold millions in profit, according to the FBI’s best information. Giancana’s biographer William Brashler wrote, “Five gambling boats in particular were gold mines for Giancana.” When word of Giancana’s prosperity reached Accardo, the boss suddenly decided that Mooney was, in fact, still in the Outfit and was thus required to send a cut of his profits back to Chicago. Accardo instructed an aide, Richard Cain, who was also an FBI informant, “I want you to go to Mexico and explain the facts of life to him. I mean the facts of
life,
do you understand what I’m saying?”

When G-man Roemer heard that Accardo might be gearing up to hit Mooney, he worried that the murder would bring the G down on Accardo. Roemer was clearly conflicted: He had been chasing Accardo for decades, but now when the whacking of Giancana threatened to backfire on Accardo, Roemer realized that Chicago could live with an original Outfit member, but not with another boss who might have no rules of conduct. Roemer thus arranged another neighborhood stroll with his ostensible adversary.

“I think you know you’re the right guy for the job you’ve got,” Roemer said. “And we think so too. You keep the Outfit out of narcotics, you only do what you have to do with the heavy stuff . . . Watch out on the hit on Mo. It’ll backfire on you.”

“Roemer, I appreciate your thoughts,” answered the boss. “There are worse guys than you around. But I don’t think there’s any good in you coming around. You do your job and I’ll do mine. Whatever is gonna happen will happen.”

With that, the two men shook hands and went their separate ways, with Roemer not knowing that his plea had absolutely no effect on Joe Accardo’s ultimate decision.

And Then There Was One

On October 11, 1972, after years of successfully stalling IRS and Immigration probes, seventy-five-year-old Paul “the Waiter” Ricca was felled by a fatal heart attack, in what was becoming a cardiac epidemic among Outfit bosses. In addition to his legal entanglements and occasional rulings with Accardo, Ricca had spent his declining years in relative quiet, often lolling about the Al Italia arrivals gate at O’Hare Airport, where he would chat with deplaning Italian tourists in the language of their shared inheritance. The day after Ricca died in his own bed, his lifelong friend Joe Accardo stood by his casket and greeted well-wishers as though it were his own brother who had passed. When the wake concluded, Ricca was buried with the full rites of the Catholic Church.

After his role in the Hughes takeover negotiations, Johnny Rosselli was imprisoned in the Friars Club scam in 1971. At sixty-five years of age, the man who had grown accustomed to tailored silk shirts was going back to prison blues, sentenced to a five-year term. He ultimately served two years and nine months, but by the time he left McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary, his relationship with Chicago was completely severed. In three years, he would have one last appearance in the headlines, although not by his own choosing.

Although the Outfit had de facto expired with the loss of Curly Humphreys, it was now officially over. The original gang that had seized the baton from Big Al Capone had a reign of forty-one years, a duration that far eclipsed that of any other underworld enterprise in U.S. history. What followed would have Joe Accardo, the ultimate survivor, attempting to pass on the vast network of national upperworld business partners, co-opted labor unions, legitimate businesses, and corrupt politicians to another generation.

The Chicago Underworld Today

At its peak, the Chicago Outfit employed hundreds of full-time “associates,” and thousands of soldiers, in its quest to expand its influence from coast to coast. The outposts established by Accardo et al. in locales such as Miami, Hollywood, and Las Vegas are now run instead by the local underworlds and have become so enmeshed with the legitimate sphere as to be virtually indistinguishable from their white-collar counterparts. It is unknown if these local power brokers still pay a tithe to Chicago, but it is a matter of courtesy that when an associate of the gang that founded Sin City arrives there for a spree, mountains are moved to make his stay enjoyable.

Since the Strawman setback (see Epilogue), and the deaths of the original Outfit bosses, the Windy City underworld has greatly contracted, content to run rackets in the Cook County vicinity. Chicago crime historian Howard Abadinsky, a professor of criminal justice at Chicago’s St. Xavier University, has opined, “The Outfit is a business and they’ve learned that having a smaller core is good business.”

Today there are believed to be as few as fifty Chicago organized-crime members in what
Chicago Magazine
recently called “Mob Lite.” Whereas local crews traditionally numbered seven, that figure has dwindled to a mere three, on the North, South, and West Sides. From these strongholds, the new, lean Chicago underworld continues to mine the traditional sources of treasure: gambling and labor unions (for both pension kickbacks and extortion of businesses who require their services). One such labor union believed to be controlled by Chicago’s Mob Lite is the nineteen-thousand-member Laborers’ International Union of North America, which sits on a $1.5-billion treasury. Controlling the unions allows the Mob Lite to have implicit, and usually legal, influence on work contracts. Abadinsky calls the new regime’s approach “remarkably sophisticated.”

The new Chicago mob has gone so low-profile that experts cannot even agree on who heads it. Some well-informed mob historians believe that John “No Nose” DiFronzo, seventy-one, an Accardo-style CEO, is the current chieftain.
²
Others assert that Joe “the Clown” Lombardo, another seventy-one-year-old, and a survivor of the Strawman purges, is in charge. Local G-men believe that sixty-eight-year-old Joe “the Builder” Andriacchi, a construction mogul, is running the show. Lastly, there is the strong possibility that all three run the local rackets by committee. This is the view of Professor Abadinsky. “It’s fantastic. It’s unbelievable,” Abadinsky recently said. The crime chronicler explained that mobs have often designated straw front men as boss to confuse the G. “But the Outfit has gone even further; they’ve purposely made no effort to designate anyone as boss, so no one really knows. They realized that there’s an inevitable conclusion to being a dapper don. Just look at [New York boss John] Gotti . . . He’s in jail now for the rest of his life.”

When he was paroled in 1992, Joe Lombardo went so far as to make a public pronouncement about his lifestyle, attempting to convince the locals that they had nothing to fear from him. That year, his classified ad appeared in the
Chicago Tribune:
“I am Joe Lombardo, I have been released on parole from federal prison. I never took a secret oath with guns and daggers, pricked my finger, drew blood, or burned paper to join a criminal organization. If anyone hears my name used in connection with any criminal activity, please notify the FBI, and my parole officer, Ron Kumke.”

The increased low-profile extends to the adoption of a modus operandi at greater odds than ever with the use of violence and the trafficking in narcotics. “That they’ve managed to stay out of street-level drug deals is an amazing success story for the Outfit,” Abadinsky told
Chicago Magazine.
“The temptation, the money, is so incredible. This is true discipline.” A friend of Joe Lombardo’s recently claimed that Lombardo decreed in the early nineties that murder and mayhem were now forbidden, except in the most extreme cases, and then only when given the green light from above. It has been asserted that there were only six Outfit-sphere murders between 1990 and 1994, and even that number might be exaggerated. Abadinsky told
Chicago Magazine:
“When you have fantastically lucrative businesses like gambling, in which victims willingly participate and no one’s getting beaten up or killed, it draws much less attention from law enforcement - no one’s complaining. And when you’re not shaking down every bookie or restaurant owner on every street corner, when you’re not peddling drugs at the street level, you don’t require as many employees.” Wayne Johnson, the current chief investigator for the Chicago Crime Commission, says of the Outfit descendants, “They won’t take bets from just anyone, and when someone can’t pay, the penalty will often be as simple as blacklisting the guy and letting everyone in the business know that he’s a stiff.”

Regretfully, the abhorrence of street violence by the heirs to Accardo and Humphreys is not shared by the Young Turks that comprise the inner-city cocaine-dealing gangs with ties to Russian, South American, Chinese, and Mexican drug cartels. Turf wars and drive-by shootings in sectors such as Cabrini Green are regular occurrences, with Glock Nine-toting terrorists putting Capone’s “Chicago typewriter” gunmen to shame.

As the Chicago underworld continues to profit from its traditional sources of revenue, sectors of the city’s officialdom likewise continue to form partnerships with their alleged prey. Not only are the requisite pliant pols kept happy, but the city’s designated law enforcement officers are continually hit with a barrage of corruption allegations. In 1997, Chicago police superintendent Matt Rodriguez was forced to resign when his close friendship with convicted felon Frank Milito came to light. In 2000, retired deputy police superintendent William Han-hardt was charged with leading a nationwide band of jewel thieves who stole over $5 million in precious gems between 1984 and 1996. It has been charged that Hanhardt utilized his contacts at police headquarters to identify his jewelry salesmen targets. And when vice cops recently raided adult bookstores and peep shows owned by alleged mob associate Robert “Bobby” Dominic, they were met by the men hired by Dominic as security, the Chicago Police Tactical Unit’s Detective Joseph Laskero and Officer Anthony Bertuca, both coincidentally assigned to the raiding vice unit.

Chicago area politicians also made news recently when nine officials of Al Capone’s Cicero were charged in 2001 with stealing and laundering $10 million from the town’s health insurance fund. Among those indicted was the town’s president, Betty Loren-Maltese. One month earlier, a federal jury awarded former Cicero police chief David Niebur $1.7 million, after he had been fired by Loren-Maltese for working with the FBI on investigating corruption in Cicero.

Many of the survivors of the original regime have realized the immigrant gangster dream by making the transition into legitimate business. When recently asked what has become of the old-guard hoods, Jeanette Callaway, the director of the Chicago Crime Commission, laughed. “They’re everywhere,” Callaway says. “They’ve become involved in every possible Chicago business.” It is a truism in Chicago that when strolling down Michigan Avenue’s “Magnificent Mile,” one is surrounded on both sides by enterprises successfully entered into by former Outfit members.

Ironically, the Outfit’s own progeny appear to have no interest in the underworld, but have instead fulfilled their parents’ desires to embark on careers that gained them upperworld acceptance. It is a sacrosanct Italian dictate that holds that one’s offspring become better educated and more successful than one’s self; the next generation must improve upon the previous one. A child of one of the original top bosses, who asked not to be named, recently said, “My father would not discuss those kinds of things with the family. He was very closemouthed, but it was clear he did not want us to follow in his footsteps.” Mooney’s daughter Antoinette Giancana received a similar message from her father: “I don’t think any of these guys wanted their kids to get involved in crime.”

Consequently, the Outfit’s heirs took whatever trusts were allotted to them and either went into business or pursued higher education; a number of them are Realtors, stockbrokers, restaurant owners, etc. Some, like Jackie Cerone’s son, became prominent attorneys. Joe Accardo set up numerous family members with careers, such as his brothers John (who became a movie projectionist) and Martin (a tavern owner). Joe’s granddaughter Alicia became a highly regarded Hollywood script supervisor. There were occasional obstacles such as when Joe’s son, Anthony Accardo, Jr., attempted to set up a travel agency in the early sixties. According to one of Tony’s closest friends, “Bobby Kennedy got wind of this and sent out his goons to talk to potential clients - telling them they’d have IRS problems. The agency never materialized. That’s a story you can take to the bank.”

1
. Other influential constituents such as Ronald Reagan, World War II hero Audie Murphy, and California senator George Murphy all lobbied Nixon on Hoffa’s behalf, hoping to obtain either Teamster business or pension-fund financing for pet projects.

2
. DiFronzo obtained his moniker in 1949 when a part of his nose was shot off by a bullet that was standard issue for the Chicago police department.

Epilogue

T
he passing of Paul Ricca carried with it an ominous undertone, one appreciated by few outside the Outfit’s world. It had been Ricca who had first brought Mooney Giancana to the Outfit as his driver, then later remained his chief booster as he rose through the ranks; Ricca was one of the few who had stood by Mooney during his constant breeches of gang protocol. Now, with Ricca gone, Giancana was without his sponsor. In Accardo’s eyes, if Giancana refused to capitulate soon, the upstart exile’s fate was all but sealed. It was one of many circumstances Accardo would have to confront in the years ahead as the last survivor of the original Outfit.

The final acts in Accardo’s career are here briefly summarized due to the constraints of space.

1974

Increasing his distance from the front lines, Joe Accardo purchased a $110,000 condo that bordered the fairway of Palm Springs Country Club Golf Course. The home, in a gated community on Roadrunner Drive in Indian Wells, California, kept Accardo far removed from the wiretap fray and gave his wife, Clarice, the retired life she had so long coveted. When in Chicago, Accardo stayed at his home on Ashland Avenue, which he retained after his Indian Wells purchase.

Throughout this period, the Outfit’s day-to-day boss was Joey “Doves” Aiuppa, so nicknamed for his 1962 prosecution on charges of illegally shooting, along with his shotgun-toting soldiers, more than fourteen hundred mourning doves in Kansas. (Bobby Kennedy had been so excited by the conviction, he flew to Kansas for the sentencing.
¹
) Along with powerful underboss Jackie “the Lackey” Cerone, Aiuppa oversaw a regime infamous for its strict enforcement of the Outfit’s code. Aiuppa’s tenure was bloody, typified by more executions for drug dealers, as well as for bookies and juice men who neglected their “street tax.”

Before totally abandoning the Vegas casinos, a crime consortium that included Kansas City, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Chicago (represented by Aiuppa for Joe Accardo) sang its swan song in Sin City, its new lead singer named Allen Glick. A sucker with far shallower pockets than Howard Hughes, local entrepreneur Glick naively thought (or so he later claimed) that he could obtain a $62-million loan from the Teamsters pension fund with no stings attached. His subsequent 1974 purchase of the Stardust, Fremont, Hacienda, and Marina casinos gave the underworld one last chance at hitting the gambling capital’s jackpot. However, this time, the hoods would finally learn what it felt like to lose in Las Vegas. All except Joe Accardo, that is.

At this time, the first RICO successes were yet to be secured, thus the gangs believed they could raid the golden goose one more time. With the endorsement of Milwaukee “theater owner” Frank Bal (who was in fact Milwaukee mob boss Frank Balistrieri, and who was ultimately subservient to Chicago), Glick obtained his Teamster loan. However, before the first set of dice were polished, Glick was told by Bal, under orders from Accardo and the consortium, to hire Chicago’s Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal to be in charge of operations. “If you interfere with any of the casino operations,” Rosenthal warned Glick, “or try to undermine anything I do here . . . you will never leave this corporation alive.”

Over the next three years, the cartel skimmed $7 million per year from the slots alone (investigators believe, but cannot confirm, that a similar amount was taken from the tables). In four years, Glick would be ordered to sell his Argent Corporation to an even more pliant owner or his children would be killed. He did as told and disappeared into southern California obscurity with a tidy profit.

The same year Glick was being booted from Nevada, Mooney Giancana was receiving the same sentence in Mexico, rendering all his hard work in the gambling-junket business for naught. On the night of July 18, 1974, the Mexican government seized Mooney in his pajamas and slippers, after eight years in exile. In a surprise abduction by Mexican immigration authorities, Mooney was deported on a charge of being an unwanted visitor. After being driven to Mexico City, where authorities alerted the FBI, he was sent to San Antonio, Texas, and met there by Chicago agents who bought the penniless Giancana a one-way plane ticket to Chicago. And due to local law, Mooney was never able to retrieve the millions he had deposited in Mexican banks. It was a frail, unshaven Giancana, outfitted in a blue work shirt and a pair of pants four sizes too large (given him by authorities in Mexico City), who unceremoniously boarded the flight back to the Second City.

Tipped to Mooney’s arrival, longtime adversary and macho man Bill Roemer raced to O’Hare Airport to get in his face, for old times’ sake. However, when Roemer confronted the aged former boss and heard his greeting, Roemer backed off. The G-man later wrote that Giancana “was undoubtedly the wealthiest person on that plane, but he looked like some Italian immigrant landing at Ellis Island, destitute and frail.”

“I’m not gonna be involved in anything anymore,” Mooney whispered. “You’ll soon find out that I have nothin’ goin’ for me here. I’m out of it. So, please, just leave me alone. Nothin’ personal like it was between us before. If it takes an apology, then this is it. Let’s just forget what has been before.”

Although he had been intent on goading Mooney into another fight, Roemer became disarmed by the gangster’s feeble visage. However, the agent quickly found a way to relieve his frustration. “I think at that moment,” he later wrote, “I realized that I had won.”

1975

On June 18, 1975, Mooney Giancana was shot to death in his basement. For months, the ailing Mooney had been telling friends that he would do anything to avoid “rotting in jail.” The don was currently the subject of another grand jury proceeding and had agreed to meet with investigators for the Senate’s Church Committee, which had been investigating, among other things, the Kennedy administration plots to murder Fidel Castro. The same committee had also called Johnny Rosselli, who voluntarily agreed to testify. Now, Mooney’s prospective testimony, under subpoena, would virtually guarantee more unwanted front-page coverage for organized crime in Chicago, a prospect that, in addition to Mooney’s refusal to pay tribute to Accardo, likely sealed his fate.

On his last night alive, Giancana had been cooking his favorite meal of sausage, escarole, and
ceci
beans in his basement kitchen sometime after 10 P.M. His daughter Francine had visited that evening, and as she drove away around ten, she saw Mooney’s longtime aide Butch Blasi pull into the driveway. Blasi’s car was also observed there by Chicago detectives who were patrolling the suburban homes of a number of bosses that evening. About two hours later, family friend and Giancana tenant Joe DiPersio went downstairs to check on Mooney and discovered the body. Giancana had been shot seven times with a silencer-equipped .22, once in the back of the head, once in the mouth, and five times under the chin in an upward direction.

Although it has been reported that the killer took no loot, that may not be the case. “Mooney had a velvet bag full of diamonds and other precious jewels,” remembers his son-in-law Bob McDonnell. “He always used to call it his ’escape insurance,’ something he could use if he ever had to leave the country in a hurry.” Mooney’s daughter also remembers the valuable cache, which has never been located. Until it was recently brought to her attention that Accardo was feuding with Mooney over money, Antoinette never considered that the missing jewels may have been taken by the killer. All told, Giancana’s assets at the time of his death (in cash, property, trusts, and investments) totaled about $1 million, although he was reportedly worth $25 million at his peak. It has never been determined whether any of his resources are gathering dust in a Swiss account or a buried stash.

In 2001, a source who was close to Butch Blasi at the time stated that Blasi admitted to having been the perpetrator. A few months after Giancana’s slaying, a village worker found the murder weapon on a patch of grass located halfway along a route to Blasi’s home. After a long bout with dementia, Blasi passed away, an occurrence that effectively ended authorities’ interest in the case.

On June 24, only six days after Mooney’s murder, the don’s assassination-plot partner Johnny Rosselli gave his first testimony in Washington before a rapt Church Committee, once again placing the underworld in the media spotlight. The exquisitely tailored Rosselli was in great form and, totally disavowing Curly Humphreys’ dictum to say nothing, spared no details. “It has always puzzled me,” committee member Senator Richard Schweiker later said, “why he came in, and why he was so forthcoming.”

“John gave a fully detailed description,” his lawyer Leslie Scherr later recalled. “Everything that had gone on in ’61 and ’62, everything from that era, and every one of those guys were mesmerized by John. He was hypnotic. The guy would have made a wonderful lawyer.” At one point, Rosselli brought the room to convulsive laughter when answering Senator Barry Goldwater’s query as to whether he had taken any notes during the plotting.

“Senator, in my business, we don’t take notes,” Rosselli deadpanned in response. After being excused, Rosselli agreed to return for a second round on September 22. With Rosselli’s testimony to be sealed for the next twenty years, underworld leaders across the nation surely feared that the garrulous gangster, now totally chastened by his late-life prison stay, must have divulged secrets that would cause Curly and Paul to spin in their graves. Like so many other underworld players of his era, Johnny Rosselli was now living on borrowed time.

On July 30, just five weeks after Mooney’s murder, Jimmy Hoffa disappeared. He had placed himself in jeopardy in April 1973 when he had declared his intention to take back the Teamsters. However, most experts believe that the underworld was already happy with Fitzsimmons and decreed otherwise, for reasons stated. “Hoffa was also a government informant,” says Dan Moldea. “All the Teamster presidents occasionally talked against their associates to the government, that’s how they survived.” Moldea believes the contract to kill Hoffa, meant also as a warning to Fitzsimmons, was put out by Carlos Marcello of New Orleans and Santo Trafficante of Tampa, and from there it was given to East Coast bosses Tony Provenzano of New York and Russell Bufalino of Pennsylvania. Both the FBI and Moldea agree that the actual killer was Sal Briguglio, an enforcer for Provenzano. What the hoods never knew was that Fitzsimmons, in fear of both the mob and the IRS, quietly followed Hoffa’s lead and began informing for the G as well. “Fitzsimmons was a stoolie for [IRS investigator] John Daley,” a partner of Daley’s recently confirmed. “That’s how he stayed out of prison. It’s also one of the reasons the government was able to start building its case against the mob’s pension-fund loans in Nevada.”

1976

After a third meeting in Washington with members of the Church Committee, a semiretired Johnny Rosselli traveled to Plantation, Florida, to visit his sister, Edith. Anxious to make another score, Rosselli called Hollywood producer-friend Brynie Foy and pitched him a new film idea, a thinly veiled roman a clef in which a patriotic gangster helps the White House kill Fidel Castro, but the operation backfires when Castro gets his own people to plan the American president’s death. Perhaps Rosselli was trying to cash in on his recent Church Committee testimony, the salient points of which had leaked to the press. According to some, Foy believed the story was too implausible to get interest from the studios.

On a May 1976 trip to Los Angeles, Johnny had a relaxed dinner with old chum Jimmy Fratianno, of the L.A. underworld. The California hood was clearly worried about Johnny, and given Rosselli’s recent testimony and attempts to sell his Mafia-CIA story to the studios, it was small wonder.

“Johnny, be careful, will you,” Fratianno implored. “This thing of ours is treacherous. You never know when you’re going to make the hit list. Don’t let Trafficante or [Jackie] Cerone set you up.”

“Will you stop worrying?” Rosselli nonchalantly responded. “I’m all right. Everything’s under control.”

On July 28, during another visit to Plantation, Florida, Rosselli borrowed his sister’s car and drove off just after noon with his golf clubs. It was the last time he was seen alive. That night, the family began their frantic search, with Rosselli’s brother-in-law recalling that Johnny had once said, “If I’m ever missing, check the airports, because that’s where they usually leave the car.” It was an eerie prognostication: His car was found two days later at Miami International Airport, and seven days after that, on August 7, Johnny’s grisly remains were found. He had been strangled to death, then dismembered, stuffed into a rusted oil drum, and dumped at sea. Rosselli’s metal coffin washed ashore not far from the former Biscayne Bay home of Curly Humphreys.

Fred Black, a Washington influence peddler and close Rosselli friend, was among those certain that Santo Trafficante had ordered the hit. That it had taken place in Trafficante’s domain was telling. For years, the Florida boss was believed by many to have been playing a dangerous game, operating a numbers racket (bolita) out of Havana in partnership with Castro, while living among the Castro-hating exiles. The theory goes that Trafficante feared reprisal from Castro if his role in the CIA plots surfaced, or from the exiles if his game with Castro was revealed. Beyond the speculation, there was never a suspect officially named in the murder.

“I was saddened,” CG Harvey recently said, “like I would be with any friend.” Just two months earlier, on June 8, CG had lost her husband, Johnny Rosselli’s great CIA chum, Bill Harvey, due to heart failure.

1977-78