14.
Surveillance records maintained by both federal and local authorities reflect that Joe Accardo set out for Las Vegas by way of Los Angeles on January 15,1953. Accardo’s itinerary included a brief stopover in L.A. to confer with Johnny Rosselli before traveling on to Sin City. Accompanying Accardo was his personal physician, Dr. Eugene Chesrow, whom Joe had maneuvered into the top post at Oak Forest Hospital, and fast-rising underboss Mooney Giancana.1 The foray also represented something of a school field trip for Giancana, who was being groomed by Accardo to take over the day-to-day running of the Outfit. In addition to the constant harpings of Clarice for Joe to retire, the IRS was making rumblings that it was going to do to Accardo what it had done to Capone twenty-four years earlier. Joe wisely decided to concentrate on his tax case, with Curly as adviser, while Mooney Giancana fronted the organization, much as Nitti had done after Capone’s imprisonment. Although key decisions would still be authorized by the old guard of Accardo, Humphreys, and Ricca, for public consumption Mooney was now the boss. With his elevation came the ascendancies of his crew, many of whom were buddies from the old 42 Gang: Sam Battaglia, Felix Alderisio, Marshall Caifano, Jackie Cerone, and Butch Blasi among them.
At the time of the Chicago trio’s westward journey, the L.A. Police Department (LAPD) was focused on discouraging any more out-of-town hoods from setting up shop in the City of Angels, as Accardo (ticketed under the name S. Mann) was soon to discover. With the country’s most aggressive intelligence unit on guard at the city’s key points of entry, the LAPD gained a reputation for spotting gangsters as they alighted from trains, planes, and buses, mugging them and then tossing them back aboard for a painful return trip home.
After being met at LAX airport by two Outfit members on assignment in L.A., the group proceeded to Perino’s Restaurant in Beverly Hills, scrutinized all the while by plainclothes LAPD officers from the “airport squad,” who had ID’d them on arrival. Before the group had time to digest their meal, the cops swooped down. Accardo and friends gave the officers their true names after the police had frisked them and discovered the three travelers carried over $12,000 in cash, which may have represented the gang’s newest Vegas investment fund. However, before the trio could transport the cash to Nevada, they were sent back to Chicago by the LAPD’s front guard, the Organized Crime Intelligence Unit, or OCID.
For the next two years, the Outfit maintained a low profile in Las Vegas, awaiting the perfect opening to make their big move. But the gang was never content to ignore new opportunities while waiting for another to coalesce. According to a long-withheld 224-page report by Virgil Peterson, “The Jukebox Report of 1954,” Curly Humphreys devised a scheme wherein the Outfit would “take over ASCAP.” The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) was formed in 1914 by songwriter Victor Herbert as a nonprofit clearing house for coordinating the collection of song-performance royalties as a service to composers. In 1954, ASCAP was pushing to obtain royalty payments from the nation’s jukeboxes, many of which were controlled by the Outfit. Humphreys saw this as an opportunity for his gang to complete its vise grip on the entertainment industry: They already controlled the jukes, which were manipulated into creating Top Ten hits for their stable of performers, who in turn were booked by Jules Stein’s Outfit-friendly MCA into their clubs in Las Vegas and elsewhere, and finally, the performers’ record companies were often run by the Outfit, and when not, the gang simply flooded the market with their own counterfeit versions.
Now Humphreys saw still one more way to squeeze profit from the operation by obtaining either an interest in ASCAP or negotiating a kickback deal, wherein the gang would receive a cut of the composers’ royalties for the privilege of allowing their material to be placed in the Outfit’s jukes. At the time, ASCAP was realizing approximately $18 million per year in payments. According to Peterson’s sources, ASCAP president Stanley Adams and the company attorney, Herman Finklestein, came to Chicago in February 1954 to negotiate with the manager of Jake Guzik’s Century Music Company, Daniel Palaggi. At the time, Century was believed to control more than 100,000 of the nation’s 575,000 jukeboxes. ASCAP initially proposed that Century contribute one dollar per juke per year into the fund. During the two days of meetings at the Palmer House, Century Music (aka the Outfit) agreed to the payout, but only if ASCAP would kick back 30 percent of the collected royalties to Chicago’s Jukebox Operators Association, controlled, of course, by the Outfit. The deal would cost the Outfit $100,000 per year, but the 30 percent cut of ASCAP’s $18 million in yearly royalties came to $5.4 million, a $5.3-million profit per year for two days’ work at the Palmer. Peterson’s report noted, “It is understood that ASCAP is inclined to accept the proposed deal.” No further details are known of the duration of the alleged relationship.
During this period, the Outfit also worked to solidify affairs on the home front. One such endeavor entailed throwing their considerable political clout behind a Democratic machine politician’s bid for mayor of Chicago. Having backed his career for twenty-odd years, the Outfit brought out the votes in its wards to help ensure the February 1955 election of Richard J. Daley.
Boss Daley
Joe Accardo’s gang toiled so diligently on Daley’s behalf because they knew him and felt certain he would look the other way while they conducted their business. Their prognostications proved accurate, as Daley neither persecuted nor elevated the Outfit bosses during his long tenure at the mayoral helm. He just seemed to ignore them. Richard “Boss” Daley’s laissez-faire attitude toward the Outfit came as no surprise to the Chicago electorate. Savvy locals remembered that the Boss’ early patrons were machine pols such as Big Joe McDonough, widely believed to have been in league with the Outfit’s predecessor, the Torrio-Capone Syndicate. Daley was also the protege of Eleventh Ward committeeman Hugh “Babe” Connelly, likewise known to have been the recipient of Outfit payoffs. When Daley assumed Connelly’s post in 1947, it was believed that the gang had merely decided it was time for a change. As Alderman Edward Burke told writers Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, “They were sick of the old man [Connelly]. He was probably taking too big a slice of the gambling and whatever.” Just prior to the 1955 mayoral election, the Chicago Tribune warned, “If Mr. Daley is elected, the political and social morals of the badlands are going, if not to dominate, then surely to have a powerful influence on its decisions.” Despite the warning, Daley won the 1955 contest, due in no small part to a 13,275-to-l,961 plurality in the Outfit-controlled First Ward.
The paper was proven correct when Mayor Daley quickly made three executive decisions clearly favorable to Accardo and Co. First, he replaced the powerfully antimob head of the important, contract-granting Civil Service Commission, Stephen E. Hurley, with William A. Lee, the head of the Humphreys-infiltrated Bakery Drivers’ Union. Chicago news analyst Len O’Connor said that the appointment was “patently a political payoff.” Second, according to the FBI, when Humphreys ordered the gang’s First Ward alderman, John D’Arco, to arrange for the Outfit’s man to be appointed that precinct’s police captain by Daley, D’Arco and Daley delivered. “D’Arco then contacted Mayor Daley,” the report stated, “and advised him that he wanted this captain to command his district. . . The appointment was then announced by [Police] Commissioner [Timothy] O’Connor.” Third, in 1956, Daley disbanded the city’s intelligence unit known as Scotland Yard. This elite wing of the police department had been compiling thousands of dossiers on Chicago’s hoodlums, the result of years of painstaking surveillance. According to the FBI, the unit was disbanded when Daley learned that they had bugged a bookmaker in the gang’s Morrison Hotel hangout, where Curly Humphreys had coincidentally lived for a time, and where Daley had had his campaign headquarters. Daley had also been informed that during the campaign, Scotland Yard had bugged Daley’s Morrison offices, supposedly under the orders of his incumbent opponent, Mayor Martin Kennelly. After the Yard’s offices were padlocked, the Chicago Crime Commission lamented, “The police department is back where it was ten years ago as far as hoodlums are concerned.” That year’s annual Accardo Fourth of July cookout was thus especially festive, as noted in the July 16,1956, issue of Time magazine: “Chicago hoodlums and their pals celebrated around a champagne fountain at the plush River Forest home of Mobster [Joe] Accardo . . . The Accardo soiree, an annual affair, had a different spirit this year. Where once his guests had slipped their black limousines into a hidden parking lot on the Accardo property, they now made an open show of their attendance, and the Big Boss’ gardens rang fresh with ominous joy.”
During the early years of Daley’s two-decade reign, “Da Mare” used a number of trusted friends as liaisons to the Outfit. As noted again by the FBI, one of these conduits was a childhood friend from the Eleventh Ward named Thomas Munizzo. Daley’s FBI file, obtained by Cohen and Taylor, stated: “Munizzo reportedly collected vast sums of money from the hoodlum element for the Daley mayoralty campaign . . . [Munizzo] was considered the contact man . . . between the hoodlums and the mayor’s office for favors . . . with respect to gambling or the crime Syndicate.” The Bureau further noted that Daley also utilized his former law partner, William Lynch, as a “go-between” for the Outfit and City Hall.
When Daley appeared at the Outfit-controlled First Ward Democratic Headquarters, he actually boasted about his record of giving official jobs and civil contracts to Outfit associates. “I’ve been criticized for doing this,” Daley told the overflowing crowd, “but I’ll make no apologies. I’ll always stand alongside the man with a criminal record if I think he deserves another chance.” Unlike the cocaine-pushing gangs that would succeed the Outfit, the first wave of immigrant hoods were anxious to legitimize their lives, and Daley decided to give them a chance to do it. Predictably, the feeling was mutual. Speaking on behalf of the Outfit, Curly Humphreys was overheard years later on hidden FBI bugs telling Johnny D’Arco, “This mayor has been good to us.” To which D’Arco replied, “And we’ve been good to him. One hand washes the other.”
It would be easy to mistake Daley’s tolerance of the Outfit for simple corruption. However, the more accurate assessment appears to be that Daley understood better than most that the sooner the hoods were promoted up the social ladder, the sooner they would disappear into the landscape much the same way as the Founding Fathers who institutionalized the enslavement from the African subcontinent, or the westward explorers who orchestrated the demise of more than six million Native Americans, or the aging robber barons who defrauded untold millions of their life savings. Why, Daley may have wondered, should Chicago’s greedy frontiersmen be treated any different from their predecessors? Mayor Daley seemed to know innately what Kefauver had failed to grasp, and what Professor David Bell of Columbia University had labeled “the process of ethnic succession”: The violence associated with the process was, at least in the case of organized crime, overwhelmingly intramural, and when it spilled over, it seemed to dissipate once the gang obtained what it believed was its rightful share of the American Dream. As Daley once responded to a question about his indulgence of the Outfit, “Well, it’s there, and you know you can’t get rid of it, so you have to live with it.”
The Riviera
With another adherent ensconced in Chicago’s mayoral office, the Outfit turned its attention back to the Silver State. As Daley was solidifying his power in 1955, the gang made its first big move in Las Vegas when Joe Accardo and the Outfit secretly financed the $10-million Riviera Hotel, with a group of Miami investors as fronts. The hotel’s silent investors also included Meyer Lansky. In an effort to guarantee the casino’s success, Accardo decided to turn to an old friend with a proven track record, Gus Greenbaum.
Greenbaum, in failing health, had recently stepped down from the ownership of the Flamingo, taking with him the casino’s ledgers, which held the identities of the Flamingo’s Gold Club high rollers. After burying the valuable dockets in the Nevada desert, Greenbaum retired in Arizona. In Phoenix, Gus became pals with the state’s junior senator, who led a shadow life cavorting with underworld characters. Known on the Las Vegas Strip as a “swinger,” Senator Barry Goldwater (ne Goldwasser) had been a frequent visitor to Greenbaum’s Flamingo. Supposedly, a Greenbaum aide helped ghostwrite one of Goldwater’s speeches.
Greenbaum had scant time to settle into his new life before Accardo and Jake Guzik visited him in Phoenix and ordered him out of retirement. Greenbaum initially refused the edict, but a few nights after Accardo and Guzik took their leave, Greenbaum learned that his sister-in-law, Leone, had received a telephone threat. “ ’They’ were going to teach Gus a lesson,” she told her husband. In a few days, Leone was found dead smothered in her bed, and Gus Greenbaum packed for Vegas to manage the Riviera.
Most likely ordered by Accardo, Greenbaum drove back out into the desert, where he dug up and dusted off the ledgers containing the priceless list of Flamingo Gold Card members. With the Flamingo list as a foundation, Greenbaum’s secretaries were soon busied with mailing out new memberships for the exclusive, well-comped, high rollers’ club at the Riviera.
But the Riviera saga was far from over. In an incredible turn of events, Gus Greenbaum committed a cardinal offense when he chose another mutual friend of his and Goldwater’s to be the entertainment director for the hotel. Often seen with Goldwater in the senator’s private plane was a man with extensive knowledge of the entertainment industry, William “Al” Nelson. As one of Goldwater’s first contributors when he ran for Congress (to the tune of $5,000), Nelson and his wife, Laurie, were among the senator’s closest friends. Probably unbeknownst to the senator, Nelson had been in hiding from the Outfit for eleven years. Since he had stool-pigeoned the gang’s hierarchy in the Hollywood extortion case, former pimp Willie Bioff had assumed his wife Laurie Nelson’s maiden name. For unknown reasons, Bioff ended up in Phoenix, where he bought a small farm and hooked up with Goldwater and Greenbaum, who, without informing his Outfit superiors, hired Bioff-Nelson as the Riviera’s entertainment director.
Sometime that year, one of the Outfit’s most notorious hit men, Marshall Caifano, aka John Marshall, was staying at the Riviera when he spotted and ID’d the accursed Willie Bioff. Caifano promptly reported back to Accardo, who confronted the addiction-addled Greenbaum. With a straight face, Greenbaum explained that he had brought in Bioff for the express purpose of keeping down the entertainers’ salaries - something with which Bioff was much experienced. But Accardo would have none of it. In short time, Greenbaum was paid a visit by Caifano, who recited Accardo’s decree: “Get rid of that fink or else.” When Willie’s dismissal was not forthcoming, someone decided it was time for the former whore-beater to pay the price for selling out his fellows. On November 4, 1955, Willie “Al Nelson” Bioff left the front door of his Phoenix home and got behind the wheel of his pickup truck parked in the family driveway. Police later determined that a dynamite bomb had exploded when Willie turned the ignition, sending parts of Willie and his truck all over his Phoenix neighborhood. The incident illustrated something Johnny Rosselli said to a fellow hood: “Us fucking Italians ain’t human. We remember things too long, hold these grudges inside of us until they poison our minds.”
Bioff’s murder stunned Gus Greenbaum, whose personal demons now grew to include heroin addiction. Greenbaum’s “horse” problem only exacerbated his health woes, poor gambling abilities, and his growing infatuation with prostitutes. And his decline would only be tolerated for so long by his Chicago taskmasters.
The Stardust
The Riviera would not be the Outfit’s only Las Vegas expansion point in 1955. Johnny Rosselli’s old bootlegging pal Tony Cornero would (unintentionally) provide the gang another lucrative opportunity in the casino game. In Los Angeles, Cornero had apparently been stewing over the Sin City successes of gangs from Chicago, New York, Cleveland, and elsewhere. After all, the hotel-casino concept had been Cornero’s in the first place with the Meadows, and had it not been for the depressed economy of the 1930s, Tony Cornero would now be king of the Vegas Strip. After the Meadows closed, Cornero had returned to Los Angeles, where he made a fortune with his offshore gambling ships, the flagship being the 350-crew Rex. When the boom returned to Las Vegas, Cornero took his fortune there and announced that he was finally going to build his dream hotel in the heart of the Strip, the 1,032-room Stardust.
Cornero’s concept for the Stardust once again displayed his visionary genius. He rightly concluded that elegant joints like Moe Dalitz’s Desert Inn had a finite clientele, whereas a casino designed for the low-roller masses would attract gamblers by the busload. Although the hotel’s frontage would boast the Strip’s largest (216 feet long) and most garish lighted sign (7,100 feet of neon tubing and more than 11,000 bulbs), the hotel itself would be little more than a warehouse, where guests could stay for a mere five dollars per night. The Stardust’s all-you-can-eat buffets and practically free lodging would become a Sin City staple.
A variety of factors caused Cornero’s Stardust dream to go bust. Complicating the typical Las Vegas cost overruns was Cornero’s own gambling addiction, which quickly depleted his bank account. Just weeks before the scheduled August 1955 opening of the hotel, Cornero learned he was out of money, unable to pay staff or purchase furnishings and gambling instruments. On July 31, Cornero paid a morning visit to Moe Dalitz’s Desert Inn, where it is believed Cornero hoped Dalitz would make him an emergency loan. According to one telling, Dalitz met with Cornero for several hours; however, Dalitz ultimately declined to get involved. On his way out of the Desert Inn, Cornero could not fight the temptation to hit the craps tables, where he went quickly into the hole for $10,000. When Dalitz’s crew not only refused to extend his marker, but had the audacity to charge him for his drinks (a monumental affront in the pits), Cornero went ballistic. Within minutes, sixty-year-old Tony Cornero was clutching his chest with one hand even as he clutched the dice with the other. He was dead of a heart attack, with less than $800 to show for the estimated $25 million he had made in his lifetime.
The story is then picked up by the Outfit’s traveling emissary, Johnny Rosselli, who promptly reported the new vacancy back to his Chicago bosses. According to the files of the LAPD’s intelligence unit, which had been tailing Rosselli for years, “Mr. Smooth” had been making the trek to Sin City regularly, cutting deals, and brokering complex intergang partnerships. George Bland, a retired Las Vegas-based FBI man, disclosed that one of the Bureau’s illegally placed bugs revealed that one major casino had the skim divided twelve different ways. One partner later called Johnny “the Henry Kissinger of the mob,” and Rosselli’s business card from the period said it all, and simply: “Johnny Rosselli, Strategist.” Rosselli’s biographers described his role in Las Vegas as “nebulous, but crucial . . . He maintained open channels to all the different out-of-town factions, as well as to the California-based operators downtown, and served as a conduit to political fixers like Bill Graham in Reno, and Artie Samish, known in California political circles as ’the Governor of the Legislature.’” Rosselli was soon living full-time in Vegas, dividing his time between his suites at Dalitz’s Desert Inn and the Outfit’s Riviera. In their 1963 book, The Green Felt Jungle, authors Reid and Demaris described a typical Rosselli day:
Rosselli spends his leisure hours (that is, all the waking hours of his day) at the Desert Inn Country Club. He has breakfast there in the morning, seated at a table overlooking the eighteenth green. Between golf rounds, meals, steam baths, shaves and trims, Twisting, romancing, and drinking, there is time for private little conferences at his favorite table with people seeking his counsel or friendship. It may be a newsman, a local politician, a casino owner, a prostitute, a famous entertainer, a deputy sheriff, a U.S. Senator, or the Governor of Nevada.
As Johnny remarked to a fellow hood, “I’m now the man in Vegas.”
Armed with the news of Cornero’s cardiac, Rosselli flew to Chicago, where he met with Accardo, Humphreys, and Guzik at Meo’s Restaurant. It was decided that the gang would finish construction and assume the debt of the Stardust in a partnership with Cleveland’s contribution to Vegas, Moe Dalitz. However, the Outfit would run the operation. When the time came to name a front for the operation, Chicago brought in an old friend, a gifted con man who owed Humphreys and Accardo a huge favor: Jake “the Barber” Factor. Five years later, Johnny Rosselli described the arrangement to longtime friend, and L.A. mafioso, Jimmy Fratianno: “Jake Factor, an old friend of Capone . . . shit, I used to see him when he came to the Lexington to see Al . . . took over and finished building the place. So I went to Sam [Giancana] and told him we could move into this joint. Listen, Jake owed Chicago a big one. Moe Dalitz wanted in on it and so it’s a fifty-fifty deal.”
Over the next two years, Factor and the Outfit poured money into the Stardust operation, while Jake continually lobbied the newly formed Gaming Control Board for a casino license, where he was consistently rebuffed. Before the Stardust could open for business, the Outfit had to assign someone who could obtain a casino license and, per custom, simultaneously watch over Jake Factor. Joe Accardo and his new front, Mooney Giancana, once again made the seventeen-hundred-mile journey to Las Vegas to make the appointment. Taking Factor aside, Joe whispered the name John Drew in his ear. As a former Capone crew member, Drew had already obtained, thanks to a few greased palms, a license to operate the Outfit’s Bank Club in Reno, where he watched over front man Bill Graham. In subsequent years, Chicago FBI agent Bill Roemer witnessed Drew having a business dinner at the St. Hubert’s Grill with his sponsor, Curly Humphreys. Johnny Rosselli later named other Stardust “supervisors” brought in for good measure: “[Sam Giancana] sent Al Sachs and Bobby Stella to help [Drew]. Dalitz’s got Yale Cohen to watch his end. But Sam’s got a sleeper in there, Phil Ponti, a made guy from Chicago. A real sharp operator.”
When the Stardust finally opened for business on July 2, 1958, it proved well worth the effort. After the grand opening, attended by guests of honor then senator and future president Lyndon Baines Johnson and his trusty sidekick Bobby Baker, the money began arriving in Chicago almost faster than it could be counted. “They’re skimming the shit out of that joint,” Rosselli later told Fratianno. “You have no idea how much cash goes through that counting room every day. You, your family, your uncles and cousins, all your relatives could live the rest of their lives in luxury with just what they pull out of there in a month. Jimmy, I’ve never seen so much money.” Coming from a man who had lived though the phenomenal profits of the bootlegging era, this speaks volumes about the lure of Las Vegas. Carl Thomas, an expert on the skim, estimated that the Stardust was contributing $400,000 per month to the Outfit’s coffers. Rosselli would rightfully brag for years, “I got the Stardust for Chicago,” and for his role in setting up this windfall for the Outfit, Johnny was also well compensated. “I’m pulling fifteen, twenty grand under the table every month,” Rosselli said.
On the Home Front
Back in Chicago, the year 1956 brought with it the regular irksome skirmishes with city officials not on the gang’s payroll. At the time, many Chicago police were playing a dangerous game, harassing Outfit members to increase their bargaining power with the hoods; i.e., the gang must pay more to relieve the pressure. According to a close friend, the ailing Jake Guzik was tormented more than most. “Those fucking cops used to run him up and down ten flights of stairs, hoping he’d have a heart attack,” the friend said. “They wouldn’t stop until he put them on his payroll.” On January 13, while the police were attempting to probe gambling at the gang’s Owl Club in Calumet City, Humphreys and Guzik were arrested on the Near North Side. The detention was meant as another vexation, and the duo were quickly released. Six days later, both men were again brought downtown, and this time they were charged with disorderly conduct, another harassment that was rarely upheld. When the case was brought before Judge John Pope, the police were chastened instead. “I’ve seen too many of these cases where the police file DC charges against persons they just want to question,” Pope scolded. “You filed false charges and you are trifling with the court.” Pope then advised that Curly and Jake had the right to sue the city for false arrest. Of course Curly Humphreys’ credo dictated that discretion was the better part of valor, but Guzik promptly enlisted the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a $50,000 “infringement of civil liberties” suit against the city. But before the case could be decided, five decades of playing cat and mouse with the cops took its toll on the sixty-nine-year-old Guzik.
When heart failure claimed the Outfit’s strongest link to Al Capone on February 21,1956, it happened fittingly at the very spot where Guzik had disbursed official bribery uninterrupted since the 1920s - his table at St. Hubert’s Olde English Grill on Federal Street. Also appropriately, with Guzik at the time was the man who had inherited his role as the Outfit’s political shaman, Curly Humphreys, who had by now secured the hidden ownership of the St. Hubert’s. Humphreys’ FBI case officer described what happened next: “Not wanting the body to be found in a mob hangout, Murray Humphreys, who had been with him, had his men carry Guzik’s body to his home in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side, where the amazed widow was instructed to advise police that he had died there.”
The Bureau noted that Humphreys assumed his self-appointed role as the Outfit’s benefactor in times of grief or transition. From this point on, according to the FBI, Humphreys sent $200 “every Christmas to Mrs. Guzik, the widow of his former partner in organized crime . . . [he] instructed [Bartenders’ Union agent Carl] Hildebrand to mail the cashier’s check to Mrs. Guzik without a return address so that she won’t know it is from Humphreys.”
Bobby’s Crusade
By the end of 1956, the nation’s lawmakers were swamped with reports that Teamster officials were looting the members’ pension fund and forging alliances with the underworld. In December, the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field was established to investigate the contentions. Chaired by a devout Baptist Democrat from Arkansas, Senator John J. McClellan, the investigation would eclipse even the Kefauver probe in its scope, lasting over two and one-half years and hearing fifteen hundred witnesses whose recollections (or lack thereof) were laid out over twenty thousand pages of testimony. The WASP chairman made it clear early on that his investigation would be a continuation of the xenophobic battles of the pre-Volstead era. As he viewed in self-righteous disgust the procession of twentieth-century immigrants, most charged with committing crimes that paled in comparison to those of his own forebears, McClellan declared, “We should rid the country of characters who come here from other lands and take advantage of the great freedom and opportunity our country affords, who come here to exploit these advantages with criminal activities. They do not belong in our land, and they ought to be sent somewhere else. In my book, they are human parasites on society, and they violate every law of decency and humanity.”
The many inherent ironies of an upperworld investigation of the underworld surfaced almost immediately when the “McClellan Committee” chose as its chief counsel Robert F. Kennedy, the seventh child of Boston millionaire, and former Roosevelt-administration diplomat, Joseph P. Kennedy. Over the years, countless upperworld bosses and ordinary witnesses have attested to Joseph Kennedy’s working in consort with the underworld to establish his fortune. Bobby Kennedy quickly commandeered the probe, on which his brother Jack served as a Senate member, with a style alternately described as either forceful or bellicose. When the thirty-one-year-old Kennedy traveled back to Massachusetts for Christmas in 1956, he excitedly announced the full-blown inquiry to his father. Papa Joe, fully cognizant of the extent of the upperworld- underworld alliance that had helped build his dynasty, was not impressed.
According to Bobby’s sister Jean Kennedy Smith, the argument that ensued at Hyannis Port that Christmas was bitter, “the worst one we ever witnessed.” Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. described the row as “unprecedentedly furious.” The politically savvy father warned that such an upheaval would turn labor against Jack in his presidential quest. Longtime Kennedy confidant Lem Billings recalled, “The old man saw this as dangerous . . . He thought Bobby was naive.” Bobby, however, saw things differently, believing such a crusade would actually enhance the family’s image. Chicago investigator Jack Clarke, who headed Mayor Daley’s investigative unit and occasionally counseled Bobby Kennedy, also detected Bobby’s personal agenda. “If Bobby really wanted to investigate organized crime, he never had to leave Boston,” Clarke recently said. “The McClellan thing was a show. Bobby thought it was just good politics.” Clarke’s view is supported by Bobby’s friend, anticrime journalist Clark MoUenhoff, the Washington editor of the Des Moines Register. MoUenhoff, who had been prodding Bobby Kennedy for months to spearhead such an investigation, met with little success until he called Bobby and introduced his brother Jack’s presidential aspirations into the debate. “Kefauver did his investigations five years ago and it got him enough clout to beat your brother’s butt [at the 1956 Democratic National Convention].” Suddenly, Bobby’s interest was piqued. “Well, why don’t you come down and we’ll talk about it.”
Eventually, Bobby began cajoling McClellan about forming the committee, but Joe Kennedy was not yet convinced his son’s probe could not be short-circuited. Joe enlisted Bobby’s mentor, Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, to try to talk some sense into the young firebrand. But Douglas’ intervention also proved futile, as Douglas later told his wife about Bobby’s intransigence, “He feels this is too great an opportunity.”
When the committee went out of business, it had established evidence that led to the convictions of ninety-six of its criminal witnesses. And although it steered clear of upperworld liaisons, it occasionally stumbled inadvertently into embarrassing disclosures, such as that several of the targeted unions leased their New York offices from none other than Bobby’s father. One of Kennedy’s key targets, Teamsters VP Jimmy Hoffa, said years later, “You take any industry and look at the problems they ran into while they were building it up - how they did it, who they associated with, how they cut corners. The best example is Kennedy’s old man . . . To hear Kennedy when he was grandstanding in front of the McClellan Committee, you might have thought I was making as much out of the pension fund as the Kennedys made out of selling whiskey.”
The Tropicana
While the McClellan Committee did battle with Teamster officials in Washington, the Outfit remained unfettered in its Las Vegas expansion. The success of the Stardust had inspired Rosselli and the Outfit to gear up for still more acquisitions. In a feat of ambassadorial legerdemain that rivaled the latter-day shuttle-diplomacy efforts of President Jimmy Carter, Rosselli brokered a complex partnership in the $50-million Tropicana, designed to be the most luxurious facility on the Strip. The intricate ownership trust of the Tropicana, which opened for business on April 3,1957, included the Outfit, Frank Costello of New York, Meyer Lansky of Miami, and Carlos Marcello and “Dandy” Phil Kastel of New Orleans. Another curious partner in the deal was Irish tenor Morton Downey, the best friend and business partner of Kennedy family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy. In 1997, Morton Downey, Jr. said that the Tropicana investment, as well as numerous others made by his father, were conceivably hidden investments of Joe Kennedy’s, with Downey acting as the front. “Joe was my dad’s dearest friend,” Downey, Jr. said. “My father owned ten percent of the Tropicana. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he was fronting it for Joe. That’s how they worked. My father often had someone ’beard’ for him also. I remember when he would jump up screaming at the dinner table when his name surfaced in the newspaper regarding some deal or other. ’They weren’t supposed to find out about that!’ he’d yell.”
To oversee the Outfit’s stake in the enterprise, Curly Humphreys sent a trusted associate named Lou Lederer from Chicago to run the casino, which would become the most profitable in Las Vegas. For appearances, the Tropicana operation was fronted by the same man who fronted for the Commission’s interest in Miami Beach’s Fontainebleau Hotel, Ben Jaffe. Despite this precaution, the hoods’ hidden interest in the Tropicana became known when Frank Costello was shot above his right ear by a rival New York gangster on May 2, 1957. Although the wound proved superficial, its unintended ramifications were anything but. While Costello was in the hospital recuperating, detectives found an incriminating handwritten note in his pocket. Written in the hand of Humphreys’ guy Lou Lederer, the explosive scrap of paper notated the skim from the Tropicana:
As a result of the serendipitous discovery, Costello was forced to divest his interest in the Tropicana. More important, the local Mormon-controlled banks began denying loans to questionable entrepreneurs, and the Mormon-controlled Gaming Control Board became even more stingy, and discriminatory, with its licensing approvals. Until this time, the gangster owners had financed much of their start-up costs with moneys supplied by the Mormon-owned Bank of Las Vegas. Although they certainly had more than enough disposable income to afford the costs, the hoods’ decision to go with a more traditional method served a more important function by not calling the attention of the IRS to their immense hidden nest egg. Luckily for the Outfit, a new, well-endowed bank had just opened in Chicago, and it curiously seemed to prefer gangster clients.
The First National Bank of Accardo
If the Outfit had to face a bump in the road in Vegas, it could not have come at a more fortuitous time than 1957. That year saw the realization of an Outfit Five-Year Plan that gave them “preferred borrower” status for low-interest loans from a new bank, otherwise known as the Central States Pension Fund of the Teamsters Union.
The key players in this unprecedented dispensation were an old Capone associate named Paul “Red” Dorfman, a Teamster up-and-comer from Detroit named James Riddle Hoffa, and the plan’s architect, Curly Humphreys.
The FBI called Red Dorfman, titular head of a number of labor unions including the Humphreys-controlled Waste Handlers Union, one of the five or six men closest to Joe Accardo, while a Chicago Teamster described him as “a hood’s hood.”2 Another Teamster said about Dorf- man, “He was a small, thin, red-haired guy who’d walk in and throw two bullets on a guy’s desk and tell him, ’The next one goes in your fuckin’ head.’ “ In the late forties, Hoffa’s ambition to ascend the Teamster power structure was in overdrive. He knew that to achieve his goals he would have to gain the allegiance of the all-powerful Outfit, which by now had a vise grip not only on Chicago’s influential local Teamsters, but on the locals of numerous cities west of Chicago, which were also taking orders from Humphreys.
Through a union-busting Michigan steel hauler named Santo Perrone, Hoffa met Humphreys’ guy Red Dorfman, who then introduced Hoffa to Accardo, Humphreys, Ricca, and the rest. Hoffa also became close friends with Joseph Glimco (ne Guiseppe Glielmi), appointed by Curly in 1944 to run the fifteen powerful Teamster taxicab locals of Chicago. According to the FBI, Red Dorfman suggested to Humphreys that if the Outfit’s Teamster locals, which Curly controlled, backed Hoffa’s advancement, Hoffa would return the favor by opening up the Teamsters’ pension fund vaults to the Outfit and their friends. At the 1952 Teamster convention, where Hoffa was seen schmoozing Joey Glimco and other hoods, the underworld decided to bequeath Hoffa the union’s vice presidency, a prelude to his coronation five years later. However, all knew that Hoffa would be the real power behind the “front” president, Dave Beck. According to Rosselli’s friend L.A. mobster Jimmy Fratianno, Beck agreed to retire after one five-year term, while Hoffa worked behind the scenes to broaden his own power base, simultaneously proving to his underworld sponsors that he was capable of ruling.
The fine points of the deal dictated that Hoffa would appoint Red’s son, Allen, a college phys-ed teacher, to administer the pension fund loans. Technically, a Teamster fund board of trustees, with Allen as a “consultant,” had to authorize the loans, but in actual practice, Allen with his intimidating underworld sponsors, called the shots on loan approvals. From that point on, the hard-earned dues of truckers, warehousemen, and taxi drivers from the twenty-two states that comprised the Central Fund would subsidize the Outfit’s business ventures in Nevada and elsewhere. And for the next twenty-five years, Outfit-backed Allen Dorfman disbursed the assets of a fund that would be valued at $400 million by the midsixties. By 1961, the fund had lent over $91 million in low-interest (6 percent) loans. In all, some 63 percent of the fund’s holdings were made available to borrowers.
For the first few years (until Hoffa assumed the Teamster presidency in 1957), the Outfit kept its “withdrawals” low profile, mostly in the form of business funneled to Allen Dorfman’s newly constituted Chicago branch of the Union Casualty insurance company. During those years, father and son Dorfman were estimated to have received over $3 million in commissions. An emergency loan-of-sorts involved the “purchase” of Paul Ricca’s Indiana farm by his new friend Jimmy Hoffa’s Detroit Teamster locals, this despite labor-union ownership of property being illegal in Long Beach. Hoffa later said that the property was to be converted into a school for Teamster business agents. At the time, Ricca was facing an IRS deadline for payment of tax penalties, so the Teamsters paid Ricca $150,000 for the spread, which was valued at only $85,000. In addition, the Riccas were permitted to live in the house free of charge for over a year.
In 1957, the year of the bank crackdown in Vegas, the Teamsters were preparing to name a new international president to replace incumbent Dave Beck, who was facing federal tax and larceny charges, the result of McClellan Committee revelations. The Outfit’s Five-Year Plan, arranged in 1952, would now achieve fruition, with Hoffa’s being maneuvered into the Teamster presidency at the upcoming September convention to be held in Miami.
On August 28, 1957, one month before the Teamster convention, the OCID unit of the Los Angeles Police Department watched surreptitiously as the Teamsters Executive Board met with Jimmy Hoffa and three powerful residents of the Windy City at L.A.’s Townhouse Hilton Hotel. An LAPD memo in the files of the Chicago Crime Commission gives further details of what the OCID witnessed:
According to information given to the LAPD, three men are with Hoffa for the purpose of aiding his cause in becoming President of the Teamsters Union. It is claimed that the men in question are: Murray Humphreys, Marshall Caifano, [and Humphreys aide] Ralph Pierce all of whom are well-known Chicago hoodlums. It is stated that a member of the Executive Board is being taken before these men singly, and they are advising members of the Executive Board in no uncertain terms that Hoffa is to be the next President of the Teamsters Union.
When the word came down to Dorfman, he dispatched his close friend Johnny Dio (Dioguardi) to New York to organize Teamster “paper locals,” which had the sole purpose of assuring Hoffa’s control of the New York Joint Council of the Teamsters. According to one report, Curly Humphreys, who was known to frequent the Sea Isle Hotel in Florida, was on hand one month later at Miami Beach’s luxurious Eden Roc Hotel to watch from the shadows as Hoffa accepted the Teamster presidency before seventeen hundred roaring delegates.
In the aftermath of Hoffa’s election, Humphreys’ personal friendships with Teamster officials only grew stronger. Jeanne Stacy Humphreys remembers that Curly was very close to John T. “Sandy” O’Brien, the international vice president of the Teamsters, whose wife, Marge, just happened to be the secretary of the Teamsters pension fund. According to the FBI, Humphreys and Congressman Libonati used their Teamster connection with the O’Briens to secure yearly Teamster donations for an underprivileged boys’ camp in Colona, Wisconsin. Curly Humphreys also maintained a close personal relationship with Hoffa, who often vacationed at the Humphreys’ Key Biscayne home. FBI bugs heard Curly tell Joey Glimco, “Hoffa was the best man I ever knew.” According to Humphreys, whenever the Outfit told Hoffa to do something, “He just goes boom, boom, boom, he gets it done.” Humphreys added, “One thing I always admired about the guy, they tried to fuck him, but he never took a bad attitude about it.” On occasion, Humphreys even lent his legal expertise to Hoffa. “I worked on this case for him,” Humphreys said, “and paid out a lot of money for him and never got it back.” Despite the warming relationship with the new Teamster boss, the hoods would wait a suitable while before making withdrawals from their new bank. But once they commenced, they would be ravenous. In the meantime, key Chicago bosses had to tend to business at home.
On the Homefront II
Under Humphreys’ tutelage, the Outfit was enjoying great business successes, but the period was especially trying for Humphreys’ personal life. Weary of Curly’s skirt chasing, and fully cognizant of the affair with Jeanne Stacy, Clemi Humphreys filed for divorce, after thirty-five years of marriage, in Norman, Oklahoma, on July 6, 1957. Her petition alleged that Curly had ’been guilty of gross neglect and incompatibility has existed . . . for more than three years by reason of which the parties have not lived together.’ Within a year, Humphreys married Jeanne Stacy, lavishing on her a beautiful waterfront home in Key Biscayne, Florida. The FBI was never able to confirm the marriage to Stacy, although they combed official records in St. Louis, Chicago, Miami, and even Mexico City. “That’s because we got married in Georgia,” Jeanne Humphreys recently said. “The justice of the peace almost fainted when Murray handed him two hundred dollars for a two-minute ceremony.”
In Florida, neighbors knew Curly as Mr. Lewis Hart, a retired oilman from Texas. Jeanne Stacy has recalled the numerous Outfit confabs that took place at the Key Biscayne home, where Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa was also a frequent guest.3
The home, at 210 Harbor Drive, boasted stunning views across the bay to Miami Beach, where the Humphreys often luxuriated at the mob-friendly Fontainebleau Hotel, also the site of the wedding reception for Mooney Giancana’s daughter Bonnie on July 4,1959. The FBI noted that Humphreys may have made a simultaneous purchase of a country house and adjoining cattle farm at Round Lake, Illinois. According to his new wife, Curly maintained friendly relations with his ex, calling her regularly in Norman. “He had to,” Jeanne Humphreys says. “Clemi had done all the gang’s bookwork for so many years. Even though they were divorced, they were still in business together.”
Humphreys’ family distress did not end with his marital upheavals; his daughter, Llewella, provided her own drama. Although details are sketchy, it seems certain that, after high school, Llewella, a gifted pianist, went to Rome to pursue her music studies. In one interview she claimed to have performed three concerts with the Rome Symphony Orchestra, although this has not been verified. What is certain is that she began an illicit affair with the married Italian actor Rossano Brazzi. Upon returning to America, Llewella, who now called herself Luella Brady (an anglicization of Brazzi), gave birth in California on July 14, 1955, to Curly’s only grandchild, George Llewellyn Brady, whom Luella claimed was Brazzi’s progeny. Extant photos and love letters from Brazzi appear to confirm the parentage. Brazzi was in California at the time seeking to establish his career in America, and according to Luella, her father used his Hollywood contacts to ensure Brazzi’s roles in such films as Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), Summertime(1955), and South Pacific (1958). Curly’s new wife suggested in jest that Curly acknowledge George’s “Italian genes,” thereby qualifying him for membership in the Mafia. Curly, who was anxious to extricate himself from his way of life, found the remark neither wise nor funny.
By January 1958, Luella was experiencing a recurrence of mental instabilities that had plagued her on and off over the years. Curly had her committed to a Kansas City sanitarium, where she would remain for over three years. “Murray spent over thirty-six thousand dollars on her hospital bills,” remembers Jeanne Humphreys.
Although Humphreys’ heart disease was progressing, he kept up a hectic pace. In addition to having to squire his new young-enough-to-be-his-daughter wife, and caring for his actual daughter and fatherless grandson, Humphreys’ legal counseling skills were in constant demand. Even as Humphreys told all within earshot that he was retired from the Outfit - and he may have wanted to be - he had to oversee the Teamster pension fund operations and strategize the Accardo tax situation. The IRS had given Accardo an ultimatum, stating that he could no longer claim vast amounts of “miscellaneous income” as he had since prohibition. According to information gathered by the Chicago Crime Commission, Curly’s solution was unveiled at a meeting at the Armory Lounge in Forest Park, headquarters of the new boss, Mooney Giancana.
In attendance with Humphreys were Accardo, Sidney Korshak, Giancana aide Jackie Cerone, Eugene Bernstein (the tax consultant so pivotal in the Hollywood parole deal), and officials from the Fox Head Brewing Company. Humphreys owned twenty-two hundred shares of Fox Head, and he had decided to instruct the company’s executives to place Accardo on their payroll to the tune of $65,000 per year. The maneuver only managed to buy time, as the IRS eventually indicted Accardo. During this time, Accardo, in a further effort to decrease the feds’ attention on him, put the word out on the streets that Mooney Giancana was now the boss of the Outfit. In time, Joe’s decision to make Giancana a Nitti-type flak-catcher would prove to be inspired.
One member of Accardo’s legal team, who wishes to remain anonymous, recently recalled how the Outfit conducted a typical brainstorming session at his office. “Joe and Curly would show up late at night with three or four assistants, each of which carried bags of groceries,” the attorney remembered. “For two hours they’d cook an Italian meal, which we had to eat before we conducted business. Everything revolved around food.” Finally, around midnight, the group would commence work. On the eve of one of Accardo’s most important court hearings, the hoods showed up unannounced at the attorney’s office for an all-night, last-minute strategy session. After the mandatory cookfest, as they finally started to work, Joe noticed the attorney’s secretary was on the verge of tears. Accardo cajoled the woman into an explanation for her sorrow. She told of her recent engagement, and her first meeting with her in-laws, which was to take place the next day. The girl was expected to prepare a meal for her fiance and his parents, but had no skill in the kitchen. Seeing the gang feasting on an impeccable lasagna had brought her insecurities to the point of breakdown. Accardo told her, “Not to worry.” He adjourned the all-important confab, and he and his assistants took off to scour the county for a market open at 1 A.M. - or to open one. When they returned an hour later, they spent the rest of the night preparing a four-course gourmet meal as a wedding gift to the distraught bride-to-be.
“The gang left about five A.M., with no work having been done,” recalls the attorney. “We met at the courthouse at nine A.M. and faked it.”
The “eat first” ritual reoccurs like a leitmotiv in the business world of the Outfit. Frequently overheard on hidden FBI microphones were good-natured sarcasms about one another’s expanding waistlines. On some occasions, gang members discussed which prisons’ cuisine was more fattening. Curly was often heard addressing his associates with “Hey, Fat Boy.” The importance of food is clearly seen in the bosses’ choice of bodyguards, many of whom had to double as cooks. Mooney Giancana was especially fortunate: His driver/bodyguard, Joe Pignatello, was a gourmet chef who eventually opened his own Italian restaurant in Las Vegas (Joe and his restaurant are still there at this writing).
Before Accardo’s trial finally commenced in 1960, Humphreys obtained the list of prospective jurors, numbering more than one hundred, and had his boys run background checks on them. Curly found numerous ways to muscle the jury pool. “We have to work on the weakest jury guy and scare the shit out of him,” Curly said unknowingly into hidden FBI mikes. When one on the jury list turned out to be a trucker, Humphreys knew exactly how to handle it. As recounted by his FBI case officer, Humphreys “immediately dispatched Frank ’Strongy’ Ferraro to . . . call Jimmy Hoffa on the phone, find out whether this trucker was a member of the Teamsters, and if so, what local did he belong to and who could be contacted within the Teamsters to approach this possible juror to understand what a bummer of a case against Accardo this really was.”
(Humphreys had things well in hand when the trial finally began in September 1960. However, the court had been tipped by the FBI, which had by this time inherited a bug previously placed in one of the Outfit’s meeting places, and the judge reprised what Judge James Wilkerson had done in the Capone tax trial three decades earlier. On the first day of the trial, Judge Julius Hoffman switched juries. When Humphreys found out, he was livid, according to the FBI bugs. Agents listened in as Curly railed about all his hard work, using dozens of “made guys, all down the drain.” When Accardo was convicted and sentenced to six years, the case was appealed, allowing Curly to try again, and when the appeal was heard in October 1962, the verdict was reversed, because, according to the FBI, Curly Humphreys had strong relationships with the appellate court judges. That court deemed that Accardo had received prejudicial pretrial publicity.)
Although Joe Accardo was afforded little respect from the federal boys, his prestige in the Windy City was at an all-time high. He had developed close friendships with numerous successful local businessmen, many of whose wives worked with Clarice Accardo on community issues and local charity drives. And though he exercised his power quietly, Accardo’s long reach is retold in countless local anecdotes. One such example recalls the time in 1957 when Joe purchased a used car as a surprise high school graduation gift for his daughter Marie. Among Joe’s friends at the time was John Marino, the manager of the Hendrickson Pontiac Dealership in Forest Park, the largest Pontiac franchise east of the Mississippi. As a regular customer, Joe was well-liked by the mechanics, who knew him as the dealership’s biggest tipper. According to Dr. Jay Tischendorf, whose father, Jerry, was the shop supervisor at Hendrickson’s, Joe brought Marie’s gift in for a tune-up, accompanied by two “assistants.”
“I need this done by three,” Accardo said to Tischendorf. “My father almost fainted,” recalls the younger Tischendorf. “At the time, there was a strike by the mechanics” union, and no work could be taken in.’ Jerry Tischendorf started to say, “I’m sorry, Mr. Accardo, but - “ when he was cut off by a smiling Accardo, who repeated, “This is for my daughter, it’s important. I’ll see you at three.” Before Tischendorf could catch his breath, Accardo was gone. “My father assumed that Joe had no idea about the strike,” says Jay Tischendorf. While Jerry Tischendorf fretted about what to do, Joe Accardo must have been laughing. “Within half an hour, all the shop’s mechanics showed up,” Jay was told by his father. Apparently, Accardo had his men get the word out to the union, which was likely controlled by Humphreys, that the strike was suspended for two hours to service Marie’s car. Accardo returned at three and picked up his immaculately tuned automobile.
That same year, 1957, Paul Ricca also continued to feel the wrath of the IRS, which prevailed upon immigration authorities to commence deportation proceedings. As if the Accardo case were not enough to deplete Curly’s energies, he now had to work the Ricca case, which lasted three years. One of his strategies was to hire a New York detective agency to surveil the jurors in an effort to compromise them. However, this strong-arm approach was vetoed by his fellows, Accardo and Giancana. When Ricca was convicted, the gang realized they should have followed Curly’s advice. The FBI noted that, since the conviction, “the hoodlums . . . are more inclined to listen to Humphreys in this regard.” Although Ricca would eventually be imprisoned on tax charges in 1959, Curly worked tirelessly on his appeal and was able to quash the deportation order.
As if Curly did not have enough to fret over, his laundry empire, which he had never abandoned, continued to expand. By August 1957, Humphreys had formed partnerships with several companies, including Normal Wet Wash Laundries, Modern Laundry & Dry Cleaning, Empire Laundry, and Lewis Wet Wash Laundries and Dry Cleaning. The FBI reported that all the stress was taking a profound toll on the fifty-eight-year-old gangster, who was believed to have suffered three more heart attacks within the last year. The FBI would eventually overhear conversations that gave evidence that Humphreys’ legendary mild manner was beginning to fray. “I’m going to retire and go to Wales where there are only Protestants, so I can get away from the Catholics and Jews,” Curly complained. On another occasion, Humphreys told Frankie Ferraro that he was off to Florida for a year and a half, bone weary from doing legal work for his inferiors. “The hell with you guys - I’ve been doing this for thirty years,” Humphreys ranted.
In 1957, the frenetic activity under way in Chicago, Las Vegas, and Washington would be eclipsed by a momentous gathering just ten miles west of Binghamton, Newr York. The assemblage would herald a new era in the epic of the Outfit, an era marked by the gang’s volatile, and often contradictory, relationship with the federal government, or, as they referred to it, the G.
1. Chesrow’s elevation was a typical Outfit move. The Oak Forest Hospital was directly across the street (159th and South Cicero) from a building referred to by the gang as The Wheel. This facility was a gambling joint and a clearinghouse for prostitutes recently arrived from various Midwestern states. The girls would stay at the Wheel for a week while going through a battery of medical checkups before being dispatched to Windy City brothels for their three-month “tour.” This rotation, or wheeling, was overseen by none other than the good doctor Chesrow.
2. For a couple months in the late 1930s, Dorfman’s Scrap Iron Union had one temperamental slugger who would achieve infamy after he moved to Dallas in 1947. Known in Chicago as an emotional powder keg, Jacob Rubenstein, aka Jack Ruby, would avenge President Kennedy’s November 22, 1963, assassination by whacking his killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, two days later.
3. Jeanne, a passionate animal lover, populated the new home with sundry wildlife such as mynah birds, parrots, dogs, and a squirrel monkey. ’What made it even more bizarre,’ says Jeanne, “was that the mynah birds mocked the dogs and monkeys.” The cacophony was a surreal counterpoint to the parade of gangsters who commandeered Jeanne’s kitchen for hours on meeting days. On one occasion, Jeanne thanked her Cuban-born housemaid, Modesta, for putting up with the mayhem. “Gracias, mi amiga,” Jeanne said. “Mi casa es su casa.” Modesta shot back, “Mrs. Hart, no gracias. Su casa es un loco casa!”
Besides fishing in the Keys, the “Harts” of Key Biscayne dawdled about in their garden, a hobby that gave rise to a humorous exchange between Curly and Modesta, whose thick accent often made for laughable exchanges. Worried about her boss’ health, Modesta once warned him about working too long in the hot garden, adding that if he did not rest, she would tell Mrs. Hart when she returned.
“Do you know what happens to stool pigeons?” Curly asked the housekeeper. Whereupon Modesta went into the kitchen and returned with a stool. “It’s where it always is,” Modesta scolded.