Part One
1.
While imprisoned in Philadelphia in 1930, Big Al Capone underwent the kind of self-reflection that is an inescapable by-product of incarceration. For Capone, it resulted in a grand scheme he bequeathed to his successors. Later, in Chicago, in anticipation of his 1931 tax conviction, Capone held one last Syndicate meeting before what he assumed would be a brief incarceration. Summoning his most loyal and indispensable soldiers to his side, Snorky presented his vision: a national crime corporation that would be run not by an all-powerful boss, but by a board of directors, a corporation of thieves partnering with the Torrio-Lansky Commission, whose goal was to make a swift transition into more legitimate white-collar scheming. Until now, this world had been dominated by the upperworld robber barons and Wall Street swindlers, whom the nation held to an infinitely lower standard of justice than the rest of the population. By encouraging his heirs to follow that path, Al Capone was orchestrating his legacy.
The new regime heeded the mistakes of the old, adopting a modus operandi that would serve them effectively well into the future. Capone’s heirs apparent grasped the obvious: Al’s downfall was largely due to his refusal to hide his money or to provide an explanation of what he did for a living. Capone’s personal style only increased his vulnerability. Combined with his penchant for violent retaliation and a high profile - fancy clothes, flashy cars, and movie-star hangers-on – Capone was his own worst enemy. His heirs would contrast Capone’s style with one of their own: anonymity. No effort would be spared to avoid press coverage of the new bosses.
Al Capone took every opportunity to point out the judicial double standard in rationalizing his crime wave. Although unschooled, Capone learned on the streets what respected academics such as Ferdinand Lundberg acquired in research libraries. In his seminal 1968 book, The Rich and the Super-Rich, Lundberg described how the fortunes (and social standings) of Carnegie, Whitney, Rockefeller, McCormick, and others were built on a foundation of white-collar thuggery, or as Capone called it, “legitimate rackets.” Robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt hardly recoiled at the accusation, asking, “You don’t suppose you can run a railroad in accordance with the statutes, do you?”
Among the crimes Lundberg attributed to the country club set were “embezzlement; big fraud; restraint of trade; misrepresentation in advertising and in the sale of securities; infringement of patents, trademarks, and copyrights; industrial espionage; illegal labor practices; violations of war regulations; violation of trust; secret rebates and kickbacks; commercial and political bribery; wash sales; misleading balance sheets; false claims; dilution of products; prohibited forms of monopoly; income tax falsification; adulteration of food and drugs; padding of expense accounts; use of substandard materials; rigging markets; price-fixing; mislabeling; false weights and measurements; internal corporate manipulation, etc.”
The victims of white-collar crimes numbered in the millions, many of whose lives were destroyed in stock market swindles and labor abuses. At the time of his 1931 pretrial proceedings, Capone gave an interview to Liberty magazine, in which he recalled:
Why, down in Florida, the year I lived there, a shady newspaper publisher’s friend was running a bank. He had unloaded a lot of worthless securities upon unsuspecting people . . . One day his bank went flooey. The crooked publisher and the banker were urging bankrupt depositors who were being paid thirty cents on the dollar to put their money in another friend’s bank. Many did so; and just about sixty days later, that bank collapsed like a house of cards too. Do you think those bankers went to jail? No, sir. They’re among Florida’s most representative citizens. They’re just as bad as the crooked politicians. I ought to know about them. I’ve been feeding and clothing them long enough. I never knew until I got into this racket how many crooks there were dressed in expensive suits and talking with affected accents.
Another robber baron who may have fueled Capone’s rationale was Boston-based banker/political patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy. According to numerous reports, Al Capone had known Kennedy since they cut a bootlegging arrangement in 1926. By the time Capone was imprisoned, Kennedy was widely known to have been one of the most offensive robber barons of the era.1
Fueled by such rationalizations, Capone’s heirs set about engineering their version of the American Dream. Such an enterprise required distinct divisions of labor and brainpower, and in his preprison powwow, Capone installed an executive team with the requisite talents. Virgil Peterson, who headed the Chicago Crime Commission for three decades, later remembered that a friend of his was offered a $25,000-a-year job to direct a “new corporation.” Further investigation revealed that the “corporation” was in fact the Capone Syndicate. Peterson’s friend passed up the offer, but the Syndicate continued their head-hunting, and Capone’s eventual appointment of a CEO-type successor incorporated a deceit characterized by a stealthy brilliance.
In naming forty-two-year-old Frank Nitti (ne Nitto) to the top post, Capone employed a strategy that has been largely ignored in discussions of Chicago crime: the boss is quite often a lightning rod, intentionally positioned to deflect attention from the real power, i.e., the lower-profile board of directors. Nitti’s appointment was also predictable given his Sicilian birth and seniority over the other members of the Outfit, as they now called themselves, most of whom were barely thirty when Capone was collared.
Nitti was never the tommy-gun-wielding “enforcer” that has been depicted. He earned his sobriquet The Enforcer because his role mandated enforcement of the internal rules adopted by the board of directors. This responsibility did not entail gunfire, only arbitration. Born Francesco Raffele Nitto in Augori, Sicily, in 1889, Nitti was in fact a smallish, introspective gangster, but like Capone’s other successors, he appreciated the effect of the occasional show of power. Within two months of Nitti’s installation as “CEO,” bombs went off in forty warehouses and offices in and around Chicago. No one was hurt, and little actual stock was destroyed. The attacks were a forceful announcement to Chicago’s citizens that the Outfit was now in charge.
Virtually every mass media portrayal of Frank Nitti has bordered on the fallacious. Most recently, in the 1987 film The Untouchables, Nitti was depicted as the villainous archenemy of the equally misrepresented “heroic” prohibition agent Eliott Ness. In the film’s dramatic climax, the intrepid Ness pushes Nitti off a rooftop to his death. In fact, nothing like that ever occurred. Nitti’s death had absolutely nothing to do with Ness, who ironically was a womanizing, antibooze enforcer who ultimately drank himself to death.2
Nitti’s parents brought him to America when he was three years old, settling in Brooklyn, the New York borough that had given rise to so many Chicago bosses. It is not known if he associated with Capone, Torrio, et al., during this period, although it is highly likely, given where he would soon end up. After learning the barber trade, Nitti entered the New York to Chicago gangster pipeline around 1920. In the Windy City, Nitti quickly made his name as one of Chicago’s premier “fence” operators. With his extensive network of shady buyers for stolen goods, Nitti was perfectly positioned in 1920 to make the transition to bootlegging with Torrio’s Syndicate. Nitti made his bones with Torrio-Capone as a successful smuggler of top-shelf whiskey from Canada to Chicago and, in 1930, was convicted of lesser tax charges than his boss, Capone, who was jailed one year later. With his loyal wife, Anna, spearheading his early-parole petition, the prison received character references from, among others, a mortuary owner who was a longtime friend of the gangster’s - one can only wonder how much business the Syndicate had sent his way. Nitti himself promised the parole board that, if paroled, he would immediately move to Kansas City and accept a position in the dairy business. He would of course do neither. Granted parole soon after the Big Guy “went away,” Nitti instead returned to Chicago and accepted the leadership post bequeathed to him by Capone.
With Nitti in place to draw the flak, the board of directors - the Outfit was free to forge the consummate gangster “think tank,” devising schemes that allowed their enterprise to flourish for decades. More important, their stewardship effectively granted their descendants a seamless merge with the upperworld, old-money tribe. Beyond doubt, the most significant member of this board was the twenty-five-year-old referred to by his associates as Joe.
Joe
Accardo has more brains for breakfast than Al Capone ever had all day.
-George Murray, Chicago American columnist
Antonino Leonardo Accardo was born in Chicago on April 28,1906, the son of a Sicilian immigrant shoemaker. The youngest of five siblings with three brothers and a sister - he grew into a five-foot-nine-inch, two-hundred- pound barrel of muscle. As a teenager raised in Little Sicily on Chicago’s Northwest Side, he got his parents’ assent to join the workforce instead of enrolling in high school. Little is known about Accardo’s youth. The young Antonino held various jobs, among them grocery clerk/ delivery boy and truck driver. Those were his day jobs. By night, the teenaged Accardo made a rapid ascent up the ladder of crime, starting as a pickpocket, graduating to house burglar and then car thief. Although he was hit with numerous arrests, the youngster never spent a night in jail and as an adult he never would. Years later, FBI agents would describe his language as laced with profanity, while grudgingly admitting that he was never a braggart or a liar. After the excesses of his youth, Accardo would become renowned for his fairness.
When Volstead passed, Accardo’s parents, like many of their Sicilian neighbors, joined the cottage industry of alcohol home cooking. Their son, along with his punk chums, gravitated to Claude Maddox’s Circus Cafe, located on North Avenue. Maddox was on the periphery of the Torrio bootlegging Syndicate, tithing the requisite percentage to the gang from Cicero. Young Antonino’s pals at the Circus included Vincenzo Gibaldi, aka the infamous “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn, Capone’s chief hit man. With such liaisons, Accardo was brought under the Torrio umbrella, where he functioned as an enforcer, compelling the Syndicate’s “franchised” bar owners and loan-shark debtors to pay up. He wielded his baseball bat so forcefully - at human heads, not baseballs - that he soon acquired the moniker Joe Batters. His closest friends addressed him as Joe so regularly that his given diminutive, Tony, was all but forgotten even years later by his own wife.
At the height of the Chicago beer wars, with Capone forced to swell the ranks of his personal army, young Accardo first came to Capone’s attention. According to some accounts, Joe was brought to Capone by one of the Big Guy’s bosses, “Tough” Tony Capezio. Still others believe McGurn suggested the young muscle. In any event, the seminal first meeting between Capone and Joe, as deduced by the FBI, occurred in early 1926, when the twenty-year-old youngster was ushered into one of Capone’s headquarters - the Four Deuces, the Lexington, or the Metro-pole Hotel. His enlistment procedure was quite simple by Italian mob standards: There was no elaborate East Coast Mafia ritualism, melodrama, and symbolism. Most likely, there was a quick oath of loyalty to Capone and the Syndicate, with the young capo-to-be swearing to uphold the most intrinsic Sicilian beliefs: respect for wives and families, and contempt for “stoolies.”
Joe Accardo thus became a fixture in the lobbies of Capone’s headquarters, where the young tough often sat guarding the entrance, “Chicago typewriter” in his lap. Completely loyal to the Syndicate, Joe made his bones with Capone-Torrio by eliminating traitors to the regime. When the North Siders’ convoy of assassins fired on Capone on April 26, 1926, it was Joe who pulled his boss down and shielded him with his twenty-year-old body. Capone was rightfully impressed and elevated Accardo to the role of his personal driver and chief bodyguard. (It will be seen that the role of driver for the boss often presaged a future leadership post.)
Accardo’s star rose quickly, and it is widely assumed that he was a key player in the notorious St. Valentine’s Day massacre in 1929. Former Chicago FBI agent and Accardo biographer Bill Roemer held that Accardo was actually one of the gunmen, along with John Scalise, Albert Anselmi, and Jack McGurn. Accardo also matched the description of the man using the name James Morton who rented the getaway car, which had been disguised as a police car. Four months later, when two of the assassins (Anselmi and Scalise) were murdered in Indiana by Capone after plotting a mutiny, they were beaten to a pulp with a baseball bat. Agent Roemer is among those who believe Accardo wielded the stick. Subsequently, Capone was heard to say about Joe, “This guy is a real Joe Batters.”
After the madness of that spring, Joe accompanied Capone as his personal bodyguard when the boss and a dozen other Syndicate members attended the 1929 Atlantic City mob convention. During a break, Accardo went to a tattoo parlor and had a bird emblazoned on the back of his right hand. The creature appeared to flap its wings when Joe opened and closed his fist. Unimpressed, Capone chastised his young soldier, “Kid, that will cost you as much money and trouble as it would to wear a badge with the word thief on it.” Despite the thoughtless act, Joe remained close with the Big Guy. Later that year, Joe was arrested for vagrancy in Florida while golfing with Capone and Jack McGurn. When Capone’s archenemy, temporary president of the Unione Siciliana Joey Aiello, was murdered in October 1930, Joe was considered the prime suspect.
In 1934, three years after the Outfit assumed control, twenty-eight-year-old Joe Accardo wed Clarice Porter, twenty-two, a beautiful blond chorus girl and the daughter of Polish immigrants. As best as can be ascertained, Joe was a faithful husband, as well as a doting father to their two sons and two daughters. In a short time, Accardo became a capo, a young boss with his own crew of ten. Among his chief responsibilities was overseeing the Outfit’s gambling operations. Attempting to put a veneer on his image, Joe insisted that his associates refer to him as JB, a moniker more befitting the country club set. But try as he might, the name Joe stuck.
Years earlier, as a teenaged runner for the Torrio-Capone organization, Joe had often worked side by side with with a young man nine years his senior named Felice De Lucia, better known as Paul Ricca. They became each other’s lifelong best friends. Their fellowship would span decades; their shared stewardship of the Capone regime’s residue would become the stuff of local legend.
Paul
Felice De Lucia was born in 1897 in Naples, Italy, making him thirty-four years old when Al Capone was convicted of tax evasion. In Italy, Felice committed his first murder at age eighteen, when his sister Amelia was disgraced by the family of a boy she was dating. In a fit of rage, Felice murdered the suitor, Emilio Perillo. After serving two years, Felice tracked down and murdered the witness who had fingered him. On the run, De Lucia stole the identity of fellow Neapolitan Paul Maglio and made his way to New York and the New York to Chicago gangster pipeline. In the Windy City, De Lucia assumed the name Paul Ricca and took work as a waiter, a job that would earn him the appellation Paul ’the Waiter’ Ricca.
Ricca worked to establish a far different persona from the violent one he had earned in Italy. In Chicago, his reputation was that of a soft-spoken, well-mannered businessman. In his late twenties, Ricca took work as a manager of Little Italy’s World Playhouse, a side enterprise of the Torrio-Capone combine. His superior intellect was not unnoticed by the Big Fellow, and Ricca’s star rose quickly. When Ricca married in 1927, his new best friend, Al Capone, stood up for him as best man. Soon, Capone appointed young Paul as his personal emissary in dealings with syndicates from other cities. When Johnny Torrio established the Commission with Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky in New York, Ricca was honored with the critical role of liaison to the gang from the Big Apple. The coming decades would see yearly powwows convened in mob-favored restaurants, with the gangs intent on maintaining and coordinating the alliance. At such times, Paul Ricca played either the host in Chicago or the traveling emissary to New York.
At the infamous 1929 Atlantic City mob confab, New York mob boss Meyer Lansky advised a young Paul Ricca on how to get rich in the rackets: “Play the waiting game,” said Lansky. “Keep your name out of the newspapers and build your own organization.” Ricca and his Outfit colleagues took the admonition to heart. With Nitti as the interim front man, it was only a matter of time before the real brain trust took over. As Paul patiently waited his turn at the helm, his nickname, the Waiter, became a double entendre.
Simultaneous with the enlistment of Joe and Paul in the midtwenties, Capone installed another key member of his team. Capone met the young man when the new recruit was twenty-seven years old. The newest Syndicate soldier combined great style and charm with one of the fiercest intellects in the annals of organized crime. His closest friends knew him as Curly.
Curly
He was a man of many aliases. John Brunswick, G. Logan, Mr. Lincoln, Dave Ostrand, Cy Pope, and John Hall are among more than two dozen listed by the FBI. The press referred to him as The Camel, or The Hump, but it was the nicknames bestowed on him by people who actually knew him that spoke volumes: Mr. Einstein, The Brainy Hood, and Mr. Moneybags. If he had chosen the straight life, Llewelyn Morris Humphreys could have been an adviser to presidents or the CEO of a Fortune 500 firm. A master of syllogism, Humphreys’ gift for didactic reasoning left everyone in awe. Tall and nattily attired, he moved as easily among Hollywood studio heads and nationally known politicians as he did among the gang that frequented the Four Deuces.
Although he had no compunction about meting out the ultimate punishment to an enemy, he did it rarely, and only as a last resort. To the rest of his acquaintances Humphreys was a charming, soft-spoken, and rakish dandy. He was often described as the nicest member of the Outfit. The only known Welsh gangster, Humphreys was so courteous and trustworthy that when told of his passing, his FBI case officer reportedly had to stifle a tear. Arguably the most fascinating hoodlum who ever lived, he was so obsessive about his low profile that he remains for many “The Unknown Gangster.”
Humphreys was born in Chicago on or about April 20,1899, to Welsh immigrants. Since no birth certificate has ever surfaced, the exact date remains in question. As best can be determined, Humphreys had one brother and three sisters, he being the third born. As a youngster, his mane of dark, curly hair earned him the nickname by which his close friends would know him from then on: Curly. Precious little is known of his early years, as he always demurred at discussing them. Even in congressional testimony decades later, Curly Humphreys refused to open up about his formative period. What little has emerged suggests that, as a boy, Curly sold newspapers, but soon gravitated to petty theft and street gang fights. As a thirteen-year-old, he came under the influence, perhaps by court order, of a Chicago judge named Jack Murray, who saw in Curly a rare brilliance.
According to various accounts, Murray attempted to school the bright young rebel in the ways of the political world, an attempt that would backfire, as young Curly heard only what he wanted: there was a double standard for the great turn-of-the-century robber barons and the rest of the world. Curly appears to have taken this as a clarion call to join the life of the amoral criminal in a world without reason. In honor of the well-intentioned judge, and to thank him for the political education, Curly changed his name to Murray Humphreys. He also became a talented jewel thief.
Little is known of Curly’s life over the next few years. FBI records indicate that as a sixteen-year-old, he was nabbed for petty larceny, for which he served sixty days at the House of Correction. Humphreys, who even by this tender age had mastered his use of “persuasion and payoff,” had had the charge reduced from felony burglary, which would have mandated a much longer prison term. George Murray, a journalist and acquaintance of Humphreys’, recalled that Humphreys first obtained a private meeting with the prosecutor. The precocious young man was in rare form as he argued: “You try to get me indicted for burglary and I will weep in front of the grand jury. They probably won’t indict me because I am only sixteen. But even if you get me to court the do-gooders will say that because of my extreme youth 1 ought not to be sent to prison. However, if you reduce the charge to one of petty larceny, I will plead guilty. I will get a light sentence. You will get a conviction that looks good on your record. Everybody will be happy. What’s more, you will receive a suitable gift before the case goes to court.”
The prosecutor was persuaded, and the next day an expensive, diamond-studded wristwatch was placed anonymously on his desk and Curly’s modus operandi was now carved in stone. As the Big Guy would later say, “Anybody can use a gun. The Hump uses his head. He can shoot if he has to, but he likes to negotiate with cash when he can. I like that in a man.”
Curly’s style became so famous in Chicago that to this day hoods and nonhoods alike happily quote aphorisms they attribute to the disarming Welshman. Among the most quoted:
• “Love thy crooked neighbor as you love thy crooked self” - inscribed on a plaque hung above his fireplace.
• “Go out of your way to make a friend instead of an enemy.”
• “No good citizen will ever testify to anything if he is absolutely convinced that to do so will result in his quick and certain death.”
• “The difference between guilt and innocence in any court is who gets to the judge first with the most.”
• “If you ever have to cock a gun in a man’s face, kill him. If you walk away without killing him after doing that, he’ll kill you the next day.”
• “Vote early and vote often.”
Years later, Curly would hang another wall plaque with an inscription many believe represents his finest intellectual achievement. In 1951, acting on Curly Humphreys’ advice, Outfit bosses befuddled a Senate panel with a plea legislators had never heard before: citing their Fifth Amendment privilege, they refused to answer the investigators’ questions. Although the refusal had been voiced in criminal court, Congress had not previously experienced this tactic, and believing the exemption could not be enforced in their venue, they cited the bosses for contempt. Much to their consternation, the committee was informed by the courts that Curly’s precedent-setting ploy was in fact legal. Soon, a plaque was seen hanging in Curly’s Oklahoma house: “I refuse to answer on the grounds it might incriminate me.”
In 1921, while on the lam for a jewel heist, Curly fled to his brother’s home in Little Axe, Oklahoma. The slick-talking Humphreys took work as a door-to-door Victrola salesman. On one of his rounds he met, and charmed, a beautiful half-Cherokee college student named Mary Clementine Brendle. Clemi, as she was known, would become an indispensable component in the financial workings of the Outfit. Said to have possessed total recall, Clemi would eventually commit to memory the names of one hundred union presidents - unions Curly would be controlling.
After a brief courtship, the couple married and returned to Chicago, where the heat had cooled on the new bridegroom. Now in his early twenties, Curly found work as a short-order cook at Messinger’s Restaurant on Halsted Street. There he met another brilliant (and perhaps the only college-educated) gangster, Fred Evans. Evans had studied accounting, engineering, and architecture, earning his degree at age nineteen. At the time he met Humphreys, Evans was earning his walk-around money buying and selling jewelry and distressed merchandise that he acquired at government auctions, taking advantage of a pre-Black Tuesday financial depression that prompted insurance companies to hold auctions in an attempt to recoup their losses.
Inevitably, the two prodigies were drawn to each other like magnets. Curly opined that if the two joined forces, they could “fence” pilfered merchandise, which included repainted stolen cars (acquired by Curly’s gang), alongside Evans’ goods at the warehouse Evans rented. As with everyone else who met Curly, Evans was charmed, and a partnership was born. Not surprisingly, their enterprise quickly escalated into the big-money operation of bootlegging. However, with no breweries of their own, the young men took the direct approach - they hijacked the other bootleggers’ trucks. Humphreys proved to be not only a talented booze thief, but an effective kidnapper as well. Often, bootleggers were kidnapped until their partners paid up in either booze or money. Among the gangs, kidnappings were a nuisance that came with the territory. All was going along swimmingly until Curly made the first, and possibly last, stupid mistake in his life: He hijacked a shipment owned by Capone.
After fleeing in terror from the gun-toting Humphreys, Capone’s driver scurried back to the Four Deuces and reported what had happened. In short order, Capone had the young upstart hauled before his tribunal of one. Instead of relegating the curly-headed thief to the heap of corpses of previous transgressors, however, Capone was inveigled by the defendant. Just as he had before the juvenile division prosecutor, Curly somehow (details are unknown) talked himself out of being sanctioned, and before he was through, he was not only acquitted, he was offered a job. Curly never forgot Capone’s act of forgiveness and became one of his most loyal charges. Later, Curly would name his pet dog Snorky in homage to Capone.
After a brief stint as a beer-truck driver for the Syndicate, Humphreys was given a role more suitable to his intellect: the protection racket. Curly quickly became adept at the ways of extortion and graft. Curly’s preference for the payoff resulted in his masterminding of the 1931 Capone jury pool bribery. Through his contacts in the judicial system, he obtained the list of jurors, who, had they not been switched at the last minute, were totally corrupted and poised to acquit Capone. When Capone eventually went to jail, Curly, Joe, and Paul paid regular visits to the man who had brought them all together.
Al Capone once said, “Nobody hustles like the Hump.” This truism rendered Curly’s role in the Outfit a no-brainer: He assumed control of union takeovers, political liaisons, and protection rackets. He also would develop into a brilliant legal tactician, inventing novel defense strategies for his oft-indicted associates. Curly’s future successes were predicted by the Chicago Crime Commission, which named Humphreys the new Public Enemy Number One after Capone “went away.” With only a brief prison term in his future, Curly proceeded to establish himself as one of the Outfit’s most powerful chieftains for decades to come.
Johnny
One of Curly’s most important Outfit associates was a largely absentee member named Johnny Rosselli. Like Curly, Rosselli was another affable Outfitter, and the country’s original gangster-patriot, referred to as The All-American Mafioso by his biographers. Another gangster with a penchant for thousand-dollar silk suits, Rosselli loved his high style almost as much as he loved his adopted country. In addition to being the Outfit’s traveling emissary to locales such as Hollywood and Las Vegas, Rosselli partnered with the intelligence community and the Kennedy White House in their efforts to remove Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. And Rosselli was likely the only one involved who refused to accept payment for his services. When he died, a high-ranking CIA executive who had worked with him wept openly, much as Curly’s death moved his FBI case officer.
Rosselli was born Filippo Sacco in Esperia, Italy, in 1905. Six years later, his family brought him to New York, on their way to permanent residence in East Boston. As a youngster, Sacco, like his other future Outfit mates, was drawn to the world of street gangs, seduced by the allure of easy money. Like so many before him, young Sacco spent countless hours at the mirror practicing malocchio (the evil eye), or the Look. Years later, Rosselli counseled a friend, “The secret is not to look in their eyes. You pick a spot on their forehead and zero in. That way you don’t blink, you don’t move. It intimidates the hell out of them.” Judging from the career he went on to have, one can assume Sacco, like Capone, mastered the Look.
Dropping out of school, Sacco took work as a driver of a horse-drawn milk wagon, the better to provide cover for his chief enterprise, narcotics trafficking, specifically morphine. Milky, as he was called, was collared twice in 1922, the result of a sting operation involving a pliant drug informant. After spending six months behind bars, Sacco was released, and the informant was soon found murdered. Authorities put two and two together and decreed Filippo Sacco suspect number one. Seventeen year-old Sacco took his cue and fled to New York City, where he assumed the name John Stewart. After a few months distinguishing himself in the local gang scene, Sacco/Stewart was quickly farmed out to the big leagues via the New York to Chicago gangster pipeline. Eighteen-year-old Sacco became Joe Accardo’s predecessor as Al Capone’s driver and bodyguard.
Capone and Sacco/Stewart became so close that some believed them to have been cousins. One night, Al convinced Sacco to adopt a more appropriate Italian surname. Back at home, the young gangster leafed through an encyclopedia until he chanced upon an entry concerning a fifteenth-century painter who had added Last Supper frescoes to the walls of the Sistine Chapel: Cosimo Rosselli. From then on, Filippo Sacco was Johnny Rosselli. Even his family seemed to forget his birth name when speaking of him.
During his time with Capone, Rosselli, like Paul, Curly, and Joe, grew to appreciate the importance of appearance. But unlike Capone, who was drawn to garish, often flamboyant attire, Johnny mimicked the suave, understated sophistication of Paul Ricca and his peers. In time, Rosselli began acquiring his own fitting nicknames, among them Mr. Smooth.
Just as the Syndicate was about to take off under Capone’s rule, unforeseen troubles cut short Rosselli’s stay in Chicago. Rosselli may have been tough on the outside, but no amount of staring into the mirror could strengthen his inherited weak lungs (his grandfather died of tuberculosis, his father of influenza). After a typically harsh Illinois winter, Rosselli was diagnosed with incipient tuberculosis. After consultation with Capone, Johnny was dispatched to the West Coast to be the eyes and ears of the Syndicate, on the lookout for opportunities should the infant Hollywood “dream factory” catch hold. Capone was smart: During the Depression, the only people who appeared to flourish were gangsters and entertainers (in the year after the 1929 stock crash, Warner Brothers Pictures was valued at $160 million).
Arriving in Los Angeles, Rosselli quickly attached himself to the bootlegging operation of Anthony Cornero Stralla, aka Tony “the Hat” Cornero. The stylish Cornero, a perfect match for the dapper Rosselli, made his living transporting alcohol on ships from Canada and Mexico. He became so successful that he soon earned the moniker King of the Western Rumrunners. At the time, Cornero was engaged in bloody sea battles with rival rumrunners that conjured up images of pirate exploits. As a trusted associate, Rosselli’s star, and income, rose with Cornero’s. Tony the Hat eventually came to feel police pressure and fled to Canada, where he turned his interest to gambling. By 1930, he would relocate in Nevada, where Rosselli and Humphreys were spreading Capone’s money around to any member of the state legislature who would vote for the Wide Open Gambling Bill.
With Cornero in absentia, Rosselli gravitated to Jack Dragna’s crime organization. Considered Al Capone’s alter ego, Dragna, ne Anthony Rizzoti, was the City of Angels’ own bootlegging/extortion/gambling kingpin. The local press named him “the Al Capone of Los Angeles.” Dragna’s operation flourished largely due to his friendship with Mayor Frank Shaw, the most corrupt chief executive in Los Angeles history. The Rosselli-Dragna liaison was mutually beneficial. Rosselli needed a sponsor to gain acceptance in his new home; Dragna valued not only Johnny’s street smarts, but his ties to the powerful Chicago Syndicate, which Dragna hoped would amplify his own purchase in the national crime hierarchy. In a police raid on the office of Dragna’s lieutenant Girolomo “Mo Mo” Adamo, evidence was found of the growing cooperation between Dragna’s gang and Rosselli’s Outfit: Adamo’s phone book contained the addresses and private unlisted phone numbers of Curly Humphreys and Joe Accardo.
Throughout the twenties, Rosselli maintained close contact with Capone. In September 1927, Capone threw a weeklong party to honor his friend boxer Jack Dempsey, prior to Dempsey’s ballyhooed title fight against champion Gene Tunney. (Capone offered to fix the fight; Dempsey, however, declined. He should have accepted - Tunney won.) The fight was the largest spectacle ever to hit Chicago, with over 150,000 fight fans arriving from all over the country to view the fisticuffs at Soldier Field.
Arriving by train from Los Angeles was Johnny Rosselli. After the fight, he accompanied Capone’s cousin Charlie Fischetti back to the Metropole Hotel, where Capone’s bacchanal was in full swing. For sheer extravagance, Capone’s bash ran a close second to the proceedings at the stadium: Pianist Fats Waller played, Al Jolson sang, and the top-shelf alcohol and women were in great abundance - all paid for by Capone. “There must have been a thousand people in that place,” Rosselli later said in Senate testimony. Polly Adler, the famous New York madam, attended the bash and later recalled in her memoir, A House Is Not a Home, “Capone was certainly a grand host - Lucullus and those old Roman boys could have taken lessons from him.”
Johnny attempted to return the hospitality when Capone journeyed to L.A. later that year. When Capone was booted from the posh Biltmore Hotel, Johnny tried to intercede with the local police, offering his home to Capone and his entourage. The authorities refused the deal and put Capone et al. on the next train east.
In due time, Rosselli would gravitate to the burgeoning movie business, a move that would have profound repercussions for the Outfit. In that milieu, Rosselli made the acquaintance of the robber baron already known to Al Capone and Curly Humphreys, Joseph P. Kennedy. Like Capone and his gang, Joe Kennedy was anxious to discover what the new people’s opiate would be, now that booze was widely available. The get-rich- quick crowd desired another tightly controlled product that was in big demand - what Curly Humphreys described to his wife as “the new booze.” It seemed that Capone, via Rosselli and Humphreys, wasn’t the only bootlegger who grasped that the new booze was the Hollywood dream factory. As he later testified, Johnny Rosselli often played cards and golf with the Kennedy patriarch, who was now a prime mover in Tinseltown. All told, Kennedy’s 1920s contacts with the Outfit were but a prequel to a partnership arrived at four decades in the future.
While Mr. Smooth took full advantage of the hedonism of the movie capital, back in Chicago his sartorial polar opposite, “Greasy Thumb,” was going about the mundane but essential task of attending to the Outfit’s bookkeeping.
Jake
In the Outfit’s ruling system, a spot on the second rung was reserved for Russian-born Jake Guzik. At forty-four years old, he was twelve years Al’s senior when they both went to prison for tax evasion in 1931. As a child (one of twelve siblings), Guzik witnessed his parents’ arrests on white-slavery charges. Jake and his five brothers eventually became pimps themselves after starting out as errand runners for the prostitutes owned by their parents. Guzik was well-known for his lack of personal hygiene; his former driver, George Meyer, remembered the plump pimp: “Everything he ate for a week you could see on his vest. And the B.O.!”
Guzik was not only Capone’s bookkeeper at the Syndicate’s Four Deuces headquarters, he was his closest friend and confidant. They became so simpatico that friends began calling Guzik “the Little Fellow,” a reference to Al’s sobriquet “the Big Fellow.” In 1924, when a bloodied Jake showed up at the Four Deuces, mugged by a thug named Joe Howard, Capone went into a rage. In what was becoming an increasingly rare show of hands-on revenge, Capone tracked down Howard in a Wabash Avenue saloon, placed a pistol an inch from Howard’s head, and squeezed the trigger, killing him instantly. Capone’s display of loyalty to someone as repellent as Guzik was not unnoticed or unappreciated by other gangsters unaccustomed to receiving such support from on high.
During the Torrio-Capone regime, Guzik had operated in a room leased by Torrio for “A. Brown, M. D.” The office, just one block from the Four Deuces headquarters, was illegally raided by Mayor Dever’s men in 1924. Although the material seized could not be entered as evidence the raiders had neglected to obtain a search warrant - the bounty gave an insight into the Torrio-Capone operations, as well as Guzik’s role in it. Included in the seizure were numerous ledgers kept by Guzik, which detailed the inner workings of the regime. Among the docket headings were alcohol suppliers; Canadian and Caribbean route information; a list of commercial wholesale alcohol buyers (hotels, restaurants, etc.) and illegal speakeasies; officials (politicians, police, etc.) on the payoff schedule; a list of breweries owned by the Syndicate; and a list of brothels and gambling dens owned by the Syndicate.
The press nicknamed Guzik “Greasy Thumb” for reasons that are still debated. One explanation holds that the financial whiz earned the name as a sloppy waiter who often let his thumb dip into the soup. The more probable version postulates that the name reflects Guzik’s role as “the palm greaser” who disbursed countless stacks of greenbacks to corrupted cops and politicians. These payments were made from Guzik’s regular table at St. Hubert’s Old English Grill and Chop House (which he owned behind front-man owner Tommy Kelly). Whatever the source for the nickname, there is no evidence that anyone outside the working press referred to Guzik as Greasy Thumb.
Capone shared his bounty with Guzik, who reportedly earned millions, for which the government could show no paid taxes. So trusted was Guzik by Capone that he was given the honor of chairing Al’s 1926 peace conference. Guzik was convicted on tax charges one year before Capone and would serve five years, before returning to the Outfit as its financial and legal consigliere.
This then wras the Outfit’s starting lineup: Joe Accardo, Curly Humphreys, Paul Ricca, Johnny Rosselli, and Jake Guzik. Their efforts were buttressed by a supporting cast of hundreds. No effort was spared to insulate the leadership from the violent enforcement inflicted by the expendable ones. Among the troops who ran the gauntlet were Rocco and Charlie Fischetti (beer distribution); Joe Fusco (liquor); Frank Pope and Anthony Volpe (gambling); Peter Penovich, Jr. (floating casinos); ;Duke Cooney (brothels); Hyman Levin (collections); Jack McGurn, Louis Campagna, and Frank Milano (gunmen-enforcers); James Belcastro and Joseph Genaro (bomb squad); Sam “Golf Bag” Hunt (enforcer; found with Jack McGurn at the scene of a murder with a bag of golf clubs mixed in with a still-warm machine gun).
The Outfit adopted, whether arrived at casually or as result of formal discussion, a strict set of personal guidelines for the new regime: The board would hold daily meetings; at least six days out of the week, they put in twelve-hour workdays; Outfit leaders would dress the part, just as corporate directors of the upperworld; wives and families were to be respected at all times and kept insulated from the business of the Outfit; boozing and drug usage were not tolerated. The antinarcotics stance was a remnant of Capone’s own beliefs. “Only two kinds of hustlers I can’t stand: a pickpocket and a hophead,” Al had told his gang. Capone’s abhorrence of drugs was said to have resulted in his ordering the murders of users within the gang. Years later, Paul Ricca learned the meaning of Capone’s fears firsthand when his son became a drug addict. The edict against using was mild in comparison to that against dealing. During the reign of the Outfit, drug trafficking was strictly prohibited, and those who succumbed to the temptation of easy money in the narcotics trade were removed with great dispatch. When one member, Chris Cardi, was arrested for drug dealing, he was made an example when the bosses let him serve out his sentence, only to have him killed immediately upon his release.
The gang’s bylaws also had a practical rationale. One alcoholic union thug named George McLane, who was to be conscripted against his will into the Outfit, recalled his meeting with Capone’s successor, Frank Nitti. “He told me to stop drinking and get on the wagon,” McLane said. “Nitti said that there was an unwritten law in the Outfit. They are not allowed to drink, because they might shoot their mouth off. If they shoot their mouth off, they will be found in an alley.” But what thoroughly shocked McLane was that “they didn’t even chase broads during business hours.” Lastly, the Outfit continued Capone’s nondiscriminatory work ethic: No one was excluded from the Outfit due to race, religion, or nationality. But the leadership and key decisions were still reserved for Italians only.
The work of the Outfit was thus transfigured from amorphous hooliganism to the “business” of crime, and one its most important agendas, the control of the city’s workforce, was delegated to Curly Humphreys.
1. In the midtwenties, banker-investor Joe Kennedy purchased the Film Booking Office as well as controlling interest in RKO Productions. When he branched into Pathe Films, he plundered its stock, giving insiders such as himself stock worth $80 per share, while common stockholders were reimbursed to the tune of a mere $1.50. Many lost their life savings, while Kennedy walked away with a cool $5 million. The swindled stockholders tried to file suit but to no avail.
At the same time, Kennedy worked for Guy Currier’s Boston investment firm, and when Currier was away, Kennedy scrutinized his private files to gain insider information. Currier’s family now says that Currier felt double-crossed by Kennedy, whom he believed to be corrupt.
In 1929, Kennedy attempted a hostile takeover of the California-based Pantages theater chain. When owner Alexander Pantages balked, Joe Kennedy paid a seventeen- year-old girl $10,000 to accuse Pantages of rape. Pantages was charged and sentenced to fifty years in prison (later reversed), and Joe Kennedy got the theater chain at a greatly undervalued price. Four years later, when the girl wanted to admit her role in the frame-up, she suddenly died, apparently of cyanide poisoning. On her deathbed, the twenty-one-year-old admitted her conspiracy with Kennedy, who had promised to make her a film star (see Ronald Kessler, Sins of the Father, pp. 51-59).
It has been well documented that Kennedy used insider information to ’sell short’ before the 1929 stock market crash, making millions off the misery of his fellow citizens.
2. The role of Ness went to Kevin Costner, who appeared to be making a career of historical misrepresentations when, in the 1991 film JFK, he portrayed the bullying New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison as Jimmy Stewart reincarnated. Costner continued the theme in 2000, when he starred in and produced the dramatic recreation of the Cuban missile crisis Thirteen Days. In that role he played presidential adviser Kenny O’Donnell, who had no known input in the crisis; virtually all of “O’Donnell’s” actions and words in the film are invented.