Part Two
5.
“No politician ever turned his back on a bundle of currency,” Tommy Maloy once said to his union subordinates. Emulating knowledgeable hoods like Curly Humphreys, Maloy followed up his words with action. As the boss of Local 110, the Motion Picture Operators’ Union, the feisty Irishman resembled Humphreys in one other way: When the payoff failed, Maloy upped the ante until he got what he needed. Although he succeeded for a time, Maloy learned the hard way that he was a mere stepping-stone in a great Outfit scam that saw them plant permanent roots in the City of Angels. In a three-stage operation that included Outfit takeovers of two key unions and Johnny Rosselli’s maneuvers in Los Angeles, the gang from Cicero undertook the first of many endeavors that propelled them permanently onto the national scene.
Thomas E. Maloy was born in Chicago in 1893 and spent his youth gaining a reputation as a tougher-than-usual gang member. Eventually he came to the attention of local union strong-arm Maurice “Mossy” Enright, known as the boss of the building trade unions as well as the garbage workers. For a time, Enright had been a slugger for North Side gangster Deanie O’Banion, before evolving into a fearsome union organizer who did not shy away from bombing a recalcitrant business owner’s building. Maloy became Enright’s chauffeur, squiring Mossy around in his long, terrorist-filled sedan known as the Gray Ghost. The young Maloy also became Mossy’s protege, absorbing his teacher’s insights until one day in 1925, when Enright earned the distinction of becoming Chicago’s first drive-by shooting victim.
Maloy proceeded to take work as a projectionist in a small Chicago movie house, while simultaneously running a craps game under the theater’s stage. After performing muscle work for the theater operators’ union boss, Jack Miller, Maloy was bequeathed the top spot when Miller resigned. Maloy retained his position through intimidation backed up by blackjacks and dynamite. Supposedly, at Maloy’s first official union meeting, the membership erupted in a near riot, threatening strikes against the theaters and violence against its own leadership. Maloy wasted no time asserting his position by spraying the union hall’s ceiling with bursts of machine gun fire. The members lost their nerve and became submissive to Chicago’s newest “alpha dog.” With his theater as a base of operations and with Enright as inspiration, Maloy quickly began slugging his own way up, becoming a never-convicted suspect in nine murders, including that of one unbowed theater owner murdered in Maloy’s office.
Tommy Maloy’s chief scam, and the one that brought him to the attention of Curly Humphreys, was the systematic extortion of local movie theaters, especially the lucrative Balaban & Katz chain of houses. Barney Balaban, who later moved west to run Paramount Pictures with his brother, and Stan Katz, future VP of MGM, started with one theater in 1908 and by 1930 had built up Chicago’s most prosperous movie chain, numbering dozens of houses. The B&K empire was obviously dependent on its film operators, and by extension, Tommy Maloy’s Motion Picture Operators’ Union. In a manner that would have brought a smile to the face of his mentor Mossy Enright, Maloy extracted huge sums from B&K (among others) for the promise of union tranquillity. At the time, union rules mandated that there be two workers in the projection booth, one for picture and one, the fader, to synchronize the phonograph machine to the then silent movies. It was known that one man could perform both tasks, so Maloy told B&K he could arrange for one-man projection suites in their theaters for a “contribution” to his favorite charity: Tommy Maloy. In addition, Maloy was able to squeeze small wage increases from his marks, thus keeping his membership placated. Like so many other labor racketeers, Maloy made a show of throwing crumbs to his membership while simultaneously robbing them blind.
While Maloy enjoyed his $125 per week B&K kickbacks (in addition to his $25,000-a-year union salary), his workers made their own contributions to the Maloy Fund: “Special assessments” were added to union dues whenever Maloy needed a Caribbean cruise, or a $22,000 European vacation with his mistress; unwitting members rewarded their leader with gifts of a $4,000 bathroom and a $5,000 bar, so he could ostensibly conduct business at home. Investigators later conservatively estimated that Maloy plundered half a million dollars from his union treasury.
It was a virtual impossibility that Maloy’s golden goose would evade the Outfit’s radar. In fact, the gang had been interested in the entertainment business since the days when Al Capone had first booked his favorite jazz bands into his speakeasies. At that time, Capone had developed a relationship, likely a silent partnership, with Dr. Jules Stein in his infant booking agency with the inflated name the Music Corporation of America (MCA). Native Chicagoan Stein got his start as a booker of bands and sometime bootlegger. Like Capone, Stein battled with Roger Touhy, who tried to muscle Stein out of the booze business. It is widely believed that Stein allied with the Syndicate to gain protection from Touhy. As one Chicago investigator told writer Dan Moldea, “Touhy was nothing next to Capone and his boys, and that’s where Stein’s connections were.” Stein was soon using Capone’s musclemen to force theaters to book his acts. One such thug, Willie Bioff, would figure prominantly in one of the Outfit’s boldest takeovers. Among Stein’s earliest clients was a young actor named Ronald Reagan, who frequented the Club Belvedere in Iowa, which was owned by the Outfit.
An interesting sidebar to the saga of Capone hitman Jack McGurn reflects the increasing camaraderie between gangsters and the Hollywood glitterati during the Syndicate era. Recently, Bing Crosby biographer J. Roger Osterholm wrote of the crooner’s periodic rounds of golf played with partner Jack McGurn: “Crosby just loved golf; he didn’t care who he played with,” said Osterholm. “I stress that it was just very innocent; it was just to play golf.” Osterholm adds that Crosby ditched McGurn when he learned of his line of work. But the biographer vastly understated the true nature of the Crosby-McGurn liaison.
Recently released FBI documents and interviews with knowledgeable Chicagoans add a far more sinister dimension to Crosby’s odd golf pairing. The FBI’s documentary record shows that Crosby was the unlucky recipient of numerous Black Hand-type extortion threats, some of which are included in his FBI file. According to the Bureau, Crosby paid out many thousands of dollars over the years to the extortionists. At some point, Crosby had enough, according to one witness who circulated on the Outfit’s periphery. That witness, a woman whom we will call Ruth Jones, was McGurn’s golfing partner. One day, Jones asked McGurn how he came to play golf with Crosby, and McGurn told her the origins of their friendship.
“Crosby was doing a gig at the Chicago Theater on Wabash,” says Jones, “when he was met backstage by two freelance Black Handers.” The extortionists gave Crosby two days to pay up, or else. The savvy Crosby knew where to seek relief: his manager, the legendary Dr. Jules Stein, founder of MCA. As a man familiar with the workings of the Capone Syndicate, Stein knew just where to turn for help with Crosby’s Black Hand problem. His name was Jack McGurn.
On the appointed day, McGurn arrived at the theater, where he was introduced to Crosby in advance of the extortionists’ arrival. The two thugs arrived at what they thought was Crosby’s dressing room, only to be met by the legendary enforcer McGurn. “They knew very well who Jack was and what they were in for,” recalls Ruth Jones. “Jack beat the shit out of them and then threw them out into the back alley, which borders the dressing room.”1 Bing Crosby was both beholden and enthralled. He engaged McGurn in a lengthy conversation, at times asking what favor the singer could do for the gangster. McGurn refused all the overtures, but when the conversation turned to their mutual love of golf, McGurn’s resolve weakened: “Well, there is one thing you might do - meet me for a round of golf.” Crosby happily obliged, and the two were soon hitting the links at Chicago’s Evergreen Country Club. The friendship blossomed, with McGurn playing rounds with Crosby on McGurn’s visits to Los Angeles to do business with Johnny Rosselli and other Outfitters. Stein later moved to Hollywood, where MCA would live up to its vaunted moniker, becoming the most powerful agency in town. It should also be recalled that prior to Hollywood’s christening as the movie capital, the Windy City had that distinction. Like Stein, many other local movie folk relocated west, forming the backbone of the motion picture industry as it is known today.2 In the 1920s, one fifth of all films shot were produced in Chicago, and since these productions needed cooperation from Syndicate-controlled trade unions, Capone (via Curly) became well acquainted with the workings of the movie machine. Ironically, the studios paid the Syndicate’s unions off for the privilege of immortalizing many of Chicago’s own hoods in gangster films starring actors such as Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson.
The Outfit’s encroachment into the theatrical world was, in hindsight at least, a predictable expansion of its empire. Al Capone reportedly ordered the takeover of Maloy’s union from his “vacation” home on the island of Alcatraz. Others believe the decision was reached in an Outfit meeting with Joe Accardo, Frank Nitti, Curly Humphreys, Paul Ricca, and attorney Joe Bulger in attendance. Of course, the scenarios are not mutually exclusive. In any event, the gang bided their time, waiting for the perfect opening. They did not have long to wait, since Tommy Maloy’s road to riches was becoming bumpy, and like so many before him, he sought out the help of Al Capone’s heirs.
For years, a number of theater owners had refused to pay Maloy to waive the union’s two-operators-per-booth requirement. By 1930, with the nation’s financial depression adding to their woes, the owners had had enough and began complaining to local politicians, prompting a Cook County state’s attorney to open an investigation into Maloy’s activities. In desperation, Maloy turned to the Outfit’s payoff guru, Curly Humphreys. Together the two men trundled off to the state capital in Springfield and began spreading around bags of cash. Consequently, legislation was introduced mandating the use of two operators “for the safety of the public.” This was long after moviemakers began syncing the sound on the filmstrip, making the fader operators even more redundant. At the same time, one of Maloy’s rivals for the union leadership turned up murdered. Some believe the description of the dapper young shooter with the mane of curly, dark hair precisely described Curly Humphreys. However, as with other gangland murders, nothing ever came of it.
The Hollywood Kid
With the Outfit’s hooks now firmly embedded in Maloy’s union, events unfolding in Los Angeles were about to play into its grand scheme. By the early thirties, the gang’s West Coast ambassador, Johnny Rosselli, had also began to focus on the world of entertainment, very likely at the directive of his Chicago superiors. Rosselli’s bootlegging partner, Tony Cornero, had moved on to Nevada, where he opened a gambling casino, cashing in on the newly passed Wide Open Gambling bill. The legislation was helped along by Johnny and Curly, who had made special graft-delivery trips to the state capital. Now Rosselli glommed onto the movie studio bosses, who were themselves enamored of gambling and gangsters.
Propitiously, Rosselli had recently become the Outfit’s Los Angeles gambling czar, thanks to deals made back in his gang’s Chicago headquarters, and agreements reached with their Commission counterparts in New York. By the time Capone “went away,” he had struck a partnership with upperworld race-wire king Moses Annenberg: Capone’s boys were paid $100,000 to muscle out Annenberg’s Chicago competitors in the nascent wire business. Although the Outfit was not content to merely stay a partner in the lucrative wire service, at least it had a toehold. Out in the City of Angels, Johnny Rosselli became the point man for Annenberg’s expanding empire, forcing bookies to subscribe to the service. With L.A. mayor Frank Shaw thoroughly bribed, the operation flourished. Given the studio bosses’ predilection for the ponies and their infatuation with hoods, the suave Johnny Rosselli was a natural fit. Long before the Outfit’s studio takeover scheme congealed, Hollywood had entered into a fawning relationship with gangsters: Ben Siegel of the New York gang was already a known conqueror of starlets; Frank Costello was chummy with Columbia’s Harry Cohn and the William Morris Agency’s George Wood; box office sensation (and gambling addict) George Raft was a virtual member of Owney Madden’s gang out of New York (and later Arkansas).
Johnny Rosselli became the movie honchos’ bookmaker and personal adviser, placing bets and socializing with the likes of Joe Schenck (United Artists), Harry Cohn (Columbia), and Joe Kennedy (RKO and Film Booking Office). As bookie to the studio heads, Johnny would glean information vital to the Outfit’s movieland aspirations. By either threatening to expose hidden skeletons or to call their vigorish, Rosselli was able to acquire silent partnerships for the Outfit in many Hollywood careers. It is believed that in this way the hoods “sponsored” actors such as George Raft, Chico Marx, Jimmy Durante, Jean Harlow, Gary Grant, Clark Gable, and Marilyn Monroe. Rosselli’s near fraternal bond with Harry Cohn gave him, and by proxy the Outfit, an education in the ways of the motion picture business. Cohn typified the thug as businessman. A former small-time crook from New York, “White Fang” Cohn was a ruthless executive who openly spoke of his reverence for Benito Mussolini, as well as his disdain for workers’ unions. Although Depression-era Hollywood suffered huge drop-offs in profits, studio heads like Harry Cohn continued to live extravagant lifestyles, but the skilled workforce was forced to make concessions. By early 1933, studio employees watched in disbelief as their high-living employers slashed wages by a staggering 50 percent. On July 24, 1933, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) struck. The strike by IATSE, then the largest union in the entertainment field, and affiliated with 99 percent of the nation’s theaters, could not be ignored by the studios and their collective, the Association of Motion Picture Producers (AMPP). When the AMPP resolved to break the strike, the choice for the role of strikebreaker was easy: Cohn’s new tough-guy buddy from the Chicago Outfit, Johnny Rosselli.
Since many of Hollywood’s glitterati were transplants from the Windy City, they were well acquainted with just how thorough the Outfit could be. “They asked if I could help,” Rosselli later testified. “I said the only way to help is to fight fire with fire.” And he did. Fliring a crew of local toughs, Rosselli kept the gates open for scab strikebreakers desperate for work. In one bitter, ugly week it was over, with the IATSE practically destroyed after its members deserted ship en masse when the union caved in to Rosselli. On the winner’s side, the dapper Johnny Rosselli was elevated to the status of hero by the movie moguls, and he was soon seen at their palatial estates, enjoying tennis, swimming, and cavorting with an unending stream of beautiful starlets. Back in Chicago, Curly Humphreys began referring to Johnny as “the Hollywood kid,” while his Hollywood friends nicknamed the affable mobster Gentleman Johnny. But it was not all play for Rosselli, who used his newfound propinquity to soak up intelligence on the inner workings of Hollywood. Little did Joe Schenck, Harry Cohn, and their producers’ union realize that in schooling their bookmaking chum from Chicago, they were setting up the Outfit with a permanent, and lucrative, presence in the film industry. When he was put on the permanent AMPP payroll, Johnny Rosselli knew he had arrived. Before long he invited his Chicago mates to barrel through the opening he had created.
In Chicago that same year, 1933, the final component of the master plan fell into place when a falling-down-drunk labor boss picked the wrong place to shoot off his mouth. The racketeer with the alcohol problem was George E. Browne, business manager for Local 2, the 450member stagehands union, having assumed the post by pummeling the head of his predecessor with a lead pipe. Browne moonlighted by selling “protection” to the chicken dealers in Chicago’s Fulton Street Market. Although Browne was believed to have been drunk every night of his life, this particular bender actually had a reason: Browne was celebrating the culmination of a highly lucrative scam.
Word of a good racket traveled fast in Chicago, and like the Outfit, George Browne had become aware of Tom Maloy’s blackmailing gig with the Balaban & Katz theater chain. When Browne likewise decided to hop on the B&K gravy train, he had no idea he would end up as merely the middleman for the firm of Nitti, Accardo, Humphreys, et al.
Critical to the success of George Browne was his partnership with a brothel owner and all-around thug named Willie Morris Bioff. He would also prove to be the Achilles’ heel of the entire operation, a player whose imprudence caught the Outfit by surprise too late in the game. The Russian-born Bioff was by all accounts an evolutionary malfunction. By the age of ten he was plying girls with candy, not for his own pleasure, but so that he might palm them off on older boys for ten cents apiece. When a girl attempted to rebel, he tortured her before beating her up. “Next time you talk this way,” he scolded, “it’s a dime’s worth of acid in the face.” Before he was twenty, the revolting Bioff was a full-fledged pimp on his way to owning his own brothel. For his “legitimate” day job, the pudgy Bioff became a $35-dollar-a-week union slugger responsible for enforcing dues payments. After serving time for pandering, Bioff took up the slightly less unsavory occupation of extortion: He sold protection to kosher chicken sellers in the same Fulton Street Market as George Browne.
When Bioff met George Browne, probably at Fulton’s chicken stalls, Bioff grasped the financial implications of Browne’s position. “No matter what anybody tells you, people do not have to eat,” Bioff lectured Browne (as later recounted by Browne). “The only thing they really got to do is get laid or see a show whenever they can dig up the scratch.” Since Bioff had the sex angle under control, he saw Browne as his ticket to untold riches. Browne was likewise enamored of the repulsive beater of women and hired Bioff as chief slugger for his stagehands union. It was a marriage made in mob heaven: a goon who sold protection to kosher chicken dealers linked with one who protected the gentile chicken retailers.
Browne and Bioff’s first extortions involved kickbacks paid them by strip-club owners who feared competition. The owners knew that if Browne and Bioff were kept comfortable, they would instruct their stagehand members not to work for any start-up clubs, effectively keeping them from operating. Browne and Bioff made the rounds, telling the established club owners that the movie house down the block was about to move into the far more lucrative strip-show trade. Suitably frightened, the owners always anted up.
Browne and Bioff believed they wrere doing fine until they learned about Tom Maloy’s fleecing of B&K. Despite the Depression’s having slowed business at the B&K chain, George Browne headed straight for Barney Balaban’s hospital room, where he was awaiting treatment, to shake him down. Under the guise of a concerned union leader who had to sadly report that his workers were in desperate need of a 25 percent raise, George Browne made his appeal to Balaban. Balaban saw through Browne’s transparent show of sympathy and cut right to the chase. Browne later testified to Balaban’s response: “He said he was paying Tommy Maloy one hundred and fifty dollars a week. He said he would like to take care of me like that.” After leaving to think it over, Browne called Balaban with his decision: He wanted $20,000 up front to cover retroactive pay cuts back to 1930. “Twenty thousand on the barrelhead or stink bombs at the busiest hours in every B&K house in town,” Browne warned.
Balaban capitulated, on the stipulation that Browne come up with a way for Balaban to disguise the payoff from his stockholders. That proved easy, since Bioff had instituted a soup kitchen for unemployed stagehands. Balaban made his check out to the soup kitchen as a donation. The soup kitchen itself was meant to be anything but altruistic. The food was obtained for free, Capone-style, and was separated into two categories: cheap soup and bread for the unemployed and a free “deluxe menu” for politicians, cops, and judges - the real intended recipients of the largesse. “I never saw a whore who wasn’t hungry, and I never saw a politician who wasn’t a whore,” Bioff said. “So we’ll let them eat for nix.” Writer George Murray described the deluxe menu thus: “It consisted of roast chicken with chestnut dressing, roast duck glazed with orange juice basting, roast prime of beef, broiled double lamb chops or pork chops, or tender porterhouse steaks. [It] occasionally had such delicacies as braised calf shank, oxtail stew, beef and kidney pie.”
Balaban signed a $20,000 check over to The Stage Hands Union Soup Kitchen, $19,000 of which was split by Browne and Bioff, with the remaining $1,000 covering Balaban’s attorney’s fee. The money was supposed to go to the workers as a retroactive reimbursement of the 1929 pay cut. That was the ruse, in any event. As Bioff later testified, “The restoration of the pay cut was forgotten. We were not interested in that then or at any other time. We didn’t care whether wages were reduced or raised. We were only interested in getting the dough, and we didn’t care how we got it.” Bioff and Browne did offer one display of altruism: The soup kitchen received two cases of canned soup, costing Browne and Bioff $2.50 each.
Browne and Bioff did their best to conceal their childlike glee from Balaban when he handed over the bribe. But once out of earshot, the duo celebrated as if they had just hit the trifecta at Sportsman’s Park. “As soon as we were alone, Willie and me laughed and did a little fandango dance step in our office,” Browne later testified. “Then we decided we ought to go to the Club 100 to have a few drinks and talk to the girls. We both knew the guy who ran the club, Nicky Dean.”
The decision to party at the Club 100 was momentous. The former Yacht Club on East Superior Street was now run for the Outfit by Al Capone’s cousin Nick Circella, also known as Nicky Dean. His brother, August, ran burlesque houses, thus the Circellas were well acquainted with the stagehands union and Browne and Bioff. “Pride goeth before the fall,” warns the old maxim, and it was never proven more accurate than in the events and repercussions of that night at the Club 100. George Browne had a reputation as a loudmouthed drunk, often making the rounds of the speakeasies, where he brandished his pistol and pretended to be a gangster. The real gangsters saw him as a buffoon, a harmless court jester. However, on this night, Browne, the village idiot, and his chum Willie the pimp, would actually impress the professional hoods when they let on about their newest scam. Although tonight they were in ecstasy over their brilliant B&K maneuver, they would most certainly come to wish they had never concocted it.
After a couple of hours in the club’s first floor playing the dice game 26, the inebriated pair took a couple of the club girls upstairs to play craps. By now the liquor had typically loosened George Browne’s tongue as he sought to impress his new lady friend with the story of his financial windfall. Word quickly got back to Circella, and before the revelry ended, Circella had managed to spend an hour alone with Browne, who happily bragged about the clout of his stagehands union.
The next day, Circella met with the Outfit for lunch at the Capri Restaurant, where he informed Nitti and Ricca what he had learned. A call was placed to Browne, who was still sleeping off the previous night’s bender. A frightened Browne listened as Outfitter Frankie Rio ordered Browne to meet him at a Chicago intersection. Rio drove Browne around the city while the tearful union boss pleaded for his life. Unbeknownst to Browne, the Outfit’s intent was nonviolent; they merely intended to put the fear of God in him. They succeeded. Two days later, Browne and Bioff were directed to the the Riverside home of Rio’s bodyguard (and Frank Nitti’s next-door neighbor), Harry Hochstein. Although they were led to believe that they were going to a social soiree with abundant female participation, upon arrival Browne and Bioff quickly realized that this was in fact an Outfit business meeting. In attendance were Nitti, Ricca, Charlie Fischetti, and an out-of-towner, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter. Browne and Bioff knew Lepke by reputation: He was the most notorious killer in the New York crime gang of Lucky Luciano. Although Curly Humphreys was not known to be in attendance, it is a virtual certainty that his union expertise played a large role in the Outfit’s evolving strategies. Some believe that Curly was a participant, but that when details of the meeting emerged in later testimony, he was intentionally spared by witnesses due to his irreplaceable role in the Outfit.
Pieced together from subsequent testimony, key details of the Riverside meeting are known. After a sumptuous buffet, waiters served up Italian espresso and spumoni ice cream as Nitti called the meeting to order. He stated at the outset that he was aware Browne coveted the IATSE presidency, and that he had in fact narrowly lost his election bid at last year’s convention. The next convention was to to be held one year hence in 1934 in Louisville, which brought Nitti to the point. “You gonna run for president again?” Nitti asked Browne. When Browne responded that he hoped to do just that, Nitti hypothesized, “Suppose this time we saw to it that you had enough votes to win. Hands down. No contest. Would you like that?” Of course Browne liked it. At that point Nitti made George Browne a classic “offer he couldn’t refuse.” “In this world if I scratch your back, I expect you to scratch mine. If you can win by yourself, you don’t need us,” Nitti teased. “But if you want our help, we’ll expect you to cooperate. Is that fair enough?”
“That’s fair enough,” answered the Outfit’s newest inductee, Browne. Nitti nodded to Buchalter, signaling that he report back to Lucky Luciano, who would in turn deliver the New York stagehands union’s delegation.
If the Outfit’s “secret” agenda was not synthesized at the time of the Riverside meeting, it would soon be. In March 1934, three months before the IATSE convention, Johnny Rosselli returned east to update the Outfit on his Hollywood experience. It was decided to convene at Big Al’s estate in Palm Island. In attendance were Nitti; Ralph Capone, who had been back and forth to Hollywood working with Johnny; Paul Ricca; Nicky (Dean) Circella; Charlie Fischetti; and Curly’s assistant, Ralph Pierce. One mystery surrounding this critical planning session was the extent of Curly Humphreys’ revered counsel. Although local scribes wrote that Curly spent his entire “lam” in Mexico, from where his liaison with the Outfit would have been problematic, it turns out that he was much closer to the action. According to numerous FBI sources noted in the huge Humphreys file, Curly and his unidentified blonde traveling companion spent many months in Bloomington, Indiana, a mere 234 miles southwest of Chicago. However, Jake Guzik likely had little involvement in this confab, as he was still serving out his tax conviction sentence. Browne and Bioff were not invited.
When the meeting was called to order, Johnny regaled his superiors for over an hour, explaining in detail the inner workings of the movie industry. Essentially, Rosselli explained, the Hollywood trade unions, such as IATSE, had been broken. The major studios, Johnny continued, were churning out a feature film a week, and fully 40 percent of their overhead was in the craft services. The monopolistic style of the major studios rendered them vulnerable to a strong union, should one emerge. Having already subsumed Maloy’s Operators’ Union and Browne’s stagehands union, and poised to take over the weakened IATSE at the national convention, the Outfit was well positioned to “go Hollywood.” Even Nitti had done some homework, arriving at the meeting armed with newspaper clippings from the Chicago financial pages. His research informed him that, despite a Depression-era drop-off, the movie business was the fourth-largest industry in the United States. Nitti had also determined that many of the major Hollywood studios were subsidiaries of the theater chains. Barney Balaban’s brother John, for instance, ran Paramount studios. The Loew’s theater chain was a holding company for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, while the president of Twentieth Century-Fox was the brother of Loew’s president. Since the gangsters now had direct control over the exhibitors’ employees, the theater owners, many with headquarters in New York, became the studios’ Achilles’ heel and were therefore chosen as the Outfit’s first front of attack.
“So the guys in New York are already softened up for us,” Nitti said. “They are just waiting for us to walk in the door and ask for money.” He recalled how Al Capone had often expressed his desire to move in on Hollywood. It was well-known that many stars and producers were either juiced up or had other skeletons in their closets. If nothing else, they were vulnerable to blackmail. Nitti then concluded colorfully, “The goose is in the oven waiting to be cooked.”
Nick Circella was designated Browne’s nonstop watchdog, while Johnny Rosselli was directed to look over the shoulder of Bioff, who would soon be dispatched to Los Angeles. Before the meeting adjourned, the Outfit had voted to institute a methodical plan to infiltrate the business of movies, with Nitti closing the meeting by saying, “I think we can expect a permanent yield of a million dollars a year.”
1. McGurn was certainly versed in the ways of muscling entertainers. In 1927, he was given a 25 per cent interest in the North Side Club the Green Mile for settling the club’s dispute with comedian Joe E. Lewis. After the popular Lewis, who had been the club’s star attraction for a year, jumped ship for a better offer at a rival club, McGurn was brought in to talk some sense into Lewis. Before opening at his new venue, the Rendezvous, Lewis was informed by McGurn, “You’ll never live to open.” Lewis did in fact open, but one week later he was met by three thugs, two of whom crushed his skull with pistol butts, while the third hacked away mercilessly at Lewis’ face with a large knife. Incredibly, he recovered, but the resultant brain damage left him unable to talk for months, and the knife wounds left him disfigured. During his convalescence, Lewis received a $10,000 gift from Al Capone. The story was dramatized in the 1957 Frank Sinatra film The Joker Is Wild.
2. Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal, started in Chicago, likewise Adolph Zukor;Barney Balaban, president of Paramount; Sam Katz, VP of MGM; and Leo Spitz, president of RKO. Actors from Chicago included Wallace Beery, Tom Mix, and Gloria Swanson.