Gus Russo - The Outfit: The Role of Chicagos Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America

Russo has provided the in-depth coverage that reporters working during the heyday of the mob would have liked to have done... an informative, tireless read. It is for followers of mob lore or the beginner who wants to jump with both feet into a subject that has often been only superficially reported.
Chicago Tribune

A fascinating tale.
New York Post

An impressive in-depth history of Chicagos elusive crime syndicate... Russo humanizes the shadowy gangsters without denying their violent proclivities... this is the book to beat in examining this midcentury criminal empire.
Publishers Weekly

This is the most in-depth, dispassionate study of organized crime and big business to date. Russo located most of the skeletons in this masterful probe.
Jack Clarke, Special Investigator for Chicago Mayors Kennelly through Daley, and Illinois Governors Stevenson through Kerner

A serious and entertaining read.
Baltimore Magazine

Nothing is left out.
Chicago Sun-Times

Absolutely captivating! For a wiseguy like me it was like going back to the neighborhood for an education. I couldnt put it down.
Henry Hill, the inspiration for the film Goodfellas and the bestselling bookWiseguys

The Outfit is an outstanding work of investigative reporting about a crucial juncture in American parapolitics. The index alone is worth the price of admission. Congratulations, then, to Gus Russo for digging so deep and writing so well about a very mysterious place in time, and the murderous characters who gave it so much glamour.
Jim Hougan, former Washington editor of Harpers and a ward-winning investigative author ofSpooks: The Haunting of America-The Private Use of Secret Agents and Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA

The Outfit

The Role of Chicagos Underworld
in the Shaping of Modern America

Gus Russo

BLOOMSBURY

Copyright 2001 by Gus Russo

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010

Published by Bloomsbury, New York and London
Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Russo, Gus, 1949
The Outfit : the role of Chicagos underworld in the shaping of modern America / Gus Russo.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Outfit (Gang) -- History. 2. Mafia -- Illinois -- Chicago -- History.
3. Chicago (Ill.) -- History. 4. Chicago (Ill.) -- Politics and government.
I. Title
HV6452.132 0877 2002
364.1060977311 -- dc21
2001056637

eISBN: 978-1-59691-897-9

This paperback edition published 2003

10 9 8 7 6

Typeset by Hewer Text Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound in the United States of America by
R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company, Harrisonburg, Virginia

For Anthony and Sadie Russo, my parents.

And for

Augustino & Rosina Russo and Anthony & Rose Cascio,
my grandparents,

with love and gratitude.

Contents

I n the New Cabaret Artistes, an illegal strip joint in Liverpool, a buxom stripper named Janice gyrated to the rhythms of twenty-year-old John Lennon and his even younger mates, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. In Cuba, youthful new prime minister Fidel Castro nationalized the formerly American-owned oil refineries. Meanwhile, the first ten U.S.-supported volunteers arrived at a secret Panama Canal Zone facility to begin training to retake their Cuban homeland back from Castro. The results of these and other events would be well documented in history books yet to be written. But the momentous conference under way in the mansion at 915 Franklin Avenue would, by mutual decree of the participants, never be chronicled.

It was June 1960, and in far-removed corners of the world unseen events were unfolding that would define a revolutionary era to follow. In fact, multiple revolutions - cultural, political, and sociological - were in their embryonic stages. This was the interregnum - the transition between the misnamed happy days of the Eisenhower years, and the terrifying brinksmanship of the Cold War sixties.

The palatial estates on Franklin, in the tony Chicago suburb of River Forest, were the setting on this otherwise unexceptional Thursday evening. Lawns were being tended by caretakers; Mercedes sedans were having their wax jobs refined. Young couples ambled off to the movies, perhaps to see Spartacus, or Psycho. The typical residents, stockbrokers, lawyers, and the like, were going about their lives.

In a much different manner, an atypical neighborhood denizen, a son of Sicilian immigrants named Antonino Leonardo Accardo, was also going about business as usual; with his lifelong friend Murray Humphreys and two other associates, he would, after a sumptuous lasagna dinner, decide who would become the next president of the United States.

For decades, these Thursday-night meetings were convened at the manse owned by Joe Accardo, as he was known to friends. Decisions made at these soirees ran the gamut: from who to whack for an indiscretion; to which national labor union to take over this week; to whether they should answer the White Houses call to murder Castro; to the creation of a gambling paradise in the Nevada desert; or, as in this case, to go along with Joe Kennedys request to guarantee his son Jacks appointment to the U.S. presidency.

The participants prided themselves on the relatively obscure manner in which they were able conduct their business. We start appearing on the front page and its all over, one was heard to say. The phrase became a mantra of sorts. Of course this enterprise was known, especially to law enforcement agents, but was so smoothly run that proof of the organizational links were unobtainable - at least for the first fifty years or so.

The colleagues in question were, in fact, the heirs apparent to the empire of bootlegging kingpin Scarface Al Capone. Capones downfall in 1931 provided an important lesson for the Accardo-Humphreys generation: exaggerated violence and a high media profile were the kiss of death and were to be avoided at all costs. Hundreds of millions were at stake, an amount not worth gambling for the luxury of being seen with movie stars. That was for amateurs.

Be assured, this was not The Mafia of the East Coast gangsters, laden with elaborate ritual and internecine rivalry; nor was it La Cosa Nostra as described by Joe Valachi when he sang to the feds. This band of brothers had shed the more objectionable traits of Big Als 1925-31 Syndicate. The new regimes capos shared as much commonality with Capone as modern man does with Cro-Magnon cave dwellers. Perhaps as a nod to their enlightened, modernized dominion, a new name quickly emerged for the Chicago crime organization: The Outfit.

Booze"

What hath God wrought? Although the query posed by Samuel Morse related to the unforeseeable consequences of his Morse code telegraphic breakthrough, it could just as easily have been directed at the topic of the religious pilgrimage to America. For it was a God-fearing Pilgrim sect called the Puritans who inadvertently set the wheels in motion for a vast criminal reign that would rule the New World two centuries hence.

Espousing a dogmatic, Bible-ruling theocracy, these seventeenth-century settlers to colonial America set the stage for a hedonistic backlash that reverberates to this day. Their humanity-denying canon in fact helped contribute the most unsightly fabric to the patchwork of the soon-to-be-named United States of America. The law of unintended consequences was never more aptly applied.