by Gus Russo
On October 5, 1978, Michael Volpe, Accardo’s longtime housekeeper, vanished, an event believed by some to have been connected to his grand jury testimony five days previous. In response, the FBI executed a search warrant on Accardo’s eighteen-room Ashland Avenue home. With Joe’s daughters Linda Lee and Marie escorting them, the G spent over seven hours in a sacrosanct abode they had seen only from the outside since its construction in 1963. On the rancher’s first floor, the agents found little besides the indications of upscale urban domesticity. The basement, however, was another story.
The lower region of the home consisted of a long hallway, its walls covered with Joe’s photos and glass cases housing his gun collection. The hallway divided a large do-it-yourselfer’s workshop on one side, and Accardo’s conference room on the other. The large, carpeted conference room was commanded by a huge round table encircled by thirty chairs. “How many strategies had been plotted there?” mused FBI agent Bill Roemer.
Adjoining this room was the requisite kitchen; however, in this case it was an industrial-sized affair with walk-in pantries, coolers, and a wine cellar. One of the pantries contained a locked door that none of the house keys opened. The agents broke down the door and found that it concealed a bank-size vault. Accardo was called in Palm Springs and he reluctantly gave the G the combination to the vault. Inside Accardo’s ten-by-fifteen-foot vault, the agents found two .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolvers, a pile of bullets, and fifty-five stacks of $50 and $100 bills totaling $250,000. The G confiscated not only the weapons, but the loot, forcing Accardo to spend weeks in courts to have it returned.
1981
On June 4, 1981, Accardo was arrested in Chicago, taken downtown in handcuffs, and charged along with sixteen others in a Miami-based scheme to receive $2 million in kickbacks from the medical plan of the 550,000-member Laborers International Union. Using crack Chicago attorney Carl Walsh, Accardo was able to show that the indictment was, for once, specious, there being only hearsay innuendo connecting him to the fraud. When the case was adjudicated, only six of the defendants were convicted. The case was a good example of overzealous prosecutors attempting to utilize RICO, but not taking the time to prove the necessary linkages.
1982-84
In late 1982, as a result of a massive FBI surveillance operation called PENDORF (Penetration of Dorfman), Allen Dorfman was convicted of defrauding the Teamsters pension fund, a display of the proper uses of RICO and Title III. On January 20, 1983, while awaiting sentencing, Dorfman was murdered in the Hyatt Hotel parking lot in Lincolnwood, Illinois. Some believe he was hit to prevent him from cutting a deal with the G; apparently he had been hinting at such a strategy. Gang insiders also claim that boss Joey Lombardo, also convicted in the case, expected Dorfman to bail him out; when he failed to deliver, the murder was ordered. Those same insiders assert that “the big hit” was so important that no Italians were used as executioners, and that mob bail bondsman Irwin Weiner, who had accompanied Dorfman to the Hyatt, had set him up.
But the biggest blow was still to come. Since the late seventies, when the Carter administration had got serious about corruption and ordered hundreds of taps, the FBI, in a two-phase operation code-named Straw-man, had learned of the mob consortium that was skimming the Tropicana (Phase One), and the Stardust, Hacienda, and Marina casinos (Phase Two). At the trial, Teamsters president Roy Williams (who had succeeded Frank Fitzsimmons, who died in 1981) admitted being paid by the mob. Combined with Glick’s incriminating testimony, the damning tapes from the conspirators’ phone conversations, and a retrieved ledger that described how the skim was divided, the case was so airtight that some of the defendants pled guilty before the jury returned verdicts. Amazingly, Glick claimed to have no idea that Frank Bal was mobster Frank Balistrieri. Bill Ouseley, the lead FBI investigator on the case, said recently that Click’s contention was absurd. “Glick was a brilliant guy,” said Ouseley. “Vegas was a cesspool at that time, and everyone knew how the game was played. However, after a long period of working to obtain Glick’s testimony, we reached agreement wherein he would be a neutral witness, and we were happy with that.”
As a result, many of the mob bosses received stiff sentences, ranging from thirteen to thirty years. In all, there were more than thirty defendants, only one of whom was acquitted. Fronting for Accardo, bosses Joey Aiuppa, then seventy-seven years old, and Jackie Cerone each received a twenty-eight-year term. Once again, Accardo was unscathed. Lead government prosecutor David Helfrey recently opined, “Accardo was definitely involved, but we can’t convict without the evidence.” Helfrey explained that since Accardo was ostensibly retired in Palm Springs, he was not under electronic surveillance and thus had no incriminating links to convicted boss Joey Aiuppa. And since the defendants did not take the stand, there was no opportunity to draw them out on Accardo. It was a classic use of the Outfit’s strategy of the front man/ flak-catcher.4
On February 23, 1984, a frail, seventy-seven-year-old Joe Accardo appeared under subpoena before the U.S. Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which at the time was conducting a scaled-down organized-crime inquiry along the lines of McClellan. Under advice from counsel Carl Walsh, Accardo refused to answer the probers’ questions, not citing the Fifth Amendment, but his belief that the foundation for the questions was arrived at through the use of illegal wiretaps. After being cited for contempt of Congress, Accardo’s appeals wound their way through the courts until he was ultimately ordered to answer the questions.
On June 21, Accardo appeared before the federal tribunal again, and this time he answered the questions, but in a manner that would have been laughable had they not been coming from a man who appeared as everyone’s kindly grandfather.
“I have no knowledge of a crime family in Chicago,” Accardo meekly answered Senator William Ross (R-Del.). “I’ve never been boss.” To another query, Accardo said, “I only know about [organized crime] from the newspapers.” Incredibly, Accardo claimed that he had no idea what Joey Aiuppa did for a living. His sole admission was that he had broken the law many years ago when he had gambled.
Accardo’s appearance, altered by the ravages of bouts with cancer and heart disease, apparently affected his inquisitors. Although a perjury citation would obviously have prevailed on appeal, the lawmakers allowed Accardo’s testimony, and Accardo himself, to stand unmolested. It now appeared a certainty that Joe Accardo’s parroted boast that he had never spent a night in jail would be a permanent memorial.
1992
The year began ominously, with the passing of Joe Accardo’s longtime First Ward mouthpiece, Pat Marcy. On May 27, 1992, eighty-six-year-old Joe Accardo, the last surviving Outfit boss, died of heart failure at Chicago’s St. Mary of Nazareth Hospital. With all of his best friends having preceded him into the Great Beyond, Joe’s wake consisted mostly of family. Buried in the Queen of Heaven cemetery in suburban Hillside, Accardo (as usual) is flanked by allies: the remains of Paul “Ricca” De Lucia on his right and Sam Battaglia on his left. While over at Mt. Carmel Cemetery, Frank Nitti, Dion O’Banion, the Gennas, and Roger Touhy keep Big Al Capone company.
On July 27,1992, Curly Humphreys’ only child, Luella Brady, died, like her father and most of his pals, of heart failure in Norman, Oklahoma, at age fifty-seven. Since Curly’s death in 1965, Luella had made yearly pilgrimages to Switzerland to avail herself of her father’s nest egg, secreted in a numbered bank account in Zurich. However, due to a combination of mental instability, drug addiction, and, in an ironic twist, given her father’s acumen, a naive business sense, Luella had managed to squander every penny of her father’s accumulated treasure. Two years earlier, the Oklahoma State Supreme Court disbarred attorney Coy McKenzie for preying on Luella’s instability when he’d convinced her in the early 1980s to invest the last of her inheritance, over $400,000, in a racetrack-purchase scam. The Daily Oklahoman summarized the tawdry affair: “A Norman attorney’s effort to save a failed racetrack in Stroud led to financial ruin and disb
arment for him and left a millionairess destitute and without food.”
Adding insult to injury, McKenzie had convinced Luella to put up the 320 acres near Norman that she had also inherited as collateral for a loan when her money ran out. The bank foreclosed on the property, which was eventually sold to a Realtor who parceled out ninety-nine lots that sold for a combined $2.25 million.
1996
On June 20, 1996, the last member of the early Outfit brain trust, Sidney Roy Korshak, died at his home at 808 North Hillcrest Road in Beverly Hills, his brother and confidant, Marshall, having died just the day before in Chicago. Sidney’s New York Times obituary headline read: SIDNEY KORSHAK, 88, DIES; FABLED FIXER FOR THE CHICAGO MOB. Among those in attendance at Korshak’s wake were Barbara Sinatra, Robert Evans, Tony Martin and Cyd Charisse, Angie Dickinson, and Suzanne Pleshette.
And in a last great Outfit money mystery, Sidney Korshak left his wife nothing but their homes. The money had vanished.
1. In response to his conviction, Aiuppa established the Yorkshire Quail Club south of Chicago in Kankakee County. Joey’s club catered to underworld members around the country, who traveled to Yorkshire when their bloodlust needed sating. Aiuppa had come far since his days manufacturing the gang’s slot machines in his Cicero plant, the Taylor Furniture Company.
2. The burglar victims were identified as Bernard Ryan, Steven Garcia, Vincent Moretti, Donald Swanson, John Mandell, John McDonald, and Bobby Hartogs. Their executioners were believed to be John Borsellino and Gerry Carusiello.
3. According to a July 15,1985, article in the Reno Gazette-Journal, New Jersey was spending $3.4 million annually on casino regulation, fully ten times what was allocated in Nevada; also, New Jersey appointed 92.3 policing officials per casino, as compared to 1.1 in Nevada.
4. For details of the Strawman operation, the reader is urged to read the brilliantly researched Casino by Nicholas Pileggi.
Afterword: The Outfit, and
Organized Crime, in Perspective
The heirs to Al Capone had an unquestionable impact on twentieth-century America, from their establishment of lotteries and interstate offtrack betting to envisioning Las Vegas, to promoting the ascendancies of Jimmy Hoffa and John Kennedy, to their establishment of key components of the entertainment industry. Of course, the question must be asked, but at what cost? Through its use of murder and mayhem (usually against equally hooligan competitors), the Outfit oversaw a virtual nonstop assault on the Internal Revenue Service, its perennial target, fleecing it out of every cent possible.
What overwhelms the researcher, however, is the degree to which the number of actual Outfit “innocent” victims is out of all proportion to the response of Congress and the Department of Justice. It is a sad fact that underworld crimes pale in comparison to the institutionalized abuses of the upperworld, many of which were committed in partnership with the more vulnerable immigrant hoods. Yet the history of U.S. law enforcement paints a consistent picture of a country that chooses to live in denial of its own national ethos, a choice that condemns it to fostering crime at every level of society. Since its inception, the United States has routinely attacked crime from the bottom up, when, in fact, it is the free ride given the upper class that has inspired generation after generation of new arrivals.
The History of True Organized Crime
The demonization of the lower-class criminal had its roots in the conceptual foundations of Anglo law, formulated in Middle Ages England, and appropriated by the architects of the New World. In attempting to equalize the legal rights of the landed aristocracy and the emerging industrial rich, these two entities reached an understanding wherein they became equal under the law. The lower classes were exempt from the negotiations. By combining an adversarial system of justice with a representative-democracy form of government, the upperworld all but guaranteed that Aristotle’s prediction would come to fruition: These dicta would result in the swift evolution to a plutocracy, or government by the rich. (In one year, it was estimated that of thirty successful Senate candidates, twenty-eight of them spent more than their defeated opponents.) In Aristotle’s construct, the upper class would always be free to gamble, plunder, and buy alcohol and sex. Because it could afford to hire the best attorneys and to elect puppet officials to create the needed loopholes, the new gentry were allowed to flagrantly break the law in ways cartels such as the Outfit never imagined. Laws were passed to prohibit usury, or loan-sharking, thus to eliminate competition with the upperworld banks. The problem became exacerbated when the banks often refused to make loans to risky, newly arrived citizens, who needed money to survive just as much as those with good credit. Juice men quickly rushed in to fill the void.
Just as the loan sharks filled a vital need for the immigrant wave, so too did the numbers kings, racketeers, and bootleggers, who employed countless unskilled, illiterate workers who would otherwise have been placed on the public dole or, worse, resorted to violent crime.
It has never really been a secret that the American upperworld economy, to say nothing of its legal institutions, is powered by the triple engines of greed, hypocrisy, and, for lack of a better term, linguistic prestidigitation. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigrant arrivals deduced this soon after arrival, and some (the underworld) decided to exploit the apparent invitation to villainy, knowing they would likely not be punished if they could quickly make the transition to the thoroughly indemnified upperworld.
Historian Curt Johnson wrote: “An impartial observer might conclude that a history of the United States could be written around instances of the triumph of greed over principle and compassion.” Johnson added that the only difference between the upperworld gangsters and the underworld variety was that the lower-class criminals “had guts to spare.” He might have added that, at every turn, crime organized by the underworld was dwarfed by that constituted by the upperworld. Sociologist Stanley D. Eitzen determined that the monetary impact of white-collar crime surpassed all forms of street crime by a factor of ten. More important, the American system of justice consistently gives the flagrant white-collar offenders virtual carte blanche, while plastering the nation’s front pages with tales of arrests of bank robbers, gambling bosses, bookies, and labor racketeers. This feat of prestidigitation served the purpose of engaging the reader writh tales of Capone and Accardo, while distracting them from the far bigger story of massive, routinely sanctioned white-collar crime.
Sociologist Edwin Sutherland, who coined the term white-collar crime, pointed out that “white-collar criminals are by far the most dangerous to society of any type of criminals from the point of view of effects on private property and social institutions.” (White-collar crime has been defined to include bribery, kickbacks, payoffs, computer crime, consumer and banking fraud, unsafe working conditions, illegal competition, deceptive practices, embezzlement, pilferage, and securities theft.) Sutherland concluded that these “established entrepreneurs” “make Mafias and Crime Syndicates look like pushcart operations.” Sutherland described the chief difference between underworld and upperworld crime thus: “[The underworld gangsters] have indeed the requisite qualities of ruthlessness and unscrupulousness but lack finesse.” Professor David Bell, a former chairman of Columbia University’s department of sociology, also challenged Congress’ and the Department of Justice’s tunnel vision. Bell concluded that underworld crime represented merely a stepping-stone, if a vulgar one, used by some immigrants to overcome extreme prejudice on their way to legitimate lifestyles. There was no mysterious international “Mafia” committed to crime for crime’s sake. In Bell’s view, Estes Kefauver, for example, failed to understand “the process of ethnic succession.”
The protocols that gave white-collar criminals a wide berth in the United States were established when the first English settlers arrived in the New World in the seventeenth century. According to Randall M. Miller, author of The Dictionary of African American Slavery, approximately six hundred thousand Africans were abducte
d from their homeland over a 350-year period. Eventually, their descendants, also slaves, numbered some four million (by 1860). The abhorrent practice was legitimized by Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers, who together crafted what should have been called “The Declaration of Independence for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.” It has long been painfully obvious that the Founding Fathers’ high-minded talk of liberty and virtue was mere rhetoric designed to disguise the new country’s true mandate to sanctify greed, or, in their euphemism, “manifest destiny.”
Benjamin Franklin and George Washington broke with Great Britain not merely over a quest for personal liberty, but also a desire to be free to take “Indian” property west of the Appalachians, a policy that the Brits had prohibited. John Hancock signed on because, as one of the biggest New World smugglers, he stood to lose a fortune if forced to pay British import taxes.
Under the Founders’ watch, the systematic destruction of the Native American culture was undertaken. Before the Revolution, Jefferson had written in A Summary View of the Rights of British America that the land and the riches in the New World were “undoubtedly of the allodial nature.” Untwisting this tortured language, what the racist Jefferson was saying was “To the victor go the spoils.” Jefferson showed his more compassionate side when he suggested that the WASP invaders should initially attempt to steal the natives’ possessions nonviolently. He wrote that the Chickasaw tribe should be encouraged to run up unpayable debts at the government stores. “They will always cede lands,” Jefferson wrote, “to rid themselves of debt.” When that gambit proved not speedy enough, the erudite framers looked the other way as the West was taken through outright slaughter. Colin G. Calloway, author of American Revolution in Indian Country, wrote, “Thomas Jefferson wanted to see the Ohio Shawnees exterminated or driven from their lands.” At the time, the native population was estimated to have exceeded eight million. By 1900, that figure had plummeted to 120,000. When the Nazi’s acted similarly in the twentieth century it was rightly called genocide.
