by Russo, Gus
With Bioff as its front, the Outfit set up its West Coast headquarters in the penthouse of Hollywood’s twelve-story Taft Building, previously notable as a locus for movie star dentists. Although comfortably ensconced, Bioff continued to receive his marching orders from Chicago, including one directive that resulted in Browne and Bioff obtaining still more personal income for their efforts. In this instance, Nitti instructed the duo to hire one Izzy Zevlin to manage their books. “Izzy has forgotten more about accounting than those Internal Revenue Service guys ever knew,” Nitti boasted. Upon meeting Bioff and Browne, Zevlin enlightened the thugs as to how they could reap vast sums that Nitti and the gang would not have to learn about. With Zevlin maintaining two sets of books, one supposedly hidden from the Outfit, Bioff and Brown wasted no time in levying a new 2 percent surcharge on the IATSE members’ paychecks - for the strike insurance fund, they claimed. Of course, Bioff and Browne were being paid by the producers not to call a strike, but there was little chance the workers would learn of that subrosa compact. Bioff assumed the Outfit had little chance of discovering the secret surcharge connived by Zevlin. This “assessment” income was noted in the second set of books, kept in a vault, supposedly below the Outfit’s radar.
It is not known how Nitti learned of the rip-off - perhaps Zevlin was merely his agent provocateur - but when he did, he exploded. In Chicago, Nitti confronted Browne. “Nitti got so mad he backed me into the bathroom,” Browne later testified. “I thought he was going to push me out the window.” To Browne’s feeble protestations, Nitti yelled, “There’s a lot of guys in the Outfit that have to be taken care of.” Then, like a scolding parent, Nitti announced their punishment: “From now on, whatever money we get won’t be split fifty-fifty. You keep one third for you and Willie, and I’ll take two thirds for my people.” According to court testimony, the surcharge scam eventually netted the conspirators over $6.5 million, two thirds of which was sent back to Chicago. The surcharge was merely a hint of things to come. With all the pieces now in place, the time had at last arrived for the “Chicago crowd” to apply the coup de grace.
In April 1936, the studio heads were thunderstruck upon learning that their wicked alliance had backfired: The moguls themselves were but mere pawns in the Outfit’s game. On April 16, Willie Bioff, George Browne, and Nick Circella showed up at Nick Schenck’s New York office, and Browne let the other shoe drop. “I want you to know that I am the boss,” Browne intoned, “and that I want two million dollars out of the motion picture industry.” Schenck turned pale. He later testified that he thought Browne had lost his mind and was talking nonsense. “At first I couldn’t talk,” remembered Schenck. He recalled Bioff’s saying, “You know what will happen. We gave you a taste of it in Chicago. We will close down every theater in the country. You couldn’t take that. It will cost you many millions of dollars over and over again. Think it over.” George Browne then chimed in and assured Schenck that Bioff and he were serious and gave Schenck a few hours to ponder his fate. During the break, Nick Schenck met with Sidney R. Kent, the chief of Loew’s sister company, Twentieth Century-Fox. Kent begged the entrapped Schenck, “Talk them out of it. They’ll wreck the industry.” But Kent was probably unaware of Schenck’s previous deal with the Outfit that now tied the industry’s hands.
When the gangsters returned that afternoon, Schenck told them there was no way he could raise the $2 million. Willie Bioff cut him off, countering, “All right. I’ll take one million.” Schenck again tried to spar with Bioff, who ended all discussion when he stood up to leave, saying, “One million. That’s my final offer.” Sidney Kent’s objections aside, the studio heads really had no choice; they had happily allowed the Outfit to take over and reinvigorate IATSE, and now they had to pay the price. It was now impossible to operate the studios without IATSE. The next day, the gang returned and Bioff dictated the payment schedule: $50,000 per year from each of the four major studios (Fox, Warner Bros., MGM, and Paramount), and $25,000 from the smaller firms (RKO and Columbia, for example). Making matters worse, Willie the pimp was in a hurry: “Oh, yes, and I want one hundred thousand up front.”
Within three days, the beleaguered Kent and Schenck raised the cash and delivered it to Bioff and Browne at their suite at the Waldorf-Astoria. Although the two gangsters nervously harbored the thought that the movie executives might turn up with the feds, their fears were quickly dispelled. As per Bioff’s instructions, both producers carried plain brown-paper bundles, each containing $50,000 in hundred-dollar bills. Adding to their indignity, the studio heads were forced to cool their heels while the gang meticulously counted the one thousand individual C-notes. “There were twin beds right there in the hotel suite,” Schenck later told a jury. “I put my money on the right-hand side of the bed. Bioff took half the money and started counting it. He put the other half on the other bed and told Browne to count it.” As Willie Bioff later said, “I had Hollywood dancing to my tune.”
With Fox and Loew’s in line, Bioff headed back to Los Angeles to inform the other studio chiefs of their fate, while Browne took care of business in Chicago. Willie Bioff knew no other game than hardball, and one by one, the studios surrendered to the gang. When studios balked at the extortion, there were threats. Louis B. Mayer, of MGM, later testified that he capitulated only when Bioff threatened to kill him before dawn. In some cases, such as the deeply in debt Warner Bros., Bioff had to settle for less than he demanded. Major Albert Warner cut a deal for $10,000 in advance plus regular installment payments. Financially strapped Paramount produced $27,000. Books were juggled routinely to keep the arrangement from the prying eyes of stockholders. Albert Warner’s brother Harry noted one $12,000 payment as “Christmas presents for critics.”
Only Columbia studios was protected from Bioff’s strong-arm ways. Recall that Columbia’s head, Harry Cohn, was Johnny Rosselli’s best friend in Los Angeles. When Bioff put pressure on Cohn’s studio with a wildcat strike, Cohn immediately picked up the phone and called his buddy, Gentleman Johnny, who raced over to Bioff’s office, despite being told by the secretary that he was out. Finding Willie behind his desk as expected, Rosselli raged, while Bioff pleaded that he had Frank Nitti’s blessing. For Johnny, that did not matter where a close friendship was involved. Besides, Nitti was only a figurehead. The real power was with Accardo, Ricca, and Humphreys. They would understand the difference between business and personal loyalties. “To hell with you and Nitti,” Rosselli screamed. Bioff refused to bend and Rosselli stormed out. But later that night, Rosselli turned up at Bioff’s home with the “Al Capone of Los Angeles,” Jack Dragna, and read Willie the riot act. Bioff called Cohn to announce the strike was canceled. “The strike is off,” Bioff said. “You can thank Johnny - nobody but Johnny could have done this for you” It was Cohn’s last problem with IATSE,
In the first year alone, the Outfit amassed over $1.5 million from the studio extortions and the 2 percent union members’ surcharges. They amplified their profit by anointing the bookmaker for each studio lot. Chicago transplants such as Izzy Adelman handled thousands of bets a month for the studio employees. With all the action in Hollywood, the gang accrued inestimable moneys. “To top it all off, they were getting to screw the best broads in America,” one Outfit associate fondly recalled. Then the original “Slick Willie” engineered a new variation of the extortion scam to take some heat off the studio heads: He had himself appointed “purchasing agent” for all raw film stock acquired from Du Pont Chemicals. His 7 percent commission, for which he did no work, netted Bioff a combined $230,000 in 1937 and 1938. He kept the studios reasonably placated by living up to his end of the bargain: over the next four years, IATSE members in various cities saw their wages decline 15 to 40 percent. When the rival Federation of Motion Picture Craftsmen struck in 1937, Bioff imported some notorious Chicago sluggers to break the strike by breaking some heads. Although the strikers had hired tough longshoremen for protection from Bioff and Rosselli (and by implication the studio bosses), t
hey were far outmuscled by the out-of-towners. The workers watched in terror as thugs armed with Chicago typewriters arrived in Lincoln Zephyr town cars at the Pico Street gate of Twentieth Century-Fox. They met little resistance. The efficiency of the mogul-mobster relationship left even Sidney Kent impressed. “We have had less interruption of employment, less hard feeling, less recrimination,” he declared in 1938, “and have built more goodwill than any industry I know of in the country.” Harry Warner chimed in, admitting that it was just plain “good business” to have a relationship with Bioff.
Joe Schenck knew exactly what Warner meant by “good business.” As Bioff would later testify, the Schenck brothers were in the middle of their own scam when they entered into one with him: They were diverting theater receipts in a profitable scheme that was robbing their stockholders blind. Over six years, as a favor to his new partners, Bioff made at least a dozen courier trips from New York to Hollywood, wherein he delivered bundles of the purloined cash from Nick Schenck to his brother Joe at his house. One such delivery alone amounted to $62,500. Often sitting by his pool while taking the lucre, Joe would ask Willie, “Did Nick take care of your traveling expenses?” When Bioff replied in the negative, Joe handed him $500 from the bundle, “to cover the two cross-country trips you made.” The Shencks attempted to convince Willie that the money was intended to line the pockets of bribed state legislators, not theirs. But Willie knew better. “These businessmen are nothing but two-bit whores with clean shirts and a shine,” Willie philosophized.2
And the Schenck brothers were not the only studio heads who saw the silver lining to be gained by entering into a relationship with gangsters. George Skouras of the eighteen-theater chain of Fox movie houses in New York paid Bioff $25,000 to handle his competition, the Frisch-Rintzler circuit. At the time, the banks were chiding Skouras for mismanaging his theaters to the tune of $60,000 more than it cost Frisch to operate the same number of theaters. Since Skouras had no desire to cut his perks and extravagances, he asked Willie to make certain that his competitors’ operating costs became intolerable. Bioff later recalled that the answer was simple: “As a result of that conversation, I called up the heads of the Frisch-Rintzler circuit and increased their [union pay] scale sixty thousand dollars per year.” Even more disquieting was that the courier for the Bioff bribe was Sol Rosenblatt, former general counsel to the Democratic National Committee, and an administrator in Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act program. For his services, Rosenblatt took a 25 percent commission. As writer Stephen Fox concluded, “Bioff did not have to ’corrupt’ Hollywood any more than he had needed to corrupt the stagehands union. In both instances he merely folded smoothly into the environment.”
Back in Chicago, George Browne quickly moved to consolidate his union’s power. The dissolution of the L.A. local the previous winter was followed in the coming months by the forced nullification of union branches around the country. On July 10,1936, Browne and his “board” declared marshal law: The union, they pronounced, was in “a state of emergency.” Local meetings and elections were banned, and the Outfit began exporting its Chicago craftsmen to Hollywood, where they were placed in key IATSE posts. According to one Outfit insider, “Ricca, Accardo, and Humphreys made one thing clear - their people should be placed in the infrastructure of IATSE, not just in the vulnerable roles of leadership.” This brilliant strategy would ensure the gang’s presence in the film business for decades, even if Bioff took a fall.
Going Hollywood
With the Outfit allowing Bioff to keep fully a third of the take, he began to compete with the Hollywood set in ostentatious lifestyles. After fifteen years of subjecting his family to life in hotel rooms, Willie the pimp went domestic: In 1937 he purchased an eighty-acre farm and built a spacious home in the L.A. suburb of Woodland Hills. Bioff christened his new home Rancho Laurie after his wife. Instead of hookers, his neighbors were now Hollywood celebrities such as Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Taylor, Tyrone Power, and Clark Gable; he filled his home with Louis XV furniture; he collected rare oriental vases; he built a wood-paneled library that was stocked with rare volumes, although he himself was never known to read beyond the comic-book level; he planted alfalfa and $600 olive trees. “My wife is nuts about flowers and so am I,” Willie told the press. “We grow all our own fruit and vegetables. I’m building a playhouse so I can have a place to entertain my pals.” Bioff later recalled how he furnished his lavish new digs: He muscled $5,000 worth of furniture from RKO executive Leo Spitz. “So I went to Leo and I said, ’Leo, I gotta have some drapes and other things for my new home and I thought maybe you could get them for me wholesale through RKO’s purchasing department.’ Of course I didn’t intend to pay for them.”
Not all of Rancho Laurie’s amenities reflected domestic bliss. In the home where the Bioffs raised seven children there also dwelled a phalanx of bodyguards; not well concealed on the home’s adobe exterior were adornments not normally seen on suburban homes: gun turrets. Willie Bioff took to dressing in “Al Capone chic,” featuring garish, brightly colored tailored suits. When the press teased Willie for wearing $150 suits and $15 shirts, he had a standard retort: “It’s the union that’s rich, not Willie Bioff.”
Bioff audaciously ordered studio heads around as if they worked for him. Once, when a studio gate security guard denied Bioff’s car entry to the lot, Bioff ordered Louis B. Mayer, then the highest-paid executive officer on earth, to drop what he was doing and come out to give the guard a tongue-lashing. Warner Bros.’ president, Harry Warner, so feared the erstwhile panderer that he hired a personal bodyguard. In 1939, Mr. and Mrs. Bioff took a cruise to Brazil; as described by historian Alson Smith, Bioff’s cabin suite overflowed with “flowers and farewell gifts from the movie men whom he was persecuting; most of whom were fervently praying he would drown.”
Then came Nitti, Charles Gioe, Louis Campagna, and the others. All were grim-faced. There was no laughter or greeting. Nitti waited until all were seated, then he spoke. “Bioff, you been trying to muscle in. You think you’re going to run things for yourself. You’re trying to put yourself in front of George Browne. You’re trying to take personal charge of this vaudeville actors” union and its treasury and its dues. You’re just headed for a hearse . . . From now on, Charlie Gioe will run this actors’ union. Now let’s hear no more about it.
Bioff came to his senses and groveled back to California with his tail between his legs.
Willie Bioff was now the cock of the walk, and he never let anyone forget it. His temerity even extended, albeit briefly, to his relations with the Outfit. One nervy perpetration nearly cost him his life. Bioff’s close shave was precipitated by a Commission decision to absorb a vaudeville performers’ union called the Artists and Actors Association of America within IATSE. Since the crime bosses of New York and Chicago controlled so many nightclubs where the vaudevillians worked, the alliance would obviously assist with bookings and pay negotiations. But Willie Bioff opposed the move, coveting this one union, and its treasury, for himself. As if unfamiliar with the Outfit’s talent for retribution, Willie refused to facilitate the gang’s directive. Bioff later testified that a few days after his foolhardy show of independence, he received a call from Paul “the Waiter” Ricca. “You’re in trouble, but good,” Ricca bellowed. The Outfit boss then ordered “Willie the Maverick” to catch the next plane to Chicago. On his arrival in the Windy City, Bioff went directly to Nitti’s office at the Bismarck Hotel, where he was met by Ricca. “He said he came early to warn me,” Bioff later said. Willie was about to become the defendant in a kangaroo court presided over by all the Outfit members. Local journalist George Murray described the scene:
With its coffers bulging, the Outfit’s Chicago-based members also began enjoying the spoils of victory, like Bioff in California. After 10 percent of the profits were allocated to the Outfit’s mutual fund, a sort of corporate treasury, the hoods indulged themselves. The Capone style was much in evidence, if not in the way the Outfit bosse
s conducted business, than at least in the manner in which they spent their earnings. Much as Capone had relaxed at his brother’s Mercer, Wisconsin, farm, and at his own digs in Florida, so did his heirs. Paul Ricca, who filed his tax returns as a marble importer and owner of the World Playhouse Movie Theater, acquired an eleven-hundred-acre farm in Kendall County, Illinois, for $75,000. At about the same time, Paul had suffered multiple fractures (back, pelvis, leg, and foot) when a Loop building elevator in which he was riding fell three floors. For a time, Sunday-night Outfit meetings were held at his farm while he recuperated. Ricca’s wife, the former Nancy Gigiante, kept the pasta flowing as the men made their plans. Likewise, Louis Campagna and his wife, Charlotte, purchased an eight-hundred-acre farm, the L.C. Ranch, in Fowler, Indiana, and a second eighty-eight acre spread in Berrien Springs, Michigan. At the L.C. Ranch, Campagna devoted most of the acreage to cultivating crops such as wheat, corn, and soybeans; the remaining land was set aside for his two hundred head of cattle. In the years to come, Curly Humphreys, as well as Capone’s cousin Charlie Fischetti, also followed the Big Guy’s lead and bought vacation homes in Florida.
Unlike Accardo and others, Humphreys believed the Outfit should refrain from purchasing ostentatious digs in Illinois. When in Chicago, Curly lived in a succession of upscale hotels, the Bernard, the St. Clair, and later the Morrison. By this time, the Humphreys family included their toddler daughter, Llewella, born in 1935.3 The new arrival prompted Curly to purchase a nondescript Chicago house, although he continued to lease hotel rooms for the many nights he would be away from home. In the yard of the family’s 7710 Bennett Avenue home, Curly built his daughter an intentionally crooked garden playhouse, a reference to Curly’s way of life.
As the years wore on, Humphreys spent an increasing amount of time in Norman, Oklahoma, the place of his half-Cherokee wife’s upbringing, taking the opportunity to build by his own hand a modest home on his three-square-mile parcel of land. The house contained a secret entrance to a basement that was believed to be used for gang business and money storage. Curly’s sense of humor was much in evidence at the Norman house: His in-ground pool had silver dollars affixed to the bottom so he could watch in delight as guests dove in to try to retrieve them. Curly insulated his Oklahoma relations, who referred to him as Uncle Lew, from his line of work, and he and Clemi often spoke in Italian when discussing Outfit business in their presence. Humphreys bonded with the Native American inhabitants in the area, paying them extravagantly for house chores and groundskeeping. His gardener, a Native American known as Skybuck, educated Curly to the tragic plight of his fellows, initiating Curly’s lifelong devotion to their cause. Curly’s nephew Jimmy O’Neill recalled, “Every holiday, Uncle Lew would go downtown, fill the station wagon with turkeys and other food, and give it to the underprivileged Indian children.” To this day, old-timers fondly recall Curly Humphreys’ handing out silver dollars to complete strangers who appeared destitute. So total was the break from his life in the Windy City that Curly the Welshman took to dressing in cowboy attire when in town.
