The Outfit

by Russo, Gus

  Sidney Korshak would never practice law in California; his task was more subtle, more shadowy. He was the fixer for both the Outfit and the Commission, his role being that of dealmaker or dealbreaker, depending on what Mr. Lincoln or Mr. Lansky ordered.4 With the studios at the mercy of the mob-controlled craft unions and talent agencies, dealing with Korshak became the first order of business for any studio that wished to stay solvent. Korshak’s indispensable mediating skills set a trend in Hollywood that exists to this day. As many a producer can attest, in modern Hollywood, the entertainment business is now virtually run by attorneys. One Hollywood insider recently joked, “In Hollywood, they cast a lawyer like they cast an actor.” And they probably cast the lawyer first.

  Over the decades, Korshak maintained close relationships with former Capone associate Jules Stein and Stein’s partner at MCA, Lew Wasserman. These friendships were vital to assuring the Outfit’s continued weight in movieland over the decades. Like Jake the Barber (who was a Korshak client), the Schencks, the Annenbergs, and innumerable others before, Sidney Korshak mastered the art of walking through life with one foot in the upperworld and one in the underworld. Other Korshak connections to the entertainment world were of obvious attraction to hoods anxious to make a mark in that industry. As with Stein, Korshak was a lifelong friend of CBS president Bill Paley, who, like Korshak, had risen out of Chicago’s Twenty-fourth Ward.

  Korshak’s wife, Bernice, a model and Ice Capades skater, obtained a glimpse of Sidney’s clout early on. After returning from the honeymoon, Mrs. Korshak read from a list of coded messages that awaited her new husband.

  “George Washington called, everything is status quo. Thomas Jefferson called, urgent, please call ASAP. Abraham Lincoln must speak with you, important. Theodore Roosevelt called three times, must connect with you before Monday.”

  “Your friends sure have a strange sense of humor. Who are they?” asked Bernice.

  “Exactly who they said they were,” was Sidney’s terse response. “Any other questions?” According to producer Bob Evans, who was told the anecdote by Bernice, “Fifty years later, Bernice has never asked another question.”

  In Los Angeles, Joe Accardo’s longtime associate and gambling expert Charles “Cherry Nose” Gioe who, like Korshak, lived at the Seneca, had first introduced Sidney Korshak to Willie Bioff. “Sidney is our man,” Gioe had instructed, “and I want you to do what he tells you. He is not just another lawyer. He knows our gang and figures our best interest. Pay attention to him, and remember, any message you get from him is a message from us.” Three days after Bioff’s indictment, Korshak renewed his acquaintance with the man who formerly pummeled prostitutes in Chicago’s Levee.

  “You will admit to being Schenck’s bagman and do your time like a man,” Korshak explained to Bioff when they convened at L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel two days after the indictment. Bioff knew that defying Korshak meant defying the Outfit. He accepted his fate and prepared for the trip back to New York to plead guilty. Korshak obtained $15,000 from his Chicago bosses, a gift to Bioff to defray his attorney fees. It is assumed that similar arrangements were made with George Browne, who also turned himself in.

  The third defendant, Nick Circella, the most obvious link to the Chicago bosses, disappeared after his indictment the following September. His flight invites the reasonable inference that he was ordered to go on the lam by the Outfit, since his interrogation would leave a key gangster open to being “turned” by the government. It was a chance, however remote, that the gang was unwilling to take. Circella went into hiding with his girlfriend Estelle Carey, a thirty-four-year-old, beautiful, blond hostess at Circella’s Colony Club. Carey, a former 26 game dice girl,5 had moved up to the lucrative position of hostess when she hooked up with Circella. As a hostess, Estelle’s primary responsibility was to steer potential high rollers from the legal 26 game to the illegal, big-money craps tables on the second floor. The role also called for the occasional bedding of a client in a third-floor suite, if that’s what it took to keep him happy. Circella, who was known to share Estelle with his Outfit associates, often crowed about her talents. “I once saw her steer an oilman from Tulsa to the tables,” Circella boasted. “He lost ten grand in an hour. She kept him happy all the time, and after that, whenever he came to Chicago, he wanted Estelle.” Now on the run with Nick Circella, Estelle Carey dyed her hair black, abandoning the high life of Chicago’s nightclub district for the suburbs.

  The summer of 1941 saw a battery of legal maneuvers that stalled Bioff and Browne’s trial opening as long as possible. On October 6, 1941, the trial finally commenced, opening with pleas that were unheard of in gang circles: Both defendants defied Korshak’s directive and pled not guilty, assuring that witnesses would be heard who could tip the prosecutors to the real scope of the operation. In Chicago, the bosses seethed, worrying that the capricious Bioff might trump his mistake and take the stand. To the gang’s increased consternation, he did. Now all they could do was hold their collective breath and hope for the best. Bioff’s testimony showed that he had decided he could fight the charges without giving up the Outfit. His one-note defense was inventive, if nothing else: “They bribed me. I didn’t extort them.” Bioff claimed weakly that the producers sought him out to guarantee labor peace.

  Although Bioff himself spared the Outfit, the gang’s fears were eventually realized when the trial heard from another witness. As a result of Schenck’s limited cooperation, prosecutors Boris Kostelanetz and Matthias Correa had deposed a number of other movie moguls. Lightbulbs went off in the prosecutors’ heads when they inadvertently picked up a bombshell from the lips of Warner Bros.’ head, Harry Warner. The beleaguered executive recalled that on one occasion when Willie Bioff had upped his cash demands, he had let slip the true scope of the racket. “The boys in Chicago insist on more money,” Bioff had blurted. That was all the prosecutorial team needed to hear. They were now certain that Bioff’s Chicago background was more than happenstance, since it went straight to the heart of the regime of Al Capone’s heirs, the Outfit. Although it was too late in these proceedings to vet the new revelation, the prosecutors were salivating over the potential for future investigations. After three weeks of testimony, and after only two hours of deliberation, the jury returned a guilty verdict. Soon Bioff received his ten-year sentence, while Browne got an eight-year term. On December 1, one week prior to America’s declaration of war against Germany and Japan, and within weeks of the Bioff and Browne verdicts, Circella was apprehended while having breakfast at Shorty’s Place on Cicero Avenue, miles from his normal haunts on the Near North Side. To the great dismay of the prosecutors (and the relief of the Outfit), Circella played his role true to form: He clammed up. On March 8, 1942, Circella pled guilty and quietly went away to prison.

  For the prosecutors, the work had just begun. Putting away the heirs to Al Capone was potentially a career-making case, and the team gave it the requisite attention. The were emboldened by the June 1934 passage of the Federal Anti-Racketeering Act (the Copeland Act), which gave law enforcement new weapons to train on gangsters. With Schenck serving a lenient three-year sentence (which was reduced to one year and a day), and Browne and Bioff facing hard time, the prosecutors strategized over how to build their case against the Outfit. Initially, they focused on the double-book-keeping Izzy Zevlin, hoping he might provide the link to the Outfit. He would be indicted later that year, but without providing the fatal blow to the Outfit. Meanwhile, the other Outfit bosses lay low, hoping the heat would die down. Some even sought to embellish their biographies with patriotic gestures. Curly Humphreys utilized his Hollywood connections to organize a wartime bond rally at Chicago’s Soldier Field. Pressed into service were such luminaries as Bob Hope, George Raft, Jimmy Durante, and a young up-and-comer named Frank Sinatra. Johnny Rosselli, in his effort to wave the flag, went so far as to enlist in the army. The thirty-seven-year-old sufferer of chronic tuberculosis was a recruitment long shot at best. However, after an init
ial rejection, the persistent Rosselli was inducted on December 4, 1942. Although his patriotism was never in question, his biographers labeled his move for what it was, an “all-American alibi.”

  Throughout 1942, the intrepid federal prosecutors in New York prodded Bioff, Browne, and Circella with little success. Circella toyed with the idea of cooperating with investigators. “He never agreed to spell everything out for us, but there was a measure of cooperation,” Kostelanetz told writer Ed Becker decades later. But with the dawning of 1943, a horrific piece of savagery turned the tide in the government’s favor.

  At 3:09 in the afternoon on February 2, 1943, Chicago firemen were called to an apartment at 512 Addison Street on the North Side near Lake Michigan, where neighbors had smelled smoke. Racing up the stairs to the third-floor apartment, the firemen found the still-smoldering corpse of a redheaded young woman on the dining-room floor. Her remains were in a horrid state: She had been stabbed with an ice pick, beaten, and set afire after being doused with a flammable liquid. The flash fire had burned the flesh off her legs up to her knees. The apartment’s condition bespoke of a fierce struggle. The woman’s blood and hair covered the walls and floors in the kitchen and dining room. In the kitchen, investigators found the bloody objects used to assault the woman before she was set ablaze: a blackjack, an ice pick, a knife, an electric iron, and a broken whiskey bottle. The police concluded that the crime had occurred just hours before their arrival. The victim, it was learned, had been on the phone with her cousin when she had had to answer the door. “I’m expecting someone” were her last words as she hung up. Although two fur coats were missing, the victim’s much more valuable jewelry was untouched. Police wondered if the coats were taken to give the appearance of a robbery. Also, the bottle of flammable liquid found in the ashes had not belonged to the deceased or her roommate, and burglars are not typically known to carry combustibles with them to a heist.

  Virtually no one suspected organized crime involvement in the tragedy, since killing a wife, girlfriend, or any woman for that matter violated the gangsters’ unique moral dogma. In addition, since the Outfit had taken over, innocent bystanders were insulated from the fray even more so than in Capone’s day. What gave the investigators pause was that both the victim’s given surname, Smith, and her blond hair had been changed several times, and that most recently she had been known as Estelle Carey, the talented nightclub hostess and lover of Nick Circella.

  Investigators learned that Carey had dyed her hair still again (this time red) and gone into hiding after Circella’s indictment, taking up with a roommate named Maxine Buturff. Although police initially suspected a mob hit, they never determined why Carey would feel threatened by gangsters whose code prohibited the terrorizing of women. Like most other Chicago murders of the era, Carey’s would go unsolved, allowing speculation to fill the void. One theory holds that Carey had been two-timing Circella and had divulged his hideout to authorities; another view maintains that both Circella and Carey had skimmed from the Outfit’s Hollywood extortion operation and thus courted punishment; another hypothesis postulates that the Outfit killed Carey to dissuade the defendants from entertaining the notion of testifying against the bosses; lastly, there remains the possibility that the crime was just a ghastly coincidence, having nothing to do with the Outfit or the Hollywood trial. This last possibility certainly jibes with the Outfit’s aversion to involving women in its affairs. It is widely believed in Chicago that Carey was seeing Outfit enforcer Marshall Caifano on the side, and that she was using her cachet with him to manipulate, and infuriate, countless creditors. But tending to verify the gang’s culpability was that coincident with Carey’s murder, George Browne’s wife received an anonymous phone call warning her and her husband not to cooperate with the investigation, lest her lifeless body turn up in somebody’s trunk.

  Whatever its motive, the murder of Carey, combined with the death threats, produced powerful but opposite effects on Circella and Bioff. If Nick Circella had seriously entertained the thought of singing to the G, he quickly thought better of it after the slaughter on Addison Street. “As soon as [Carey] was killed, that was the end of it,” prosecutor Kostelanetz recalled. “[Circella] turned off, boom, just like an electric light.” Unlike Circella, Willie Bioff, fearing for his beloved Laurie and their children, reacted with rage, saying, “While we do time for them, they are murdering our families.” Bioff proceeded directly to the prosecutor’s office asking, “What do you want to know?” For his part, George Browne took the middle ground, cooperating only minimally with the investigators.

  Now a friendly prosecution witness, the reckless Bioff attempted to enhance his appeal to the government by adding patriotism to his rationale for giving testimony, telling prosecutors, “I am a loyal American. I just want to get out so I can do my part against the Axis.” Bioff was not the only culprit attempting to play the patriotism card. Called before a grand jury that summer, Johnny Rosselli left his army barracks at Fort McPherson, Georgia, and journeyed to New York, where he took up residence at the Waldorf-Astoria. When he appeared before the jurors, the “all-American mafioso” showed up in full army dress. But his posturing was futile. Not even an appeal to America’s opposition to the evil Third Reich could derail the government’s high-speed investigative train. Within days, on March 18, 1943, conspiracy and extortion indictments were returned against Rosselli, Nitti, Campagna, Ricca (De Lucia), and Gioe, as well as Phil D’Andrea, Frankie Diamond (Maritote), and a New Jersey union boss named Louis Kaufman, who had helped engineer Browne’s takeover of the Kentucky IATSE convention.

  Rosselli was still in New York when the ax fell and thus became the first defendant picked up by the police. Instead of accompanying his Eighty-first Battalion to Normandy, a uniformed Private Rosselli was arraigned and hauled off to jail. The same night the indictments were returned, the news was widely reported on Chicago radio. A hastily arranged Outfit meeting convened that night at Nitti’s Riverside home. At this caucus, out of necessity, the torch was passed from Frank Nitti to Joe Accardo and Curly Humphreys. Paul Ricca would also have been included, except that he was virtually assured a stiff prison term. In short time, Paul Ricca lit into the fifty-eight-year-old Nitti. “Frank, you brought Browne and Bioff to us,” Ricca yelled. “You masterminded this whole thing and it went sour.” Ricca then pronounced sentence: Nitti should take the fall honorably, just as Big Al had done.

  “But it’s a conspiracy charge,” countered Nitti. “We all have to hang together.” Nitti had had such a rough time in his previous incarceration that he was determined not to go away again without a fight. Tempers flared as the combatants rose to scream at one another. “Frank, you’re asking for it,” threatened a panting Ricca. One boss’ threatening another brought the room to an uneasy silence. In a daring breach of traditional etiquette, Nitti walked to the door, opened it, and indicated that his former friends had to leave. Walking out into the fittingly chilly March night, the Outfit executive board members knew that, in one way or another, they had seen the last of their old compadre Frank Nitti.

  The following day brought a freezing rain to Chicagoland. As the 2 P.M. train crawled down the tracks of the Illinois Central Railroad, its crew was startled to see a clearly drunk man stumbling toward them on the tracks. He was holding a whiskey bottle in one hand and a .32-caliber pistol in the other. The train ground to a halt after the well-dressed, smallish man made threatening gestures in its direction. In fact, he just wanted the workers to keep their distance. With the railroad men watching in horror, the despondent man aimed his gun at his head and fired two shots, but he was so drunk that he missed, putting the bullets instead through the crown of his fedora. On his third attempt, Frank Nitti’s gun found its mark, blowing his brains out in full view of the onlookers. His death remains to this day the only suicide of a high-ranking gang leader. Gang historians surmise that the Outfit gave Nitti the choice of going to prison or facing the business end of a Chicago typewriter. Nitti chose neit
her.

  Seemingly unfazed, the Outfit bosses moved on to new business, the most pressing of which was the need to post bail of $500,000. The money was raised in much the same way that the gang had produced much of its alcohol during prohibition: the Unione Siciliana was recruited into the effort. Soon, thousands of small checks began arriving at the Outfit’s headquarters, sent by the tightly knit community of Italian immigrant families, formerly the gang’s alky cookers. Contributing to the effort was a mixed assortment of crooked bookies and legitimate small-business men, all of whom felt they owed something to “the boys.” The FBI later identified some eighteen individuals who appeared at the Chicago offices of the American Casualty Company, the enlisted bail-bond company, toting tens of thousands of dollars each. They arrived bearing personal checks, money orders, cashier’s checks, and boxfuls of cash. One married couple, Jack and Betty Sussman, arrived with $50,000 in cash. The organizer of the fund drive was the mysterious “supreme president” of the Italian-American Union (formerly the Unione Siciliana), and the former twenty-one-year-old mayor of suburban Melrose Park, attorney Joseph I. Bulger (Imburgio).6 Bulger, now in his early fifties, was born in New Orleans, from where he was rescued by a Cajun woman after his father was lynched by the local xenophobes. The woman brought the youngster to Chicago, where he prospered, eventually graduating at age twenty from the John Marshall School of Law7. After becoming one of the youngest presidents of the Unione Siciliana, Bulger assumed the role of consigliere for the Outfit, and lawyer of record for the gang’s bosses, having personally handled a lawsuit for Ricca involving a fire at his Berrien Springs farm years earlier. Some believe Bulger was the hidden “ultimate leader” of the Outfit, working from his 139 North Clark Street office to link the organization back to the old country, which in turn siphoned off a percentage of the ill-gotten profits from the Windy City. This belief, though widespread in Chicago’s Italian ghettos, is virtually impossible to prove.