The Outfit

by Russo, Gus

  During this period, the extent of the Outfit’s interest in Cuba is impossible to determine. With scant FBI (or later CIA) penetration in the offshore haven, the degree of American investments on the island has always been shrouded in mystery. However, numerous well-placed sources have emerged over the years telling a consistent story of Windy City ties to Cuba. It was widely believed that the Chicago gang had a hidden stake in Havana’s Sans Souci, Capri, and Tropicana casinos, owned in part by Santo Trafficante, Jr, the numbers boss of Florida. Trafficante, the only gangster to stay behind after Batista’s 1944 fall from power, would install a Mooney Giancana underling named Lewis McWillie as his pit boss at the Trop. McWillie would later perform the same service for Mooney at a casino hotel he secretly purchased in Reno, Nevada, in 1960. Federal narcotics agent Charles Siragusa told investigative reporter Dan Moldea that the Outfit hit man who had been indicted in the 1947 James Ragen murder was the gang’s chief liaison to all things Cuban. “Dave Yaras was probably one of the first members of the Chicago underworld to ’discover’ Florida after Capone was sent to jail,” Siragusa said. “He ran a number of gambling operations on the island [Cuba] and was also the Chicago mob’s liaison to the Cuban exile community after the fall of Batista.”

  Other Outfit members had maintained a presence in the Cuban paradise. As captured in photos in extant family albums, Curly Humphreys had been traveling with his family to Cuba at least since the early 1940s. Likewise, it was oft reported that Joe Accardo enjoyed regular deep-sea-fishing vacations to Cuba and other Caribbean destinations. However, it is unknown if they conducted gang business on these outings. Despite the dearth of offshore intelligence, hints of the Chicago gang’s growing interest can be seen most conspicuously in the movements of Johnny Rosselli, always the most visible of the core Outfit members.

  After the Kefauver circus, Johnny Rosselli’s star began to dim in Tinseltown. When his friend Brian Foy left Eagle Lion Studios, the owners let Rosselli’s contract expire, while Johnny’s parole adviser was telling him that the best way to avoid suspicion was to hold down regular employment. The loss of the Eagle Lion gig was stressful, but it was the dismissal of Johnny by his longtime pal Harry Cohn of Columbia that convinced “Mr. Smooth” to seek out greener pastures. Cohn stunned Rosselli when he refused to give him a producer’s job on the studio lot. “Johnny, how could I give you a job?” Cohn asked. “The stockholders would scalp me.” “You’re a rotten shit,” an angry Rosselli fired back. “Did the stockholders complain when I got ten years of prison because of you?”

  There is some compelling evidence that before Rosselli abandoned Flollywood he managed to redress his snub by Cohn. At the time, the once meteoric career of gangster hanger-on Frank Sinatra was in free fall. With his voice in great disrepair, his marriage to Ava Gardner failing fast, and his MGM film contract recently canceled, “The Voice” was believed by his closest friends to be on the verge of suicide. Meanwhile, Harry Cohn was casting for the World War II film From Here to Eternity. Sinatra had read the book and was obsessed with landing the role of Private Angelo Maggio, a scrawny Italian-American soldier with a heart bigger than that of GI Joe. It was believed at the time that the film would be awash in Oscar nominations the following year, and Sinatra envisioned the film’s resuscitating his flagging career. The trouble was that Harry Cohn wanted only legitimate seasoned actors to read for the part.

  Sinatra managed to sit down with Cohn, and over lunch the producer pulled no punches. “Look, Frank, that’s an actor’s part, a stage actor’s part,” Cohn told the crooner. “You’re nothing but a fucking hoofer.”

  Dismayed but not yet resigned to defeat, Sinatra had his white-hot actress wife, Ava Gardner, lobby his case with Cohn’s better half. Other friends were conscripted into the cause, but Cohn gave little indication that he was interested in Sinatra. At this point, according to a number of well-placed sources, Sinatra enlisted the aid of the Outfit’s Johnny Rosselli. News reports initially surfaced that noted New York Commission boss Frank Costello was telling friends that his longtime pal Frank Sinatra had approached him for help with the Cohn situation. Columnist John J. Miller told writer Kitty Kelley that this was not uncommon. “Sinatra and Frank C. were great pals,” Miller remembered. “I know because I used to sit with Frank C. at the Copa and Sinatra would join us all the time. He was always asking favors of the old man, and whenever Sinatra had a problem, he went to Frank C. to solve it.” Apparently, this newest accommodation was facilitated by the Outfit’s Johnny Rosselli.

  Although studio executives have denied that a Rosselli intervention ever took place, Rosselli admitted his role to his niece shortly before his death many years later. Former publicist and Rosselli pal Joe Seide said in 1989 that one of Costello’s key men told him how he had flown to L.A. to enlist the Outfit’s Rosselli in the cause. According to Seide: “The Maggio role, Sinatra wasn’t going to get it. There were no two ways about it . . . Johnny Rosselli was the go-between. Johnny was the one who talked to Harry - he was the one who laid it out. That was serious business. It was in the form of ’Look, you do this for me and maybe we won’t do this to you.’ . . . It wasn’t even a secret in the business.”

  To no one’s surprise, From Here to Eternity was nominated in ten categories for the 1953 Academy Awards, winning eight of the coveted statuettes. Among the winners was Frank Sinatra for Best Supporting Actor. And as he had hoped, Sinatra’s career took off and the singer never looked back. The pivotal role Rosselli played in Sinatra’s turnaround, if in fact it happened, goes a long way toward explaining their lifelong friendship, which began about this time. The episode might also account for Sinatra’s dutiful obliging of Humphreys’ daughter when she needed a date for her high school dance. It was the least he could do for a gang from Chicago who had changed his life forever.

  The alleged Rosselli-Sinatra incident was fictionalized in the 1969 novel The Godfather (which the Outfit played a key role in getting made as a movie, as will be seen). In that telling, a down-in-the-dumps Italian singer named Johnny Fontaine had his mob sponsors make a studio head “an offer he couldn’t refuse” in order to land their boy a plum film role. In the movie version, the mogul woke up to the sight of his prized racehorse’s severed head in his bed.1

  The Outfit’s Emissary Goes Tropical

  Rosselli’s friends in Hollywood had not deserted him socially, but they drew the line at having professional relationships with the now infamous ex-con. Thus the Outfit’s travelling emissary set out to conquer new worlds, simultaneously smoothing the way for his associates in Chicago. The top spot on Johnny’s new itinerary was Cuba.

  Although his presence on the island is mentioned in only one FBI document, Rosselli’s business expansion into Cuba, as recounted by numerous associates and government agents, is undeniable. The timing for Rosselli and the Outfit could not have been better, since in 1952, Batista-Lansky had retaken the island nation and made up for lost time in establishing their Caribbean Monaco. Batista quickly placed Lansky in charge of gambling at the plush Montmartre Club and the more modest Monseigneur Club, both in downtown Havana. As Batista’s “adviser on gambling reform,” Lansky took an above-the-table retainer of $25,000 per year, and untold millions below. His money-counting crew had a saying that would become a mantra in Las Vegas: “Three for us, one for the government, and two for Meyer.”

  Lansky next installed a casino in the elegant ten-story Nacional Hotel, over objections by expatriate Americans such as Ernest Hemingway, who viewed the placid, noncommercial gardens of the Nacional as their private club. Designed by art deco icon Igor Plevitzky, who also drew the plans for The Breakers in Palm Beach and The Biltmore in Coral Gables, the Nacional was (prior to Lansky-Batista) the last place one would expect to find the gambling ilk. With its manicured lawns on a bluff overlooking Havana Harbor, the Nacional had been the perfect setting for afternoon teas and bridge parties for the leisure class. But the avaricious Lansky-Batista changed all that with the addition of a bar,
a showroom, and a casino. The Cuban gold rush was now on, and the Outfit’s interests were represented by Los Angeles exile Johnny Rosselli.

  In her autobiography, Mooney Giancana’s daughter Antoinette remembered her father “constantly hopping a plane” for Havana in the years before her mother’s death in 1954. As Antoinette recalled: “Sometimes he was with Accardo, or the Fischettis, or Gus Alex, or Johnny Rosselli. Rosselli managed one of the Cuban hotel casinos, the Sans Souci, with the boss of the Florida crime family, Santo Trafficante.”

  When Trafficante testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, he admitted having known Rosselli since at least 1945. That same committee referred to government sources who, like Antoinette Giancana, knew that Rosselli “had a management role” in the Sans Souci. In 1990, the former casino floor manager at the Nacional, Refugio Cruz, said in an interview that he saw Rosselli there several times in the midfifties, dining with Lansky. “It was as if royalty was visiting,” the Cuban recalled. Likewise, an anonymous source told Rosselli’s biographers that he was hired by Rosselli during the same period to oversee publicity for acts appearing in some of Havana’s casino showrooms. The FBI believed that Rosselli, like Dave Yaras, had also coordinated hidden investments for the Outfit in Cuban gambling.

  The lack of FBI surveillance in Cuba effectively curtails further investigation into the specifics of the Outfit’s Cuban casino investments. However, the steady growth of the gang’s fascination with gambling in the Nevada desert is well documented.

  The Outfit Explores the Green Felt Jungle

  When the subject of the Las Vegas casino boom is broached, invariably the first name that comes to mind is that of Meyer Lansky’s partner Ben “Don’t Call Me Bugsy” Siegel, whom many credit with creating the industry when he built his Flamingo Hotel-Casino in 1946. But in financing Siegel’s dream, Lansky’s Commission (which included the Outfit) was acting on the groundwork laid two decades earlier by none other than Curly Humphreys, Johnny Rosselli, and the Big Guy himself, Al Capone. And the Outfit’s interest in the desert oasis demonstrated once again the gang’s uncanny prescience and survival skills, talents that saw them beat the upperworld to still another pot of gold. It is a certainty that, as early as the 1920s, someone in Chicago’s empire of crime was versed in the history of the desert Southwest, a history that made the locale ripe for Outfit expansionism. (See gambling appendix.)

  Wide-Open Gambling

  In the early twentieth century, the combined effect of the nation’s Depression and the depletion of the southern gold and silver mines sent Nevada officials scurrying to invent ways to revive the state’s flagging economy. While the locals debated remedies, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation was about to break ground on a project that would propel much of the Southwest into an era of prosperity. For over twelve years, federal officials had argued over what to do about the disastrous periodic flooding of the fourteen-hundred-mile-long Colorado River. Finally a bold plan was approved that would, if successful, not only tame the Colorado, but provide water and hydroelectric power throughout the West: The government moved to construct the world’s largest dam thirty miles to the southeast of Las Vegas. Since no city can grow without an adequate water supply, the construction of the massive Hoover Dam, which broke ground in 1931, went a long way toward making the idea of Las Vegas viable. The project had the ancillary benefit of employing more than five thousand workers, many of whom relocated to Nevada from out of state.2 With so many hardworking, hard-partying laborers spending their paychecks in nearby Las Vegas, the predictable vices once again flourished, happily tolerated by officials.

  Much as Roosevelt would call for a repeal of Volstead in order to avail the economy of an alcohol-tax windfall, so too did Nevadans start talking of legalizing gambling. One editorial writer for the Reese River Reveille summed up what many were thinking: “If we are going to have gambling . . . let’s have it in the open and be honest with ourselves. Regulate the thing and use the revenue for some good purpose.” This was happening at the same time that the Outfit, preparing for the end of prohibition, was casting about for “the new booze.” With their racetrack maven Johnny Patton already operating illegal dog tracks outside Reno, the Chicago bosses, like the Nevada upperworld, concluded that a legalized-gambling mecca would allow them to expand their race operations and construct gambling joints. It now appears that the Outfit dipped into its treasury to persuade any statehouse holdouts of the wisdom of wide-open gambling.

  By the time Nevada governor Fred Balzar signed the law legalizing gambling on March 19, 1931, there were already whispers that some state legislators had been the recipients of graft from gambling entrepreneurs. As A. D. Hopkins wrote in a 1999 article in Las Vegas’ Review Journal: “It is commonly believed that cash was spread around to lubricate the passage of casino gambling in 1931, but the source of that money has long been the subject of speculation.” Of course, if Chicagoans were involved in such a thing, it was a good bet that Curly Humphreys, the Outfit’s political payoff mastermind, would have been the coordinator. The FBI’s massive file on Humphreys notes his constant travel to grease the skids for Outfit business. In one example, Humphreys traveled to New York State to bribe legislators to repeal the Sullivan Act, which forbade ex-cons from carrying a weapon.3 Irv Owen, a Norman, Oklahoma, native and retired attorney who had known Humphreys’ extended family and friends since 1937, recently made the emphatic statement that he knew exactly how the Wide Open Gambling Bill came to be enacted. “In the 1930s, Humphreys and his protege Johnny Rosselli [whom Curly always called the Hollywood Kid] bribed the Nevada legislature into legalizing gambling,” Owen said. “Las Vegas owes everything to Murray Humphreys.” Regarding Outfit money passing under the table at Carson City, Owen was recently corroborated by John Detra, the son of one of Las Vegas’ earliest gambling-club owners.

  John Detra’s father, Frank Detra, had moved from New York to Las Vegas in 1927. A year later, according to his son John, thirty-one-year-old Frank Detra and his family began receiving visits from none other than Chicago’s Al Capone, then twenty-eight years of age. Although John has no knowledge of how the two met, it was clear to him that they were close friends. (It is possible that the friendship goes back to New York, since both men were there at the same time and were of the same age.) The younger Detra still retains a gold pocket watch Capone gave his father, the back of which bears the inscription “Franco Amici Alphonse,” which translates as “Frank and Alphonse are friends.” Detra and Capone were obviously planning a business partnership, says John.

  After a brief stint as a dealer in downtown’s Boulder Club, Detra was staked by a still unidentified Eastern entity to build his own club five miles outside the city line, on a section of old Highway 91 (the future Las Vegas Boulevard) that would later be named The Strip. His club, The Pair-O-Dice, would make history as the Strip’s first upscale carpet joint. In the vicinity at the time, there was only The Red Rooster sawdust roadhouse. Although Detra’s club was a speakeasy of sorts (a password was needed to enter), it boasted all the refinements of Vegas lounges that would hold sway three decades later. Open only at night, the Pair-O-Dice featured delicious Italian cuisine, jazz and dance bands, fine wine, and, of course, table games. To keep the operation afloat, the requisite bribes were in force. “The old man went to town every month with envelopes, several of them, and came back without the envelopes,” John says.

  When the 1930 debate over gambling legalization was joined, young John began accompanying his father as he made deliveries of cash-stuffed briefcases and envelopes to influential Nevadans across the state. Frank Detra admitted to his son that the money was being spent to ensure the passage of the Wide Open Gambling Bill. John believes the money had to have come from the Capone gang, since Capone was the only major player close to his father. John was aware that some monies were being paid to state legislators, but his father’s role may have been even more critical to the pro-gambling strategy: Frank Detra’s contacts supersed
ed the local power brokers. “They were all federal people, top-drawer people who influenced the state people,” John remembers. On one trip to Reno, John was asked to make the delivery himself. “Dad gave me a little briefcase and said, ’See that house over there? Go ring the bell,’” John recently remembered. “I went over and rang the doorbell, and a man came to the door and said, ’Oh, thank you,’ took the suitcase and closed the door.”

  After gambling was legalized in 1931, Frank Detra openly operated the Pair-O-Dice until 1941, when he sold the business to Guy McAfee, who incorporated the club’s structure into his Last Frontier Club. Detra, who died in 1984, went on to operate clubs in Reno and Ely.

  Outfit associates not only moved quickly to open the first legal upscale nightclubs like the Pair-O-Dice, but also established Nevada’s first casino-hotel. After gambling legalization, Las Vegas city commissioners issued only seven gambling licenses for downtown clubs, most of which had maintained illegal gambling operations for years. Among the license recipients were the Boulder Club, where Frank Detra had briefly worked as a dealer, and the Las Vegas Club.4 Club owners with Outfit affiliations were among the first to cash in on the Las Vegas gambling rush. On May 2, 1931, Johnny Rosselli’s bootlegging partner from Los Angeles, Tony “The Hat” Cornero, opened Las Vegas’ first legal hotel-casino, The Meadows, just east of the city. Unlike the small, sawdust-coated downtown casinos on Fremont Street, Cornero’s place was a Lansky-like “carpet joint,” but combined with well-appointed hotel accommodations. The May 3 Las Vegas Age newspaper described the Meadows: “Potent in its charm, mysterious in its fascination, the Meadows, America’s most luxurious casino, will open its doors tonight and formally embark upon a career which all liberal-minded persons in the West will watch closely.”