The Outfit

by Russo, Gus

  Humphreys quickly forwarded a copy of the memo to Las Vegas, where the casino bosses were similarly shocked. The warning inspired the Las Vegas contingent to press their own sources, who also served up a plum. Later in the month of April, Las Vegas FBI agents listened in astonishment as Fremont Casino manager Ed Levinson read aloud from a just-written FBI summary of the skimming operation. “My God,” Levinson lamented, “they even know about Ida [Devine].” The purloined memo sent the various casino executives scurrying throughout their physical plants in efforts to ferret out the illegal bugs. FBI mikes were soon ripped out of Levinson’s office, the Dunes, and also the Horseshoe. Not all the mikes were found, however, but open talk of money was soon forbidden in the gambling venues.

  Not content with the pace of his antimob crusade, Attorney General Robert Kennedy authorized the G to revert to its tried-and-true weapon, the IRS. Armed with the FBI’s discovery of the Humphreys’ luxurious Biscayne Bay home, the taxmen first sought to prove that it was impossible that the former $75-per-week dice girl Jeanne Humphreys, whose name appeared on the $55,000 mortgage, could have afforded either the home or the extensive improvements; likewise, the purchase was out of all proportion to Curly’s income, as reported to the IRS.

  When the IRS spoke with Curly, he informed them that Jeanne had indeed contributed $50,000 to the home. In seeking to determine if Jeanne was capable of such a purchase, the taxmen spoke with her former husband, Outfit bookie Irving Vine. Vine, who lived at a hotel owned by Humphreys aide Ralph Pierce, told the taxmen that his former wife maintained no such nest egg, and that he would agree to testify to that effect. Although Vine told the truth as he knew it, he was mistaken. During their marriage in the 1940s, Jeanne did indeed have a low income. But after they separated, Jeanne developed a high-class clientele in the better clubs. “I had one tip of fifteen hundred dollars,” she says. “Another time I had a first-class vacation to Vegas paid for by one tip alone.” By the midfifties, Jeanne had banked so much savings that she purchased her own home in Florida, thus to be near her brother who also lived in the Sunshine State. In Florida, Jeanne supplemented her savings by working at a dog track. Indeed, part of the money for the down payment on the Key Biscayne home came from the sale of her other Florida home. Thus, there was some truth in what Curly had told the IRS.

  Some have postulated that Vine sought a possible payback on the man who he may have believed stole his wife, but Jeanne Humphreys emphatically denies it. “Our marriage broke up long before I began seeing Murray,” she says. “In fact, our marriage broke up long before we separated. The last three years we only lived together out of convenience.” Whatever his motivation, Vine unwisely agreed to testify against Humphreys.

  According to the local press’ ubiquitous unnamed “informed sources,” the Outfit dispatched a number of soldiers who urged Vine to rethink his ill-considered persecution of underworld icon Curly. It is widely believed that when Vine ignored the warnings, the Outfit lashed out in a manner seen less and less frequently in recent years. After being called to Pierce’s Del Prado Hotel on May 6 by a hysterical chambermaid, homicide detectives surveyed a scene that was explicitly described by writer Ovid Demaris: “Homicide detectives found Irving Vine lying on the floor, dressed only in blood-smeared shorts, his mouth and nose sealed with surgical tape, his legs also bound with tape, a shirt twisted loosely around his neck and a pillow covering his head. Three of his ribs were broken, his face was scratched and his knees bruised, but the real damage was to the lower part of his body where savage tortures had been inflicted with an ice pick during a period of several hours. Death was due to suffocation.”

  As first culled from Humphreys’ massive FBI file by Welsh historian Royston Webb, the Bureau was told by informants that “Vine was murdered on behalf and under instructions of Humphreys, due to the fact that he was a prospective witness for the IRS . . . but also to serve the purpose of enabling Mrs. Humphreys to say that she received money . . . from Vine . . . She will now be in a position where she can throw the blame, not on Humphreys, but on Vine, now deceased.” The G, however, was unable to track down the elusive Humphreys, who fled Chicago for Oklahoma and then Miami during the dustup.

  “He flew to Florida the next day, worried that I had read the news of my ex-husband’s murder,” Jeanne recalls. “He told me, ’We didn’t have anything to do with it. We don’t do things like that.’” But Jeanne knew that when Outfit bosses believed they were betrayed, they did do things like that. She has always believed that her second husband authorized the murder of her first husband.

  Returning to Chicago after the heat had died down, Humphreys maintained a furious workload, despite his own deteriorating heart condition, which periodically saw him hospitalized. In addition to his constant legal research on behalf of Accardo and Ricca, he also assisted Ralph Pierce on a lawsuit he had filed against the police department; Buster Wortman, who was being prosecuted for intimidating a racetrack official; and Marshall Caifano, for whom Humphreys rigged a jury. On the business front, Humphreys’ workload was equally daunting: He investigated gambling ventures for the Outfit in the Bahamas, Santo Domingo, and the Leeward Islands; brokered the sale of Pete Fish’s restaurant; met with Kansas City boss Nick Civella; negotiated the heavyweight boxing match between Ernie Terrell and Eddie Machen; worked with Libonati in Washington and others in the state capital to defeat antimob bills; bought and sold properties and continued to seek avenues for expanding his dry cleaning empire; and spoke regularly with Hoffa, Korshak, and Rosselli to oversee the Outfit’s national ventures.

  Humphreys experienced some minor victories in his legislative partnership with Libonati, getting Mr. Malaprop to introduce legislation that would outlaw Bobby Kennedy’s surveillance techniques. In one conversation (overheard by the G) with Pat Marcy at the First Ward headquarters, Libonati spoke of his warfare with the attorney general, bragging, “I killed six of his bills - that wiretapping, the intimidating informers bill . . . “ The eavesdropping G-men summarized the balance of the conversation thus: “Libonati thinks that JFK is a sweetheart but RFK is cruel. Libonati describes how he opposed a RFK bill and got a call from Mayor Daley. Libonati told John Kennedy to stop Robert calling Mayor Daley on such matters. Bobby said on TV that his brother wants him to stay out of politics because he is the Attorney General. Libonati takes credit for this, saying, ’That was me.’”

  With Humphreys working himself into an early grave, one can only imagine how he took the news that the so-called boss, Mooney Giancana, using the name J. J. Bracket, had spent two weeks in May with Frank Sinatra and Phyllis McGuire on the Hawaiian islands of Oahu (at the Surf Rider Hotel) and Maui (at the Royal Lahaina Lodge).

  The constant surveillance became so bothersome that Humphreys decided to move from his Marine Drive apartment to new and hopefully more secure digs. Regretfully for Humphreys, the effort he put into the move had the opposite effect, although he never learned just how. Through their Celano’s bug, Little Al, the G heard Curly speak of the move, but perhaps as a tease, he refused to disclose the new location. At the tailor shop, he told his associates that his new address would be so secret that “not even you guys are going to know.”

  After putting his furniture in storage with a friend, who adamantly refused to cooperate when the G came asking questions about where Curly was going to settle, the gangster decided on a shiny new twin-towered apartment complex, overlooking the Chicago River. Designed by famed architect Bertrand Goldberg, the two “corncob” towers consisted of pie-slice-shaped rooms radiating from a concrete core, with the first eighteen floors reserved for parking. The recently completed Marina Twin Towers sixty-story aerie was the tallest apartment building in the world, and much in demand with the city’s high-rolling apartment dwellers. Part-time residents like Curly’s upperworld alter ego Joe Kennedy were also quick to take apartments in the coveted habitat. FBI agent Bill Roemer claimed that, of all the apartments available in the Second City, he guessed that Curly was going to
move into the Twin Towers and quickly moved to develop an informant, a secretary, inside the complex.

  Although Roemer was allowed to see the building’s register log, he failed to pick up on the name Eddie Ryan, Curly’s longtime gofer, who had rented apartment 5131 in the East Tower. However, when Roemer’s informant called to say that Ryan had just shown up with Humphreys, who was going to move in the next day, the G-man had to hustle. Illegally presenting their government IDs, a crew of agents gained admission to Humphreys’ new dwelling later that same day, where they hid another microphone, which they nicknamed Plumb.3

  After weeks of overseeing a meticulous painting and carpeting of the apartment, Humphreys moved in on Memorial Day, believing the FBI agents would be on holiday. Unaware of the G’s bug, Curly followed form and G-proofed (he thought) the apartment. Ironically, while Humphreys secured the abode, the very adversary he was securing it against was listening in. Humphreys’ very unofficial biographers in the FBI noted in Curly’s file how he sought to protect himself: “[He spent] considerable time in his new apartment supervising the installation of additional locks. He mentioned that although the G has expert lock-pickers, they will be unable to gain access to his apartment due to the expensive locks and bars he has installed on his doors and windows . . . Humphreys kicked a paper hanger out of his apartment because he was not convinced that the paper hanger was what he claimed to be.”

  The Bureau further stated that Curly and his aide Ralph Pierce were attempting to “locate someone who can manufacture equipment which will scramble or garble their conversations so that their conversations cannot be monitored by someone outside the room.” And despite living on the fifty-first floor, Humphreys had bars and railings installed on his balcony, the perfect metaphor for the caged existence his was now forced to live when in Chicago. The FBI soon learned more about Curly’s security precautions, as noted in his file: “The apartment now has a burglar alarm, three inside and outside locks, a tear gas device, bars and double-thickness glass on balcony window, pistol and shotgun.” Curly also gave his maid a tear-gas gun that dispensed a dye that stained the offender for days. He also looked into the possibility of obtaining a “Tear Gas Watchdog,” which would automatically fire on any intruder.

  With Curly now thoroughly compromised by Plumb, the FBI refocused on Mooney Giancana, whom it rightfully believed could be pushed over the edge, thereby exacerbating internal gang strife. On June 8, 1963, the FBI watched as Mooney and Phyllis joined Sinatra at his parents’ home in Hoboken, New Jersey. When he returned to Chicago, Mooney was met with a civil-liberties assault unparalleled in U.S. criminal history. In their effort to drive Giancana to self-destruction, the Chicago G-men, without the approval of their SAC (special agent in charge), Marlin Johnson, decided to complement their covert surveillance with blatant, round-the-clock, blanket coverage. The ploy had been used to a lesser degree thirty-three years earlier with Al Capone, when two uniformed cops tried unsuccessfully to unnerve Capone by following him everywhere after he left his voluntary incarceration in Philadelphia. Now, in 1963, the G called the technique lockstep, and the agents were certain that the attendant publicity would further ostracize the don from his associates.

  For the next few weeks, the agents waited for Mooney to emerge from his Wenonah Park home in the morning, then followed him on all his sundry errands until he returned at night. When Mooney got out of his car, a team of agents likewise alighted from theirs, encircled the gangster at a radius of a few feet, and went everywhere he went: to the movies, restaurants, stores, golf courses, a walk, and even to church. Once again, the suburb was treated to the sight of the master wheelman coursing through its streets, his harassers in hot pursuit. When Giancana raced through his regular commercial car-wash tunnel, the employees cheered, “Go, Mo, go!” as he sped out the other end, spraying soap in all directions. On the golf course, the mediocre player Giancana and his playing partners were rushed by the FBI foursome behind them, with the agents often encircling the green and taunting Mooney as he putted. This was no small nuisance since Giancana took his game so seriously that he had had a putting surface landscaped into his backyard. Roemer described another aspect of the lockstep: “If he went to dinner, we went with him . . . [If] he got up from the table to go to the men’s room, I’d get up and be at the next urinal. I found that really bugged him. He had shy kidneys. He couldn’t do it when I was right there.”

  The tactic soon began achieving its desired effect, as Mooney started snarling at his unwanted companions, “Get away from me, you cock-suckers!” In his first serious effort to terminate the coverage, Giancana set a trap for the G-men by luring them to his lair, the Armory Lounge. Agents Roemer and Rutland followed Mooney into his headquarters and quickly realized that all of Mooney’s most notorious musclemen were present. While some of the most dangerous men in America gave the G-men the Look, the agents wondered if perhaps they had gone too far and were now about to be ambushed. Surprisingly, the agents were allowed to leave the lounge unmolested. Minutes later, while the agents waited in their car for the Giancana party to exit, one of the gangster’s aides, Chuckie English, came out of the restaurant and ran menacingly up to Roemer’s car.

  “Sam says to tell you that if Kennedy wants to sit down with him,” English said, “he knows who to go through.” He was of course referring to the same man Papa Joe Kennedy had gone through to get to Mooney for the election fix.

  “Sinatra?” Roemer asked

  “You said it,” said English.

  Mooney’s flare-up with the G was immediately brought to the attention of Humphreys and Accardo. In a few days, the overweening agents listened to a conversation in Humphreys’ apartment that proved their strategy was bearing fruit. The Bureau’s transcript quoted one of Mooney’s underbosses, Frank Ferraro, venting to Curly:

  Frank: “So help me God, I’m about to jump out your fucking widow.”

  Curly: “What’s wrong?”

  Frank: “That fucking Giancana, wait until you hear what he’s done now. He’s not making good decisions.”

  Curly: “What happened?”

  Frank: “Saturday night, Roemer and Rutland, they’re on Giancana. He takes them to the Armory. They get in a fucking shouting match. Whole bunch of our guys and Roemer and Rutland. When it’s all over, Giancana sends Charley McCarthy [English] out to see Roemer. What do you think he told Roemer?”

  Curly: “What?”

  Frank: “Charley McCarthy told Roemer that Mo told him to tell Kennedy to talk to him through Sinatra.”

  Curly: “For Christ sakes, that’s a cardinal rule! You don’t give up a legit guy! He tells Roemer that Sinatra is our guy to Kennedy?”

  Frank: “More or less. I’m so fucking mad, I could jump out your window. We got to do something about this. The G is driving this man goofy. He’s not right. He’s making mistakes. He don’t belong in that spot he can’t take the pressure.”

  Curly: “I think this has to be brought to the attention of Joe [Accardo] and Paul [Ricca]. They’ve got to know the condition of this man’s mind.”

  Within a few weeks, the Outfit conceded one battle to the G. On June 23, the gang abandoned Celano’s forever. As a parting shot, Curly Humphreys, in full stage voice, announced for the last time, “Welcome to the eleven A.M. meeting of the Chicago crime syndicate. We hope everybody is tuned in.”

  That same month, Mooney Giancana virtually guaranteed the Outfit’s presence on the front pages when he did the unthinkable: He decided to sue the FBI over their lockstep harassment. Outfit bosses were said to actually be secretly rooting for the FBI, since a government victory might result in a college stay for their starstruck boss, who had been in gross neglect of his responsibilities. But Mooney placed an ace up his sleeve when he enlisted famed civil-rights attorney George N. Leighton of Harvard Law School to come to his aid. Giancana turned on the charm, having Leighton over to his home, where the lawyer saw nothing but a loving extended family coming and going. Interviewed recently, Lei
ghton said, “I found Giancana to be one of the finest persons I have ever known.” Once aboard, Leighton devised a brilliant strategy, hiring a local production crew to film the G in action. Under the direction of private eye Don Ricker, the film crew accompanied Mooney on trips to the cemetery, church, golf course, and even the Armory Lounge. The FBI fully cooperated, not at all intimidated by the filmmakers. Occasionally, Mooney treated Ricker to the game of chase he played with the G, racing through the suburban streets, seemingly without disturbing the brake pedal. “I got my start this way,” Mooney boasted to his white-knuckled passengers.

  Much to his bosses’ horror, Giancana’s suit became a front-page staple and a lead television news story. When his suit was heard in court, a parade of Mooney’s friends and relatives attested to the harassment. At one point, the courtroom lights were dimmed as Don Ricker projected the incriminating film. Comic relief was supplied on occasion, such as when attorney Leighton implored the judge regarding the filmed lockstepping on the golf course.

  “Maybe you’ll appreciate the position of a golfer,” Leighton said, “who is about to take his eighteenth putt and looks up to see six FBI agents watching him.”

  “The most I ever had was four putts,” Judge Richard B. Austin responded.

  What happened next surely caused Humphreys, Ricca, and Accardo to turn pale: Giancana took the stand in his own defense, leaving himself open to cross-examination, and a possible rehash of the entire history of Chicago crime and all the Outfit leaders who controlled it. It was a rare opportunity for the prosecuting U.S. attorney’s office, which made it all the more shocking, and infuriating, to the G-men when their lead attorney said to Judge Austin, “We have no questions, Your Honor.”

  It was later revealed that Robert Kennedy had personally instructed U.S. Attorney John Lalinsky to refrain from cross-examining the mob boss, ostensibly because the Justice Department did not wish to legitimize the judicial branch’s authority over the executive. However, many have postulated that perhaps Robert Kennedy did not wish to risk giving Giancana a forum from which to hang out the Kennedy family’s own dirty laundry: the Castro murder plots, the affairs with Campbell and Monroe, and the election fix. This possibility was buttressed many years later when Will Wilson, the assistant attorney general, Criminal Division, in the Nixon administration testified before Congress about a statement made to him by J. Edgar Hoover. Wilson told the committee that in 1971 Hoover recounted for Wilson how, during the Kennedy administration, the Bureau was about to arrest Giancana for racketeering when Bobby Kennedy burst into Hoover’s office and prevented Hoover from going forward, saying, “He knows too much.”