Double Cross

by Sam Giancana

  Mooney had announced he would be placing Antonio’s remains in the mausoleum, still under construction. Chuck wondered whether this tribute was a concrete demonstration of Mooney’s remorse—whether it was rooted in love. But out of respect, he didn’t ask his brother.

  In September, Chuck decided to drive by the cemetery and check on the mausoleum’s progress. To his surprise, he found Mooney there, standing alone under a tree. In the bright sun of the late afternoon, the tombstones cast long shadows on the grass. His brother turned and shaded his eyes with one hand when he heard the car. Seeing that it was Chuck, he waved.

  “Hey, we both must have been thinking about Pa, huh?” Chuck said. It was more a statement than a question.

  “Yeah, I was . . . I guess . . .” Mooney’s voice trailed off. “I wanted to see how this was comin’ along.” He pointed to the impressive granite structure. “Pretty nice, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah, beautiful. It’s”—he searched for a word—“magnificent . . . really magnificent. You know, Ange and Pa would be so proud.”

  “Yeah, I guess they would.” Chuck noticed that Mooney seemed distracted as he shook his head and then cupped his hands over his cigar to light it. A fleeting smile passed over his face. Then suddenly somber again, he sighed and stared out across the graves. “Ever notice how the sunlight and the shadows make a cemetery look like rows of piano keys?”

  “Why, no. I guess I never did.” Mooney’s comment startled Chuck; he had no idea what his brother was talking about. He studied the contrast of dark and light that alternated between each row of tombstones and then nodded in agreement. “You know, you’re right; they do, don’t they?”

  “Yeah, I noticed it when I first came out here. It’s funny, but when I did, well, I kinda realized somethin’.” He paused and there was a mournful look in his eyes Chuck hadn’t seen before. “It’s all one big fuckin’ game, Chuck. No matter what tune you play . . . this . . .” He motioned to the graves. “This is where you end up. Death . . . it’s the great equalizer.” He started to laugh. “It’s almost funny, isn’t it? Because in the end, nothin’ really matters, after all. Not one fuckin’ thing.” He sighed and threw his cigar into the fresh dirt at his feet. “So you like the mausoleum?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Me, too,” he said, and without another word, he turned and walked to his car.

  Chuck thought about his conversation with Mooney for several days. The last time he’d seen his brother so morose was when he was going to Joliet back in 1929. Certainly in the days after the funeral, Mooney’d put on a damned good show; to see him around the guys, you’d never have known there was anything wrong. But that day at the cemetery, Chuck thought he’d seen a lonely man. One who’d locked himself away from human emotion. Mooney was slowly becoming entombed by a living mausoleum of his own making.

  Chuck believed death was a funny thing; right out of its shadow, life always creeps in. It was as if God didn’t want people to dwell on their own mortality for very long—and to make sure they didn’t, He always sent a new life. At least, that’s how Chuck felt when their baby was born on October 28, 1954.

  It was a boy and he thought he’d never been so excited in his life. He loved his other son, little Chuckie, with all his heart and soul, but there was something about the birth of this baby—maybe it was the timing—that was special.

  He wasn’t sure when he’d had the idea; perhaps it was when he’d been daydreaming about taking a kid in to Mooney and saying, “Here he is . . . this is the one you’ve been waiting for.” But at some point over the past months, he’d decided he wanted to name the baby, if it was a boy, Samuel Mooney Giancana. It would be the ultimate tribute to his brother. And it might do more to lift Mooney’s spirits than anything else.

  There were only two problems with his idea. First, Anne Marie had long ago decided she wanted to name the baby Ricky. And second, Chuck knew he had to have Mooney’s permission to do something so extraordinary.

  He imagined Anne Marie would be more difficult to convince than Mooney. Mooney would be pleased, perhaps even genuinely thrilled, to have a male child named in his honor. Conversely, Anne Marie would be disappointed.

  “Oh, Chuck,” she said, sighing from her hospital bed. “Does Mooney have to be a part of our lives to the extent that we name our son after him? I wanted to name him Ricky . . . you’ve known that for months.” She looked down at the gurgling pink-faced infant swaddled in her arms. Chuck sensed the bitterness in her voice. “Why? I don’t think it’s so important to name him after Mooney.” Her dark eyes suddenly grew fierce. “And I don’t want to. I really don’t.” She glared back at him. “Furthermore, I won’t.”

  He sat down on the bed. “Please. It would mean so much to my brother. I know it would. And, Babe, it would mean so much to me. Please.” He took her hand.

  “I don’t think so.” She pulled her hand away. “I just don’t want to, Chuck. No.”

  “Babe, I don’t ask you for so much. Do I?” He tried to fix her eyes in his. He wanted her to see, to understand why this meant so much to him.

  “Well, this is asking too much. I won’t do it. I won’t have Mooney be a part of our lives like that. . . . He’s already more important than anything else in the world to you. He already rules our lives as it is. And that’s fine . . . I knew that when we got married. But no more. Please, no. No more. It’s not fair.”

  “But you don’t understand. Mooney doesn’t have a boy to carry on his name. This would be so special. And an honor. We would be thanking him, too.”

  “Well, didn’t I hear that some girl at the envelope factory had a boy by him? Why can’t she name her baby after him?”

  “Babe, stop it. . . . You know that can’t happen. Listen to me, please, Babe. This is more important than anything I’ve ever asked. Please, I’m begging you now,” he said, his voice tremulous. Tears filled his eyes. “Please.”

  She looked away and then down at the baby sleeping in her arms.

  “Well, at least tell me you’ll think about it,” he pleaded.

  She was silent. “All right. All right. I’ll think about it . . . but that’s all . . . I’m not promising anything. You understand?”

  He was elated; she was weakening. “That’s all I ask,” he said, and kissed her.

  Two days later, Chuck went by Mooney’s house. In the basement kitchen, Mooney fried some sausages and green peppers for lunch and they sat down at the long carved oak table with their meal and a bottle of wine.

  Chuck had waited anxiously for this moment and his words spilled out in breathless, rapid fire. “Mooney, I had a special reason for comin’ over. . . . I’ve come to ask your permission for somethin’. Somethin’ I hope you’ll be pleased about.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?” Mooney set his glass down and gave Chuck his full attention.

  “We want to name our new son after you . . . Samuel Mooney Giancana. It’s our way of makin’ a lasting tribute to you. A way to show our respect”—his voice grew soft as he continued—“and love for you.” Chuck took a deep breath; he’d never said anything like that to Mooney before.

  Mooney stared into his eyes for what felt like forever before speaking. “After me? A little kid named after me?”

  Chuck thought he detected a mist come over Mooney’s eyes. He held his breath, waiting for his brother’s reply.

  A broad smile spread across Mooney’s face. “Of course, Chuck. Of course . . . I’m honored.” He reached over to grasp Chuck’s hand in his.

  “No,” Chuck corrected. “We are.”

  Mooney grinned and said, “Hey, you think he’ll be the one?”

  “The one?”

  “Yeah, the kid I’m waitin’ to see. The one who can measure up. The one who will go to college and be smarter than the rest of us assholes? You think?”

  “Hell, maybe he’ll be President,” Chuck said, laughing.

  Mooney laughed, too. “No, we want him to be the dog . . . not the tail. We want
him to be in control.”

  “Yeah, you’re right about that. You can be sure Anne Marie and I will do everything within our power to make certain this little boy grows up to make you proud . . . everything to make sure he honors your name.”

  “I know you will, Chuck . . . that’s why I’m givin’ you my blessing. I trust you. Shit, you know what that means?”

  Chuck nodded. “I think so.”

  “It means that there’re not too many people I can trust. But you’ve never let me down.” He lifted his wineglass. “Here’s to the future . . . the future of Sam Giancana . . . my godson. Salud.”

  “Salud . . . and here’s to my son’s godfather.” Chuck raised his glass. “The most powerful man the Outfit has ever known.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Mooney said, filling their glasses again.

  Chuck left his brother’s home that day happier than he’d ever been in his life; his son would make Mooney proud someday.

  They called the little boy Mooney from the start, and it didn’t seem to take Anne Marie long to adjust to the idea. In fact, she now seemed proud that his brother had been so pleased.

  It was a year of contrasts they wouldn’t forget, and as it drew to a close, Chuck often thought of the tombstones, Mooney’s “piano keys,” the light and dark. In Chuck’s way of thinking, they’d come out into the light; he didn’t think his brother was right about it not mattering which tune you played—it did matter. He hardly ever thought about the whistling man of his childhood anymore; his dreams were no longer haunted by the eerie tune or Mooney’s face staring from within the crowd, his whispered “omertà.” Chuck had come to the conclusion that it wasn’t death that was the equalizer, as Mooney had said; no, it was life. And he wanted to make sure they lived it to its fullest.

  Mooney’s thoughts were fixed on death, however, when he sent Chuckie Nicoletti and Milwaukee Phil to eliminate his last few local stumbling blocks to personal power in 1955: Charlie Cherry Nose Gioe, Frank Maritote, and Louis Greenburg. They’d been old-timers, Capone men, whose grumblings represented an affront to Mooney and his control. Others, like Louis Campagna, Charlie Fischetti, Jake Guzik, Claude Maddox, and Sam Golfbag Hunt were aging rapidly or were by now largely impotent members of the Outfit.

  By mid-1955, Tony Accardo and Paul Ricca were being scrutinized by the IRS. Accardo, in particular, was nervous and anxious to drop out of sight. Just as the Browne-Bioff scandal had been a godsend to Mooney more than a decade earlier—resulting in the imprisonment of his superiors and freeing his way to power—now the heat on Accardo and Ricca gave him the last nudge he needed to assume absolute control. Accardo stepped aside and, at a private Outfit gathering held at the Tam O’Shanter Country Club in north Chicago, Mooney was formally made boss of Chicago’s Outfit.

  In November, Chuck heard that Marshall Caifano, still working Las Vegas, had stumbled across a name from the past: Willie Bioff.

  Since turning on his friends during the notorious Browne-Bioff case in 1941, an act that led to many of Chicago’s top mobsters being convicted and imprisoned, Bioff had fled to Phoenix and lived under the name William Nelson. He’d become close friends with Republican Barry Goldwater, supporting Goldwater’s campaign and jaunting around the country in the senator’s private plane. In 1952, perhaps in a fit of overconfidence, he’d taken a job at the Las Vegas Riviera under its manager, Gus Greenbaum. Once in town, it didn’t take Marshall Caifano long to spot the traitor—the Riviera was backed by Chicago.

  At the news of Caifano’s discovery, Mooney reverted to the tried and true. On November 4, 1955, Bioff turned the key in the ignition of his truck and was scattered like so many leaves in the wind. The explosion was heard for miles.

  It was typical Chicago, typical Mooney. Bioff had probably grown tired of the day-in, day-out fear and lost his edge. That’s the way it always happened; just when a guy let his guard down, the hammer would fall.

  By 1956, Mooney was publicly known as “the man” in Chicago—and Chuck’s admiration for his brother’s power, savvy, and style grew. The Outfit was rapidly expanding its geographic territory under Mooney’s iron fist to include towns, both large and small, scattered throughout the nation’s midsection. Communities as seemingly diverse and inconsequential as Paducah, Kentucky, and Ames, Iowa—and hundreds in between—now had something in common: They all felt the force of Chicago, all had one of Mooney’s lieutenants in their midst, running games and whores. In every instance, the lion’s share went back to Mooney; if it didn’t, the sleepy little towns were awakened to Chicago’s presence by the stench of decaying flesh on one of their deserted country roads.

  Over thousands of miles, Mooney Giancana—or Sam, as he was being respectfully called more and more—held the fate of two-bit hustlers, whores, bookies, and loan sharks in his hand. And anybody who was anybody knew it.

  The sheer expanse of territory he controlled gave him the instant respect of the Commission, and it was this power that Joe Kennedy was counting on when he instructed Chicago’s Mayor Daley, who owed Kennedy several favors, to “contact Sam Giancana” in May of 1956.

  Kennedy was at the end of his rope; he’d erred in judgment, Daley relayed to Mooney, and now he needed help. Could they meet on the East Coast? To that question, Mooney responded with a resounding no. If Joe Kennedy wanted to talk, he’d have to come to Chicago. After all, Mooney protested, Kennedy had been conducting business in Chicago for years; he’d owned the Merchandise Mart since 1945 and maintained an office in the city. If there was a meeting, it would be in Chicago or not at all.

  In Chicago, three days later, he met with “old man Kennedy” in a suite at the Ambassador East.

  The meeting with Joe Kennedy intrigued Mooney for several reasons. Although most closely tied to Costello and the New York gang, Kennedy was no stranger to Chicago. Mooney had known the scheming Irish bootlegger for over twenty-five years, a relationship that hailed back to the days of Diamond Joe Esposito and Mooney’s sugar runs to Boston during Prohibition’s heyday. Nor had he forgotten the scrape Kennedy had had with Detroit’s Purple gang; Chicago had bailed the arrogant mick’s ass out of a sure hit back then.

  Kennedy’s ties to the underworld intersected at a hundred points. Besides making a fortune in bootlegging, Kennedy had made a financial killing in Hollywood in the twenties—with the help of persuasive behind-the-scenes New York and Chicago muscle. When Prohibition came to a close, as part of a national agreement between the various bootleggers, Kennedy held on to three of the most lucrative booze distributorships in the country—Gordon’s gin, Dewar’s, and Haig & Haig—through his company, Somerset Imports.

  It was also no secret, according to Mooney, that Joe Kennedy—along with such industrialists as General Motors’s founder William Crapo Durant, and John David Rockefeller, Jr.—had been given prior knowledge of the coming stock market crash in 1929. “In fact,” Mooney told Chuck, “they made it happen. They figured out how they could get even richer. Shit, old man Kennedy made over a million bucks sellin’ the market short before it fell. They manipulated the whole fuckin’ thing.”

  The thirties were good to Kennedy. Mooney said Joe used the leverage gained from obtaining campaign contributions for FDR—one hundred thousand dollars from Chicago and New York alone—to win an appointment from Roosevelt as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. And four years later, in 1938, FDR gave him the coveted ambassadorship to England in exchange for a similar amount.

  According to Mooney, as the forties gave way to the fifties, Kennedy tried to distance himself from his old cronies by selling Somerset Imports and his interest in the racetrack at Hialeah. Initially, Mooney said, that had been fine. “We liked it that way. He was a guy on the inside and he owed us big. We didn’t care if he wanted to play high-and-mighty . . . as long as we could work with the guy . . . because if there ever was a crook, it’s Joe Kennedy.”

  Joe had called on Mooney once before, regarding a distasteful little problem his son Jack had g
otten into. A marriage needed to be annulled and Joe didn’t want any publicity—in fact, not only did he want the marriage annulled, he also wanted any record of it completely removed from all legal documents. Once this was accomplished, Jack—his slate clean once more—could get on with his father’s political agenda.

  The job required discretion and a man who knew how to get things done. Mooney directed Johnny Roselli to handle the legalities for Kennedy, and that was the end of that.

  Most recently, Mooney’s friend and longtime Kennedy mentor Frank Costello had had a major falling-out with the Irishman. The rupture had been building due to Joe’s increasingly fierce reluctance to return favors to his former pals. Costello rightfully believed the Mob had helped make Kennedy a rich and powerful man, and now when he’d called in a marker, the Irish bastard had not only balked, he’d ignored him. It was easy to understand why there was a contract out on Joe Kennedy.

  Surveying the gnarled face of the aging bootlegger, which was how Chuck’s brother insisted on describing Joe Kennedy, Mooney felt a twinge of admiration. The guy was taking his life into his hands coming to Chicago like this; he couldn’t be sure Mooney wouldn’t make good Costello’s contract. But here he was.

  Mooney looked distractedly around the suite. He’d take his time, make the guy sweat a little. He finally lit a cigar and met Joe’s eyes. “So, what can I do for you, Joe?” He tapped his cigar on the ashtray.

  “I need your help.”

  “My help?” He placed one hand over his heart in mock innocence. “Why my help?”

  Kennedy cleared his throat. Mooney knew it was tough for the old bird to come crawling to Chicago, and he watched with some pleasure as the man’s hands twisted in his lap; they were the only outward sign of his anxiety.