The Mafia Court: Corruption in Chicago

The Mafia Court: Corruption in Chicago

Copyright © 2014 John Russell Hughes All Rights Reserved.

Presentation Copyright © 2014 Trine Day, LLC.

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Trine Day LLC

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2013937962

Hughes, John Russell

The Mafia Court: Corruption in Chicago—1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes references and index.

(ISBN-13) 978-1-937584-51-1 Print

(ISBN-13) 978-1-937584-52-8 Epub

(ISBN-13) 978-1-937584-53-5 Mobi

1. Mafia -- History. 2. Organized crime -- History. 3. Mafia -- Illinois (State) -- Illinois -- Case studies. 4. Organized crime -- Illinois (State) -- Illinois -- Case studies. 5. Political corruption. 1. Title

First Edition 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the USA

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Hey, Sam, how about a loan? 


Whattaya need? 


Oh, about $500. 


Whattaya got for collateral? 


Whattaya need? 


How about an eye? 


– Sam Giancana

Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class.

— Al Capone

Ours is a government of checks and balances. The Mafia and crooked businessmen make out checks, and the politicians and other compromised officials improve their bank balances.

— Steve Allen

To: Mary Ann Hughes, my beautiful wife, and my daughter and two sons

Table of Contents

CoverImage

Title page

Copyright page

Quotes

Dedication

Prologue

The Pioneers

The Bosses

Soldiers of the Mob

Culture of Corruption in Chicago

Operations Greylord and Gambat

Operation Family Secrets

Epilogue

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Prologue

I want to tell you, my readers, about the origin of this book. In 2005, I wrote and published a book entitled, JFK and Sam, about the assassinations of President Kennedy and Sam Giancana and their relationship.

Early one evening, I received a telephone call from a man who said that he had read the book and wanted to talk with me about its contents. I invited him to come to my home that evening at 7:30 p.m. He called back and asked if he could bring his wife, and twenty minutes later called again asking if he could bring his secretary. I agreed to both requests.

At 7:30 p.m. a new Mercedes Benz pulled up in our driveway and a handsome gentleman appeared in his Armani suit, looking forty-five to fifty years of age. With him were two beautiful blondes in their early twenties.

Later, I found that these blondes were not the wife and secretary that they were supposed to be. It turns out that the father of this gentleman was a wealthy member of the Chicago Mafia and also a labor union president. His son, our visitor, was closely associated with the Mafia and personally knew most of the guys you read about in the newspaper.

That evening was very memorable for both me and my wife. We had a lively conversation about the Chicago Outfit and its contribution to the assassination of JFK, but an even livelier discussion about the assassination of Sam Giancana.

As a matter of fact, he said that he knew, and often saw on the streets of Chicago, the assassin of Giancana. My wife and I were both impressed with the charm of this gentleman who also was very articulate. After the three of them left later that evening my wife and I thought that this adventure was one of the most memorable times of our lives.

Five years passed. One evening the telephone rang and it was our Mafia friend. He had recently found religion, and through the Catholic Church had gotten to know a world-famous British Lord. Both were inviting me to write a new book about the corruption in the Chicago courts.

Especially because the invitation had come, in part, from the British Lord, I accepted the invitation. I thought that this would be an interesting task, although I was busy writing medical articles about the brain, my specialty. Since I had written my previous book about Sam Giancana and knew his history well, the plan was that I should review the evidence up to and including Giancana, and a co-author would handle the history from Giancana to the present.

Everything was going well during the first year of research and writing. Nearly every day I was in telephone and/or e-mail communication with the ex-mobster. Also, I had received encouraging e-mails from the British Lord.

Suddenly, everything changed. The ex-mobster was diagnosed with a serious illness, and telephone and e-mail communication nearly ceased. Also, my co-author was very concerned with the manuscript that he had already written about an unrelated topic, and which he was counting on the British Lord to help him publish.

The ex-mobster’s background and character finally surfaced when he told my co-author, whom he had persuaded to be part of our project, that he needed to be paid thousands of dollars in order to keep his contact with the British Lord. My co-author was so desperate to keep this contact that he wrote out a check for the extorted amount. After reconsideration, he stopped payment on the check.

Extortion then was directed toward me. I was told that to continue the project, I needed to pay the ex-mobster the same amount of money. Of course, I was appalled after being asked to take on this project, and then to be told that I had to pay a significant sum of money to carry out the request that was made to me. As one might imagine, the co-author gave up on the project, and I decided to pursue the task by myself. Thus, this book was born through one of the Mob’s favorite techniques – extortion.

However, I am very pleased with the result and I sincerely hope that you, the reader, will also be pleased.

The Pioneers

Genna Brothers: 1910-1920

The Genna family arrived in Chicago from Italy in 1910. They were known as tough individuals, and they created an organization called the Black Hand. There were many brothers, including Sam, Pete, Mike, Tony, Angelo and Jim. In 1919, just before the Volstead Act ushered in Prohibition, the Genna Family applied for a license to produce industrial alcohol. However, they occasionally substituted methyl for ethyl alcohol and added various other ingredients, referring to the product as scotch, rye or bourbon. They also added some glycerin to make the concoction smooth enough to be swallowed. The home distillery yielded 350 gallons of raw alcohol a week at a cost of 50-75 cents a gallon, which the Gennas wholesaled at $6/gallon. The retailer then reduced the strength by half with water. Each gallon yielded 96 bar drinks at 25 cents a shot, for a profit of $40 a gallon.

The Gennas paid off more than 400 policemen to escort the trucks that carried this booze. Also, they paid five police captains, scores of plainclothesmen, and special detectives assigned to the state’s attorney. Their distilleries were located within a few blocks of police stations and operated 24 hours a day. So many men in blue made an appearance in these warehouses that local people often nicknamed the booze plants the Police Station, located at 1022 Taylor Street. Maxwell Street cops were paid $10-125/mo. In no time at all, the Genna Family was grossing more than $300,000 a month, with net earnings at $150,000. Only 5% of this income went to graft.

Immigrants from Sicily had a special relationship with the Gennas, who paid Sicilian families $15 a day, 10 times what they could have earned at hard labor, to distill 50 gallons of corn-sugar booze. This arrangement was great as far as the Sicilian families were concerned, mainly because the Gennas were very much supported by the Unione. The full title of this organization was the Unione Siciliana di Mutuo Soccorso Megli Stati Uniti, founded in the early 1880s in New York, and eventually it proliferated into 32 branches around the U.S.A. This organization played a major role in the lives of people that had come from Italy, since they provided jobs, housing, insurance and burial benefits. Sicilian families paid weekly dues to the Unione and were also taught English to help them adjust to the American way of life. The Unione also functioned as mediator between the Sicilian immigrants and the American authorities.

Around this time there were 30 murders committed during a war involving aldermen, but only one resulted in a trial. Angelo Genna was prosecuted for the murder of Paul Labriola and was defended by an assistant state’s attorney who resigned his office to plead the case. He was acquitted mainly due to the lack of prosecution witnesses. Gangster Dion O’Banion observed, We have a new disease in town called ‘Chicago amnesia.’

Big Jim Colosimo 1910-1920

One of the other early bosses was a man named Giacomo Big Jim Colosimo, Big Jim had a very flashy lifestyle that contributed to his empire in Chicago. Racketeering, gambling and prostitution were his base of power, and the First Ward Alderman, named Michael Hinky Dink Kenna took special care of him. Big Jim had established his own café on South Wabash, and had a beautiful young woman, named Dale Winter, as a singer in this café. Jim fell in love with this girl, who was less than half his age. In search of a quiet domestic bliss, Big Jim married Dale, but on May 11, 1920, only four months after the Volstead Act had become law, he was shot down in the lobby of his own restaurant.

The question was, who murdered Big Jim? He had an associate named Frankie Yale who was a suspect, as were other individuals. The police questioned as many as 30 suspects, including a man named Johnny Torrio, but no one was ever charged. One witness initially described the murderer as someone who fit the profile of Frankie Yale, but in a lineup refused to identify him. Although never charged, Torrio was believed to have paid Yale, or someone like him, as much as $10,000 to murder Big Jim. He has appeared as a character several films, and a fictionalized account of the murder was made into a TV movie in 1998 called Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues.

Johnny Torrio 1920-1925

Johnny Torrio was Big Jim’s second-in-command and, with the Chicago crime world in chaos after Jim’s death, immediately took charge of the business, as he had earlier in New York City. He got together with the leaders of all the crime families in Chicago and engineered a truce. Torrio had an important revelation. Thanks to the Volstead Act, he said, there was no longer any need to engage in crime against each other. There was sufficient money to go around, he said, and the gangs could carve up the city into different territories. His group took the downtown Loop and part of the West Side. Another group took the South, while the Northwest was taken by another organization. Only the South Side refused to participate in the deal, and this was a big mistake. All five brothers that were running the South Side were quickly executed by Torrio’s men.

Torrio then branched out into the suburbs, and the booze flowed freely with the wildest bootlegging dreams becoming a reality. Torrio’s main strength, however, was his ability to develop cartels and alliances. He also engineered an alliance between two key Chicago powerhouses: the Genna Family and the Unione Siciliana. Thus, Torrio was a criminal far ahead of his time. He would forgo personal vendettas, stooping to murder only as a practical necessity. Corporation counsel guided him, funneling unlawful profits into lawful channels until, as a multi-millionaire, his financial status was similar to that of reputable businessmen. One U.S. District Attorney described Torrio as unsurpassed in the annals of American crime: possibly the nearest thing to a real mastermind this country has yet produced.

There was a disintegration of Johnny Torrio’s truce with the North Side, caused by the great rancor between the Italians and the Irish. This fragile agreement might have lasted until the Eighteenth Amendment’s repeal ten years later, if not for the ambitions of one North Side baron, named Dion Deanie O’Banion.

O’Banion loathed Italians, and referred to them as greaseballs. A contradictory figure in some ways, O’Banion had been a childhood choirboy at the Holy Name Cathedral. He was involved with racist murders, but was usually home by 5 o’clock to be with his loving wife Viola for the rest of the evening. He was a gifted floral arranger and actually owned a flower shop that was referred to as the Mob’s florist. He might spend much of his lunchtime killing people, and some claimed he murdered as many as 60 individuals. When he went into bootlegging, he often delivered the beer in his floral delivery truck.

O’Banion was especially powerful in the 42nd Ward of Chicago, but the Torrio group dictated everything that happened in the town of Cicero, a suburb of Chicago. O’Banion often appeared with his thugs at polling places in direct view of election judges and clerks. He was interested in seeing that the Republicans got a fair shake, and would often show his revolver to make sure everyone knew that he meant business. Democrats were physically stopped from voting, to the extent that at one time the Republicans were able to get 98% of the vote.

One difference between O’Banion and Torrio was that Deanie was probably a certifiable psychopath. When one of his partners died in a riding accident in May 1923, he had one of his enforcers execute the poor horse. On another occasion, police collared O’Banion at a safecracking job only because he and his crew could not resist the temptation to belt out a popular song.

O’Banion and Torrio continued to have difficulties with each other. Torrio’s headquarters was in a building on South Wabash Avenue called the Four Deuces. This was a four-story building with the first floor including a saloon and Torrio’s own office. The second and third floors were involved with gambling, and the fourth floor was really a whorehouse. It was a very busy place, frequented by the aristocracy of the underworld, as well as politicians and businessmen from the overworld. Though twelve unsolved murders were committed in this establishment, compared with what was happening off those premises, it may have been considered the safest place in town.

In the eleven years between 1920 and 1931, there were a total of 629 unsolved killings within the city limits, not counting the more than 5,000 homicides classified as non-gang related. For Johnny Torrio, the name of the game was quid pro quo, or favor for favor. The gang’s operation involved the aldermen and committeemen with thousands of patronage jobs. These jobs included bartenders, bookies, waitresses, bookkeepers, clerks, bouncers, bellhops and any other positions open to voters. The gang also provided gunmen and thugs to supervise the polls on Election Day and this became a vicious cycle. The politician needed the gangster, the gangster needed the policeman, and the policeman needed the politician. Thus, the patronage system included the police force. The Chief of Police did not even hire his own personnel; all appointments were dictated by the Central Committee of whichever party was in power.

In the mid-1920s beer ran through Chicago streets day and night in long convoys. The Internal Revenue Service estimated that the weekly net for the Torrio Empire was at least $100,000. However, Johnny Torrio’s luck began to go bad when he was swept up in a raid on one of his breweries, convicted, and sentenced to a year in jail. A few months later a black sedan pulled up alongside his car, and four gunmen opened fire with sawed-off shotguns. He stared thoughtfully at two bullet holes in his hat. Two days later he and his wife were in their car in the street directly behind their home when another black sedan roared down the street and cut loose with two Thompson machine guns. Fifty slugs riddled the buildings and trees around them, with three shots finding their mark. He spent at least a month in the hospital wavering between life and death. Then he decided to call it quits.

Trying to find some way out, Torrio remembered he had a one-year sentence that he was appealing, and decided to go into a Waukegan jail. There, six of his thugs, along with the police force in the jail, guarded him around the clock.

Torrio had first come to Chicago in 1910 as a bodyguard for Big Jim Colosimo. When he decided that he too needed a bodyguard, he asked for a ruthless thug from Brooklyn called Al Brown. Most newspapers referred to him as Alphonse Capone. In 1925, Torrio surrendered his entire operation to his protégé in return for assistance in getting him safely to Italy. After Mussolini began to pressure the Mafia there, Torrio returned to New York City in 1928 and became a leader in the international Mafia.

The Bosses

Alphonse Gabriel Capone 1925-1932

Al Capone was born in Brooklyn, New York, on January 17, 1899. His father was a barber and his mother was a seamstress. Al had eight brothers and sisters: Jane, Raffaele (often known as Ralph), Salvatore (also known as Frank), John, Albert, Matthew, Rose and Mafalda. The Capone family arrived in the United States in 1893, and resided in several different places in the Brooklyn area. Al was expelled from Public School 133 and left the New York Public School System for good at age fourteen. He took some odd jobs in the Brooklyn area, including working in a candy store and a bowling alley.

Al was a member of several small time gangs, including the Junior Forty Thieves, the Brooklyn Rippers and also the Five Points Gang. Al was also mentored by racketeer Frankie Yale, a bartender in a Coney Island dance hall. It was in this particular arena that Capone received wounds that gave him the famous nickname Scarface. He apparently insulted a woman while working at a Brooklyn nightclub, which provoked a fight with the lady’s brother, who sliced the left side of Al’s face three times. At the request of Frankie Yale, Capone apologized to the brother and actually hired him as a bodyguard later in life. Capone decided he wanted to marry a girl named Mae Josephine Coughlin, but he was under the age of 21. After her parents gave their consent, the marriage took place on December 30, 1918. Earlier that month Mae had given birth to their only son, Albert Francis Capone, also known as Sonny.

Capone soon departed the New York area for Chicago, but without his new wife and son, who would join him later. In 1923, Capone purchased a house at 7244 South Prairie Avenue in the South Side. Al lived in the seven ground floor rooms with his mother, two sisters, his wife and son. Brother Ralph occupied the eight rooms above with his wife Velma and a son and daughter.

Al enrolled sister Mafalda in a private girls’ school near his home, called the Richards School, for which he played Santa Claus every Christmas. At times, he would arrive at the entrance in his Cadillac heaped with boxes of candy, baskets of fruit, turkeys and a gift for every student and teacher. The two youngest brothers, John and Matt, also made their home for some years at 7244 South Prairie. Matt had an exemplary record as an adolescent and had gone to Marmion Military School in Aurora, Illinois, and then to Pennsylvania’s Villanova University. Twenty-seven year old Frank Capone completed the family circle.

Capone came to Chicago at the invitation of Johnny Torrio, his mentor in the Five Points Gang after Torrio moved to Chicago. Torrio was having problems with the Black Hand, which Capone quickly resolved by killing all the members of that group. Al found many business opportunities in Chicago involving bootlegging, especially with the onset of Prohibition. Capone was one of the suspects in the Frankie Yale murder, and was also up for a rape charge. These charges were upsetting to Al’s deeply religious family, especially his devout Roman Catholic mother.

By 1922 Capone was known to the Chicago police, but not very well known by newspaper reporters. The first time they mentioned him they called him Alfred Caponi. One August morning he was racing his car along North Wabash Avenue with a girl beside him and three men in the rear seat. He rounded the corner of East Randolph Street and crashed into a parked taxi, injuring the driver named Fred Krause. Capone flashed a deputy sheriff’s badge and showed his revolver and threatened to shoot Krause. From a passing streetcar the conductor yelled at him to put down his weapon. Capone threatened to shoot him too. His four companions fled, and the police arrived before any further violence occurred.

He was booked as Alfred Caponi on three charges: assault with an automobile, driving while intoxicated and carrying a concealed weapon, any one of which would have sufficed to put an ordinary offender behind bars. However, like almost every case that was to be filed against deputy sheriff Capone during the next seven years, it did not even come to trial. He never set foot in court. The charges were not only dropped, but were expunged from the record.

In 1923, newly-elected