The Outfit

by Gus Russo

  In Chicago that same year, 1933, the final component of the master plan fell into place when a falling-down-drunk labor boss picked the wrong place to shoot off his mouth. The racketeer with the alcohol problem was George E. Browne, business manager for Local 2, the 450member stagehands union, having assumed the post by pummeling the head of his predecessor with a lead pipe. Browne moonlighted by selling “protection” to the chicken dealers in Chicago’s Fulton Street Market. Although Browne was believed to have been drunk every night of his life, this particular bender actually had a reason: Browne was celebrating the culmination of a highly lucrative scam.

  Word of a good racket traveled fast in Chicago, and like the Outfit, George Browne had become aware of Tom Maloy’s blackmailing gig with the Balaban & Katz theater chain. When Browne likewise decided to hop on the B&K gravy train, he had no idea he would end up as merely the middleman for the firm of Nitti, Accardo, Humphreys, et al.

  Critical to the success of George Browne was his partnership with a brothel owner and all-around thug named Willie Morris Bioff. He would also prove to be the Achilles’ heel of the entire operation, a player whose imprudence caught the Outfit by surprise too late in the game. The Russian-born Bioff was by all accounts an evolutionary malfunction. By the age of ten he was plying girls with candy, not for his own pleasure, but so that he might palm them off on older boys for ten cents apiece. When a girl attempted to rebel, he tortured her before beating her up. “Next time you talk this way,” he scolded, “it’s a dime’s worth of acid in the face.” Before he was twenty, the revolting Bioff was a full-fledged pimp on his way to owning his own brothel. For his “legitimate” day job, the pudgy Bioff became a $35-dollar-a-week union slugger responsible for enforcing dues payments. After serving time for pandering, Bioff took up the slightly less unsavory occupation of extortion: He sold protection to kosher chicken sellers in the same Fulton Street Market as George Browne.

  When Bioff met George Browne, probably at Fulton’s chicken stalls, Bioff grasped the financial implications of Browne’s position. “No matter what anybody tells you, people do not have to eat,” Bioff lectured Browne (as later recounted by Browne). “The only thing they really got to do is get laid or see a show whenever they can dig up the scratch.” Since Bioff had the sex angle under control, he saw Browne as his ticket to untold riches. Browne was likewise enamored of the repulsive beater of women and hired Bioff as chief slugger for his stagehands union. It was a marriage made in mob heaven: a goon who sold protection to kosher chicken dealers linked with one who protected the gentile chicken retailers.

  Browne and Bioff’s first extortions involved kickbacks paid them by strip-club owners who feared competition. The owners knew that if Browne and Bioff were kept comfortable, they would instruct their stagehand members not to work for any start-up clubs, effectively keeping them from operating. Browne and Bioff made the rounds, telling the established club owners that the movie house down the block was about to move into the far more lucrative strip-show trade. Suitably frightened, the owners always anted up.

  Browne and Bioff believed they wrere doing fine until they learned about Tom Maloy’s fleecing of B&K. Despite the Depression’s having slowed business at the B&K chain, George Browne headed straight for Barney Balaban’s hospital room, where he was awaiting treatment, to shake him down. Under the guise of a concerned union leader who had to sadly report that his workers were in desperate need of a 25 percent raise, George Browne made his appeal to Balaban. Balaban saw through Browne’s transparent show of sympathy and cut right to the chase. Browne later testified to Balaban’s response: “He said he was paying Tommy Maloy one hundred and fifty dollars a week. He said he would like to take care of me like that.” After leaving to think it over, Browne called Balaban with his decision: He wanted $20,000 up front to cover retroactive pay cuts back to 1930. “Twenty thousand on the barrelhead or stink bombs at the busiest hours in every B&K house in town,” Browne warned.

  Balaban capitulated, on the stipulation that Browne come up with a way for Balaban to disguise the payoff from his stockholders. That proved easy, since Bioff had instituted a soup kitchen for unemployed stagehands. Balaban made his check out to the soup kitchen as a donation. The soup kitchen itself was meant to be anything but altruistic. The food was obtained for free, Capone-style, and was separated into two categories: cheap soup and bread for the unemployed and a free “deluxe menu” for politicians, cops, and judges - the real intended recipients of the largesse. “I never saw a whore who wasn’t hungry, and I never saw a politician who wasn’t a whore,” Bioff said. “So we’ll let them eat for nix.” Writer George Murray described the deluxe menu thus: “It consisted of roast chicken with chestnut dressing, roast duck glazed with orange juice basting, roast prime of beef, broiled double lamb chops or pork chops, or tender porterhouse steaks. [It] occasionally had such delicacies as braised calf shank, oxtail stew, beef and kidney pie.”

  Balaban signed a $20,000 check over to The Stage Hands Union Soup Kitchen, $19,000 of which was split by Browne and Bioff, with the remaining $1,000 covering Balaban’s attorney’s fee. The money was supposed to go to the workers as a retroactive reimbursement of the 1929 pay cut. That was the ruse, in any event. As Bioff later testified, “The restoration of the pay cut was forgotten. We were not interested in that then or at any other time. We didn’t care whether wages were reduced or raised. We were only interested in getting the dough, and we didn’t care how we got it.” Bioff and Browne did offer one display of altruism: The soup kitchen received two cases of canned soup, costing Browne and Bioff $2.50 each.

  Browne and Bioff did their best to conceal their childlike glee from Balaban when he handed over the bribe. But once out of earshot, the duo celebrated as if they had just hit the trifecta at Sportsman’s Park. “As soon as we were alone, Willie and me laughed and did a little fandango dance step in our office,” Browne later testified. “Then we decided we ought to go to the Club 100 to have a few drinks and talk to the girls. We both knew the guy who ran the club, Nicky Dean.”

  The decision to party at the Club 100 was momentous. The former Yacht Club on East Superior Street was now run for the Outfit by Al Capone’s cousin Nick Circella, also known as Nicky Dean. His brother, August, ran burlesque houses, thus the Circellas were well acquainted with the stagehands union and Browne and Bioff. “Pride goeth before the fall,” warns the old maxim, and it was never proven more accurate than in the events and repercussions of that night at the Club 100. George Browne had a reputation as a loudmouthed drunk, often making the rounds of the speakeasies, where he brandished his pistol and pretended to be a gangster. The real gangsters saw him as a buffoon, a harmless court jester. However, on this night, Browne, the village idiot, and his chum Willie the pimp, would actually impress the professional hoods when they let on about their newest scam. Although tonight they were in ecstasy over their brilliant B&K maneuver, they would most certainly come to wish they had never concocted it.

  After a couple of hours in the club’s first floor playing the dice game 26, the inebriated pair took a couple of the club girls upstairs to play craps. By now the liquor had typically loosened George Browne’s tongue as he sought to impress his new lady friend with the story of his financial windfall. Word quickly got back to Circella, and before the revelry ended, Circella had managed to spend an hour alone with Browne, who happily bragged about the clout of his stagehands union.

  The next day, Circella met with the Outfit for lunch at the Capri Restaurant, where he informed Nitti and Ricca what he had learned. A call was placed to Browne, who was still sleeping off the previous night’s bender. A frightened Browne listened as Outfitter Frankie Rio ordered Browne to meet him at a Chicago intersection. Rio drove Browne around the city while the tearful union boss pleaded for his life. Unbeknownst to Browne, the Outfit’s intent was nonviolent; they merely intended to put the fear of God in him. They succeeded. Two days later, Browne and Bioff were directed to the the Riverside home of Rio�
�s bodyguard (and Frank Nitti’s next-door neighbor), Harry Hochstein. Although they were led to believe that they were going to a social soiree with abundant female participation, upon arrival Browne and Bioff quickly realized that this was in fact an Outfit business meeting. In attendance were Nitti, Ricca, Charlie Fischetti, and an out-of-towner, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter. Browne and Bioff knew Lepke by reputation: He was the most notorious killer in the New York crime gang of Lucky Luciano. Although Curly Humphreys was not known to be in attendance, it is a virtual certainty that his union expertise played a large role in the Outfit’s evolving strategies. Some believe that Curly was a participant, but that when details of the meeting emerged in later testimony, he was intentionally spared by witnesses due to his irreplaceable role in the Outfit.

  Pieced together from subsequent testimony, key details of the Riverside meeting are known. After a sumptuous buffet, waiters served up Italian espresso and spumoni ice cream as Nitti called the meeting to order. He stated at the outset that he was aware Browne coveted the IATSE presidency, and that he had in fact narrowly lost his election bid at last year’s convention. The next convention was to to be held one year hence in 1934 in Louisville, which brought Nitti to the point. “You gonna run for president again?” Nitti asked Browne. When Browne responded that he hoped to do just that, Nitti hypothesized, “Suppose this time we saw to it that you had enough votes to win. Hands down. No contest. Would you like that?” Of course Browne liked it. At that point Nitti made George Browne a classic “offer he couldn’t refuse.” “In this world if I scratch your back, I expect you to scratch mine. If you can win by yourself, you don’t need us,” Nitti teased. “But if you want our help, we’ll expect you to cooperate. Is that fair enough?”

  “That’s fair enough,” answered the Outfit’s newest inductee, Browne. Nitti nodded to Buchalter, signaling that he report back to Lucky Luciano, who would in turn deliver the New York stagehands union’s delegation.

  If the Outfit’s “secret” agenda was not synthesized at the time of the Riverside meeting, it would soon be. In March 1934, three months before the IATSE convention, Johnny Rosselli returned east to update the Outfit on his Hollywood experience. It was decided to convene at Big Al’s estate in Palm Island. In attendance were Nitti; Ralph Capone, who had been back and forth to Hollywood working with Johnny; Paul Ricca; Nicky (Dean) Circella; Charlie Fischetti; and Curly’s assistant, Ralph Pierce. One mystery surrounding this critical planning session was the extent of Curly Humphreys’ revered counsel. Although local scribes wrote that Curly spent his entire “lam” in Mexico, from where his liaison with the Outfit would have been problematic, it turns out that he was much closer to the action. According to numerous FBI sources noted in the huge Humphreys file, Curly and his unidentified blonde traveling companion spent many months in Bloomington, Indiana, a mere 234 miles southwest of Chicago. However, Jake Guzik likely had little involvement in this confab, as he was still serving out his tax conviction sentence. Browne and Bioff were not invited.

  When the meeting was called to order, Johnny regaled his superiors for over an hour, explaining in detail the inner workings of the movie industry. Essentially, Rosselli explained, the Hollywood trade unions, such as IATSE, had been broken. The major studios, Johnny continued, were churning out a feature film a week, and fully 40 percent of their overhead was in the craft services. The monopolistic style of the major studios rendered them vulnerable to a strong union, should one emerge. Having already subsumed Maloy’s Operators’ Union and Browne’s stagehands union, and poised to take over the weakened IATSE at the national convention, the Outfit was well positioned to “go Hollywood.” Even Nitti had done some homework, arriving at the meeting armed with newspaper clippings from the Chicago financial pages. His research informed him that, despite a Depression-era drop-off, the movie business was the fourth-largest industry in the United States. Nitti had also determined that many of the major Hollywood studios were subsidiaries of the theater chains. Barney Balaban’s brother John, for instance, ran Paramount studios. The Loew’s theater chain was a holding company for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, while the president of Twentieth Century-Fox was the brother of Loew’s president. Since the gangsters now had direct control over the exhibitors’ employees, the theater owners, many with headquarters in New York, became the studios’ Achilles’ heel and were therefore chosen as the Outfit’s first front of attack.

  “So the guys in New York are already softened up for us,” Nitti said. “They are just waiting for us to walk in the door and ask for money.” He recalled how Al Capone had often expressed his desire to move in on Hollywood. It was well-known that many stars and producers were either juiced up or had other skeletons in their closets. If nothing else, they were vulnerable to blackmail. Nitti then concluded colorfully, “The goose is in the oven waiting to be cooked.”

  Nick Circella was designated Browne’s nonstop watchdog, while Johnny Rosselli was directed to look over the shoulder of Bioff, who would soon be dispatched to Los Angeles. Before the meeting adjourned, the Outfit had voted to institute a methodical plan to infiltrate the business of movies, with Nitti closing the meeting by saying, “I think we can expect a permanent yield of a million dollars a year.”

  1. McGurn was certainly versed in the ways of muscling entertainers. In 1927, he was given a 25 per cent interest in the North Side Club the Green Mile for settling the club’s dispute with comedian Joe E. Lewis. After the popular Lewis, who had been the club’s star attraction for a year, jumped ship for a better offer at a rival club, McGurn was brought in to talk some sense into Lewis. Before opening at his new venue, the Rendezvous, Lewis was informed by McGurn, “You’ll never live to open.” Lewis did in fact open, but one week later he was met by three thugs, two of whom crushed his skull with pistol butts, while the third hacked away mercilessly at Lewis’ face with a large knife. Incredibly, he recovered, but the resultant brain damage left him unable to talk for months, and the knife wounds left him disfigured. During his convalescence, Lewis received a $10,000 gift from Al Capone. The story was dramatized in the 1957 Frank Sinatra film The Joker Is Wild.

  2. Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal, started in Chicago, likewise Adolph Zukor;Barney Balaban, president of Paramount; Sam Katz, VP of MGM; and Leo Spitz, president of RKO. Actors from Chicago included Wallace Beery, Tom Mix, and Gloria Swanson.

  6.

  “Hollywood, Here We Come”

  (The New Booze II)

  In August 1933, the entertainment industry’s biweekly newsletter Variety reported on the widely circulating rumor that “the Chicago crowd,” was fixed to launch an assault on the 1934 IATSE convention. Although the trade paper was making reference to George Browne’s predicted second try at the union presidency, the prognostication was more accurate than could be known at the time. In fact, the most significant “Chicago crowd,” the Outfit, was about to hijack the convention, with George Browne as its front man.

  On June 34, 1934, the IATSE delegates convened their biennial assemblage in Louisville, Kentucky, at the ominously named Brown Hotel on Broadway. In an unusual move, IATSE barred the local press from the closed-door proceedings. John Herchenroeder, editor of Louisville’s Courier-Journal, recalled for crime reporter Hank Messick years later, “We sent a reporter over to the hotel, but he couldn’t get in, so we ignored the convention.” It soon became clear why prying eyes were not allowed to witness the furtive gathering. In attendance alongside union delegates were mobsters from all the major crime families: Meyer Lansky, Ben Siegel, Lucky Luciano, and Lepke Buchalter from Newr York; Longy Zwillman from New Jersey; Big Al Polizzi from Cleveland; Johnny Dougherty from St. Louis; and of course the hosts, Chicago’s Outfit. With Buchalter as the gangsters’ “floor manager,” gunmen patrolled the aisles, sat on the dais, and lined the room’s perimeter. Many observers had the impression that there were more gunmen than delegates in the hotel’s auditorium. Not surprisingly, IATSE delegates were quickly persuaded to anoint Browne as their new pr
esident. So frightened was the membership that no one else dared ask to be nominated. George Browne ran unopposed. (After the convention, the Outfit billed IATSE for the gangsters’ hotel rooms and traveling expenses.)

  The new IATSE president took the stage, feigning astonishment at his fortune. His performance set a new standard for maudlin behavior as he cried profusely, seemingly unable to muster the strength to give a speech. All he could do was repeat over and over, “Thank you, boys. Thank you.” He was likely addressing his gangster benefactors.

  After the convention, Browne, Bioff, and Circella were sent to New York, where they informed the Producers’ Association of their intent to revitalize IATSE. After the meeting, Bioff was taken by Circella to the Medical Arts Sanitarium, where Johnny Rosselli was undergoing treatment for his chronic tuberculosis. It was time for Bioff to meet his Los Angeles overseer. “Johnny Rosselli here is our man,” Circella intoned. “He handles the West Coast for us. If there is anything that goes on on the West Coast with any producing company, we will know. There is nothing you or George can do that we won’t know.”

  Browne and Bioff spent the remainder of 1934 in Chicago bringing holdout unions into line with their power play. In later testimony, Bioff explicitly detailed his modus operandi (expropriated from Tommy Mal­oy) when he recalled his approach to theater owner Jack Miller: T told Miller the exhibitors would have to pay two operators in each booth. Miller said: “My God! That will close up all my shows.” I said: “If that will kill grandma, then grandma must die.” Miller said that two men in each booth would cost about $500,000 a year. So I said, well, why don’t you make a deal? And we finally agreed on $60,000 . . . You see, if they wouldn’t pay, we’d give them lots of trouble. We’d put them out of business - and I mean out.’