by Gus Russo
1. Located among the staff files of the Kefauver Committee is a report stating that Curly met his Intelligence Unit contact once a month at venues such as the Roosevelt Club coffee shop or the Bismarck Hotel. “The sole purpose of the meet,” the committee’s report stated, “is to chat and make a drop [payoff].”
2. The wife of one of Las Vegas’ chief meat suppliers, Irving “Niggy” Devine, Ida brought the skim from Vegas by train to Chicago, where she was usually met at Union Station by perennial Outfit lawyers George Bieber and Mike Brodkin. After the money was cut, Devine trained on to mob strongholds such as New York, where she gave Frank Costello his share, or to Cleveland and John Scalish, or to Miami and Meyer Lansky.
3. Roemer writes that the name came from Humphreys’ penchant for resolving problems by referring to what “Joe the Plumber,” or Al Capone, would do. In their report, the agents described Curly’s elegant, if not spacious, new fifty-first floor home: “Looking straight ahead, it commands an excellent view of Lake Michigan. Looking slightly to the left, it commands an excellent view of the Tribune Tower, and looking to the right, it commands a view of State Street, the most prominent street in Chicago . . . The apartment is one of the choicest at Marina City . . . it is furnished extravagantly with several expensive-looking paintings hanging on the walls, with a player piano, apparently new, and with very expensive-looking furniture.”
4. The Cal-Neva was reopened in January 1964 under new ownership.
5. On September 6, 1963, in a public speech in Havana, Castro indeed said: “We are taking into account . . . the Caribbean situation, which has been deteriorating in the last few days due to piratical attacks by the United States against the Cuban people . . . Kennedy is a cretin . . . the Batista of our times . . . If U.S. leaders are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe. Let Kennedy and his brother Robert take care of themselves since they too can be the victims of an attempt which will cause their deaths.”
20.
Endgames
As Mooney Giancana settled into his new digs at the Cook County jail, the Outfit breathed a sigh of relief. And it was more than Mooney’s removal that caused the bosses to relax. With the guilt-ridden Bobby Kennedy traumatized to the point of catatonia, and the new president more concerned with healing the nation’s wounds and trying to wrap his backroom-specialized brain around the knotty problem of Jack Kennedy’s Southeast Asian undertakings, Bobby Kennedy’s “list” became less of a priority.
On July 11, 1965, under increasing pressure from court decisions that upheld the Fourth Amendment’s right-to-privacy provision, President Johnson ordered the FBI to remove its illegal bugs from the underworld lairs.
In Chicago, as elsewhere, the removal order placed the G-men in great peril, as they once again had to surreptitiously enter the mob hangouts and pull out the sources of their hard-won intelligence. “It was a heinous slaughter,” wrote Bill Roemer, “devastating to our coverage of the mob.” While the G risked life and limb, they seethed as they learned of former attorney general Robert Kennedy’s disavowal of his knowledge of the illegal microphones. But they saved their public vitriol for President Johnson. Roemer wrote: “I can only surmise that [Johnson] was afraid that sooner or later the bug[s] would reveal something of his activities . . . [regarding] the days when he was amassing his wealth as a senator from Texas . . . It was enough to raise suspicions that he had some things to hide somewhere along the line. There were those who even thought he might have been on the take, that the mob had gotten to him.”
As if to rub salt into the wounds of the agents, President Johnson’s vaunted 1965 Commission on Law Enforcement produced little of value, even relegating a sixty-three-page report on Chicago corruption by Notre Dame professor G. Robert Blakey to four footnotes. It is conceivable that Blakey’s report was so treated due to the Pandora’s box it threatened to open, for the professor’s censored thesis stated frankly: “The success of the Chicago group [mob] has been primarily attributable to its ability to corrupt the law enforcement processes, including police officials and members of the judiciary . . .” Two years later, the deputy director of President Johnson’s Crime Commission, Henry S. Ruth, cut off Henry Peterson, the head of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime Division, in midsentence when he launched into his findings regarding corruption in the Teamsters. “We’re going to move on to another subject,” Ruth said.
The relief felt by the Outfit was to be short-lived, however, as the stresses of a life in organized crime were about to catch up with its irreplaceable mastermind, Llewelyn Morris “Curly” Humphreys.
The last year and a half had been a whirlwind for the ailing sixty-five-year-old gangster. Although twice divorced, Curly continued to see both ex-wives frequently. In 1964, Humphreys took his first wife, Clemi, and daughter, Luella, on a two-month tour of Europe, with stopovers in Switzerland, France, Greece, and England. In what may have been Curly’s way of bringing his life full circle, the last stop on the itinerary was his father’s homeland, Wales, Curly’s first-ever visit. Daughter Luella described her father’s reaction: “He went around and visited with cousins over there and he truly enjoyed himself. He stayed and settled the estate and sold the land because he knew he was on borrowed time . . . and he made sure everyone got a deed to property . . . He was just thrilled he made it home.”
In January 1965, Humphreys took one of his many return trips to Oklahoma, this time to bail his daughter out of her financial woes, largely the result of a recent divorce. After returning home to Chicago, Humphreys was seen by the FBI dating numerous women, including his second ex-wife, Jeanne. On her thirty-seventh birthday, Jeanne received a $37,000 gift from Humphreys in a futile gesture aimed at winning her back.
Even as he attempted to keep a low profile, only Humphreys could finish the mob’s work that he had initiated. Humphreys continued to lobby the state capital on behalf of antigambling legislation and against wiretapping proposals. Before pulling its bugs, the Bureau heard Curly’s glee when the wiretapping bill was defeated. “The fight is not over,” Curly instructed his associates, “and that fight versus other anticrime bills, especially the immunity bill, must continue.” When he failed to defeat one set of antimob legislative proposals, Curly was heard to complain, “I had thirty-five labor organizations attacking these bills, but they couldn’t do a thing.”
The final act in Curly Humphreys’ dramatic life commenced when he appeared before a grand jury on May 19, 1965, and refused to answer questions. So confident was he that he also declined to invoke the Fifth Amendment, saying instead that he refused to answer because he had no idea what the prosecutors were talking about. But in doing so, Curly was too clever for his own good, committing a rare legal miscalculation. When he failed to reappear for a another round of questioning on June 25, a warrant was issued for his arrest.
Humphreys was located the next day in Oklahoma, where he was placed in lockup for the weekend. His bank-robber cellmate wrote his son about the legendary gangster: “We played quite a few hands of Chicago style gin rummy . . . He is a very interesting character, friendly, soft-spoken, considerate, smart, and above all loaded with long green. He wound up a good friend of mine.”
On his return to Chicago, Humphreys posted bail and worried to his brother Ernest that the gross miscalculation might ruin his reputation. The FBI noted that the brother assured him differently, comparing “the lifelong success of his brother in organized crime to the perennial domination of baseball by the New York Yankees.”
After a few months of fruitless testimony by Curly’s peers, it was decided out of desperation to charge him with contempt and perjury (Humphreys had testified that he was unaware of the scheduled June 25 court appearance). Agent Roemer was charged with serving the arrest warrant on Curly, but he refused. “I did not want to execute it,” Roemer wrote. “I was fond of the guy and did not want to be the one who snapped the handcuffs on him.” At one-thirty in the afternoon, Thanksgiving Day
, 1965, three FBI agents went to Curly’s apartment and knocked for several minutes. Finally, a distraught Humphreys opened the door, his trusty .38 pointed straight at the agents. After disarming the sixty-five-year-old hood, the agents began to search the premises, albeit with no search warrant.
At that point, the agents became interested in Humphreys’ safe and asked him for the key. When Curly refused, the agents attempted to pry his hand from his pocket. Curly became hysterical and fell onto his bed tussling with FBI agent Danny Shanahan. After tearing Curly’s pocket, the key was retrieved, giving the G access to Curly’s safe. Once opened, the safe revealed $25,000 in cash and a letter that related to the Willie Bioff Hollywood scandal. After the money was counted twice in Curly’s presence, the gangster was taken downtown, where his pal Morrie Norman posted his $45,000 bail about 6 P.M. While signing his release papers, a disgusted Humphreys sniped at reporters, “Here we go again.” However, when an attractive TV reporter named Jorie Luloff asked Curly if he had a comment, the aging lothario quipped, “None, except, my, you are a pretty girl.”
Returning to his apartment, the fastidious Humphreys set about cleaning up the residue of his struggle with the G. While pushing his vacuum cleaner, his heart also sucked in detritus, a blood clot. Curly fell dead, his head hitting a table in the fall. At eight-fifty, Curly’s brother Ernest discovered the body.
The phone rang at Bill Roemer’s home that night. It was Chicago Tribune reporter and FBI confidant Sandy Smith, calling with the news of Curly’s death.
“I felt like I had taken a punch in the stomach,” Roemer later wrrote. “Honestly, it was as if a part of me died that night. No more Hump? What would my life be like? He was a major reason I enjoyed what I was doing.” Roemer also felt responsible for having helped piece together the “two-bit” perjury case, without which “Hump would still be alive.”
An autopsy was performed out of fear that Humphreys may have been poisoned by an enemy. However, it was determined that he died of a blood clot in the heart. His Oklahoma family flew in for the private funeral at the Donnellan Funeral Home. Only ten mourners, names unknown, attended the wake. After the ceremony, Curly’s remains were cremated, although he had wished for his body to be donated for medical research.
After the funeral, the Oklahoma contingent repaired to Morrie Norman’s restaurant, where they were met by a grieving Bill Roemer. “I told them all how much I respected their husband, father, and grandfather, and that I deeply regretted what had happened,” the agent later wrote. Turning to Curly’s grandson, George, Roemer said, “Fie was a fine man.” Summing up his feelings for Humphreys, Roemer wrote in his autobiography, “There was a style about the way he conducted himself. Flis word was his bond. I surely was to miss him. My work would lose some of its glitter.”
Humphreys’ ashes were taken to Oklahoma, interred under a huge stone on his property that said only “Humphreys.”
The news coverage befitted Curly’s stature. His EPITAPH - NO GANGSTER WAS MORE BOLD announced Sandy Smith’s headline in the Chicago Tribune. “Humphreys died of unnatural causes - a heart attack,” quipped Mike Royko, who also noted that “Humphreys turned Sam Giancana from an unknown semiliterate into a well-known semiliterate.” On a more serious note, Royko stated, “[Humphreys] devised legal strategies and political fixes that have yet to be equaled. He engendered appreciation for his immense intellect, his finesse, and again within the perspective of his vocation, his civility.” The Daily News opined, “His brains spoke louder than his muscle . . . At the time of his death, Humphreys was still the crime syndicate’s master fixer, the man who could ’reach out for’ a judge, a policeman, or even a congressman.”
Among the personal effects seized at Curly’s apartment by the FBI was a seventeen-page sheaf of notes containing the notation “No. 46-400 at 20.” Since Humphreys owned pieces of Las Vegas casinos, in addition to every other Outfit gambling enterprise, investigators hoped the cryptic code would lead them to a stash of millions in a Swiss bank account, but Swiss law prevented the banks from responding to inquiries about Curly’s alleged nest egg. However, almost immediately after her father’s passing, Luella Humphreys Brady began what would be a yearly trip to Zurich, Switzerland, where she would raid the Swiss bank account of her deceased father, the fruits of his four-decade career with the Outfit. In 1984, Huw Davies, the comptroller of a prestigious Welsh public television station, encountered Luella in transit on one of her yearly forays to Zurich. In his Cardiff office, Davies was shown one stash of over a million dollars, which Luella was transporting back to Oklahoma.
In Key Biscayne, Jeanne sold the house, bequeathed to her in Curly’s will, for $205,000.
The corpses continued to pile up: Not long after Humphreys’ death, Joe Bulger, the Unione Siciliana consigliere, and the Outfit’s mysterious “secret boss,” died when the small plane he was piloting to Miami crashed; on March 24, 1966, forty-nine-year-old Virginia Hill finally succeeded in poisoning herself to death in Kopple, Austria. Jeanne Humphreys believes Hill was despondent because March was “payday,” and it had been Curly alone who made certain her yearly “pension” was delivered. As noted, Hill was just one of many who had benefited from Humphreys’ generosity. In Florida, Mae and Sonny Capone had used Outfit disbursements to finance a Miami Beach restaurant, The Grotto. Shortly after Curly’s arrest, they lost the business and Sonny was charged with shoplifing $3 worth of sundries from a supermarket, his only run-in with the law.
In California, Johnny Rosselli was also experiencing the passing of the torch of organized crime. On May 11, 1966, Los Angeles FBI agents informed Rosselli that they knew his real name was Filippo Sacco, and that he was an unregistered alien. Although Rosselli did not know it at the time, the Bureau had obtained the intelligence from a man who had functioned as Rosselli’s courier, delivering yearly $10,000 gifts to Rosselli’s mother in Boston. “We got nothing against you, John,” said one of the agents. “It’s a matrer of national security.”
“Talk to my lawyer,” was Rosselli’s response to the agent who brandished nothing more than a pesky misdemeanor violation, albeit with a hint that he was after bigger fish. The next day, Johnny flew to Washington to meet with his CIA contacts, Shef Edwards, still with the Agency, and Bill Harvey, by then an attorney in private practice. Rosselli assured his partners in the assassination plots that he was not going to jeopardize national security by singing to the FBI. However, upon his return to the West Coast, Rosselli was told by the FBI that what they actually wanted was the goods on the Outfit’s skimming operation in Las Vegas. Rosselli politely refused. (After one year, however, the INS case had refused to go away, and the CIA had as yet not come to Johnny’s rescue. Rosselli began leaking part of the assassination story to syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, with the proviso that Anderson not use any gangsters’ names. Anderson’s column thus became the first public disclosure of the CIA-Mafia plots sanctioned by the Kennedys. Frightened that Rosselli would soon give up more, the CIA, according to its own records, finally intervened with the INS, and the immigration threat was dropped.)
Although the Outfit’s Mr. Smooth was supremely confidant that he could deal with the immigration bother, he was unaware that one of his side ventures was set to blow up in his face. Since the early sixties, Rosselli had taken a cut from a card-cheating scheme run at the Beverly Hills Friars Club. The cheating had been devised by Maury Friedman, a businessman for whom Rosselli had brokered a complex partnership in the purchase of Las Vegas’ Frontier Hotel. With illegal high-stakes gin games holding sway on the third floor of the Friars, Friedman had holes drilled in the roof, from where lookouts would tip their playing partners via a radio hookup. In this manner, regular patrons such as entertainers Zeppo Marx, Tony Martin, Phil Silvers, and others were relieved of approximately $40,000 nightly. As a matter of courtesy, Rosselli was sent a percentage of the take. After years of successful celebrity fleecing, the scam was about to become unraveled.
Back in Chicago on Me
morial Day, 1966, Mooney left prison and was immediately summoned by the two remaining bosses, Joe Accardo and Paul Ricca, who had not forgiven him for both bringing the suicidal Kennedy fix to them and for his front-page-grabbing style. Informants told the FBI that the meeting between the bosses was a hot-tempered screaming match, with Mooney on the losing side. Accardo and Ricca not only removed Giancana from his leadership role, but ordered him out of the country until further notice. A recalcitrant Giancana left family behind and fled to Mexico, while Accardo and Ricca tried to salvage their empire.
The original Outfit was now crumbling, the combined effect of processes natural and man-made: Curly Humphreys and Jake Guzik had passed on; Rosselli had been placed under increased official scrutiny; Mooney Giancana had been banished; and Jimmy Hoffa was exhausting his appeals on two thirteen-year terms for his misuse of the pension fund. Only Accardo and Ricca were left, and they longed for retirement. There would follow a succession of temporary front men to take Giancana’s place, trusted bosses like Sam Battaglia, Phil Alderisio, Jackie Cerone, Joey Aiuppa, Joe Ferriola, Sam Carlisi, and John DeFronzo. But invariably, the key decisions were made by the gangsters’ last links to Big Al Capone, “Joe Batters” Accardo and Paul “the Waiter” Ricca. And although the Outfit’s final years saw the members more often on the defensive than not, a handful of lucrative conquests were still to be had before they too abandoned the mortal coil.
In 1966, one year before Hoffa went away, he and Allen Dorfman approved a $20-million pension-fund loan to hotel magnate Jay Sarno, for the building of Las Vegas’ most garish paean to gambling yet, Caesars Palace Hotel and Casino, a seven-hundred-room retreat (later expanded to twenty-five hundred) that features Romanesque fountains; the eight-hundred-seat Circus Maximus Theatre, patterned after the Roman Colosseum; numerous marble and concrete-over-chicken-wire replicas of classic Roman sculpture, frescoes, and murals; and an Olympic-size pool formed out of eight thousand pieces of Italian marble.