The Outfit

by Gus Russo

  The way Bob Evans saw it, he had no choice but to call the Outfit’s Hollywood dealmaker, Sidney Roy Korshak. The producer had been a great friend of Korshak’s since the early fifties and claimed that the pair met every day until 1980, when they had a falling out. Like most upperworld achievers, Evans was well aware of the Outfit’s knack for getting things done - they were, after all, action men. Years later, Evans wrote of the power Sidney Korshak, and by proxy the Outfit, now wielded: “A nod from Korshak, and Santa Anita closes. A nod from Korshak, and Madison Square Garden stays open. A nod from Korshak, and Vegas shuts down. A nod from Korshak, and the Dodgers suddenly can play night baseball. Am I exaggerating? Quite the contrary. In the spirit of confidentiality, it’s an underplay.”

  Among Korshak’s Tinseltown triumphs was the critical assistance he had given Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan in settling the 1966 actors’ strike. In 1971, the same year Evans faced his Godfather predicament, Korshak served as uncredited legal adviser for the Las Vegas-based James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever. Korshak had recommended his friend Jill St. John for the costarring role of “Plenty O’Toole.”

  As recounted in his memoir, The Kid Stays in the Picture, Evans, who was in New York at the time, placed a call to Korshak at his New York office in the Carlyle Hotel:

  “Sidney Korshak, please.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Sidney, it’s Bobby.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I need your help.”

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s an actor I want for the lead in The Godfather.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I can’t get him.”

  “Yeah?”

  “If I lose him, Coppola’s gonna have my ass.”

  “Yeah?”

  Evans advised Korshak of his turndown by MGM’s Aubrey, a revelation that elicited a nonstop recitation of yeahs from Korshak.

  “Is there anything you can do about it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Really?”

  “The actor, what’s his name?”

  “Pacino . . . Al Pacino.”

  “Who?”

  “Al Pacino.”

  “Hold it, will ya. Let me get a pencil. Spell it.”

  “Capital A, little / - that’s his first name. Capital P, little a, c-i-n-o.”

  “Who the fuck is he?”

  “Don’t rub it in, will ya, Sidney. That’s who the motherfucker wants.”

  As Evans tells it, twenty minutes after the friends hung up, an enraged Jim Aubrey called Evans.

  “You no-good motherfucker, cocksucker. I’ll get you for this,” Aubrey screamed.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know fuckin’ well what I’m talking about.”

  “Honestly, I don’t.”

  “The midget’s yours; you got him.”

  That was Aubrey’s final statement before slamming the phone down on a befuddled Evans, who immediately called Sidney. The master fixer advised the producer that he had merely placed a call to Aubrey’s boss, Kirk Kerkorian, and made the request. When Kerkorian had balked, Korshak had introduced his Outfit connections into the negotiations.

  “Oh, I asked him if he wanted to finish building his hotel,” Korshak told Evans. “He didn’t answer . . . He never heard of the schmuck either. He got a pencil, asked me to spell it - ’Capital A, punk l, capital P, punk a, c-i-n-o.’ Then he says, ’Who the fuck is he?’ ’How the fuck do I know? All I know, Bobby wants him.’”

  The rest, as they say, is history. Not only did The Godfather redefine the cinema, but Al Pacino became a star, and Kirk Kerkorian completed his MGM Grand, earning him the moniker Father of the Mega-Resort.

  When the film was screened for a party of Hollywood insiders at a Malibu estate, antimob crusader Steve Allen somehow made the guest list. “There was the usual crowd there,” Allen said in 1997, “but there were also a few swarthy Vegas boys who had ’organized crime’ written all over them. After the movie, my wife, Jayne, made a remark about gangsters that caused one producer, who was friendly with the mob, to get in her face. ’You have no idea what you’re talking about, lady,’ this character told her.”

  Allen says he intervened before the face-off got ugly, and soon thereafter, he and Jayne made their exit.

  “The next morning, while I’m just waking up,” Allen said, “our housekeeper came banging on our bedroom door.”

  “Mr. Allen! Mr. Allen!” called the frantic woman. The entertainer rushed out and followed his housekeeper to the front porch, where, in a scene reminiscent of the movie he had just seen, he found an enormous severed leg and shoulder of a horse. Allen knew the name of the producer who had had the set-to with Jayne and, in a show of defiance, had the carcass delivered to his home. (The producer, whom Allen identified for the author, was a close friend of Johnny Rosselli’s, whom Allen believed also attended the screening.)

  Sidney Korshak’s behind-the-scenes role in the making of The Godfather was merely one illustration of many such maneuverings. Korshak also facilitated the production of another Paramount box-office success, the 1976 remake of King Kong. In 1975, according to the film’s chronicler Bruce Bahrenburg, “Paramount was looking for another ’big’ picture in the same league as their recent blockbusters, The Godfather and The Great Gatsby.” When the project was announced in the trades that year, Universal Pictures sued the new film’s producer, Dino De Laurentiis for $25 million, claiming it alone held the rights to the remake of the original 1933 RKO production. Universal simultaneously filed suit against RKO, which had sold the rights to De Laurentiis, after it had supposedly already done the same to Universal.

  De Laurentiis countersued for $90 million, as the legal morass became more entangled with each successive day. “The legal issues surrounding the copyright to Kong,” Bahrenburg wrote, “are as puzzling as a maze in a formal British garden.” With the lawsuits casting a shadow on the film, Paramount nonetheless went ahead in early January 1976 with principal photography, and it now became imperative that the legal issues be resolved. Although the courts had failed to bring about a deal, there was, of course, one man who was famous for just that, and he already had a track record with Paramount and Universal, whose parent company, MCA, was run by his close friends Lew Wasserman and Sid Sheinberg. The master negotiator was, again, Sid Korshak.

  According to a source close to the film, a luncheon was arranged at Korshak’s Beverly Hills home between executives of Paramount and Universal (MCA). “Sidney was the court,” says the source. “In a couple hours, a deal was arrived at that made everybody happy. Sidney had done more over his lunch hour than dozens of high-priced attorneys had done in eight months.” The source, a producer at Universal, adds that Korshak was paid a $30,000 fee for his 120-minute business lunch.

  Variety later reported that Universal agreed to allow Paramount to make the film with Universal maintaining the rights to a future sequel. “I am very pleased,” De Laurentiis told the press, “and would like to thank MCA’s Lew Wasserman and Sid Sheinberg for their understanding and generosity in making such accommodations possible.” Per custom, Sid Korshak’s name never surfaced in connection with the resolution.

  Back on their home turf, Accardo and Ricca periodically surfaced to pass judgments on various individuals who threatened the Outfit’s common good. They were particularly hard on soldiers who broke the cardinal rule that forbade trafficking in narcotics. It is believed that ten drug dealers were slain in one week on Accardo’s orders; others who received the ultimate sanction included “street tax” scofflaws, who refused to pay the mandated tithe to the men who made it all possible.

  Among the more unsettling news the duo was receiving was that from Mexico, where Mooney Giancana, ever the survivor, was making a fortune. Since his settling in a walled estate called San Cristobal in Cuernavaca, Mooney had been constantly in transit, using contacts he had made over the years to set up gambling cruise ships and casinos throughout the Caribbean and Central
and South America. The former boss’ passport was stamped by the customs agents of Lebanon, Iran, Spain, Peru, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Greece, and every major European destination.

  Mooney’s gambling ventures were not only legal, but wildly successful, netting him untold millions in profit, according to the FBI’s best information. Giancana’s biographer William Brashler wrote, “Five gambling boats in particular were gold mines for Giancana.” When word of Giancana’s prosperity reached Accardo, the boss suddenly decided that Mooney was, in fact, still in the Outfit and was thus required to send a cut of his profits back to Chicago. Accardo instructed an aide, Richard Cain, who was also an FBI informant, “I want you to go to Mexico and explain the facts of life to him. I mean the facts of life, do you understand what I’m saying?”

  When G-man Roemer heard that Accardo might be gearing up to hit Mooney, he worried that the murder would bring the G down on Accardo. Roemer was clearly conflicted: He had been chasing Accardo for decades, but now when the whacking of Giancana threatened to backfire on Accardo, Roemer realized that Chicago could live with an original Outfit member, but not with another boss who might have no rules of conduct. Roemer thus arranged another neighborhood stroll with his ostensible adversary.

  “I think you know you’re the right guy for the job you’ve got,” Roemer said. “And we think so too. You keep the Outfit out of narcotics, you only do what you have to do with the heavy stuff . . . Watch out on the hit on Mo. It’ll backfire on you.”

  “Roemer, I appreciate your thoughts,” answered the boss. “There are worse guys than you around. But I don’t think there’s any good in you coming around. You do your job and I’ll do mine. Whatever is gonna happen will happen.”

  With that, the two men shook hands and went their separate ways, with Roemer not knowing that his plea had absolutely no effect on Joe Accardo’s ultimate decision.

  And Then There Was One

  On October 11, 1972, after years of successfully stalling IRS and Immigration probes, seventy-five-year-old Paul “the Waiter” Ricca was felled by a fatal heart attack, in what was becoming a cardiac epidemic among Outfit bosses. In addition to his legal entanglements and occasional rulings with Accardo, Ricca had spent his declining years in relative quiet, often lolling about the Al Italia arrivals gate at O’Hare Airport, where he would chat with deplaning Italian tourists in the language of their shared inheritance. The day after Ricca died in his own bed, his lifelong friend Joe Accardo stood by his casket and greeted well-wishers as though it were his own brother who had passed. When the wake concluded, Ricca was buried with the full rites of the Catholic Church.

  After his role in the Hughes takeover negotiations, Johnny Rosselli was imprisoned in the Friars Club scam in 1971. At sixty-five years of age, the man who had grown accustomed to tailored silk shirts was going back to prison blues, sentenced to a five-year term. He ultimately served two years and nine months, but by the time he left McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary, his relationship with Chicago was completely severed. In three years, he would have one last appearance in the headlines, although not by his own choosing.

  Although the Outfit had de facto expired with the loss of Curly Humphreys, it was now officially over. The original gang that had seized the baton from Big Al Capone had a reign of forty-one years, a duration that far eclipsed that of any other underworld enterprise in U.S. history. What followed would have Joe Accardo, the ultimate survivor, attempting to pass on the vast network of national upperworld business partners, co-opted labor unions, legitimate businesses, and corrupt politicians to another generation.

  The Chicago Underworld Today

  At its peak, the Chicago Outfit employed hundreds of full-time “associ­ates,” and thousands of soldiers, in its quest to expand its influence from coast to coast. The outposts established by Accardo et al. in locales such as Miami, Hollywood, and Las Vegas are now run instead by the local underworlds and have become so enmeshed with the legitimate sphere as to be virtually indistinguishable from their white-collar counterparts. It is unknown if these local power brokers still pay a tithe to Chicago, but it is a matter of courtesy that when an associate of the gang that founded Sin City arrives there for a spree, mountains are moved to make his stay enjoyable.

  Since the Strawman setback (see Epilogue), and the deaths of the original Outfit bosses, the Windy City underworld has greatly contracted, content to run rackets in the Cook County vicinity. Chicago crime historian Howard Abadinsky, a professor of criminal justice at Chicago’s St. Xavier University, has opined, “The Outfit is a business and they’ve learned that having a smaller core is good business.”

  Today there are believed to be as few as fifty Chicago organized-crime members in what Chicago Magazine recently called “Mob Lite.” Whereas local crews traditionally numbered seven, that figure has dwindled to a mere three, on the North, South, and West Sides. From these strongholds, the new, lean Chicago underworld continues to mine the traditional sources of treasure: gambling and labor unions (for both pension kickbacks and extortion of businesses who require their services). One such labor union believed to be controlled by Chicago’s Mob Lite is the nineteen-thousand-member Laborers’ International Union of North America, which sits on a $1.5-billion treasury. Controlling the unions allows the Mob Lite to have implicit, and usually legal, influence on work contracts. Abadinsky calls the new regime’s approach “remarkably sophisticated.”

  The new Chicago mob has gone so low-profile that experts cannot even agree on who heads it. Some well-informed mob historians believe that John “No Nose” DiFronzo, seventy-one, an Accardo-style CEO, is the current chieftain.2 Others assert that Joe “the Clown” Lombardo, another seventy-one-year-old, and a survivor of the Strawman purges, is in charge. Local G-men believe that sixty-eight-year-old Joe “the Builder” Andriacchi, a construction mogul, is running the show. Lastly, there is the strong possibility that all three run the local rackets by committee. This is the view of Professor Abadinsky. “It’s fantastic. It’s unbelievable,” Abadinsky recently said. The crime chronicler explained that mobs have often designated straw front men as boss to confuse the G. “But the Outfit has gone even further; they’ve purposely made no effort to designate anyone as boss, so no one really knows. They realized that there’s an inevitable conclusion to being a dapper don. Just look at [New York boss John] Gotti . . . He’s in jail now for the rest of his life.”

  When he was paroled in 1992, Joe Lombardo went so far as to make a public pronouncement about his lifestyle, attempting to convince the locals that they had nothing to fear from him. That year, his classified ad appeared in the Chicago Tribune: “I am Joe Lombardo, I have been released on parole from federal prison. I never took a secret oath with guns and daggers, pricked my finger, drew blood, or burned paper to join a criminal organization. If anyone hears my name used in connection with any criminal activity, please notify the FBI, and my parole officer, Ron Kumke.”

  The increased low-profile extends to the adoption of a modus operandi at greater odds than ever with the use of violence and the trafficking in narcotics. “That they’ve managed to stay out of street-level drug deals is an amazing success story for the Outfit,” Abadinsky told Chicago Magazine. “The temptation, the money, is so incredible. This is true disci­pline.” A friend of Joe Lombardo’s recently claimed that Lombardo decreed in the early nineties that murder and mayhem were now forbidden, except in the most extreme cases, and then only when given the green light from above. It has been asserted that there were only six Outfit-sphere murders between 1990 and 1994, and even that number might be exaggerated. Abadinsky told Chicago Magazine: “When you have fantastically lucrative businesses like gambling, in which victims willingly participate and no one’s getting beaten up or killed, it draws much less attention from law enforcement - no one’s complaining. And when you’re not shaking down every bookie or restaurant owner on every street corner, when you’re not peddling drugs at the street level, you don’t require as many employees.
” Wayne Johnson, the current chief investigator for the Chicago Crime Commission, says of the Outfit descendants, “They won’t take bets from just anyone, and when someone can’t pay, the penalty will often be as simple as blacklisting the guy and letting everyone in the business know that he’s a stiff.”

  Regretfully, the abhorrence of street violence by the heirs to Accardo and Humphreys is not shared by the Young Turks that comprise the inner-city cocaine-dealing gangs with ties to Russian, South American, Chinese, and Mexican drug cartels. Turf wars and drive-by shootings in sectors such as Cabrini Green are regular occurrences, with Glock Nine-toting terrorists putting Capone’s “Chicago typewriter” gunmen to shame.

  As the Chicago underworld continues to profit from its traditional sources of revenue, sectors of the city’s officialdom likewise continue to form partnerships with their alleged prey. Not only are the requisite pliant pols kept happy, but the city’s designated law enforcement officers are continually hit with a barrage of corruption allegations. In 1997, Chicago police superintendent Matt Rodriguez was forced to resign when his close friendship with convicted felon Frank Milito came to light. In 2000, retired deputy police superintendent William Han-hardt was charged with leading a nationwide band of jewel thieves who stole over $5 million in precious gems between 1984 and 1996. It has been charged that Hanhardt utilized his contacts at police headquarters to identify his jewelry salesmen targets. And when vice cops recently raided adult bookstores and peep shows owned by alleged mob associate Robert “Bobby” Dominic, they were met by the men hired by Dominic as security, the Chicago Police Tactical Unit’s Detective Joseph Laskero and Officer Anthony Bertuca, both coincidentally assigned to the raiding vice unit.

  Chicago area politicians also made news recently when nine officials of Al Capone’s Cicero were charged in 2001 with stealing and laundering $10 million from the town’s health insurance fund. Among those indicted was the town’s president, Betty Loren-Maltese. One month earlier, a federal jury awarded former Cicero police chief David Niebur $1.7 million, after he had been fired by Loren-Maltese for working with the FBI on investigating corruption in Cicero.