by Russo, Gus
During the early years of Daley’s two-decade reign, “Da Mare” used a number of trusted friends as liaisons to the Outfit. As noted again by the FBI, one of these conduits was a childhood friend from the Eleventh Ward named Thomas Munizzo. Daley’s FBI file, obtained by Cohen and Taylor, stated: “Munizzo reportedly collected vast sums of money from the hoodlum element for the Daley mayoralty campaign . . . [Munizzo] was considered the contact man . . . between the hoodlums and the mayor’s office for favors . . . with respect to gambling or the crime Syndicate.” The Bureau further noted that Daley also utilized his former law partner, William Lynch, as a “go-between” for the Outfit and City Hall.
When Daley appeared at the Outfit-controlled First Ward Democratic Headquarters, he actually boasted about his record of giving official jobs and civil contracts to Outfit associates. “I’ve been criticized for doing this,” Daley told the overflowing crowd, “but I’ll make no apologies. I’ll always stand alongside the man with a criminal record if I think he deserves another chance.” Unlike the cocaine-pushing gangs that would succeed the Outfit, the first wave of immigrant hoods were anxious to legitimize their lives, and Daley decided to give them a chance to do it. Predictably, the feeling was mutual. Speaking on behalf of the Outfit, Curly Humphreys was overheard years later on hidden FBI bugs telling Johnny D’Arco, “This mayor has been good to us.” To which D’Arco replied, “And we’ve been good to him. One hand washes the other.”
It would be easy to mistake Daley’s tolerance of the Outfit for simple corruption. However, the more accurate assessment appears to be that Daley understood better than most that the sooner the hoods were promoted up the social ladder, the sooner they would disappear into the landscape much the same way as the Founding Fathers who institutionalized the enslavement from the African subcontinent, or the westward explorers who orchestrated the demise of more than six million Native Americans, or the aging robber barons who defrauded untold millions of their life savings. Why, Daley may have wondered, should Chicago’s greedy frontiersmen be treated any different from their predecessors? Mayor Daley seemed to know innately what Kefauver had failed to grasp, and what Professor David Bell of Columbia University had labeled “the process of ethnic succession”: The violence associated with the process was, at least in the case of organized crime, overwhelmingly intramural, and when it spilled over, it seemed to dissipate once the gang obtained what it believed was its rightful share of the American Dream. As Daley once responded to a question about his indulgence of the Outfit, “Well, it’s there, and you know you can’t get rid of it, so you have to live with it.”
The Riviera
With another adherent ensconced in Chicago’s mayoral office, the Outfit turned its attention back to the Silver State. As Daley was solidifying his power in 1955, the gang made its first big move in Las Vegas when Joe Accardo and the Outfit secretly financed the $10-million Riviera Hotel, with a group of Miami investors as fronts. The hotel’s silent investors also included Meyer Lansky. In an effort to guarantee the casino’s success, Accardo decided to turn to an old friend with a proven track record, Gus Greenbaum.
Greenbaum, in failing health, had recently stepped down from the ownership of the Flamingo, taking with him the casino’s ledgers, which held the identities of the Flamingo’s Gold Club high rollers. After burying the valuable dockets in the Nevada desert, Greenbaum retired in Arizona. In Phoenix, Gus became pals with the state’s junior senator, who led a shadow life cavorting with underworld characters. Known on the Las Vegas Strip as a “swinger,” Senator Barry Goldwater (ne Goldwasser) had been a frequent visitor to Greenbaum’s Flamingo. Supposedly, a Greenbaum aide helped ghostwrite one of Goldwater’s speeches.
Greenbaum had scant time to settle into his new life before Accardo and Jake Guzik visited him in Phoenix and ordered him out of retirement. Greenbaum initially refused the edict, but a few nights after Accardo and Guzik took their leave, Greenbaum learned that his sister-in-law, Leone, had received a telephone threat. “ ’They’ were going to teach Gus a lesson,” she told her husband. In a few days, Leone was found dead smothered in her bed, and Gus Greenbaum packed for Vegas to manage the Riviera.
Most likely ordered by Accardo, Greenbaum drove back out into the desert, where he dug up and dusted off the ledgers containing the priceless list of Flamingo Gold Card members. With the Flamingo list as a foundation, Greenbaum’s secretaries were soon busied with mailing out new memberships for the exclusive, well-comped, high rollers’ club at the Riviera.
But the Riviera saga was far from over. In an incredible turn of events, Gus Greenbaum committed a cardinal offense when he chose another mutual friend of his and Goldwater’s to be the entertainment director for the hotel. Often seen with Goldwater in the senator’s private plane was a man with extensive knowledge of the entertainment industry, William “Al” Nelson. As one of Goldwater’s first contributors when he ran for Congress (to the tune of $5,000), Nelson and his wife, Laurie, were among the senator’s closest friends. Probably unbeknownst to the senator, Nelson had been in hiding from the Outfit for eleven years. Since he had stool-pigeoned the gang’s hierarchy in the Hollywood extortion case, former pimp Willie Bioff had assumed his wife Laurie Nelson’s maiden name. For unknown reasons, Bioff ended up in Phoenix, where he bought a small farm and hooked up with Goldwater and Greenbaum, who, without informing his Outfit superiors, hired Bioff-Nelson as the Riviera’s entertainment director.
Sometime that year, one of the Outfit’s most notorious hit men, Marshall Caifano, aka John Marshall, was staying at the Riviera when he spotted and ID’d the accursed Willie Bioff. Caifano promptly reported back to Accardo, who confronted the addiction-addled Greenbaum. With a straight face, Greenbaum explained that he had brought in Bioff for the express purpose of keeping down the entertainers’ salaries - something with which Bioff was much experienced. But Accardo would have none of it. In short time, Greenbaum was paid a visit by Caifano, who recited Accardo’s decree: “Get rid of that fink or else.” When Willie’s dismissal was not forthcoming, someone decided it was time for the former whore-beater to pay the price for selling out his fellows. On November 4, 1955, Willie “Al Nelson” Bioff left the front door of his Phoenix home and got behind the wheel of his pickup truck parked in the family driveway. Police later determined that a dynamite bomb had exploded when Willie turned the ignition, sending parts of Willie and his truck all over his Phoenix neighborhood. The incident illustrated something Johnny Rosselli said to a fellow hood: “Us fucking Italians ain’t human. We remember things too long, hold these grudges inside of us until they poison our minds.”
Bioff’s murder stunned Gus Greenbaum, whose personal demons now grew to include heroin addiction. Greenbaum’s “horse” problem only exacerbated his health woes, poor gambling abilities, and his growing infatuation with prostitutes. And his decline would only be tolerated for so long by his Chicago taskmasters.
The Stardust
The Riviera would not be the Outfit’s only Las Vegas expansion point in 1955. Johnny Rosselli’s old bootlegging pal Tony Cornero would (unintentionally) provide the gang another lucrative opportunity in the casino game. In Los Angeles, Cornero had apparently been stewing over the Sin City successes of gangs from Chicago, New York, Cleveland, and elsewhere. After all, the hotel-casino concept had been Cornero’s in the first place with the Meadows, and had it not been for the depressed economy of the 1930s, Tony Cornero would now be king of the Vegas Strip. After the Meadows closed, Cornero had returned to Los Angeles, where he made a fortune with his offshore gambling ships, the flagship being the 350-crew Rex. When the boom returned to Las Vegas, Cornero took his fortune there and announced that he was finally going to build his dream hotel in the heart of the Strip, the 1,032-room Stardust.
Cornero’s concept for the Stardust once again displayed his visionary genius. He rightly concluded that elegant joints like Moe Dalitz’s Desert Inn had a finite clientele, whereas a casino designed for the low-roller masse
s would attract gamblers by the busload. Although the hotel’s frontage would boast the Strip’s largest (216 feet long) and most garish lighted sign (7,100 feet of neon tubing and more than 11,000 bulbs), the hotel itself would be little more than a warehouse, where guests could stay for a mere five dollars per night. The Stardust’s all-you-can-eat buffets and practically free lodging would become a Sin City staple.
A variety of factors caused Cornero’s Stardust dream to go bust. Complicating the typical Las Vegas cost overruns was Cornero’s own gambling addiction, which quickly depleted his bank account. Just weeks before the scheduled August 1955 opening of the hotel, Cornero learned he was out of money, unable to pay staff or purchase furnishings and gambling instruments. On July 31, Cornero paid a morning visit to Moe Dalitz’s Desert Inn, where it is believed Cornero hoped Dalitz would make him an emergency loan. According to one telling, Dalitz met with Cornero for several hours; however, Dalitz ultimately declined to get involved. On his way out of the Desert Inn, Cornero could not fight the temptation to hit the craps tables, where he went quickly into the hole for $10,000. When Dalitz’s crew not only refused to extend his marker, but had the audacity to charge him for his drinks (a monumental affront in the pits), Cornero went ballistic. Within minutes, sixty-year-old Tony Cornero was clutching his chest with one hand even as he clutched the dice with the other. He was dead of a heart attack, with less than $800 to show for the estimated $25 million he had made in his lifetime.
The story is then picked up by the Outfit’s traveling emissary, Johnny Rosselli, who promptly reported the new vacancy back to his Chicago bosses. According to the files of the LAPD’s intelligence unit, which had been tailing Rosselli for years, “Mr. Smooth” had been making the trek to Sin City regularly, cutting deals, and brokering complex intergang partnerships. George Bland, a retired Las Vegas-based FBI man, disclosed that one of the Bureau’s illegally placed bugs revealed that one major casino had the skim divided twelve different ways. One partner later called Johnny “the Henry Kissinger of the mob,” and Rosselli’s business card from the period said it all, and simply: “Johnny Rosselli, Strategist.” Rosselli’s biographers described his role in Las Vegas as “nebulous, but crucial . . . He maintained open channels to all the different out-of-town factions, as well as to the California-based operators downtown, and served as a conduit to political fixers like Bill Graham in Reno, and Artie Samish, known in California political circles as ’the Governor of the Legislature.’” Rosselli was soon living full-time in Vegas, dividing his time between his suites at Dalitz’s Desert Inn and the Outfit’s Riviera. In their 1963 book, The Green Felt Jungle, authors Reid and Demaris described a typical Rosselli day:
Rosselli spends his leisure hours (that is, all the waking hours of his day) at the Desert Inn Country Club. He has breakfast there in the morning, seated at a table overlooking the eighteenth green. Between golf rounds, meals, steam baths, shaves and trims, Twisting, romancing, and drinking, there is time for private little conferences at his favorite table with people seeking his counsel or friendship. It may be a newsman, a local politician, a casino owner, a prostitute, a famous entertainer, a deputy sheriff, a U.S. Senator, or the Governor of Nevada.
As Johnny remarked to a fellow hood, “I’m now the man in Vegas.”
Armed with the news of Cornero’s cardiac, Rosselli flew to Chicago, where he met with Accardo, Humphreys, and Guzik at Meo’s Restaurant. It was decided that the gang would finish construction and assume the debt of the Stardust in a partnership with Cleveland’s contribution to Vegas, Moe Dalitz. However, the Outfit would run the operation. When the time came to name a front for the operation, Chicago brought in an old friend, a gifted con man who owed Humphreys and Accardo a huge favor: Jake “the Barber” Factor. Five years later, Johnny Rosselli described the arrangement to longtime friend, and L.A. mafioso, Jimmy Fratianno: “Jake Factor, an old friend of Capone . . . shit, I used to see him when he came to the Lexington to see Al . . . took over and finished building the place. So I went to Sam [Giancana] and told him we could move into this joint. Listen, Jake owed Chicago a big one. Moe Dalitz wanted in on it and so it’s a fifty-fifty deal.”
Over the next two years, Factor and the Outfit poured money into the Stardust operation, while Jake continually lobbied the newly formed Gaming Control Board for a casino license, where he was consistently rebuffed. Before the Stardust could open for business, the Outfit had to assign someone who could obtain a casino license and, per custom, simultaneously watch over Jake Factor. Joe Accardo and his new front, Mooney Giancana, once again made the seventeen-hundred-mile journey to Las Vegas to make the appointment. Taking Factor aside, Joe whispered the name John Drew in his ear. As a former Capone crew member, Drew had already obtained, thanks to a few greased palms, a license to operate the Outfit’s Bank Club in Reno, where he watched over front man Bill Graham. In subsequent years, Chicago FBI agent Bill Roemer witnessed Drew having a business dinner at the St. Hubert’s Grill with his sponsor, Curly Humphreys. Johnny Rosselli later named other Stardust “supervisors” brought in for good measure: “[Sam Giancana] sent Al Sachs and Bobby Stella to help [Drew]. Dalitz’s got Yale Cohen to watch his end. But Sam’s got a sleeper in there, Phil Ponti, a made guy from Chicago. A real sharp operator.”
When the Stardust finally opened for business on July 2, 1958, it proved well worth the effort. After the grand opening, attended by guests of honor then senator and future president Lyndon Baines Johnson and his trusty sidekick Bobby Baker, the money began arriving in Chicago almost faster than it could be counted. “They’re skimming the shit out of that joint,” Rosselli later told Fratianno. “You have no idea how much cash goes through that counting room every day. You, your family, your uncles and cousins, all your relatives could live the rest of their lives in luxury with just what they pull out of there in a month. Jimmy, I’ve never seen so much money.” Coming from a man who had lived though the phenomenal profits of the bootlegging era, this speaks volumes about the lure of Las Vegas. Carl Thomas, an expert on the skim, estimated that the Stardust was contributing $400,000 per month to the Outfit’s coffers. Rosselli would rightfully brag for years, “I got the Stardust for Chicago,” and for his role in setting up this windfall for the Outfit, Johnny was also well compensated. “I’m pulling fifteen, twenty grand under the table every month,” Rosselli said.
On the Home Front
Back in Chicago, the year 1956 brought with it the regular irksome skirmishes with city officials not on the gang’s payroll. At the time, many Chicago police were playing a dangerous game, harassing Outfit members to increase their bargaining power with the hoods; i.e., the gang must pay more to relieve the pressure. According to a close friend, the ailing Jake Guzik was tormented more than most. “Those fucking cops used to run him up and down ten flights of stairs, hoping he’d have a heart attack,” the friend said. “They wouldn’t stop until he put them on his payroll.” On January 13, while the police were attempting to probe gambling at the gang’s Owl Club in Calumet City, Humphreys and Guzik were arrested on the Near North Side. The detention was meant as another vexation, and the duo were quickly released. Six days later, both men were again brought downtown, and this time they were charged with disorderly conduct, another harassment that was rarely upheld. When the case was brought before Judge John Pope, the police were chastened instead. “I’ve seen too many of these cases where the police file DC charges against persons they just want to question,” Pope scolded. “You filed false charges and you are trifling with the court.” Pope then advised that Curly and Jake had the right to sue the city for false arrest. Of course Curly Humphreys’ credo dictated that discretion was the better part of valor, but Guzik promptly enlisted the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a $50,000 “infringement of civil liberties” suit against the city. But before the case could be decided, five decades of playing cat and mouse with the cops took its toll on the sixty-nine-year-old Guzik.
When heart failure claimed th
e Outfit’s strongest link to Al Capone on February 21,1956, it happened fittingly at the very spot where Guzik had disbursed official bribery uninterrupted since the 1920s - his table at St. Hubert’s Olde English Grill on Federal Street. Also appropriately, with Guzik at the time was the man who had inherited his role as the Outfit’s political shaman, Curly Humphreys, who had by now secured the hidden ownership of the St. Hubert’s. Humphreys’ FBI case officer described what happened next: “Not wanting the body to be found in a mob hangout, Murray Humphreys, who had been with him, had his men carry Guzik’s body to his home in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side, where the amazed widow was instructed to advise police that he had died there.”