by Russo, Gus
The Chicago contingent was incensed that the Commission meeting had taken place in a venue they had warned against. Giancana was especially irritated, venting to Rosselli, “I told that fuckin’ jerk in Buffalo [Stefano Magaddino] that we shouldn’t have the meeting in the goddamn place that he should have the meeting here in Chicago, and he’d never have to worry about cops with all the hotels and places we control.” Years later, Mooney had still not let up about the confab. Utilizing a telephonic wiretap placed in one of the gang’s hideouts, the FBI heard Mooney chew out Magaddino personally for the debacle in New York. “I hope you’re satisfied,” Mooney fumed. “Sixty-three of our top guys made by the cops.” To which the chastened Buffalo mobster replied, “I gotta admit you were right, Sam. It never would have happened in your place.” In the next few sentences of the FBI’s transcript, Giancana said more about the Outfit’s influence, and legit business penetration, in Chicago than a hundred editorials: “This is the safest territory in the world for a big meet. We could’ve scattered you guys in my motels; we could’ve had the meet in one of my big restaurants. The cops don’t bother us there. We got three towns just outside of Chicago with the police chiefs in our pocket. We got what none of you guys got. We got this territory locked up tight.”
The national press had a field day with the Apalachin story, an occurrence that gave a temple-pulsing headache to the director of the nation’s premier investigative unit, the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover, the portly paladin who was ever protective of his beloved Bureau’s reputation, was now being pressured into action against organized crime. For decades, Hoover had denied that crime was anything but a local problem, that just such an assemblage as Apalachin was inconceivable. Now, for the first time publicly, Hoover was seen as being behind the curve. The G’s boss moved quickly to make up for lost time. On November 27, Director Hoover fired off a memo to all the FBI field offices. The missive was headlined “Top Hoodlum Program (THP),” and it ordered the FBI to penetrate the inner sanctums of organized crime, define it, and make cases that would stick. Hoover’s number two man, Cartha DeLoach, contends that the THP had actually been formed earlier in the year and that Apalachin only energized it. Other agents, such as Chicago’s Bill Roemer disputed this.
In either event, the nation’s major cities soon saw an influx of new G-men sent to ensure the success of the THP. By far the most emphasis was placed on New York, which welcomed twenty-five new agents, and Chicago, with ten. For the next two years, the new federal arrivals went to school on organized crime. In Chicago, FBI special agents wisely sought out the counsel of the former members of the city’s Scotland Yard investigative unit, recently disbanded by Mayor Daley. Although it would take many months before the Bureau was able to acquire connected sources, and critical inside information, it would eventually do so. That success would represent a major turning point in the fortunes of the Outfit. In the short term, the Outfit’s chieftains, increasingly desirous of going legit, kept a low profile throughout most of 1958-59, confining their business expansion to the offshore gambling haven of Cuba. While Meyer Lansky had just opened his deluxe twenty-one-story, 440-room Havana Riviera Hotel Casino (the first large Cuban building to be fully air-conditioned), the Outfit expanded in other directions. With Mooney Giancana as his partner, Joe Accardo invested in Havana-based shrimp boats and processing plants, an endeavor that reaped still more millions in profit. Accardo also teamed with Diamond Joe Esposito to cut in on the lucrative Cuban sugar export business. The Outfit’s low-profile domestic activity was believed by some to have had one bloody exception: In Vegas, drastic action was taken to prevent the Outfit’s Riviera HotelCasino plum from going belly-up.
The disturbing reports from Las Vegas were unabated: Gus Green baum’s personal descent was escalating. He was deep into the abyss of heroin addiction, spending night after hazy night with prostitutes, but only after losing stacks of money at the craps tables. His dreadful condition, which allowed him only a couple hours of afternoon work, predictably spilled over into his administration of the Outfit’s Riviera business. Although Greenbaum had worked his managerial magic for a decade in Las Vegas, now for the first time his ledger sheets were awash in red ink. With the Riviera’s casino doing a good volume of business, the Chicago bosses knew it could not be losing money - unless Gus Greenbaum was skimming to support his many addictions. Consequently, Greenbaum received another visit from the dreaded Marshall Caifano.
“Sell out or you’re gonna be carried out in a box,” Caifano ordered.
After Caifano left, Greenbaum consulted with his senior staff, telling them, “I don’t want to leave. This goddamn town is in my blood. I can’t leave.” The stance was either courageous or foolhardy, given not only Greenbaum’s current troubles with the Outfit, but also that he still had not repaid them the $1 million he had borrowed for the Flamingo Hotel improvements after Bugsy’s death.
What happened next may have come as the result of a Thanksgiving, 1958, meeting of “the Four Joes,” 124 miles south of Phoenix. The site was the Grace Ranch, owned by Detroit gangster Pete “Horse Face” Licavoli. The FBI received reports that Joe Accardo had made the holiday trek to Licavoli’s outpost to confer with New York Commission bosses Joe Profaci and Joe Bonanno and his brother-in-law Joe Magliocco, all of whom had attended Apalachin. With Accardo playing host, the Four Joes feasted on barbecued steak and discussed their business in Sicilian. It was rumored that one of the business decisions they reached cost Joe Accardo $1 million - the money he had lent to Gus Greenbaum for the Flamingo, which could now never be repaid.
In the late morning of December 3, less than a week after the Grace Ranch summit, Gus Greenbaum’s housekeeper happened upon a grisly scene in the Greenbaum bedroom. Still in silk pajamas, Gus Greenbaum’s corpse lay across his bed, his head nearly severed by a vicious swipe from a butcher knife. On a sofa in the den fifty feet away was found the body of Gus’ wife, Bess, also the victim of a slashed throat. Although no one was ever charged in the murders, the killings were widely believed to represent a Bugsy redux, i.e., the fastest way to effect a managerial change in Sin City. If in fact the Greenbaum murder was sanctioned by the Four Joes, the killing of Bess was a potent departure from the Outfit’s rule that prohibited involvement of innocent family members. There is also the distinct possibility that the hired killer overstepped his authority in an effort to dispose of a witness. Chicago insiders believe that the hit was authorized by the Riviera’s Miami investors, since police learned that two suspicious men had arrived from Miami the day of the murders, only to return to Miami that very night. Lending credence to this scenario was a conversation Johnny Rosselli had with Jimmy Fratianno two years after the murders. When Fratianno brought up the Greenbaum killings, Rosselli said, “That was Meyer’s contract.” Meyer Lansky was of course well-established in Miami and was an investor with his fellow Floridians in Greenbaum’s Riviera.
Back in Phoenix, the Greenbaums’ funeral was attended by three hundred mourners, among them Senator Barry Goldwater.
All the while in Washington, the McClellan hearings churned on. For the Outfit, the tribunal was little more than a nuisance, with the gang having to dodge a spate of congressional subpoenas. Eventually, some of the bosses appeared, only to plead the Fifth Amendment ad nauseam.1
Bobby Kennedy expressed a strong initial interest in hearing from Curly Humphreys on the subject of his alleged anointment of Hoffa. According to files in the Chicago Crime Commission (CCC), Kennedy’s investigators were also interested in Humphreys’ control over the Chicago Restaurant Association and the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union. “Books of the Union have been sub-poenaed [by the committee] and restaurant owners and workers are being interviewed throughout the city,” a CCC memo noted. Chicagoans were therefore shocked when the Welshman never appeared before the McClellan Committee. The mystery was resolved on February 25, 1959, while Robert Kennedy was grilling Chicago slot king Eddie Vogel. Kennedy was essentially reading “for the record,” since Vo
gel pled the Fifth to all questions posed. While ticking off the names of various gangsters with whom Vogel was associated, Kennedy included: “Rocco Fischetti, Charles Fischetti, who is now dead; Murray ’the Camel’ Humphreys, who is now dead . . .” (Italics added.) The committee had somehow been led to believe that the very much alive Humphreys had passed on.
At least one connected Chicagoan was wise to the scam. Mayor Daley’s intelligence chief, Jack Clarke, laughed recently when the incident was brought up. Clarke had assisted the committee’s staff on occasion, as when they tried to locate Outfit leaders. “The committee had hired some local detectives to do their skip-tracing,” Clarke remembers. “Humphreys slipped them some C-notes and told them to report back that he had died. Apparently, Bobby bought it.”
Making the committee oversight even more unbelievable is that that very year, 1959, Humphreys appeared before an Illinois grand jury investigating organized crime and put on one of his seminal performances. It happened on April 1, 1959, and Curly’s performance was likely his idea of an April Fools’ Day joke. According to the April 4 edition of the Chicago American, Humphreys appeared but a pale shadow of his former self. “Humphreys has lost the dapper, erect appearance of his better days,” the paper reported. Wearing a crumpled raincoat, and feebly hobbling with a cane, Curly told onlookers, “My left leg is crippled - arthritis. I’ve gone to fifty doctors, but they haven’t been able to correct it.” For good measure, Humphreys sported a patch over his left eye. “It’s some sort of nervous disorder,” he explained. A local journalist quipped, “Humphreys is over the hump.” John Morgan, who wrote a Humphreys biography published in Wales, described what happened next, a scene that presaged the climax to the 1995 film The Usual Suspects: “Humphreys was asked a few questions: he croaked the Fifth Amendment a few times. After five minutes, the embarrassed court allowed him to leave. He shuffled into the April air, turned into Rush Street, threw away his walking stick, his raincoat and his homburg and skipped as blithely as ever from bar to bar to meet old friends. But the picture of the broken man was in every newspaper.”
Despite this widely reported incident, Kennedy and the committee proceeded as if they still believed the gangster to be dead, and made no effort to contact him.
“The Waiter” Is Unmasked
Whereas Curly Humphreys succeeded in disappearing from the G’s radar, Paul Ricca had no such luck. For over ten years, and with no fanfare, federal agents had quietly been building a case against a man they had initially believed to be chiefly a tax cheat. They soon concluded that Ricca was also an illegal alien and a murderer. While Ricca was imprisoned on the Hollywood extortion case conviction in 1945, an anonymous tipster apparently contacted the Chicago branch of the Immigration Service and informed them that Ricca had entered the United States on a false passport, using the name of Paul Maglio, a real citizen of a small Italian village of six thousand named Apricena. The investigation took a decade, but Ricca’s pursuers eventually stumbled into an astonishing coincidence: The real Paul Maglio had also emigrated to America, and to of all places, Chicago. In a strange twist, Maglio had been leading a parallel life as a laborer in the shadow of his alter ego, one of the most powerful crime bosses in the country. Adding to the bizarre tale was that Maglio had no idea he had been impersonated by Ricca. Even more, Maglio had been the town clerk of Apricena and knew that only one local family was named Maglio, and that there was only one Paul Maglio - him.
At Ricca’s Immigration trial, the surprise witness was none other than the real Paul Maglio, who delivered testimony so airtight that Ricca offered no defense. Although he was ordered deported, Ricca was supremely confidant that the order would never be enforced. Ricca boasted, “I’ll blow the lid off politics, from the White House down.” Through Curly Humphreys, Ricca demanded that all the pols who had been feasting at the gang’s trough be marshalled in his defense. In short time, Ricca’s petition to remain at liberty was remanded to the federal district court of Judge Michael L. Igoe, who was one of the many friendly officials who had marched behind the coffin of the Outfit’s patriarch Big Jim Colosimo in 1920. Ricca was said to have laughed in Igoe’s face after the judge granted him his request.
According to Humphreys’ second wife, Jeanne, Curly worked tirelessly to have the deportation order quashed, putting in long hours in legal research and strategizing. The work on the immigration issue proved successful, but the feds merely fell back on their charge of last resort, tax evasion. On this charge, even Curly could not obtain a complete dismissal, and on July 1, 1959, Ricca was sent to Terre Haute to start a ten-year sentence, later reduced to three years, with twenty-seven months ultimately served.2 The real Paul Maglio, who said he had testified to prove that not all Italians are lawbreakers, became a neighborhood hero, still walking fourteen blocks back and forth to work every day.
Ricca’s imprisonment caused him to miss by three days the wedding reception Mooney threw for his daughter Bonnie and her husband, Tony Tisci (Congressman Libonati’s secretary) at Miami Beach’s Fontainebleau Hotel. The muted affair, by gang standards, was held on the very day most mob watchers were in River Forest gawking over Joe Accardo’s Fourth of July barbecue. Giancana purposely kept the marriage low-key, after the fallout from the much more lavish reception he had thrown for another daughter, Antoinette, three months earlier. That affair, which had featured more than seven hundred guests at Chicago’s LaSalle Hotel, had drawn local headlines and become fodder for questions put to Mooney two months later when the boss appeared before the McClellan Committee. Mooney, therefore, decided to keep Bonnie’s wedding off the press’ radar. Poor Bonnie was thus prevented from receiving the same kind of envelope largesse as her sister, who collected over $200,000 at her gala. “I never saw most of the money,” Antoinette recently said. “I gave it to my father for safekeeping and never saw it again, except for a few thousand dollars he gave me for a down payment on my house.”
Cat and Mouse with the G
Although green to the world of the Outfit, Chicago’s newly assigned G-men were under such pressure from Hoover that they worked overtime until learning who the leaders were, and where to find them. With Ricca already in “college” and Accardo lying low, the agents became most interested in Curly Humphreys and Mooney Giancana. FBI men like Ralph Hill, John Roberts, Bill Roemer, Marshall Rutland, John Bassett, and Vince Inserra hit the streets, attempting to tail their targets. In many instances, their efforts played out like a Keystone Kops comedy, in which the hoods used their well-honed skills to toy with the agents. Local G-men remember one humorous incident in which they employed a full-court press on Mooney Giancana, dispatching nine cars to his home one morning, intent on following his every move. Little did they know they were about to match driving skills with the most talented wheelman from the Patch. When Giancana drove off, he took his pursuers on a labyrinthine route, causing them to bark excitedly to one another on their radios, at times nearly colliding with one another. After successfully losing all nine cars, Mooney snuck up on one of them from behind, then stopped alongside the agent’s car and chided, “Here I am.”
On another occasion, Curly Humphreys saw that on one particularly hectic day the G was following him everywhere he went, from a newsstand, to an attorney’s office, to a restaurant, to a hardware store, etc. Eventually tiring of the game, Curly had his driver stop the car, then alighted and walked back to the startled agents parked behind him. “Look, this is silly,” Curly said. “Instead of wasting all this gasoline, why don’t I just send my driver home and go with you guys. That way you’ll know exactly where I am at all times.” Humphreys then opened the back door of the federal car, got in, and was chauffeured for the rest of the day by the federal government. Needless to say, the agents took a grudging liking to the disarming Welshman, as did almost everyone else who had personal contact with him. The charm he had first cast as a teen on his court-appointed adjudicator was as potent as ever. On one occasion, agents followed Joe Accardo and Curly Humphreys into a
movie theater as they took in a matinee of the 1959 film Al Capone. Sitting inconspicuously behind the bosses, the agents eavesdropped as the old chums critiqued the adaptation of their patriarch’s career. “No. No, it wasn’t like that at all,” they said repeatedly, nudging each other.
Unbeknownst to the G-men, their routines were also being scrutinized - by the Outfit. The gang knew one agent, Bill Roemer, coached his son’s Little League team and had determined the boy’s practice schedule, so they coordinated their most important gatherings around little Roemer’s baseball. One gang member recalled walking to a meeting with Accardo and worrying about Roemer’s surveillance. “He’ll be gone by three,” Joe replied confidently.
In his memoir, Bill Roemer makes much of the “Family Pact” he reached with Curly, whom he called Hump. At the time, according to Roemer, his wife, Jeannie, had been receiving threatening phone calls. “Your husband is a dead man,” they would whisper before hanging up. In addition, Roemer’s two sons were seen followed to school by two mysterious men in a car. Wisely, Roemer sought out Curly to intervene. One morning, Roemer approached Humphreys outside his current residence at 4200 Marine Drive and introduced himself.
“Yes, Mr. Roemer, I know who you are. What can I do for you?” Humphreys asked.
Roemer explained what had been going on, and Curly replied, “Mr. Roemer, I understand your situation. I’ll look into it.” Roemer suggested ground rules that essentially stated, “You stay away from our families and we’ll stay away from yours.” Curly agreed to take the matter up with his associates and get back to Roemer. A week later, Humphreys reported, “Bill, this was the work of a misguided individual. I have spoken to him, and you can rest assured your family will have no more problems.” With that, the two amicable adversaries shook hands on the Family Pact. However, when Humphreys later learned that the G had given the press the name of Frankie Ferraro’s mistress, Humphreys and Roemer’s mutual friend and restaurant owner Morrie Norman was asked to set up another meeting.