Double Cross

by Sam Giancana

  Double Cross

  The Explosive, Inside Story of the Mobster Who Controlled America

  Sam Giancana

  Chuck Giancana

  Copyright © 2010 by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 555 Eighth Avenue, Suite 903, New York, NY 10018.

  Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 555 Eighth Avenue, Suite 903, New York, NY 10018 or info@skyhorsepublishing.com.

  www.skyhorsepublishing.com

  10987654321

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Giancana, Sam, 1954-

  Double cross : the explosive, inside story of the mobster who controlled America / Sam and Chuck Giancana.

  p. cm.

  9781602397781

  1. Giancana, Sam, 1908-1975. 2. Criminals--United States-- Biography. 3. Mafia--United States--History--20th century. I. Giancana, Chuck, 1922- II. Title.

  HV6248.G38G53 2010

  364.1092--dc22

  [B]

  2009034644

  Printed in the United States of America

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  AUTHORS’ NOTE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  EPILOGUE

  INDEX

  Until 1969, our family was held captive by the legacy of Chicago Mob boss Sam Giancana. At that time, we mistakenly thought that by changing our last name, we could escape the very real stigma attached to being related to a notorious “gangster.” It was an act whose logic ultimately proved faulty, for it succeeded in stripping us of our rich Italian heritage, to say nothing of our friends and family. Hiding behind a mask, we denied our very existence, creating merely the illusion of normalcy. It was an illusion only we could dispel. This book is dedicated to the person who showed us that only by removing the mask can we ever truly hope to see ourselves.

  The saga of Sam Giancana, its social and historical significance aside, would never have reached a single reader without the sincere enthusiasm of our literary agent, Frank Weimann; for his tireless efforts and friendship, we are indebted. Nor could this story have come to life with such grace and power without the expert guidance of our editor, Rick Horgan; for his tremendous vision and encouragement, we are deeply grateful.

  AUTHORS’ NOTE

  In writing Double Cross, we’ve attempted to impart the essence of an enigmatic man as well as to portray, as accurately as possible, his involvement in national and global affairs as he himself related it. However, what follows is not an investigative treatise on the life and times of Sam Giancana—nor, do we believe, should it be. Too many important political revelations have gone unnoticed by the U.S. reader due to tedious journalistic research, which results, unfortunately, in tedious reading.

  Instead, the subject of Sam Giancana’s life has been approached with every attempt to engage the reader—to tell a good story—while maintaining historical accuracy. Most of the information contained in these pages is the result of conversations, held over five decades, between Sam Giancana and his brother. The balance is the natural by-product of being on the inside of Chicago’s Outfit: information gleaned from personal experience (as younger brother to Chicago’s most powerful Mob leader) and contemporaneous conversations with various Outfit members. We’ve made every attempt to relate these conversations and events as unerringly as recollection will allow over the span of more than five decades.

  What has emerged from this endeavor is something that is far greater than the sum of its parts. Double Cross is, in the end, more than a biography of a mobster, more than an exposé of organized crime, more than a steamy report featuring all the right players, more than a true crime narrative, and certainly more than a gripping political drama filled with Presidents, spies, and secret agents.

  But despite these acknowledged assets, Double Cross may still be criticized for its lively approach. Bringing Sam Giancana and his times to life in a fashion more common to the novel than the exposé, all the while presenting the Mob leader’s own point of view, has made Double Cross a disturbingly entertaining story. And a subject such as this should not, by most accounts, be entertaining. Because of this approach, however, far more people can be expected to read Double Cross, and the historical purist will be forced to concede that no amount of journalistic research could ever replace the personal perspective offered by Sam Giancana himself.

  Although most Americans have known little up until now about Sam Giancana’s impact on the nation, it’s precisely this lack of knowledge that has made writing Double Cross so necessary. Tired of the blatant misinformation and inaccuracies that have continued to be reported on topics ranging from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre to the death of Marilyn Monroe and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, we decided it was time, once and for all, to tell the story of these events as Sam Giancana related it. The resulting revelations contained in Double Cross, although shocking, speak for themselves.

  Thus, we now present what was confided to Chuck Giancana by his brother Sam Giancana as the truth of the times. It should be added that we do so with much sadness and no small measure of fear. This is a sordid and difficult legacy—and one we did not choose. It’s therefore our desire that, after completing the book, the reader will not find those bearing the Giancana name guilty, by association, with a man who so destructively changed the course of history.

  We do believe there may yet be a positive outcome to the saga told here. Once armed with a truer account of our nation’s past, the reader—no longer enslaved by an apathy borne of falsehood—may possess a renewed ability to affect America’s future. And, in the final analysis, that may be what Double Cross is all about. Perhaps the reader, like these authors, will conclude that the ultimate double cross was not perpetrated against one individual but was, more significantly, committed against the people of this nation and the citizens of the world.

  SAMUEL M. GIANCANA

  CHUCK GIANCANA

  August 1991

  CHAPTER 1

  Everything was right; it was a beautiful night for a murder. Above the rustling treetops lining the quiet Oak Park, Chicago, suburb, occasional streaks of heat lightning flashed in the night sky. Although it was after ten o’clock, the sweltering humidity hadn’t lifted; the air was thick and hot and still. A dog barked in the distance. The sounds of crickets and humming air conditioners muffled the killer’s heavy, measured footfalls as he stealthily made his way along one side of the modest bungalow and down the concrete stairs to the basement below. He felt the .22 target pistol against his waist, hidden beneath his belt, reminding him of the task at hand.

  He had nothing to fear—nothing to hide; he and his intended victim were friends. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, the heavy steel door sw
ung open as it had a thousand times before and the familiar smell of cigar smoke, mingled with sausage and garlic, slapped him with countless memories spanning a lifetime of trust and loyalty. He looked Mooney Giancana squarely in the eye, and smiled.

  If he knew what was coming, Mooney showed no fear, not the slightest inkling. Instead, he turned his back to continue nursing the fat sausages that sizzled in the pan. Hunched over the stove, he looked old from the back, like a graying hound past his prime.

  The metal of the gun had grown warmer against the killer’s spine. The six-inch tube placed over the barrel’s nose pressed insistently. Mooney had always told him timing was everything—and the killer knew it was time now. He stepped up behind his friend and in one swift motion pulled the gun from its hiding place. Pressing it against the base of Mooney’s skull, he pulled the trigger. A sharp crack rang out and his victim lurched forward and then back again, falling faceup on the floor.

  The killer stood over Mooney, a man he’d known for thirty years, and watched as he fought for air, gurgling in his own blood. And then he placed the gun into the gaping blue-lipped mouth and fired again. The bloody face shuddered; its vacant eyes fluttered and rolled. He shoved the gun under Mooney’s chin and lodged five more bullets in what was left of a brain.

  His job accomplished, the killer calmly glanced from his watch to the sausages browning nicely on the stove. Then he walked back out the door into the summer night air. And vanished.

  “Mooney’s dead.”

  The words echoed through the night, shaking Chuck Giancana into consciousness. He felt the phone go cold in his hand. He wanted to ask how and why and a million other questions, but the voice on the line continued: “It sounds like a hit . . . he was shot in the head.”

  There was no emotion in the telling, just a strange formality. True to form, even his brother’s death was a sort of business, to be reported from a safe distance, like everything else connected to the Outfit.

  For a while, Chuck just sat on the side of the bed, listening to the dial tone. He wanted it to sink in, to really feel it. It was June 19, 1975, and his childhood hero—Chicago’s great and powerful underworld boss, Sam “Mooney” Giancana—was dead. It was finally over. Once and for all.

  Two days later, Chuck attended his brother’s wake. Hundreds of reporters, curious onlookers, FBI agents, and police officers crowded the chapel parking lot, lending a carnival-like atmosphere to an otherwise somber affair. “Where’s their respect?” Chuck mumbled angrily to his wife as they rushed past the photographers and through the heavy double doors.

  Inside, two bullnecked Outfit guys were posted at the doorway. Guarding this entry was an honor, and one they weren’t taking lightly; Chuck watched as the men skillfully assessed him from a distance and then, recognition in their eyes, nodded in deference and stepped aside.

  Chuck Giancana had been to Chicago’s Montclair Chapel countless times over the years; it was popular with the Italians. Plenty of unlucky Outfit soldiers had been laid out within the grim silence of its elegantly decorated walls, but nothing prepared him for the magnitude of Mooney’s wake.

  He suddenly felt awkward, out of place—“like a whore in church,” he’d later recall—as he moved past the men and through the arched door into the chapel. A hush enveloped the red-carpeted room and the heavy scent of flowers took his breath away; he’d never seen so many at Montclair before. But this wasn’t just any Outfit wake, he reminded himself; this was Sam Giancana’s.

  Lining the chapel walls were wreaths piled on wreaths, and buried beneath them was his brother’s bronze casket; it was the most beautiful Chuck had ever seen. Torch lamps guarded each end and cast a golden glow across red roses cascading from two stately brass urns.

  Confronted with such opulence, Chuck thought a person could almost forget Mooney had been murdered. No one, it seemed, wanted to dwell on the truth—the cruelty, the brutality of his brother’s life. Or the double-dealing that had ended it.

  There were a lot of things about his brother’s life and death that bothered Chuck. But the questions that burned within him most were who and why?

  Chuck knew it had to be somebody Mooney trusted; although in the Outfit, who pulled the trigger and who ordered the hit were two very different things. The press said it was just another gangland slaying aimed at silencing a fellow mobster. But that didn’t make sense; Mooney might have been scheduled to go up before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, but he never would have talked.

  Nor had Mooney been moving in on anybody’s territory; Mooney’s territory was the world. The very idea his brother had overstepped his bounds in Chicago was the craziest thing Chuck had ever heard.

  It wasn’t that Mooney wouldn’t share the spoils of his international victories, either, as some people speculated. Mooney always took care of the guys in the Outfit. He wasn’t greedy. And he sure as hell wasn’t stupid.

  No, none of those explanations made sense to Chuck. So he guessed it had to be another angle, one he and everybody else just hadn’t thought of yet. True, it looked like a mob hit. And true, it had to have been carried out by a trusted lieutenant—which meant only a handful of Outfit guys. But something was wrong with the story. And that something was lack of a motive; the Outfit just didn’t have one.

  Shit, things sure can change.

  He’d loved Mooney more than he’d ever loved anybody in the world. And he’d hated him, too. But in spite of that, he’d always thought he was untouchable, never thought Mooney would be double-crossed like this. But who? And why? That was all he wanted to know.

  He also wished he knew what it was about the past that made it seem so goddamned good. How could anybody in their right mind call those days the good ones? It sounded crazy. But crazy or not, here he was a half century later, in 1975, wishing he could have them back. Wishing he could see his big brother walk through the door of their crumbling little flat, cussing and raising hell as he stepped over sheets of newspaper carefully placed by their sisters on the freshly scrubbed floor.

  That was before Mooney really hit it. It had all seemed like a game to Chuck back then; all he’d really known was that his brother was important, a “big guy” in something people called the Syndicate.

  Chuck laughed bitterly to himself. Had he known as a punk kid what he knew now, he would have run so far, so fast, he never would have stopped. But hell, as a kid you think you’re immortal. There aren’t any stakes too high, because nobody ever calls their marker. And there aren’t any consequences too great, because you’re too smart or too tough or too good to get caught. That’s the irony of living, he guessed. You never realize the truth until it’s too late. And a lot of good the truth does when you’re an old man and the game is over.

  For some reason, the New Year’s party Mooney threw back in 1955 came to him now—it seemed like years ago. Mooney was riding high that night and everybody who was anybody in the Outfit was there; it was a big formal blowout.

  Chuck grinned to himself. Damn, Mooney was an elegant bastard and he’d gotten pretty high that night, all right. Chuck could still see him with that can of shaving cream. What the hell had possessed Mooney to start a shaving-cream fight? The feds would never believe a story like that: Mooney Giancana, all-round fun guy. It was more like a fraternity party than a Mob celebration; before it was over, Mooney had shaving cream all over his face and tux. Then the other men had found more. Pretty soon, everybody was throwing champagne. It was wild, really wild. And it was probably the first time he’d seen Mooney laugh since his brother’s wife, Ange, had died; he’d laughed until Chuck thought he’d die laughing, right there in front of God and everybody. Well, Mooney hadn’t died laughing, goddamn it. No, some fucking bastard had gone and killed him, instead.

  Chuck took a deep breath, stepped up to the casket, and looked down at the waxen face. He suddenly realized he’d never seen his brother sleeping—at least not in a long, long time. Mooney. His childhood hero.

  He couldn’t help star
ing at Mooney’s body. What had been a tall, robust man now seemed shrunken and gnarled—reminding Chuck of the old tree he’d cut down in his backyard almost a decade before. That was the very day he’d decided to change his name. And he’d never spoken to Mooney again. Never seen him again. Not until now.

  Chuck stood before the casket, looking down at his brother, thinking about that old tree. Had the tree felt something, had it understood—in some strange way—that its days were numbered? It was a silly idea, of course.

  He’d stood by that day as the landscaper’s ax tore through the rotted bark. Once down, the old tree lost its former majesty; it looked like any other broken pile of sticks. He never would have imagined it had been so big and strong and proud. It was the same with Mooney, lying in front of him now.

  A flash of metal caught his eye. It was the silver cross of a rosary placed across Mooney’s hands. Chuck looked up from the casket.

  And suddenly, he knew.

  It wasn’t the Outfit that had wanted Mooney dead. But he knew who had. He might not be able to prove it; that didn’t even matter. All that really mattered was that he knew.

  The sound of the tree as it fell to the ground—the terrible cracking noise of bone when a bullet finds its mark—filled Chuck now with a pulsing fear. He felt his heart leap in his chest, could hear it pounding in his ears. It hadn’t been the Outfit that wanted his brother dead. Mooney had another, far more powerful ally that would have feared his testimony before the Senate committee. Over the years, its commitment to secrecy had hung over Mooney’s head like the sword of Damocles, waiting, just like the woodsman’s ax for the tree. Waiting, until it dealt its fatal blow.