Double Cross

by Sam Giancana

  Chuck turned from the casket. He had his answer.

  CHAPTER 2

  For most children, a tree stands as a sentinel, a rite of passage. A gauge by which to judge time and the changing seasons; one’s height in relation to its knotted trunk; one’s strength and agility in climbing its perilous branches. Over time, it becomes a haven for games of hide-and-seek, a permanent carving board displaying life’s accomplishments and passions. But for six-year-old Mo Giancana, the big oak tree behind the family’s two-story flat on West Van Buren stood as a different symbol. . . .

  Antonio Giancana’s dark eyes focused glaringly on the small child cowering in front of him. The boy plainly required more discipline; the beatings Antonio had meted out daily had had no effect on him. He was more rebellious than ever.

  Like the old mare that dumbly pulled Antonio’s cart loaded down with fruits and vegetables along the streets of Chicago’s Little Italy, little Mo could also be broken, beaten into passive submission. A man’s will was stronger than a mere child’s, Antonio had declared to his wife, and he was determined to teach his son this fundamental truth.

  Without another word, he gathered up the struggling boy, carried him into the twilight, and chained him to the towering oak that stood behind their sagging tenement. There he proceeded to beat his tethered prisoner with a razor strap until Mo turned bloody and knelt on the ground, begging him to stop. Then Antonio went inside to his dinner of pasta and vegetables, leaving the whimpering child to face his pain and the encroaching nightfall alone.

  The moon was up and full in the sky before Antonio unchained Mo and dragged him inside. From that night forward, the skinny little six-year-old slept on the floor in the corner of the kitchen and would come to know the oak tree well.

  Faced with such brutality, there are some children whose character will slip into oblivion, to be lost forever. But others reach inside themselves and find an anger so deep, a rage so violent and strong, that it never subsides. And instead, with each fresh inequity, a sense of self is fanned that can’t be extinguished. That fire blazed within Mo Giancana.

  Although he celebrated his birthday on June 15, records show he was born on May 24, 1908, to Antonio and Antonia Giancana, in Chicago’s Little Italy, a neighborhood known as the Patch, and christened Momo “Jimmy” Salvatore Giancana. Antonio called the little boy Mo, and, if nothing else, was proud to have a son.

  The Giancana family was little different from the other Italian families who squeezed between Taylor and Mather streets. It was a neighborhood—once the sole domain of the immigrant Chinese—that bordered row after row of thriving, glittering brothels lining the riverfront district known as the Levee. Those who settled there were largely from the southern provinces of Italy or the island of Sicily; Antonio and his wife were natives of the Sicilian village of Castelvetrano.

  Between 1890 and 1910, the Italian population in Chicago swelled to more than forty thousand, and their numbers continued to grow until the olive-skinned strangers spilled over into streets and ghettos once occupied mostly by Irish and Jews. Resentment and prejudice soon followed. For an Italian—a dago, a greaseball, as the Irish called these Sicilians—to cross over the imaginary line that separated the Patch from the Irish neighborhood on Halsted Street meant certain retribution from the burly, ruddy-faced mick immigrants settled there. Consequently, sidewalk brawls and bloody battles broke out in the streets bordering the Patch almost daily.

  It was an easy transition for these frightened immigrants to view the Irish coppers—who did nothing to intervene in the ethnically inspired skirmishes and showed little if any sympathy for a battered dago—as the enemy. They’d brought little else with them from the Old Country save their culture—a peculiar assortment of odd customs and habits—which had at its heart an enduring mistrust and fear of those in power and the laws they made. In Sicily, their ancestors had borne the hardships imposed by a system of government that hailed back to the days of feudalism—one in which roaming bands of armed men both protected and punished at will. To Italian immigrants, Chicago police harkened back to those times, serving only to punish. And without the authorities for protection, the Italians turned to each other for support and safety in the New World, clinging to their heritage with all the tenacity of a drowning man to his ship.

  The hills and valleys of Sicily may have held little more than rocky, barren soil—hardly an opportunity for future agrarian wealth—but the factories of the Industrial Revolution that regurgitated soot and fumes over the Patch presented even less attraction for Antonio and his friends and neighbors. Had the fat-cat Anglo industrialists welcomed the cheap labor the Italians represented, which most did not, it was still unlikely that men like Antonio Giancana would have been drawn to heavy industry’s dark and stinking confines.

  A people accustomed to making their living under the sun and at the mercy of the elements, they were slow to abandon their culture; many had been peddlers in the Old Country, and, once in the Patch, they quickly purchased carts and set off into the squalid streets to hawk a variety of Old Country favorites: popcorn, fruits and vegetables, lemon ice, and corn on the cob.

  For pleasure, Antonio Giancana and his neighbors gathered in the evenings with their wives and children to play bocci and laugh and tell jokes and sip homemade wine—as their ancestors had done for centuries in some distant yet still-beloved village.

  As more immigrants came, the Patch became a riot of smells and sounds and colors: a place where garbage, vegetables, and spoiled meats rotted beneath teeming flies on the wooden sidewalks, and packs of stray yellow dogs fought for a taste of the bloated horses and manure that steamed and stank for days in the mud-filled streets. Disease was quick to spread. Few children lived and fewer thrived.

  The two Giancana children somehow managed to survive in the neighborhood’s harsh environment, but Antonio considered his son—unlike frail, unassuming Lena, Mo’s older sister, whom Antonio adored—a curious and troublesome child. Mo’s stubborn independence and inquisitive nature were viewed by his father not as redeeming qualities but, rather, as confirmation that Mo was rebellious and meddlesome.

  When Mo’s mother, Antonia, died—as had so many other women in the Patch—from a miscarriage on March 14, 1910, the boy was not yet two. Precocious, he seemed to understand that he’d lost his only human ally, and any childhood spark he possessed was quickly buried with her; little Mo became sullen and quiet.

  Antonio, a traditional Italian male, didn’t waste any time seeking out another wife, one who could bear more children and care for the two he already had. He expected no more or less than any other man in the Patch: a clean house, proper meals on the table, and a child every two years. And with those expectations, he married Mary Leonardi.

  After Mary joined the Giancana household, Mo fell asleep to the nightly sounds of Antonio’s violent outbursts and the piteous cries of his battered stepmother. What the woman did to incur his father’s wrath, he never really knew.

  She wasn’t a beauty, but rather a solemn-faced woman resigned to her lot in life. Mary became a stoic and dutiful wife, giving birth to her first child, Antoinette, in 1912; then to another, Mary, in 1914, when six-year-old Mo was just entering first grade at Reese Elementary.

  Antonio turned to the oak tree with regularity over the next four years, believing in his ignorance that the chain and beatings he delivered would eventually tame his unruly son. He also looked to the stern disciplinarians at Reese Elementary for added support, making sure new teachers were fully aware that Mo was a troublemaker and sadly in need of reform.

  The legacy his father bestowed on him became a self-fulfilling prophecy. By the time he was ten years old, and in fifth grade in 1918, Mo’s teachers pronounced him a hopeless delinquent. He was sent to St. Charles Reformatory for six months, where, Antonio believed, the boy would learn his lesson. If not, he warned him, he’d take care of him when he returned.

  In the late spring of 1918, Mo did come back—but not to his father
’s household, now laboring under the strain brought on by the births of two more children, Josephine and Vicki, nor to the grim walls of Reese Elementary.

  Instead, Mo slept mostly in abandoned cars or beneath back porches. He wandered the streets and stole food from vendors. Thus, it was inevitable, as he skulked up and down the streets of Chicago throughout 1919 and 1920, that little Mo Giancana would finally find a home within a gang.

  They were a band of crazy dago punks from the Patch, a gang called the 42s. They’d started out with Joey Colaro—a smooth-talking tough guy they nicknamed “Babe Ruth”—as their leader. At first, Colaro, along with Vito Pelleteiri, Mibs Gillichio, Pete Nicastro, and Louis Pargoni, stole clothes from lines around the Patch and made money selling them on street corners. When petty crime lost its luster, the boys turned to stealing “shorts”—cars left unattended, which they could either strip for parts or sell outright. But they soon graduated from stolen goods to bombings and murder, developing a reputation as the meanest, most vicious dagos anywhere around.

  Historians would later suggest that the gang came to the name 42 one day when one of the more literate of their group recounted the story of Ali Baba and the forty thieves. And although there probably were never more than twenty members of the gang at any given time—someone was always getting killed or being sent to the reformatory in St. Charles—the name 42 stuck.

  The people of the Patch called gang members “smartheads” and spoke of them in a manner that conveyed a strange mixture of awe, respect, and fear. They frankly admired the gang for its ability to outwit the mick coppers, who they believed interfered in the affairs of Italians. Like the 42s, the immigrants neither trusted nor revered outside authorities, but felt mostly resentment and contempt for their presence in the Patch. The young gang members might break the American laws, might even settle disputes with murder and violence, but to the people in their neighborhood, they were a welcome reminder of the type of law and order they were accustomed to in the Old Country. Hence, the 42 gang was more often extolled by Italians than railed against.

  Much to their glee, the 42s were also notorious outside the neighborhood, making newspaper headlines by terrorizing the streets in souped-up cars. They became well known for their ability to “whip” corners—a getaway method in which a driver took a corner as fast as possible on two wheels.

  Mo, a homeless and starving boy with little else to occupy his time, joined up with this unsavory cast of characters. He quickly decided to win a place of leadership and respect among his fellow gang members and practiced his skill at whipping corners at every opportunity, using barrels set up in alleys as a makeshift obstacle course. It wasn’t long before skinny little Mo had earned a well-deserved reputation as the 42s’ best wheelman.

  Skills like Mo’s often came in handy. There could be no doubt that a hair-raising getaway was preferable to being “pinched.” If that happened, they had to come up with enough money to pay off, or “fix,” the coppers. Gang leader Joey Colaro was considered king of the fixers and took monthly collections of ten dollars from each gang member to cover such inevitabilities.

  It didn’t take Mo long to realize that the coppers represented not the fair hand of justice but, rather, a hand outstretched, looking for a payoff. If there was a copper or judge who couldn’t be bought, for the right amount of money, he and his friends hadn’t found one.

  The going rate to have charges dropped by a judge or police captain was five hundred dollars—more than most of them could muster. This forced the boys to turn to their parents, who barely had enough money to survive as it was. But no decent Italian family could completely turn its back on a son in trouble, no matter how heinous the crime, and consequently, if they were arrested, most 42s found themselves out on the streets again in no time at all, thanks to a payoff made by their debt-ridden parents.

  Common people might believe the police were on the side of good and right, but not Mo and his friends in the 42; they knew better. All that separated cops from robbers were a few dollar bills; it was that simple. There was no honor, no virtue; those ideals were the stuff of fairy tales. Reality in the Patch dictated a different code of survival, and Mo, already calloused by life at the tender age of twelve, embraced that code as his own.

  His friends were a Mad Hatter’s assortment of screwed-up kids and sociopaths whose limited choice of role models consisted of either hardened criminals, celibate priests, or poverty-stricken parents who couldn’t speak English and knew little if anything of the new American laws and mores.

  It wasn’t a hard choice for members of the 42, for as Mo Giancana said, “We’re not a bunch of fuckin’ rum-dums.” They fashioned themselves after the more visible gangsters, such as whoremaster Big Jim Colosimo or his nephew, Johnny Torrio; the young Al Capone and his cronies; or the Black Hand sugar baron, Diamond Joe Esposito. These were men who had money and power and women—men to whom even their uneducated parents bowed with respect.

  With that in mind, 42 gang members became gross caricatures of their heroes, and did their best to go them one better, dreaming up outrageous schemes for burglaries, sexual assaults, and, should they deem it appropriate, murder. If parents were aware of their sons’ bizarre activities, they gave no indication, but went stoically about the business of survival.

  When bored, Mo and the rest of the gang hung out at Goldstein’s Delicatessen, Mary’s Restaurant, or Bonfiglio’s Pool Hall. For fun, they turned to the sport and refinement of exquisite torture—Mo was particularly good at entertaining fellow members with new methods of bludgeoning the numerous cats that slinked along the neighborhood’s alleys.

  For sexual release, gang members excelled in gang shags—gang rapes—or engaged in elaborate public “pulling” contests, masturbatory challenges to determine who could ejaculate first or the farthest.

  By the time he was thirteen, in 1921, Mo had become known as the craziest, the “mooniest” of them all, earning him the nickname “Mooney.” They said the hollow-eyed boy would do anything on a dare, anything for two bits, a beer, or a cigarette. Nothing mattered, nothing except this newfound family and winning its esteem.

  Street gangs had been a fact of life in the United States long before the turn of the century. Ethnic lines were typically drawn between neighborhoods, and in response, gangs of brawling young men formed for protection.

  The oldest gangs in Chicago, the Black Hand, dated back to 1890, when the Italians were congregated between Oak and Taylor streets and Grand and Wentworth avenues. They had mystically inspired names such as the Camorra, the Mysterious Hand, and the Secret Hand, but unquestionably the most ferocious were the Sicilian Black Hands.

  They were not a secret society or sect whose rites were closely guarded by the Italian people, but, instead, a loosely organized means of inciting terror for profit. The Black Hand traditions were brought over from the feudalistic Old Country, and featured as core elements kidnapping and extortion. The Black Hand protected its loyalists and severely punished its rebellious detractors.

  Innocent fellow immigrants became its chief prey and provided the fodder necessary for expansion. Local police authorities—paid off by wealthy Black Hand dons—turned a deaf ear to any cries for justice from the Italian citizenry.

  By 1900 in Chicago, several other gangs of differing ethnic persuasions emerged. The Irish Market Street gang had become a strong force by 1902 and even had a juvenile division—the Little Hellions, with an up-and-coming young choirboy named Charles Dion O’Banion as its leader. Another Irish band of toughs, the Valley gang, controlled the bloody Maxwell Street section and concentrated on burglaries, pickpocketing, and, eventually, contract murder.

  But the most formidable Chicago Black Hand gangs centered around two Italians: Diamond Joe Esposito and Big Jim Colosimo. Diamond Joe had established himself as padrone, or boss, as early as 1905 by utilizing the familiar Old Country tactics of extortion and payoffs to gain political and union ties. Big Jim Colosimo took a different and—wisely—non
competitive road to fortune through high-class prostitution, establishing a widespread enterprise of gilded, red-velvet brothels that generated millions of dollars and considerable influence.

  Both Italians operated cafés; Colosimo’s became a hangout for fast-living celebrity idols of the day such as Enrico Caruso, George M. Cohan, Al Jolson, and Sophie Tucker. Esposito’s Bella Napoli was a meeting place for up-and-coming gang leaders.

  Gang expansion also occurred in New York during the early 1900s. And as in Chicago, the most important of the gangs, the Morello gang, had as its heritage the Black Hand. Other New York gangs formed rapidly; among them the James Street gang and Five Points gang—the latter led by Chicago’s Big Jim Colosimo’s nephew, Johnny Torrio.

  In 1909, Big Jim found himself in need of additional services. Continued extortion by opposing gangs—rivals of Diamond Joe Esposito’s, as well—had begun to nibble at his profits. Colosimo appealed to Diamond Joe to intervene on his behalf. It was a request that required additional organizational muscle and inspired Diamond Joe to bring in Colosimo’s nephew from New York.

  Johnny Torrio was a hardworking hustler who’d already proven with the New York Five Points gang that he possessed the tough leadership necessary. Once settled in Chicago, he soon had his uncle’s brothels running more profitably than ever before.

  To further control his own burgeoning territories, Diamond Joe Esposito sponsored the six Genna brothers from Sicily in 1910. With assistance from Esposito’s right-hand man, Joe Fusco, the enterprising and ruthless Gennas launched their criminal careers as Black Hand enforcers, extortionists, and brothel operators.