by Sam Giancana
Quizzed about Huey Long, Mooney told Chuck that for years the senator had worked closely with the Syndicate on everything from slot machines to casinos, becoming partners with Carlos Marcello in New Orleans; Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano, and Meyer Lansky in New York; Santo Trafficante in Florida; and Paul Ricca in Chicago. But by 1935, Long had “gotten out of hand” and another loony assassin was located. Unlike Cermak, Long was no turncoat traitor; he simply became too greedy, demanding over $3 million a year in payoffs from his “friends.”
“He was cutting into profits . . . greed killed Huey Long,” Mooney insisted. “It’ll get you every time. Always remember, any profit is a good profit and always leave somethin’ for the other guy. That’s what Long forgot.”
Chuck would remember that afternoon for the rest of his life. It marked the beginning of a new relationship with his brother; he was no longer a child in Mooney’s eyes.
Over the past years, New York had had its own share of double crosses. Mooney said half the guys there were crazy. “It’s not at all like Chicago,” he explained with no small amount of pride in his voice. “Here, we got control, under one boss. We’re organized. In New York, they’ve been backstabbin’ and killin’ each other for years.”
Indeed, the gang wars had raged on in New York until Lucky Luciano seized power in 1931. But even Luciano’s reign was cut short when, just five years later, he was arrested on charges of compulsory prostitution. In a case spearheaded by vengeful Special Prosecutor Thomas Dewey, Luciano was found guilty on ninety counts of direction of harlotry and extortion. With Luciano’s sentence of thirty to fifty years in Clinton State Penitentiary, Frank Costello—man with whom Mooney would someday collaborate—took control.
By spring’s first thaw in 1936, while other boys his age were still in knickers and playing jerk-off games, Chuck decided to leave such childish trappings and behavior behind forever. When he wasn’t at Mooney’s or on the corner selling the season’s first tomatoes for his father, he looked at girls. On Saturdays, he hopped the bumper of some “rich sap’s car” and went up on California and Roosevelt, to Douglas Park. There, he’d sit in the shade of the massive oaks all afternoon, catching the scent of fresh pine.
The air smelled different in the park’s wooded lawns, clean and clear. And the sounds weren’t those of boisterous, argumentative vendors or swearing, dissatisfied customers but of squeaky little sparrows and fat, chattering squirrels. He liked to watch the young men in their starched white shirts, hair neatly pomaded beneath straw hats, as they paddled across the lake in canoes carrying pretty girls with Carole Lombard bobs.
Much to his friends’ dismay, Chuck even stopped entertaining the neighborhood with his crazy acrobatics—swinging from electrical wires, jumping from stoops and second-story rooftops. “Don’t you know shit like that’s for kids?” he exclaimed in exasperation to his puzzled friends.
It wasn’t that he’d suddenly lost his guts; in fact, he’d become more daring. But the childhood thrills were gone. The only people that still put the scare in Chuck were his brother Mooney—and the big Irish coppers. Both were as constant as ever; the beatings from his brother hadn’t ended and the police hadn’t gotten any smaller as he’d grown larger.
It baffled him that one of the worst coppers around wasn’t even a mick. His name was Frank Pape—no relation to Mooney’s cohort Joe Pape. An Italian from the neighborhood, Frank Pape had joined the force in 1933 and over the previous three years had managed to make quite a name for himself. He didn’t screw with Mooney, though, and on one of his increasingly frequent rides with his brother that spring, Chuck had an opportunity to see Mooney in action.
It was almost dinnertime and they were driving down Ashland in a Ford souped up for getaways when Mooney spotted Pape rounding a corner.
“Let’s have some fun,” he said to Chuck and Fat Leonard as he whipped the corner in pursuit.
“Cut in front of him,” Leonard said, laughing. “Dare him, Mooney, just dare that son of a bitch to try to outrun us. . . . In this car the poor bastard don’t stand a chance. . . . That’ll get under his fuckin’ skin real good.” He looked back at Chuck. “Havin’ fun?”
Chuck nodded and said nothing as his brother pulled up behind the police car, honking and yelling out his window.
“Hey, Pape . . . hey, you goddamned traitor greaseball . . . hey, asshole. . . .” They came alongside the copper. “Fuck you, Pape.” With those words, Mooney cut right in front of the cop and hit his brakes. He and Fat Leonard were in stitches.
“Pape don’t know whether to shit or go blind, Mooney,” said Leonard, looking over his shoulder at the car behind them. “He’s going fuckin’ crazy.”
Mooney looked back and gestured out the window. “Va fa in culo”—“Fuck you”—he yelled, and, with tires squealing, whipped the corner.
“Man oh man, that copper’s gonna be mad tonight,” Leonard said, hurriedly loosening his wide, striped tie and rolling up his sleeves.
“This is great,” Chuck exclaimed. “Give it to ’em, Mooney.” They were going fast and it was exhilarating. At last, he’d found a thrill to surpass the ones he’d left behind as childish.
“Someday, I’ll give that motherfuckin’ Pape more than this . . . right, Leonard?”
“Right.”
Mooney slammed the car into second gear and left the mighty Frank Pape in a cloud of burning rubber. They laughed and laughed at the sight of the mad little wop swearing and shaking his fist behind them.
“That was nothin’,” Fat Leonard remarked a few minutes later. “You should see when your brother catches one of ’em in a fuckin’ alley. We give ’em a taste of what they do to our people in the neighborhood. Jesus, Mooney knows how to make ’em cry for their mamas.”
“Shut up, Leonard,” Mooney interrupted, giving him a stern look. “You’re going home for dinner now, Chuck.”
Pape was one of the few cops Mooney left pretty much alone, but when he wasn’t on a real job for the Syndicate, he loved to corner the other mick officers in some clammy, dark alley within the safety of the neighborhood and beat the living hell out of them. Taking revenge on the coppers for all the abuse “his people”—as he called them—had taken for years made Mooney Giancana a hero to the Italians of the Patch.
Soon to be fourteen, Chuck had begun to think of himself as street-smart, someone who knew his way around, and that summer he spent time swaggering up and down the alleys shooting the breeze with smartheads. But whatever carousing he did, he did during the day. He might be a sharpshooter—a tough guy—but he still avoided the coppers, especially on Friday or Saturday nights, in spite of what the neighborhood men said about Mooney having them under control; cops were crawling all over, looking for trouble, and, as Mooney had warned him, “They’ll pick you up for no goddamned reason and take you down to the station house, put your ass in a fuckin’ lineup, and shake you down . . . or worse, set you up for some crime you didn’t commit.”
Sitting out on the stoop in front of the flat like he’d done most every hot summer night for as long as he could remember, Chuck got more insight into why people in the Patch had come to idolize Mooney.
A group of neighborhood men were playing bocci beneath the streetlight and started to talk about his brother among themselves.
“Until Mooney came along, you couldn’t stand on this corner here and play craps or ball or anything,” one paunchy Sicilian with slick-backed hair said to the rest of the group. “You know I’m right. The mick coppers . . . why, they used to just walk right up . . . and wop you real good with their nightsticks and yell, ‘Break it up here, you dirty dago greaseballs.’ ”
They all nodded in agreement. “That Mooney’s made a difference, he sure has.”
They believed there was security in the neighborhood thanks to Mooney, and that the coppers knew better than to incur Mooney’s wrath. “The police give Mooney plenty of room . . . and his family and friends, too,” Chuck heard one say. “The most the coppers wi
ll dare these days is a shakedown,” said another.
The men said the coppers had seen what lengths Mooney would go to in order to make an enemy pay, having found what was left of more than a few men Mooney’s entourage had worked over. They said that had made all the difference in how they were treated in the Patch.
It was no secret that Mooney would get hold of some unlucky Lastard and while two or three crazies from the old 42 gang held the guy down, Mad Dog DeStefano would shove a poker right up his ass. “ ‘Clear to China,’ that’s what the coroner says,” commented one of the bocci players. “Yeah, all the way up the poor son of a bitch’s innards ’til his eyes bug out.”
If the guy was a stoolie who had talked too much or to the wrong people, and Mooney and his friends wanted to have a little more fun, the men said the hoodlums cut off his penis and crammed it right down his throat.
“Mama mi, that would hurt,” the paunchy Sicilian cried, and they all grabbed their testicles in mock pain and laughed. He described how there would be blood everywhere and, at the sight, most rookies vomited all over the place. “The examiner always tells the new ones the same thing . . . that you can’t cut off a man’s dick without him bleedin’ like a stuck pig, so they’d better get used to it.” They laughed again. “That Mooney’s put the fear of Jesus into them coppers and it’s a good thing, too.”
It was clear to Chuck. listening to the men rave about Mooney, that there were just some rules in the Patch you didn’t break—even if you were a cop. Staying out of his brother’s way was one.
“ ‘Better to take a bribe than a poker up the ass,’ that’s what the precinct captain tells his men,” the Sicilian said, concluding their discussion. Chuck had to believe that the coppers followed that advice.
CHAPTER 6
Throughout the remainder of 1936, Mooney continued to harvest the rewards of dozens of lucrative illegal enterprises. When he’d married Ange three years before, he’d taken a “job”—which paid a measly forty dollars a week—at her brother Michael’s factory, Central Envelope. He used this employment to satisfy the nosy, by-the-book probation officers concerned with his rehabilitation.
In actuality, Mooney frequently assisted the gang’s clever Welshman, Murray Humphreys, on labor fixes that needed a “convincer.” In 1934 and 1935, he’d still driven occasionally for Jack McGurn—enjoying the steady supply of blond show girls Jack brought his way. But by 1936, McGurn had fallen from grace and Mooney carefully avoided supporting him when seated at a table with one of the gang’s bosses, Paul Ricca. The Syndicate’s attitude toward McGurn had changed drastically since their St. Valentine’s Day job; when McGurn himself was gunned down on February 13, 1936, nobody shed any tears.
“The guy didn’t have a pot to piss in. High and dry, that’s the way we left him . . . sellin’ junk to the moolies. Somebody did us all a favor makin’ Jack McGurn go away,” Ricca commented at the news of his fellow gangster’s demise, while daintily sipping an espresso.
Over the years, Mooney had developed a keen admiration for forty-five-year-old Paul Ricca. Paul could almost always be found at the Napoli, the haunt once owned by Diamond Joe Esposito and now controlled by his successors.
Mooney described Ricca, an enigma to most of those around him, as a cruel, heartless bastard who could laugh while cutting out a guy’s liver with an ice pick—or cry with sincere sentiment at the birth of some soft-brained soldier’s kid.
Ricca was a somewhat handsome man with strong Italian features and a firm square jaw that he clenched when angered. To those outside the underworld, he reflected the mannerisms of a wealthy country gentleman, slipping into upper-crust society and wealthy political circles with ease. He used this talent to cloak a violent criminal past, like cashmere around a leper. Mooney told Chuck that the ladies and crooked politicians loved him.
Ricca reached the shores of North American opportunity before his twenty-first birthday. In Italy, where he was known as Paul DeLucia, he’d served time for a murder he had committed at seventeen—and was personally responsible for at least two dozen more. After release in 1920 from his dank and stinking gray-walled Italian cell, he immediately killed the man who’d testified against him and fled the country.
Once in New York, he was passed on to Diamond Joe Esposito in Chicago, which was where Mooney had first met him. Under Esposito, Paul joined a stable of eager young immigrants with criminal backgrounds, working with the foul-tempered Gennas, running moonshine, and as a waiter in Esposito’s Bella Napoli. There he earned the nickname Paul “the Waiter.”
Ricca climbed up the ladder to win Esposito’s favor, becoming closely aligned with Capone. Although Esposito’s death didn’t sadden Ricca at the time, when the Roaring Twenties became the Depressed Thirties, memories of the old regime started to give him twinges of nostalgia; Diamond Joe knew how to keep a low profile. Capone, on the other hand, had become an obstacle to “free enterprise,” a larger-than-life figure on whom G-men, like Eliot Ness, and Treasury Agent Frank Wilson could build their careers.
After the public outrage accompanying the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the Treasury Department, with Ricca’s blessing, turned up the heat on Capone. Ricca hadn’t been disheartened by Capone’s prison sentence; as Mooney explained to Chuck, Scarface may have been Ricca’s friend, but this was business—they had an operation to run and with Capone out of the way, there’d be no stopping Ricca.
The media might proclaim Frank Nitti Chicago’s boss, but Mooney insisted it was a convenient ruse—intended to keep the likes of Eliot Ness confused as to the actual power structure in Chicago. Those on the inside knew better: Paul Ricca ran the show. For proof, one had only to look at obvious examples of Ricca’s power; when major business deals were made with other bosses from other cities, Nitti was nowhere to be found. Nor would men like Jake Guzik and Murray Humphreys consult or take orders from a man of Frank Nitti’s ilk—a barber turned enforcer, a man they believed possessed half their intellect.
While Frank Nitti served as front man, attracting the scrutiny of the press, Ricca was free to work the back rooms with Murray Humphreys, virtually unnoticed. Together, the two gangsters slapped more backs and lined more pinstriped pockets than a country politician, letting their old crony Greasy Thumb Jake Guzik take care of the money. If polite conversation didn’t work, then, like Esposito and Capone before him, Ricca sent Mooney Giancana, ever the trusted executioner, to give the uncooperative a taste of hot lead.
Mooney told Chuck there was a “finesse” to crime the way Paul played it, and because of that, Ricca had won not only his respect but that of the President of the United States, politicians looking for votes, and police captains more interested in taking bribes than fighting crime.
A few years earlier Ricca had used the threatened loss of income resulting from Prohibition’s end to formalize his national role. In Chicago’s Bismark Hotel, he’d hosted a private meeting of the nation’s crime leaders to discuss the Syndicate’s future. Gangsters such as Lucky Luciano, Rocco Fischetti, Harry Ducket, and Sylvester Agoglia all attended, but Meyer Lansky, who’d come to town with his friend and colleague Luciano, wasn’t invited to participate. Instead, Lansky was told to wait in the Bismark’s lobby while Ricca made his pitch upstairs for a Syndicate takeover of unions, coast to coast.
Among Ricca’s men, Welshman Murray “the Camel” Humphreys—“Curly,” to his friends—was the most knowledgeable about union activity and the most visionary regarding its possibilities. Humphreys saw a time when the gang would completely control the unions. Entire industries could then be manipulated any way the Syndicate desired. Unlike Capone, who, according to Mooney, had more guts than guile, Humphreys had the brains to make it happen, and in the early twenties, he’d launched an attack on Chicago’s south side dry cleaners union, plucking the gang’s first real cherry.
Controlling this union brought home to Humphreys an important truth: Control a work force and you control the livelihoods of countless families sustained by
those jobs. By threatening union members with loss of work, the gangsters could marshal the efforts of husbands, wives, sons, and daughters in support of virtually any scam the gang could dream up, including swinging an election.
But aside from valuable political clout, Humphreys also found union coffers, brimming over with a ready source of capital, highly attractive; thus, his representatives wasted no time raiding the funds of unions they took over.
With Ricca’s organizational ability, Humphreys’s foresight, and Greasy Thumb Jake Guzik’s financial acumen, what had started out as merely another form of extortion—squeezing money out of rich businessmen in exchange for smooth labor relations—soon became an endless source of revenue. Unions were targeted for takeover and the word went out to the younger thugs such as Mooney Giancana, Willie Bioff, and Johnny Roselli to muster together bands of psychopathic hoodlums for shakedowns.
It was Mooney’s chance to showcase his ruthlessness and guts, but also—more important—his ability to lead, and he grabbed the opportunity. For his muscle, he called on old 42s like Fifi Buccieri, Mad Dog DeStefano, Needles Gianola, Chuckie Nicoletti, and Teets Battaglia. He took pride in the fact that, after a few weeks or days of steady pressure from his terroristic hoods, union officials were more than willing to comply with whatever he had in mind. And with each success, Mooney’s stock rose.
Following the conquest of the dry cleaners union, the building trades, barber’s union, and motion picture operator’s union rapidly fell. If there wasn’t a union, Humphreys made one up. People suddenly became members of unions they’d never heard of and their employers began paying dues and fees to Syndicate front men in exchange for protection from violence.
In 1934, the Chicago gang became more daring and ambitious in its tactics and Ricca, Nitti, and Humphreys, who claimed to have gotten a foothold in Hollywood by financially backing fellow bootlegger Joe Kennedy’s successful entry into the motion picture industry, decided to take their union rackets national by placing a local man, George Browne, along with Willie Bioff, in power as president of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Motion Picture Operators. The move gave Chicago absolute supremacy over Hollywood’s film industry and the theaters in which films were shown.