by Sam Giancana
But through it all, Mooney remained undaunted. He never faced trial on the indictments, was never served with so much as a subpoena. He explained that twist of fate thus, “I may not be able to control a jig policy king . . . yet . . . but I have most of the cops and politicians around the country in my pocket.”
He also managed to prove in May of 1951 that he had a number of big-name celebrities in his pocket, as well, with an event called “Night of Stars.” This extravaganza was sponsored by the Italian Welfare Council—one of Ange and Mooney’s only real charities—and was an effort to raise money for poor Italian children.
Years later, Chuck would hear people claim that Night of Stars had been Ange’s brainchild, that she’d manipulated Mooney, using her feminine guile, into participating, and that she’d personally worked long hours promoting the event.
On the contrary, Night of Stars hadn’t been Ange’s idea, nor did she exert herself promoting the community charity. Not because she was ill or frail—as she was so often portrayed—but because as Mooney’s wife she was “above all that.” Indeed, Mooney had been more than willing, without his wife’s prodding, to provide the underworld leverage necessary to assure the success of Night of Stars. Whether it was a charity or a union Outfit guys wished to promote, they always used the same tactics: muscle and men. And in this case, Mooney put his men to work promoting Night of Stars, directing them to “encourage” customers to purchase tickets to the event. As Chuck quickly found out, if a guy didn’t manage to unload his share of tickets, well, he was stuck buying them all himself—which was good incentive to turn to muscling other guys into taking them off your hands.
Chuck would never be able to say whether all the effort had paid off for the poor children of the Italian neighborhood—he never saw the final tally for Night of Stars—but three years later, Mooney would confide he’d grown tired of carrying the neighborhood, growling, “Hey, why the hell should my men pick up the tab and buy all the goddamned tickets? If the Italians in the neighborhood don’t give a damn about their own people, then fuck’ em.”
Mooney stopped supporting the event after that and that was the end of Night of Stars. Each spring, Chuck couldn’t help missing the lineup of celebrities his brother always managed to assemble—entertainers such as Bob Hope, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Jimmy Durante, and Frank Sinatra. Such a public demonstration of his brother’s power made Chuck proud to be a Giancana—which was the real reason why, he guessed, he’d always miss Night of Stars.
Like his role model, Mooney, Chuck spent more time away from home than not. He insisted that dinner be served at five-thirty each night, and after eating one of Anne Marie’s painstakingly prepared dinners, he either made his way to the Cosmos theater for work or dropped by an Outfit bar to talk to the guys. Late one night in June, he was shooting the breeze with Needles and Fat Leonard, and they started reminiscing about the good old days at the Boogie Woogie.
“Man oh man, the shine broads in there were class, real class,” Leonard remarked.
“And what about the music?” added Needles. “That joint was really hoppin’. I never seen so many hot colored packed together.”
“Hey, remember when Mooney and Teddy Roe ran into each other?” Leonard said. “Boy, was that shine burned up.” He began to snicker. “He coulda killed Mooney, for sure.”
“I bet he would still now, if he could,” Chuck remarked.
“Yeah, well the guy’s number’s up. I can promise you that. Mooney’s had it with the little fuck. He’ll be gone with the wind,” Leonard said, chuckling.
Needles laughed. “Hey, I like that one . . . gone with the wind . . . just like the movie. Send Roe back to a plantation somewhere and let him fertilize some fuckin’ cotton.”
“Or back to hell, where the nigger bastard came from to begin with,” Leonard added, picking up his drink in a gesture of mock toast. “Here’s to Teddy Roe, may the sorry motherfucker soon rest in peace.” Leonard shot a look at Needles, who couldn’t contain a smirk.
About that time, Milwaukee Phil walked in with Chuckie Nicoletti. They pulled up chairs and ordered drinks.
“Hey, where’s Mad Dog? I thought he was comin’ over,” Needles said.
They groaned collectively.
“He’ll be here. He stopped who the fuck knows where. But, if he said he was droppin’ by, he’ll be here,” Phil said, taking a sip of his drink. “So I hear Teddy Roe’s ship has come in,” he added, and raised one eyebrow. The group began laughing.
“Yeah, that’s what we were just talkin’ about. . . . That’s one shine Mooney’s gonna give a one-way ticket,” Needles said.
“Ain’t life shit?” Leonard said, and then burst out laughing.
They all joined in and Chuck noticed Mad Dog come in the door. The guy was a lunatic; they didn’t call him Mad Dog for nothing. Mad Dog DeStefano was crazy, totally nuts. He’d be in a rage one minute and the next, laughing like a loony. He usually wore pajamas, fly open, wherever he went, and looked as if he’d just crawled out of bed. He got off on killing. It was almost funny the way everybody gave Mad Dog wide berth. Cold-blooded killers didn’t want to cross him. Chuck always tried to avoid him. DeStefano spotted their table and made his way along the bar. He sat down and, amid roars of laughter, immediately launched into a graphic description of his latest torture technique. He loved ice picks, but he loved to talk about them more.
Chuck scanned the faces of the men seated alongside him. There wasn’t a man sitting at the table who hadn’t taken a guy out, except him. And, with the exception of DeStefano, they were really nice guys. They didn’t act like people might think killers would act. They acted like normal guys. The wives would never have guessed that any one of them could slit a man’s throat without blinking an eye. But they’d all done that and a lot worse. All for Mooney.
Which made it okay, Chuck guessed. Whether it was gambling, burglary, or murder, it was all the same. Everybody had a job to do in the organization. And they did it for Mooney. Although sometimes he wondered whether Mooney was just an excuse. Like fear. How many times had he heard somebody say they were afraid of Mooney. Afraid they would be killed if they didn’t do exactly what Mooney wanted—from buying the right model car to making an appearance at a family wedding. To hear people associated with the Outfit talk, they were always afraid. But looking around the table now, he didn’t think any of the guys looked afraid of anything. Actually, they all looked as if they thought they had it made.
The question of whether something was right or wrong never entered a guy’s mind. That question got buried early on. And out of a desire to get ahead, it stayed buried. Should it surface by some strange chance, it was fear that pushed it down again into the backwaters of the guy’s conscience.
Chuck tried not to think about those kinds of things—never discussed them with anybody, not even Anne Marie, most of all not with her. But sometimes he thought the honest-to-God truth was that it was all just an excuse. It wasn’t because of Mooney—or fear—that he and the rest of the guys worked for the Outfit. Anybody who worked for the Outfit did it because they liked the money. It didn’t matter whether it was all stolen; it didn’t matter whether a guy had to kill for the privilege of being in the Outfit. What did matter was that you had five hundred a week when other saps had fifty. And you were respected, treated as if you were special. People knew your name—you got the best seat in a restaurant, the best cut at the butcher’s.
He and the rest of the guys who worked for the Outfit might tell themselves they did it for Mooney or that they didn’t have a choice, but that was all just bullshit. You did it for yourself.
Later, Chuck would chide himself for not realizing what Fat Leonard and Needles had been getting at with all the talk about Teddy Roe. But that night, he didn’t take it too seriously. He always knew Mooney would go after the guy sooner or later—which made Chuck no different from any other person familiar with the law of the street. He just didn’t know how soon.
CHAPTE
R 13
What happened on June 19, 1951, was almost, to the letter, a repeat performance: a darkened street; a sleek sedan stealthily stalking its intended victim; its passengers, three fedora-hatted men in silk suits, toting guns. The moment Teddy Roe looked into his rearview mirror and spotted the bright headlights flashing behind him, he probably knew. It had Mooney Giancana written all over it.
Roe had prepared himself for just such an inevitability. After a series of run-ins with Mooney, he’d hired off-duty coppers as body guards. In the five years since Eddie Jones’s abduction, the black policy king and his family had lived with the constant threat of death. Mooney had once said that fear wore a man down—made him tired and careless—and that living in fear was worse than death itself. But Mooney hadn’t yet locked horns with the likes of Teddy Roe. Roe had become a hero in the colored neighborhood because he hadn’t knuckled under to the dago mobsters. He’d stood up to the man the colored papers called “the meanest of them all,” Mooney Giancana, and lived to tell about it. That alone won him their adulation and the nickname the “Robin Hood of Policy.”
With Roe alive and flourishing, Mooney had yet to gain control of all south side policy wheels. Teddy Roe was the last holdout, and for that he was a hero.
After the heat died down following the Jones incident, Roe’s business thrived instead of folding. It grated Mooney to know that his policy takeover was incomplete, that Roe’s loyal gamblers flooded his wheels in record numbers, making him richer than ever.
Mooney had tried a number of tactics to pry Roe out of operation. His soldiers bombed Roe’s home and threatened his family. Meanwhile, Mooney offered the cocky mulatto $250,000 to leave town, to which Roe had sneered, “I’ll die first.” It was a surprise to those who worked for Mooney that he hadn’t taken Roe up on it. Why he’d waited so long to move against Roe was a mystery—because he plainly hated the guy.
Chuck, however, theorized that Roe struck a chord somewhere in his brother. There had never before been a man or woman Mooney couldn’t have. Nor had there been, to Chuck’s knowledge, anyone who stood up to Mooney in his forty-three years as Roe had. In some twisted way. Chuck knew Mooney admired that. It was the same with a broad. As long as she played hard to get, Mooney was up for the challenge. He’d try everything—money, gifts, introductions to his celebrity friends—because, as he put it, “There’s always somethin’ a broad wants more than her fuckin’ virtue.”
Perhaps what Mooney wanted most was to find the one person who didn’t have a price. Someone to restore his faith in humanity—a faith that had been lost as a child while chained to the tree on Van Buren. Significantly, he’d often told Chuck that, “unlike those whores they call politicians,” once he’d made up his mind about something, “nobody can buy me or fuckin’ scare me into anything.”
Mooney’s was a hardheaded stubbornness that struck Chuck as a trait more Irish than Italian. But Mooney had his own unswerving brand of principles and for better or worse—legal or illegal, immoral or moral—he held to them with uncommon tenacity. Somewhere there existed his equal. Chuck had to believe that so far, the stubborn, snarling, self-assured policy king was as close as Mooney had ever gotten to that man.
Roe must have thought it was the end when he curbed his Lincoln; but unbeknown to his assassins, his off-duty bodyguards were shadowing him. With customary confidence, and not a small amount of courage, Roe got out of his car to face whoever was tailing him.
Fat Leonard, Jimmy New York, and Vincent Ioli watched the man bravely walk toward them. They smiled at one another and snuffed out their cigarettes.
“It’s time,” Leonard said softly, and opened the door. Those would be his last words.
The three Italians were caught completely off guard for perhaps the first time in their lives. A hail of bullets, from both Roe and his bodyguards, greeted them the minute their feet hit the pavement.
Leonard managed to get off one shot before Jimmy New York heard the sickening crack of bone and saw his friend’s skull pop open at the temple with a snap, gushing blood and brains. From the other side of the car, Ioli screamed he’d also been hit. Instinctively, they scrambled back into the safety of their car and sped off into the night, leaving Fat Leonard behind to die in a pulsing pool of blood.
The 42s had a rule in the old days; Joey Colaro had passed it down when Mooney and the rest of them were nothing more than crazy punks in the Patch: “Never, ever, leave one of your own behind.” Mooney remembered it clearly—just as if it were yesterday, he told Chuck. And he would never forgive the two men who didn’t. “When push comes to shove, when a guy’s got a gun to his head, that’s when you know what he’s made of,” he said at the news of the bungled job. The two men might have saved their own skins, but they lost Mooney’s trust in the process. Chuck knew Mooney would never allow them to rise in the organization after such a transgression.
Chuck was sobered by the news of Fat Leonard’s demise. “Live by the sword, die by the sword,” Mooney said all the time. Chuck guessed that justice had just come to Fat Leonard Caifano sooner than most.
Roe was initially charged with Fat Leonard’s murder, but predictably, the charges were dropped and he was hailed in the colored papers once again for his courage in the face of the Italians. Chuck imagined Mooney probably had never wanted to defeat an adversary more than he wanted to defeat Roe. But, leaving Fat Leonard’s funeral, Mooney’s only comment about the entire affair was characteristically succinct: “Roe’s a fuckin’ dead man.”
For the rest of the summer, Mooney traveled from city to city. He went to Miami and Cuba all the time now, sometimes as often as once a week. Las Vegas had also become a frequent stopover point during his trips to California. His touch points were largely gambling enterprises and they now stretched west from Chicago to Kansas City, Las Vegas, and Hollywood; north to Detroit and Canada; and south to Miami, Louisiana, and Texas. Nicoletti and Needles told Chuck, “Your brother’s the only guy the other bosses will even let come in to their town. There’re only two guys Marcello will do business with . . . Mooney and Costello. But Mooney’s gonna sew up the whole fuckin’ country before it’s over with.”
Mooney was also making frequent jaunts to Mexico, the Middle East, and Europe—solidifying. Chuck imagined, the international contacts about which he’d spoken. For most people, such treks would have been part business, part vacation. For Mooney, it was always all business. Not that he didn’t come across some good-looking woman and have a little extracurricular fun in the sack, or roll a few dice in a swank casino somewhere. But the points of interest—the famous museums, the ancient ruins, the grand architecture to be found in the cities he visited—all left him cold. If Mooney wasn’t cutting a deal or planning one, he was bored. That was a Giancana trait. And it told Chuck that Mooney was not out on a lark in a sunny resort somewhere. Mooney was moving up and moving up fast.
The guys Chuck talked to all agreed. That fall, Chuck sat down in the Armory Lounge, a favorite hangout among Outfit lieutenants, with Chuckie English, one of Mooney’s right-hand men.
“Mooney’s taken over Chicago,” English stated matter-of-factly. “Nobody here is gonna stand in his way.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Two reasons, Chuck, two simple reasons.” English held up two fingers as he spoke. “First, your brother is a genius at makin’ money. Meyer Lansky says he’s the only Italian he’s ever met who handles money like a Jew—and better than most Jews, at that. And when Mooney makes money, everybody makes money . . . that’s the first thing.”
“And?”
“The second thing is real simple. If the guys in Chicago don’t fall in line, they’re gonna be pushed. And they know it. So”—English laughed—“it’s an easy choice. Die or be rich. Mooney doesn’t fuck around.”
The two sat in silence before English continued. “You know I’ve gone with Mooney to New York, Cuba, Vegas. He’s cuttin’ these guys in on deals he’s put together all over the country . . . he
ll, all over the world. It’s usually gambling that opens the door, but now it might be guns or jewelry, opium or oil or cigarettes, you name it. And it’s the same all over. Word gets around. You know, he’s the only guy who goes to meet with the families in New York or to see Marcello in New Orleans who doesn’t take a bodyguard. That’s how confident he is. Nobody would dare hit Mooney Giancana. He’s worth too much alive.”
As Mooney’s influence within the national Commission soared, so, too, did his political clout. Murray Humphreys continued regularly to shuttle back and forth to Washington, making “social calls,” and recently he had added California to his list. Meanwhile, Chicago political leaders such as Jake Arvey worked on the inside, greasing palms and trading favors. Considered a “kingmaker,” Arvey was particularly busy now, working on the upcoming presidential election.
As Mooney said was typical, New York was again rumbling under the greed that had become its heritage. Since his Kefauver testimony, Frank Costello had been targeted by Vito Genovese. To get to Costello, however, required the removal of Costello’s longtime ally, Willie Moretti.
Moretti had been partners with Longy Zwillman in New Jersey. Recently, however, he’d begun showing the classical signs of advanced syphilis, making him garrulous and shooting off his mouth about family business. Genovese leapt at this excuse to eliminate Moretti and insisted he be hit. Costello, who had served as best man at Moretti’s wedding, sought to protect his friend, hiding him in California until Moretti was brought back to New York prior to the Kefauver hearings.
Although Moretti behaved himself during testimony before the committee in early 1951, shortly thereafter, he began granting interviews with reporters. Again Genovese, with secret hopes of taking over Moretti’s operations in New Jersey and further weakening Frank Costello, insisted Moretti be taken out.
Recognizing that Moretti offered him little protection from Genovese, Costello looked to Albert Anastasia, head of New York’s Murder, Inc., for support. He told Anastasia that he’d back a hit on Anastasia’s boss, Vincent Mangano, and push for Anastasia as Mangano’s replacement. In April, Vince Mangano disappeared and was assumed murdered. Anastasia was made boss, giving his full support privately to Costello.