The Outfit (43 page)

Sometime that year, one of the Outfit’s most notorious hit men, Marshall Caifano, aka John Marshall, was staying at the Riviera when he spotted and ID’d the accursed Willie Bioff. Caifano promptly reported back to Accardo, who confronted the addiction-addled Greenbaum. With a straight face, Greenbaum explained that he had brought in Bioff for the express purpose of keeping down the entertainers’ salaries - something with which Bioff was much experienced. But Accardo would have none of it. In short time, Greenbaum was paid a visit by Caifano, who recited Accardo’s decree: “Get rid of that fink or else.” When Willie’s dismissal was not forthcoming, someone decided it was time for the former whore-beater to pay the price for selling out his fellows. On November 4, 1955, Willie “Al Nelson” Bioff left the front door of his Phoenix home and got behind the wheel of his pickup truck parked in the family driveway. Police later determined that a dynamite bomb had exploded when Willie turned the ignition, sending parts of Willie and his truck all over his Phoenix neighborhood. The incident illustrated something Johnny Rosselli said to a fellow hood: “Us fucking Italians ain’t human. We remember things too long, hold these grudges inside of us until they poison our minds.”

Bioff’s murder stunned Gus Greenbaum, whose personal demons now grew to include heroin addiction. Greenbaum’s “horse” problem only exacerbated his health woes, poor gambling abilities, and his growing infatuation with prostitutes. And his decline would only be tolerated for so long by his Chicago taskmasters.

The Stardust

The Riviera would not be the Outfit’s only Las Vegas expansion point in 1955. Johnny Rosselli’s old bootlegging pal Tony Cornero would (unintentionally) provide the gang another lucrative opportunity in the casino game. In Los Angeles, Cornero had apparently been stewing over the Sin City successes of gangs from Chicago, New York, Cleveland, and elsewhere. After all, the hotel-casino concept had been Cornero’s in the first place with the Meadows, and had it not been for the depressed economy of the 1930s, Tony Cornero would now be king of the Vegas Strip. After the Meadows closed, Cornero had returned to Los Angeles, where he made a fortune with his offshore gambling ships, the flagship being the 350-crew
Rex.
When the boom returned to Las Vegas, Cornero took his fortune there and announced that he was finally going to build his dream hotel in the heart of the Strip, the 1,032-room Stardust.

Cornero’s concept for the Stardust once again displayed his visionary genius. He rightly concluded that elegant joints like Moe Dalitz’s Desert Inn had a finite clientele, whereas a casino designed for the low-roller masses would attract gamblers by the busload. Although the hotel’s frontage would boast the Strip’s largest (216 feet long) and most garish lighted sign (7,100 feet of neon tubing and more than 11,000 bulbs), the hotel itself would be little more than a warehouse, where guests could stay for a mere five dollars per night. The Stardust’s all-you-can-eat buffets and practically free lodging would become a Sin City staple.

A variety of factors caused Cornero’s Stardust dream to go bust. Complicating the typical Las Vegas cost overruns was Cornero’s own gambling addiction, which quickly depleted his bank account. Just weeks before the scheduled August 1955 opening of the hotel, Cornero learned he was out of money, unable to pay staff or purchase furnishings and gambling instruments. On July 31, Cornero paid a morning visit to Moe Dalitz’s Desert Inn, where it is believed Cornero hoped Dalitz would make him an emergency loan. According to one telling, Dalitz met with Cornero for several hours; however, Dalitz ultimately declined to get involved. On his way out of the Desert Inn, Cornero could not fight the temptation to hit the craps tables, where he went quickly into the hole for $10,000. When Dalitz’s crew not only refused to extend his marker, but had the audacity to charge him for his drinks (a monumental affront in the pits), Cornero went ballistic. Within minutes, sixty-year-old Tony Cornero was clutching his chest with one hand even as he clutched the dice with the other. He was dead of a heart attack, with less than $800 to show for the estimated $25 million he had made in his lifetime.

The story is then picked up by the Outfit’s traveling emissary, Johnny Rosselli, who promptly reported the new vacancy back to his Chicago bosses. According to the files of the LAPD’s intelligence unit, which had been tailing Rosselli for years, “Mr. Smooth” had been making the trek to Sin City regularly, cutting deals, and brokering complex intergang partnerships. George Bland, a retired Las Vegas-based FBI man, disclosed that one of the Bureau’s illegally placed bugs revealed that one major casino had the skim divided twelve different ways. One partner later called Johnny “the Henry Kissinger of the mob,” and Rosselli’s business card from the period said it all, and simply: “Johnny Rosselli, Strategist.” Rosselli’s biographers described his role in Las Vegas as “nebulous, but crucial . . . He maintained open channels to all the different out-of-town factions, as well as to the California-based operators downtown, and served as a conduit to political fixers like Bill Graham in Reno, and Artie Samish, known in California political circles as ’the Governor of the Legislature.’” Rosselli was soon living full-time in Vegas, dividing his time between his suites at Dalitz’s Desert Inn and the Outfit’s Riviera. In their 1963 book,
The Green Felt Jungle,
authors Reid and Demaris described a typical Rosselli day:

Rosselli spends his leisure hours (that is, all the waking hours of his day) at the Desert Inn Country Club. He has breakfast there in the morning, seated at a table overlooking the eighteenth green. Between golf rounds, meals, steam baths, shaves and trims, Twisting, romancing, and drinking, there is time for private little conferences at his favorite table with people seeking his counsel or friendship. It may be a newsman, a local politician, a casino owner, a prostitute, a famous entertainer, a deputy sheriff, a U.S. Senator, or the Governor of Nevada.

As Johnny remarked to a fellow hood, “I’m now the man in Vegas.”

Armed with the news of Cornero’s cardiac, Rosselli flew to Chicago, where he met with Accardo, Humphreys, and Guzik at Meo’s Restaurant. It was decided that the gang would finish construction and assume the debt of the Stardust in a partnership with Cleveland’s contribution to Vegas, Moe Dalitz. However, the Outfit would run the operation. When the time came to name a front for the operation, Chicago brought in an old friend, a gifted con man who owed Humphreys and Accardo a huge favor: Jake “the Barber” Factor. Five years later, Johnny Rosselli described the arrangement to longtime friend, and L.A. mafioso, Jimmy Fratianno: “Jake Factor, an old friend of Capone . . . shit, I used to see him when he came to the Lexington to see Al . . . took over and finished building the place. So I went to Sam [Giancana] and told him we could move into this joint. Listen, Jake owed Chicago a big one. Moe Dalitz wanted in on it and so it’s a fifty-fifty deal.”

Over the next two years, Factor and the Outfit poured money into the Stardust operation, while Jake continually lobbied the newly formed Gaming Control Board for a casino license, where he was consistently rebuffed. Before the Stardust could open for business, the Outfit had to assign someone who could obtain a casino license and, per custom, simultaneously watch over Jake Factor. Joe Accardo and his new front, Mooney Giancana, once again made the seventeen-hundred-mile journey to Las Vegas to make the appointment. Taking Factor aside, Joe whispered the name John Drew in his ear. As a former Capone crew member, Drew had already obtained, thanks to a few greased palms, a license to operate the Outfit’s Bank Club in Reno, where he watched over front man Bill Graham. In subsequent years, Chicago FBI agent Bill Roemer witnessed Drew having a business dinner at the St. Hubert’s Grill with his sponsor, Curly Humphreys. Johnny Rosselli later named other Stardust “supervisors” brought in for good measure: “[Sam Giancana] sent Al Sachs and Bobby Stella to help [Drew]. Dalitz’s got Yale Cohen to watch his end. But Sam’s got a sleeper in there, Phil Ponti, a made guy from Chicago. A real sharp operator.”

When the Stardust finally opened for business on July 2, 1958, it proved well worth the effort. After the grand opening, attended by guests of honor then senator and future president Lyndon Baines Johnson and his trusty sidekick Bobby Baker, the money began arriving in Chicago almost faster than it could be counted. “They’re skimming the shit out of that joint,” Rosselli later told Fratianno. “You have no idea how much cash goes through that counting room every day. You, your family, your uncles and cousins, all your relatives could live the rest of their lives in luxury with just what they pull out of there in a month. Jimmy, I’ve never seen so much money.” Coming from a man who had lived though the phenomenal profits of the bootlegging era, this speaks volumes about the lure of Las Vegas. Carl Thomas, an expert on the skim, estimated that the Stardust was contributing $400,000 per month to the Outfit’s coffers. Rosselli would rightfully brag for years, “I got the Stardust for Chicago,” and for his role in setting up this windfall for the Outfit, Johnny was also well compensated. “I’m pulling fifteen, twenty grand under the table every month,” Rosselli said.

On the Home Front

Back in Chicago, the year 1956 brought with it the regular irksome skirmishes with city officials not on the gang’s payroll. At the time, many Chicago police were playing a dangerous game, harassing Outfit members to increase their bargaining power with the hoods; i.e., the gang must pay more to relieve the pressure. According to a close friend, the ailing Jake Guzik was tormented more than most. “Those fucking cops used to run him up and down ten flights of stairs, hoping he’d have a heart attack,” the friend said. “They wouldn’t stop until he put them on his payroll.” On January 13, while the police were attempting to probe gambling at the gang’s Owl Club in Calumet City, Humphreys and Guzik were arrested on the Near North Side. The detention was meant as another vexation, and the duo were quickly released. Six days later, both men were again brought downtown, and this time they were charged with disorderly conduct, another harassment that was rarely upheld. When the case was brought before Judge John Pope, the police were chastened instead. “I’ve seen too many of these cases where the police file DC charges against persons they just want to question,” Pope scolded. “You filed false charges and you are trifling with the court.” Pope then advised that Curly and Jake had the right to sue the city for false arrest. Of course Curly Humphreys’ credo dictated that discretion was the better part of valor, but Guzik promptly enlisted the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a $50,000 “infringement of civil liberties” suit against the city. But before the case could be decided, five decades of playing cat and mouse with the cops took its toll on the sixty-nine-year-old Guzik.

When heart failure claimed the Outfit’s strongest link to Al Capone on February 21,1956, it happened fittingly at the very spot where Guzik had disbursed official bribery uninterrupted since the 1920s - his table at St. Hubert’s Olde English Grill on Federal Street. Also appropriately, with Guzik at the time was the man who had inherited his role as the Outfit’s political shaman, Curly Humphreys, who had by now secured the hidden ownership of the St. Hubert’s. Humphreys’ FBI case officer described what happened next: “Not wanting the body to be found in a mob hangout, Murray Humphreys, who had been with him, had his men carry Guzik’s body to his home in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side, where the amazed widow was instructed to advise police that he had died there.”

The Bureau noted that Humphreys assumed his self-appointed role as the Outfit’s benefactor in times of grief or transition. From this point on, according to the FBI, Humphreys sent $200 “every Christmas to Mrs. Guzik, the widow of his former partner in organized crime . . . [he] instructed [Bartenders’ Union agent Carl] Hildebrand to mail the cashier’s check to Mrs. Guzik without a return address so that she won’t know it is from Humphreys.”

Bobby’s Crusade

By the end of 1956, the nation’s lawmakers were swamped with reports that Teamster officials were looting the members’ pension fund and forging alliances with the underworld. In December, the Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field was established to investigate the contentions. Chaired by a devout Baptist Democrat from Arkansas, Senator John J. McClellan, the investigation would eclipse even the Kefauver probe in its scope, lasting over two and one-half years and hearing fifteen hundred witnesses whose recollections (or lack thereof) were laid out over twenty thousand pages of testimony. The WASP chairman made it clear early on that his investigation would be a continuation of the xenophobic battles of the pre-Volstead era. As he viewed in self-righteous disgust the procession of twentieth-century immigrants, most charged with committing crimes that paled in comparison to those of his own forebears, McClellan declared, “We should rid the country of characters who come here from other lands and take advantage of the great freedom and opportunity our country affords, who come here to exploit these advantages with criminal activities. They do not belong in our land, and they ought to be sent somewhere else. In my book, they are human parasites on society, and they violate every law of decency and humanity.”

The many inherent ironies of an upperworld investigation of the underworld surfaced almost immediately when the “McClellan Committee” chose as its chief counsel Robert F. Kennedy, the seventh child of Boston millionaire, and former Roosevelt-administration diplomat, Joseph P. Kennedy. Over the years, countless upperworld bosses and ordinary witnesses have attested to Joseph Kennedy’s working in consort with the underworld to establish his fortune. Bobby Kennedy quickly commandeered the probe, on which his brother Jack served as a Senate member, with a style alternately described as either forceful or bellicose. When the thirty-one-year-old Kennedy traveled back to Massachusetts for Christmas in 1956, he excitedly announced the full-blown inquiry to his father. Papa Joe, fully cognizant of the extent of the upperworld- underworld alliance that had helped build his dynasty, was not impressed.