granted rights in Nevada and California. In exchange Chicago got juicy rewards in Florida, Cuba and the Bahamas.
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Some writers have tended to downplay Chicago's importance, noting that it frequently does not have membership on the national commission that supposedly runs organized crime. What they fail to understand is that there are
two
national crime syndicates in the United StatesChicago and the rest. This influence was the achievement of Accardo and Ricca and has been extended by their successors, Sam Giancana and, especially, Joey Aiuppa.
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Never one to concern himself too much with day-today matters, Accardo gladly brought a Ricca favorite, Sam Giancana, into a leadership role in the 1940s. Whenever he wished, Accardo stepped back in to take control. Eventually, Giancana became too hot and Accardo and Ricca had to return to active leadership in the mid-1960s. With Ricca's death in 1972, Accardo brought in an old gunman buddy, Joe Aiuppa, boss of the Cicero rackets, to run things, thus allowing Accardo a life of leisure in his 22-room mansion with its indoor pool, two bowling alleys, pipe organ and gold-plated bathroom fixtures (described as being worth a half a million dollars).
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It would be wrong, however, to believe that his aloof ministering meant Accardo ever lost any of his hardness. Never forgetting his enforcer past, Accardo presided over the Chicago Outfit's relentless reign of brutality.
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The fate of one William ''Action" Jackson, a collector for the mob who forgot who he was collecting for, bore the Accardo trademark. Found stripped naked and hanging by his chained feet from a meat hook in a Cicero basement, he had been beaten on the lower body and genitals with Accardo's trusty old weapon, a baseball bat, then carved up with a razor, his eyes burned out with a blowtorch. Following those tortures he was further dissected; he died, the coroner reported, not of his wounds but of shock. Pictures of the body were distributed later in mob circles as an admonishment against theft within the organization.
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When Sam Giancana was assassinated in 1975, it was obvious that the move could only have been made with Accardo's approval, if it were a mob operation. A number of gangsters earnestly informed the press that Accardo was not behind the murder, that the Giancana killing was "a CIA operation all the way" to prevent him from revealing details of the agency's use of the underworld in a bizarre and childish Castro assassination plot.
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Accardo, who looked upon the death sentence as a solution to pesky problems, was nonetheless known for his fairness, a characteristic that won him considerable affection from gangsters. Once, Jackie the Lackey Cerone complained to him that an old hit man buddy of his, Johnny Whales, had gone soft in the head and that the "Dagos" in the mob would knock him off. Cerone said he tried to reassure Whales that he had nothing to fear from Italians, that the mob had a great many "Jews and Pollacks also. I told him this but he was still afraid." Accardo, a firm believer in the old Capone tenet of multi-ethnic membership, was sympathetic and asked Cerone if he wanted Whales killed. Cerone said he liked Whales too much for that but assured Accardo he would have no more to do with Whales in the future. Accardo was said to have magnanimously accepted this view.
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Noted as an excellent pool player, Accardo was once victimized in a $1,000 game by a pool hustler who had wedged up the table and then adjusted his technique accordingly to win the match. When the trick was spotted, Accardo accorded all the blame to himself. "Let the bum go," he ordered. "He cheated me fair and square."
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By the late 1970s, Accardo had returned to a multimillionaire semi-retirement in which Joey Aiuppa was said to be joining in with Cerone to take over active leadership. However, there was no doubt that if the circumstances warranted, old Joe Batters would come back.
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And he did return when the Outfit's Las Vegas empire fell apart and the top leadership went to prison. Accardo proceeded to juggle the remaining leaders' roles and gave mobsters new assignments as he saw fit, with never a word of objection from the admiring ranks. He continued to administer control right up till his death of natural causes in 1992.
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He never served a night in jail.
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Ace of Diamonds: Mafioso "bad luck" card
Newspaper photos captured the macabre scene of Joe the Boss Masseria slumped over the table, six bullet holes in his body streaming blood onto the white tableclothand the ace of diamonds dangling from his right hand. Assassinated in April 1931 in a Coney Island, Brooklyn, restaurant, he had been playing cards with his top aide, Lucky Luciano, who had set him up for death. Luciano excused himself from the table and went to the men's room. In the ensuing moments, four armed gunmen rushed in and shot Masseria to death. Since that time the ace of diamonds has been dubbed the Mafia's hard-luck card.
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The legend is strictly manufactured. As newsman Leonard Katz revealed in his book,
Uncle Frank, The Biography of Frank Costello
, "Irving Lieberman, a veteran reporter for the
New York Post
, covered the murder of Joe the Boss and was at the scene. An imaginative
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