The Outfit (14 page)

While the mobsters procrastinated, Frank Costello held a meeting with Roosevelt’s advisers. Costello’s faction required a concession of their own: As governor, Roosevelt had recently unleashed Judge Samuel Sea-bury on a civic corruption investigation, and the New York “mob delegation” wanted the dogs called off. As Luciano recalled, “When Frank got the word that Roosevelt would live up to his promise to kill the Seabury investigation - I mean like tapering off so he could save face - it was in the bag for him.” The gangsters instructed their delegates to support Roosevelt.

Luciano was saddled with the task of breaking the news to Al Smith. According to Luciano, Smith, who had long coveted the White House, broke down in tears on hearing the news. When told the details of the deal, Smith warned, “Frank, Roosevelt’ll break his word to you. This is the biggest mistake you ever made in your entire life by trustin’ him. He’ll kill you.” Ignoring the warning, the mob threw their considerable weight behind Roosevelt, who won on the fourth ballot. In the subsequent general election, Roosevelt handily defeated the incumbent Herbert Hoover. Joe Accardo’s wheelman at the time, the young Salvatore “Mooney” Giancana, allegedly told his brother years later that the Outfit financially supported the Roosevelt effort in Chicago, support that would greatly escalate in Roosevelt’s subsequent reelections. “Shit, he got to the White House thanks to Syndicate money,” Giancana supposedly told his brother (in Chuck Giancana’s
Double Cross).
Luciano was a bit more restrained in his summary, adding, “I don’t say we elected Roosevelt, but we gave him a pretty good push.” Although unproven, Lucky’s and Mooney’s allegations, if true, would help make sense of Outfit-related controversies a decade later.

Regretfully for the New York mob, the trap predicted by Smith proved accurate: After his inauguration the following year, Roosevelt turned Judge Seabury loose on his investigation. In
The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano,
Lucky talked of the hard-learned lesson:

Roosevelt had been a prick all along, but I gotta give him credit for one thing - he was really smooth . . . I always knew that politicians was crooked; that you could buy ’em anytime you wanted and you couldn’t trust ’em around the corner. But I didn’t think it was the same with a guy who was gonna be President. I never knew that muscle could buy its way into the White House. I never knew that a guy who was gonna be President would stick a knife in your back when you wasn’t looking. I never knew his word was no better than lots of racket guys’. But I guess nobody should become President of the United States on the back of a gangster.

Despite Roosevelt’s alleged betrayal, the Outfit would continue to dabble in presidential politics. Only Luciano’s close Outfit chum, Curly Humphreys, remained the voice of reason in these dealings. Three decades later, he alone would caution against the Outfit’s coddling of bootlegger/robber baron Joe Kennedy and his son Jack. Curly had not forgotten the Roosevelt double cross.

Although the Democratic convention came and went without incident, Mayor Anton Cermak remained obsessed with ridding the city of the Italian gang element before the spring 1933 opening of the World’s Fair. Local banker Rufus Dawes, brother of former U.S. vice president Charles Dawes, was directing the Chicago-hosted Fair, slated for a May 27,1933, grand opening. Given the Great Depression setting, the Fair’s name, “A Century of Progress,” seemed a contradiction. But the title was meant to illustrate the great strides made by the Windy City since its incorporation one hundred years earlier and had been in the planning stage a year before the stock market’s 1929 Black Tuesday.

Dawes and Cermak allegedly had nightmare visions of millions of Fair patrons witnessing the sideshow to which Chicagoans had become accustomed: gangland drive-by shootings. Such a spectacle could hardly be expected to lure investment capital - the real purpose of the Fair - into the city. Of course, Cermak’s actual agenda remained the same: to establish his own criminal organization. Thus the anti-Syndicate crackdown continued.

The Cermak-Outfit war finally entered its climactic phase on December 19, 1932, five months before the Fair’s opening. As the Outfit later learned from its spies, Teddy Newberry met with Cermak “special squad” detective sergeant Harry Lang, paying him the then astronomical sum of $15,000 to dispose of Nitti once and for all. Joined by Patrolmen Harry Miller and Chris Callahan, Lang drove to Nitti’s fifth-floor office at 221 North LaSalle Street, an address provided them by Cermak. The officers encountered six men, including the typically unarmed Frank Nitti. In later testimony, Callahan described what happened next: “We took the six men from the little anteroom into a larger office. We searched them. Nitti had no gun. While I held Nitti by the wrists, Detective Sergeant Lang walked up to Nitti from behind and shot him three times.” He had been hit twice in the back and once in the neck. While falling, a shocked Nitti gasped to Lang, “What’s this for?” Callahan recalled that Lang then returned alone to the anteroom and shot himself in the hand, the better to claim that he had shot Nitti in self-defense.

With Nitti’s injuries seemingly fatal, a police physician arrived and tended to Lang’s trivial hand wound while the bleeding Nitti lay unconscious. Later, at Jefferson Park Hospital, the gangster regained consciousness long enough to tell his treating surgeon (his son-in-law), Dr. Gaetano Rango, “I didn’t shoot Lang. I didn’t have a gun.” He then slipped back into unconsciousness. While Nitti appeared to be at death’s door, Lang and Miller were lauded by the City Council, given bonus pay and meritorious service awards. But back at Jefferson Park Hospital, unbeknownst to the self-congratulatory officials, Nitti was making a miraculous recovery.

When word of Nitti’s condition reached City Hall, Cermak, Lang, Newberry, and Miller were gripped with fear. They knew the Outfit’s retribution would be swift and bloody. Cermak changed addresses, doubled his personal security, and placed guards at the homes of his daughters. According to newsman Jack Lait, the Outfit placed a bomb under Cermak’s car when it was parked in the Loop, but the device malfunctioned. On December 21, Cermak, Lang, and Miller suddenly left town for an extended stay in Florida. The official explanation for the trip was Cermak’s need to recuperate from a bout of dysentery. Many, however, believed that the timing of his illness was far too convenient to be coincidental. Before his departure, a clearly shaken Cermak told a reporter that the Outfit had threatened his life, and so he had bought a bulletproof vest. His parting charge to his troops was “Wage bitter war on the gangsters until they are driven from our city.” Two weeks later, Teddy Newberry’s body was found in a ditch in suburban Indiana. He was still wearing the diamond-studded belt buckle given him by Al Capone years earlier.

Word of Newberry’s passing terrified the trio of tourists visiting the Sunshine State. Five weeks later, on February 13, 1933, Mayor Cermak attempted to mend fences with now President-elect Roosevelt, who was visiting Florida, and whom Cermak had not supported at the previous summer’s Democratic National Convention. It has been also said that Cermak hoped to persuade Roosevelt to attend opening day of the upcoming World’s Fair. What happened next eerily presaged the assassination of President John F. Kennedy thirty years later: A lone nut fires three shots at a political leader on a Southern-state tour, with rumors spreading of organized crime involvement.

After greeting Roosevelt at a public appearance in Miami’s Bayfront Park, Cermak, who had uncharacteristically neglected to don his protective vest, was shot by a former Italian army sharpshooter named Giuseppe Zangara. When his Chicago secretary rushed to his hospital bedside, Cermak managed to say, “So you arrived all right. I thought maybe they’d shot up the office in Chicago too.” The fifty-year-old Cermak lingered for three weeks before succumbing to gangrene and pneumonia, and Zangara was summarily tried and executed.

The accepted version of the murder has it that Zangara was a complete psychopath who, despite being a sharpshooter, missed his real target, Roosevelt, a man whom he paradoxically said he admired. But in Chicago, another theory held sway: Cermak’s killing was intentional, a fallout from the Outfit-Cermak power struggle. Municipal Judge John Lyle, Chicago’s fiercest and most knowledgeable antimob jurist of the era, opined, “Zangara was a Mafia killer, sent from Sicily to do a job and sworn to silence.” The expounded theory posits that Zangara, whose occupation was betting on dogs and horse races, owed the mob huge gambling debts and was ordered to kill Cermak or be tortured to death. It was also alleged that he had been promised that his mother would be cared for should he be caught in the act. Lastly, renowned criminal attorney and criminologist August Bequai learned in his research for his book
Organized Crime
that Zangara gave an interview shortly before his execution in which he admitted that he had been ordered by the Outfit to kill Cermak. Although, when recently queried, Bequai could not recall the source of his contention, it was likely none other than the most famous syndicated columnist of the time, Walter Winchell. Using all his powers of persuasion to finesse his way past Zangara’s prison guard, Winchell obtained the only interview with the killer. According to what Winchell told his editors, Zangara was ordered to kill Cermak, and that had he missed, the fallback plan was to assassinate the troublemaking mayor on the opening day of the World’s Fair. Winchell’s editors declined to print the story since Winchell had no way to prove its veracity. However, sixty years later, thousands of Secret Service records obtained by investigative journalist John William Tuohy virtually proved the mob-hit allegation.

It turns out that the thirty-three-year-old Zangara had immigrated to America ten years before the Cermak murder. Settling in New Jersey, Zangara became a bootlegger, which resulted in his 1929 arrest for operating a massive thousand-gallon still. After spending seven months in Atlanta Federal Prison, he relocated to Florida, where he became addicted to gambling at both the horse and dog tracks. Zangara’s addiction was worsened because most of his bets failed to deliver. According to government records, Zangara became “juiced up” and was forced to work off his vigorish by becoming a drug mule: He couriered narcotics from a south-Florida processing plant to members of the New York Commission. However, for reasons unclear, Zangara went afoul of his controllers. Documents hint that he was possibly caught cheating them out of their profits. In any event, Zangara was earmarked for elimination. However, before the hit was enacted, Paul Ricca picked up the telephone.

The Waiter called Dave Yaras, a feared Outfit enforcer and labor liaison to Florida, who was moonlighting with Zangara’s New York dope pipeline. Ricca informed Yaras that the Cermak situation in Chicago had become unbearable, and that the Outfit had decreed that Cermak should be whacked, most suitably when out of town. And he was on his way to Florida. Did Yaras have any ideas? Yaras offered up the doomed Zangara. With Ricca’s consent, Zangara was made an offer he couldn’t refuse: either be killed horribly on the spot or kill Cermak and take his chances by pleading insanity in a state with liberal laws regarding mentally unstable criminals. Zangara chose the latter.

Unbeknownst to Zangara, he had more to fear than the Florida legal system. Sources told the Secret Service that Ricca dispatched two of his best killers, Three Fingers Jake White and Frankie Rio, to kill Zangara in the post-assassination confusion. On the morning of February 13, tipped by the gangsters, Zangara first proceeded to the Bostick Hotel, where Cermak was going to privately call on the owners, Horace and May Bostick, who were longtime friends. However, by the time Zangara arrived, Cermak had departed. The owners of the hotel nonetheless remembered seeing him on the premises stalking the Chicago mayor. “Zangara’s object in coming here,” May Bostick told the Secret Service, “was to kill Cermak.”

At 9:25 that night, Tony Cermak was seated on the park’s bandstand as Roosevelt’s car approached, and while Zangara waited in the crowd of fifteen thousand, Roosevelt’s vehicle stopped mere feet from Zangara. With Roosevelt lifted onto the trunk, Zangara had a clear shot at the president’s back - but did not take it. Instead, he waited for the president to spot Cermak: “Tony! Come on down here.” Cermak walked down and spoke with the president for about three minutes, then returned to the stage area. With Cermak at one end of the stage, and Roosevelt’s car on the other side, some thirty feet away, Zangara fired three shots
in Cermak’s direction.
William Sinnot, a New York policeman injured in the attack, said, “He was no more shooting at Mr. Roosevelt than I was.” Mark Wilcox, a Florida congressman who witnessed the shooting, stated emphatically, “He was shooting at Cermak. There is no doubt about that. The killer waited until Mr. Roosevelt sat down and then fired.” For his part, Roosevelt agreed with the other eyewitnesses that he was not the target. For the rest of his life he reiterated the opinion that Zangara was “a Chicago gangster” hired to take out Cermak.

Upon hearing news of the attack, the Chicago police department moved to have the Miami authorities round up eighteen Outfit associates known to be in Miami. However, Chicago state’s attorney Tom Courtney, known to be in the pocket of the Outfit, countermanded the department’s request before they could send it. Meanwhile, the imprisoned Zangara, who futilely pled insanity, took the prison’s warden, Leo Chapman, into his confidence. Chapman told the Secret Service that Zangara was anything but insane, and that he was in fact linked to “some sort of criminal syndicate.” Zangara’s last words before receiving twenty-three hundred volts in the electric chair were “Go ahead and push the button.
Viva Italia! Viva Comorral” Comorra
is an Italian word synonymous with
Mafia.

Back in Chicago, firehouses sounded their alarms in celebration upon hearing of Cermak’s death: The late mayor had hounded the firefighters with unannounced midnight raids to catch men who might be dozing on the job. In short time, Sergeant Lang was fired from the police force and tried for assault with intent to murder Nitti. After hearing damning testimony from both of Lang’s partners, the jury returned a guilty verdict. Lang, however, had other ideas. “I will blow the lid off Chicago politics and wreck the Democratic Party if I have to serve one day in jail,” he threatened to a throng of reporters. Within hours he was granted a new trial, and when bail was posted at $15,000, so many worried politicians chipped in that the court was awash in $45,000 cash. Lang was said to have chuckled when he heard. He must have laughed harder when his new trial was postponed into oblivion and never occurred. Interestingly, after his firing from the force, Lang left the Cermak sphere and sided with another crook, Maxie Eisen, a racketeer and former associate of none other than Big Al Capone.