Authors: Gus Russo
Back in Chicago on Memorial Day, 1966, Mooney left prison and was immediately summoned by the two remaining bosses, Joe Accardo and Paul Ricca, who had not forgiven him for both bringing the suicidal Kennedy fix to them and for his front-page-grabbing style. Informants told the FBI that the meeting between the bosses was a hot-tempered screaming match, with Mooney on the losing side. Accardo and Ricca not only removed Giancana from his leadership role, but ordered him out of the country until further notice. A recalcitrant Giancana left family behind and fled to Mexico, while Accardo and Ricca tried to salvage their empire.
The original Outfit was now crumbling, the combined effect of processes natural and man-made: Curly Humphreys and Jake Guzik had passed on; Rosselli had been placed under increased official scrutiny; Mooney Giancana had been banished; and Jimmy Hoffa was exhausting his appeals on two thirteen-year terms for his misuse of the pension fund. Only Accardo and Ricca were left, and they longed for retirement. There would follow a succession of temporary front men to take Giancana’s place, trusted bosses like Sam Battaglia, Phil Alderisio, Jackie Cerone, Joey Aiuppa, Joe Ferriola, Sam Carlisi, and John DeFronzo. But invariably, the key decisions were made by the gangsters’ last links to Big Al Capone, “Joe Batters” Accardo and Paul “the Waiter” Ricca. And although the Outfit’s final years saw the members more often on the defensive than not, a handful of lucrative conquests were still to be had before they too abandoned the mortal coil.
In 1966, one year before Hoffa went away, he and Allen Dorfman approved a $20-million pension-fund loan to hotel magnate Jay Sarno, for the building of Las Vegas’ most garish paean to gambling yet, Caesars Palace Hotel and Casino, a seven-hundred-room retreat (later expanded to twenty-five hundred) that features Romanesque fountains; the eight-hundred-seat Circus Maximus Theatre, patterned after the Roman Colosseum; numerous marble and concrete-over-chicken-wire replicas of classic Roman sculpture, frescoes, and murals; and an Olympic-size pool formed out of eight thousand pieces of Italian marble.
Although Sarno appeared to have a clean reputation, the FBI had learned two years earlier, just before its bugs were pulled, that the Caesars grand strategy had long been in the planning and that its putative owner would be just another in a long series of front men used by the Outfit and its partners. Before the casino opened in August 1966, the Bureau leaked a nine-hundred-page bug and wiretap report to Chicago reporter Sandy Smith, who in July of that year wrote a two-part expose in the
Chicago Tribune,
followed by another in
Life
magazine. Since the Bureau was embargoed from using the illegal tap evidence, they decided to leak the material in hopes of arousing public disapprobation. Smith’s articles stated emphatically that the soon-to-open Caesars, like many other Las Vegas casinos, was actually owned by a gangster consortium that ultimately answered to the Outfit. In his
Life
series, Smith also named “The Lady in Mink,” Ida Devine, as the Outfit’s new courier and even displayed an FBI surveillance photo of her at the train station (the only way she would travel).
The FBI was later told by an informant that the deal to cut up the Caesars skim was arrived at in October 1965 at a Palm Springs house rented by two Las Vegas showgirls. In what came to be known as the Palm Springs Apalachin, mob bosses from around the country, including Joe Accardo, Longy Zwillman, and Jimmy Alo, arrived to work out the details.
The disclosures in the Smith articles reverberated throughout gangland. “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo advised his Las Vegas partner Meyer Lansky to sell out. “Let’s take the money and have a quiet life,” Alo said to his lifelong friend. Chicago entrepreneurs took a similar tack, but with a critical distinction. With Jimmy Hoffa packing for college (and Allen Dorfman not far behind), Joe Accardo devised a temporary solution to the G’s Vegas onslaught. He would instruct Johnny Rosselli to keep an eye out for squeaky-clean suckers with deep pockets, then start unloading the gang’s holdings, with one key proviso: The Outfit would manage the casinos. “Timing is everything” goes the aphorism, and Accardo’s timing could not have been more fortuitous. On Thanksgiving Eve, 1966, Howard Hughes, the “billionaire kook” as he was known to the mob, moved into the penthouse suite of the gang’s Desert Inn Hotel. Hughes, a total recluse, liked the habitat so much that he refused to leave on checkout day, much to the rancorous objection of the hotel’s other pampered high rollers.
“Tell them to go to hell,” Hughes ordered his aides after the hotel managers attempted to evict him.
As fate would have it, Hughes, the sole owner of Hughes Tool Company, had just sold his stock in Trans World Airlines for $546 million, and it was burning a hole in his pajama pocket. Thus, the famous agoraphobe felt it less troublesome to buy the Desert Inn than to move out and instructed his key staff to work out the details. And Joe Accardo’s good fortune did not end there, for Hughes’ right-hand man was none other than Robert Maheu, friend of Johnny Rosselli, Las Vegas’ greatest partnership broker, most recently tasked to find a purchaser for his casinos - and who better than a man who would never surface to testify in court.
Bob Maheu instinctively turned to his old assassination chum Rosselli to get the ball rolling. “I told Mr. Hughes that I thought I had found a person fitting the background that he had requested me to seek,” Maheu later testified in court, “a person who had connections with certain people of perhaps unsavory background. . .” In his autobiography, Maheu admitted, “Johnny smoothed the way.” Although the Outfit had decided on a new front man, its mob partners in other cities had to be convinced. Using the skills that later earned him the sobriquet The Mafia’s Kissinger, Johnny Rosselli spent three months convincing the partners to agree to the Hughes buyout. For his diplomatic legerdemain, Rosselli was paid a $50,000 “finder’s fee.”
It is not known if Maheu or his boss were aware that they had become merely the newest pawns in the Outfit’s front-man motif, but years later Maheu told Chicago investigator Jack Clarke, “Johnny told me who to hire to run the casinos and pit crews.” Las Vegas
Review-Journal
reporter Sergio Lalli divined what had happened when he wrote, “The mob went about its business as usual.” Historians Roger Morris and Sally Denton called the sale nothing more than “a classic Las Vegas shell game.” And Johnny Rosselli himself told Jimmy Fratianno, “The whole thing was a Syndicate scam . . . We roped Hughes into buying the Desert Inn.” Fittingly, Hughes took over on April Fools’ Day, 1967. Shortly thereafter, the hoods sold their newest sucker the Frontier, the Sands, the Castaways, and the Silver Slipper, for a total of $45 million. Before he pulled up stakes four years later, on another Thanksgiving Eve, Hughes was relieved of another $50 million via the skim.
It would take Howard Hughes four years to realize that he was being robbed blind in his casinos’ count rooms. In 1970, he put his Las Vegas holdings up for sale, as his Mormon Mafia aides secreted him out the back door to the Bahamas. In a parting shot, Flughes called Bob Maheu “a no-good, dishonest son of a bitch” who “stole me blind.” Thanks to the 1969 passage of the Corporate Gaming Act, corporations were finally permitted to own casinos in Nevada, and they seized the baton lustily, moving quickly, as one local historian put it, “to purifying the wages of sin.” Overnight, upperworld bastions such as Hilton Hotels, MGM, Holiday Inn, the Ramada Inn Corporation, and impresarios Kirk Kerkorian and Steve Wynn began their irreversible push to give Sin City a superficial veneer not unlike that of Disneyland - but at the heart of it all would remain gambling activities shamelessly rigged in the casino owners’ favor.
Before they were completely finished with Las Vegas, however, the Outfit would find one more sucker to front for them in Sin City.
The Hughes purchases were not the only occurrences causing celebration in underworld enclaves in 1967. Although they were not the architects of Jack Kennedy’s murder, the nation’s organized-crime bosses, not unlike Fidel Castro, became the chief beneficiaries of Lee Harvey Oswald’s marksmanship. President Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Democratic successor to Jack Kennedy, appointed one do-nothing attorney general after another. After a stint by Nick Katzenbach in which little was done to continue Bobby Kennedy’s war on crime, things only got better for the bosses.
President Johnson brought still more smiles to the faces of Accardo and Ricca when he appointed Ramsey Clark, the son of Supreme Court justice Tom Clark, to be the new attorney general, replacing Nicholas Katzenbach. (Tom Clark resigned his Supreme Court chair to avoid conflict-of-interest charges.) The reader may recall that it was Tom Clark who had facilitated the early paroles of Ricca and his cohorts in the Hollywood extortion case two decades earlier; Clark had also restricted the FBI’s probe into vote fraud in the Truman-Pendergast stronghold of Kansas City in 1947. The Outfit’s enthusiasm for the appointment of Ramsey Clark would prove well-founded, as the new AG made it clear from the beginning that he was not going to authorize bugs or wiretaps, both of which he felt were infringements of privacy rights, in addition to being “wasteful and unproductive.” Incredibly, Clark also abandoned the G’s one ace in the hole when it came to bagging the most wanted hoods, the Internal Revenue Service. The new AG surely warmed the heart of Joe Accardo, who had been fighting the taxman for years, when Clark testified that it is “not OK to select organized crime cases” for scrutiny by the IRS. When Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1968, Clark made it clear that he would not utilize the wiretapping provisions of the bill.
In place of the surveillance, which had actually proved of immense use to the FBI’s understanding of organized crime activities, Clark expanded the regional Strike Force operations, which by 1967 had only one outpost, in Buffalo, New York. Under Clark, the Strike Force set up shops in Detroit, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Chicago, Newark (N.J.), and Miami. However, having been stripped of their most effective tools, and receiving little encouragement from their standard-bearer, the Strike Forces under Clark saw few successes. Clark Mollenhoff, the reporter who had persuaded Bobby Kennedy to join the McClellan Committee, wrote in his book
Strike Force,
“The Organized Crime Division weakened under Acting Attorney General Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, and all but expired as Ramsey Clark became the Attorney General . . . His bleeding for the poor criminals was so extensive that some joked that he must be in quest of the Mafia vote.” Ramsey Clark indeed harbored short-lived presidential ambitions and faced the prospect of challenging the leftist, antiwar positions of candidate Robert Kennedy. Mollenhoff surmised that Clark’s views on privacy rights “appeared to be the only way for a young man with obvious presidential aspirations, who at that time was backed by everyone from the
New York Times
to President Johnson, to move to the left of Senator Kennedy.”
When Richard Nixon again ran for president in 1968, the “law and order” candidate aimed much of his campaign rhetoric at Ramsey Clark, whom he charged with “leading an official retreat” in the battle against organized crime. “If we are to restore order and respect for law in this country,” Nixon fulminated upon accepting the Republican nomination, “there’s one place where we’re going to begin: We’re going to have a new attorney general of the United States of America.”
After Nixon won the 1968 contest, thanks to his own election high jinks, he indeed appointed as attorney general a bug-happy John Mitchell, who charged up both the FBI and the regional Strike Forces in their antimob prosecutions. Of course, President Nixon’s motives may not have been entirely grounded in morality: He obviously remembered how organized crime had helped steal the 1960 election from him, and he was now in a position to prevent a reoccurrence in 1972. And Mitchell’s prosecutions turned out to be straw targets, especially after Mitchell’s sloppiness resulted in the dismissal of nearly seven hundred federal indictments that were based on improperly authorized wiretaps.
More troublesome for the underworld was the passage of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, the most important aspect of which was a section entitled “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations,” or RICO, crafted largely by one of Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department subordinates, G. Robert Blakey. Now the G would be able to indict not only entire crime organizations by showing a pattern of criminal activity over a ten-year period, but also anyone who could be shown to be involved in said organization. Such associations would not be easy to prove, but at least it was now possible to make war on the “organized” part of organized crime.
Combined with the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, Title III of which sanctioned court-approved wiretaps, RICO would eventually decimate criminal organizations in every major city. (During the next decade, more than twenty Mafia bosses were indicted, and most were convicted.) The FBI heard one New York mob boss complain, “Under RICO, no matter who the fuck we are, if we’re together, they’ll get every fuckin’ one of us.” Interestingly, the first prosecutor to successfully navigate the intricacies of RICO was an Italian U.S. attorney in New York City named Rudolph Giuliani, who worked tirelessly for years to create the templates for the first RICO convictions.
The Outfit and Hoffa’s Presidential Clemency
In 1971, Nixon was under pressure from many directions to offer executive clemency to Jimmy Hoffa, imprisoned since 1967 on jury-tampering and pension-fund kickback convictions. Without presidential intervention, Hoffa v/as likely to serve out his two concurrent thirteen-year terms. Both the rank and file, and the interim Teamster boss Frank Fitzsimmons, who counted Nixon as a close friend, had been lobbying for Hoffa’s release.
1
Nixon may have been leaning toward such a move, since he felt he owed Hoffa for the million-dollar contribution he had made to Nixon’s candidacy in 1960. However, it now appears that Nixon was finally convinced by the promise of another fat check, this one from none other than Joe Accardo.