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The Mob that made modern America
Sunday, September 07, 2003

The Outfit
The Role of Chicago's Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America
By Gus Russo Bloomsbury €21.30
Reviewed by Linda Maher

With names like the Monk, the Penguin , the General and the Viper gracing our news bulletins every day, you could be forgiven for thinking that Ireland's underworld is becoming a major problem.

But until the movie business, the gambling scene, the political world and the drug trade are all totally under their control, these mobsters have a long way to go to catch up with the gangs of Chicago.

"Chicago was the capital of unsolved murders... In a five-year period, there were 136 gang killings, with only one conviction. It remains an amazing fact that - federal prohibition laws excluded - no member of [Al] Capone's Syndicate was ever convicted of any local crime in Chicago."

Gus Russo's account of the Chicago underworld, and by association the NewYork cartel, is a superb look at the workings of gangster life. From the well-known members such as Capone to the lesser-known Johnny Torrio, the `Outfit' was made up of the top gangsters of the early 20th century.

In fact,one of its members, Curly Humphreys, studied law while in prison and was the first person to utilise the Fifth Amendment outside a criminal court (the refusal to say anything that might lead to self-incrimination). It is a ploy that has been much used and abused since then.

While Prohibition gave the gangsters the opportunity to make millions of dollars from bootlegging, the greed of different factions threatened to destroy their chances for huge profits.

This eventually led to the St Valentine's Day massacre, in which seven members of the Moran gang were shot dead by Capone's henchmen using `Chicago typewriters'.

TheUnioneSiciliana di Mutuo Soccorso negli Stati Uniti (known as the Unione) was founded in New York in the 1880s and provided help to immigrants on their arrival in the country.

The gangsters knew that to get the upper hand over their rivals, they would have to get the support of the Unione - a difficult task for the Irish gangs as the Unione tended to support the Italians.

When the Unione hooked up with Torrio, it seemed to be an all-powerful coalition.

"From his headquarters in the Four Deuces,Torrio oversaw an enterprise that was, thanks to Volstead [Prohibition], pulling down over $10 million a year from combined booze and vice in greater Cook County."

During this time, police and politicians were paid to look the other way while the gangs did their business.

When Prohibition was repealed, the Outfit moved into the jukebox and film industries. They had a hand in almost every union i n Hollywood and developed first the music industry top ten and then the top 40.

A prominent position on an Outfit jukebox almost guaranteed a song would be a hit, so record producers and promoters often paid the gangsters to put their record in the number one spot.

Their influence in the industr y was shown when Humphreys' daughter Llewella needed an escort to her high school prom and asked her father to arrange for Frank Sinatra to be her date.

One phone call later and Ol' Blue Eyes was on his way to Chicago.

The natural progression for the Outfit was into politics. It started with local elections and affairs of state, but soon moved onto a national level.The Outfit had truly arrived when it got involved in the election of JFK.

The members were approached by JFK's father, Joe, who asked them for a large contribution to the campaign and the support of their employees for the election push. Many of the Outfit's leaders didn't want to get involved, but the lure of a sympathetic ear in the White House was too strong.

Kennedy's opponent, vicepresident Richard Nixon, had allied with Jimmy Hoffa in an attempt to secure his election, but when he failed he was unable to live up to his half of the deal, at least until he later became president.

When Joe Kennedy was courting gangsters to support his son's presidential push, his other son Bobby was attempting to stop them.

He was the chief counsel for the McClellan Committee,which was set up to investigate charges that Teamster officials were cheating union members out of their pensions and making deals with the underworld.

Mutual friend Sinatra arranged meetings between the Teamster leaders and Joe, where they were told that "Bobby's anti-Teamster vendetta had been put aside".

In 1931, Jake `the Barber' Factor (brother of cosmetics baron Max) moved to Chicago after swindling millions of p ou nds i n Br itai n and France. His victims in Britain included members of the royal family and the chief of Scotland Yard, so he was a much-wanted man.

In 1962, the Immigration and Naturalization Service tried to deport Factor back to Engla nd, butitwas stopped when then attorney general Bobby Kennedy brought him to Washington to review the case. Factor had contributed $22,000 to JFK's election fund in 1960 and Kennedy now wanted his help with another financial problem.

"Factor later told the press that Bobby Kennedy slyly brought up that he needed donations to help secure the release of 1,113 Cuban Brigade soldiers captured by Castro's forces in the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961.

"Reports had been circulating for months that Kennedy was placing threatening calls to business leaders with tax or other pending legal matters, practically extorting the funds from them."

After a number of meetings between the two Kennedys, it was recommended that Factor, who claimed that he donated $25,000 to the fund, be pardoned.

The final chapter of Russo's account of the Outfit is a fascinating look at underworld and upperworld crime in the US. Without exactly siding with the gangsters, he compares their crimes and sentences to those of the executives of corporate America, including Ford, Lincoln Savings and Loan and even the Department of Energy.

He also points out that the gangsters could not have gone as far as they did without the support of the politicians and those in control in the justice department, few of whom were punished.

This is a superbly re searched history of crime in the 20th century and the effect it had on the shaping of America. Despite the multitude of books available about the era, this is one of the few that investigates the links between the Outfit and some of America's highest-ranking officials.

Although many of the names involved in this book are not immediately recognisable; by the time you're finished you'll wonder how you never heard of them. A frightening but fascinating read.