Accardo: The Genuine Godfather and The Chicago Outfit -- Book Review
Accardo: The Genuine Godfather
by William F. Roemer, Jr., New York: Ballantine/Ivy. 1995. 434 pp.
The Chicago Outfit: Images of America
By John J. Binder. Charleston, SC; Chicago, IL; Portsmouth, NH; San Francisco, CA: Arcadia. 2003. 128 pp.
Together, these two books provide a comprehensive overview of organized crime in Chicago during the twentieth century. The Chicago Outfit is a picture book supplemented with well informed, detailed text. Accardo, which has no pictures -- a major drawback -- is a firsthand account by an FBI agent assigned to investigate Anthony Accardo and other top mobsters in the Chicago Outfit. Generally the two books complement one another very well, although there are some important discrepancies which I will discuss later. I wish I had seen Binder's book before I read Roemer. I discovered it after reading Roemer. The pictures make the people and events described much more vivid. The photographs Binder has gone to considerable trouble to collect are mostly of very good quality, and some of them, he says, have been unearthed and published for the first time in this volume. Interspersed among the portraits, candids, and police mug shots, are some crime scene photos of murdered gangsters that are quite graphic, including four shots of the bloodied corpses of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Viewer discretion advised. He is not always careful about dating each photograph, which is lamentable, but he has taken the trouble to identify nearly every person in each photograph, which is a valuable, commendable achievement. The text in The Chicago Outfit is succinct, but very informative. Binder is obviously very knowledgeable and has researched this subject quite thoroughly. However, some of his information and conclusions differ markedly from Roemer, despite his awareness of Roemer's book and his high regard for it. The Chicago Outfit has no index, which is a major inconvenience that makes it hard to find anything, if you are looking for someone or something in particular, while Accardo has an excellent index, which is very helpful and makes the book a good reference.
Accardo begins with a story I remember well, having followed it in the Chicago newspapers in early 1978. I lived in Chicago during Accardo's hegemony and this episode was particularly salient. In early January of 1978, during a particularly cold winter, it made headline news that Tony Accardo's house in River Forest, a western suburb of Chicago, had been burglarized. Accardo had not been there, preferring to spend the brutal Chicago winter in southern California. Nothing was taken, but the place was ransacked. I remember reading about it in the papers and thinking that it was an extremely puzzling and ill-advised crime. It was related to a jewelry heist at a shop owned by Harry Levinson on North Clark Street near my own neighborhood. When Levinson arrived at his shop one morning in November, 1977, and found it stripped clean of his Christmas inventory, he went to Tony Accardo to see what could be done about it. In a few days Levinson got his jewelry back in time for the holiday shopping season. The jewelry thieves were unhappy about this and apparently retaliated by breaking into Accardo's residence. In a few weeks the first burglar's body turned up with his throat cut and repeatedly shot. Over the next couple of months a total of seven bodies, all from the same North Side burglar gang, appeared in succession all over the area, the throats were usually cut and some of the victims were tortured as well. Roemer feels that the burglary story is an appropriate beginning to the story of Tony Accardo, and I would have to concur.
Paul Ricca said that Tony Accardo had more brains at breakfast than Al Capone had all day long. Tony Accardo was probably the most capable leader organized crime ever had. He was also one of the most durable, dying of natural causes in 1992 at the age of 86. Accardo committed an unknown number of murders as a top deputy of Al Capone; he ordered perhaps hundreds of murders as leader of the Chicago Outfit; he extorted millions of dollars from many people over many years; and Roemer claims he never spent a night in jail. He also had many good qualities in his character. He was reasonable, prudent, low key, restrained in his use of violence, a family man deeply devoted to his wife and children from every indication. William Roemer, the FBI agent in charge of investigating him for thirty years, respected him, and I would say from reading his book, liked him as well. Roemer presents this book as a biography of Tony Accardo. It is not, really. It is more accurately a survey of the history of organized crime in Chicago, which obviously has a lot to do with Tony Accardo, but as far as calling it a biography, it is more an autobiography of William F. Roemer, than it is a biography of Tony Accardo. This book is far more revealing of William Roemer than it is of Tony Accardo in terms of depicting a personality. Tony Accardo is a shadowy figure throughout this book, as he was in life. We see his actions, his dilemmas, his challenges, but we do not see much of him. We can see decisions he made and their consequences, but this book is for the most part not a personal document illuminating Accardo as a person. There is much of personal consequence with respect to Roemer, and it is indeed interesting. But after reading this long account I do not feel I have any understanding of Tony Accardo as a human being. Roemer devotes three pages to the first 20 years of Tony Accardo's life. It was during this time that he became a street thug, committing muggings, home invasions, armed robberies, and car thefts, among other crimes. He had been arrested eight times by the time he was 21, usually for disorderly conduct. In 1926, his friend and accomplice, Vincenzo De Mora, aka Machine Gun Jack McGurn, introduced him to Al Capone. This is all we get from Roemer about the early development of Tony Accardo.
He once killed two of Capone's rivals by beating them to death with a baseball bat. This pleased Capone, who commented, "This guy is a real Joe Batters!" The name stuck. He was always known within the Outfit as "Joe Batters," or "J.B." Roemer said that he always called him Joe in his encounters with him, and even his wife, Clarice, called him Joe. He later acquired the name "Big Tuna" because of his fondness for deep sea fishing. He once caught an exceptionally large tuna on one of his fishing expeditions and was photographed proudly displaying his catch. The picture was popularized in the press and he became known in the papers as "Big Tuna." But inside the mob he was always known as Joe Batters.
Roemer's book is a litany of crimes and anecdotes spanning nearly a century. The stories are fascinating as are the personalities, and Roemer was an insider who knew and experienced firsthand the people and events he describes. But he lacks psychological insight and his perspective tends to be good guy versus bad guy, which I suppose is how one would expect a police officer to see things. However, it does make the book seem glib and superficial at times. Describing people in terms of their rap sheets does not get at the essence of their lives. Some of the figures developed in some detail in the book besides Tony Accardo are: Murray Humphries, Sam Giancana (whom Roemer especially did not like), Jackie Cerone, Gus Alex, and Tony Spilotro. While this book is a must read for anyone interested in the history of the Chicago Outfit, it is a very incomplete account, and in some ways it represents a distortion, being the perspective of a cop who is trying to arrest and convict the subjects of his study, rather than a more complete and balanced view of a biographer or sociologist interested in depicting the totality of the subject's life.
There are some significant discrepancies between Roemer and Binder over matters of fact and interpretation. Roemer, based on what he heard over hidden microphones in the Outfit's headquarters in the early 1960's, claims that Tony Accardo was one of the shooters in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre on North Clark Street, along with Machine Gun Jack McGurn, John Scalise, and Albert Anselmi. Binder, on the other hand, argues that the shooters at the St. Valentine's Day Massacre were Fred Burke, Gus Winkler, Ray Nugent, Bob Carey, and Fred Goetz, with Byron Bolton acting as a look-out across the street (p.38). I tend to give Roemer more credibility because he heard private discussions among Chicago mobsters themselves. Binder's argument seems more tenuous and less directly connected to the event. In another example, Roemer repeatedly states that Anthony Accardo never spent a night in jail. Binder claims that Accardo was arrested and held overnight at least twice (p. 68). Another point of difference has to do with the suicide of Frank Nitti, the successor to Al Capone, in 1943. Gangsters often die violent deaths, but it is extremely rare for it to be by their own hand, so Nitti's suicide is extraordinary for a top mobster. Binder attributes it to Nitti's to ill health in a losing battle with cancer (p.64). However, Roemer relates a falling out between Paul Ricca, Louis Campagna, and Nitti over Nitti's handling of the Hollywood Extortion Case, which resulted in indictments of many of the Outfit's top leadership, including Ricca and Campagna. A meeting at Nitti's house to discuss the matter ended with Nitti throwing Ricca, Campagna, and the rest of the Outfit's top leadership unceremoniously out. The next day he walked to a nearby railroad track and shot himself in the head (p.81). Again, I think Roemer's explanation is more credible than Binder's. Roemer insists repeatedly that Tony Accardo and Paul Ricca kept the Chicago Outfit out of the narcotics trade throughout their leadership tenure and enforced it with maximum severity. It was partly principled and partly public relations. If the Outfit was not involved in drug trafficking, it would draw less heat from the Federal government and from local authorities. Binder, in contrast, concludes that since the 1950s there has been Outfit involvement in narcotics at the "wholesale" level, but not at the retail level of the street (p. 111). In this vein, Roemer criticizes a report released by the DEA in 1977 that connected Jackie Cerone and other top Outfit members with narcotics trafficking. While concurring with most of the report he suggests that the DEA may have simply lied about this aspect of it in order to promote its own activity and importance (p. 300). I don't know who to believe on this one. Maybe Roemer did not know Jackie Cerone as well as he thought he did, but on the other hand, I have no trouble believing that the DEA would lie in a public report to promote itself and tar someone it didn't like.
Roemer is surprisingly candid about the FBI's illegal bugging and harassing of Chicago mobsters. In 1959, during off hours, the FBI broke into a tailor shop that the mob was using as a meeting room and installed a bug, which was active for six years. It produced much valuable information for the FBI on the Outfit's activities. However none of it was admissible in court because the information was illegally obtained. Encouraged by this success, the FBI went on illegally, surreptitiously bugging people all over the country. However, Lyndon Johnson put a stop to it in 1965 on grounds that it was a blatant violation of civil rights, a decision Roemer greatly mourned.
Roemer related an interesting story about his surveillance of Outfit figures. They got on to the fact that he was tailing them and began to try to intimidate him by making obscene phone calls to his wife, following his children to school, trying to get into his house when his wife was home alone by posing as insurance agents. Roemer went to Murray Humphries and cut a deal whereby each side agreed to refrain from harassing the families of the others. Roemer later (1987) wrote a letter of recommendation to the Director of Security for the National Football League on behalf of Accardo's grandson, Eric Kumerow. Kumerow was graduating from Ohio State University that year as a football star. There was a rumor circulating that the NFL would blacklist Kumerow because of the identity of his grandfather, Tony Accardo. Roemer, in keeping with the deal he had made with Humphries many years before, wrote to counteract this rumor and vouch for Kumerow. Roemer was not sure if his letter had any effect, but Kumerow was drafted by the NFL in 1988 and played for the Miami Dolphins and later the Chicago Bears.
The lack of pictures is a major deficiency in Roemer's book, but there are three very useful appendices offering a time line and two summary articles that give a condensed summary of events covered. Overall, Accardo is a valuable historical document, an ably written narrative by a participant in the events retold. It has some limitations and biases, but the wealth of information and many stimulating stories make it an engrossing read.
Having studied organized crime for many years I would offer a few observations about it that are often echoed by other writers, but not usually emphasized. First of all, organized crime is indeed organized. It has a social structure that is coherent and purposeful, there is clear leadership, there is a code of conduct, there are lines of communication, there are processes and procedures for getting things done, there are enforcement mechanisms for maintaining discipline, but very importantly, organized crime could not exist without broad support within the society. The sustenance of organized crime is essentially economic, not dedication to ideology or a vision for social change. The men described and pictured in these two books are in it primarily for the money. There are other reasons and support factors as well, but fundamentally organized crime is motivated by the lure of money. Books about organized crime tend to emphasize the lurid: the violence, the intimidation, the extortion, and thefts that are a large part of the criminal activity, but that is not all there is to it. If it were, it could not continue with the power and resilience that it has. The fact of the matter is that organized crime delivers. It delivers economically for the those within the organization and it delivers desirable contraband to those who want it. Certainly men who make their life within criminal organizations qualify as "bad actors." But that cannot be the entire substance of their lives. These people are integrated into the community. Many of them hold high positions in government or in business. They are often widely respected within their communities. There are good reasons for this, and they are not usually emphasized in books and biographies about these people, especially written by someone like William Roemer, who was an FBI agent whose entire career was built upon investigating their crimes and putting them in jail. The failing of a book like Roemer's is that he doesn't understand why he is playing on this chessboard, why these two armies are locked in combat, and what the whole conflict is all about. He sees his task very narrowly and his mission is clear and unproblematic. His book is very interesting and highly informative. Where he differs with Binder, in most cases I think he has the advantage in credibility and in argument. But he lacks a deeper understanding of both the players and the context in which these little life and death dramas are lived out. I will have more to say about this in a future post.