No Honor among Thieves – What Family Secrets Tell Us about the Chicago Outfit Then and Now

No Honor among Thieves – What Family Secrets Tell Us about the Chicago Outfit Then and Now

By Richard C. Lindberg


Was there ever any honor among thieves? Mafia traditionalists like Antoinette “Annette” Giancana, daughter of Sam “Momo” Giancana, who was boss of the Outfit from 1957-1966 during some of its most ruthless, blood-stained days of recent memory, lament the passing of family honor and the code of “Omerta” and the belief that the family business, the “Family Secrets” currently being exposed in shocking and gruesome detail inside the hallowed halls of the Federal Building just now, be kept inside the family at all costs.
A month ago I guested on Milt Rosenberg’s fine “Extension 720” program on WGN Radio along with author/criminologist Arthur Bilek, to discuss the Chicago “Outfit,” its’ past, its, present and its uncertain future. The “Outfit” as it is known colloquially in the Windy City, is Chicago’s organized crime “family” if that term may be loosely applied to the hard-core collection of thugs and racketeers who are spilling secrets to save their necks. Indeed, the organized crime faction and the dwindling number of “street crews” shaking down deadbeat gamblers for juice payments, and installing video poker machines in Stone Park saloons is a true multi-ethnic “outfit” of thieves, murderers and shake-down artists distinguished from the hierarchal structure of the mostly Italian-American “five families” in New York City who at least pay superficial lip service to the notion of honor, loyalty and maintaining stone-cold silence.
During Milt’s call-in segment, Annette got through to Dr. Rosenberg and greeted us warmly. Now I’ve known Annette for a number of years – our paths have crossed many times as she chronicled her father in several books, and I, covering the beat for a police union newspaper I once wrote for, and the books I’ve authored that touch upon organized crime (O.C.) in Chi-town.
The self-styled “Mafia Princess” grew up on the Near West Side when Taylor Street was best remembered for the legacy of the “Terrible Genna Brothers” – imported Sicilian killers who brewed up the rot-gut whiskey that was peddled door-to-door in the early years of Prohibition – and not the Little Italy one finds today, with its chi-chi restaurants and quaint old-world charm, sanitized and reinvented for the tourists and young urban aesthetes purchasing town homes on Lytle Street, and other back streets once populated by the Black Hand, and the Giancanas.
Sam, Mike and Pete Genna would turn over in their grave knowing that their old liquor dump, where the cops used to collect payoffs from the home-made alky-cookers once a week, is an empty lot adjacent to the Rosebud Restaurant where today the Super-Tuscan wines sell legally for ten times the amount of a keg of Genna rot-gut.
Annette’s point was well taken and it got me to thinking. It is probably true that there is no honor anymore, at least as the term was commonly understood in the heyday of the 1940s and 1950s when wise guys walked around with swagger and arrogance and everyone in the neighborhood knew who they were. In her father’s time Annette said she could not have imagined such a thing as this unfolding: the “tragedy” of Calabrese brother ratting out the other Calabrese brother, with the grown son somewhere in the middle and looking for leniency from the courts and protection from mob vengeance. What a terrible thing it is, said Annette, but I have to wonder, what is the real meaning of honor?
The Outfit reached the apex of its strength not under Al Capone – he was a piker compared to the real earning power of the mob and its powerful sachems, Paul “the Waiter” Ricca, Jake Guzik, Tony Accardo and of course the Rat Pack-Kennedy-worshipping boss wearing the sunglasses and snap-brim fedora – “Momo” Giancana – in the 1940s and 1950s. The labor union locals, the slot machines, Rush Street vice, wide-open gambling in downtown Chicago – the Chicago mob had it all. They had the politicians in their hip pockets and paying homage by looking the other way. The River Wards and the West Side Bloc whose influence extended all the way down to the state house in Springfield - the Outfit of our father’s generation had it all.
The gangsters were local celebrities and just about everyone on the street could rattle off the names of the bosses, who was in, who was out, and lied moldering in the grave. The boss ran the rackets – because in those days no-one feared Federal indictments. Tony Accardo, the “Big Tuna” who actually reeled in a five-footer was brought before the Federal court in 1960, and beat the rap. Nothing less was expected. Nothing more was to come until the early 1990s, when, under the leadership of the first George Bush, the U.S. Strike Forces armed to the teeth with the new RICO laws accomplished well night the impossible. They savaged organized crime families in Philadelphia, New York, Cleveland, and yes, even here, in wicked, lusty old Chicago.
The Outfit of hold faced the music. Most would not have run off and hid in the bushes like Joey “the Clown” Lombardo did in 2005. In recent Family Secrets testimony, it was revealed that Lombardo, whose real street name was “Lumpy” – and not the “Clown” (a press invention likely cooked up by the late Sandy Smith and Art Petacque who covered the mob beat when there were still stories left to report) – hid out down the block down from the Elmwood Park Police department, and would weep in sorrow because he could not see his family members.
I cannot imagine Lombardo weeping – mob watchers, the Chicago Crime Commission and scores of Chicago detectives assigned to the organized crime unit remembered him as one of the toughest hombres of them all. But maybe he did. Maybe Joey has mellowed, gone soft, or just got old. The times after all, have changed. Today it’s every wise guy for himself. The Federal Witness Protection Program provides sanctuary for nearly everyone with a Family Secret to tell, and there are plenty of them to be sure.
Who’s really in charge these days? It depends on who you talk to. Ultimately, maybe no-one’s in charge because they fear the consequences. This generation of mobster is a different breed of cat. They no longer wear Armani suits, patronize Rush Street nightclubs (where have all the night clubs gone, is perhaps the better question to ask) in the company of hot-looking blondes, nor do they stuff dead bodies in parked cars at O’Hare. None of the murders under consideration in this trial occurred after 1986. The lesson learned from all of this – the one takeaway from everything coming out of the Federal Building these days – is that killing is bad for Outfit business.
That doesn’t mean O.C. in Chicago has gone away, although one elected State Representative says it has. The kill-crazy days of the 1920s and 1950s and sixties may be over, and those so-called “men of honor” who refused to rat out their pals and squeal to the Feds are dead or in prison, but the Outfit still exists. With the passing of years, it has just grown leaner and perhaps a tad less meaner. .
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Richard Lindberg is the author of 12 books about Chicago, and a member of the Chicago Crime Commission.