He was tight with the Outfit’s boss of bosses, Al Capone.
Their relationship was not founded on admiration or respect.
It was cash, tons of it, paid by Nunzio for the right to operate.
Capone ordered every illegal booze maker in town to buy precious molasses exclusively from Nunzio, and in exchange Nunzio gave Capone’s organization fifty percent of his profits. Capone took half of the booze makers’ profits too-not to mention what he shook out of the thugs who delivered the liquor, the rumrunners and bootleggers. The Chicago Mafia made so much money from illegal liquor that it was able to expand its criminal operations across the country and the world. And unlike the Mafia in other large cities, the Chicago organization was multi-ethnic. There were lots of Italians at the top, but everyone-Greek, Jewish, Irish, African American, and at least one very bad English guy-was welcome, as long as they earned money. Eventually, it even rebranded itself with a business term rather than an ethnic one-the Outfit. All of this sounds innocent by today’s standards, even a little romantic, like some of the stuff I’ve watched in the Classic Movie Club. Except that if any of those booze makers disobeyed Capone and bought molasses from another source, his guys would beat, maim, blind, disfigure, or murder the offenders and their families. They pummeled people with bats and pipes and tire irons, drove them around in car trunks filled with bricks, pounded nails into their heads and feet, set fire to them, drowned, choked, stabbed, smothered, and hung them, and sometimes even mercifully shot them.
It was brutal and done with intent, the opposite of romantic or innocent.
The Outfit called it doing business.
Nunzio did business with them from the beginning of Prohibition to the end.
In fact, the speakeasy he built far beneath the bakery was the Outfit’s gathering place of choice. Long after the bakery closed each day, a procession of criminals and their significant others rode the oven-elevator down to Club Molasses to drink their own illegal product and gamble away the profits they made selling it. Meanwhile, through his molasses business, my great-grandfather provided a foundation for modern organized crime in Chicago. Illegal booze financed the Outfit’s investments in prostitution (everyone is a victim), gambling (shreds souls and lives), extortion, loan-sharking, labor racketeering, and on and on, including the precursor of illegal drugs. The system of distribution, laid like railroad tracks during Prohibition-who imports, who brokers, who sells-is the same one the illegal-drug train runs on today. In the margin of the notebook, Grandpa Enzo scribbled a reflection: “The money that began with molasses was a puddle seeping toward a rivulet, the rivulet trickled toward a stream, the stream bubbled into a river, the river rushed toward the sea. And now, we are the sea. . the bottomless, churning sea.” The tone seems self-satisfied, almost proud, but at the same time overwhelmed, like it’s all too much to deal with.
Eventually it became way too much.
The Outfit extended its reach to Cuba, Hollywood, Washington D.C., and beyond.
Meanwhile, the organization in Chicago was in chaos.
Al Capone was sentenced for tax evasion in 1931 and locked away in Alcatraz penitentiary in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Among his many evil attributes, he had been a master of crime management, keeping competing interests and rogue personalities in line by sheer force of will. Among his many failings was a weakness for the spotlight. Big Al was a publicity hound, constantly showing off his expensive cars and shiny diamond stickpins, and even shinier women.
He opened soup kitchens for the poor and spent lavishly on orphans in an attempt to change his public reputation from crime lord to benefactor. In the end, all that it did was attract attention to his lifestyle. The FBI wondered how it was that a guy with so much disposable income never paid taxes, and he was quickly convicted and sent away. Upon release from prison eight years later, he retired quietly to Miami. Capone never returned to Chicago, and it was said that he’d died in Florida, but no one ever saw his dead body. Crooks around the world speculated about what had happened to his vast personal fortune, estimated at a hundred million dollars in cash. It was rumored that he hadn’t died, but instead snuck off to Italy with his money. Another rumor, scribbled in a margin, was that Capone was spotted in Chicago as late as 1951, holding secret meetings with none other than Giuseppe “Joe Little” Piccolino, the inventor of the Capone Doors.
The Outfit didn’t care what happened to him.
They were just glad he was gone.
They vowed never again to seek the spotlight and to go as far underground as possible, since publicity served only to weaken the organization.
As soon as Capone was gone, a thug with a low profile and big brain named Frank Nitti stepped into the void.
Nitti, it turned out, needed Nunzio.
During Prohibition, Nitti’s job was to distribute Nunzio’s molasses among the illegal distilleries. He was impressed-dumbfounded, really-at my tiny, gentle great-grandfather’s ability to control the smugglers, liars, and thugs who worked for him. These were bad men with small brains and short tempers, yet each one was intimidated by Nunzio, and Nitti never forgot it. By the time he took over, Prohibition had ended, liquor was legal, and the ocean of cash that flowed from illicit booze dried up. Still, the Outfit had plenty of income from all of its other businesses, both legitimate and nefarious. By 1940, Nitti realized that the time had come to restructure, and after studying several corporate models, concluded that consolidation was in order. He split the Outfit in half, with the moneymakers (sales, loan-sharking, bribery, investments, and banking) on one side, and the muscle (intimidation, beatings for hire, enforcement, collections, and executions) on the other. He knew the entire organization could be boiled down to those two divisions, since each one depended on the other-without money, they couldn’t protect their business, and without protection, they couldn’t make money. Because he was a modern man, he named himself chief executive, and appointed a vice president to each division.
Genarro “The Gent” Strozzini was the very first VP of Money, a position and title that were handed to his son, his son’s son, and on down the line.
Agosto “Gus Batters” Battuta was the first VP of Muscle, and a Battuta had been the Outfit’s chief knee-cracker ever since.
Strozzini and Battuta were oil and water and hated each other from the beginning.
If Battuta’s guys were slow to collect a debt, then Strozzini was slow to pay Battuta’s guys, and then Battuta’s guys exercised their knuckles on Strozzini’s guys, and so on. Nitti was tempted to erase them both and start over, but he had selected them because they were so good at what they did-Strozzini could pinch a penny until it squealed, while Battuta was a born killer with no conscience-and because they commanded the loyalty of large gangs of their own. He needed to get them under control, but if he focused on one versus the other, he would lose the edge of impartiality so critical to his stature-and that’s when he thought of Nunzio. He remembered the little man’s outsized ability to control sour personalities, and while he held no real hope that Nunzio could tame Strozzini and Battuta, he thought it was at least worth a try.
The end of Prohibition ended Nunzio’s molasses business but he had made enough money to retire from the Outfit and become an actual baker, which he found that he loved. My great-grandmother, Ottorina, ran the front of the store, and with a wink and a nod, they offered a specialty: molasses cookies. Grandpa Enzo was a little kid, already working in the kitchen, and here I learned something strange. Apparently, Nunzio named it Rispoli amp; Sons, plural, because there had been another son-Grandpa Enzo had a younger brother whose name and fate are not recorded, only the fact that he existed. In any event, Nitti asked Nunzio to intercede between Strozzini and Battuta, and Nunzio agreed. Only he, Nitti, and the two men were present at the meeting. The notebook is vague on details, stating only that Strozzini and Battuta left arm in arm, professing undying loyalty to each other. Whatever Nitti witnessed was enough-from that day on, Nunzio was the Outfit’s official feud breaker and peacemaker. He took the title counselor-at-large and settled disputes at Club Molasses, which evolved from a speakeasy to a quasi courtroom.