Champagne didn’t last a year. He stepped out of line by holding back payoffs and Accardo blew his top again. He ordered Champagne removed in the usual gangland fashion. Sam Giancana asked Accardo to give Champagne a break.
“The guy just made a stupid mistake, Tony,” Giancana said. “Toss him out. That should be enough punishment.”
Accardo relented and Champagne was allowed to live. Accardo then appointed Thomas E. Keane, alderman and committeeman of the Thirty-first Ward. He represented the Chicago Restaurant Association at Springfield when he was a member of the state legislature. He later became city council floor leader for Mayor Richard J. Daley. Daley, like John “Bathhouse” Coughlin, is a master of the malaprop. In defending Keane against charges that the legislator was incompetent, Daley said, “I resent the insinuendo in each respect.”
The fear that Accardo placed in the hearts of men, especially those whom he threw out of the Syndicate, was evidenced in 1958 when Teitelbaum and Champagne appeared before the McClellan Committee. Both men invoked the Fifth Amendment more than a score of times.
Louis Romano, loyal to Accardo, who also appeared before the Committee, threw the hearing into an uproar by his brazen and overbearing conduct.
Chief Counsel Robert F. Kennedy asked Romano about the many murders attributed to him. Romano half-rose in his chair and pointed a finger at Kennedy, his face purple with anger.
“Why don’t you go dig up all the dead people in the cemeteries and ask me if I killed them too, you Chinaman!”
The Committe members learned later that “Ghinaman” was another name for bagman or payoff man in Syndicate parlance. Kennedy raked Romano over the coals.
The Committe got no place in their investigation of Chicago’s restaurant industry despite the fact that testimony brought out the fact that more than two score restaurants had been burned down. In each case, police authorities labeled the fires as ARSON!
Owners of restaurants refused to state that they were paying off to the Syndicate, to admit there was any form of shakedown, or that they were forced to buy any Syndicate service or product.
In 1960, Accardo was convicted of income tax evasion on pressure by Sheriff Richard B. Ogilvie, a former federal attorney. The conviction was reversed by the United States Gircuit Court of Appeals in Chicago.
In his campaign for reelection, Sheriff Ogilvie learned that Sam (Sam Mooney) Giancana had issued orders that he had to be stopped. Precinct captains, under orders from the Syndicate, went from house to house and told the voters that voting for Ogilvie would be an act that would give “the people who have helped you the greatest displeasure.” About two weeks later, Ogilvie was informed that Giancana had declared that Ogilvie was a dead duck and there was no chance of his being reelected.
Giancana was wrong. Despite the precinct captains’ work, the voters of Cook County reelected Ogilvie in the hopes he would be able to stop the Syndicate. Backing up his campaign promises, Ogilvie led a series of raids on Syndicate bookie and gambling joints in Cicero. Working with sledge hammers and axes, Ogilvie’s men battered down steel doors and smashed every piece of equipment in each place. No one of any importance was arrested and the entire series of raids took on the aspect of a witch hunt.
Seymour Simon, president of the Cook County board of commissioners, and the man who controlled and set the budget for the sheriff’s department, declared that the raids were too costly.
“They have turned up nothing of value in halting gambling. No sooner is a place closed then it is opened again and running bigger than ever. I’m calling the raids off.”
Accardo had won again.
There were ugly rumors that Simon may have been in the employ of the Syndicate and so ordered the raids be stopped. Simon was cleared of all guilt on his demand for an investigation of the rumors. He was, in truth, an honorable and honest public official.
In the meantime, several murders occurred. One of them was the killing of Danny Stanton. Stanton, a close friend of Frank Nitti’s, had once been connected with the Syndicate as a union organizer. With the death of Nitti, Stanton left the Syndicate and went on his own. A fatal error. He gained control of the Checkroom Attendants Union which was part and parcel of the Chicago Restaurant Association. Stanton was ordered to step out and relinquish the Union. He spat in the face of the man Accardo had sent to deliver the ultimatum, “Give it up or else.”
Many a self-styled tough guy learned to his regret that to defy that final, uncompromising demand is to sign a death warrant for himself. Stanton was shot down on a Chicago street. He had beaten a murder rap in Wisconsin, pushed around a lot of minor labor leaders at a time when he had the Syndicate behind him. Without the terrifying power of the Syndicate behind him he was no more than a clay pigeon. The two gunmen met him face to face, pointed their guns at his heart, and blew it to shreds.
Accardo proved he was following Capone’s modus operandi time and time again. He was the cunning architect of a new type criminal syndicate that polished up the rough edges of the operations once run by Dion O’Bannion, Johnny Torrio, Al Capone, and Frank Nitti. He had learned the way from two masters, Louis Lepke Buchalter and Charlie Luciano.
Accardo took over the Chicago Street Cleaning Union. In this he took a page from the methods introduced by Big Tim Murphy, one of the greatest paradoxes in Chicago’s criminal history. Murphy had been a state legislator. He could have made the governor’s chair. Instead, he chose the field of crime and touched all the bases — mayhem, rape, extortion, mail robbery, and murder. Like Buchalter, who followed him almost a decade later, Murphy played both ends to the middle. He collected from the unions and from both business and industry.
First he started labor troubles by sending his goons to shops with orders to “wreck them a little.” He then called on the owners and told them he could stop the trouble in consideration of a certain amount each week. When they paid, he then sent other men around to tell the owners or bosses that the workers were demanding more pay. The increases he asked were exorbitant. The owners argued for lesser amounts. He said he would try to settle the demands at some place between the two — the owners’ offer and the union’s demands. Having established that, he went to the union and told the officers he could get the rank and file an increase in hourly rates if the union would agree to increase the dues of each member of the union and pay him twenty-five per cent of the total.
That was Accardo’s method. He not only took a leaf from Murphy’s book but took the whole book and then revised it to suit the prevailing economy. Accardo muscled in on almost every union in the city, including the machinery of the Municipal Courts. He was able to place his own men in court offices and alongside some judicial benches so he could have advance warning on the issuance of warrants and other legal actions.
Accardo’s invasion of the unions was nothing new. He just did it better than his predecessors. Before him, Joe D’Andrea was credited with introducing the peon system whereby he extorted money from Italian laborers working in the city’s sewer system. D’Andrea was president of the Sewer and Tunnel Miners’ Union. He was killed in a labor war.
Tony D’Andrea, no relation to Joe, then took over. Tony D’Andrea, a Mafia bigshot, was international president of the Hod Carriers Union and an ex-convict. He, too, was murdered.
Michael J. “Umbrella Mike” Boyle, who served prison sentences for restraint of trade and contempt of court, bossed the electrical workers union. A federal judge once castigated him as “blackmailer, highwayman, a betrayer of labor and a leech on commerce.”