The Outfit

 

Page 89 et seq. Women led the way into Prohibition [ 1920 - 1933 ] and women led the way out. Pauline Sabin was in favour then realised that this "experiment" was failing miserably. She went the other way by setting up and running the Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform. It worked but the Outfit moved on to controlling labour unions gambling etc.

Page 210 Tom Clark told Hoover to lay off the Outfit, making it easier for them to have power in Las Vegas, Hollywood and the White House. Tom was made Attorney General by #Harry Truman, a tool of #The Outfit. He blocked an FBI investigation of the #Kansas City Mob.

Page 216 The Outfit backed Franklin D Roosevelt. So did the Kansas City Mob

Page 220 et seq. Sidney Hillman, a Jew from Lithuania was a cunning manipulator who helped found the Congress of Industrial Organizations. He ran a union and advised Franklin D Roosevelt on the New Deal. This was good for workers. His public face was respectable but he colluded with The Outfit. As a result he was instrumental in making #Harry Truman the president of America. Harry was compromised, meaning that he could  not lean on various crooks.

This other #Second Missouri Compromise did not amuse outsiders, the rest. The Chicago Tribune wrote [ ibid 223 ]: We are face with the grinning skeleton of Truman the bankrupt, Truman the pliant tool of Boss Pendergast in looting the Kansas City's country government, Truman the yes-man and apologist in the Senate for political gangsters.

Page 235 Tom Clark dropped the mail fraud prosecution of the Outfit after they stole $1 million from IATSE members [ page 230 ] 

Page 239 et seq #Paul Ricca got out on parole on the first day he was eligible. Questions were asked so Tom Clark ordered an investigation. The FBI and Whitehouse refused to provide any evidence so they got away with it.

Pages 258 - 261 Kefauver's Little Problems, an enthusiasm for fornication [ as well as drinking and gambling ] led to him getting compromised by Sidney Korshak, the mob lawyer.

Page 261 et seq. Senator #Kefauver aka Cow Fever ran the #Kefauver Committee, an investigation of crime on television. It failed but worked well as reality television. Asking #Virginia Hill why Joe gave her lotsa money was a mistake [ p 266 ]. Her answer: I am the best cocksucker in town. They classified the paper as sealed [ SECRET ].

Pages 261-2 Kefauver found more corruption in the upper world than the underworld. This upset him. 

Page 315 The footnote says that  Jack Ruby, a criminal from Chicago, was part of Dorfman's Scrap Iron Union for couple of months before moving to Dallas and fame. Jack Ruby ex Spartacus and Dave Yaras ex Spartacus have more detail. on a vicious crook

Page 406

 Page 437 onward is something of a requiem. The FBI, under #J. Edgar Hoover was getting a grip in Chicago while various criminals were getting old, losing their drive and less able to spells in prison.

If The Outfit was losing power you might think that the good had won. In fact crime was very much part of the local scene but it was secretive. #Gus Russo [ ex Spartacus ] takes us up to 1963 and the Kennedy Job.

 

 

 

Willie Bioff ex Wiki  [ Jew ]   
William Morris ("Willie") Bioff (1900 – November 4, 1955) was an American organized crime figure who operated as a labor leader in the movie production business from the 1920s through the 1940s. During this time, Bioff extorted millions of dollars from movie studios with the threat of mass union work stoppages.

Bioff was born and briefly raised in a kosher Jewish household in Chicago, but his father kicked him out on the street when he was eight years old.^[1] Bioff soon became involved in criminal ventures, beginning with petty theft, then minor protection rackets and working his way up to pimping in Chicago's Levee vice district, of which he was later convicted in 1922. Bioff later worked for Harry and Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik where, through Guzik, Bioff met Al Capone and later Frank "The Enforcer" Nitti.^{[citation needed]}

In the 1930s, Nitti sent Bioff to California as an enforcer for Mafia-controlled union leader George Browne, who later became President of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. Bioff, aided by John "Handsome Johnny" Rosselli, eventually became the collector for the Syndicate-controlled unions in Hollywood, extorting millions of dollars from major motion-picture studios, and keeping several hundred thousand for himself. As one source notes with irony:

Amusingly, Bioff, a glorified Chicago thug, went Hollywood in a big way with his sudden wealth. But his fancy suits and solid gold business cards made him too high profile ... – hence the indictment.^[3]

Bioff later threatened a strike against New York movie theaters by demanding two projectionists in each theater. When owners complained they would go broke under the terms he demanded, Bioff agreed to an arrangement for two projectionists in exchange for reduced pay, much of which went to Bioff. By the late 1930s, a newspaper campaign began bringing attention to the Bioff-Browne extortion operation, creating a huge scandal in Hollywood. He was exposed by conservative newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler, who was trying to prove that criminal corruption was rampant in labor unions.^{[citation needed]}

 

George Brown ex Wiki      
George Brown was at one time the president of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. In 1943, he was tried and convicted with co-conspirator Willie Bioff, of extortion of $1 million from Hollywood film studio producers after threatening them with labor strikes on behalf of the Chicago Outfit.^[2]

 

J. Edgar Hoover ex Wiki       
John Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895 – May 2, 1972) was the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States and an American law enforcement administrator. He was appointed as the director of the Bureau of Investigation – the FBI's predecessor – in 1924 and was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director for another 37 years until his death in 1972 at the age of 77. Hoover has been credited with building the FBI into a larger crime-fighting agency than it was at its inception and with instituting a number of modernizations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories.

Later in life and after his death, Hoover became a controversial figure as evidence of his secretive abuses of power began to surface. He was found to have exceeded the jurisdiction of the FBI,^[2] and to have used the FBI to harass political dissenters and activists, to amass secret files on political leaders,^[3] and to collect evidence using illegal methods.^[4] Hoover consequently amassed a great deal of power and was in a position to intimidate and threaten others, including sitting presidents of the United States.^[5]

 

 

 

Curly Humphreys ex Wiki    
Murray Humphreys (20 April 1899^[1] – November 23, 1965) (also known as The Camel or The Hump), was a Chicago mobster of Welsh descent who was the chief political and labor racketeer in the Chicago Outfit during Prohibition. Considered to be a ruthless but clever man, Humphreys believed in killing only as a last resort as he was known to place great trust in the corruptibility of authority figures; a favorite maxim of his was: "The difference between guilt and innocence in any court is who gets to the judge first with the most".^[2] But perhaps the statement that best summed up Humphreys' philosophy of life was: "Any time you become weak, you might as well die".^[3] Al Capone said of him, "Anybody can use a gun. 'The Hump' can shoot if he has to, but he likes to negotiate with cash when he can".

Humphrey’s other role in the Chicago Outfit was to do everything in his power to ensure its members attracted as little press attention as possible. Whereas some mobsters, such as Sam Giancana and Filippo Sacco, welcomed the limelight, most gangsters took their cue from Humphreys, conducting themselves behind the scenes out of public view. He lived most of his life in a nondescript bungalow in South Shore, Chicago.

 

Estes Kefauver ex Wiki 
Carey Estes Kefauver (/ˈɛstɪs ˈkiːfɔːvər/;^[2] July 26, 1903 – August 10, 1963) was an American politician from Tennessee. A member of the Democratic Party, he served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1939 to 1949 and in the Senate from 1949 until his death in 1963.

After leading a much-publicized investigation into organized crime in the early 1950s, he twice sought his party's nomination for President of the United States. In 1956, he was selected by the Democratic National Convention to be the running mate of presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson. Still holding his U.S. Senate seat after the Stevenson–Kefauver ticket lost to the Eisenhower–Nixon ticket in 1956, Kefauver was named chair of the U.S. Senate Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee in 1957 and served as its chairman until his death........ He ran the Kefauver Committee

 

Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. ex Wiki     
Joseph Patrick Kennedy Sr. (September 6, 1888 – November 18, 1969) was an American businessman, investor, and politician known for his high-profile positions in United States government and for the political and other achievements of his children..........

Kennedy was a leading member of the Democratic Party and of the Irish Catholic community. President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Kennedy to be the first chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which he led from 1934 to 1935. Kennedy later directed the Maritime Commission. Kennedy served as the United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1938 until late 1940, when he annoyed Roosevelt by his pessimism about Britain's survival. During the Battle of Britain in November 1940, Kennedy publicly suggested that "Democracy is finished in England. It may be here [in the United States]".^[2] Following this controversy, Kennedy resigned his position.

Kennedy was married to Rose Kennedy. During his later life he was heavily involved in the political careers of his sons. Three of the Kennedys' sons attained distinguished political positions: John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) served as a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts and as President of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) served as Attorney General and as a U.S. Senator from New York, and Ted Kennedy (1932–2009) also served as a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts.

James Roosevelt, son of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, helped Kennedy start his liquor business after Prohibition.^[22]

 

John F. Kennedy ex Wiki 
John Fitzgerald Kennedy (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963), often referred to by the initials JFK and Jack, was an American politician who served as the 35th president of the United States from January 1961 until his assassination in November 1963. Kennedy served at the height of the Cold War, and the majority of his work as president dealt with managing relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba. A Democrat, Kennedy represented Massachusetts in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate prior to becoming president.

Kennedy was born into a wealthy, political family in Brookline, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University in 1940, before joining the U.S. Naval Reserve the following year. During World War II, he commanded a series of PT boats in the Pacific theater and earned the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for his service. After the war, Kennedy represented the 11th congressional district of Massachusetts in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1947 to 1953. He was subsequently elected to the U.S. Senate and served as the junior Senator from Massachusetts from 1953 to 1960. While in the Senate, Kennedy published his book Profiles in Courage, which won a Pulitzer Prize. In the 1960 presidential election, he narrowly defeated Republican opponent Richard Nixon, who was the incumbent vice president.

Kennedy's administration included high tensions with communist states in the Cold War. He increased the number of American military advisers in South Vietnam. In April 1961, he authorized a vain attempt to overthrow the Cuban government of Fidel Castro in the Bay of Pigs Invasion.^[2] Kennedy authorized the Cuban Project in November 1961. He rejected Operation Northwoods (plans for false flag attacks to gain approval for a war against Cuba) in March 1962, however his administration continued to plan for an invasion of Cuba in the summer of 1962.^[3] In October 1962, U.S. spy planes discovered Soviet missile bases had been deployed in Cuba; the resulting period of tensions, termed the Cuban Missile Crisis, nearly resulted in the breakout of a global thermonuclear conflict. Domestically, Kennedy presided over the establishment of the Peace Corps and the continuation of the Apollo space program, and supported the Civil Rights Movement, but was only somewhat successful in passing his New Frontier domestic policies.

On November 22, 1963, he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson assumed the presidency upon Kennedy's death. Marxist Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the state crime, but he was shot to death by Jack Ruby two days later. The FBI and the Warren Commission both concluded Oswald had acted alone in the assassination, but various groups contested the Warren Report and believed that Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy. After Kennedy's death, Congress enacted many of his proposals, including the Civil Rights Act and the Revenue Act of 1964. Kennedy ranks highly in polls of U.S. presidents with historians and the general public. His personal life has also been the focus of considerable interest, following revelations of his chronic health ailments and extramarital affairs.

 

Paul Ricca ex Wiki     
Paul Ricca (born Felice DeLucia; 1897 – October 11, 1972), was a Chicago mobster who served as the nominal or de facto leader of the Chicago Outfit for 40 years. He went away for the #Hollywood Extortion Racket

 

Frank Sinatra ex Wiki         
Sinatra was also heavily involved with politics from the mid-1940s, and actively campaigned for presidents such as Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. In crime, Sinatra was investigated by the FBI for his alleged [ sic ] relationship with the Mafia.

 

Gus Russo ex Spartacus     
Gus Russo was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1950. As a student Russo was opposed to the Vietnam War and worked for Robert Kennedy during the 1968 presidential campaign. He also began taking an interest in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and eventually produced a screenplay that was later turned down by Oliver Stone.

In 1991 Russo was recruited as a researcher on a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) documentary on the life of Lee Harvey Oswald. According to Russo: "With a huge research budget, we divided into four teams. All of us were given great latitude. I was allowed to follow up on every lead (conspiratorial and otherwise) I had always wanted to test. We went everywhere Oswald went, from Minsk, Russia to Atsugi, Japan. I crisscrossed the U.S. for eighteen months." Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald? was finally shown on television in 1993.

Dan Rather chose Russo to represent the critics of the Warren Report in his 1993 television special, Who Shot JFK? Russo was also employed as an investigative reporter for ABC News and worked with Peter Jennings on the television production of Dangerous World, The Kennedy Years.

In 1998 Russo published Live By The Sword: The Secret War against Castro and the Death of JFK. In the book Russo argues that Lee Harvey Oswald was probably a lone gunman and that the secret war against Fidel Castro "precipitated both President Kennedy's assassination and its cover-up." Russo suggests that Oswald was the lone gunman and that Lyndon B. Johnson, the Central Intelligence Agency and Robert Kennedy took part in the cover-up in order to prevent a nuclear war against Cuba and the Soviet Union.

Assassination of John F. Kennedy Encyclopedia    
The book was well received by the anti-conspiracy media and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The leading supporter of the lone-gunman theory, Gerald Posner, wrote: "Russo's Live by the Sword unequivocally places the guilt on Lee Harvey Oswald. He convincingly demonstrates that the cover up that followed the assassination was prompted in part by the fear of top government officials, including Bobby Kennedy, that Castro, or the climate fostered by his regime, might have played a role in the murder and that the United States' own plots to kill Castro would be exposed."

James P. osty was also impressed with the book and wrote: "The reason most people have not accepted the conclusions of the Warren Report is its failure to ascribe a motive to Oswald. Live By the Sword finally discloses the most likely motivation for Oswald as well as the reason that motive had to be kept secret."

Other books by Russo include The Outfit (2002), the story of the "secretive organised crime cartel that began its reign in prohibition-era Chicago before becoming the puppet master of Hollywood, Las Vegas and Washington". Russo also co-wrote Gangsters and Goodfellas (2004) with Henry Hill. Russo's latest book is Supermob (2005)

 

Gus Russo ex Wikipedia      
Gus G. Russo (born 1950 in Baltimore, Maryland)^{[citation needed]} is an American author and researcher of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.^[1]

Russo was part of a team of researchers that worked on the 1993 Frontline Lee Harvey Oswald documentary, Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?, for PBS.^[2][3] He is the author of Live by the Sword: The Secret War Against Castro and the Death of JFK, a book which states that Lee Harvey Oswald alone killed the president in retribution for Kennedy's policies toward Fidel Castro and Cuba.^[1]

Russo has also written books about the Chicago Outfit and mob lawyer Sidney Korshak. In The Outfit, Russo points out that while the Mafia is responsible for heinous crimes, they aren't the only "business" that engages in destructive and illegal activities. The Mafia's "upper world" counterparts, big business, has been responsible for many crimes themselves (white collar crime), have escaped punishment, and still operates without being prosecuted.^{[citation needed]}

Co-authored by Stephen Molton, Brothers In Arms: The Kennedys, the Castros, and the Politics of Murder states that Castro's regime employed Oswald in retaliation for plots against the Cuban leader.^[4]

 

Harry Truman ex Wiki      
Harry S. Truman^[b] (May 8, 1884 – December 26, 1972) was the 33rd president of the United States from 1945 to 1953, succeeding upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt after serving as vice president. He implemented the Marshall Plan to rebuild the economy of Western Europe, and established the Truman Doctrine and NATO.

Truman was elected to the United States Senate in 1934 and gained national prominence as chairman of the Truman Committee aimed at reducing waste and inefficiency in wartime contracts. Soon after succeeding to the presidency he authorized the first and only use of nuclear weapons in war. Truman's administration engaged in an internationalist foreign policy and renounced isolationism. He rallied his New Deal coalition during the 1948 presidential election and won a surprise victory that secured his own presidential term...........

Corruption in the Truman administration became a central campaign issue in the 1952 presidential election. After Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower's electoral victory against Democrat Adlai Stevenson II, Truman went into a financially-difficult retirement, marked by the founding of his presidential library and the publication of his memoirs. When he left office, Truman's presidency was criticized, but scholars rehabilitated his image in the 1960s and he is highly-ranked by scholars.

 

Kansas City Mob ex Wiki        
The Kansas City Crime Family, also known as Civella crime family (pronounced [tʃiˈvɛlla]), is a Mafia family based in Kansas City, Missouri.

The Italian-American organized crime family began when two Sicilian mafiosi known as the DiGiovanni brothers fled Sicily to Kansas City, Missouri, in 1912. Joseph "Joe Church" DiGiovanni and Peter "Sugarhouse Pete" DiGiovanni began making money from a variety of criminal operations or rackets shortly after their arrival.^[1]

Their fortunes greatly improved with the introduction of Prohibition, when they became the only group bootlegging alcohol in Kansas City.^[1] Their rackets at this time were controlled by John Lazia, who later became the leading figure when the organisation expanded. The gang was given virtually a free hand to operate by their boss Tom Pendergast, head of the Pendergast Machine that controlled Kansas City's government at the time. Under Pendergast, Kansas City became a wide-open town, with absolutely no alcohol-related arrests being made within city limits during the entirety of Prohibition. The DiGiovanni family directly benefited from this lack of enforcement of prohibition laws.^[1]

 

Tom Pendergast ex Wiki   
Thomas Joseph Pendergast (July 22, 1872 – January 26, 1945), also known as T.J. Pendergast, was an American political boss who controlled Kansas City and Jackson County, Missouri from 1925 to 1939. Though only briefly holding elected office as an alderman himself, Pendergast, in his capacity as Chairman of the Jackson County Democratic Party, was able to use his large network of family and friends to help elect politicians (through voter fraud in some cases) and hand out government contracts and patronage jobs. He became wealthy in the process, although his addiction to gambling, especially horse racing, later led to a large accumulation of personal debts. In 1939, he was convicted of income tax evasion and served 15 months in a Federal prison. The Pendergast organization helped launch the political career of Harry S. Truman, a fact that caused Truman's enemies to dub him "The Senator from Pendergast."^[1]

Pendergast may bear comparison to various big-city bosses, but his open alliance with hardened criminals, his cynical subversion of the democratic process, his monarchistic style of living, his increasingly insatiable gambling habit, his grasping for a business empire, and his promotion of Kansas City as a wide-open town with every kind of vice imaginable, combined with his professed compassion for the poor and very real role as city builder, made him bigger than life, difficult to characterize.^[2]

 

Virginia Hill ex Wiki      
Virginia Hill (born Onie Virginia Hill; August 26, 1916 – March 24, 1966) was an American organized crime figure. An Alabama native, Hill became a Chicago outfit courier during the mid-1930s.^[5] Hill was famous for being the girlfriend of mobster Bugsy Siegel.^[6]

 

Hollywood Extortion Racket ex Gangsters Inc.    
The 1930s through to the 1940s are known as the Golden Age for Hollywood. During those days eight major studios controlled the entire movie industry from top to bottom. They would make the movie and distribute it via their own theatres. But the big studios were also held in a choke hold by the American mob, which managed to extort millions of dollars from the movie moguls.

#Willie Bioff and #George Browne were in a jubilant mood when they entered Club 100 in Chicago. The two men had just made $19,000 by extorting the biggest theatre chain in Chicago and were surprised at how easy it had been. Browne was business manager of Local 2, a stagehands union with 450 members. He had reached this position by beating the previous business manager with a lead pipe. Besides his union work Browne also extorted stores along Fulton Street.

This is where Browne met Willie Bioff, a.k.a. Willie the Pimp. At age five, Bioff had immigrated to the United States from Russia. Four years later Bioff was leading men to brothels, telling them that his “little sister was home alone.” Prostitution remained his main activity. After he got married, his wife helped him out by misleading teenage runaway girls to work for a Southside brothel...........

The movie business was the fourth-largest industry in the US, and could make the mob millions. A few days later Browne and Bioff were invited to the house of a Chicago gangster who happened to live next door to Nitti. During this meeting, Nitti, backed by Chicago Outfit mobsters Paul Ricca, Charlie Fischetti, and Jewish boss “Lepke” Buchalter from New York, was very clear: We know about your racket and we are taking over. But Nitti was a businessman and decided to keep Browne and Bioff involved. Thanks to mob influence Brown was elected as head of the IATSE: The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. With Browne in place the mob would be able to extort every movie theatre chain in the United States.

During the 1930s there were five major studios that not only made movies, but also distributed them through their own theatre chains. Since the mob controlled the unions it could sabotage screenings by causing strikes, or, if that didn’t work, setting fires in theatres throughout the US, causing the studios major losses. The mob now had Hollywood in a choke hold.