Social History: The central thesis of Gus Rosso's book is that a powerful criminal fraternity known as the 'Outfit' successfully infiltrated every facet of American life, and his book is at its most fascinating when it deals with two areas of influence: the Outfit's impact on the entertainment industry, and the part it played in JFK's 1960 campaign, writes John Connolly.
In 1960, the monstrous Joe Kennedy, father of US presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, approached a group of gentlemen in Chicago with a proposal. If they contributed to his son's campaign fund and promised him the support of the non-Teamster unions in the impending election, Kennedy Senior would guarantee them a hotline to the White House. It was not the only time that Joe Kennedy would make such a proposal to a group of businessmen, but what made this offer so distinctive was that the gentlemen in question were known collectively as "the Outfit", and they were the most powerful criminal fraternity in the United States.
The Outfit was formed in Chicago by the heirs of Al Capone, and remained untroubled by the kind of bloody rivalries that undermined the five New York crime families, thanks to the St Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929, which effectively wiped out its main opposition. It was thus able to concentrate on expanding its operations and becoming the dominant criminal force in labour unions, the nascent Las Vegas, and in the music and film industries, thanks in no small part to the organisational abilities of one Llewelyn "Curly" Humphreys, the only major Welsh gangster in US history and the organisational genius behind the Outfit. Charming, intelligent, opposed to the use of violence except as a last resort, and a master strategist, it was Humphreys who hit upon the brilliant legal ploy of advising mobsters to "plead the Fifth" (i.e. to refuse to answer a question on the grounds that it might lead to self- incrimination) before Congressional committees, the first time the tactic had ever been used outside a criminal court.
The central thesis of Russo's painstaking history of the Outfit is that it successfully infiltrated every facet of American life, from the delivery of a quart of milk to the election of presidents, and his book is at its most fascinating when it deals with two areas of influence: the Outfit's impact on the entertainment industry, and the part it played in JFK's 1960 campaign.
Johnny Rosselli, a dapper, tubercular gangster, was nominated to lead the Outfit's incursion into the potentially lucrative world of 1930s Hollywood. Using the gang's experience of union infiltration in the midwest, the Outfit set about successfully taking over the craft unions, since almost half of all movie overheads were tied up in the craft side of the business. Wage rates in the largest entertainment union, IATSE, fell by up to 40 per cent over the next four years as the mob skimmed paychecks and agreed backroom anti-labour deals with the studios. In turn, those same studios (with the exception of Columbia, thanks to studio boss Harry Cohn's friendly relations with Rosselli) were forced to pay an annual fee or risk being shut down.
Even the movie stars found themselves within the gangsters' reach. Rosselli's status as studio bookmaker and loan shark enabled him to gather information vital to the Outfit's Hollywood aspirations, leaving famous names open to blackmail and exploitation. Such luminaries as Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Jimmy Durante and Marilyn Monroe are all believed to have attracted the attentions of the Outfit in this way. Others, like Frank Sinatra, allied themselves willingly, to the extent that when Curly Humphreys's daughter, Llewella, needed a date for her high school prom, she asked her father to arrange for Sinatra to be her escort. One phone call later, Sinatra was on the next plane to Chicago.
Actress Jean Harlow was less fortunate in her association with Chicago. Her stepfather, the Chicago mobster, Marino Bello, pimped her to studio executives, and she was also the girlfriend of New Jersey gangster Longy Zwillman. When Harlow married Paul Bern, an MGM studio assistant, against Bello's will, Bern was shot dead two months into the marriage, possibly also because he refused to share his wife with Zwillman.
While Hollywood made the Outfit a great deal of money, its members were always on the lookout for ways to increase their influence in the corridors of power. It could already convincingly claim to have influenced one presidential election through its links with the Kansas city mob that sponsored the rise of President Harry Truman. (Outfit boss Sam "Mooney" Giancana remarked of Truman that "(he) owes everything he's got to us . . . We own him".) In return, Truman did not object when his crooked attorney-general, Tom Clark, dropped mail fraud charges against the Outfit in 1947 and ensured that all of its leading lights were released from jail in what came to be termed "the impossible parole", masterminded, once again, by Curly Humphreys.
Presciently, it was Humphreys who objected most strongly to the Outfit's support for John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign. JFK's eventual opponent, Richard Nixon, already had the support of Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa, who hoped for assistance with his own legal difficulties if Nixon was elected, so the support of the other labour unions was crucial to Kennedy's chances. Giancana, excited by the prospect of another sympathetic administration in the White House, ignored Humphreys's reservations and decided to put the weight of the Outfit behind Kennedy (although the Outfit already enjoyed at least one bizarre link to the Kennedys, as Sinatra, Johnny Rosselli, Giancana and JFK all shared the same girlfriend, Judith Campbell).
Humphreys went to work, spending money and exerting his influence to ensure that the labour unions would support Kennedy. In each of the states in which the Outfit had a strong union presence, Kennedy squeaked to victory, in the case of Illinois (where the Outfit and Chicago's Mayor Daley ensured that even the dead managed to vote) by a margin of 0.2 per cent, prompting allegations of electoral fraud that were, unsurprisingly, never investigated by Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department. Similar allegations of fraud by Kennedy supporters arose in Texas, Nevada, and Alabama, where Kennedy's vote was counted twice.
It could be argued that the decision to support Kennedy marked the beginning of the end for the Outfit. To the gang's almost touching surprise, the hated mob-tormentor, Bobby Kennedy, was installed as attorney-general, and the very individuals who had worked to elect one brother found themselves hounded by another. "I might have known that guy would f**k us," Mooney Giancana ruefully remarked of JFK.
The Outfit subsequently entered a period of gradual decline, due in no small part to the passing of the anti- racketeering RICO laws in 1970. Under pressure to give evidence against their fellow mobsters or face lengthy jail terms, a number of high-profile Outfit members threatened to cave in and confess. The patriotic Rosselli, who had assisted the CIA in its actions against Castro in Cuba, was strangled, dismembered, and dumped at sea in an oil drum to prevent him from talking. Giancana was shot to death in his basement. Curly Humphreys, by contrast, died of a blood clot to the heart while cleaning up his apartment.
What Russo posits, at the end of this serious, scholarly, and engrossing work, is that the Outfit was certainly no worse, and arguably more honourable, than the supposedly "respectable" businessmen, such as Joe Kennedy, who sometimes colluded with it. The Outfit merely represented a more open display of the triumph of greed over principle and compassion which has characterised the actions of big business in the US since the reign of robber barons like the Vanderbilts, the Morgans and the Rockefellers.
Like so many other immigrants, the members of the Outfit wanted their children to be more successful than they themselves were, and their offspring were discouraged from engaging in criminal enterprises. The Outfit's activities were simply an alternative means to an end coveted by millions: the acquisition of security and happiness through wealth, and the ultimate achievement of the Great American Dream.
John Connolly's latest novel, Bad Men, is published by Hodder & Stoughton
The Outfit: The Role of Chicago's Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America. By Gus Russo, Bloomsbury, 550pp, £14.99