The Road to Perdition

For students of the gangster life, the chief satisfaction of Gus Russo’s enormous chronicle, “The Outfit: The Role of Chicago’s Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America,” will be the lavish attention paid to the Chicago mobsters who came after the heyday of Al Capone. Russo demonstrates that Capone’s successors, though less storied than that 1920s icon, were equally colorful and eccentric and that their dealings in a post-Prohibition world were vastly more labyrinthine and sophisticated.

Chicago civic boosterism has long held that the city’s lawless days, when the machine gun ruled and politicians belonged to racketeers, was strictly a Jazz Age aberration, but as Russo makes abundantly and embarrassingly clear, organized crime persisted in Chicago for decades. Once Capone and his mentor, Johnny Torrio, the father of American corporate crime, laid the groundwork, succeeding generations of gangsters built and maintained the Outfit, as the remarkably durable, one-size-fits-all racketeering organization came to be called. The Outfit insinuated itself into Chicago’s infrastructure and achieved a legitimacy that Capone and his associates could only imagine; its influence reached Las Vegas and Hollywood, but it remained a quintessentially Chicago institution. Russo convincingly demonstrates that the road to perdition lasted at least until the 1960s.

This idea, which Russo drives home with grim zeal, is one that today’s civic leaders would rather forget, as I learned when I was at work on my biography of Capone. In the course of my research, I went to see one of the city fathers, a man whose trophy-filled office was a monument to himself. “What’s a nice boy like you doing writing about gangsters?” he challenged. “Why don’t you write about Chicago’s museums, symphonies and parks?” Nevertheless, in spite of his, and others’, protestations, Chicago’s reputation for inspiring an amazing variety of gangster activity stubbornly clings to the city.

In contrast to recent books about crime, which emphasize the warped sensibilities of the criminals themselves, “The Outfit” is a throwback to an earlier era of crime writing, the hairy-chested, comprehensive, now-it-can-be-told indictments compiled by writers like Hank Messick, Virgil Peterson and Ovid Demaris. Russo had access to “eighty-seven cubic feet of documents” generated by the U.S. Senate’s 1950-51 committee inquiry into organized crime led by Sen. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. (One of the ironies of organized crime is how much material concerning its supposedly secret machinations is in the public record, thanks to FBI wiretaps and the Freedom of Information Act. Would that we knew as much about the inner workings of the White House as we do about various sit-downs among Chicago hoodlums.)

With his attention to detail, Russo is at his best when he patiently deconstructs the careers of such Outfit figures as the demonic hoodlum Willie Bioff (“an evolutionary malfunction”), who terrorized the motion picture industry; Sam Giancana, perhaps the most reckless figure in a book filled with sociopaths; and especially Murray “The Camel” Humphreys, the Outfit’s mastermind, who was in many ways a more influential and certainly shrewder criminal than his mentor, Capone. I have never read a better, or more exhaustive, account of how these men built their empires and how they lost them. (Most gangster stories end in tragedy, as “The Outfit” demonstrates over and over.)

But Russo gets into trouble when his assumptions run too far ahead of the facts. This book is by no means the first to link Joseph P. Kennedy, the patriarch of the Kennedy clan, to bootlegging and to various schemes to manipulate the 1960 presidential campaign in his son’s favor. Russo cites every bit of evidence that he can muster to support his contention that Kennedy and the Outfit conspired to influence the voting, but the case, while thought-provoking, remains largely circumstantial. Nevertheless, the moral passion behind the author’s account of that controversial election is impressive.

I wish I could admire Russo’s style as much as I do his substance. Reaching for tough-guy eloquence, he trips all over himself: “Torrio guessed that Capone was a train wreck just waiting to happen and decided to bail out and hitch his wagon to an idea that dwarfed even the Torrio-Capone Syndicate: an affiliation with New York gangsters Meyer Lansky, Ben Siegel, and Lucky Luciano.” Anecdotes are related with a singular lack of flair. I was surprised to learn, for example, of Humphreys’ curious fascination with producing home movies; The Camel even made a home movie at Alcatraz, of all places, “sarcastically dubbing the track with the popular song ‘Hail. Hail, the Gang’s All Here.’ ” I wanted to know more; but the author seemed so preoccupied with getting out his data that he neglected to suggest what it all means.

The book’s methodology would have benefited from more careful consideration. In this account, Russo seems to give all sources equal weight, whether they are FBI wiretap transcripts, newspaper clippings, court transcripts, interviews conducted by the author or hearsay. With so much data at hand, some of it carefully considered and accurate but much of it spurious, Russo often resorts to taking hearsay as fact. At one point, Russo appears to accept Luciano’s explanation for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s decision to call off an investigation into organized crime, although Luciano is no one’s idea of a reliable source.

To make matters a little worse, “The Outfit,” for all its research, does not include endnotes or footnotes; reading the book, I wondered time and again, “Where is he getting this stuff?” The list of sources at the end provides a rough guide, but the author often fails to link quotations and incidents throughout the book to specific sources. I do not believe Russo wanted to obscure his sources, which are impressive, but he missed an important step in documenting them.

Despite these caveats, “The Outfit’s” exhaustive reporting and comprehensive analysis of Chicago’s criminal culture make the book one of the essential works on the subject of organized crime. Virtually every tale told about the Outfit can be found here. Criminologists will consult it for decades, and general readers who follow Russo to the end will think twice the next time they buy a movie ticket or cast a ballot.

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From ‘The Outfit’

For those Americans not in denial of their history, the term organized crime has always meant something other than Al Capone, Mooney Giancana or Meyer Lansky. Without doubt , the best organized crime in the United States is a coalition of upperworld businessmen, pliant politicians and corrupted law enforcement officers. “Corruption is as American as cherry pie,” wrote author and former Senate staff member Nathan Miller. “Graft and corruption played a vital role in the development of modern American society and the creation of the complex, interlocking machinery of government and business that determines the course of our affairs.”

The crimes of this shadowy partnership surpass in spades the criminal escapades of underworld cliques like Chicago’s Outfit. However, this very upperworld paradigm gives both rationale and inspiration to the underworld gangsters we choose to vilify in their stead. As a society we no longer have to purchase our vices from gangsters: We can merely sit at home and, thanks to the General Motors-owned DirecTV, have pornography delivered straight to our television sets (or to our Hilton Hotel room in Vegas); through state-sponsored commercials, we are enticed to play the G’s lottery, a game so tilted in the state’s favor as to make the hoods’ numbers racket seem like charity.