Capone’s Successors
The question of who succeeded Capone is complicated by rivalries, shared responsibilities, the mob’s withdrawal from the national spotlight, not to mention the unraveling ball of yarn Capone left behind.
During the later of the eight months he spent in Pennsylvania prisons for gun possession, it is said Capone continued to rule the Organization. After his 1931 conviction for tax evasion, Capone remained at least the titular head of the Organization while imprisoned in Cook County Jail, where he is said to have enjoyed special visiting, telephone and correspondence privileges. His suzerainty might have survived a transfer to Leavenworth, where his brother Ralph, Jake Guzik and Frank Nitto remained in prison. But his last minute remove to the distant federal penitentiary in Atlanta all but severed his connection with his cronies, and his subsequent transfer to Alcatraz shut him off completely.
The name that most often arises as Al’s successor is Frank Nitto, or “Nitti” as the press and subsequent dramatizations dubbed him. Ruthless, claustrophobic, and paranoid, he was a small, dapper man who had grown up in Capone’s Brooklyn neighborhood. During the Big Fella’s federal imprisonment he began to purge Capone loyalists, most notably “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn and Al’s “American Boys.” Against Capone’s advice, Nitto tried to intimidate Hollywood movie moghuls by taking over industry unions, including projectionists’. But those exploits eventually backfired, and to avoid another prison sentence, he shot himself in a Chicago rail yard.
Some historians believe Nitto’s power has been overstated, and that he was at best chief of operations: one of a triumvirate Capone had appointed to lead in his place after his 1929 conviction. The others were the indispensable Jake Guzik and the brutal, wily Tony “Batters” Accardo, so named for the baseball bats he sometimes wielded on Capone’s behalf. After Nitto’s suicide, Accardo took over, allying himself with his pal Paul Ricca with whom he shared power over what had come to be known as the Outfit.
Thanks to their brutal machinations, reticence, and unprecedented mutual trust, Chicago remained independent from the New York mafia. Some say Ricca was the real boss, and Accardo his consigliere, while John “Jackie the Lackey” Cerone handled the day-to-day.
For a period, the titular boss was Sam Giancana, but he could make no move without his elders’ permission. Splashy, mercurial, and starstruck, Giancana had a highly publicized affair with singer Phyllis McGuire, involved himself in a CIA plot to poison Fidel Castro, pimped for Sinatra and John F. Kennedy, sent the catastrophic Tony Spilotro to act as his enforcer in Vegas, and refused to share his offshore-casino profits with the Outfit’s hierarchy.
With Ricca’s death in 1972, and before Giancana’s assassination in 1975, Accardo handed the reins to Joey Aiuppa and retired to his $500,000 mansion. In 1986, as the Outfit’s Las Vegas operation began to self destruct, Aiuppa and Cerone were imprisoned for failing to declare $2 million in untaxed casino winnings and sentenced to long prison sentences.
With Ricca dead, Accardo more or less retired, and Aiuppa and Cerone out of commission, the lines of succession get murky, with underbosses like Joey Ferriola and Sam Carlisi vying for Capone’s battered throne.
There seems to be a consensus that John “No Nose” DiFronzo ran things until 2014, when he fell victim to that most dreaded ailment in an enterprise in which so little is written down: Alzheimers.
After DiFronzo’s death in 2018, or, more likely, before, the top job reportedly went to a self-described carpet cleaner named Salvatore DeLaurentis, with an assist from consigliere Albert “Albie” Vena.
But who the hell knows?
Copyright © 2019 by Andrew Ward. All rights reserved.
