“Greasy Thumb”
In an era of criminal high fashion and overweening ostentation, Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik [Goo-zik] was an unlikely looking gangster: a small, rumpled, hangdog, gravy-stained schlemiel with a gaze more fearful than fearsome.
He preferred to be called Jack, perhaps because “Jake” emphasized his Russian/Polish Jewish ancestry. He was known as “Greasy Thumb” either because, as a young waiter, he tended to stick it in the soup; or because he was always licking it as he counted out payments on Capone’s behalf; or simply because it was his job to “grease” the cops and politicians who turned a blind eye to the Organization’s operation.
Guzik got his start by following his brothers Harry and Sam into the white slave trade, tricking country girls into applying for work as maids, subjecting them to professional rapists to “break them in,” and selling them to the city’s brothels and clip joints. The brothers got John Torrio’s attention by breaking up Jack Zuta’s monopoly on prostitution. Their excesses, however, contributed to the passing of the Mann Act, under which Harry served time, while his little brothers Jake and Sam entered the policy racket. A partner in the misnamed Sanitary Vending Machine Company, Sam eventually became Capone’s slot machine wizard, while Jake demonstrated his way with numbers.
By one account Guzik ingratiated himself with Capone by reporting a conversation he overheard between two men bent on killing the Big Fellow. For his part, Capone earned Guzik’s undying loyalty by personally blowing out the brains of a smalltime gangster who had mugged the little bagman on his rounds.
Guzik became Capone’s most skillful and trusted subordinate, overseeing the Organization’s army of quaking accountants. He proved himself so essential to the Organization’s prosperity and smooth operation that after Alphonse went to jail, and a paranoid Frank Nitto (Nitti) began culling the outfit of Capone’s staunchest loyalists, he never laid a glove on Guzik.
Like Capone, he was convicted of tax evasion and received a sentence of five years. But once he got sprung, Ricca and Accardo welcomed him back to the fold. After Capone’s release from federal custody, it was Guzik who told the press that his old pal was “nutty as a cuckoo” and thus no threat to his successors.
Wearing dark glasses to obscure his appearance, he took the Fifth in front of the Kefauver Committee in 1952. At the time of his death four years later, he was living in Chicago under the alias Jack Arnold. His wife Rose blamed the authorities’ harassment for hastening his death, but a contributing factor to the former white slaver’s demise may have been the life sentence his son Charles had recently received for child molestation.
Copyright © 2018 by Andrew Ward. All rights reserved.
