Franchising crime
Mob leadership baffles experts
NWI Times
May 27, 1991
http://www.nwitimes.com/uncategorized/franchising-crime-mob-leadership-baffles-experts/article_a151bb74-d121-57d4-8182-f016a572973a.html
Who's running the show for the Chicago Outfit?
The FBI, Chicago Police Department and Chicago Crime Commission don't agree. Lt. John Guarnieri of the Chicago Police Department's Intelligence Unit, a professional mobologist, said his candidate for chairman of the Outfit is John "No Nose" DiFronzo, a 62-year-old River Grove, Ill. resident with one felony conviction for burglary in 1950.
"I know for a fact that DiFronzo is running the show," Guarnieri said.
In its latest chart, the FBI puts Sam "Wings" Carlisi, 69, of Bartlett, Ill. at the top of the chart, one step above DiFronzo.
"If you're a boss, they come to you," Guarnieri said, "but Carlisi goes to people, while people go to DiFronzo."
The Chicago Crime Commission, meanwhile, says in its 1990 report on Chicago organized crime that the mob's dinosaur, 85-year-old Anthony Accardo, is the "chairman" and that Carlisi is the street boss and DiFronzo the underboss.
The FBI and Chicago police acknowledge that Accardo plays a role, but both say he serves as a consigliere, or a counselor, an advisor - sort of an elder statesman whose advice is respected and most often taken.
Accardo of Barrington Hills, Ill. is credited by the Chicago Crime Commission as one of the Capone gunmen at the Feb. 14, 1929, St. Valentine's Day Massacre, where six members of rival George "Bugs" Moran's gang and a hanger-on were machine-gunned inside a garage on North Clark Street.
Although newspapers hung the nickname "Big Tuna" on Accardo - because of a picture taken of him with an enormous fish he had caught - his mob compatriots call him "Joe Batters," a reference to his handiness with a baseball bat on the heads of Capone enemies.
If it all sounds too much like something out of "The Godfather" to be true, consider that law enforcement surveillance recently saw mobster Richard "The Cat" Catezone, from Chicago's Bridgeport area, celebrating his release from prison on extortion charges with a big blowout on Rush Street.
"They were kissing his ring. These 25-, 30-year-old punks from Bridgeport were kissing the ring of this guy - a fat, bald nobody," said one of the officers. "By the end of the night, he was drunk in the gutter. And they were kissing his ring. It made me sick."
Although recent revelations show the Chicago mob's influence extends in Indiana as far east as South Bend and Elkhart, the remainder of the state has little in the way of what is called "traditional" organized, or LCN crime, FBI shorthand for "La Cosa Nostra," or "Our Thing."
Robert Pertuso, supervisor at the Merrillville FBI office, said there is lucrative gambling in Indiana cities like Indianapolis, Lafayette, Fort Wayne, Muncie and Evansville but no large Italian population to form an LCN nucleus.
"There is lucrative gambling," Pertuso said. "But there is no evidence these guys are paying street tax to the Chicago Outfit. First of all, you have to have an Italian family, and in places like Indianapolis, there is no LCN residing there."
FBI Special Agent James Cziperle, an organized crime expert, said of Indiana outside this area, "They have organized crime, but it's all local, non-LCN associated."
Italian-Americans are quick to point out that a majority of their countrymen are not "wise guys," and are in fact in the forefront of mob prosecution: people like Guarnieri and Pertuso and New York City's crusading anti-mob former U.S. Attorney Rudolph Guiliani and Diane Giacalone, one of two prosecutors who took mob bosses like John Gotti, Carmine Persico, Anthony Corallo and Anthony Salerno to trial in 1986.
The traditional Italian organized crime family structure, although firmly in place in areas with large Italian populations like New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia and Kansas City, is inevitably going to suffer from the same force that created it: immigration.
As Asians flow into the United States, displaced from Vietnam, Hong Kong, Thailand and Cambodia, they are quickly forming their own secret crime societies. There have always been the tongs, or Chinese secret organizations, but they have usually restricted their activities to predominantly Chinese areas and population.
Russians, too, are immigrating in huge numbers while the door of glasnost remains open, and they likewise are bringing a traditional organized crime structure with them. Federal authorities already have convicted some Russian organized crime figures in New York and California.
In some markets, alliances have been formed between the old and new organized crime syndicates. The Russian organized crime influence in the gasoline market in some areas of the country has also been linked to four of the five New York City Italian syndicate families, federal authorities there say.
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