From the Chicago Tribune, originally published September 24, 2006, updated August 21, 2021:
Supermob: How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became America’s Hidden Power Brokers
By Gus Russo
Bloomsbury, 623 pages, $34.95
For most Americans, real racket power in the last century hovered somewhere over the Hudson River, and no wonder. They saw New York-area gangsters featured in the best books and movies about the Mafia. Flamboyant bosses like John Gotti grabbed headlines with good sound bites and flashy trials, or the occasional high-profile hit in a crowded restaurant.
But while East Coast mob families splattered each other’s brains in the marinara, the Second City’s less-colorful Mafia, known as the Outfit, built a criminal empire that was truly second to none. Its tentacles stretched to the West Coast and wrapped securely around Las Vegas. Not that its members didn’t whack their own wayward bosses along the way, but their executions were mostly private affairs, often dispatched with a few well-placed .22s to the back of the head.
Author Gus Russo has done yeoman’s work in pulling the Outfit bosses from the shadows to show how their muscle and methods came to dominate organized crime. In his 2001 book, suitably titles “The Outfit,” he chronicles the Chicago mob’s rise to national power after Al Capone. Now, he weighs in with “Supermob.” If you know about the short shrift the Outfit has received in the popular imagination, you can almost forgive the breathless title, but Russo pointedly uses the term “Supermob” to describe a band of Jewish lawyers, politicians and businessmen who acted as cat’s-paws for some of the Outfit’s most ambitious scams. Although he credits a Senate investigator with first using the term “Supermob,” Russo takes it to a new level, suggesting a gang of white-collar kingpins as ruthless and tightly knit as a Mafia family. He is also serious about the “Super,” claiming that the members of his “Kosher Nostra” would ultimately profit more from their “amoral, and frequently criminal careers” than did their Outfit allies.
Like all other Chicago gangster stories, Russo’s starts with Capone, a criminal mastermind far more sophisticated than the brutal Scarface we know from the movies. Unlike gang leaders before him, he was not content with cornering the market on gambling and bootlegging. The “financial wiz” who showed him the way was Alex Louis Greenberg. He put Capone’s money into real estate and service industries with free flowing cash, such as banks, entertainment venues and hotels. In the beginning, to protect the various investments, the mob used its excess money to buy politicians and its excess muscle to strong-arm unions. Eventually these inroads into the public sector and labor organizations would become lucrative sources of income themselves.
As the schemes got more complicated, the mobsters needed the help of lawyers, politicians and frontmen with relatively clean criminal records. It was a Faustian bargain, but it helped launch some of the most prominent names in Chicago’s Jewish community. For example, according to Russo, Outfit funds and connections formed the foundation on which lawyer Abe Pritzker’s family built the Hyatt hotel chain.
At the nexus of mob influence and political corruption was lawyer Jacob Arvey, the most important Jewish cog of the city’s multiethnic Democratic machine. His clout with the Truman administration put a protege in charge of property seized from German companies and interned Japanese-Americans. Russo documents how these West Coast assets were sold for a fraction of their value to silent mob partners and the young lawyers, Arvey accomplices, who served as their frontmen. Some of these young lawyers then set up shop in California and duplicated Chicago’s Democratic machine there, fueling their candidates’ campaigns with money donated by the mob and its related unions.
But the Outfit’s insidious control of unions most drove its westward expansion. Back in the earliest days of moving pictures, Chicago mobsters used the threat of projectionist walkouts to shake down local theaters. These extortion schemes worked their way back to the studio lots. According to Russo, the movie moguls did not mind seeing leftist organizers pushed to the side by mob goons, who could at least be paid off to keep the cameras rolling.
Producers also got squeezed by the stars in front of the cameras, especially those managed by Jules Stein and Lew Wasserman of MCA, Hollywood’s first powerhouse talent agency. Back in Chicago when Stein started the firm as Music Corporation of America, he was booking area bands and using a “union racketeer” to throw stink bombs in nightclubs that wouldn’t take his acts. He was supposedly a silent partner with Outfit bosses in the hot spots where his bands played, and according to Russo, he would continue to blur the line between ownership and union influence throughout his career.
Later, when Wasserman client Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency of the Screen Actors Guild, he helped push through a waiver permitting MCA to be the only agency that could also produce programs for the burgeoning TV industry. This competitive edge helped Stein and Wasserman gain control of Universal Pictures and create Hollywood’s first multimedia behemoth. In return for the SAG waiver, Russo asserts, Wasserman secretly cut Reagan into production deals (counter to SAG rules) and helped transform him into the ubiquitous TV presence that launched his political career.
The Outfit had its hooks in Las Vegas from the start (a Chicago mobster bribed Nevada legislators to pass the Wide Open Gambling Bill), but if the bosses hadn’t had their fingers in the Teamsters pension fund, the city wouldn’t be what we know today. From 1959 to 1961, they took $91 million from the union to build or improve one casino after another. Over the next decade, as Las Vegas’ popularity soared, the Outfit was perfectly positioned to dominate the scene, with its control of corrupt politicians from both parties, its manipulation of the service unions and even its access, through Hollywood back channels, to the hottest entertainers, like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. Eventually millions in cash skimmed from the casino counting rooms would make its way to Chicago’s mob bosses.
Members of Russo’s Supermob were pivotal resources in each of the Outfit’s connections to Las Vegas, but none more so than Sidney Korshak....
....MUCH MORE
