Family Affair Read online

  “Las Vegas had never seen anybody like Tony Spilotro,” said a former law enforcement agent. “A lot of guys came out to the desert and liked to play gangster and lot of real gangsters came out there too but, for the most part, left their criminal affairs behind them wherever they came from. This guy was a hard-core wiseguy through and through, and when he came to town and didn’t have anyone looking over his shoulder, he went wild. I mean real cowboy stuff that the cops and public weren’t accustomed to. He probably killed a dozen people just to let people know he was serious and that a new regime was starting up. Back in the day, when Bugsy and lot of the New York and early Chicago guys got there, they were trying, at least on the surface, to act like businessmen. Tony was a gangster and he didn’t know any other way to act, nor did he care to try to sugar-coat his persona for anybody. He was just a typhoon of illegal activity that came in and stayed for fifteen years to everybody’s great dismay.”

  Bringing in a group of close to thirty men from the Midwest to make up a crew of subordinates and help him to get the city in order, it wasn’t long before he began shaking down anyone he could find. He sent for Herbert “Fat Herbie” Blitzstein, a Jewish enforcer from the North Side of Chicago known for his mutton-chop sideburns and loud clothing selection, to be his right-hand man and primary buffer between him and the street. He took old friends Paul “Paulie the Indian” Schiro, Joey Hansen, and Chris Petti, and stationed them in Arizona, Los Angeles, and San Diego, respectively, to act as fences for stolen property and look after Outfit interests on his behalf. It wasn’t long before three of his brothers, John, Victor, and Michael, had at least partially relocated to Nevada and joined Tony’s crew as well.

  Doing something that had never before been done in Vegas, he imposed a citywide street tax—strong-arming every bookie, loan-shark, drug dealer, pimp, and thief he could get his hands on into paying him a piece of their profits in order to operate. From his office inside his gift shop at Circus Circus, he started his own bookmaking and juice loan racket, eventually getting dealers and casino employees from every casino on the Strip—most of whom were degenerate gamblers, alcoholics, and junkies themselves—indebted to him in one way or another. Recruiting a cadre of professional card cheats and burglary experts to be part of his crew, he began taking down big-money poker games in a number of the casino’s card rooms and robbing out-of-town bigwigs in their hotel suites via tipsters he had stationed across the city.

  Anyone who resisted Spilotro and refused to get with the program was outright done away with—killed in cold blood. During Tony’s first six months in town there were six unsolved homicides of local loan sharks who scoffed at the notion of lining up behind the new regime. Over the next five years, there would be more gangland-related murders than in the previous twenty-five years combined. Jerry Delman, a Vegas-area bookmaker and former Chicago associate of Spilotro’s; Joseph “Red” Klimm, a casino pit boss; Marty Bucceri, an Outfit-connected blackjack dealer; Rick Manzi, an Outfit associate; and Tamara Rand, a silent investor in one of the mob-run casinos and hotels, were all suspected to have been murdered either by Tony himself or by his crew on his orders.

  The Ant also put a number of police officers and casino executives on his payroll, and soon he knew the skinny on all of his biggest adversaries. As a result, he was able to combat much of what they were trying to do to stop him. Everybody fell in line. It became crystal clear who was running Vegas. It wasn’t the mayor. It wasn’t the city council. It wasn’t the cops. It was Tony “The Ant” Spilotro. The desert had its first don.

  6.

  Boosting the Boss

  The Big Tuna’s Revenge

  Bodies were popping up everywhere—mangled and tortured corpses being found in cars and the trunks of cars all over Chicago in the frigid early months of 1978. One person disappeared all together, conspicuously absent from his everyday life in the Windy City, but never found. When all was said and done, ten people were murdered or presumed dead, each of their lives taken in the wake of a daring burglary that took place in a suburban River Forest home on January 6. But, this was not just any home. This was the residence of the city’s reigning mafia don, Tony Accardo, a man of very few equals across the nation’s gangland landscape. A person who could have a life ended with one phone call or even a simple nod of his head. Unfortunately for the men who planned and carried out the risky and ill-advised home invasion, he was also a man of little patience when it came to being disrespected. For a mafia head of state like the Big Tuna, brazen acts of defiance and breaches of mob protocol resulted in swift and often painful retribution. As most in the city were acclimating themselves to the new year, reentering the workforce after a few days off to celebrate the holidays, the relatives of the murder victims were spending the first portion of 1978 making funeral plans. Ten men. All of them the victims of what was one of the most horrific and bloody purges of mafia dissidents in the history of the underworld.

  The fateful break-in at the home of Tony Accardo that set this string of nearly a dozen gore-ridden homicides in motion was preceded by another audacious break-in of sorts—a daring diamond heist that was carried out at one of the biggest jewelry stores in Chicago in late December 1977 and deemed by authorities in local law enforcement as the most lucrative jewel robbery of the decade. During the week before Christmas, a Saturday to be exact, a crew of Outfit jewel thieves, led by thirty-one-year-old career criminal and alarm expert John Mendell, invaded Levinson’s Jewelry Store. After almost twenty-four hours of work inside, they walked away with over $1 million in cash, jewels, and fur.

  Under most circumstances, a score of this magnitude, pulled off by a veteran and skilled crew like the one headed by Mendell would be greeted by The Outfit with great cheer and fanfare. However, due to some key lapses in judgment on Mendell’s part, this was not the case.

  The owner of Levinson’s Jewelry Store, located on Clark Street in the north end of The Loop, was Harry Levinson. In addition to owning and operating his jewelry store for over fifty years, Levinson was rumored to operate an Outfit-backed sports book and loan-shark operation on the side. He also was known to be a good friend of Tony Accardo’s. Brought up during Prohibition in a Jewish section of the city, Levinson once worked for Hymie Levin, who, in his heyday, was one of the biggest bookmakers in Chicago. Levin was a close acquaintance of Accardo’s, kicking up a large amount of tribute payments from his wide-scale booking operation to the Midwest mob boss. This was how Levinson was introduced to and became friendly with Accardo, and this is why his business was off-limits to The Outfit’s vast network of professional thieves.

  But John Mendell didn’t play by the rules. He foolishly bypassed the crime family’s standard chain of command and neglected to get an okay to knock over the jewelry store from his direct superiors in The Outfit. If he had, he would have been informed to stay away from Levinson’s store due to the owner’s relationship with Accardo. Mendell—known as one of the best high-end burglars in the city, and for being arrogant and stubborn—saw the score, took it down, and decided to deal with the repercussions of his actions after the job was done. This decision, along with the one to take his frustrations out on Accardo’s personal property that followed, cost him and his crew their lives.

  JOHN Mendell was born in South Dakota in 1947. His family came to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century from Ukraine and settled in the center of America’s Badlands. Dropping out of a small South Dakota high school during his junior year, Mendell relocated to Chicago in the mid-1960s, planting his roots on the city’s rugged South Side. Quick to meet up with members of The Outfit’s theft unit, he cut his teeth as a professional criminal throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although he spent a portion of his twenties doing a couple of stints in prison for drug dealing and burglary, he actually established a sterling reputation as one of the best in the city at circumventing complex alarm systems. Thus he became a valuable commodity in underworld power circles across the area and was often tap
ped by The Outfit to take down top-end scores on its behalf.

  “Mendell was as one of the premiere burglars in Chicago during the 1970s,” said former FBI agent Jack O’Rourke. “He was known as a great entry man and knew all the security systems department stores and jewelry shops used like the back of his hand. He had a crew behind him, and they were all real professionals. These guys were taking down only top scores, nothing small scale. If the mob was looking to pull off big-time smash-and-grab jobs, the Mendell crew was one of the first places they turned.”

  In 1967, Mendell’s name showed up on the Chicago Police Department (CPD) blotter for the first time when he was arrested and charged with the murder of an underworld associate he believed to be cooperating with law enforcement against him. The charges were eventually dropped when the prosecutor failed to find enough credible witnesses for the case, but the incident put Mendell on the CPD’s radar as a possible up-and-comer with the Chicago crime family—someone willing to pull the trigger to rid himself or his bosses of a problem. By 1971, he had taken his first Outfit-related bust, when he was arrested, along with syndicate heavies Sam Bills and Ronnie Jarrett, for hijacking a quarter of a million dollars of aspirin off a delivery truck near the Wisconsin border.

  Soon, he was making enough money to move out of the down-trodden south suburbs to the more ritzy north suburb of Lincolnwood, where he purchased a nice-size two-story house with his new wife, who was over a decade his senior. With his new influx of cash, he began dressing in more expensive clothes and driving nicer cars. He was able to do all this while hiding under the guise of being a floor manager at his father-in-law’s West Side tool and die shop.

  As a matter of practice, Mendell used to attend trade shows in the jewelry industry to case potential victims. At one particular show in the early autumn of 1977, he spotted Levinson, a master salesman, showing off his newest acquisition—the Idol’s Eye, a highly coveted seventy-carat hulk of a diamond that he had recently purchased from a jewelry magnate in London. Levinson’s asking price: a cool million dollars. Upon seeing the Idol’s Eye, Mendell, the master crook, had his mark.

  If Mendell knew of Levinson and his connections within The Outfit before targeting him for the job is a question still up for debate. Whether he knew and didn’t care or didn’t know and just failed to check his proposed heist with the powers that be in the crime family, the fact is he planned the complicated score for over two months. He cased the store for over three weeks and recruited just the right group of thieves to make up his crew. By late December, he was ready to make his move.

  On December 21, Mendell and three others broke into the jewelry store via a bathroom window, using an acetylene torch to cut through the rusty steel bars that guarded the store from intruders. In order to remain undetected, Mendell used his trademark skill and bypassed myriad exceedingly complex alarm systems. Spending close to twenty-four hours inside the store, the crew made its way into and through four separate safes, looting as much cash and merchandise as they could get their hands on. To Mendell’s dismay, the largest safe the group encountered, the one containing the prized Idol’s Eye diamond, couldn’t be cracked, and the group had to leave behind the one piece of jewelry they had gone in trying to get.

  Nevertheless, it was a monumental score, the biggest of all of the burglars’ careers, and they celebrated accordingly. According to FBI surveillance reports, Mendell and several others were observed partying late into the night in the days before Christmas at the posh and celebrity-filled Pump Room, as well as in a number of other fancy restaurants, bars, and discotheques in and around the city’s Rush Street nightlife district.

  UPON arriving at his store on the Monday morning after the break in and finding it in shambles, Levinson was in a state of shock. He had never been burglarized before, probably because he was known to be too close to the city’s crime syndicate to touch. However, there he was, smack dab in the middle of a disaster site. The showroom was a mess, extensively rummaged through and filled ankle deep in water, which had been used by the bucketful during the heist to cool the steel as it was cut through by the invaders’ blow torches. He called the police. He called his insurance company to inform them of what had transpired and that he would soon be filing a claim on the stolen merchandise. And then he made his most important call of all: he called the Big Tuna.

  Meeting with his old friend Tony Accardo the day after the robbery at one of Accardo’s favorite haunts, the North Side bistro Chez Paul, Levinson expressed his extreme displeasure. Not one to mince words, Accardo echoed his friend’s sentiments and assured him that he would take care of the problem immediately. What happened next is another matter still up for debate. Some believe Accardo had his lieutenants reach out to the group of bandits and numerous fences to whom they had already laid off some of the merchandise, reclaim the stolen goods, and return them to Levinson only a few days later. Others believe that after retrieving the stolen items, Accardo returned a portion of them, fenced the rest through his most trusted vendors, and split the cash among his inner-circle.

  Regardless of the specifics, it’s known that Mendell and his crew lost their monumental score and were severely reprimanded in the process by Accardo’s underlings. With the situation seemingly resolved, Accardo and his wife left Chicago and headed to their winter home in a plush, secluded area of Palm Springs, California.

  Though most people involved in the incident thought the matter was done and over, John Mendell apparently failed to receive the memo. He was seething with anger and resentment. Despite being told who Levinson was connected to, he couldn’t understand or accept the fact that Accardo would favor a Jewish associate over people who had been tirelessly working for him on the street, grinding out a living in the lurid underworld to fill his bank book. As the New Year came and went, Mendell hatched a plan for revenge.

  Getting his crew back together, Mendell decided—in an act of supreme stupidity and contempt—that they would break into Accardo’s house while he was away in California and retake what was still there from their score. Why he would tempt fate by taking his aggressions out on a person as dangerous as Accardo probably will never be determined. But the fact is that on January 6, Mendell and his crew broke into The Big Tuna’s residence, again bypassing an intricate alarm system, and took anything and everything they could find. Fortunately for Accardo, they missed his biggest hiding spot: a ten by fifteen foot chrome steel vault that housed most of the Big Tuna’s prized possessions, including over a quarter of a million dollars in cash, hidden in a basement-size cove concealed behind a mirror in the home’s foyer.

  Nonetheless, the damage had been done. When the estate’s caretaker, Michael Volpe, arrived the next morning, he was greeted by overturned furniture, vandalized art work, and strewn drawers. Immediately calling his boss in Palm Springs to inform him of the incident, Accardo jumped on the first flight available and high-tailed it back to Chicago to deal with the situation. The mafia kingpin had been violated in a display of supreme defiance. Accardo was fuming. And from that point forward, Mendell and his cronies were living on borrowed time.

  “When I heard about the Accardo break-in, there was no question in my mind it was Mendell and his crew that had pulled it off,” said Jack O’Rourke. “Everybody knew that Johnny Mendell was the only guy who could probably pull something like that off. Not many people could outsmart an alarm system like he could. In a lot of ways that skill served him well on the street. He got a lot of jobs because of it. But in this case, it worked against him. I mean if we knew who did it, Accardo and his boys did too.”

  TONY Accardo was no stranger to killing in the name of protecting his property. He had done it before. Specifically, close to fifteen years earlier, when Accardo was suspected to have ordered a murder contract on a man named Van Corbin. A builder, part-time thief, and former neighbor of the don, Corbin had been hired by the Accardo family to oversee construction on their home. Accardo, a man who liked to keep his affairs as secret and discreet a
s possible, made it clear to Corbin that he was under no circumstances to divulge the floor plans or blueprints of the house he was building for him. Corbin, who was generously compensated for the job, agreed. However, two years after the residence was completed, Corbin found himself in financial crisis and the target of an investigation by the Internal Revenue Service. In an effort to ease the pressure the government was putting on him, Corbin offered to show the FBI his copies of the Accardo home blueprints. The FBI gladly and with great eagerness accepted the offer. Word of what his ex-neighbor had done made it back to Accardo—some actually believe that Corbin himself, in hopes of mitigating the damage of his mistake, told the mafia boss of his indiscretion—and suddenly the man who used to dine and occasionally go on fishing trips with the Big Tuna was in much more trouble with the mob than he had ever been with the government. His life was no longer worth the cost of the paper that his death certificate would eventually be printed on. Within a month, Corbin was gunned down by two masked assailants in the parking lot of the motel where he was hiding.