Including murdering and dumping best friends as a required task. With roles, once formed or played out- there was no refusals or going "away" from any compliances within any time limits of afterwards. And outfits intertwined or of high complexity even to each other. Nor the teams of lawful side that fingered so many.īrutal and dominating to all others lives. But neither is anything about these groups of criminals either. He's not a highly organized writer or is the prose always smooth and easy to understand. Re-creating events from court transcripts, police records, interviews, and notes taken day after day as the story unfolded in court, Coen provides a riveting wide-angle view and one of the best accounts on record of the inner workings of the Chicago syndicate and its control over the city’s streets.Ģ.5 stars rounded up for the accuracy of the facts toward this extremely difficult context and case reporting. The Chicago courtroom took on the look and feel of a movie set as Chicago’s most colorful mobsters and their equally flamboyant attorneys paraded through and performed: James “Jimmy Light” Marcello, the acting head of the Chicago mob Joey “the Clown” Lombardo, one of Chicago’s most eccentric mobsters Paul “the Indian” Schiro and a former Chicago police officer, Anthony “Twan” Doyle, among others. went after his uncle Nick as well, a calculating but sometimes bumbling hit man who would become one of the highest-ranking turncoats in mob history, admitting he helped strangle, stab, shoot, and bomb victims who got in the mob’s way, and turning evidence against his brother Frank. volunteered to wear a wire to gather evidence against his father, a vicious loan shark who strangled most of his victims with a rope before slitting their throats to ensure they were dead. Painting a vivid picture of murder, courtroom drama, family loyalties and disloyalties, journalist Jeff Coen accurately portrays the Chicago Outfit’s cold-blooded-and sometimes incompetent-killers and their crimes in the case that brought them down. A top mob boss, a reputed consigliere, and other high-profile members of the Chicago Outfit were accused in a total of eighteen gangland killings, revealing organized crime’s ruthless grip on the city throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. He didn't listen, and on that cold February day in 1985 he was tortured, strangled and mutilated by an Outfit hit squad.Even in Chicago, a city steeped in mob history and legend, the Family Secrets case was a true spectacle when it made it to court in 2007. In 1985 Smith, 48, had been warned, by none other than the boss of the Outfit's north suburban gambling operations Salvatore "Solly D" DeLaurentis.įor months Solly D had been telling Smith that if he didn't start paying the Outfit a $6,000 per month share of his sports book profits, he would indeed end up as "trunk music" according to federal authorities. But without the prosecutions from the Hal Smith murder, the Family Secrets case might never have been made. The Hal Smith killing resulted in a federal prosecution that put away several top hoodlums for years and, most importantly, was the precursor to "Operation: Family Secrets." That case, still two decades away, would decimate the Outfit. For the Outfit, that killing began a concentrated effort by federal law enforcement in Chicago to prevent a gangland war and stop the progression of murders that had been a mob business model for decades.
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