A complicated story, but: Ricca got 10 years for extortion. He also had tax evasion and mail fraud cases pending against him, which prevented him from being paroled. Eugene Bernstein, a tax lawyer, arranged to pay off the tax debt, so that case was dropped. Then Paul Dillon, a Missouri lawyer who was tight with the Kansas City Pendergast machine that sponsored Harry Truman's career, arranged for the mail fraud case to be dismissed (supposedly by promising Truman's Attorney General, Tom Clark, that he'd be named to a Supreme Court seat). Then Dillon supposedly arranged for the parole board to spring Ricca.

New question: Ricca's extortion conviction stemmed from Mob domination of the Movie Projectionists' Union. Which gangster was the original corrupter of that union (hint: New Yorker)?