I came across this when I was looking online for anything about "Hy Larner" who is supposedly The Chicago Outfit's version of Meyer Lansky. I am currently reading the book "Double Deal" and his name comes up quite a bit. Here's an article/interview written around the time the book was released with the book's authors Michael Corbitt and Sam Giancana.


Family Secrets

Chuck Goudie

The I-Team takes you on a little ride with the Chicago mob. Our wheelman is one of Chicago's most legendary outfit figures, somebody who knows the syndicate's closely held family secrets.

Who did the murders? Where the bodies are buried? And how are the rackets are run? What you are about to see is the first public interview he has ever done.
Chuck Goudie: You're not a snitch?
Michael Corbitt: No.
Goudie: You're not an informant?
Corbitt: I'm a whistleblower. This is a group of people that I worked for 30 years and either because of old age or because I wasn't useful to them anymore, decided they wanted to have me killed, so I decided that the best way to get revenge was to try to do them before they do me.

"They" are the Chicago mob. He is Michael CorbItt. Settling an old score is why he says he's talking to the ABC7 I-Team.

Corbitt was a policeman for 22-years, and the chief of police in Willow Springs, Illinois, from 1973 to 81. All the while, he also worked for the Chicago outfit. In 1965 Corbitt was a loyal crime syndicate foot soldier when the Don, Sam Giancana, made him an offer he couldn't refuse.

"He said you want to be a policeman? I said are you crazy? I don't want to be a cop. I can't make no money being a cop, and I was right, there was no money there. He said, Well don't worry about it, it will be alright," said Corbitt.

Alright because Sam Giancana was the Chicago outfit's powerful and pitiless boss of bosses. Giancana was known as "Mooney" because of his fondness for lunacy as a teenager. Even though Giancana became friends with Hollywood stars, religious leaders and U.S. presidents, one of the mob's greatest family secrets was that for two decades Corbitt was Giancana's handpicked cop in a suburb controlled by the outfit.

"Willow Springs was wide-open whorehouses, wide open gambling, book joints&it had everything, everything you could imagine. Strippers dancing with live bears, it was a zoo. Remember I came into that job when I was 20. You aren't supposed to be a police officer in Il until you are 21," said Corbitt.

Former Chief Corbitt says Willow Springs was an oasis for the underworld.

"Upstairs at the Willowbrook Ballroom for 20 years was a full-blown casino. You'd think there would be no cars there after 11 o'clock at night. There were no cars there until 11 o'clock at night. They had a cocktail lounge with a hidden stairway and upstairs everybody would go, tuxedos, all the finer people from our city would be there partying," said Corbitt.

Today in Willow Brook the ballroom has new owners, the village has new leadership and the mob playground is long gone, dissolving after Chief Corbitt plead guilty to racketeering, extortion, bribery and his connection to the 1982 murder plot against Diane Masters.

"I was approached initially to kill her and even was given a key to the house to make it look like a home invasion," said Corbitt.

Corbitt says he didn't kill the wife of mobbed-up lawyer Alan Masters, but was paid to dispose of her corpse.

"I was given a job of dumping the car in the canal, knew whose car it was, don't know who was in the trunk had no idea, and as a favor to another mob guy, I dumped the car. And that is the end of the story," said Corbitt.

Corbitt did 12 years in federal prison for his crimes and was released two years ago.

During our interview in Florida, in a city the 58-year-old Corbitt asked us not to reveal for his own safety, he unlocked the secrets behind several of the Chicago mob's greatest hits-naming the assassins and their motives.

First: the brazen murder of Corbitt's mentor Sam "Mooney" Giancana--at one time the most powerful mob boss in America.

June 1975-- Mooney was in his basement kitchen in Oak Park frying a bedtime snack of fresh sausage when a gunman with a 22 pistol ambushed him and escaped.

Goudie: Do you now know who killed your uncle?
Sam Giancana: Absolutely.

Giancana is named after his uncle, Sam Giancana.

"He was a man who knew too much and ultimately he had to be silenced. He was killed the night before federal agents were to take him to Washington to testify," said Sam, mobsters nephew.

The Don's namesake is a former Chicago advertising executive and now an author. He and Corbitt teamed up on some book research that Giancana says has yielded the name of his uncle's assassin.

"Tony Spilotro did a job because he was in a position to be able to do it, he was asked to do it and he did it and that was that," said Giancana.

Anthony "Tony the Ant" Spilotro was a ruthless, rising star in the Chicago outfit, a brutal hoodlum, whom Corbitt says executed an order from mob elder statesman Anthony "Joe Batters" Accardo to rub out Sam Giancana.

"By himself in the house--- boom boom boom. See you," said Corbitt. "He knew how to get into Sam's house without people seeing him, only a few people knew how to do that and he was one of them. Because Sam was like one of his guys that he took orders from and lived up to also."

Eleven years later, Spilotro himself was on the receiving end of a mob hit that to this day is unsolved.

In June 1986, the Ant and his brother, Michael, were buried alive in an Indiana cornfield. Corbitt says it was because outfit leaders found millions of dollars missing from the Las Vegas casinos that Spilotro controlled as the mob's emissary to Vegas.

"He had a water bed in his home, they knifed the water bed, moved it out of the way, found a hole in the floor and found $10 million in cash which they took, all of it. Came back to Chicago, told him to come to a meeting in a motel, case closed," said Corbitt.

Corbitt says the Spilotros were Savagly attacked by two of the mob's toughest thugs.

"The beating was applied by Rocky Infelise and Bobby Bellavia&"

Robert "Gabeet" Bellavia and Ernest "Rocco" Infelise were both later handed long prison terms in an unrelated racketeering. They remain behind bars.

No one has ever been charged in the Spilotro or the Giancana murders. Lawyer Alan Masters died in prison serving time for the plot to kill his wife...and from his deathbed named a suburban cop as the triggerman. That person has never been charged.

Some of what we reported tonight and more family secrets will be in a book by Michael Corbitt and Sam Giancana called "Double Deal" to be nationally available on February 20.

Family Secrets: Part II

Chuck Goudie

February 11, 2003 - In an I-Team exclusive, the namesake of one of Chicago's most famous mob bosses--together with one of Chicago's most legendary outfit figures--spills "Family Secrets."

The Chicago outfit is one of the city's most enduring businesses. It has thrived and survived since Al Capone for one reason-- corruption. Organized crime may use murder to permanently lay off some of it's wayward workers, but the mob lives and breathes by paying off the three p's&police, public officials and political figures.
One million dollars in $100 bills. How much does it weigh? Like a butcher knows prime rib, Chicago mobsters know their endless stream of green.

"We were counting, restacking and taking the paperwork up and putting big thick rubber bands around the money and weighing it. I don't know why we weighed it. I don't know why we weighed it but I know what it weighs. A million dollars in hundred dollar bills weighs 11 pounds-22 ounces. That's pretty good," said Michael Corbitt, former mob insider.

For more than twenty years of was more than pretty good for former mob soldier and mobbed-up suburban Police Chief Michael Corbitt.

In his first-ever interview, Corbitt claims that while he was a police official, he was also an outfit courier, traveling here to Las Vegas and other locations around the world to pick up the proceeds of mob-run gambling, prostitution and loan sharking. He says the outfit's pockets were lined with gold.

"We were so flagrant with stuff we did, we had money coming in to O'Hare field by suitcase full. We never got stopped one time because we had the cops at O'Hare. We had everybody. We had the cops at O'Hare, Palwaukee Airport. Nobody would every come near us," said Corbitt.

"I was born into this family," said Sam Giancana, who says he knows the family secrets. He is the namesake and the nephew of Sam "Mooney" Giancana, a syndicate dictator who for decades ruled the world of organized crime from his throne in Chicago. He did so-- according to his namesake-- through a devoted payroll of public officials.

"The criminals are not always outside the government. There's individuals that we entrust to work on our behalf that maybe are not doing the best thing for us," said Giancana. "Our government hired people like Sam Giancana to assassinate foreign heads of state."

In their research for an upcoming book, Giancana and Corbitt claim they have evidence that the Chicago mob was in cahoots with the CIA in engineering countless attempts to kill Cuban premier Fidel Castro&all unsuccessful. Also, Sam Giancana and the Chicago mob were behind the assassinations of both president John F. Kennedy and later his brother Bobby because both were trying to derail the outfit's worldwide rackets-headquartered in Chicago.

Behind the scenes, this man was the mob's international ambassador of bribes, graft and payoffs according to Corbitt. Even though Hyman Larner was a name almost never heard in public, Corbitt says he was the family's secret weapon for decades, corrupting dozens of world and local leaders.

Larner allegedly once called on President Lyndon Johnson to maneuver Sam Giancana out of prison on a contempt of court charge.
Larner and the mob said to have helped carry out the Iran-contra weapons affair.
Larner allegedly oversaw a mob operation financing arms shipments to Israel.
Larner's pet outfit project: a Chicago casino in Iran, in partnership with the late shah.
"He did not need the money but he liked the excitement and he liked the fact that they ran and maintained this high profile casino in Iran and they did and that was Hy's casino in Iran and Hy and the Shah were very close," said Corbitt.

Corbitt says that when the Shah was ousted from Iran in 1977, so was the Chicago mob.

"When we got the call, it was like a disaster, like an earthquake had hit in the middle of Chicago. Everybody came unglued. They had a lot of people in Iran too. There were 20 or 30 guys from Chicago that were over there operating this casino. It went through, the big cleric come in and took over the country, they lost everything."

Larner died last year--never having been convicted of anything. His remains are in a plain crypt in Waukegan. His legend, entombed with him.

But Corbitt says he learned from Larner. When he was the mobbed-up Willow Springs police chief, Corbitt claims to have cozied up to countless local politicians

"If you had those guys on your side you could just about get anything done anything. Boat slips, front row seats to Sinatra, zoning changed, you name it they could get it done," said Corbitt.

In Corbitt's upcoming book, he includes an example of how close he was able to put himself to politicians such as Richard M. Daley. This signed photo taken at a fundraiser Corbitt says he threw when Daley ran for state's attorney. Corbitt claims no wrongdoing by now Mayor Daley.

Tonight, a mayoral spokesman says Daley probably doesn't even remember Corbitt and that the mayor has attended many fundraisers.