On the Mafia's Greatest Hits doc. there are some wiretaps of Accardo and Giancana.My question is are thouse the real voices of JB & Mooney,or just some guys from the documentary reading the transcripts?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a47a13_BbNs

Interesting... I just listened to a little bit. Due to the exxaggerated inflection I would guess actors.

Yes i would guess actors also cuz i dont think that JB & Momo would talk in english on sit downs...who knows...

It is actors.

Ye right now ive listened to it a couple of times and i think thouse are actors...

But I think the dialogue actually is probably transcribed from real phone taps.

The FBI recorded thousands of hours of the Outfit on wires and taps back then... why it didn't result in more convictions, quicker, I don't know.

They had all the major meeting spots and phones bugged for years.

According to Gus Russo the Outfit knew about some of them but not all of them. I'm not sure I really believe that... why you would keep having your meetings at a certain place if you knew it was bugged would seem to be crazy.

Reading between the lines I guess Russo was implying that they knew the places/phones were bugged, so would still talk about stuff that was trivial, but obviously had more stealth ways of communicating anything incriminating.

Or he could just be wrong on this point and they didn't know they were tapped at all. He was definitely wrong about other things.

For sure the dialogue is transcribed from real phone taps."why you would keep having your meetings at a certain place if you knew it was bugged would seem to be crazy."

Its very good for the mob to know if the room is bugged so they can lead the fbi in wrong direction...ya know what im sayin?!

I´m sure the dialogue comes from real taps. But the voices you hear in the doc comes from actors, and not very good ones.


I think many of the bugs were ruled as illegal.

Agreed!

That makes sense.

True... although this would be a weekly, elaborate, multi-year ruse. But I think what Knuckles says makes sense, and actually I seem to remember something about that from the book now that he mentions it.

In particular I think Russo said that Murray Humphries knew their weekly meeting place behind this tailor shop downtown was bugged, but he did probably not know his phone was bugged.

Later he moved into a building here called Marina City for the specific purpose of making sure it couldn't be bugged; he built it like a fortress--but they still got a bug in there.

And the Armory Lounge which was Giancana's base was also famously bugged.

Among many other places.

In thouse times Chicago was diferent than NY cuz there was sort of a ..how should i say..respect between the fbi and the outfit,and thats why the outfit had so much power in the government system for so long,so it makes perfect sence that some of em for example M.Humphries knew bout their place been bugged.Im not sure but i think that the fbi found some boxes with the cia logo on em at Giancana's place with some anti-surveillance equipment

While this makes sense to explain the reason there were no convictions, the law that didn't allow those wiretaps to be used doesn't make sense at all. I am sure there were more than enough reasons to plant bugs without a warrant. Had they asked for the warrant, there was a high possibility the judge would leak the information to the mob.
I am not really justifying the breaking of law in majority of the cases, but situations as these are really shameful. Like in Patriarca's case: if I am not mistaken, he said enough on the tapes to fry on the chair 10 times, but the tapes were ruled as illegal, so he went free (well, maybe not immediately free, but doing 4 or 5 years is clearly not enough).

I can't remember what Russo said in the book about that. The wiretaps were a relatively new thing, and the FBI had a very odd relationship with the Outfit.

One of the weirdest parts of that book was when he was quoting from what I assume was a Bill Roemer book and Roemer called a meeting with Accardo. They met in some mall parking lot and Roember told him not to knock down some guy because the guy wasn't a rat like they thought and Accardo finally said "Look, you're not a bad guy, but why don't you do what you have to do and I'll do what I have to do and we shouldn't meet anymore."

Kind of funny.

They met in the parking lot of the Sears store at North Avenue and Harlem Avenue in Oak Park. They walked west on the north side of North Avenue (as Roemer recalled it). That is when they agreed to leave families out of it. The FBI would target Mobsters, and the Outfit would keep hands off of FBI families.

Yeah that's right! Good memory.