Here's one that's controversial. Some historians say Cerone never became the operating boss, especially at this time, while others said he did. Some good info in the article.


http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1967/11/15/page/38/article/cerone-beats-out-fifi-for-gang-reins

Another proof that there was a sort of rivalry between Cerone and SOME of the Taylor Street members.As i said before in one of my articles that Cerone and Aiuppa were "all that is left" for the Outfit.They didnt had the power as the previous crews and bosses.

Another good find.Thanks GaryMartin

Thanks for posting.

Anybody else find it odd that as soon as someone else besides Ricca, Accardo and Giancana became boss, they got busted? And for extortion?

Never really thought about it before and don't really know the facts of the Teet's case. But after reading this article maybe they didn't mind Teet's going away so they could get rid of Giancana's guy and Accardo could put in his guy.

There really wasn't a Giancana's guy versus Accardo's guy. When Accardo was boss he took Giancana with him everywhere. They were close. When Accardo retired, he and Ricca agreed on putting in Giancana. The same goes for the other bosses. Ricca and Accardo were best friends and did things by agreement, and included the capos in the decision making process. When Cerone was busted, he was visiting Ricca. Sometimes there was rivalry between SOME of the members, like the previous poster wrote, but more often than not they got along and worked together. Many members of different crews had business deals together. That was actually encouraged. When differences existed it was more of a personality difference or if someone was resisting the will of the bosses.

Nice share, GM. Thanks. Love those old ads in three Trib... Field's, Weiboldts, memories.

Here's something to consider when thinking about some type rivalry between these guys. There was never any "street wars" between any of the different crews. If you recall during the Capone era there was always someone invading another crew's territory. Remember Hymie Weiss, the Gennas, Bugs Moran, etc. ? Different factions were always fighting. That's what the St. Valentine's Day Massacre was about.

No such "street wars" occurred during the Ricca, Accardo and Giancana years. Differences of opinion and dissatisfaction, complaining, of course; no different than legitimate business. There are always complainers, bickering, etc. Just imagine trying to keep a large group of gangsters satisfied. If differences came up and could not be resolved by the parties involved, they had a "sit down." In other words a higher ranking member rendered an opinion. There was a chain of command and disagreements could be appealed. But once the boss made a decision, it was over. Going agains a boss' decision was a one-way trip to the graveyard. For the most part, Ricca and Accardo stayed out of the day-to-day business just like someone (maybe Faithful 1) stated a few days ago. Doing so kept both men further insulated from the possibility of facing criminal charges. I should say it helped because these guys were always in court. Charges were difficult to prove unless there was some type of direct involvement. Smart guys. RICO didn't become law until the early 70's......I think it was the 70's.

This is how I've been told the system worked.

Gary, you've got it exactly. The Cosa Nostra in general worked similar to a corporate or military structure (actually, kind of both), and in both of those structures the chain of command is THE method for resolving differences. Beyond that you could appeal to a higher-ranking boss, but not until you go to your immediate supervisor/manager first. Very rarely did someone go rogue and challenge their senior member since that was a one-way ticket to the mortuary.

the heights (south suburbs) was always killing each other

they killed each other while ricca and accardo were alive

I have the book,"The Boys In Chicago Heights," and there was a lot of killing in that area. I'm not from Chicago but I got the idea that some type purging was going on with the "Chop Shop" wars, etc. I remember Jimmy Catuara was killed and Al Tocco was involved. I still have the book but I can't remember all the details. I believe Al Pilotto (sp) was shot. I would have to go back and refresh my memory to look at names, etc. Was Dave Yaras part of this crew? He was shot when he was getting ready to exit his car. Come to think of it, Catuara was shot at a traffic light or stop sign. Can't actually remember all these things.

I also recall that at one time the Chicago Heights Crew was a very secretive group. Frank LaPorte was rarely photographed and I remember reading that he really stayed out of the limelight.

So, yes, there were several murders, but I believe it was within the "Heights Crew." But I'm not really sure. I do remember Matt Luzi (author) did a really good job researching the information for the book.

Here's part of the Jimmy Catuara story.

The "hits" in Chicago Heights were sanctioned by Outfit bosses (depending on the era, i.e., Ricca, Accardo, Giancana, Aiuppa).

Bullets for the Bomber

BY J.P. RICH Off The Cuff/ganglandchicagowebsite@yahoo.com

Jimmy Catuara“What the hell, they better be fair . . . Anytime you got anything coming to you, you better get it, right to the penny.”
So declared old-time gangster James “Jimmy the Bomber” Catuara in 1964 to an associate concerning an unpaid debt. He didn’t know his words were being secretly recorded by an illegal FBI listening device.

More than a decade after making that declaration, rumor had it that Jimmy Catuara was shorting his own mob superiors, not paying the Outfit bosses their full share of the proceeds from rackets he oversaw as a mid-level mob leader.

By the late 1970s, Catuara went back ages with the Outfit. All the way back when he was a kid growing up on Chicago’s Near South Side. He knew full well what the Outfit was capable of. He’d committed horrific crimes himself throughout his 50 years in the mob. His long journey led to where he sat on a summer morning in 1978 — behind the wheel of a red Cadillac, waiting for a friend.

Born in 1905, Catuara (often misspelled Catura) earned his nickname (and his feared reputation) blowing up taxicabs during Chicago’s perennial Taxi Wars of the 1920s and ’30s. In 1933, the 27-year-old up-and-coming mob terrorist was busted for possessing a dynamite bomb.

At the time of his arrest, Catuara was said be working for Near South Side crime lord James “King of the Bombers” Belcastro, who headed Al Capone’s bomb squad in the 1920s during the height of Prohibition Era warfare in Chicago. He was subsequently convicted on that bomb charge and sentenced to serve a 5-to-25-year prison term. He served eight years in Joliet State Prison and was paroled in 1942.


Thanks to that conviction, he became known as Jimmy the Bomber. Through the years, he slowly but surely became a member of good standing with the Chicago Heights crew, based out of the vice-ridden southern suburbs.

Standing 5-foot-5, weighing 160 pounds, and sporting a shiny, horseshoe-bald head, Catuara, who was also known as “the Owl,” didn’t look like much, but looks can be deceiving. He was reputed to be a hitman, was a powerful Mafia leader in northern Illinois, and was recognized as the top street boss of Frank LaPorte, the boss of the Chicago Heights crew.

As a leading disciple of the LaPorte mob, Catuara ran his own crew of tough guys. His fiefdom was based on Chicago’s Southwest Side and stretched into the southwestern suburbs. He and his underlings specialized in the traditional mob staples of gambling, loansharking, and extortion. All the while, the aging mob terrorist would tell outsiders that he made his living as a furniture salesman.

When LaPorte retired in the mid-1960s, some claim Catuara briefly took over the Chicago Heights crew. However, by the close of the 1960s, LaPorte’s former bodyguard and driver, Alfred Pilotto, was the big boss in the Heights and Catuara was again a street boss, reporting to Pilotto. Perhaps Catuara being briefly identified as the boss of the Chicago Heights crew was a simple mistake, just bad information from a snitch.

In the late 1960s, Catuara’s crew began to move heavily into the so-called “chop shop” racket, i.e., stealing cars, disassembling them, and selling the parts on the black market. Fellow Chicago Heights crew member Albert Caesar Tocco had originally gotten the Chicago Heights crew into the stolen-car business, but he got busted for running an interstate stolen-car ring and received a 3-year prison sentence in 1967.

Catuara’s crew was in competition with Al Tocco’s crew until Catuara got the upper hand when Tocco finally went to prison after his appeals ran out. Catuara’s reign in that business lasted several years until Tocco’s parole in 1973. “Lining up” the chop shops for the Outfit was now Catuara’s primary vocation.

Beginning in 1969 and lasting until at least 1980, there were about 20 murders connected to what became known as the “Chop Shop Wars” — bloody battles fought on city streets as the Outfit conquered the chop-shop business throughout the Chicago area, which, for the most part, was concentrated in Chicago Heights crew turf in the southern suburbs.

Chop-shop operators and auto thieves who refused to pay a street tax to the Outfit were killed, people in the business who were suspected of being police informants were killed, rival mobsters eventually turned the guns on each other and still more were killed.

It was Jimmy Catuara who started all of this chop-shop mayhem, but he wouldn’t be around to see it finished.

Within a few years after Tocco’s parole, he and Catuara were locked in a power struggle, allegedly over Catuara’s repeated intrusions into Tocco’s territory.

Law enforcement officers assigned to investigate the chop-shop racket in the Chicago area who couldn’t be bribed were intimidated by the crazed crews led by Catuara and Tocco. Most troublesome was an offensive against the Secretary of State’s Northern Illinois Auto Investigations Unit. In 1973, Lieutenant Vladimir Ivkovich became the commander of that 12-man unit. Within five years, Ivkovich’s life would be a living hell.

One night in early 1978, the rear window of Lieutenant Ivkovich’s squad car was shot out while parked in front of his house in Chicago. That was only the beginning. Two months after that, his car was tampered with — a tie-rod was loosened on the car’s rear axel, which would have caused an accident had he not noticed something was wrong with the car’s braking system as he backed it out of his driveway.

Early one morning a couple months later, Ivkovich was awakened by his barking poodle. He got up quickly, hurried into his kitchen, flicked on the outside lights, and opened his back door. When he opened the door to look around outside, he slid a pipe bomb off the top of the doorsteps. First he heard the clank of metal, then he saw the bomb lying on the ground with a smoking fuse. He immediately grabbed his wife and daughter, and ran out of the house to safety before summoning the Chicago Police Department’s Bomb and Arson Squad.

The bomb was disarmed and Ivkovich was informed by a police sergeant that he was lucky. The fuse was deactivated when the bomb fell off the steps. He was told that there was only a minute’s worth of fuse left. Had it exploded, the bomb — packed with black powder and shrapnel — would have been powerful enough to destroy the back side of his house. It was also pointed out that the explosion could have ignited a gas line running into his kitchen and blown up the whole house as he and his family slept. The alert dog quite possibly saved the lives of the Ivkovich family.

A month after the bombing attempt at his home, Vladimir Ivkovich suffered a gall bladder attack caused by excessive nerve tension and underwent emergency surgery. It took him seven weeks to recuperate before he could return to work and chase after the Outfit’s fearsome enforcers and the chop-shop underworld — and the trail of death, destruction, and misery those parasites of society left in their wake.

Ivkovich wasn’t the only one from the Northern Illinois Auto Investigations Unit who was targeted, either. Three of his investigators also had the back windows of their squad cars shot out while parked in front of their homes and another investigator’s car was set on fire.

In 1979, Ivkovich testified before a Senate subcommittee investigating the chop-shop business.

“My six years as commander of the unit represent the most trying and demanding period of my life,” he told shocked Senators, who listened in disbelief at what he’d gone through just doing his job as an officer of the law.

“Chicago has become the chop-shop capital of the world,” he testified, matter-of-factly.

Despite his family’s opinion that he should resign, Chicago’s chop-shop underworld was unsuccessful in scaring heroic Vladimir Ivkovich into leaving them alone.

At the time of his Senate testimony, Lieutenant Ivkovich was still bravely heading the Northern Illinois Auto Investigations Unit. However, he told the Senators that he had become a very cautious man. He said he now always made sure to search under his car for explosives before going anywhere and that now he not only carried his gun when on duty, but he carried it with him twenty-four hours a day, wherever he went — even when he took his family out to eat.

Things were even worse for Jimmy Catuara by the time 1978 rolled around.

Earlier, in 1977, the Outfit bosses tried to stop the Chop Shop Wars by inserting a beefy hoodlum named Angelo “the Hook” LaPietra as the new overlord of that racket with Al Tocco. The bosses replaced Catuara with LaPietra. They made the move in hopes of stability.

Angelo LaPietra ran the powerful 26th Street crew on Chicago’s South Side. He had a ferocious reputation as one of the most feared and brutal killers in the Outfit.

LaPietra’s newly-selected position was a clear message to those involved in the Chop Shop Wars to stop fighting and tone down the violence. The heat from investigations into that racket was hurting other mob businesses. The mayhem had to come to an end or at least slow down considerably.

Perhaps another reason for Catuara’s demotion were rumors that the Outfit bosses believed Catuara was holding back on some of the chop shop millions. He’d been a loyal Outfit servant for far too long to just have him whacked out like that, however. The bosses didn’t want him dead, but they did want him out of Chicago.

One night, mob enforcers snatched Catuara. They locked him in the trunk of a car for twelve hours. They opened the trunk and looked down at him.

“Now we just gave you a message,” one of them told him. “Why don’t you go to Arizona and retire.”

Catuara was bothered by sinus trouble and already went to Tucson at least once a year to clear out his sinuses in the dry desert heat. The bosses knew this and advised him to stay there permanently.

But Catuara wasn’t the type of guy who would allow himself to be pushed out and into early retirement. He refused to take their advice and leave Chicago. Then a rumor hit the street that he was an informant. Whether true or not, that was the last straw.

At about 7:00 a.m. on July 28, 1978 — just twenty days after the attempted bombing of Vladimir Ivkovich’s house — 72-year-old Jimmy Catuara, now a has-been syndicate kingpin, was sitting in his red Cadillac waiting for a friend at an intersection in an industrial area on Chicago’s Near West Side.

Like an hourglass with a few grains of sand left to fall, time was running out on Jimmy the Bomber. The last moments of his life were about to play out, and they wouldn’t be pretty. As they say, you reap what you sow.

At least two men were watching Catuara from inside a blue van and they decided his time was up. They hopped out of the van, guns in hand. They approached the Cadillac on either side and riddled the old gangster with a volley of bullets. Hit multiples times, he managed to crawl across the front seat and open the passenger door. He collapsed out of his car, falling into a bloody stupor on some overgrown weeds beyond the curb.

As Catuara lay bleeding, face-down on the ground, the gunman on the passenger side shot him one last time in the back. Finally, he lay still. He was hit five times: twice in the head and once each in the face and neck before the finishing shot to the back.

The hitmen ran back to the van and fled. A few blocks away, they abandoned the van for another vehicle. As the hit team melted back into the city, their well-dressed victim lay sprawled out, dead. If only he’d listen to his superiors, he wouldn’t have died the way he did: gunned down in the street.

Jimmy Catuara’s murder — preceded by the slayings of several of his most-loyal crew members — effectively ended the Tocco-Catuara rivalry in the chop-shop business. For many years after that, Angelo LaPietra and Al Tocco ran the whole thing. The murders didn’t stop, but they sure slowed down a lot once Catuara was out of the picture.

By the time of his gangland slaying, Chicago area car thieves were grossing an estimated $44 million and stealing 48,000 cars a year. That equaled more than $120,000 in gross profits a day. The Outfit received a huge chunk of that revenue, many millions a year — all thanks to the cold-blooded efforts of Jimmy “the Bomber” Catuara and other mob terrorists like him.
Copyright © 2010, 2011 | J.P. Rich Off The Cuff. All rights reserved.

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The hits on the Heights crew were mostly aprooved by Accardo through LaPorte and later Pilotto.Most of the hits were executed by Outfit hitman Gerald Hector Scarpelli.Heres few examples...

On August 8 1972 Guido Fidanzi was shot to death.

Steve Ostrowsky was shot to death on October 5,1976.

Richie Ferraro, one of Catuara’s biggest earners, disappeared in 1977.Rumours are that he was kidnapped and later his body was dismembered.

James Palaggi and Joe Theo were killed on June 15 and on August 25 1977.

Sam Annerino was killed in July 1977.He was one of Catuara's hitmen,who later switched sides and joined Tocco.

Timmy O’Brien was found dead in the trunk of his car,on May 24, 1979.

Annerino was done in the south suburb of oak lawn. Scalise was in on that hit as well.

Scarpelli was truly one of the most efficient Outfit hitmen of them all.

True,Scarpelli was one of the best.

Also Annerino was known for packing a "hitman ‘s emergency kit".Things like surgical gloves,gun with a fingerprint resistant tape,knife,garrote,wire,first aid kit, flashlight,lockpicks etc