It all comes down to which report you want to believe. There was a drug trade in Chicago, and there still is. Accardo being involved is the question. A crime commission came to a conclusion after studying everything and said Accardo pushed his men out of it, street informers and some researchers say otherwise. It's an evolving study if you keep an open mind. If a person chooses to believe he had himself and his men out of the drug trade as reports state, they believe that. If they want to believe he was in the drug trade, which is very possible, then they believe that. I like to keep an open mind and study all side, and unless there is evidence that trumps all other evidence then it is impossible to say one way or another.

Thanks ChiTown and yeah, people tend to forget that the Outfit was a part of Cosa Nostra and it has a chain of command, meaning there are no independent criminals in the organization and everyone who is involved in something illegal has to kick up to his bosses. For example Accardo was the boss from 1947 until 1952 or 53 when he briefly stepped down and later was brought back again in 1955 when Capezio died unexpectedly. My point is that during that period the Outfit had a top boss (Ricca), senior adviser (Campagna), boss (Accardo) and underboss (Giancana). So if the underboss was financing and at the same time making income from dope deals, all of that same cash went up the ladder, meaning they were all taking dope money.

The main problem is that people also forget to learn the old history of the organization, so they can understand what happened during the 70's and 80's. For example during the 1960's the Outfit's operations were on the downfall because of the many hidden informants and so during the 1970's both Accardo and Alex were scared of being closely involved in the dope biz and they left many examples down the road, but even with that the dope biz continued to thrive among the Outfit's members, especially the ones from the Grand Av and Chicago Heights crews. And if Accardo really prohibitied the dope biz, then why the brother of his successor and crew member No Nose DiFronzo got caught with whole farm for marijuana during the early 90's?!

Joe DiFronzo is who got the pot charge correct?

Yes

Another interesting thing to note is that during the mid 1980's, when Accardo was still the top boss of the Outfit with Aiuppa in jail and Carlisi as the acting boss, the Outfit was still financing dope deals. According to court and FBI investigations at the time, Joey Bonavolante was a member of the Melrose Park crew who in turn was an alleged “lieutenant” under Tony Zizzo, while this guys was a lieutenant for Marcello and Carlisi. So Bonavolante’s main role was financing the cocaine purchases with Outfit money, in return for a share of the resale profits, and this crew was led by his brother Frank and another associate known as Victor Plescia, who in turn were the two main individuals who distributed their product mainly around the Cicero, Berwyn, Bridgeview and Riverside areas. Plescia, according to the feds, oversaw the wholesale and retail drug operation which was mainly the distribution of cocaine and even though he headed the conspiracy, his main couriers were Nick Rizzato and Tony Grossi, who in turn traveled many times to Miami, from where they purchased dozens of kilos of the product. According to one report, Plescia acquired his product from a Colombian source which was connected not the the MP crew but instead to the Grand Av group. As I previously said, this was Cosa Nostra meaning no matter what is happening down there, something must come up or else lol

In October, 1989, when the feds finally had established the roles and identities of the individuals involved in the conspiracy and had sufficient evidence against them, all of the suspects were arrested, indicted, tried and convicted, including Vic Plescia, Nick Rizzato, Lee Lizzio, Kevin Geiger, Frank Bonavolante, Camillio Grossi, Anthony Grossi, Norman Demma and many others.

Plescia's crew sold coke near the Sportsmans Park in Cicero and they all worked for Sam Carlisi's crew. They would hang out at Tony Zizzo's bar just outside the park taking pages and using the outside phones alongside Zizzo's team of bookies. Vic Plescia is out of prison now - he had some time from his sentence successfully shaved in 2017.

I assume the guys that got Zizzo are still on the street today correct whoever Sarno had lined up to get him

Giancana was probably involved in narcotics in Mexico, his nephew married Miss Sinaloa of 1958.

@toodoped

Do you think any of the 4 known outfit crews have any sub-units reporting to them

Like with cicero and lake county

@cookcounty do you mean like the P-K Crew that was under Vena and consisted of Bobby Pinozzo and Paul Koroluk.

Naw i mean like a whole crew in itself, kinda like how lake county has a crew but reports to cicero

Oh I got ya...ya I'm curious too....what would you consider the C-Notes.... A gang or a farm team or maybe consider them a sub unit sort of speak

I wanna say Bobby Pinocchio son Bobby Jr. was part of the C-Notes I could be wrong tho

Cnotes are a gang that Its most criminally productive members graduate to the syndicate

Plus it probably depends on the area the cnotes are active in (meaning what branch)

Some are near mobsters neighborhoods while others are not

Is there one person that's a liason to the Outfit and the C-Notes....I'm assuming they don't report to a Captain but maybe a Soldier who in part is responsible for them sort of speak or am I way off with the whole perception of them

@ChiTown thats correct, Plescia and the rest of the gang were involved in peddling coke since it was the 1980's and besides the Colombians, the Outfit also dealt with the Hernandez family which was based in Matamoros, Mexico, and through Texas, they managed to send large shipments of cocaine and marijuana all the way to Chicago. According to the feds, the organization was headed by Elio Hernandez and his sons, and these guys were quite dangerous, mostly because they were known for doing ritualistic murders. So besides being drug dealers, they also represented a gruesome cult and sacrificed their victims in such a way, in which they believed was the only way to protect their dope peddling operations and above all, themselves. One of the family’s main representatives in the U.S. was one Mexican drug lord known as Manuel “Poncho” Jaramillo, who settled himself in Mission, Texas, which was a small place near the border. Even though Jaramillo supplied drug dealers around country such as in New York and Miami, according to the government, his main connections were in Chicago. Story goes that Jaramillo’s second job, besides overseeing their dope racket, was money laundering or in other words, he invested drug money in legitimate enterprises. But even for that, he still needed some good underworld connections, and there was no other organization for such “pleasures” if it wasn’t for the Mob. So one thing led to another and next thing you know, Jaramillo made a close relationship with none other than Chicago Heights capo Al Tocco.

@Cookcounty the Outfit always had so-called sub-crews and I wouldnt be surprised if they have few even today, concerning the larger territories that they control these days. Today I would divide the Outfit on West Side crew and South Side crew, since the Chicago Heights went under the jurisdiction of the Southsiders, while the North and Northwest Side went under the Westsiders including the Elmwood Park crew and Cicero, with the second crew being allegedly in charge of the todays Outfit with DeLaurentis holding Riccas or Accardos position.

@Hollander Giancana established a drug route which went though Mexico but it wasnt supplied with the Mexican product. You see according to some reports, the connection was established with the help of several underworld Chinese syndicates from Macao and Hong Kong areas who operated independently from the Triads. The plan was for smugglers from the Philippines to ship raw opium to a small island on the Pacific Ocean known as Guam, which in fact it’s an island on U.S. territory in Micronesia, in the Western Pacific. The transportation process was carried out mainly by individuals who were paid by the Asian crime syndicates, until they brought it in Mexico, where it was usually welcomed by local gangs who were on Giancana’s payroll. His “voice” in the Mexico area was his main attorney know as Jorge Castillo who in turn also worked as Giancana’s front man and contact with local Mexican authorities and criminal gangs. This “landing” point was obviously chosen mainly because of the constant raids on U.S. soil and because of that, now the main smuggling route extended along the Arizona-Mexico border and was mainly controlled by members of Cosa Nostra in alliance with some of the Mexican criminal factions such as the Savela brothers and one Chinese born criminal Hector Mar Wong who in turn was the main dope smuggling contact between Mexico and the Asian criminal factions

Thanks for the response, Mexico was just an entry point to the USA, like Cuba and Montreal, for H from Southeast Asia.

No problem.

The Outfit had several drug routes from.Mexico at the time since Giancana wasnt the only exiled mobster who circled the country and at the same time being involved in illegal operations. Another example would be the Circella brothers, Nick and August. In fact, August only acted as a bagman between Chicago and Mexico City, and as for his brother Nick, he was previously exiled from the U.S. and deported to Argentina, which was his original birthplace, and later established himself in Mexico. Nick Circella was an old time member of the Outfit who back in the days was imprisoned together with the top criminal echelon such as Paul Ricca and Louis Campagna, but by now he still had few interests on Chicago’s North Side through his brother and also controlled few illegal and legitimate operations around the Mexican territory. In reality, Circella was another desperate gangster who desperately wanted to return to the states and so he was always opened for “new adventures” such as the current one, meaning transporting narcotics. The useful thing was that Circella controlled a large shrimp boat business along the Pacific Coast and his boats were often overloaded and barely seaworthy, slipping through the darkness and hidden from the watchful radar of the American patrols. Sometimes, the boats didn’t even have to hide in the night since Circella was already legally exporting shrimps into the U.S., and so the product was easily being moved by sea off the San Diego coast, and later was welcomed by factions of the California crime families, who in turn transported the product mainly on Chicago’s North Side and around the Midwest. 

There was even a direct line to Chicago, but this time it came straight from London, England. Their main smugglers were two elderly women from Barcelona, Spain, identified as the Munoz sisters, Catalina and Rafaela, and one Corsican Mob associate known as Antonio De La Cruz. In fact, the Munoz sisters worked for the Armada clan and as for De La Cruz, he obviously worked for Giancana’s new business partner Francisci. Their route usually started from Barcelona to London and from there with a direct flight to O’Hare International Airport. These so-called European smugglers were known for transporting over 20 pounds of heroin, which was destined for the Chicago market, during one trip.

When the war on the Far East was over, somehow Chinese heroin found its way and arrived on America’s soil but in smaller amount. At this point, most of the Asian narcotics found its way to the U.S. through Belgium or the Netherlands, which made the city of Amsterdam the main shipping point for Asian heroin. From this point, drug trafficking from Mexico expanded and the cultivation of opium poppy fields increased and the so-called “Mexican mud” or “Mexican brown” was suddenly in great demand. From 1975, criminal groups from Mexico dominated the heroin trade and supplied an ever-increasing demand for marijuana, while the Colombian cartels slowly began to take over the cocaine market. 

Good stuff Toodoped, also interesting they had direct contacts with the Chinese. The Chinese traffickers have been in the Chinatowns in Holland for 100 years, sailors and merchants.

Well the so-called opium conflicts during the 19th century brings out the whole story

The Kansas City family also set up a heroin pipeline from Cuba to Tampa to Kansas City and other Midwest metropolitan areas. One of the first cooperating witnesses, Carl Caramusa, from Kansas City led to the exposure of the narcotics ring that was dealing about 12 million a year.

On June 21, 1945 Carl Carramusa's 16-year-old daughter watched in agony as her father's head was blown off outside his North Side Chicago home. Carramusa had moved his family to Chicago in the wake of his appearance as a federal informant in a Kansas City drug trial. His relocation worked for several years before the KC mob put a hit on him while he awaited his family in a Chicago driveway.