Almost three years ago I wrote a short article on one infamous Chicago Outfit boss but to tell you the truth, this was at the beginning of my writing career, and so the whole story wasn't that much informative. So now I've decided to make a new one which I really hope is way better than the previous. Enjoy...
It’s like almost every big city around the world has its evil communities and it seems inevitable. As time passes by, the danger of evil is increasing because most of these evil forces have a tendency to unite and organize themselves and the reason is plain. Every wrongdoer or every individual, whose deeds are at variance with accepted standards and ideals, feels the unorganized but united force of public sentiment against him. So why not join with his fellow law breakers or violators of everyday society, right?! The most successful ones are forming criminal groups with formalized structure and of course whose primary objective is to obtain money usually through any illegal activity. Usually their main purpose in joining these criminal organizations is for fellowship and business connections and in most cases the larger the criminal group, the more connections. Also when a member is asked if he belongs to a secret society, he or she frequently deny their membership. Now to enter, one must demonstrate a range of personality characteristics, which must fit closely to the stereotype of the typical criminal. For example, in some of the largest organized crime groups in the world, one of the main rules is the elevating of the self-esteem and the ability to kill without questioning and without hesitation or compassion. The whole idea is the refusal to cooperate with government authorities and self-control in the face of hardships. In personal quarrels, the criminals usually take the law into their own hands and gain respect by using violence. Any offence might trigger a campaign of vengeance and every member always has to show improvement same as the people who work in big companies, and over several years, due to his skills for making money, the member can elevate to a higher position within the organization. In reality these crime groups, are a deeply enslaving with such culture for demanding obedience, loyalty and an extreme sense of belonging. Mainly these secret criminal organizations are founded without feelings or sentiment, which are considered as a sign of weakness.
Most of these crime groups around the world have different hierarchy, but they all start with one main individual and that is the leader or boss of that criminal organization. The boss controls his members promptly and deadly, with the help of a code of silence, secrecy, extensive rules and regulations but in reality those rules are meant only for the lower level members, not for the boss. By the end of the day, he also has the last word on certain business discussions and he also takes a cut from almost every legal or illegal operation that his organization controls. The boss also put up “layers” of insulation between himself and his street men in order to defeat law enforcement efforts to arrest him and so with the help of the “layers” or captains, the orders are then passed down the line to the runners. But being the boss of an illegal organization it’s not an easy “job”, because the government always targets the top administration of that certain organized crime group. So there is another kind of organized crime groups such as the Italian organizations, the Mafia and Camorra, who for example always had their own “branches” in the United States with different kind of style in their own hierarchies. For example in the old days, the two most infamous crime groups were the Genovese crime family in New York and the Chicago Outfit.
More specifically, I want to show you that within the same country coexist two “ethnicities” that of the Mafia or Sicilian and that which is Neapolitan. The Genovese family carries its name from a Neapolitan crime boss and alleged “Camorrista”, meaning member of the Camorra organization. And the Chicago Outfit was in fact formed by Neapolitans. The most important thing that made these two crime groups special wasn’t the mostly Neapolitan top administration, but instead it was their effectiveness to always hide the real boss or the real administration from the eyes of the law. The Chicago Outfit allegedly “invented” this position known as “front boss”, meaning a guy who acted as the boss of the family in front of other crime families and similar crime groups but in reality he received orders from the real boss or administration which mostly stayed in the shadows. This position was invented by some of the higher members who came next in line after the kind of bosses who loved their lavish lifestyle and attracted too much attention both from the government and media.
This is a story about a legendary Chicago mob boss who rose in blood and stayed in the background while maintaining a huge criminal organization for more then 30 years. He was quite a known fella by the general public and maybe still is, but he was never portrayed or investigated enough so we can clearly see the importance of this particular individual in the birth of Chicago’s organized underworld. The main reason I wrote this article is about this guy’s ability of conducting his criminal empire through the image and face, which always seemed clean but in reality it was the real face of organized crime.
Naples, Italy, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but same as Chicago, the city also has its own bloody criminal history, which still continues even today. The Camorra is one of the oldest criminal organizations in the world but it wasn’t always like that. Legend goes that in the beginning the Camorra had its germ in a little organization of Neapolitan rebels who long had suffered from the tyranny of Spanish rulers. Story goes that some of the Neapolitans band together not for protection, but collectively took an oath that each day one member should kill at least one Spaniard. So this little Italian band undertook the position of the avenging god and meted out punishment as seemed to it best. You see, early in its history there was undoubtedly an excuse for the existence of such organization and it had its heroic as well as its nefarious days and even had its golden age like Freemasonry. But in time the group assumed the right to regulate society but, with a consciousness of power and freedom from high ideals of honour and ethics, the members soon found themselves in the role of crime fugitives from justice.
By the late 19th century the Camorra controlled a big part of the “Malavita” which means the criminal society around the Campania area. And so the character of the group’s tools shows the depth of its blackness. In the old days its weapons were the boycott and the knife. In fact, the revolver was an unknown weapon among the Camorristi and many of them swore never to use a gun. But as time passed by and their criminal activities became larger, the revolver was gradually replacing the knife. With the large profits came greed and after that, the act of murder became a common thing. The organization was formed of chiefs or “capintesta” of each of the twelve districts into which the society was divided and each district also had a subchief or “capintrito.” The head chief and the chiefs of divisions constituted the high tribunal of the Camorra, from whose judgment there was no appeal. Two of the first rackets for the Camorra were blackmail and kidnapping, and in fact the organization originated for this sole purpose. The profits from these two rackets, which were usually practised on the higher classes, were quite large. From that point on the Camorra aimed high. It stood in with the clergy and wits faithful in its religious duties. There are some reports that the organization even numbered among its ranks men who were high up in the political scale, memberships which will be transferred years later in the “New World.”
Camorra members arrested in Naples, Italy
On November 14, 1897, in Naples, Italy, a boy by the name of Felice De Lucia was born to Antonio De Lucia and Maria Annunziata De Lucia. His father Antonio was a proud member of the Camorra and to murder he wasn’t a stranger. Mainly he was known extortionist who blackmailed or extorted wealthy merchants around Naples area and those who opposed him, suddenly “disappeared.” Many men at the time deserted the city because of criminals such as Antonio, and never came back because they had been warned that they were watched and that such an attempt would mean fast death sentence. By now the city of Naples was in a long fight with cholera epidemics, which was spreading rapidly and for the same reasons, in 1898, Antonio took his family to Ottaviano, a municipality in the Metropolitan City of Naples, located about 20 km east of the city in the Vesuvian area. Until 1907, the De Lucia family received four more children, all daughters, including Emilia Beatrice, born 1898, Anna Clementina, born 1901, Clementina Eleonora, born 1905, and Luise Maria, born in 1907.
The cholera epidemics presented a huge problem for the criminal organizations in and around Naples, because it threatened the city with the closure of the harbour and with the diversion of the steam ships in another direction. The harbour and steam ships were the main “import/export” operations for the Camorra and so if closed, most of their operations were going to be shut down. So all of the Camorra bosses made an alliance with some wealthy boarding-house owners, and formed a mass anti-sanitary movement thus uniting the business community and organized labor in a common front against the sanitary policy of the Italian state. The leaders of the movement convinced the people that this was a plot made by people from the northern part of country to ruin Naples and advance the fortunes of Genoa.
Victims of cholera
Anyways, by 1910, Felice De Lucia was 13 years old and when his father wasn’t around, he was the man of the family house. Obviously De Lucia grew up in a family that was feared by the common people and lived by different rules and also different codes which were engraved in his genes. He wasn’t a poor kid because his father was a high level criminal and probably generated enough cash to go around. So according to their mentality at the time, it was expected of him to quickly join the “Malavita”, which represented the “farm team” for the Camorra, and to learn the way of crime first hand. In fact mainly the young and poor people were tainted by this “bad life” by which the lower strata of the Southern Italian society suffered terribly. So De Lucia was one of those young recruits who came from a traditional criminal environment which was a normal thing in the eyes of the teenager. Through the 1910’s Antonio proudly watched his only son slowly climbing the ladder of criminal success and made future plans for the young lad. De Lucia became very aggressive young “Tammurro” and a master in his work, meaning beating up people and collecting payments. There were three kinds of memberships in the Camorra at the time, being the “Tammurro” or beginner, the second was “Picciuotto” or aspirant, and the last was Camorrista or “Masto.”
De Lucia and the rest of the young crowd did the street stuff, but most of them dreamed about the day when their call comes to commit a murder and become a full member. In the old days, money wasn’t everything among the gangsters, but instead trust always came first. Don’t get confused by the word “trust” because these guys still swindled and killed each other, but “trust” in organizational meaning. If you kill someone for the organization, then everyone knows your secret and you are in it forever or until the day when murder is going to be considered legal. Also in those same old days, murder wasn’t only used for business obstacles, but it was mainly used during family feuds between two or more families. Usually the main reason for these bloody battles between the families was for shattered honour. For example, there was a tradition where two heads or the fathers from two different families make a deal on the marriage of their own children. No love, no knowledge between themselves, no nothing for the young “lovers”, only the most important thing was the good relationship and honour between the two families.
So in 1915, Antonio decided to give his oldest daughter Emilia to a boy from a family in which the father Raffaele Perillo was also a Camorra member but from a different clan, and the boy’s name was Emilio Perillo. Even though they had similar names, Emilio didn’t like Antonio’s daughter and refused the marriage. This was looked upon as huge disrespect and the clouds of war were slowly coming from the horizon. Antonio called upon his only son and gave him the “contract” and chance to defend his sister’s honour. As a real future Camorrista, De Lucia took a knife and followed the young Emilio to a garbage alley where he sliced the young man to death. But there was a problem because the murder was witnessed by a guy named as Vincenzo Capasso. After two year search of courage, Capasso finally found it and testified in court against De Lucia. On May 18, 1917, at the end of the trial De Lucia proudly looked straight in his father’s eyes as he was taken out of the court to jail. But he was lucky because of his young age he was sentenced to only three years in jail. He didn’t care about the conviction because he knew and was happy that he managed to defend his family’s honour and respectability and he also knew that when he gets out, a spot was waiting for him in the Camorra organization. That same month, De Lucia’s mother Maria died of a sudden heart attack at the age of 44.
While in jail, De Lucia managed to grow even more hatred towards the witness who testified against him. In jail he had seen what kind of rules and power led the Camorra, and he buried those lessons deep and forever in his mind. So now he wasn’t some everyday violent criminal, but instead he became a killer. When De Lucia was released from prison in May, 1920, he faced with the threat of “vendetta” from the Perillo family. So his father Antonio advised his son that he should take care of the Capasso problem and that he, meaning Antonio, was going to take care of the Perillo problem. Antonio was not a fool, he already contacted some of his relatives and peers in the “New World” and arranged everything for his son but first they had to accomplish their missions. As additional info, by now many Neapolitan gangsters travelled to the U.S. and already established their criminal “empires.”
Meanwhile, Felice De Lucia managed to find Capasso and sliced his throat from ear to ear and at the same time Antonio shot to death Raffaele Perillo. In a short time De Lucia kissed his mother and sisters and immediately fled Naples, never to return to his homeland again. After that his father Antonio took the heat by being charged with few others of his criminal associates for the homicide of Raffaele Perillo on July 1920 and with giving assistance to the "premeditated homicide on the person of Vincenzo Capasso, by causing culprit Felice De Lucia, his absconding son, to make up his mind to commit it." I believe that later Antonio was convicted to 20 years in prison, as for his son De Lucia was convicted to 21 years and 10 days in prison but this time in absentia.
De Lucia first fled to Apricena, which was ninety miles north of Naples, and from there, he abandoned his country by boat and journeyed to Boulogne, a city in Northern France, and boarded on another boat, but this time to the United States. On August 10, 1920 (some sources say 1917) De Lucia obtained entry to the U.S. through Ellis Island under the alias Paolo Maglio. Few days before his arrival, a real one Paolo Maglio already entered the U.S., a situation which will cause a lot of problems for De Lucia decades later. In New York, De Lucia was welcomed by Gennaro Calabrese, a friend of the family and De Lucia immediately took an occupation as a restaurant manager at a joint which was owned by the Gennaro family.
I’m not quite sure about De Lucia’s activities during this period, so my opinion is that there are two options. One option was that by the early 1920’s the Italian population in New York was dominated by the Sicilian Mafia. Mafiosi like Giuseppe Masseria and Salvatore D’Aquila ruled the Italian underworld with an iron fist and hard rules. I’m not quite sure but I think that 23 year old De Lucia didn’t belong to this crowd of people and if he did, I don’t think that they were going to accept him as associate so easily. The reason for that was the just finished mob war between the Mafia and Camorra in the “Big Apple”, in which the Sicilians ruled supreme. So my opinion is that De Lucia, as descendent of the Camorra, fled New York and went to Chicago, where the Camorra and other Neapolitan gangsters were just starting to rise to the top of the city’s underworld. In the old days, 23 year old guys like De Lucia were considered full fledge adults and they were more ambitious, and if considered a criminal, they were also much thirsty for the mighty dollar.
Or second option, which I believe is the mist realistic one, is that during the late 1910’s early 20’s a lot of Italian mobsters, mostly from the Brooklyn area, took trains from New York to Chicago, some as “importers” from other gangs, and some were just being “lucky” to arrive there. Two of the first New York gangsters that arrived in Chicago during the late 1900’s or early 1910’s were Giovanni Torrio and Gaetano Ricci a.k.a. Tony Goebels. They came on the request of Giacomo Colosimo, the Neapolitan mob boss on Chicago’s South Side, because he allegedly had problems with the Black Hand gangs. So I believe that Torrio and Ricci started “importing” many Italian immigrants and also mob members mostly from the Brooklyn area in New York. Anyway these were the main gangsters or as I want to call them, “fathers” of an organization which will rule the streets of Chicago for the next 70 years. By now I believe the only Chicago allies that they had were the ex-Black Hand members who switched their alliance to the Torrio/Colosimo mob and many different non-Italian gangsters that were born in the city. Also De Lucia maybe came by the same connections or was just one of the “lucky” ones, but according to some accounts, when he first stepped foot in Chicago he didn’t connect right away with the Brooklyn criminal faction in Chicago until some time.
John Torrio
While in Chicago, De Lucia again decided to “lay low” and took legitimate employment at the Dante Movie Theatre at 815 W. Taylor St. on the city’s Near West Side. By 1922, Chicago had some of the most exquisite movie palaces in the world and they were visited by all kinds of people, including judges, businessman, state representatives and also gangsters and so De Lucia was the guy who showed these people to their seats. With his job at the theatre, De Lucia also heard a lot about the workings of a theatre, and also the movie industry and its union dealings, a lesson which will bring him millions of dollars decades later but also it is going to be his first and biggest mistake.
At night, when De Lucia finished his job at the theatre, he stopped by for few sips of wine, right across the street at a restaurant known as the Bella Napoli Café at 850 Halsted. The local was owned by a very “influential” individual from Neapolitan descent known as Giuseppe Esposito a.k.a. Diamond Joe, who served guests such as local politicians, businessman and most important of all, big time gangsters. All of the Italians always spoke lovingly of their "Diamond Joe." Esposito came under Joe Marzano, a very powerful political boss from the old Nineteenth Ward and later became one of the most powerful politicians in the faction of United States Senator Charles Deneen. Esposito acted as a real “Mafia Don” since no child was born or christened without a gift from him personally. No wedding, no funeral, no street or church festival was complete without the presence of Esposito. On Christmas day no one went hungry, for in Esposito's famous Bella Napoli Café there were mountains of spaghetti and tons of hot bread which was all given for free.
Diamond Joe giving away free food for the poor
But Esposito also had a dark side of his, who was feeding it with huge illegal income from bootlegging operations and he also acted as protector for some of the local gangs and gangsters. He always said that he dedicated his life to help the needy and young unfortunate fellas, as he called them. So De Lucia saw Esposito as the key to all of his dreams and he knew that he had to get close to him in case he needed a real protection from the law. So in a short time, as fellow Neapolitan and with the “right kind of blood”, De Lucia got a new job at Esposito’s joint as a waiter and again, De Lucia served the same kind of people, but this time the gangsters were the most prominent ones.
By now Chicago’s West Side was also dominated by other more ruthless gangs such as the Sicilian clan known as the Genna brothers, who shared the same territory with Joe Esposito, and also the Torrio and Ricci gang from the Loop and South Side. Torrio and Ricci had an infamous underling or another Neapolitan and also “import” from New York, known as Alphonse Capone. Another prominent crime group was the Sicilian Aiello crime family from the city’s North Side and most of these individuals, especially the Gennas, cooperated with Esposito and often visited his restaurant. So now De Lucia had the chance to exchange words with individuals such as Angelo Genna or Joe Fusco from the Torrio mob. De Lucia was a smart individual because he was mostly interested in Esposito and the Gennas because by now this crime group gave him his “bread.” The West Side had other gangsters too such as Lawrence Mangano, or Mike Heitler, but by now the Gennas were the largest group of them all.
Esposito was too shrewd to become directly involved in the bootlegging operations, so he worked always with the factor of safety in mind. So besides having strong and deep political involvement and of course connections in very high places, Esposito also had a small group of gangsters and bodyguards around him, including his brother Sam Esposito, the Varchetti brothers Ralph and Joe, Joe Montano, Philip Leonatti, Frank DeLourentis, John Tucillo and Tony Volpe. And so Esposito wasn’t a guy who wanted to hang around with small time hoodlums so he had the pleasure to give that job to his peers.
Volpe was the main manager of the Bella Napoli and was a very close friend with De Lucia but besides that, he was also considered Public Enemy #2. Volpe was born in Argentina by Italian parents and later came to the U.S. First he started up in New York and then got “imported” and rose through the ranks of Chicago’s underworld. According to some sources, Volpe was the guy who introduced De Lucia to another “import” from New York and future “colleague” of his, Louis Campagna. In fact, Volpe was the main guy who introduced De Lucia to high level members from the Torrio gang and other crime groups. By 1924, Volpe and De Lucia were involved in reproduction and selling of counterfeit war savings stamps, or in plane words, they controlled a $500,000 a year racket by selling fake stamps. Once the cops arrested Volpe regarding the racket, later he was taken to a trail, pleaded guilty and the Judge sentenced him to 20 or 30 days in jail, which was ridiculous. If Volpe and De Lucia really often made each other company, then Volpe introduced De Lucia to quite “interesting faces” such as Daniel Serritella, city sealer of Chicago, or Alderman Albert Prignano or even Jewish “businessman” and pimp from the Near South Side Jake Guzik. In fact, I believe that Volpe played quite a major role in De Lucia’s start in Chicago’s underworld.
Tony “Mops” Volpe
