It's important when thinking about Daley and the mob that this is a question that requires attention to nuance and context. It's easy, IMO, to overstate the nature and scope of Daley's relationship to the outfit (no one here is saying this, of course, but I have seen plenty of room temperature IQ claims over the years to the effect that Daley and the outfit were essentially all the same thing and working in lockstep collaboration with each other). It's also important to keep in mind that Daley had a long career -- he was already Chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party when he was elected Mayor in 1955, and then was re-elected to the latter office 5 times, for a tenure of 21 years. His first term saw the installation of Giancana as Chicago LCN boss and his last term came early in the tenure of Aiuppa in that position. Critically, the Daley era was characterized by a shifting and precarious terrain with respect to both Federal and local LE for the Chicago outfit, as well as huge and transformative changes in the City of Chicago's demographics and ethno-racial politics. There thus isn't just one simple "Daley and the mob" picture, but rather a complicated relationship that evolved and changed over time in a broader context of rapid social and political change. There were times and areas where Daley and the mafia had goals that were aligned and others where they were not in alignment. And despite their own clout, the mob, in the latter cases, was clearly not in the position of being able to bend Daley to their will. As Daley said when someone dumped an effigy of him with a bullet hole in the head in front of his Bridgeport home during the height of his political battle with the Taylor St Italian community "No one is going to threaten me as mayor of Chicago [...] If I had been there, I would have taken care of them [and] I don’t fear death either.”
Cosmik_Debris wrote: ↑Wed Sep 04, 2024 9:29 am
Outfit Associate on Richard J. Daley: “This mayor has been good to us."
John D’Arco Sr: “And we’ve been good to him. One hand washes another.”
This is a great example. The LCN associate here was Murray Humphreys. In his 1989 book "Roemer: Man Against The Mob", Roemer claimed that this exchange was overheard in a 1960 conversation between Humphreys and D'Arco captured by the FBI bug in the 1st Ward Democratic Office. Given the cliched tone of "one hand washed another", I suspect that Roemer's version was not a verbatim reproduction. Still, the gist of it holds; by all accounts, the outfit strongly supported Daley's initial campaign in 1955 and in turn, received some favors from Daley during his first term in office. One of the ways that Daley had, pretty evidently, been "good to [them]" was his sudden disbandment of the CPD's "Scotland Yard" organized crime intelligence unit in 1956 (Time Magazine even had a piece claiming that Accardo held a champagne party at his River Forest mansion at the time toasting the closure of Scotland Yard, which had been a major source of local LE pressure for the outfit).
However, by the time of the 1960 recording, the honeymoon had begun to sour. As an FBI report summarized their intel on the matter in the 1960s:
"As the Bureau is aware there is no question that Mayor DALEY was put in office by the hoodlum element and they have expressed dismay that they cannot now control him."
In the Fall of 1960, the Feds picked up Humphreys discussing how Daley was at loggerheads with mobbed-up US Congressman Roland Libonati over a Daley-backed apartment complex project in the 1st Ward. Per Humphreys, Libonati saw this dynamic as potentially posing an existential threat to the mob-controlled 1st Ward Democratic apparatus, in that if Daley had his way, there would be a demographic turnover that would, in the FBI's words, soon lead to a situation where "there would be no more First Ward". IMO, this fight presaged a tactic used more widely by Daley in the coming years, where his administration, in essence, weaponized the allocation of "urban renewal"/infrastructure projects (public buildings, expressways, housing projects, "slum clearance") to reshape the City of Chicago in his interests. Notably, several of these projects happened to have adversely affected core Italian communities in ways that were probably not incidental.
Critically, in the 1960s Daley was responsible for backing local LE leadership inimical to organized crime. In a turnaround from coddling the mob in his first term, after winning re-election in 1959, Daley appointed staunch "reformer" O.W. Wilson as CPD superintendent in 1960. With Daley's backing, Wilson removed CPD command from City Hall to Police HQ (thus distancing CPD from direct political interference), redrew district maps and shuttered some CPD districts, mounted a campaign against graft and corruption in CPD, and launched raids on organized crime operations in the City of Chicago. Despite alleged attempts by outfit-connected politicians to convince Daley to pull Wilson, Wilson remained as superintendent until his retirement in '67 and oversaw an era where the Chicago mob faced a much more difficult relationship with CPD than they had in prior decades, with raids in the City further pushing operation into the suburbs (and presumably aggravating tensions between crews reported by CIs to the FBI later in the 1960s, as guys were alleged to have been competing for a shrinking pie of illicit racket income due to increased pressure from both local and Federal LE).
Unfortunately for the outfit, while they had many ties to local PDs in the suburbs, they didn't control the Cook County Sheriff's office. In 1962, Daley backed former FBI agent Roswell T Spencer for Sheriff. Formerly the head of the FBI's Chicago FO targeting OC (Roemer started out working for him in the 50s), Spencer was Chief Investigator for Cook County State's Attorney Daniel Ward (a Democrat and close Daley ally) and a vociferously outspoken opponent of the "syndicate", which he stridently promised "to smash" during his campaign for Sheriff. Per FBI bugs and CIs, the outfit's 1st Ward operation was "shaken" by Daley's backing of Spencer, while Giancana attempted to mobilize the "Westside Bloc" (the faction of mob-controlled Italian politicians that represented the inner city Italian "river wards" that encircled the core of Chicago) via Peter Granata to convince Daley to relent, again to no avail. In one recorded meeting, D'Arco informed Giancana that he had been unable to sway Daley on the matter and that Spencer's nomination meant that "we are in trouble".
A 1962 conversation between Pat Marcy and 28th Ward Republican Committeeman Joe Porcaro lamented the erosion of Italian influence on things like patronage jobs, Cook County judgeships, and inroads to the Sheriff's Office, with Porcaro additionally lamenting that black politicians were being given increasing clout by the Democratic machine in the City (a point also echoed by Marcy in another conversation, when he noted that "There are a lot of people in this town who resent the fact that DALEY is playing up to the [obs] jigs), and commenting that Daley was going to outsmart his opposition: "This guy is too sharp for us". Marcy subsequently advised "DALEY's got the city, don't fight it" (the conversation also included a passage summarized by the FBI as "Long harangue about how the Italians are being harassed. Everybody is against the Italians" -- the latter being a longstanding theme in Italian Chicago that was still salient when I was a kid). A subsequent report claimed that Giancana had been outraged over the Spencer affair and the inability of the Westside Bloc to deal with the threat. The climate in 1962 was further heightened when Spencer conducted raids and arrests of organized crime operations and affiliates in the weeks and days leading up to the election. Ultimately, Spencer was defeated by a narrow margin in November of 1962 (despite plausible accusations of election fraud in his favor in the City) by Republican Richard Ogilvie (who also ran on a campaign of assaulting organized crime). Spencer remained Chief Investigator for the States Attorney and used this position to continue to harass and investigate outfit-connected figures (Marcy later commented on a recording that Richard Cain was attempting to undermine Ward and Spencer, though his efforts don't seem to have done much to derail their investigations).
The gravity of the situation that core racket operations like gambling faced at this time, in light of trouble from both CPD and the Cook County Sheriff's Department and Daley's absolute control over the Cook County Democratic Party, can be summed up by this excerpt of a meeting between Giancana and D'Arco concerning Daley's backing of Spencer:
Despite having an important channel in Ogilvie's office via Richard Cain, Ogilvie was himself not at all an outfit puppet (within a few years, Ogilvie became Chair of the Cook County Board and then Governor of IL). In 1963, Marcy commented that Ogilvie was one of the outfit's principal "problems". Additionally, despite their different party affiliations, once Ogilvie was elected, Daley made peace with him and backed Ogilvie in initiatives that were seen as directly threatening by the outfit. In a 1963 meeting, Tony Tisci and John D'Arco discussed Daley backing Ogilvie and Tisci relayed to D'Arco that "The Mayor has given no consideration to getting us off the hook". The FBI believed that this latter comment was in relation to a failed attempt by Granata and the Westside Bloc to defeat an Ogilvie-promoted bill to change IL Deputy Sheriffs from patronage jobs to Civil Service jobs, a failure that reportedly had "created a large amount of apprehension among the First Ward politicians (prior recorded conversation had underscored that the mob-political apparatus was very concerned about threats to "hundreds" of patronage jobs related to the Cook County Sheriff's Department under Ogilvie). Tisci and Marcy discussed attempting to make a last-ditch effort to appeal directly to Daley on the matter, where they would have to navigate the pitfalls of exchanging favors with Daley. Tisci commented that "I would never beg him to do something", and D'Arco lamented that such an attempt would likely cause problems for him, stating "I'm not going to fall into a trap. This will probably crucify me". D'Arco met with Tisci again after personally meeting with Daley to intercede in the matter. D'Arco related that Daley brushed him off "as if to say it's none of my (obs) business" and refused to change his position supporting the Civil Service bill. D'Arco also stated that he believed that Daley had a "deal" with the Federal government to back Ogilvie against outfit interests. A 1962 FBI report did note that the FBI had planned to meet with Daley and ask for his cooperation in efforts to target the mob, though I don't recall seeing any reports discussing if such meetings actually took place and what the result may have been.
In 1967, early in Ogilvie's tenure as IL Governor, he backed a "stop and frisk" bill that authorized local LE to stop anyone "reasonably believed" to be involved in criminal activity, obtain their identification, and search them for weapons. Outfit-backed opposition had unsuccessfully attempted to defeat a previous "stop and frisk" bill in 1965 (with some even floating the claim that it would be specifically used to infringe on the civil liberties of Italians) that ultimately passed the State Legislature but was vetoed by then-Governor Otto Kerner. FBI CI Ralph Pierce told the Feds that the outfit was "particularly angered" when Daley publicly threw his support in for the 1967 bill (Pierce, like Caruso, was another Southside guy whose racket operations in the 1960s suffered under intensified CPD crackdowns on gambling, to the point where one CI claimed that "is closed down now" under Wilson's tenure as CPD chief).
That same year, a CI told the Feds that Richard Cain had attempted to contact his former boss, Ogilvie, reportedly to ask for Ogilvie's help in assisting Republican mayoral candidate John Waner "to defeat Mayor RICHARD J. DALEY". Reportedly, Cain was rebuffed by Ogilvie, who refused to meet with him (Cain had, since working as an investigator for Ogilvie as Sheriff, been disgraced and publicly outed as a mob affiliate). The FBI believed that Cain was attempting to contribute to Waner's campaign and noted that an informant had previously reported that the outfit had secretly funded Benjamin Adamowski's failed campaign against Daley for Mayor in 1963, with the FBI opining that Cain was likely acting as an intermediary in these endeavors for Granata and the Westside Bloc (Waner, of course, lost in November of 1967).
Cosmik_Debris wrote: ↑Wed Sep 04, 2024 8:37 am
With aldermanic prerogative, he couldn't really thwart the power structure of the alderman at all. They still had plenty of patronage to hand out and the Outfit wards were some of the highest vote getters for the Daley machine in the entire city.
He basically let them do their thing, as long as they continued to produce votes, be his rubber stamp and stay out of his way, they could do what they wanted, which they did.
Also known as "Aldermanic privilege". I don't want to get too much into the weeds here, but for those who are not Chicagoans, the city government is characterized as a "weak mayoral" system. Much of the day-to-day decision-making and effective power in the City is in the hands of the City Council, with Aldermen long permitted to treat their Wards like personal "fiefs", where they exercised de facto authority to approve or veto things like construction projects, zoning ordinances, land use initiatives, and such that involve their Ward. This is purely a traditional practice of the City Council not formally enshrined in any law or ordinance and historically gave Aldermen a significant avenue of on-the-street clout in that they could personally appeal to or control allocations of city services like sidewalk and road repairs in their Ward and dispense such allocations as favors to voters.
Old Man Daley's tenure, however, was notable for his *curtailing* of Aldermanic privilege, which was really at its apogee prior to his administration. Daley centralized zoning practices and permitting procedures, denied Alderman veto power (which, again, they actually had no official right to anyway), and in general shifted the balance of power in a number of areas away from the City Council to officials under the control of the Mayor's office (in other words, Daley was an exceptionally strong "weak Mayor").
Further, Daley's power and authority came not just from his position as Mayor of Chicago, but also from his concurrent position as Chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party. In the latter role, he exercised tremendous influence over Aldermen and other politicians independently of his formal governmental powers as Mayor. One significant avenue for this arena of power was Daley's ultimate authority in approving Democratic candidates running for offices in Cook County.
An interesting case that might point to tensions around who had the ultimate call on candidacies came in 1965 when Daley tapped Anthony Girolami to run as the Democratic candidate for 28th Ward Alderman, which then covered a section of the Westside West Town (Grand Ave) and Humboldt Park neighborhoods. Girolami had previously held this office, but had vacated it to became a clerk of the Cook County Probate Court. The seat became vacant when Girolami's successor, Al Tomasso, died in late 1964. Traditionally, political appointments and candidacies like this in the old "River Wards" and Italian neighborhood were treated as a de facto prerogative of the mafia (with FBI bugs in this period making it clear that Giancana, as Chicago rappresentante, had the final say on these decisions), or in its public-presenting face which manifested as the "Westside Bloc" faction. In tapping Girolami to run again, Daley was thus stepping on Giancana's toes (and I think there is no doubt that Daley was well aware of this). Girolami complained in front of an FBI bug that Daley was demanding an answer from him but that Girolami needed to confer with Giancana first and couldn't respond to Daley until he did. Giancana was reported to have been incommunicado at this time and not meeting with underlings due to constant LE surveillance (within a few months, Giancana would be jailed for refusing to testify at a Federal Grand Jury, a situation that led to his fleeing the country in 1966) and Girolami was unable to get an audience with him. According to FBI sources, it was no secret that Girolami had been in the doghouse with Giancana following the 1962 failure to block Roswell Spencer's candidacy for Sheriff, and it was alleged that Girolami had vacated the 28th Ward Aldermanic seat in the first place because Giancana had ordered him to step down. My reading of the situation is that Daley likely would have been aware of this and his tapping of Girolami to run again was an intentional provocation and a reminder of his authority as head of the Democratic machine to make the calls on who would run for office. Ultimately, Girolami was instructed by Tony Tisci that Giancana ordered him not to run, though ultimately Girolami's close protege Angelo Provenzano ran unopposed and won. Presumably, there were other points of tension between Daley and the mafia when it came to the final say in political appointments and candidacies.
A 1963 recording of D'Arco and Marcy suggested that Daley had also been interfering in 1st Ward politics and causing some trouble there. After D'Arco and then Anthony DeTolve had, in succession, dropped out of the race for 1st Ward Alderman that year (reportedly on the orders of Giancana), Michael Fiorito was entered as a write-in candidate shortly before the election. Then, Fiorito was nearly ousted as candidate when Cook County Sheriff Richard Ogilvie announced that Fiorito was being investigated for ties to the "crime syndicate" and for allegations that he had falsified his legal residence in the City of Chicago. Ultimately, Fiorito remained on the ballot and won the seat. Just before the election, however, D'Arco was recorded lamenting to Marcy "We ain't got no Alderman. Who's gonna run? It's a (obs) disgrace [...] The most powerful guy in the City (Mayor DALEY) is for them", to which Marcy replied "There's no question about it" and 1st Ward secretary Buddy Jacobson added "See how the Mayor changed [...]". One can imagine that their complaints here suggest that Daley may have been supporting Ogilvie's attempt to get Fiorito ousted from the race.
I noted above that in 1960, Rolly Libonati believed that Daley was attempting to use construction projects to undermine the 1st Ward Democratic apparatus. Daley's tenure was marked by historical transformations to Chicago's infrastructure and neighborhoods, including the construction of multiple Expressways, the construction of O'Hare International Airport, new CTA rail lines, and the construction of some of the nation's largest public housing projects, while whole sections of core inner-city neighborhoods were razed for "slum clearance" and "urban renewal". Notably, Daley was able to execute many of these major public works in the face of intense local opposition (again, a very strong "weak mayor"), partly due to his having curtailed Aldermanic privilege in favor of a more centralized City government and partly from the clout he exercised over machine politicians via the Cook County Democratic Organization.
In the early 1960s, Daley and the Trustees of the University of Illinois approved a plan to raze a large section of the core area of the Taylor St Italian community for the construction of the new University of Illinois at Chicago "Circle Campus". Daley had blocked an earlier plan by the Trustees to build the campus further West in Garfield Park. Unfortunately, while that plan had been unopposed by the public, the Taylor St Plan sparked a major outcry in the Near Westside Italian community. Months of bitter protest ensued, with a grassroots campaign led by Taylor St housewife Florence Scala. Italians publicly denounced Daley as a "dictator", held sit-ins at his office in City Hall, and flooded the City Council with protestors at the vote to approve the project. Despite then 1st Ward Alderman John D'Arco denouncing the bill to resounding cheers from the crowd, it passed the Council and subsequent attempts by the community to save itself from displacement fell on deaf ears. In 1962, over 150 acres -- which had already been carved up and diminished in this period by other large "urban renewal" projects including the ABLA CHA housing projects and the construction of the Dan Ryan and Eisenhower Expressways -- were razed, almost 15,000 people (predominately Italian) displaced, and over 600 businesses (predominately Italian) shuttered in what had been known for decades as Chicago's "Italian Downtown" (Garfield park, where the UIC campus was initially proposed, declined into a highly distressed slum by the end of the decade. Presumably, if the original plan had been implemented, much of Taylor St could have been preserved while the broader decline on the Westside may have been, at least in part, staved off).
This gutting of Taylor St left a scar in Chicago's Italian community that didn't heal for decades to come. I recall as a kid hearing claims from people that the targeting of Taylor St for multiple large infrastructure projects had been an intentional attack by Daley, who sought to "keep the Italians down" and to fragment their political power to challenge him via the Westside Bloc. While the old-school Italians back in the day in Chicago were noted for a tendency towards hostility to and suspicion of outsiders (ie., non-Italians), this could also veer into paranoia and a persecution complex. Regardless, I believe that there was some kernel of truth there, at least in that Daley saw Taylor St as an expendable community and one that also provided a major constituency to an institution that, at least at times, was a challenge to his political authority. One can note that there has also never been an Italian Mayor of Chicago, something that I also used to hear remarked as evidence of the machinations of the Irish (there hasn't been a Polish Mayor either, but that's a story for another day lol). Claims about the "Irish keeping the Italians down" presumably go as far back as the emergence of Chicago's Italian community and had earlier identified the breakup of the old "Bloody" 19th Ward -- which encompassed the Taylor St community until around 1930, when it was splintered by the City into multiple non-Italian majority Wards -- as a plot to prevent the Italians from having a powerful and unified majority Ward which they could use as a springboard for a viable Mayoral candidate (again, there's probably at least some kernel of truth to this).
Anyway, one would not want to also make an error the other way, and paint the relationship of Daley to the mob as only one of animosity. There were times when they worked together, times when they worked against each other, and probably interim periods of detente. My take is that Daley took advantage of connections to the outfit to secure their support for his first two Mayoral campaigns. After his second win, however, he seems to have taken a much more aloof and at times even antagonistic stance towards the mafia (IIRC, Roemer said much the same also). It's not like Daley went to war against the outfit though. I believe that he wanted to put them in their place, weaken their hold over the City, and knock them down a peg. And while multiple socio-demographic and structural factors were at play during this period that -- unlike leadership in local LE -- were not under Daley's influence or control, the net effect was such that from the 1960s on, the outfit never really had the kind of criminal presence or scope of operations in the City as they had before his tenure.
Coloboy wrote: ↑Wed Sep 04, 2024 10:56 am
I could ramble about chicago city inner-working for days, but I'll just share this anecdote.
This year, My dad just retired from 31 years at O'Hare working for the city. How did he get the job back in the early 90's? We lived in the ward of alderman Pat O'Connor on the north side. He met, through a mutual connection, an individual referred to only as the "chinaman", (you can't make this shit up), who was the right hand of O'Connor. My dad told the chinaman he had been trying to get on with the city for years. My dad, in at attempt to get the job over the past number of years, had been "knocking on doors" for O'Conner in the neighborhood. (For those outside of Chicago that means you canvas the neighborhood stumping/promoting for a political candidate, oftentimes with the hope that the candidate returns the favor with a job or other consideration). Chinaman got my dad on a call with O'Conner. O'Conner asks "how long have you been knocking on doors." My dad replies, "about 3 years." O'conner says "We usually like that that to be longer, but you know enough people and seem like a good guy."
A week later, he was signing papers for the job at O'Hare. The chicago way.
Many such cases. Good account and this was indeed "The Chicago Way".
For anyone interested, the term "chinaman" was a common term back in the day for a bagman, go-between, or emissary, either of the mob or for local political bigshots and such. You had "chinamen" that might handle requests for favors, "chinamen" that ferreted money being kicked up to the mob, "chinamen" that delivered bribes to corrupt public officials or Cook County judges.
