The Demise of a Don

There are no truly secure pensioners in the Mafia, but the retired Chicago don Sam Giancana, 66, was probably as much at ease one night last week as a man with his past could be. Just back from Houston and a gall-bladder operation, he had enjoyed a festive homecoming dinner in his fortress-like brick house in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. His guests were the handful of people he could trust: one of his daughters and her husband; Charles ("Chuckie") English, his partner in myriad syndicate enterprises over the years; and his loyal courier-chauffeur, Dominick ("Butch") Blazi. No matter that lawmen had shadowed Giancana's every move since he landed at O'Hare Airport and were keeping watch on the house. He was used to that.

The party apparently over, the surveillance was lifted; all seemed quiet in the house. But before midnight Giancana went down to his basement hideaway with its small kitchen to fry up a snack of Italian sausages and spinach. It was a snack that would go uneaten. Perhaps one of his guests remained behind, or perhaps he was joined by a new visitor--whoever was there was almost certainly someone he knew well. Giancana was shot seven times at close range in the face and neck.

Thus died a man with the face of a gargoyle and the disposition of a viper, a cruelly violent Mafia chieftain who ruthlessly ruled the Chicago underworld for nearly ten years. Giancana had retired from active Mob affairs several years ago. But he recently recovered his notoriety because of the revelation that he had been recruited for the Central Intelligence Agency in 1960 to assassinate Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro (see following story). Indeed, the Senate committee investigating the CIA was considering calling Giancana to testify, and had already subpoenaed his lieutenant in the plot, John Roselli, to appear this week. Giancana, moreover, had recently been questioned by a federal grand jury in Chicago about Mob activities.

Kiss of Death. The killer or killers acted with methodical precision, leaving the police with few clues beyond seven .22-cal. shell casings. A lightweight .22 is not the sort of artillery that the Mafia usually employs, leading to speculation that an embittered girl friend, of whom he had many, might have done him in. Or it might have been someone with whom he had been involved in the Castro caper who feared exposure. As for any possible CIA complicity, Director William Colby said: "We had nothing to do with it."

The circumstances seemed to suggest a classic Mafia rubout: the cheery last supper followed by the kiss of death from a trusted friend who had been persuaded to betray Giancana at the Mob's bidding. Though Giancana had so far told the grand jury nothing of value, the Mafia might have been worried that eventually he would. And though he was still a member of the Mafia's nationwide high "Commission," the Chicago local had some months before excluded him from all its activities, believing that the investigations he had inspired had crimped Mob business in Chicago. The gang-slaying theory was lent credence by a shadowy report that on hearing of the shooting, the Mafia's Boss of Bosses, New York's Carlo Gambino, promptly passed word that Giancana's killer was to be executed--again a frequent Mafia precaution after a major "hit."

Giancana understood such methods; he had employed them himself in the days when, known to his friends as "Mooney" or "Momo," he ran the Chicago underworld. His rise in the crime organization built by Al Capone began in his teens on Chicago's West Side, where he was born in 1908, the son of an immigrant grocer. A grade-school dropout, he joined the Chicago Mob as a wheelman, or getaway driver, then graduated to triggerman. Convicted of moonshining in 1939, he managed to turn his four-year sentence to his advantage by cultivating the friendship of Edward Jones, the policy king of Chicago's South Side, who was serving time for income tax evasion. From Jones, Giancana learned that the city's black-run numbers racket was a $2 million-a-year bonanza, not the penny-ante game that the Mob had always thought. Soon after Giancana was released, he and other Young Turks in the Mafia won control of the numbers through a series of vicious kidnapings, beatings and murders of black racketeers.

Long Romance. During World War II, Giancana stayed out of the service by being honest. What do you do for a living? his draft board asked. "I steal," Giancana replied. The board promptly rejected him for Army duty, describing him as "a constitutional psychopath [with] an inadequate personality and strong anti-social trends."

Giancana became boss of the Chicago Mafia family in 1955, and ruled a three-state empire of some 1,500 Mafiosi who ran gambling, narcotics, prostitution, loan sharking and other underworld ventures. At the height of his power, Giancana lived relatively modestly in Oak Park with his three daughters--his wife died in 1954--but vacationed on a lavish scale: Miami Beach and Europe in the winter, Paradise Valley near Las Vegas in the summer. While visiting Las Vegas' Desert Inn in 1960, the don noticed Singer Phyllis McGuire standing at a blackjack table, seemingly bewildered by the game. He gallantly offered some expert advice and began a long romance with the singer.

Giancana's decline began in 1959, when FBI agents planted a microphone somewhere amid the cans of tomato paste and olive oil in the back room of Giancana's Mob headquarters, the Armory Lounge in suburban Forest Park. For six years, agents listened to his most intimate business conversations, learning valuable information about the Mafia's organization and operations. In 1965 Giancana was jailed for refusing to answer the questions of a grand jury about Chicago's rackets. Released a year later, he fled to Mexico to escape further questioning and holed up in a walled estate near Cuernavaca.

The don's grip weakened. By the time the Mexican government expelled him without explanation last July, he had little power left. When he was not playing golf, he spent most of his time at home where, in the end, his past apparently caught up with him.

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