Accardo

1935-1965

Tony Accardo, né Antonino Leonardo Accardo (1906-1992), is credited with reviving and expanding the Chicago Outfit’s gambling business in the 1940s after the organization’s head Paul “The Waiter” Ricca named him underboss. Accardo himself had his hand in various gaming enterprises before and after, too.

Accardo is the great-grandfather of the National Football League’s Bosa brothers:* Nick, defensive end for the 49ers and Joey, outside linebacker for the Chargers.

Individual Participation

As early as 1940, Accardo and some Outfit partners owned and operated the prosperous Owl Club, an illegal casino-nightclub in Calumet City, Illinois, on the corner of Douglas and Plummer avenues.

The Mobster-gambler also ran book, oftentimes under the name Joe Batters, a nickname Al “Scarface” Capone had bestowed upon him for his prowess in thrashing people with a baseball bat. In the early 1940s, for example, Accardo conducted a bookmaking enterprise out of the Ogden building at 192 N. Clark St. in Chicago’s Loop.

Not only was Accardo an operator of games of chance; he also was a player and thus, a gambler in both senses of the word. Reportedly, he was one of the best patrons of his own joint, the Owl Club. Even when he older and less mobile, he kept up the activity, placing bets via the telephone.

Group Activities

While underboss, Accardo shifted the Outfit out of labor racketeering and into other areas of organized crime, including gambling. He pushed the syndicate into three specific areas: slot machines, wire service and casinos.

Slots: The Chicago Mob broadened its footprint by placing slots in various establishments beyond the main street gambling house. These included gas stations, restaurants and bars and the group’s favorite targeted outlet, social clubs and fraternal organizations. The Catholic War Vets, the American Legion Posts, the CIO Steel Workers Club, the Polish Democratic Club, and the Italian American Republican Club, are just some of the many local ones.

After successfully flooding its territory in and around Chicago with slots, the Outfit expanded geographically. It hit the neighboring cities first, then nearby states and eventually Nevada.

“Accardo made sure that all the legal Las Vegas casinos used his slot machines,” wrote John William Tuohy in the article “Accardo.”

Wire Service: During the mid-1940s the Outfit took over the Continental Press Service, the wire service that distributed race results throughout the U.S. It did so by killing the operator, James Ragen, after he’d refused to partner with the Chicago Mob.

Once under its control, Continental “became so big and lucrative that an investigating Senate committee later called it the ‘life blood’ of the syndicate,'” reported the Chicago Tribune (Nov. 18, 1984).

Casinos: Three, during the 1950s, the Outfit pursued gambling in a bigger scale. It moved into owning stakes in and skimming millions from casinos. It stuck primarily to legal gambling jurisdictions, first Havana, Cuba, while that lasted, and then Nevada. For instance, by 1961, Chicago owned controlling interests in the Riviera, Stardust, Fremont and Desert Inn, in Vegas.

Despite having a major hand in the Outfit’s gambling (and other lines of business), Accardo always denied being one of the organization’s members never mind a boss. Instead, he claimed he merely was a beer salesman for a Chicago brewery.

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* How Accardo and the Bosa Brothers Are Related

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George Raft

1958-1959, 1966-1967

Having grown up in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen with various mobsters-to-be — Meyer Lansky, Joe Adonis, Frank Costello and others — he remained cordial with them throughout adulthood.

He had deeper relationships with two, first Owney Madden, who’d encouraged him to try acting, and later Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, when they both lived in Southern California.

Life had taken this gentleman in a different direction than that of his childhood peers. He became a famous Hollywood movie star, best known for his portrayals of underworld characters, such as Frank Rio (Al Capone’s bodyguard) in Scarface (1932). His film career spanned three decades, the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s.

When that was winding down, he shifted industries and worked in the one dominated by the likes of his syndicate friends: gambling.

He was George Raft, né Ranft (1895-1980).

Pearl Of The Antilles

Starting in spring 1958, at the age of 62, Raft served as the host and entertainment director for the Casino de Capri at the Hotel Capri in Havana, Cuba, then a newly built, luxurious, 19-floor hotel with a rooftop swimming pool.

A group headed by Charles “The Blade” Tourine, a caporegime for the Genovese crime family in the U.S., operated the casino; Lansky took a cut.

The job, however, was short-lived. At the start of 1959, revolutionaries overthrew then Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Fidel Castro immediately took power and quickly closed the casinos.

Thus, Raft’s employment on the island ended.

The Great Wen

His next similar gig, beginning in 1966, was as the debonair, personable host (and front man) of the Colony Club in London, England, a plush and hugely successful casino there.

“All that was required of him at the Colony Club was to play the role of George Raft — a role that he had lived for many, many years,” Lewis Yablonsky wrote in George Raft, noting that a sign above the property read, “George Raft’s Colony Club.”

Various members of the U.S.’ National Crime Syndicate co-owned the business as overseen by Lansky, and numerous Englishmen owned stock in it. Lansky’s American associate, Dino Cellini, also a co-owner, managed the casino, for which London mobsters, Reginald and Ronald Kray, dealt with and kept out troublemakers.

Raft, then age 70, worked from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. For his efforts, he earned about $200 a week ($1,500 today) and a 5% stake in the club. He also was provided with an apartment in Mayfair with a cleaning service and a maroon, $35,000 Rolls Royce with a chauffeur. 

“The Colony Club became the ‘in’ place in London, the place to see and be seen,” Yablonsky wrote. “Frequent guests were Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton; Ari Onassis and Jackie Kennedy; former Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren; and Charlie Chaplin.”

Raft’s stint at this gambling house also ended abruptly, in early 1967, when the secretary of Britain’s Home Office revoked Raft’s residency permit, thereby deporting and prohibiting him from returning, due to his alleged associations with U.S. underworld denizens. Along with Raft, England banned seven other Americans that year, including Lansky, Cellini and Tourine, all without any sort of due process.

The country had legalized gambling as recently as 1960 and wanted to get and keep out the mobsters from the States who’d infiltrated it since. Despite attempts to get the ban on Raft lifted, it remained in place for the duration of his life.

Photo from The New York Public Library Digital Collections

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1947-1952

Despite New York mobsters trying to scare her off, an ambitious woman — Elaine Townsend (née Margaret Helgeson) — held her own as a gambling operator in the late 1940s. Bright, young and gorgeous, she parlayed her chutzpah, commerce degree and drive into making gobs of money in Cuba.

Big Screen Worthy

Her exploits in Havana among gangsters, politicians, movie stars and secret agents were so compelling that Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz planned to make a movie about them with Ball in the lead role but never did. However, a different film about Townsend — Razzle Dazzle: The Elaine Townsend Story — is slated for release on Aug. 1, 2018.

Entrepreneurial Endeavor

The Wyoming-born go-getter traveled to the Caribbean island early in 1947, at age 27.

“I’d heard Cuba was the spot for free enterprise — and I was as determined as ever to make a lot of money,” said Townsend, the daughter of a cattle rancher who’d grown up poor (The American Weekly, Sept. 5, 1948).

Once there, she heard the gambling concession at the Gran Casino Nacional, Cuba’s only legalized gaming spot at the time, was being sold for the upcoming season. Soon after, the tall blonde learned it only had been awarded to the New York Mafia in previous years. She consulted some attorneys who told her women didn’t run games in their country.

None of that deterred her, however, and she bid on the enterprise.

After negotiating for months with officials, Townsend bought the dice and chemin de fer (a variant of baccarat) operations for $30,000 ($329,000 today). She opened them in July, four months before the New York gamblers typically did.

The Confrontation

She soon found herself face to face with three of those very men from The Big Apple in the Gran Casino.

“We heard you grabbed off the dice and chemmy gimmicks here,” one of them said (The American Weekly, Sept. 5, 1948). “We came down, hoping to grab them off ourselves, and this Cuban guy says, ‘Miss Townsend got them. They’re all hers. They’re not for sale.’ We thought maybe it was a gag. It isn’t true, is it?”

When she confirmed that it was, another of the trio told her the players would “clean her out in a week.”

“What you want to do it for, honey?” the first man asked. “It’s not your racket. You got … well, you got class. You ought to be home or someplace.”

“I don’t want to go home. I want to make a lot of money,” Townsend said.

“Look, we’ll give you $10,000 more than you laid out if you’ll sell to us,” the third man said.

“No.”

“Twenty thousand?”

“I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I’ve gone through a lot of anxiety over this thing. I’ve got to be repaid for that. And so far it’s been fun. I like it. I’m going to stick with it.”

The La Cosa Nostra representatives left her alone after that.

Never having worked in gambling before, Townsend hired New Yorker Connie Immerman, not a mobster, to run the games under her watch, as he’d run them years earlier. Most recently, Immerman, with two of his brothers, had co-owned and run Connie’s Inn, a Harlem night club from 1923 to 1934, when the Depression caused them to close it.

In Havana, Townsend went on to own an interest in the Jockey Club casino and operate the games at the Montmartre after Fulgencio Batista, who usurped the Cuban presidency by coup in 1952, legalized gambling in hotels, clubs and cabarets in 1954.

Amassing Cash

Before entering the gambling industry, Townsend had toiled to earn, save and invest her money. After working her way through and graduating from the University of Denver in Colorado at age 19, she worked, often simultaneously, an assortment of jobs — teaching, selling real estate and modeling.

In 1940, at 20 years old, she visited friends in Honolulu and, after seeing the potential to make money there, she stayed. First, she ran a photo studio. Then, with the start of World War II, she opened a chain of hot dog stands, to which she eventually added a costume jewelry counter. She also bought the pool table concession in an arcade. With her income, she played the stock market … successfully.

Subsequently, she investigated business opportunities in Mexico but, instead, wound up in Cuba, just seven years after her first entrepreneurial effort.

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