Nearly 50 years after former Chicago mob boss Sam “Momo” Giancana was found murdered execution style in the basement of his home in southwest Oak Park, veteran television crime reporter Chuck Goudie says he’s ready to name the person who pulled the trigger.
Late on June 19, 1975, Giancana was shot seven times while cooking a meal of sausage, peppers and white beans. He was shot once in the back of the head, once under the chin and five times in the face with .22 caliber long rounds.
Two months later, on August 19, a 22 cal. High Standard Model M-101 pistol with a homemade silencer was found on Cook County forest preserve property across the street from 125 Thatcher Avenue in River Forest.
Much has been published about the hit, why it happened and who may have done it. There even was a musical written and staged by the local Open Door Repertory Company in 2014. It was titled, No Witness.
But for almost half a century, no name has been definitively tied to the killing.
The last time Goudie opined on the case, on June 19, 2015, he expressed scant hope of closure. In an ABC7 piece he wrote that it “apparently will not be solved.” With prime suspects Butch Blasi “and everyone else who had a hand in the hit also dead, the likelihood of justice ever coming in the case of Sam Giancana seems slim,” he wrote.
That was then. This is now. In a two-part NBC5 Investigates series entitled “Who Killed Momo?” which airs Wednesday, May 14 and Thursday, May 15 at 10 p.m., Goudie, who moved to NBC5 earlier this year, will name Giancana’s killer.
On Wednesday night Goudie will “reveal new information linked to the Giancana murder, accompanied by never-before-seen police photographs.”
He will also review the list of leading suspects in the killing and the likely motive for whacking Giancana.
On Thursday Goudie will trace the history of the .22 caliber gun used to kill Giancana. (According to the FBI, it had been purchased back in 1965 in Florida at a phony gun store, along with a second gun used in another mid-1970s mob killing.)
Viewers will hear from former mobster Frank Calabrese Jr., who’s not been shy about talking to the media, and from the newly appointed special agent in charge of the FBI Chicago office, Doug DePodesta.
It’s fair to wonder whether the promised drama will be a genuine bombshell “wow” moment, or merely a Geraldo Rivera style much ado about nothing fizzle, ala the much ballyhooed “Al Capone’s Vaults” episode in April 1986.
Older readers might recall that the only thing that turned out to be explosive about Rivera’s reporting was the controlled detonation used to blast open the brick wall that had been built to seal off a room in the basement of Capone’s one-time headquarters in the old Lexington Hotel in Chicago.
It turned out to be as empty as Rivera’s reporting.
Goudie, though, is no journalistic carnival barker. While he has his own flair for the dramatic, he has a track record of backing it up with solid reporting. He’s won a national Emmy, an Edward R. Murrow Award for Continuous Television News Reporting and numerous local Emmys and Peter Lisagor Awards for exemplary journalism.
A flashy figurehead
Giancana was named boss of the Chicago mob in 1957, succeeding Tony Accardo, who, while just 51, was under pressure from the IRS, which wasn’t buying Accardo’s alibi that he made his plush living on the salary of a beer salesman. Accardo lived in River Forest.
Giancana ran the daily operations of the Chicago syndicate until 1966, from a booth in the Armory Lounge on Roosevelt Road in Forest Park, a mile west of his home. But while Accardo stepped away from the daily operations of the syndicate, he remained the power behind the throne.
Like the similarly high profile Frank Nitti before him in the late 1940s, who was answerable to Paul “The Waiter” Ricca, Giancana was the nominal mob leader, with Accardo and Ricca retaining ultimate power behind the scenes.
Momo’s reign began tottering in 1965, after he was jailed for a year for refusing to testify before a Senate committee. Less than a year later, he was sacked; Accardo and others had become weary of him generating unwanted news headlines. He was replaced by another Oak Park resident and former 42 Gang member, Sam “Teets” Battaglia.
Giancana retreated to Mexico, where he ran several lucrative gambling operations. However, the Mexican government deported him back to the US in 1974, and he returned to his spacious brick bungalow at the corner of Wenonah Avenue and Fillmore Street in Oak Park.
Murder motive uncertain
While it’s not known exactly why Giancana was killed, he was scheduled to appear before Senator Frank Church’s committee looking into the mob’s connection to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
His killer shot him in the mouth as he lay on the floor, reportedly in a circle around the mouth, suggesting somebody wanted to send a message about talking out of school.
A second possible motive was that Accardo had become increasingly upset with Giancana’s refusal to share the earnings from his gambling interests in Mexico and Central America.
While motive and the identity of the killer remain in dispute, what isn’t disputed is that Giancana would have only let someone he trusted inside his home that night, and there were very few people he trusted.
Blasi? Spilotro? English? … Accardo?
England’s Daily Mail said in a 2018 article that Frank Calabrese Jr., son of the mob’s brutal Chinatown crew boss, Frank Calabrese Sr., told the paper that he and the FBI “‘know who did it, and it was somebody nobody would ever suspect — but he refuses to tell.”
Goudie previously reported that Giancana’s nephew had told reporters that mobster Anthony Spilotro was given the assignment to kill Giancana. Spilotro, who Giancana reportedly liked and backed, owned a house just three blocks from Giancana’s, and was reportedly a regular visitor.
Frank Calabrese Jr.’s uncle, hitman Nick Calabrese, reportedly told the FBI that Accardo was part of the hit, and that Angelo La Pietra disposed of the gun. Calabrese Jr., was more explicit, telling WGN-TV’s Ben Bradley in 2019 that his father told him Accardo did the murder, using a gun equipped with a silencer the elder Calabrese had manufactured.
But de-classified FBI reports from mid-1975 note that Blasi and fellow Oak Park mobster Chuckie English “continue to be in regular contact with” Giancana and were his only confidants.
An FBI field report stated that just two weeks before the murder, Blasi had travelled to Houston to visit Giancana in the hospital where he was recovering from “extenuating circumstances” from gall bladder surgery.
More crucially, FBI reports have Blasi, who was purportedly an FBI informant, as the last person seen with Giancana the night of his murder. Caretaker Joe DiPersio reportedly left Blasi and Giancana alone in the basement around 11:20 p.m. When he returned around 30 minutes later to check on Giancana, he found him lying in a massive pool of blood.
